The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today it is my task to speak of a very deep historical impulse. As far as anthroposophical spiritual science is concerned, we are already familiar with the fact that spiritual forces, spiritual intentions, spiritual goals stand behind everything which occurs in the world. The anthroposophical spiritual scientifically schooled view is able to see more directly the spiritual processes which stand behind historical occurrences. In order to understand what is going on we must know not only the material historical facts, but we must be able to complete then by knowledge the sort of facts which we are going to present to you today.

We will start by indicating a personality whom you all know, namely, H. P. Blavatsky. You all know that H. P. Blavatsky was a particularly psychic person in a time when materialism was at the high point in external life and she stood in a very special way in the spiritual movement of the second half of the 19th century. H. P. Blavatsky was not a personality whom one can designate in the ordinary sense as a medium, but she had, in the deepest sense, very striking psychical properties, she was a psychic personality. If you want to understand this you must realize the milieu out of which she proceeded. She came out of the Russian milieu, out of how the spiritual and physical can work together in a life in such a way that it is not normal, but abnormal. And to understand that, we must cast our attention on the special folk characteristics of the Russians, how that is different from the Central and Western Europeans.

The Middle and Western Europeans are indeed, in a certain sense, the continuous and also the newly creative configuration of that culture which proceeded out of the 4th post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin cultural period. What lived in this Greco-Latin cultural period is continued in Central and Western Europe, through the fact that in this West and Middle Europe the physical bodies specially develop themselves, also become special instruments for spiritual working, for thinking, feeling and willing. That which thinking, feeling and willing can bring together through the Instrument of the physical body, that should come out in a very primary way in West and Middle Europe. However, the situation is different with the Slavic peoples in Eastern Europe and in particular with the Russians. One can say that the way in which the physical body is mechanized through as is the case in West and Central Europe cannot occur with the Russians in so far as this people remains in its national quality. You cannot understand the Russians with West European science. You can only understand them when you know that an ether body exists. The precise characteristic of the Russian people consists in the fact that the most important activity of life does not enter into the physical body as it occurs in West and Middle Europe, but more into the ether body and therefore does not permeate the physical body so much. In the Russian people the ether body has a much greater significance than it now has for the Western and Central Europeans and especially for the American people. Hence, within the Russian people, within the folk people, not the ruling classes, a direct strong ego as is the case in West and Central Europe can never be developed in the same way. However, the “I” is always veiled over by a certain dreaminess, it almost has something of a dreamy nature in it, because just as the “I” now lives in the 5th post-Atlantean period, so it is conditioned by a special development of the physical body. During this 5th post-Atlantean period, the Russian people are not advanced far enough for the building of the “I” directly as such. That which lives and weaves in the ether body should not imprint itself into the physical body. Hence, one can say that that which is predisposed in the Russian folk, in the main, cannot at the present come to external manifestation.

Now, H. P. Blavatsky grew in part out of the Russian people, to the greatest part she has grown out of the Russian Folk Soul. It will be understandable from that that with her, the ether body in a high degree in its activity is able to be much more powerful than all physical activity in so far as we are dealing with a cognitive activity. Hence, we have in H. P. Blavatsky, in the main, a personality who can experience a large amount of her ether body, but naturally that is quite different from what one can experience through thinking and cognition with the help of the brain. Because Blavatsky has grown out of the Russian folk, she can experience an immense amount in her ether body. However, connected with that is the fact that she lacks certain qualities which West Europeans cannot be without if they want to have revelations from the spiritual worlds. H. P. Blavatsky lacked the possibility of thinking logically. This is the faculty which the Western European must have to obtain proper revelations from the spiritual world, but H.P. Blavatsky lacked this possibility of grouping together her knowledge. Nevertheless, that which permeated her ether body, which was contained in her etheric cognitive ability, did not prevent her from receiving significant revelations. Therefore precisely at the time when mankind was at the height of materialism, such a personality coming out of the East European people is present who in her stream of heredity, in her blood, still had, I might say, a dose of the Central European aspect. So there was present in her, but it was overpowered by the East European element, that which in Middle Europe leads to a logical nature and which in particular leads to will initiative which the Russian as a belonger of his folk does not have. Now what actually happened?

When we put together these two extreme poles, then we can say—of course you know that we have English books written by Blavatsky—that which occurred came as a result of her roots in the Russian nature which came out of her ether body, that was taken hold of by the English being, and it appears that her books are worked out in English. However, the most important thing is what lies between; and to understand what does lie between one must become clear that in Western Europe, particularly from the British beingness, an extensive working in of occult science proceeds which always was present as far as one can speak of the English history. Through its whole evolution of its spiritual culture, Middle Europe actually did not have the slightest idea of how incisive occult working has always come out of the British land and spread itself over Western Europe, also over Southern Europe, and so on.

When one wants to know how things stand, one must at least understand this British colored occultism. This British colored occultism is absolutely present. That which people know of as all sorts of high grades of Scottish Freemasonry and so on is actually only the external side which is shown to the world. However, comprehensive working occult schools actually stand behind this external side and they have taken up the ancient occult traditions and the ancient occult stream into themselves in a much higher degree than is the case in Middle Europe. In Central Europe, however, one must strive more and more to permit a knowledge of the spiritual world to rise up out of one's own spirituality. In the British aspect, they have preferred to lean on that which has been traditionally handed down from the more ancient occult schools. Actually we are able to go back to the beginning of the 17th century and find particularly in England, Scotland and Ireland (less in Ireland but over Scotland) such occult societies spread out in which they have continued to propagate that which was occult knowledge in the ancient times, which however they transformed in a certain way.

If one wants to find the reason for this transformation, then one must know that the 4th post-Atlantean cultural epoch which was comprised of Greekdom and Romandom lasted until the beginning of the 15th century and the task of this 4th period was to work over in itself in a purely human way that which in earlier epochs was there as spiritual revelations. What man received in revelations, that was supposed to be spiritually worked over in this Greco-Latin period. Then came the 5th period which begins with the beginning of the 15th. century. Man was supposed to focus more upon the external, more upon the physical world and not to work out new concepts. All the concepts which you have in the world today have come over from the Greco-Latin period. There have not been any real new concepts developed since the 15th century; the ancient concepts were only applied in a new way upon the processes. Darwinism never brought in one single new concept of evolution; it only applied it to certain processes. Thus, not one single new concept has arisen since the beginning of the 15th century. All of these arose previously in the Greco-Latin period. The 5th post-Atlantean period was supposed to direct its glance at the external physical plane and the British people were especially prepared for this task. They were especially adapted for this task, because the British characteristics were developed later in the British Isles.

Now, at the beginning of the 15h century something was threatening. What threatened to arise was a kind of confusion; the purely physical striving of the Britishdom threatened to be confused with a much more spiritual life, with a spiritual life which was fructified from ancient times. This took place when English dominion crossed over the channel into France. The fact that a real separation occurred was effected from the spiritual world through the appearance of Joan of Arc who precisely from the spiritual world itself had to create order in the beginning of the 15th century. The whole of external Western Europe depends, as we have said before, on this appearance of Joan of Arc. At that time there was a complete separation between the French nature and the British nature. This British being originally arose from the Angles and Saxons who had the occult sagas of Hengis and Horsa when they migrated over towards the British Isles. Now, at the time of Joan of Arc, this Anglo-Saxon layer was ruled by the Norman-Roman element and formed a lower caste. That particular British beingness which today is the superior, only happened since the 17th century, at the time when the French element was still working, and the Anglo-Saxons were the lower layer and the French spirit was the aristocratic spirit. They despised everything coming from the Angles and Saxons. For example, there was a very common expression in the 10th, 11th, 12th centuries used as a curse by the aristocracy still living in France in whom there still lived French Normanhood which went as follows: “God damn me to become an Englander”. This curse was often heard. You were not supposed to be an Englander if you wanted to be well regarded. However, this thing changed fundamentally after the separation occurred through Joan of Arc and then the Englander aspect began to develop.

There are many different processes playing about here and it would take too much time if I were to describe them completely, but deep spiritual forces held sway behind the civil war of the Red and the White Roses. But the important thing is that in the beginning of the 17th century, a certain soul incarnated in the British kingdom who did not work in a very significant way externally, but worked further and in a very stimulating way. This person incarnated in a British body in whom there was more French and Scottish blood working together and very little British blood. There actually proceeded from this soul that which gave the impulse not only for the external British spiritual life but also to the occult British life. Naturally there were certain intermediate processes which if described would cause us to go far off our theme which also formed this occult British spiritual life .

I have told you that this spiritual life was a continuation of the occult streams of the 4th post-Atlantean period. One knew an immense amount precisely because physical bodies had the most significance. There in the British occult life they knew the significance of the physical body, that the ether body was made least active, and that the physical body was regarded as an instrument of all spiritual life; and precisely because of that there was no possibility in these occult schools themselves to experience very much from the spiritual world. However, one preserved the ancient traditions in the occult schools; one preserved that which was handed down through what the ancient clairvoyant observed and they sought to permeate that with concepts. Therefore an occult science arose which worked only with the experiences of what had been handed down from what had been seen by clairvoyance in the 4th and even in the 3rd post-Atlantean period. However, that which came into existence through clairvoyance was worked through with purely physical concepts, with that conceptual material which you have when you think through the physical body. Therefore, an actual occult science arose which, however, stretched itself out over all domains of life.

Above all it is interesting to realize that in this chapter of occult science there are facts which actually were taught in these British occult schools about the destiny of the European people. That formed a very important chapter in these occult schools. I will attempt to characterize what was taught there about the destiny of the European peoples. They said the following. There was a 4th post-Atlantean period. This is what they had out of tradition. This 4th post-Atlantean period abounded with spiritual life. This 4th post-Atlantean period has brought forth the conceptual world for man, the perception about social organization. This 4th post-Atlantean period brought forward all possible things; it abounded with spiritual life. It had developed itself in Southern Europe on the Greek and Italian Peninsulas and it radiated out from there. Now, the people of Central and Western Europe were in their infancy in reference to spiritual connections at the time of the flowering of the 4th period. I am now telling you just what was taught there. Thus, the Central and Western Europeans were infants in reference to the spiritual life, infants in relation to that which could radiate out from the cultural results of the 4th post-Atlantean period. These Central AND Western Europeans very gradually worked themselves up out of their infancy until the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and they became maturer and maturer. When we say the Reformation, we do not mean the German Reformation but the English Reformation under James I, and so on. The central and Western Europeans were able to separate themselves in a sense and now a quite definite dogma arose within these occult schools, a dogma which was very strongly held, the dogma that just as the Greco-Latin peoples were the leading peoples of the 4th, now in the 5th post-Atlantean period the Anglo-Saxon culture has to take the lead. This was impressed again and again. The Anglo-Saxondom has to reign spiritually through the 5th postAtlantean period, and everything that was thought in reference to mankind's development had to be so arranged that this dogma of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon as the leaders of the 5th had to be effected.

They taught the following in these schools. There lives in East Europe today the people who are in the same condition in which the Central and Western Europeans were at the time of the Greco-Latin period; the Slavic people who are now in their infancy are in the East of Europe. They realize that these Slavic peoples must develop out of their infancy in a similar way as did the Central and Western Europeans. And just as the Romans were the wet nurse in spiritual connection in the West and Middle Europe, so must the Anglo-Saxon be the wet nurse for the East European peoples and lead them over to their later spiritual life period. It was also taught that just as the Germanic peoples differentiated themselves into Gothic and other tribes in the course of European history, so to speak, so do the Slavic peoples also differentiate themselves. Therefore they depicted how the present forces point to certain future configurations.

For example, in Russia itself, there were a number of different communities which were gathered together spatial aspect just as once numbers of people were gathered in Central and West Europe, and these people who are gathered together in Russia, so to speak, are artificially held together by a state bond. On the other hand, a folk like the Poles were held together by their religion and in spite of their attempts to become independent, these Poles had to be inserted into the Russian beingness. One had confidence in these schools that the whole of Polishdom has to be shoved in turn into the Russian being and they said that they are of the Dornau there are single Slavic peoples who exist in isolated kingdoms. And the following was repeated again and again in these schools: Such independent Slavic folk states are forming. However, these will only last until the next great European war which was going to bring everything into disorder. And they said: The independence of the Slavic States would only last a while and in the future a quite different way of being held together in reference to these East European peoples who are at present in their infancy state, must take place. This was the teaching that was given; it was not just theory but was repeated again and again in these occult schools. Therefore numerous people attempted to configure the external life to influence it in different ways so that the actual facts could form themselves in the sense of what their dogma said. People do not realize what enormous attempts were made by their occult brothers in the British Isles who had other groups in Western Europe and Italy. They knew what one person must do, what another must do and how to work in life in order to achieve their aims. For example, there was one English statesman who became friendly with a certain statesman from a small state in the Dornau which was part of Austria. A friendly arrangement was set up between them. It was so artfully arranged that, for example, on the one side they made friends, but on the other side they tried to put forth all sorts of criticism about this same state. The situation is of great significance when you methodically follow a path in which you develop friendship on the one side in order to win a certain people over and on the other side begin to show the shadow side of these people and attack them.

This is a very devilish thing, but it is an Ahrimanic trick which you can use. One member of such a brotherhood would write a book which would cause a rightful movement to be called forth, for example, and another person would write a book in order to develop friendship. That is how they work between the lines of life; all this so that the British aspect could become the ruling aspect: let us look at how the personality of H.P. Blavatsky works in this occult brotherhood situation. These occult brothers have become aware of her. These ahrimanic occultists knew very well when there was such a person who is configurated as is H. P. Blavatsky, there are all sorts of developmental forces occurring. And here we have H. P. Blavatsky in whom the ether body is active in a special way and they wanted to utilize her so that certain spiritual truths could come forward which could be favorable to their dogmas of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon people. Therefore the tendency arose in the 60's and the beginning of the 70's with these occult brothers of the West to utilize Blavatsky so as to place spiritual truths before the world of which one can say the following. Here is a person whose ideas do not come out of an ordinary human brain, but come out of an ether body and in addition to that one who can predict future elements from such an ether body, a future that holds a foundation for the 6th post-Atlantean period. And, since the 6th post-Atlantean period has not yet arrived, they can then make certain preparations in the 5th. In the case of Blavatsky who was not an ordinary medium, they could so influence her mediumistic forces that she would say what the British brotherhoods wanted. They themselves could not come before the world and say Britain shall be the rulers, but they could say: Look here, here is a person who we are not influencing in any way; she brings a quite new knowledge out of her own ether body. Their goal was that this new knowledge should be placed in the service of the Anglo-Saxon brotherhoods. These brotherhoods related themselves to her so that they were a sort of wet nurse and she was the infant. The intention of these brothers was to put a certain new occult science into the world which would be very suitable for the special aims of these Western brothers.

They would have succeeded in their intentions if Blavatsky had been a pure Russian. However, as I mentioned earlier, she had a certain dose of Central European nature in her. She had an independent nature and very soon became aware of what lived in her ether body and then she did not want to go along with what these occult brotherhoods, who wanted to develop Earth as a higher medium, wanted. After a certain time, H. P. Blavatsky developed many things on very good paths, then she entered into a high order in Paris. However, this Parisian order was dependent on the British occult streams and they tried to prepare her so that what they wanted could come out of her soul. but, as I said, she had much of this Germanic element in her and insisted on certain conditions in this order which were impossible to fulfill and the consequence was that she was excluded from this order. In the meantime she was able to take up into herself many significant secrets which were present in these orders and she began to acquire a very special taste for the whole role; she wanted to play the foremost occult role. She did not want to be just a higher medium; she wanted to direct the thing herself. She entered an American order where they told her many secrets which were only given to those in high grades. Nevertheless, this American order had a very definite intention and in time she received into her consciousness a great deal of knowledge. A whole new situation was now created. Here was a personality who knew much of the occult knowledge which the secret orders had preserved and protected. Here was a situation which had never occurred before. In America she again tried to set up certain conditions to which the American order could not agree, because if they had done so terrible confusion would have come about.

Therefore, through very dubious means, they put her in what is called occult imprisonment which one achieves through certain ceremonial magic in which the soul which you are imprisoning can have ideas which go to a certain sphere and then are reflected back. Everything that develops in the person can be seen by themselves but it is not possible to share it with the external world. It only works within itself; it is an occult imprisonment. This particular ceremonial magic leading to occult imprisonment was done in order to try to make H. P. Blavatsky harmless. In the year 1879 there was an association of occultists of various lands and it was decided that an occult imprisonment was to be placed over Madam Blavatsky and she then lived for a number of years in real occult imprisonment. It then came about that certain Indian occultists freed her from this occult imprisonment and now begins the time when Blavatsky enters into the Indian influence. Everything which I told you up to now is a kind of pre-history of Blavatsky.

We now have the development which everyone knows about. All the difficulties and problems which Blavatsky had are connected with all this pre-history. Certain Indian occultists who strove to save themselves from the British now applied certain means to release her from her occult imprisonment, and this actually was done with the consent of those who had put her in this imprisonment. The consequence was that there streamed into her soul that which was connected only with the Indian occultism. All these goings on are effected by the British brotherhoods completely rejecting that which applies to Central Europe. These brotherhoods tried to utilize Blavatsky for their political objects, but in Paris and America she objected; the inner opposition of her Russianness objected and there was opposition against making the Russians dependent upon West Europe and America. When she was in Paris, she set forth a special stipulation which could not be fulfilled because it would have necessitated a political transformation in France. In America she herself did not put forth the stipulation, but she allied herself with a man named Olcott who was interested in producing all sorts of political machinations. These people originally wanted to guide her into a certain channel failed because she was released from this and went into a different channel in which the mahatma was not what Blavatsky thought he was.

You can see in the well known novel of George Sand how occult societies and particular movements occur in Western Europe, people have a sub-role and are not externally visible. I mentioned all these things in the public lecture on Friday, all the occult streams which produce conspirators resulting in the assasination of Jure (sic), also the murder of Franz Ferdinand. Here you have the whole source of the conspiracy of which the outside world knows very little. It begins in London, it spins over into Western Europe, goes into Southern Europe, goes into the Balkans and finally goes over to St. Petersburg and plays into the whole circle in St. Petersburg. I tell you all these things because you must know that so much of what is happening is produced by causes that you know nothing about.

Our Society has a special task of freeing itself from the influence of these Western European brotherhoods. For example, remember how I was attacked in 1909, how I was accused of wanting to become president of the whole Theosophical Society, of wanting to go to India in order to influence certain political activities. On the one side you have the Berlin-Bagdad Railway and an the other side Anthroposophy. I was trying to work for the Pan-Germanic tendency, to separate India from England. In 1909 in Budapest, Mrs. Besant's intentions was to make Krishna Murti the carrier of the Christ and I would be the reincarnated St. John, the Evangelist in order to get my recognition. Actually I would not go along with that sort of thing. There were many other Theosophists against all this, in fact the International Society of Honest People was formed, really noble people and among them was Keightley who was used earlier by Mrs. Besant to correct the mistakes in her books. This International Society asked me to become its president. And in 1909 I told Mrs Besant that I did not want to connect myself with any other occult movements, only that which works with German culture within Europe. At that time I asked her what she thought about the mighty German occultism which appeared at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century in connection with German culture. And this is what she said: “Ah, that which appeared in Germany was an unsuccessful attempt in occultism that took other forms, and because that failed England must now take the situation in hand and occultism must be brought to Europe from England.” Now you can see how the situation stands. I tell you all these things as students of esoteric wisdom, you have to know these things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those who look at the historical development of humanity only in terms of the sequence of cause and effect, as is customary today, will not be able to gain from history itself that which it can be in terms of forces, of impulses for the individual human being, if one tries to penetrate into the true essence of this historical becoming. Historical development can only reveal itself to someone who is able to perceive a wise working through the succession of facts. Today it is almost the case that one is of the opinion that anyone who sees a wise event in the context of the world and especially in the historical development of humanity is indulging in superstition and attributing to things something that only he himself has thought up. However, one must not impose one's own ideas onto things. One must not force one's way of thinking onto things, but one must try to let things speak for themselves. If one is open enough, one will perceive something like an active wisdom everywhere in historical development, especially at significant turning points in human evolution.

Now, one of the things that has emerged from history is, above all, the establishment of the individual festive days of the year, especially the great festive days. It is striking when we realize that Christmas is a so-called fixed feast, falling every year near the winter solstice, on December 24 and 25. In contrast to this, Easter is a so-called movable feast, which appears to be arranged according to the constellation of the sun and moon, the observation of which is thus, to a certain extent, brought in from the extra-terrestrial cosmos. It is the case that if a person takes these festive days of the year seriously, they have a meaning for their life, they are significant in their life. That is what they should be. Meaningful, penetrating thoughts should arise on these festive days. Profound feelings and emotions should well up from the heart and soul. It is precisely through what we experience inwardly during such festive seasons that we should feel connected to the passage of time and to that which is effective in the course of time.

Now, these festive seasons have been fixed for certain historical reasons, and one has to reflect on such a fact that Christmas is an immovable festival and Easter is a movable one, that Christmas falls at a time when the earth is, so to speak, most closed off from the influences of the extraterrestrial cosmos. When the sun has the least effect on the earth, when the earth, out of its own forces, which it has retained from the summer and autumn season, produces its own covering for the shortest days, when the earth, out of itself, makes what it can with its own forces with the least influence from the cosmos, we celebrate Christmas. |

When the time begins again when the earth experiences the most significant influences from the extraterrestrial cosmos, when the warmth of the sun, the light of the sun, causes vegetation to grow out of the ground, when heaven, so to speak, works together with the earth to weave the earth's garment, then we celebrate Easter. And in that such conceptions have emerged from the thoughts of humanity, not in an abstract way conceived by the one or the other arbitrarily, but from thoughts that have, as it were, permeated humanity through long epochs, that have developed themselves, into the historical evolution something has flowed that, when recognized, at the same time evokes the possibility of deeply venerating it, the possibility of looking back to the times of our ancestors with reverence, devotion, and love. And by drawing attention to something like this, one can indeed say: Contemplation of the active wisdom in historical becoming allows those forces and impulses to emerge from this history that can then, in the right way, become rooted in the human soul and work in the human soul in the right way.

Christmas, as we celebrate it today at the shortest time of the year, on December 24th and 25th, has only been celebrated in the Christian Church since the year 354. It is not usually thought about in a forceful way that even in Christian-Catholic Rome in the year 353, Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Christ, was not celebrated on that day. It is one of the most interesting aspects of historical reflection to see how this Christmas celebration has become established, out of a historical instinct and from deeper sources of wisdom, which may have worked largely unconsciously.

Something similar, but fundamentally different, was celebrated before: January 6, which was the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ. And this Feast of the Epiphany of Christ meant the remembrance of the baptism of John in the Jordan. This Feast of the Baptism of John in the Jordan was celebrated in the first centuries of Christianity as the most important. And only from the time I have indicated does the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ, the Feast of the Baptism of John in the Jordan, so to speak, wander through the twelve holy nights back to December 25 and is replaced by the Feast of the Birthday of Christ Jesus. This is connected with deep, meaningful inner processes of the historical development of Christianity.

What does the fact that in the first centuries of the Christian worldview the memory of the baptism of John in the Jordan was celebrated indicate? What does this baptism of John in the Jordan mean? This baptism of John in the Jordan signifies that from the heights of heaven, for extraterrestrial, cosmic reasons, the entity of the Christ descends and unites with the entity of the man Jesus of Nazareth. This baptism of St. John in the Jordan therefore signifies a fertilization of the earth from cosmic expanses. This baptism of St. John in the Jordan signifies an interpenetration of heaven and earth. And in celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany, we celebrated a supersensible birth, the birth of the Christ in the thirty-year-old man Jesus.

In the first centuries of Christian development, attention was focused primarily on the appearance of Christ on earth, and of less importance, alongside this view of the appearance of an extraterrestrial Christ-being in the earthly realm, was the earthly birth of the man Jesus of Nazareth, who only received the Christ in his own body when he was thirty years old. This was the conception in the early centuries of Christianity. In these centuries, therefore, the descent of the supermundane Christ was celebrated. And an attempt was made to understand what had actually happened in the course of his incarnation.

If we allow the historical development up to the Mystery of Golgotha to take effect on us, it presents itself in such a way that in primeval times humanity was endowed with an original wisdom of a supersensible kind, an original wisdom that one must have the deepest reverence for if one is able to contemplate it in its entire inwardness, in its entire essence. In the first, only externally childlike appearing wisdom of mankind, an infinite amount is revealed not only about the earthly, but above all about the extra-earthly, and how the extra-earthly affects the earth. Then one sees how, in the course of the development of mankind, this light of primeval wisdom shines less and less in human minds, how people increasingly lose touch with this primeval wisdom. And this primeval wisdom has faded and disappeared from the human mind precisely in the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching. All phenomena of historical development in Greek and especially in Roman life show in the most diverse ways that precisely the best of humanity were aware that a new heavenly element must enter into earthly life so that the earth and humanity could continue to develop.

For the unprejudiced observer, the entire evolution of mankind on earth falls into two parts: the time that waited for the Mystery of Golgotha, waited not only in the simple, childlike minds of men, but waited with the highest wisdom — and in the part that then follows on from the Mystery of Golgotha, in which we are immersed and for which we hope for an ever broader and broader fulfillment, again in the supersensible world, again in the influence of the extraterrestrial cosmic reality on earthly events within the evolution of the earth. Thus the Mystery of Golgotha stands at the very center of earthly evolution, giving it its true meaning.

I have often tried to express this pictorially for my listeners by saying that one should look at something like the significant painting by Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper in Milan, which unfortunately no longer exists in its artistic perfection. How one sees the Redeemer within His Twelve, how one sees Him contrasted on one side with John and on the other with Judas, and how one then has the whole thing before one in its coloring. And here, precisely with regard to this most characteristic image, when contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, one must say: If any being were to come down to Earth from a foreign heavenly body, it would in the outer reality, would be amazed, for we must assume that such a being from another planet would have a completely different environment around it, and it would be amazed at all the things that human beings have created on earth. But if he were to be led to this picture, in which this Mystery of Golgotha is shown in its most characteristic form, he would intuitively sense something of the meaning of earthly existence from this picture, simply through the way in which Christ Jesus is placed among his twelve disciples, who in turn represent the whole human race.

One can sense the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha actually gives meaning to the evolution of the earth from the most diverse backgrounds. But one only fully senses that this is the case when one can rise to the vision that with the baptism of John in the Jordan a supersensible being, the Christ, has entered into a human being. This is how the Gnostics saw it, not with the world view that we are again trying to gain today through anthroposophy, but with their world view, which was the last remnant of the ancient wisdom of mankind. One might say that so much of the instinctive wisdom of humanity remained that, in the first centuries after Christ's appearance, a number of people were still able to grasp what actually happened with the appearance of Christ on earth. The wisdom that the Gnostics had can no longer be ours. We must, because humanity must be in a state of continuous progress, advance to a much more conscious, less instinctive view of the supersensible as well. But we look with reverence at the wisdom of the Gnostics, who had retained so much of the first instinctive primal wisdom of man that one could grasp the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha.

From this comprehension of the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha and of the central phenomenon of John's baptism in the Jordan, the first great festival was established. But it was already so arranged in the developmental history of mankind that the ancient wisdom was dying out and becoming paralyzed. And it was precisely in the fourth century A.D. that one could do nothing with this ancient wisdom. Yesterday I presented another point of view, showing how this ancient wisdom gradually darkened. In a certain sense, the fourth century is the one in which man made the first beginning of being completely dependent on himself, having nothing around him for his contemplation other than what the senses can perceive and what the combining mind can make of the sensory perception. In order to gain its freedom, which could never have been gained through dependence on unearthly things, if ancient wisdom had not been paralyzed, humanity had to lose ancient wisdom, had to be thrown into materialistic observation. This materialistic outlook first appeared at dawn in the fourth century A.D. and grew stronger and stronger until it reached its culmination in the nineteenth century.

Materialism also has its good side in the history of the development of mankind. The fact that man no longer had the supersensible light shining into his mind, the fact that he was dependent on what he saw with his senses in the world around him, gave rise to the independent power within him that tends towards freedom. It also appeared wise in the developmental history of humanity that materialism has emerged. But precisely at the time when materialism took hold of the earthly nature of man, it was no longer possible to understand how the influence of the extraterrestrial, the heavenly, in the symbol of John's baptism in the Jordan presented itself to humanity. As a result, people lost their understanding of the meaning of the Feast of Epiphany, January 6, and resorted to other explanations. All the feelings and emotions that were related to the Mystery of Golgotha were no longer associated with the supermundane Christ, but began to be associated with the earthly Jesus of Nazareth. And so the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ became the Feast of the Epiphany of the Child Jesus. Admittedly, the development has taken a course that has now reached a peripeteia, which must create new necessities in the striving of humanity for our present-day world view.

We see how, as early as the 4th century, human beings' full and wise comprehension of the impossibility of comprehending the appearance of Christ was already confronted with it. But human feeling, human perception, human emotion and will develop in the course of history at a slower pace than thoughts. While thoughts had long since ceased to be directed towards the appearance of Christ, hearts still turned to this appearance of Christ. Deeply intimate feelings lived on in Christendom. And these profound feelings now formed the content of historical development for many centuries. And these profound feelings expressed it - but as if from instinctive impulses - what a significant event the appearance of Christ was for the development of the earth. The festival of the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth was connected to the Adam and Eve Day, the festival of the beginning of the earth of mankind. Adam and Eve Day falls on December 24, and Jesus' birthday celebration on December 25. In Adam and Eve, people saw the beings with whom the evolution of the earth began, the beings who descended from spiritual heights, who became sinful on earth, who became entangled on earth in material events, who lost their connection with the supersensible worlds. The first Adam was spoken of in the Pauline sense; and the second Adam was spoken of as the Christ: that man can only be fully man in the post-Christian era if he unites within himself the forces that fell away from God through Adam and the forces that through Christ bring him back to God. This was expressed by bringing together the Adam and Eve festival and the Jesus birthday festival. The sense of this connection, which gives earthly life its true meaning, has been preserved in a heartfelt way over the centuries.

One example of this is the occurrence of the very heartfelt 'Paradeisspiele' (Paradise Plays) and 'Christi-Geburtspiele' (Plays about the Nativity), of which we have brought samples to be performed here, which date from the last Middle Ages, from the beginning of the modern era, when German tribes living in the western regions took them with them to the east. In present-day Hungary, such tribes settled. We find such tribes north of the Danube in the Pressburg area, we find them south of the Carpathians in the so-called Spiš area, we see them in Transylvania. We find mainly Alemannic-Saxon tribes in these areas. We then find Swabian tribes in the Banat. All these German tribes took with them the one thing from their original homeland that had been imbued with the most heartfelt sentiments, which united humanity during these centuries with the most important experience on earth.

But human wisdom increasingly took a course that also intertwined the Christ event with the materialistic conception of the world. In the nineteenth century we see the rise of a materialistic theology. The criticism of the Gospels begins. The possibility of having an inkling — as must be the case with supersensible representations — that what appears as an imagination of the supersensible is different depending on whether it is viewed from one point of view or another, is lost. One has no conception of the fact that the sages of former centuries must also have recognized the so-called contradictions in the Gospels and that they did not criticize them in a critical way. One sinks philistinely into these contradictions in the Gospels. One resolves the contradictions, one removes everything supersensible from the Gospels. One loses the Christ out of the story of the Gospel. One tries to make something out of the story of the Gospels, something like an ordinary, profane story. Gradually, one can no longer distinguish what the theological historians say from what a secular historian like Ranke says about the Mystery of Golgotha.

When one looks for the figure of Jesus in the famous historian Ranke, as he presents him as the simple but most outstanding human being who ever walked the earth, when one reads all the lovingly described in Ranke's profane history, one can hardly tell the difference between this and what the materialistic theologians of the 19th century had to say about Jesus. Theology is becoming materialistic. Precisely for enlightened theology, the Christ disappears from the view of humanity. The “simple man from Nazareth” is gradually becoming that which only those who undertake to describe the essence of Christianity want to point to. And Adolf Harnack's description of the essence of Christianity has become famous.

In this book, “The Essence of Christianity” by Adolf Harnack, there are two passages that could be truly devastating for anyone who has a sense for the real essence of Christianity. The first is that this theologian, who wants to be a Christian, says that the Christ does not actually belong in the Gospels, that the Son does not belong in the Gospels; only the Father belongs in the Gospels. And so Christ Jesus, who walked the earth in Palestine at the beginning of our era, becomes simply the human proclaimer of the Father's teaching. The Father alone belongs in the Gospels, says Adolf Harnack, and yet he believes himself to be a Christian theologian! One must say: the essence of Christianity has completely disappeared from this “Essence of Christianity”, I mean that which Adolf Harnack describes, and actually such a view should no longer call itself Christian.

The other thing that can have a devastating effect in this writing “The Essence of Christianity” occurred to me once when I was present at a lecture given in a society called the Giordano Bruno Society. In connection with the remarks of a speaker there, I had to say how the most important part of the essence of Christianity has disappeared from modern theology. I had to point to Harnack's remark in this book “The Essence of Christianity,” where he says: Whatever may have happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, the idea of resurrection, the Easter faith, emerged from this event; and it is this faith that we want to hold on to. — So the resurrection itself has become unimportant to modern Christian theologians. They do not want to concern themselves with this resurrection as a fact. Whatever may have happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, people have begun to believe that the resurrection occurred there, and it is not the resurrection that we want to hold on to, but this belief.

I pointed out at the time that the essence of Christianity had been expressed by Paul, who said, based on his experiences outside Damascus: And if the Christ had not been resurrected, we would all be lost. Not the man Jesus is the essential thing in Christianity, but the supersensible entity, which through the baptism of John in the Jordan entered into the man Jesus, which arose from the tomb at Gethsemane, and which became visible to those who had the capacity for such visibility. Paul, as the latest of them, saw it, and Paul refers to the risen Christ. I therefore had to point out at the time how the remark of one of the most famous modern so-called Christian theologians fails to see the very essence of Christianity, its supersensible nature. The chairman of the society replied to me in a most peculiar way at the time. He said that such a thing could not be contained in Harnack's book, for Harnack was a Protestant theologian, and if Harnack asserted such a thing, it would be on a par with an assertion that could only come from the Catholic side, for example, about the Holy Robe of Trier. For the Catholic, it is not important whether it can be proven that this holy robe in Trier really comes from Jerusalem, but rather that faith is attached to this holy robe. The chairman of this society was so embarrassed that he did not even admit that this remark was in Harnack's book. I told him that since I did not have the book at hand, I would write him the page number on a postcard the next day. This is also characteristic of the modern thoroughness with which books are read that have an importance in the first place. You read a book and believe that it makes a significant impression on life, and you do not even notice one of the most important remarks, but you think it is impossible that it could be in it. It is in it! All this proves to us how the supersensible Christ has been thrown out of the evolution of humanity by a theology that is becoming ever more materialistic, how people have clung only to the outward physical appearance of the man Jesus.

Now, the festive customs and dedications of the simple minds that resorted to Christmas plays were beautiful; they arose from sacred feelings. Even if people could no longer provide each other with more information about the full meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha, they also had it in their hearts where they outwardly adhered to the material appearance of the child Jesus. And in this form, the celebration of the birth of Christ is beautiful and heartfelt.

The thought that destroys the Christ in the man Jesus is not beautiful and, from the highest point of view, it is not true, even from the Christian world view. It is as if the wisdom-filled guidance of humanity had first taken into account what had to happen in order for the materialistic view and thus the development of humanity to freedom to begin and continue. Just as materialism had to come in order to liberate humanity, so the Feast of the Epiphany, which can only be understood through supersensible vision and falls on January 6, had to be moved back to the Feast of the Nativity, December 25.

The twelve holy nights lie in between. In a sense, humanity made its way back through the entire zodiac by going through a twelvefold number, at least in the symbol, when this festival was moved.

Today, by summarizing everything that is connected with the Christ through the man Jesus, we can certainly unfold all the intimacy and depth of feeling for Christmas. And in my Christmas meditation yesterday, I wanted to express in words what is beneficial in this respect for the present time. But we must, after materialism has celebrated its highest triumphs in theology, after Christ Jesus has become, precisely for enlightened theology, only the simple man Jesus, again find our way back to the intuition of the supersensible, extraterrestrial Christ-being.

If you come with this point of view, then you will make enemies of precisely the materialistic theology of today. Just as the sun materially sends down its light from extraterrestrial cosmic expanses, so the spiritual sun of Christ descended to men and united with Jesus of Nazareth. Just as one can see the revelation of the soul and spirit in the outer physiognomy of man, in his facial features and in his gestures, so one can see the outer physiognomy in that which takes place in the cosmos, in the gestures that are into the cosmos through the course of the stars, in that which, as the inner warmth of the soul of the universe, manifests itself externally through the radiation of the sun, in that one can see the outer physiognomy of what permeates the whole world spiritually and soulfully. And in the concentrated spiritual descent of Christ upon the earth, one can see the inward aspect as the outward physiognomy of the concentrated rays of the sun streaming down upon the earth. And one will understand in the right way when it is said: The solar nature of Christ descended upon the earth.

We must come back to this supersensible understanding of Christ. We must learn to direct our thoughts back to the other birth, which took place as an extra-terrestrial birth through the baptism of St. John in the Jordan, despite the heartfelt devotion we wish to preserve for the birthday of Jesus, for which Christmas alone has become. We also want to learn to understand what takes place in the Jordan baptism of John in a meaningful historical symbol before our soul, as well as what happened in the stable of Bethlehem or in Nazareth. We want to learn to understand the words as they are communicated in the Gospel of Luke in the right way: This is my son, today he was born to me. — We want to learn to understand the Christmas mystery in such a way that it becomes for us again the source of understanding for the appearance of Christ on earth. We want to learn to understand the birth of the spirit in addition to the memory of our physical birth.

Such an understanding can only gradually arise from a general spiritual comprehension of the mysteries of the universe. We must gradually struggle towards a spiritual conception of the mystery of Golgotha. To do this, however, we need insight into the origin of such impulses within the earthly development of humanity, as there was in the 4th century AD, when the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ was moved from January 6 to the day of Jesus' birthday on December 25 out of the innermost need of developing humanity. One must learn to see how the wise guidance of human history works there. One must learn to devote oneself to this historical development with one's whole being. Then one will recognize the wise guidance in human history without superstition, and without bringing one's own fantasies into it. One must learn not only to immerse oneself in history with abstract ideas and to look at cause and effect, but one must learn to devote oneself to this historical development with one's whole being. Only then will we understand what makes our time a truly transitional time, a time in which a spiritual world view must again be wrested from the materialistic view, and a natural elevation to the supersensible must again be wrested. And an expression for this elevation to the supersensible will be a new understanding of the appearance of Christ on earth, the mystery of Golgotha.

Thus for the modern man who is really able to delve into the spirit of the time, Christmas has a twofold significance: it is that which has been approaching through recent history since the 4th century AD, that which has produced such wonderful has produced such wonderful beauties precisely in the simple, unadorned folk tradition, and that which still arouses our heartfelt delight today when we see it again in the renewal of folk plays such as we are attempting through our anthroposophical science. It is all that human warmth and affection has poured into life through the centuries during which the idea of Christianity has taken on more and more materialistic forms, until in the 19th century it has come so far that it must turn around through its own absurdity and return to the spiritual. This gives us, as people of today, the second thing about Christmas: in addition to the feeling that we have for the traditional Christmas that has been handed down since the 4th century AD, for this heartfelt feeling that we want to feel with, a new Christmas should be born from our contemporary understanding, a second Christmas to the old Christmas.

The Christ shall be reborn anew through humanity. Christmas is traditionally a celebration of the birth of Jesus; in spirit it shall become a celebration of the birth of a new conception of Christ, not new in relation to the first centuries, but new in relation to the centuries since the 4th century AD. And so Christmas itself should not be just a celebration of the memory of the birth, but, as it is experienced from year to year in the near future, it should become a direct, contemporary birthday celebration, the celebration of a present-day event. This birth of the new Christ-idea must come to pass. And Christmas must become so intense that every year at this very time man will be able to reflect anew and with special intensity on the fact that a new Christ-idea must be born.

Christmas must become a festival not of remembrance but of the present, a consecration of that which the human being experiences as a birth in his immediate present. Then it will truly enter into our more recent historical becoming, then it will strengthen itself more and more in this historical becoming of humanity, also into the future, which will have such need of it. Then it will become a consecration of the world.

Today I would like to speak about an aspect of Anthroposophy which closely concerns the being of man.

It is obvious that our contact with the world between waking and sleeping is, to begin with, through our senses. We perceive different aspects of the world around us through our various senses. By means of a certain inner soul activity we build up a picture of the world on the basis of our impressions. With this I merely want to indicate how anyone may observe the course and content of his waking state. However, our existence within the world embraces not only the waking state but also that of sleep. While we sleep we are, with our soul being and our `I', outside of our body in a realm which is unknown to ordinary consciousness.

What I have just said is applicable to present-day man in the way his soul life has developed since the 15th Century. I have often indicated the extraordinary importance of this particular period in mankind's evolution.

The question arises: What is our relationship, in our sleeping state, to that realm which is closed at least to our ordinary consciousness? There are difficulties in describing this relationship, especially at this point in mankind's evolution, unless we bear in mind that man has evolved and has gone through a great many different stages. At present, in our so-called civilized age we find, when we consider man's soul life, that he must exert himself considerably when forming concepts and mental pictures. We are often thoughtless when we regard earlier periods of human life which did not have such systems of education as we now find necessary. We are superficial in the way we look at that culture which arose, in ancient times, over in the East, although the human beings were not undergoing education from childhood as is the case nowadays.

In present-day Europe it is practically impossible to imagine how differently education was regarded in the ancient Orient. Yet things were created of an exalted nature, uplifting to heart and mind. One need only think of the Oriental writings such as the Vedas and all that is contained in the wisdom of the Orient. Today everything originating in mental activity is evaluated on the basis of the circumstances of a person's upbringing and education and on what, as a result, he further accomplishes in life. The necessity to be educated and well informed is, in the first place, because each individual today must be able to form his own thoughts about life. Without this ability he would be lost in the modern world. Man has actually not yet come very far in the art of formulating thoughts. It is essential, particularly in the system of education, that progress is made in furthering the art of formulating concepts about the external world.

The necessity for this began already in ancient Greece. In Greece, though strongly influenced by the Orient, arose the first cultural life within Europe. A system of education developed which included a rudimentary cultivation of mental activity. In the Orient no appeal was made to mental effort and this still influenced Greek cultural life; in general, no exertion was made to form one's own mental pictures of external objects. Socrates¹ is rightly admired within Western culture as one of the first to induce people to form their own concepts.

However, it would be quite wrong to conclude that man was obliged to produce his thoughts by his own effort within the cultural life of the West, while there was no life of thought in the Orient. Indeed, a powerful thought life existed and the further we go back in Oriental culture the stronger and the more powerful it was. We find already before the existence of the Vedas and the Vedanta philosophy a powerful thought life. As I have often pointed out, the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy, do not represent the very first stages—which were not written down—of Oriental spiritual life. It had all fallen into decadence two or three millennia ago. People of the Orient today live in the afterglow of a once quite remarkable thought life, but a thought life utterly different from ours. We must exert ourselves—indeed, we have to sweat inwardly—forgive the crude expression, which is meant only figuratively—in order to produce our thoughts, whereas Oriental thought life was inspired. Thoughts and thought combinations arose in the ancient Oriental of their own accord. His picture of the world was inspired in him; he felt that what he thought was bestowed upon him. Inner exertion in combining thoughts was unknown to him. Between waking and sleeping he felt that thoughts were granted him. This colored his whole soul life; he felt grateful to the Gods that they bestowed thoughts upon him. The Oriental felt that when, as a human being, thoughts lived within him, it was because divine spiritual power streamed into him. It was a completely different attitude to thought life from ours.

In ancient times in the Orient the life of thoughts and feelings were not so separate as they now are for ordinary consciousness. Because man felt his thoughts bestowed upon him he also felt uplifted by them and a religious feeling united itself with every thought. He felt he must approach, with religious devotion, the powers that bestowed the readymade thoughts and thought combinations upon him.

If one seeks the external objective reason why Oriental man experienced the world in this way, one finds that it is because his sleep life was different from that of modern man. During sleep our soul and our `I' abandon the body mainly in the region of the head; the organs of metabolism and limbs are not separated from man to the same degree. These parts are still penetrated by man's `I' and soul being during sleep. I have often spoken of this but should like to place it before you once more schematically. Let this be man when awake (see drawing, left). The `I' and soul being, which I have drawn in red, penetrate the physical and etheric bodies. It would be wrong if I drew sleeping man in such a way that I had the physical and etheric bodies lying on the bed and simply drew the `I' and astral body (or soul) alongside. I must draw it so that—when the physical organs and limbs are here (drawing, right, white lines)—I draw the `I' and soul being outside man only in relation to the head. For, strictly speaking, it is only in regard to this region that man in sleep is separated from his physical and etheric bodies (red).

When we go back to those ancient times of which we spoke, the situation was different. During man's sleep the organs of his head—mainly the system of nerves and that part of the breathing system that penetrates the head—were the scene of activity for those divine spiritual beings who were concerned with the earth.

It is simply describing the reality to say that in the very earliest days of mankind's evolution on earth, divine spiritual beings withdrew from man when he woke up. When he slept they took up their abode in the human head, which was then bereft of man's `I' and soul being. During his sleep, divine spiritual beings carried out their activity in the head. When man woke in the morning—i.e., when he again sank into his head—he found the result of this activity. The divine spiritual beings regulated his nerve processes and worked right into the blood circulation. Through the ether body they exerted their influence even in the organic processes in the physical body. In general, the human beings were not clearly aware of this. Only those schooled in the Mysteries realized it; the great masses of humanity experienced it but without full awareness. Thus, when he woke man found the result of the Gods' activity in his head. And when he perceived the configuration of his thoughts, during waking life, it was because during sleep Gods had been active in his head. Thus, ancient Oriental man found every morning a heritage left by the Gods during his sleep, with the consequence that he felt his thoughts to be inspired within him. He felt the Gods' deeds as inspiration. In other words, the divine spiritual beings did not inspire man directly during his waking life; they did it during his sleep by pursuing their own activity in his head.

In those ancient times man's social behavior was induced by inspiration. Divine spiritual beings could completely regulate earthly affairs. Through their activity during man's sleep they brought about a mutual trust among human beings and also the obedience felt by the great masses towards their leaders, and so on. There was interaction throughout between the divine spiritual world and the earthly world in the ancient Orient. It was possible because man's whole organization was different.

I have often mentioned the fact that people nowadays imagine that throughout history man has always been as he is now. They assume that the physical nature of his body was the same and so, too, his soul being and the spirituality of his `I'. When a modern historian writes about ancient Egypt and deciphers its documents, then he thinks that though the people were not as clever as he is, they nevertheless thought, felt and acted more or less as he does. The view is that if one goes back far enough then man appears as a kind of higher ape, a state from which he then progresses to—well, to whatever the historian imagines. Nevertheless, it is assumed that from the time historical records began, man has been the same as he is now. This is assumed both in regard to his thinking, feeling and willing, and in regard to his etheric-physical organization.

However, that is not the case; man has altered quite considerably, also during historical times. Just consider the instance I mentioned earlier of how the physical sight of the ancient Greeks differed from ours. They did not see the color blue as we see it; they saw in fact only the reddish color shades. Modern man is mistaken when he thinks that the Greeks, because they were surrounded by beauty, particularly appreciated the beautiful blue of the sky. The Greek did not really differentiate between blue and green; he saw plainly the warm reddish-yellow colors. The sky to him therefore looked quite different from the way it is seen with normal consciousness today. The eyes have changed in the course of mankind's evolution, though in inner subtle ways. In fact, the whole sense system has become different in the course of historical times; and in the Orient, in those ancient times we are considering, the senses were so organized that man could not be deluded by them, nor did they prevent his devoting himself to the result of the divine deeds that remained in his organism when he woke from sleep.

Gradually, man's senses changed and caused him to become so intensely connected with the external world that the moment he woke his attention was drawn away from that which as a heritage was left in his organism. Because man was now differently organized the Gods no longer carried out their activity in his head during sleep. This activity no longer furthered mankind's evolution; had it continued it would not have benefited man. On the contrary, as man has now, through his senses, become so strongly absorbed in the external world he would no longer be able to pay attention to what the Gods bequeathed to him during the night. Their activity would no longer be felt as inspiration, and as a consequence of not being taken into man's consciousness it would flow back into the body, causing the organism to become old prematurely.

Man could live united with the world of the Gods because in ancient times, unlike today, his senses were not particularly orientated towards the external world. In his waking state he could absorb what he had experienced in sleep. This was a real living with the Gods, for though he could not behold them with his senses, man, in ancient times, was at least adapted to experience their deeds.

Later, in the millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, man's senses, particularly the eyes, began to develop—also in the Orient—the sensitivity to external impressions which they have now. The system of senses gradually developed to what it later became. At first man retained, in addition, in his system of nerves, what still enabled him to experience the divine spiritual deeds. His experience of them had formerly been in their purity—i.e., not mingled with sense perceptions. But now they were taken up by the senses. This had the strange result that for a large part of mankind the Gods, the spiritual beings, were drawn, as it were, into the physical organization. In consequence, what had formerly been a pure spiritual experience of divine spiritual beings, became a belief in ghosts.

The belief in ghosts is not so very ancient; what is ancient is the pure spiritual beholding of divine spiritual beings. Belief in ghosts arose first through the mingling of sense perception with beholding the divine. When the culture of the Oriental Mysteries penetrated into Europe, for example, into the magnificent spiritual life of Greece, into Greek art and philosophy, there followed in its wake, also, the seeing of ghosts by the general masses of people.

Thus, in the last millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, the former pure spiritual perception which the Oriental people possessed, had fallen into decline. It had become, particularly by large sections of the masses, a kind of perception of ghosts. This belief in ghosts wandered over into Europe; in the Orient it had been pure spiritual perception but had now become transformed into something physical. Thus, it can be said that the belief in ghosts is the last offshoot, the end product of a lofty, albeit dreamlike, spiritual seeing, which had once signified a cultural flowering in mankind's evolution.

I have described how in ancient times Oriental people felt that during sleep the head was the earthly scene of activity for divine spiritual beings. This was something of which people in general were dimly aware; those who had undergone initiation in the Mysteries were fully conscious of the fact. What I have described has a counterpart in the cultural life that has since developed.

The cultural life of more recent times is still in its early stages. The further West we go the stronger it comes to expression. To the ancient Oriental it would have made no sense had he been told that thoughts do not pulsate through the will. He knew from experience that what lived in his will, and even in his blood, was something bestowed upon him by the Gods. They formed his thoughts and during sleep they developed a powerful force in him which he experienced as inspiration.

Even today, when we look towards the East, we find, for example in the philosophy of Soloviev,² the last remnants of how things were experienced in the past. And, clearly, Soloviev would have found it incomprehensible if told that thought is not a force that impels and carries the will. However, it is the opinion today, especially in America, that thought is not the ruling factor in man. Physiology and biology as developed in America are clear demonstrations of this view. When one goes into the finer details one finds that science in America is, in this respect, something quite different from that of Europe, let alone the Orient. Modern man in the Western world is all too aware that he produces his thoughts himself. Thoughts, however, must relate to something, so it is maintained that far more important for man than the thoughts he absorbs, is the kind of family into which he is born, the way he is brought up, the political environment in which he grows up, the religious denomination he might join. All these things act on his emotions and determine his will. Thus, the will is supposed not to be directly influenced by thoughts, but is determined by such environmental factors as family, politics, country and so on. Thus, in America, in fact, Western man in general, is of the opinion that thought is not the ruler in man; at most its position is that of prime minister. The ruler is the human organism with its instincts and will impulses. Quoting Carlyle² it is said that thought may be a devoted minister, but its function is only that of an executive. And it must be emphasized that today's broad mass of humanity thinks likewise, shown by its eagerness to confirm that ancient traditions should be superseded. This is why there is today such an interest in the study of primitive man. It is thought that he lived through instincts and desires of which his thoughts were only a kind of mirror image.

Thus, today Western man looks into his inner being and asks why it is that he is driven by instincts and cravings. To him they appear devoid of spirit because he is not yet organized to perceive the spiritual in them. Yet every instinct or craving, whether good or bad, is spiritual. It may be a very evil instinct that comes to expression in one or another person, but even the most brutal urge is spiritual. The human race is always in the process of development; it must advance to such spirituality that when man looks into himself and perceives his instincts, urges and cravings he sees everywhere in them the spiritual. This will come about in the future.

It makes no difference in this respect whether a person has good or bad instincts; if they are bad it is because either Luciferic or Ahrimanic spirits hold sway in him. But they are spirits.

The assumption that the driving force in man is his instincts is, as far as being aware of the spiritual reality is concerned, similar to the earlier assumption in regard to ghosts. In ancient times spirituality was perceptible to man in the Orient. As it evolved further it became, as I have described, in the first millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, a belief in ghosts, a perception of ghosts (see drawing, blue).

From where we are at present within world evolution we look back to a time when a belief in ghosts emerged from a former spirituality; at the same time, we look towards the future and foresee a time when once again pure spiritual perception will emerge. But at present we also have a belief in ghosts, in inner ghosts. Those who believe in outer ghosts fail to see the spiritual reality in them and regard them as something that can be seen with physical eyes. Western man today, when he looks into himself, also fails to see the spiritual reality. The way he regards instincts, urges and cravings makes them into ghosts which today precede a future spirituality (red), while the ghosts of old followed an earlier spirituality (blue).

One could also say that from East to West an ancient pure spirituality developed which was followed, in the course of time, by a belief in ghosts, of which remnants are still with us. From West to East, approaching us, a later spirituality is developing which will become reality in a far distant future. The way modern man visualizes urges, instincts and cravings, in which the beginning of the new spirituality reveals itself, makes them as ghost-like as the former ghosts. This outlook makes the educated person regard with disdain the common belief in ghosts. At the same time, he attributes to man ghost-like instincts, urges and cravings. What he does not realize is that the belief in ghosts held by the masses, has as much scientific validity as his belief in desires, urges and instincts. His belief is in ghosts announcing a new beginning just as the masses have a belief in ghosts that marks an ending. Our European civilization has become so chaotic because it is the scene of collision between the old and the new ghosts.

In a West-East aphorism I have briefly characterized how, on the one hand, modern man has been for some time influenced by the ancient heritage of Oriental spirituality which has become a belief in ghosts, and how, on the other hand, he is influenced by the beginning of a spirituality that is now germinating which, through a materialistic interpretation, has turned man's instincts, urges and desires into ghosts. Those which are usually called ghosts are spirits which appear materialized through man's organization. The modern ghosts, pointing to the future, consisting of man's urges, instincts, desires and passions, have not yet become dematerialized; they have not yet become spiritual.

Man's inner soul life, particularly in Europe, takes its course within this peculiar chaotic condition created by the interaction of old and new ghosts. It is essential that man attain spiritual insight in order to arrive at a clear understanding of both. Not only man's view of the world is dependent upon such insight; but also, human life on earth as a whole is dependent upon it. That this must be so follows from the fact that it is not only man's spiritual or cultural life that is derived from his particular nature; but also, his life of rights or political life and his economic life.

But what is the origin of this particular development? I said that the earthly concern of the Gods, of the divine spiritual beings, was within the human head. We differentiate threefold man into the nerve-sense man, whose abode is mainly in the head, the rhythmic man, who lives in the middle, and the metabolic-limb man consisting of the limbs and their continuation inward in the organs of metabolism (see drawing). We differentiate this threefold man and we know that during the sleeping state of humanity in ancient times the Gods, when carrying out their earthly task, made the human head their scene of action. What is the situation at present?

The Gods also carry out their activity in present-day humanity during sleep, but no longer in the head; now it takes place in the metabolic-limb organism. The significance, the all-important point about this is, that for man, the metabolic-limb system remains unconscious also during his waking state. You will remember how I have often spoken about the fact that man is awake in his conceptual life, but completely unaware of what happens deep down in the organism to cause a muscle to carry out a movement. When present-day man has a mental picture of lifting his arm or moving his hand he has, in his ordinary consciousness, no awareness of how his mental life affects his organism. This remains unconscious even during the waking state. In other words, the scene of action of the Gods on earth nowadays is such that—unlike the situation in ancient times—man's natural evolution prevents him, to begin with, from taking possession of the divine heritage when he wakes.

Divine spiritual processes take place in man, today, between falling asleep and waking, but his present nature prevents him from having any impression while awake of the Gods' activity during sleep. In ancient times, man was so constituted that his very organization enabled him to feel his thoughts to be inspired. Present-day man produces his own thoughts, and divine spiritual deeds do not yet enter into this activity; mankind must first reach the appropriate stage of development. This is precisely the task—I would say cosmic task—which Spiritual Science must set itself. And a system of education must be part of such a plan, to enable human beings to recognize, out of their own effort and in full consciousness, the divine spiritual deeds within them. When this stage is reached man will also cease to see his urges and instincts as inner ghosts. The way they are imagined at present they are as much ghosts as the external ones. The external ghosts are not mere delusions; they are divine spiritual forces which appear materialized by being incorrectly seen through man's senses. The divine spiritual forces active in man today are seen incorrectly when they are visualized as urges and instincts.

The external ghosts are scorned today, but what is looked upon as a science deals with nothing but inner ghosts. Man must participate to bring about the transformation intended for him within cosmic evolution. Impulses in this direction ought to permeate every aspect of our culture. This would provide the possibility for man to overcome the forces of decline in their chaotic interaction with forces of ascent against which man still fights, and then strive towards the future stages in mankind's evolution by being inspired and motivated from the spirit. On this everything depends.

What I have tried to convey to you today can be seen as a kind of contemplation of the East in relation to the West, though from an esoteric point of view. Contemplation of East and West is at present altogether timely—I do not use the expression in a trivial sense. It is only through such considerations that mankind can arrive at the relevant level of consciousness.

Thus, in earlier times of earth evolution during sleep (the human being is “man” also during sleep when he does not have his physical body about him) man was in such a relationship to the Gods that he could behold, with eyes of soul and spirit, how they took up their abode in his head. In his waking state all that remained of this experience was a kind of afterglow in his life of feelings. Man became ever more distant from the divine spiritual world which he nevertheless perceived as in a dream when he looked back after having plunged into the body. That was the earlier situation; later, he only felt after waking that he was inspired.

Since then the Gods have drawn deeper down, as it were, into his physical body and man has now entered into such a connection with the Gods that they make his metabolic-limb system the scene of their activity within his earthly nature. However, as man does not completely forsake his earthly nature during sleep, he will, as a consequence, be able to experience again—coming from the divine world—impulses of will and also impulses for his life as a social being—i.e., for his relationship to other human beings—not, however, during sleep—he must experience these spiritual impulses as a complete human being while awake. It can only be attained through increasing conscious knowledge of the spiritual world. To attain this must become man's strongest aim.

This was what I wanted to convey to you as a contribution to an East-West contemplation.

• 1. Socrates, 469-399 B.C. Athenian philosopher.
• 2. Wladimir Soloviev, 1853-1900. Russian philosopher.
• 2. Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881. English philosopher and historian.

I will allude briefly to the indications given in last Sunday's lecture. They were on the subject of man's relationship to the universe and attention was called to how the forces of the human will find their way out into the cosmic expanse in the direction opposite to that of the light streaming from the sun to the earth. So it can be said that forces of will stream out from earthly humanity to meet the light. On the other hand, the element of thought is borne to the earth along the waves of the moon's light.

It was further explained that what is spreads out from man at the dissolution of his physical body is of the nature of will and thus streams out into the cosmos towards its inflowing light; and that man is borne back again towards earthly existence on the currents of the thought-element which flow along the lines of light together with everything that proceeds from the moon.

Naturally, in regard to this aspect of the will-element and the light-element, of the thought-element and the moon's light, and also to what I shall say in the present lecture, it must be remembered that when speaking of these things and making use, as it were, of the structure of the universe to illustrate them, an illustration only is meant. For it must not be thought that in these happenings the actual physical sun and the physical moon are anything else than signs for what is taking place spiritually. The true state of affairs can be described approximately in the following way.

I want to speak of these things from a certain historical aspect, but they could also be presented in a different way. My aim is to make the things I am now saying intelligible to you in greater detail.—You know that according to a more materialistic mode of thinking, our solar system originated from a kind of primal nebula. Thinking that is bound up with purely material existence conceives that our visible cosmos, our solar system, sprang from a kind of primal nebula which then consolidated and contracted into what now exists as the solar system.

From all you have heard in Anthroposophy it will be clear to you from the outset that this cannot be an exhaustive presentation of the process. However much this material explanation of cosmic happenings may be modified by saying that the nebula is permeated with forces, and so on, what is actually present cannot be fully explained in this way, for the reason that nothing contained in a Kant-Laplace or other primal nebula, or what develops from it according to the laws governing the gasiform or aeriform states, could ever have produced the animal and human souls that are living on earth, or even the forces working in the growth of plants. Such an explanation of cosmic happenings is an abstraction even if a materialistic abstraction. It must surely be obvious that in the primal nebula conceived by materialistic thinking, a spiritual reality is contained and that this primal nebula is only the outer, material expression of something spiritual. To be complete, therefore the idea of the primal nebula must include the weaving activity of the spiritual. So this Kant-Laplace nebula must be amplified by being regarded as the body of an element of spirit-and-soul—not, it is true, uniform and individual as in man, but manifold, diversified, yet for all that of the nature of spirit-and-soul.

The purely materialistic way of thinking and of formulating hypotheses goes no farther than this primal nebula. Now let us imagine that not we ourselves, but other beings, beings of the future, were to evolve ideas, based on similarly materialistic thinking, of the genesis of the world-system in which they are, or rather will be, living. Whether what I am now saying represents the reality is quite beside the point; it is said only for the sake of clarifying a thought.—We will assume, then, that in a distant future such beings conceive of a Kant-Laplace nebula as the beginning of the world's existence. At what point in the course of the ages would this nebula exist? When such beings of the future look back, it would have to be assumed—in order to make the thought clear—that our earth, that is to say, our solar system, had long since passed away, that the space it occupied had as it were become free, and that then, in this freed space, a Kant-Laplace nebula of a future world had come into existence. As long as our solar system is there, this future nebula could obviously not be imagined to exist in the space it occupies, I will formulate this example by assuming that these beings who might elaborate a materialistic theory of a future world-system place their primal nebula in the space now occupied by our own. But in accordance with what has been said, spirit-and-soul too would have to be contained in such a nebula of the future; this nebula could only be the bodily expression of an element of cosmic spirit-and-soul. Where would this cosmic element originate? What would have to be said about it?

Suppose that here (drawing on blackboard) is our Kant-Laplace primal nebula (physical plus spirit-and-soul) and here the primal nebula conceived at some future time by beings of whom I have spoken. In that nebula too, the element of spirit-and-soul would have to be contained. Where would it originate? If this future nebula were to be at the place occupied by our own solar system it would include an element of cosmic spirit-and-soul. But this would be what has remained over from the solar system in which we ourselves have lived. Our solar system would have come to an end, would have dispersed in cosmic space. The element of spirit-and-soul would have remained and that would be embodied in a new Kant-Laplace primal nebula. In other words: what I have here described would represent the Jupiter evolution. But within this Jupiter evolution would be contained the element of spirit-and-soul prepared during the Earth-evolution of humanity. In the same way we must go back beyond the Kant-Laplace nebula of the Earth to the spirit-and-soul contained in it. And this was prepared by the beings of the (Old) Moon-existence.

So when you look at the present solar system, you are beholding the outer corporeality of what passed away with the Moon-existence or was transformed from the Moon-existence into the Earth-existence. And again, what we today send out into the cosmic expanse prepares the Jupiter-existence. When, therefore, we look at our solar system we are actually looking at something that is the product of an earlier stage of existence. So when I speak of the light streaming to us from the physical sun I am speaking of something that comes out of the past. And when I speak of the streams of will flowing out to meet this light, I am speaking of something that is preparing the future. The primal work, the cosmic element of which I speak in order to have a form of expression for what happens spiritually, was thus prepared by the Old Moon-existence; and what I describe as the Spiritual is already the foundation for what will live on into the Jupiter-existence. Hence it must not be said that the sun seen by our eyes out in cosmic space draws the human will to itself. This physical sun is only the symbol for that sun-nature towards which the human will streams. And equally, the physical moon is only the physical sign for the Moon-nature which in streams of thoughts pours continually into Earth-existence.

You will find these thoughts necessary if you want to understand rightly what is meant when, in what follows, I shall be speaking of cosmic relationships which reflect, in pictures, what takes place spiritually through mankind on the Earth. And here an addition must be made to what was said in the last lecture. When our solar system as a whole is observed from the Earth, we have the Sun, and, as outer planets: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—others are of less importance. Nearer to the Earth than to the Sun we have Venus and Mercury. Let us now recall that the element of will streams out from humanity on Earth towards the Sun in cosmic space, and that after the dissolution of the body the soul too is borne out into the cosmos through this element of will, which reaches, first, the Sun-existence, the Sun-sphere.

What must in this way be stated as a fact was discovered, as I said in the last lecture, through the experiences of the ancient initiates. They sent their questions towards the Sun along the streams of the will and then received the answers from the Moon in the form of thoughts. So that what I have now said, expressing it in this particular way, is a reality. And again, if more insight is to be gained, we must go back to the experiences of the initiates in the ancient Mysteries.

Think once again of the initiate of these Mysteries sending out his questions, giving them over to the stream flowing out towards the rays of the Sun; he waits, and then, after a time, receives his answers from the Moon—in this respect holding converse with the universe.

But in this process the answers received by the ancient initiates had a specific bearing only; they were answers relating to the actual structure of the universe. So that what was contained in that ancient, more primitive science—which was in truth a lofty, although dreamlike wisdom—was brought into being by the answers received to questions sent out to meet the rays of the Sun streaming from the opposite direction. These answers were to questions referring to the structure of the universe, to the forces at work in the universe, and so on. In short, they were answers relating to the realm of physics, astronomy, to the music of the spheres, to everything embraced in these domains of knowledge in the ancient sciences.

But these initiates sent out other questions as well into the universe. They also knew, for example, how to send out questions to Mars, to the Mars-sphere. At the time when Mars could be seen in the sky they gave over their questions to currents streaming in the opposite direction to the rays of Mars. When they sent their questions to Mars they did not await the answers from the Moon but from Venus, when Venus was standing in a position facing Mars. The important point, however, is that they awaited from Venus the answers to the questions they had sent upwards to Mars.

And again, they awaited from Mercury the answers to the questions sent upwards to Jupiter. The questions to Saturn were sent far out into the cosmic expanse, and the initiates knew that in this case the answers could be awaited from the heaven of the fixed stars only, or from what represented it in those olden times—the Zodiac itself.

What was the nature of these latter questions that were sent out into the universe by the ancient initiates, the answers to which they awaited? These answers were not the abstract, scientific truths connected with the structure of the universe, as I indicated just now; but the questions were those which the initiates wished to address directly to the divine-spiritual Beings.

Thus they sent upwards to Mars questions they had to put to the Angeloi, and awaited the answers from Venus. They sent upwards to Jupiter questions addressed to the Archangeloi, awaiting the answers from Mercury. And to Saturn they addressed questions to be answered by the Archai, awaiting the answers from the Zodiac.

Whereas, therefore, direct converse was held with the cosmos in a more abstract, impersonal form, in the converse of which I am now speaking the initiates were conscious of speaking to actual Beings, divine-spiritual Beings, and of receiving utterances individually from them. In this way, therefore, decisions of will were received from the choir of the Angeloi, from the choir of the Archangeloi, from the choir of the Archai. The discourse between Sun and Moon and the initiates was concerned with the outer aspect of the cosmos; the discourse with the other planets and with the Zodiac was directed to the spiritual Beings in the cosmos.

And so there was actual and continuous intercourse between man and the cosmos, not only concerning its outer structure, but also with the cosmic Beings themselves. The old initiates knew that if, for example, they were directing their forces to Mars, it would not do merely to formulate and send out their cherished questions in terms of thought. Such questions reached only as far as the Sun and the answers came back from the Moon. When the ancient initiates wished to address questions to Mars, they were obliged to do it by composing aphoristic sayings, recitatives, mantrams, which could also be declaimed. These, sent out into the universe, were the means whereby the Mars-forces were activated in such a way that the answers to the questions, coming back from Venus, were audible to a kind of inner hearing.

If it was desired to address questions Jupiter, even the declamation of mantrams did not suffice; in this case the performance of certain definite rites was necessary. And what streamed out into the universe from these rites in the form, shall we say, of cosmic thought, came back from Mercury in certain signs which the ancient initiates knew how to interpret. If they allowed themselves to be inspired by Venus they were able to interpret the corresponding signs; so, too, if they allowed themselves to be inspired by Mercury. These signs were infinitely varied. They meant nothing at all unless a man was inspired by Mercury. If he was inspired by Mercury, he knew: This or that event is an answer to a question asked by means of ritualistic acts.

In this way, happenings and processes in nature, and also those in history which otherwise appear to be nothing more than natural or historical processes, acquired definite content; they could as it were be read. Questions addressed to Saturn entailed very special difficulty, for actions lasting over a lengthy period of time were necessary before they could even be put as questions. In the ancient Mysteries this was as a rule arranged in such a way that the teachers in the Mysteries gave their pupils a certain mission to fulfil, a mission in which the life of the pupil was dedicated to some actual achievement. What it was incumbent upon these pupils to accomplish, often extending over a period of many years, constituted the questions put to the Saturn-existence. And the answers then came back from the Zodiac.

An actual and intimate participation in the cosmos and its happenings was achieved in those rites of prayer and meditation, and by other procedures carried out by the initiates and their pupils in the ancient Mysteries. Nor was anything accomplished in a short time; what took place in such Mysteries through the course of years consisted in unceasing acts of knowledge, and in acts by which the right impulses for the deeds of men were engendered.

Insight into such happenings also enables us to picture how the forces designated as those of Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Moon, Venus and Mercury, work upon man and their significance for him. The significance of the Sun-forces is that they draw man's will-nature towards the Sun and after his death lead him out into the cosmos and thence into the spiritual world. The particular quality of the Moon-forces is that they instill into man the organic configuration which makes thinking and reflection possible; but they are also the forces which bear him back again when, coming down from the spiritual world, he must find his way through the spheres of ether to earthly incarnation.

We can speak in a similar way of the other forces, known by the names of the celestial bodies they represent, and of their effects upon man. As an example, let us take the Mercury-forces. These forces are not concentrated exclusively in the planet Mercury. They permeate the whole of space that is accessible to us and the physical Mercury is merely a manifestation of the Mercury-forces in a concentrated mineral form.

Imagine the whole of our solar system filled with the Mercury-forces. They permeate all the bodies in the solar system, and naturally our own bodies as well; but at the point where Mercury appears in the heavens they are concentrated in a physical-mineral form and so are visible there.

The Venus-forces again are all-pervading. They are merely concentrated in a physical-mineral form at the definite point where Venus is seen. And so it is with all these forces. Speaking in accordance with the reality, we must say: Venus, Mercury, Moon and the rest, all interpenetrate, but their concentrations stand at different places in the heavens.

If we can gradually form a conception of this by perceiving how Mercury gives the answers for Jupiter, by learning to know Mercury, then we also acquire knowledge of what these Mercury-forces signify for man, in the unconscious realms of his life as well. To take a simple example; When we want to walk we must have certain forces by means of which, from out of the spirit, we permeate our bones and muscles. With our spirit-and-soul we have to penetrate into the physical, into the solid constituents of our body. That we are able to do this is due to the Mercury-forces.

It can therefore be said:

1. The effect of the Mercury-forces is that man can take hold of the solid constituents of his body. If there were no Mercury-forces in the world, we should be outside the solid constituents of our body all the time.

2. The Venus-forces enable man to take hold of the fluids in his body. You know that 90 per cent of you is a column of fluid. So if the Venus-forces were not in the world you would be obliged as beings of spirit to move around the outside of this column of fluid; you could not take hold of the fluids if the Venus-forces were not in the world.

3. The Moon-forces enable man to take hold of the aeriform element in his organism.

These things can be known by studying cosmology, but such study can advance to further stages. The ancient initiates pursued this kind of study, although their science was only primitive and their clairvoyance dreamlike. Let us say, for example, that from their cosmological studies they had discovered that the Venus-forces enable man to take hold of everything that is fluid in him. Then they waited until they came across someone in whom this inability to take hold of the fluids was evident—in other words, definite forms of illness were present. A very definite form of illness sets in when, for example, a man is unable to take hold of the fluid element even in a single organ only. In such a case these ancient initiates asked themselves: What kind of medicament must be administered? When a man was not properly interpolated into the Venus-forces—when, therefore, the fluids in his organism were not under sufficient control—the initiates realised that copper must be administered as a medicament. In finding that copper has the effect of enabling the soul-and-spirit to take hold of the body; that its effect is similar to that of the Venus-forces, they discovered that the nature of the forces in the metal copper is the same as the nature of those of the Venus-sphere. Hence they connected the metal copper with Venus. Or when illness was caused by a man's incapacity to take proper hold of the solid constituents of his organism, the ancient initiates found that mercury or quicksilver must be administered. In this way they established the parallelisms between the metals and the planets. The parallelisms are given in extant literature today; but it never occurs to anybody to ask: Why is copper related to Venus?—and so on. Nevertheless these things were the outcome of genuine investigation.

If, therefore, a man speaks out of real knowledge of copper as a means of healing, it is knowledge of the connection of the human being with the cosmos. To discover whether some metallic element found in a plant has a remedial effect in one respect or another, the whole relationship of this plant to the universe must be borne in mind. And from the plant's relationship to the universe, and again from the relationship of the universe to the human being, the insight comes to us of how the medicament can take effect.

The fact that there is a certain disinclination today to admit these things can be well understood. For the endeavour nowadays is to learn in four or five years—admittedly in a way somewhat open to question—everything that is needed in order to be able to heal. But because this is not possible, because we must forever be learning more, whereas the desire is to be fully qualified after these four or five years and there is unwillingness to admit that a great deal more remains to be learnt—that is why there is this aversion to something to which no end can be in sight. But the world itself is without end, not only in the extensive but also in the intensive sense, as that is usually understood.

Unlike the Mercury-, Venus-, and Moon-forces, the Mars-forces do not enable us to take hold of something, but they protect us from dissolving away in the element of warmth.

4. The Mars-forces protect us from the tendency to flow out and away in the element of Warmth. If the Mars-forces were not present and functioning in the right way, man would have the constant tendency to dissolve in the Warmth. The Mars-forces hold him together, guard him from this. This is a matter of supreme importance, for since the warmth in man's organism is greater than the warmth of his environment, he is in perpetual danger of flowing away in the element of Warmth. To prevent this is of the very greatest importance. Therefore there must be a concentration of the Mars-forces in the human organism. And this is brought about through the presence of iron in man's blood. Iron contains forces that are identical with those of Mars and they hold man together in opposition to the tendency to dissolve away into the warmth.

The Jupiter- and Saturn-forces are not present in the human organism in this material form. They are there, but in a different form, not immediately detectable.

5. The Jupiter-forces. These forces protect man from dissolving away in the element of Light, in the Light-Ether. He would become an ever-expanding cloud of light if the Jupiter-forces were not present and at work.

6. The Saturn-forces. These forces protect man from dissolving in the Chemical Ether. Penetrating as they do into the human constitution, these Saturn-forces are connected, in a certain sense, with the innermost essence of man's nature. We speak of a “sour” or a “sweet” disposition, for example, more in a metaphorical sense. But these things are not merely metaphorical; if a human being makes an impression of sourness in the moral-physical sense, this has some connection with his chemical make-up. And the Saturn-forces have their share in this chemical make-up. The particular manner in which a human being gives expression to his nature as a whole depends upon the way in which Saturn is working in him.

A melancholic person has this particular temperament because he lives very strongly in his chemical constitution, in everything that seethes and is astir in the liver, in the bile and even in the stomach; the melancholic temperament is therefore due to this living into the chemical make-up of the organism. And this characteristic again is due to the fact that in such a person the Saturn-forces work with particular strength.

The human being appears to be concentrated inside his skin, but this is only apparently so; in reality he is part and parcel of the whole cosmos, and it is possible to indicate in detail how the cosmos has its share in the formation of the human constitution.

Thus the planets near the Sun have to do more with the physical elements in man's organism: solid, fluid aeriform. The planets distant from the Sun have to do more with the etheric elements in man s organism. Between the two groups of planets is the Sun itself. The forces of Mercury, Venus and Moon bring the human being into connection with the solid, fluid and aeriform elements. The forces of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. protect him from flowing away into the Warmth, Light and Chemical Ethers. As you see, the effects are polaric. And the Sun stands between, preventing the two groups of planetary forces from interpenetrating. Suppose the Mars-forces were able to work without restraint—and they could do so on the Moon-forces, for example. If the Sun-forces were not placed in the middle, acting as a kind of dividing-wall which simply does not allow these forces to unite, the Mars-forces—which hold the human being together as an independent entity in the Warmth-element—would, it is true, still prevent him from flowing away into the Warmth; but this independent entity would then at once be obliged to take possession of the Air, and man would become a spectre of air. In order that both processes may take place, in order that man may take hold of the aeriform constituents in his organism but also live as an independent being in the Warmth-element, the two sets of forces, those of Mars and Moon, must be kept separated. And for this purpose the Sun stands between them.

This too was well known to the old initiates. If, for example, definite symptoms of illness appear in a man owing to the fact that the Mars-forces are working too strongly, so that they break through the Sun-element, with the result that the man is then living intensely in the aeriform organism because he is better able to take hold of it—in such a case the Mars-forces must be kept separate from the Moon-forces. And for this purpose aurum (gold) must be administered. To prevent the Mars-forces and Moon-forces from flowing into one another, the Sun-forces must be strengthened. In this way the remedial effect of aurum was discovered; its effect is to bring the organism again into harmonious balance, so that what ought not to flow away is kept in check.

From all this it will be evident to you that knowledge of the universe is not possible without knowledge of man, nor is knowledge of man possible without knowledge of the universe, above all in the domain where it is a matter of applying science in the art of healing.

In various and complicated ways, we have already seen that the human being can only be understood within the context of the entire universe, out of the whole cosmos. Today we will consider this relationship of the human being to the cosmos from a rather simpler standpoint in order to bring the subject to a certain culmination in later lectures.

The most immediate part of the cosmos surrounding us is, to begin with, what appears to us as the physical world. But this physical world actually comes to meet us as the mineral kingdom, at least it confronts us only there in its intrinsic, primal form. Considering the mineral kingdom in the wider sense to include water, air, the phenomena of warmth and the warmth ether, we can study within the mineral kingdom the forces and the essential being of the physical world. This physical world manifests its workings, for instance, in gravity and in magnetic and chemical phenomena. In reality we can only study the physical world within the mineral kingdom. As soon as we come to the plant kingdom, the ideas and concepts we have formed for the physical world are no longer adequate. In modern times no one has felt this truth as intensely as Goethe.¹⁵ As a relatively young man he became acquainted with the plant world from a scientific point of view and sensed immediately that the plant world must be understood with a very different kind of thought and observation than is applicable to the physical world. He encountered the science of plants in the form developed by Linnaeus.¹⁶ This great Swedish naturalist developed botany by observing, above all, the external and minute forms to be found in the individual species and genera. Following these forms he evolved a system in which plants with similar structural characteristics are grouped into genera, so that the various genera and species stand next to each other in the same way as the objects of the mineral kingdom are organized. Goethe was repelled by this aspect of the Linnaean system, by this grouping of individual plant forms. This, said Goethe to himself, is how one observes the minerals and everything of a mineral nature. A different kind of perception must be used for plants. In the case of plants, said Goethe, one would have to proceed in the following way: Here, let us say, is a plant which develops roots, then a stem, then leaves on the stem, and so forth (drawing 1). But it does not always have to be that way. For example, Goethe said to himself, it could be like this (drawing 2):

Here is the root—but the force that in the first plant (drawing 1) began to develop right in the root is held back here (drawing 2), still enclosed in itself, and therefore does not develop a slender stem that immediately unfolds its leaves but a thick bulbous stem instead. In this way the forces of the leaves go into the thick stem structure and very little remains over to start new leaves or, with time, blossoms. Or again, it may be that a plant develops its roots very sparingly; some of the forces of the roots are left. Such a development would look like this (drawing 3):

Then there would be few stalk and leaf starts developing from the plant. All these examples are, however, inwardly the same. In one case the stem is slender and the leaves strongly developed (drawing 1); in another (drawing 2), the stem becomes bulbous and the leaves grow sparingly. The basic idea is the same in all the plants but the idea must be kept inwardly mobile in order to be able to move from one form to the other. Here I must create this form: weak stem, distinct leaves, concentrated leaf force (drawing 1). With the same idea I get a second form: concentrated root force (drawing 2). And again with the same idea I find another, a third form. And so I must create a flexible, mobile concept, through which the whole system of plants becomes a unity.

Whereas Linnaeus set the different forms side by side and observed them as he would observe mineral forms, Goethe, by means of mobile ideas, wanted to grasp the whole system of plant growth as a unity—so that he slipped out of one plant form, as it were, into another form by metamorphosing the idea itself. This kind of observation with mobile ideas was, in Goethe, doubtless the initial impulse toward an imaginative way of observing. Thus we may say that when Goethe approached the system of Linnaeus, he felt that the usual object-oriented way of knowing, although very useful when applied to the physical world of the mineral kingdom, was not adequate for the study of plant life. Confronted with the Linnaean system he felt the necessity for an imaginative means of observation.

In other words, Goethe said to himself: When I look at a plant it is not the physical that I see or, at any rate, that I should see; in a manner of speaking, the physical has become invisible, and I must grasp what I see with ideas very different from those applicable to the mineral kingdom. It is extraordinarily important for us to appreciate this distinction. If we see it in the right way we can say that in the mineral kingdom nature is outwardly visible all around us, while in the plant kingdom physical nature has become invisible. Of course, gravity and all the other forces of physical nature are still at work in the plant kingdom; but they have become invisible while a higher nature has become visible—a higher nature that is inwardly mobile all the time, inwardly alive. What is really visible in the plant is the etheric nature. And we are wrong if we say that the physical body of the plant is visible. The physical body of the plant has actually become invisible. What we see is the etheric form.

How then does the visible part of the plant really come into being? If you have a physical body, for instance, a quartz crystal, you can see the physical in an unmediated way. But with a plant you do not really see the physical, you see the etheric form. This etheric form is filled out with physical matter; physical substances live within it. When the plant loses its life and becomes carbon in the earth you see how the substance of physical carbon remains. It is contained in the plant. We can say, then, that the plant is filled out with the physical but dissolves the physical through the etheric. The etheric is what is actually visible in the plant form. The physical is invisible.

Thus the physical becomes visible for us in the mineral world. In the world of the plants the physical has already become invisible, for what we see is really the etheric made visible through the agency of the physical. We would not, of course, see the plants with our ordinary eyes if the invisible etheric body did not carry within it little granules (an overly simplified and crude expression, to be sure) of physical matter. Through the physical the etheric form becomes visible to us; but this etheric form is what we are really seeing. The physical is, so to speak, only the means whereby we see the etheric. So that the etheric form of a plant is an example of an Imagination, but of an Imagination that is not directly visible in the spiritual world but only becomes visible through physical substances.

If you were to ask, what is an Imagination?—We could answer that the plants are all Imaginations, but as Imaginations they are visible only to imaginative consciousness. That they are also visible to the physical eye is due to the fact that they are filled with physical particles whereby the etheric is rendered visible in a physical way to the physical eye. But if we want to speak correctly we should never say that in the plant we are seeing something physical. In the plants we are seeing genuine Imaginations. We have Imaginations all around us in the forms of the plant world.

But if we now ascend from the world of plants to that of animals, it is no longer sufficient for us to turn to the etheric. Here we must go a step further. In a sense we can say of the plant that it nullifies the physical and makes manifest the being of the etheric.

Plant: nullifies the physical and manifests the being of the etheric.

But when we ascend to the animal, we are not allowed to hold onto the etheric; we must imagine the animal form with the etheric now also nullified. Thus we can say that the animal nullifies the physical (the plant does this too) and also nullifies the etheric: the animal manifests that which can assert itself when the etheric is nullified. When the physical is nullified by the plant the etheric can assert itself. If then the etheric too, is only a filling, granules (again, a crude expression), then the astral, which is not within the world of ordinary space but works in ordinary space, can make its being manifest. Therefore we must say that in the animal the being of the astral is made manifest.

Animal: nullifies the physical, nullifies the etheric, and manifests the being of the astral.

Goethe strove with all his power to acquire mobile ideas, mobile concepts, in order to behold this fluctuating life in the world of the plants. In the plants the etheric is before us because the plant, as it were, drives the etheric out onto the surface. The etheric lives in the form of the plant. But in animals we must recognize the existence of something that is not driven to the surface. The very fact that a plant must remain at the place where it has grown shows that there is nothing in the plant that does not come to the surface and make itself visible. The animal moves about freely. There is something in the animal that does not come to the surface and become visible. This is the astral in the animal, something which cannot be grasped by merely making our ideas mobile, as I explained previously, by merely showing how we move from form to form in the idea itself. This does not suffice for the astral. If we want to understand the astral we must go further and say that something enters into the etheric and is then able, from within outward, to enlarge the form—for example, to make the form nodular or tuberous. In the plant you must always look outside for the cause of the variation in form, for the reasons why the form changes. You must be flexible with your idea. But the merely mobile is not enough to comprehend the animal. To comprehend the animal you have to bring something else into your concepts. If you want to understand how the conceptual activity appropriate for understanding animals must differ from that for plants, then you need more than a mobile concept capable of assuming different forms; the concept itself must receive something inwardly, must take into itself something that it does not contain of itself. This something could be called Inspiration in the forming of concepts. In the organic activity that takes place below our breathing we remain in the activity, so to speak, within ourselves. But when we breathe in, we receive the air from outside; so too if we would comprehend the animal we not only need to have mobile concepts but we must take into these mobile concepts something from the “outside.”

Let me explain the difference in another way. If we really want to understand the plant, then we can remain standing still, as it were; we can regard ourselves, even in thought, as stationary beings. And even if we were to remain stationary our whole life long we would still be able to make our concepts mobile enough to grasp the most varied forms in the plant world. But we could never form the idea, the concept of an animal, if we ourselves could not move about. We must be able to move around ourselves if we want to form the concept of an animal. And why?

When you transform the concept of a plant (drawing 1) into a second concept (drawing 2) then you yourself have transformed the concept. But if you then begin running, your concept becomes different through the very act of your running; you yourself must bring life into the concept. That infusion of life is what makes a merely imagined concept into an inspired concept. When it is a plant that is concerned, you can picture yourself inwardly at rest and merely changing the concepts. But if you want to think a true concept of an animal (most people do not like to do this at all because the concept must become inwardly alive; it wriggles within) then you must take the Inspiration, the inner liveliness, into yourself, it is not enough to externally weave sense perceptions from form to form. You cannot think an animal in its totality without taking this inner liveliness into the concept.

This conception of the animal was something which Goethe did not achieve. He did reach the point of being able to say that the plant world is a sum total of concepts, of Imaginations. But with the animals something has to be brought into the concept; with the animal we ourselves have to make the concept inwardly alive. In the case of a plant the Imagination is not itself actually living. This can be seen from the fact that as the plant stands in the ground and grows, its form changes only as the result of external stimuli, and not because of any inner activity. But the animal is, in a manner of speaking, the moving, living concept; with the animal we have to bring in Inspiration, and only through Inspiration can we penetrate to the astral.

When, finally, we ascend to the human being we have to say that he nullifies the physical, the etheric, and the astral and makes the being of the I manifest.

Humanity: nullifies the physical, nullifies the etheric, nullifies the astral, and manifests the being of the I.

With an animal we must say that what we see is really not the physical but a physically appearing Inspiration. This is the reason why, when the inspiration or breathing of a person is disturbed in some way it very easily assumes an animal form. Try sometime to remember some of the figures that appear in nightmares. Very many of them appear in animal forms. Animal forms are forms filled with Inspirations.

The human I we can only grasp through Intuition. Truly, in reality, the human I can only be grasped through Intuition. In the animal we see Inspiration; in the human being we actually see the I, the Intuition. We speak falsely when we say that we see the physical body of an animal. We do not see the physical body at all. It has been dissolved away, nullified, it merely makes the Inspiration visible to us; and the etheric body has likewise been dissolved away, nullified. With an animal we are actually seeing the astral body externally by means of the physical and the etheric. And with the human being we perceive the I or ego. What we actually see there before us is not the physical body, for it is invisible—and so too are the etheric body and the astral body. What we see in a human being is the I externally formed, formed in a physical way. And this is why people appear to visual, external perception in their flesh color—a color found nowhere else, just as the I is not found in any other being. Therefore, if we want to express ourselves correctly, we should say that we can only completely comprehend the human being when we think of him as consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and the I. What we see before us is the I, while invisibly within are astral body, etheric body, and physical body.

Now, we really only comprehend the human being if we consider the matter a little more closely. What we see to begin with is merely the “outside” of the I. But the I is perceptible in its true form only inwardly, only through Intuition. But something of this I is also noticed by the human being in his ordinary, conscious life—that is, in his abstract thoughts which the animal does not have because it does not have an I. The animal does not have the ability to abstract thoughts because it does not have an I. Therefore, we can say that in the human form and figure we see externally the earthly incarnation of the I; and when we experience ourselves from within, in our abstract thoughts, there we have the I. But they are merely thoughts; they are pictures, not realities.

If now we consider the astral body, which is present although nullified, we come to the member that cannot be seen externally but that we can see if we look at a person in movement and out of their movements begin to understand their form. Here we need to practice the following kind of observation: Think of a small, dwarflike, thickset person who walks about on short legs. You will understand his movement if you observe his stout legs, which he thrusts forward like little pillars. A tall, lanky man with very long legs will move very differently. Observing in this way you will see unity between movement and form. You can train yourself to observe this unity in other aspects of human movement and form. For example, a man with a forehead sloping backward and a very prominent chin moves his head differently than someone with a receding chin and a strikingly projecting forehead. Everywhere you will see a connection between the form and movement of a human being if you simply observe him as he stands before you and get an impression of his flesh, of its color, and of how he holds himself when in repose. You are observing his I when you watch what passes over from his form into his movements and back again into his form.

Study the human hand sometime. How differently people with long or short fingers handle their tools. Movement passes over into form, form into movement. Here you are visualizing, as it were, a shadow of the astral body expressed through external, physical means. But, you see, as I am describing it to you now, it is a primitive inspiration. Most people do not think of observing people who walk about, as, for example, Fichte walked the streets of Jena.¹⁷ Anyone who saw Fichte walking through the streets of Jena could also have sensed the movement and the formative process which were in his speech organs and which came to expression particularly when he wanted his words to carry conviction although they were in his speech organs all the time. Inspiration, at least in an elementary form, is required in order to see this.

But when we see from within what we have thus seen from without, which I have told you is perceptible by means of a primitive kind of inspiration, what we find is, in essence, the human life of fantasy permeated with feeling. It is the realm where abstract thoughts are inwardly experienced. Memory pictures, too, when they arise, live in this element.

Seen from without the I expresses itself, for example, in the flesh color but also in other forms, for example, in the countenance. Otherwise we would never be able to speak of a physiognomy. If, for example, the corners of one's mouth droop when one's face is in repose, this is definitely connected karmically with the configuration of one's I in this incarnation. Seen from the inside, however, abstract thoughts are present here. The astral body reveals itself externally in the character of the movements, inwardly in fantasy or in the pictures of fantasy that appear to the human being. The astral body itself more or less avoids observation, the etheric body still more so.

The etheric body is really not visible from outside, or at most only becomes visible in physical manifestation in very exceptional cases. It can, however, become externally visible when a person sweats—when a person sweats the etheric body becomes visible outwardly. But you see, Imagination is required in order to relate the process of sweating to the whole human being. Paracelsus¹⁸ was one who made this connection. For him, not only the manner but the substance of the sweat differed in individual human beings. For Paracelsus, the whole human being—the etheric nature of the entire human being—was expressed in this way. Generally speaking, then, there is very little external expression of the etheric. Inwardly, on the other hand, it is experienced all the more, namely in feeling. The whole life of feeling, inwardly experienced, is what is living in the etheric body when this body is active from within, so that one experiences it from within. The life of feeling is always accompanied by inner secretion. To observation of the etheric body in the human being it appears that the liver, for instance, sweats, that the stomach sweats—that every organ sweats and secretes. The etheric life of the human being lives in this process of inner secretion. Around the liver, around the heart, there is a cloud of sweat, all is enveloped in mist and cloud. This needs to be understood imaginatively. When Paracelsus spoke about the sweat of the human being he did not say that it is only on the surface. He said rather that sweat permeates the whole human being, that it is his etheric body that is seen when the physical is allowed to fall away from sight. This inner experience of the etheric body is, as I have said, the life of feeling.

And the external experience of the physical body—this, too, is by no means immediately perceptible. True, we become aware of the physical part of human corporeality when, for example, we take a child into our arms. It is heavy, just as a stone is heavy. That is a physical experience; we perceive something which belongs to the physical world. If someone gives us a box on the ears there is, apart from the moral experience, a physical experience, too—a blow, an impact. But as something physical it is actually only an elastic blow, as when one billiard ball impacts another. The physical element must always be kept separate from the other, the moral element. But if we go on to perceive this physical element inwardly, in the same way we inwardly perceive the external manifestation of the life of feeling, then in the merely physical processes we experience inwardly the human will. The human will is what brings the human being together with the cosmos in a simple, straightforward way.

You see, when we look around us for Inspiration we find it in the forms of the animals. The manifold variety of animal forms is the basis for our perceptions in Inspiration. You will realize from this fact that when Inspirations are seen in their pure, original form, without being filled with physical corporeality, that these Inspirations can then represent something essentially higher than animals. And they can, too. But Inspirations that are present in the spiritual world in their pure state may also appear to us in animal-like forms.

In the times of the old atavistic clairvoyance people sought to portray in animal forms the Inspirations that came to them. The form of the sphinx, for example, was intended to create a picture of something that had been seen in Inspiration. We are dealing, therefore, with superhuman beings when we speak of animal forms in the purely spiritual world. During the days of atavistic clairvoyance—and this continued in the first four Christian centuries, in any case, still at the time of the mystery of Golgotha—it was no mere symbolism in the ordinary sense, but a genuine inner knowledge that caused men to portray, in the forms of animals, spiritual beings who were accessible to Inspiration.

It was in complete accordance with this practice when the Holy Spirit was portrayed in the form of a dove by those who had received Inspiration. How must we think of it today when the Holy Spirit is said to have appeared in the form of a dove? We must say to ourselves: Those people who spoke in this way were inspired, in the old atavistic sense. They saw him in this form as an Inspiration in that realm of pure spirit where the Holy Spirit revealed himself to them.

And how would the contemporaries of the mystery of Golgotha who were endowed with atavistic clairvoyance have characterized the Christ? Perhaps they had seen him outwardly as a man. To see him as a human being in the spiritual world they would have needed Intuition. And people who were able to see his I in the world of Intuition were not present at the time of the mystery of Golgotha. That was not possible for them. But they could still see him in atavistic Inspiration. They would, then, have used animal imagery, even to express Christ. “Behold the Lamb of God!” was true and correct language for that time. It is a language we must learn to understand if we are to grasp what Inspiration is, or to see, by means of Inspiration, what can become manifest in the spiritual world. “Behold the lamb of God!” It is important for us to recognize once again what is imaginative, what is inspired, and what is intuitive, and thereby to find our way into the language that echoes down to us from olden times.

In terms of the ancient powers of vision this way of language presents us with realities. But we must learn to express such realities in the way they were still expressed, for example, at the time of the mystery of Golgotha, and to feel that they are justified and natural. Only in this way will we be able to grasp the meaning of what was represented, for example, over in Asia as the winged cherubim, in Egypt as the sphinx, and what is presented to us as a dove and even as Christ, the Lamb. In ancient times Christ was again and again portrayed through Inspiration, or better said, through inspired Imagination.

• 15. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German poet and thinker. Published Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790; in this book he shows the leaf as the primeval organ of the plant out of which all other plant organs evolved.
• 16. Karl von Linne (Linnaeus) (1107–1778), Swedish naturalist, father of modern systematic botany.
• 17. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), German idealist philosopher. Important for the development of anthroposophy. See Rudolf Steiner: Truth and Science and The Riddle of Man.
• 18. Paracelsus (1493–1541), Renaissance alchemist, doctor, and philosopher. Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, Origins of Modern Science (Lecture Eight).

From the descriptions I have given of inspired and intuitive knowledge it will be evident that it is possible for man to experience the cosmos in his inner nature, his soul and spirit. I was able to indicate yesterday that such an experience occurs during sleep, only that ordinary consciousness is unaware of it. Man experiences cosmically, but in ordinary consciousness he knows nothing of it. One can say that man in his physical sense life experiences himself in his physical and etheric bodies and considers their organs as his inner nature. In cosmic experience—as it occurs in sleep, for example—he experiences as his inner nature a reflection of cosmic beings. Thus, even in the state of sleep man's ordinary inner world becomes in fact an outer world. When he sleeps, he simply has before him as an outer world his physical and etheric bodies, which otherwise constitute his being, and the cosmos which to sense observation constitutes the surrounding world becomes in a certain sense an inner world.

But, during sleep, a continuing desire to return to his physical body exists in man's astral and ego nature. This is especially strong in that deepest stage of sleep which I pointed to yesterday as the sleep in what I have called “fixed star consciousness.” This desire to return to the physical and etheric bodies naturally is connected with the fact that these bodies continue to exist, fully alive, during sleep. Man develops this intense longing to return because of the spiritual moon forces active in the cosmos, as I described yesterday.

If spiritual science, anthroposophy, is to be rightly understood, one must keep clearly in mind that the various relationships must be presented from the greatest number of viewpoints. For instance, someone might hear me say that the reason why a man wants to return into his physical and etheric bodies in the morning is that his soul yearns to do so. Then someone else could say that this return depends upon the moon forces. Both are correct, only that the wish to return is aroused during man's cosmic experience by the moon forces that also permeate his astral and ego organizations between falling asleep and waking. These moon forces, that is their spiritual correlation, cannot function when man is in his pre-earthly existence prior to his descent from the spiritual world and prior to his having taken on his physical body. When he is in a purely spiritual cosmos in his prenatal existence, no such relation to a physical and etheric body is possible, for they are non-existent. During sleep, however, they wait to be ensouled and filled again with spirit by the actual inner human entity.

Such a physical-etheric organism is not present in pre-earthly man, but something else is. At a certain stage of his pre-earthly existence he experiences a kind of cosmos as his , inner world. In a way he feels himself to be a cosmos. But in this prenatal existence, this cosmos differs from the one that surrounds us between birth and death and is perceived by the senses. This cosmos, which is experienced at a certain stage of pre-earthly life, is a kind of cosmic seed of the later physical human organism with which man must clothe himself when he descends to earth existence. Just think of everything earthly man possesses as his physical organism, spread out boundlessly: lungs, liver, heart, etc., all their processes—naturally as forces, not as physical-material organs—spread out into cosmic infinity. Man experiences this in such a way, however, that his soul encompasses this cosmos, having it at the same time as his inner life.

When I say that man experiences his future physical organism as a germ, a seed, there is a difference between using the word germ in one instance for spiritual existence and in another for physical existence. In the latter one means something small that unfolds into a larger organism. But when I say that the cosmic germ of man's physical body is experienced in pre-earthly existence as a cosmos, this germ is immeasurably large, and gradually contracts until at last it is small. Naturally, one must consider that in this case—at least for the spiritual, the pre-earthly existence—the word large is used figuratively in relation to the later word small, for in pre-earthly existence one does not experience space as one does here in the physical world. Everything is experienced qualitatively. Space as we know it in our sense world exists only for this sense world. But in order to illustrate this so that we can take something from human language to characterize these conditions of pre-earthly existence, this distinction can well be made. So, we can say that the cosmic human germ is immense, and gradually contracts more and more, until it finally appears small in man's physical organism.

Thus, we must picture to ourselves that in his pre-earthly existence man does not have the same star-filled view of the cosmos as we perceive it from the physical world; he has a cosmos around him that contains soul-spiritual beings. Man feels himself bound up with them, he feels them, as it were, within him. He feels his soul nature spread out far across this cosmos. This cosmos is actually nothing else than his future physical body expanded to a universe. Man experiences his future inner world as a cosmic outer world, which, however, he experiences along with his inner being. Therefore, we can say that this whole cosmos—I would like to call it the cosmos of man—that man experiences as his own, is his own individual existence. At the same time, he experiences the life of other beings, of other human souls and spiritual beings who do not enter physical existence. He lives into these beings, so that he experiences a kind of universe of his own and at the same time a kind of being-together with other beings. I should like to call this being-together with other beings at this stage of pre-earthly existence an active intuition; a real, experienced intuition. What is at other times reproduced in supersensible perception by intuition is a living reality for pre-earthly existence.

Now, in the way I described it yesterday, while man in sleep lives in a replica of the cosmos—being outside his physical as well as etheric organizations which, however, possess finished and completed form—in pre-earthly life he has the developing physical organism as his being, I cannot even say, around, but within himself. Yet, at the same time, man is within as well as outside himself, and his life consists in active soul-spiritual labor on the development of this organism. Whereas, in physical life, we arrange our work so that outer sense-perceptible objects are purposefully transformed and we ourselves are changed with them, in our pre-earthly life we labor to make our physical organism as it should be. We incorporate into it what later in earth life must be present as wisdom-filled cooperation of the physical organs with each other as well as with the soul, and of the soul with the spirit. Before birth, we live in a universe (which is our own being), whose development consists in being molded purposefully to serve as our future earth organism.

In this pre-earthly condition, we possess consciousness because we are present in this universe not only with our perceptions but also with our activity of spirit and soul. Sleep, by contrast, is without consciousness because the physical and etheric bodies are no longer developing but completed, and we cannot work in sleep on what is already finished. But we experience them in the form described by me yesterday. In the pre-earthly condition, everything representing our link with the developing universe, which draws together increasingly so as later to become our physical organism, all this is force, an inner mobility that expresses itself as a form of consciousness differing from that of earth life. It is a bright, clearer state of consciousness than the one that comes into being in our physical existence. With it we are able to experience our own working toward earthly life that is to come. If, here in earth existence, we observe our physical organism externally, or in the way it is seen by anatomy or physiology, we certainly cannot compare it with the grandeur, the glorious majesty of the universe that surrounds us as the world of the stars, the clouds, and so forth. Yet, what has been compressed into this human physical organism is grander, more powerful, more majestic than the physical cosmos around us in earthly existence, when it is seen as the universe by the human soul before it descends to earth. If you think of everything contained in materialized form in the physical body, all that is hidden in man here on earth because it has been compressed and covered over by matter, and you picture all this transposed into the spiritual, then you would have to think of a universe with which our physical cosmos, despite all its stars, suns, etc., cannot in the remotest degree be compared for vastness, grandeur and majesty.

We find our way into earthly existence out of a spiritual, pre-earthly world view having a grand, mighty content. The highest cultural work in which we can ever participate here on earth is but a trifle compared to that in which man shares during his pre-earthly existence. I say shares, because countless spiritual beings of the most varied hierarchies work together with man in creating the wondrous structure of his physical organism. This work, when seen in its essence, is of an inspiring and blissful nature. Truly, nothing small and unimportant is indicated, when, to the question, “What does man do between death and a new birth in pre-earthly existence?”—the answer is: At a certain stage he works with the spirits of the cosmos on the configuration, the inner wisdom-filled structure of a physical human body by preforming it as an universal spirit-germ.¹ Compared to man's earthly existence, this is a celestial, blissful existence. But everything that happens in celestial existence is concealed in immeasurable depths in the physical organism in which man is clothed on earth. Indeed, as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, these celestial events belong to the most concealed aspects of the human physical organization.

This is the tragedy of materialism that it believes it can know matter and speaks always of matter and its laws. But in all matter, there lives spirit, but not only in such a form that we can uncover it in the present; it lives in such a way that to discover it we must look back into very different ages and states of experience. What materialism knows the least about is the material human organism. Not until materialism came into being did the complicated material structures of physical earth existence become as concealed as they now are from the otherwise admirable natural science of the present time. We shall now proceed to discuss other aspects of man's pre-natal existence.

The stage of pre-earthly experience I have just described can also be characterized by saying that man experiences his given environment, which is at the same time his own being, as an existence he has in common with the spiritual universe.

That universe, however, is an association of living spiritual beings, among whom man experiences himself as soul and spirit. This consciousness, alive and luminous in the highest degree, begins to dim, to fade at a definite point in time. It is not that it is then experienced as a weak consciousness but compared to the clarity and intensity it possessed during a certain stage of pre-earthly existence, it dims down. If I should describe by an imagination what a significant and intense experience it is, I would express it like this. At a certain point of pre-natal existence, man begins to say to himself: Along with my own being I have seen other spiritual-divine beings around me. Now it appears to me as if these divine beings are beginning to cease to show their complete form to me. It now seems to me as if they were assuming an external figurativeness in which they envelop themselves. It appears to me as if they were becoming star-like—like the stars I learnt to know through physical sight when I was last on earth. They are not yet stars, but spirit beings which seem to be on their way to star-existence.

It is a feeling as if the real spirit world withdraws a little from the human being, then retreated more and more until only a replica of it stood before him as a cosmic revelation of this spirit world. Instead of the intuitive, active life with the spiritual world, it is as if we were becoming inspired by a cosmic replica of this spiritual world.

Parallel with this vision goes an inner soul experience that man must undergo, as it were, in which the spiritual world in its primal aliveness withdraws and bestows only a revelation of itself to him. This awakens in his soul in pre-earthly existence an experience that, if I may borrow a word from earth life, I could call a sense of privation which expresses itself—again describing it in earthly terminology—as a longing for what he is about to lose. In the first stage something he once possessed is in the process of being lost, but it has not yet been lost. To the extent that man feels that he is losing it, a sense of privation and a desire to have it back arises inwardly. It is at this stage of pre-earthly existence that the human soul becomes accessible to the spiritual moon forces of the cosmos. The sense of privation and longing just spoken of prepare the soul to be accessible to them.

Earlier, these spiritual moon forces seemingly did not exist for them. Now, as the spiritual cosmos begins to fade away, a connection arises between what vibrates through the universe as moon forces and the forces of desire that the cosmos, which previously appeared to man as inwardly and spiritually alive, changes into a mere revelation to the degree that the earlier active, living intuition becomes an active living inspiration, to this extent the moon forces cause an inner individual being of man to appear. As a consequence, he no longer feels himself to be in an universe where subject and object do not really exist for him and everything is subjective. Hitherto, he has lived within other beings. Now, subject and object once again begin to have some significance for him. He has a feeling that he exists subjectively as an individual soul, something that the moon forces bring about for him. At the same time, he now begins to sense the revelation of the cosmos as an objective outer world.

To make use again of an earthly way of expressing what is actually present in this pre-earthly existence, I could say that in this human soul, gifted with inwardness by the moon forces, something like the following thought springs to life: I must possess it, this physical body, toward which everything has tended, which I myself along with others worked on as on a cosmic, spiritual germ. In this way man becomes ready to descend to earth existence. The sense of privation and longing linked with the moon forces prepare him for desiring earthly existence, to wish he were down on earth. This wish is the after-effect of his earlier work on the universal, cosmic part of the physical body. I said already yesterday that the moon forces always represent the element that prepares man for another earth life. During sleep it is these forces which impel him back into earth life. As I said, in a certain stage of his pre-earthly existence man is unconnected with these moon forces, but then he penetrates them. To the same degree, the tendency arises in him to turn again to the life on earth. Even though the earthly physical body and etheric organism are not yet there, within him are contained the after-effects of what he himself worked on and brought about as the cosmic-spiritual preliminary stage of the earthly body. After the translation I shall proceed at once to discuss the additional processes leading to earth life.

If I am to speak further in the way I have thus far been characterizing the relationships of man's total life as perceived by inspired and intuitive perception, I must say now that what man experiences in full clear consciousness during pre-earthly existence, as I described it at the beginning of today's lecture, is what he experiences later in earth life as his religious disposition. This natural tendency consists of these experiences as they are reflected in his feelings and heart (Gemüt), the feeling of his connection with the divine foundation of the world. If therefore man as a soul being in pre-earthly existence wished to explain to himself how this soul nature places itself here in earthly existence, then, in the moment when he passes from sharing in the living-spiritual cosmos to the experience of mere revelation under the influence of the moon forces, he would have to say: I pass from an existence saturated with divine activity to a cosmic existence. Under the influence of the moon forces, I now begin to draw together that brilliant cosmic consciousness I previously developed out of the whole universe into a more inward consciousness.

I said, the brilliant cosmic consciousness grows dim, but the more it fades the more does a subjective consciousness arise in man's soul to which the cosmic revelations appear as something objective. So we can say that man passes over into an inspiration in which he knows himself as a member of the cosmos. In this second stage of pre-earthly existence he experiences cosmology.

What man bears within him on earth as a striving for cosmological wisdom is an after-effect of these experiences of pre-earthly existence that I have just described, in the same way that the religious consciousness is an after-effect of the earlier stage of divinely permeated consciousness. These things are lived through in pre-earthly existence. They have their after-effects in earthly existence in which they appear as the religious and cosmological endowments of the human soul. Every night, as I described yesterday, they are renewed afresh. They are present as man is born into earthly life; he brings them along as endowments. The sequences of day and night cause them to become dim, but each night man's cosmological inclinations are stimulated again by the experience of the world of planets and stars. In the same way, his God-permeated nature is kindled during the last stage of sleep as I have already indicated. Therefore, one could say that if man desires to come to a religious life founded on knowledge, and to a cosmology grounded in knowledge, he must be able in fully conscious earthly life to call forth pictures of what is experienced in pre-earthly existence, as has been described.

In the stage when man is seized by the moon forces, when the outer universal world, which earlier was the universe of his own physical body, now appears only as a revelation—in that moment there occurs what I may call the loss of his connection with what earlier was his own human universe. Man loses this universal germ of his physical body on which he had worked so long. At a certain stage of pre-earthly life, he no longer possesses it. Instead, he has an inner being, called into existence by the moon forces, shot through and permeated by the desire for earth life, and he is surrounded by images of a spiritual cosmos. If he reaches out spiritually for these pictures he pierces right through them. Their reality is no longer there, at a certain stage of his experience in pre-earthly existence, reality has been lost to his soul. The soul no longer has the reality of this, man's universe, around and within it. Shortly thereafter—after the loss of this universal reality—earthly conception of the physical body takes place. The physical body is now taken over, drawn together out of the spiritual universe and further developed within the course of physical, hereditary evolution. What man worked upon cosmically for a long time in the spiritual world falls away from him and reappears again as conception of the physical human body takes place on earth. The processes that man has undergone spiritually above and in which he collaborated now find their physical continuation on the earth below. For the time being man remains unconscious of this physical continuation in his prenatal spiritual existence, for it takes place below on the earth. His spiritual-physical organism has streamed down to the earth and contracts into the tiny physical human body. The whole majestic universe is drawn together and permeated and penetrated by what physical heredity contributes. What man previously had as reality now surrounds him only in pictures; it is a cosmic recollection of the cosmic reality of work done on the physical organism.

In this prenatal period of his pre-earthly experiences when man is surrounded by the cosmic pictures of his human universe in which reality is no longer contained, he becomes ready to draw the etheric element into these pictures from all directions of the cosmos—for the cosmos also includes an etheric nature and is in this respect an etheric cosmos. Out of the cosmic ether man now draws etheric elements into his cosmic picture world. What is within him only as cosmic memory, he fills with world ether, draws it together and so forms his etheric organism. He does this at the time his Physical organism has fallen away from him, finding its continuation below, through conception, in the stream of physical heredity. Thus, man clothes himself in his etheric organism.

Now everything that lives in the soul as a sense of privation and desires, as longing for earthly life, passes along into the etheric organism, which is accustomed to being united with a physical, bodily organization since it permeates the physical organization of the cosmos. From all this arise the forces that draw man down again into what he was unaware of earlier when he had cosmic consciousness. Now, the soul-spiritual human being, clothed in the etheric body, strives by its own wish down toward what his physical organism has become on earth, which he himself prepared in the first place in its spiritual form. This, then, after the above-described experiences, brings about the union of the soul-spiritual with the physical body. The remaining points that can be mentioned will be added in the last brief consideration.

I believe it has become clear where the boundary exists between that of what the human soul is aware and that of what the human soul is unaware in a pre-earthly sense during the last stage of prenatal experience which directly precedes earthly experience. The human soul is conscious of the subjective element that the moon forces have brought about in the soul; it is conscious of the universal tableau that is now merely present in pictures like a cosmic memory of the work done on man's universe; it is conscious of how the forces draw together out of the world ether to create the human etheric organism. It remains unconscious of everything that happens on the earth below in the physical human organism, which only now has come into form through its physical metamorphosis, and through conception will develop further in the line of physical heredity. But, as I indicated, there is a union of the last cosmic consciousness with what is unconscious; a submerging into this unconsciousness.

With this, the cosmic consciousness is extinguished, and in a tiny infant there appears something like an unconscious memory of what has been experienced in pre-earthly exis tence. An unconscious but active memory then works intensively upon the baby's development, using the undifferentiated, or little differentiated substance of the human brain and the rest of the organism. Already during the embryonic stage, during which the uniting process mentioned gradually takes place, and also later, after birth, man works like a sculptor on the formation of the brain and the remaining organs. This unconscious but active memory of pre-earthly life works on the organism most intensively in a child's first years. While what is most essential has been previously prepared and then is realized in its after-effects, much is still to be worked into this cosmic-physical, spiritual organism condensed into a physical human body. This is a contradiction but must be understood in the context in which I have described it for you today. Much is still to be worked into this organism. It is therefore the unconscious but active memory that works in the infant as an inner human, sculpturing element.

If the consciously experienced last stage of pre-earthly life could be brought into earth life, the pure philosophy of ideas would have its supersensible content. For just that cosmic etheric element that plays into the images of the human organism is what yields a truly alive philosophical conception. But, even so, in spite of its lively quality, something in this philosophical conception is lacking. It corresponds, after all, to a stage of pre-earthly experience where man is particularly estranged from his physical organism, when he is unconscious of it. This lends a somewhat otherworldly quality to even the most alive philosophy, for instance the kind that arises out of the dreamlike clairvoyance of primeval times. Because philosophy, if it is alive, corresponds an experience which earth life escapes, it always has a strong desire to comprehend earthly activities but feels itself hovering above earthly existence. Philosophy always has an idealistic quality, which implies that it is based on something not of this earth, particularly when it is inwardly alive. Actually, it is only in the last stage of pre-earthly existence that a man is a philosopher. It would be necessary to recall here in earth life what is spontaneously present in his conscious experience in that last period. There, man is a true philosopher, as earlier he was a true cosmologist when confronting the cosmic revelations, when the cosmic beings had already withdrawn from him; and he was a true perceiver of religion in the first pre-earthly stage I described today. But since an unconscious but active memory appears in the infant, it was also possible for me to say here: If you could include in the philosophy of ideas and bring to full consciousness what appears unconsciously in an infant, philosophy would arise. That is quite natural, because what an infant experiences is the unconscious memory of what the soul experiences in the last stage before its union with the physical body.

Therefore, religious insight, cosmology and philosophy must be gifts out of the supersensible world if they are to be right. Only if they become this again, and are recognized as such by man, will they fully satisfy humanity's spiritual needs.

Today I have sought to describe for you those matters connected with the mystery of birth. In the following days I will have to present the other side, the matters that are connected with the mystery of death, in order gradually to round out the picture that should represent for us how what is of the greatest spiritual value here in earth life must be a reflection, a replica, an effect of what man can experience, perceive and know in supersensible existence, because he is not only an earthly sense being but a soul-spiritual, supersensible being and therefore belongs also to the world of soul and spirit. And if he is to feel himself fully as man in human life at every stage of sense experience, he must also include knowledge of the supersensible in his life on earth.

• 1. For this concept see especially the cycle given in the Hague in November 1923 translated under the title of Supersensible Man, in the fourth lecture of which Rudolf Steiner explains how the spirit-germ of each organ is created in the different spheres of the cosmos during the life between death and rebirth.

Today I shall try to give a wider view of a subject already often touched upon. I have frequently pointed out how, for modern man, moral and intellectual conceptions diverge. On the one hand we are brought, through intellectual thinking, to recognition of the stern Necessity of Nature. In accordance with this necessity we see everything in Nature under the law of Cause and Effect. And we ask also, when man performs an action: what has caused it, what is the inner or outer cause? This recognition of the necessity for all events has in modern times acquired a more scientific character. In earlier times it had a more theological character, and has so still for many people. It takes on a scientific character when we hold the opinion that what we do is dependent on our bodily constitution and on the influences that work upon it. There are still many people who think that man acts just as inevitably as a stone falls to the ground. There you have the natural scientific colouring of the Necessity concept. The view of those more inclined to Theology might be described as follows. Everything is fore-ordained by some kind of Divine Power or Providence and man must carry out what is predestined by that Divine Power. Thus we have in the one case the Necessity of natural science, and in the other case unconditioned Divine Prescience. One cannot in either case speak of human Freedom at all.

Over against this stands the whole Moral world. Man feels of this world that he cannot so much as speak of it without postulating the freedom of the decisions of his will; for if he has no possibility of free voluntary decision, he cannot speak of a morality of human action. He does however feel responsibility, he feels moral impulses; he must therefore recognise a moral world. I have mentioned before how the impossibility of building a bridge between the two, between the world of Necessity and the world of Morals, led Kant to write two critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason in which he applies himself to investigating the nature of simple Necessity, and the Critique of Applied Reason in which he inquires into what belongs to Moral Cosmogony. Then he felt compelled to write also a Critique of Judgement which was intended as an intermediary between the two, but which ended in being no more than a compromise, and approached reality only when it turned to the world of beauty, the world of artistic creation. This goes to show how man has on the one side the world of Necessity and on the other the world of Free Moral Action, but cannot find anything to unite the two except the world of Artistic Semblance, where—let us say, in sculpture or in painting—we appear to be picturing what comes from Natural Necessity, but impart to it something which is free from Necessity, giving it thus the appearance of being free in Necessity.

The truth is, man is not able to build a bridge between the world of Necessity and the world of Freedom unless he finds the way through Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science, however, requires for its development a fulfilment of the aphorism which won respect centuries ago, the saying of the Greek Apollo: “Know thyself!” Now this admonition, by which is not intended a burrowing into one's own subjectivity but a knowledge of the whole being of man and the position he occupies in the Universe—this is a search that must find a place in our whole spiritual life.

From this point of view we may really say that the course taken by the development of the spiritual Movement directed to Anthroposophy has in the last few days taken a step forward; it has begun to show clearly to the spiritual life of humanity, how we must seek to illuminate modern methods of thought with a knowledge of Man; for it is a fact that the knowledge of Man has to a very great extent been lost in modern times. This was our aim in the course of lectures that has just been held for doctors, where an initial attempt was made to throw light in a positive way upon matters with which medical science has to concern itself. [*Published by Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, 1961, (third edition) with the title: Geisteswissenschaft und Medizin. English translation (now out of print) entitled: Spiritual Science and Medicine, can be borrowed from the Library, Rudolf Steiner House, London, N.W.I] In the series of lectures given by our friends and myself, we tried to show how a connection must be made between the individual sciences and what these can receive from Spiritual Science. It is very desirable that within our Movement there should be a strong consciousness of the need for such attempts; for if we are to succeed it is absolutely necessary to make clear to the outer world—in a sense, to compel it to understand—that here no kind of superficiality prevails in any domain, but rather an earnest striving for real knowledge. This is often hindered by the way in which things reach the public from our own circles, so that it is supposed, or may easily be maliciously pretended, that all kinds of sectarianism and dilettantism are allowed here. It is for us to convince the outer world more and more how earnest is the striving underlying all that this Movement represents. Such attempts must be carried further afield, and they must be carried further by the forces of the whole Anthroposophical Movement; for we have now made a beginning with a true knowledge of Man which must form the foundation of all true spiritual culture. It is true to say that from the middle of the fifteenth century, man's earlier concrete relation to the world has been growing more and more abstract. In olden times, through atavistic clairvoyance man knew much more of himself than he does today, for since the middle of the century intellectualism has spread over the whole of the so-called civilised world. Intellectualism is based upon a very small part in the being of Man, a very small part; and it produces accordingly no more than an abstract network of knowledge of the world.

What has knowledge of the world become in the course of the last centuries? In its relation to the Universe, it has become a mere mathematical-mechanical calculation, to which in recent times have been added the results of spectra analysis; these again are purely physical, and even in the physical domain, mechanical-mathematical. Astronomy observes the courses of the stars and calculates; but it notices only those forces which show the Universe, in so far as the Earth is enclosed in it, as a great machine, a great mechanism. It is true to say that this mechanical-mathematical method of observation has come to be regarded simply and solely as the only one that can actually lead to knowledge.

Now with what does the mentality which finds expression in this mathematical-mechanical construction of the Universe reckon? It reckons with something that is founded to some extent in the nature of Man, but only in a very small part of him. It reckons first with the abstract three dimensions of space. Astronomy reckons with the abstract three dimensions of space; it distinguishes one dimension, a second (drawing on blackboard) and a third, at right angles. It fixes attention on a star in movement, or on the position of a star, by looking at these three dimensions of space. Now man would be unable to speak of three dimensional space if he had not experienced it in his own being. Man experiences three-dimensional space. In the course of his life he experiences first the vertical dimension. As a child he crawls, and then he raises himself upright and experiences thereby the vertical dimension. It would not be possible for man to speak of the vertical dimension if he did not experience it. To think that he could find anything in the Universe other than he finds in himself would be an illusion. Man finds this vertical dimension only by experiencing it himself. By stretching out our hands and arms at right angles to the vertical we obtain the second dimension. In what we experience when breathing or speaking, in the inhaling and exhaling of the air, or in what we experience when we eat, when the food in the body moves from front to back, we experience the third dimension. Only because man experiences these three dimensions within him does he project them into external space. Man can find absolutely nothing in the Universe unless he finds it first in himself. The strange thing is that in this age of abstractions which began in the middle of the fifteenth century, Man has made these three dimensions homogeneous. That is, he has simply left out of his thought the concrete distinction between them. He has left out what makes the three dimensions different to him. If he were to give his real human experience, he would say: My perpendicular line, my operative line, my extensive or extending line. He would have to assume a difference in quality between the three spatial dimensions. Were he to do this, he would no longer be able to conceive of an astronomical cosmogony in the present abstract way. He would obtain a less purely intellectual cosmic picture. For this however he would have to experience in a more concrete way his own relationship to the three dimensions. Today he has no such experience. He does not experience for instance the assuming of the upright position, the being in the vertical; and so he is not aware that he is in a vertical position for the simple reason that he moves together with the Earth in a certain direction which adheres to the vertical. Neither does he know that he makes his breathing movements, his digestive and eating movements as well as other movements, in a direction through which the Earth also moves in a certain line. All this adherence to certain directions of movement implies an adaptation, a fitting into, the movements of the Universe. Today man takes no account whatever of this concrete understanding of the dimensions; hence he cannot define his position in the great cosmic process. He does not know how he stands in it, nor that he is as it were a part and member of it. Steps will have now to be taken whereby man can obtain a knowledge of Man, a self-knowledge, and so a knowledge of how he is placed in the Universe.

The three dimensions have really become so abstract for man that he would find it extremely difficult to train himself to feel that by living in them he is taking part in certain movements of the Earth and the planetary system. A spiritual-scientific method of thought however can be applied to our knowledge of Man. Let us therefore begin by seeking for a right understanding of the three dimensions. It is difficult to attain; but we shall more easily raise ourselves to this spatial knowledge of Man if we consider, not the three lines of space standing at right angles, but three level planes. Consider for a moment the following. We shall readily perceive that our symmetry has something to do with our thinking. If we observe, we shall discover an elementary natural gesture that we make if we wish to express decisive thinking in dumb show. When we place the finger on the nose and move through this plane here (a drawing is made), we are moving through the vertical symmetry plane which divides us into a left and a right Man. This plane passing through the nose and through the whole body, is the plane of symmetry, and is that of which one can become conscious as having to do with all the discriminating that goes on within us, all the thinking and judging that discriminates and divides. Starting from this elementary gesture, it is actually possible to become aware of how in all one's functions as Man one has to do with this plane.

Consider the function of seeing. We see with two eyes, in such a way that the lines of vision intersect. We see a point with two eyes; but we see it as one point because the lines of sight cross each other, they cut as shown in the drawing. Our human activity is from many aspects so regulated that we can only understand its regulation by reference to this plane.

We can then turn to another plane which would pass through the heart and divide man back from front. In front, man is physiognomically organised, behind he is an expression of his organic being. This physiognomical-psychic structure is divided off by a plane which stands at right angles to the first. As our right and left man are divided by a plane, so too are our front and back man. We need only stretch out our arms, our hands, directing the physiognomical part of the hand (in contrast to the merely organic part) forwards and the organic part of the hands backwards, and then imagine a plane through the principal lines which thus arise, and we obtain the plane I mean.

In like manner we can place a third plane which would mark off all that is contained in head and countenance from what is organised below into body and limbs. Thus we should obtain a third plane which again is at right angles to the other two.

One can acquire a feeling for these three planes. How the feeling for the first is obtained has already been shown; it is to be felt as the plane of discriminative Thinking. The second plane, which divides man into front and back (anterior and posterior) would be precisely that whereby man is shown to be Man, for this plane cannot be delineated in the same way in the animal. The symmetry plane can be drawn in the animal but not the vertical plane. This second (vertical) plane would be connected with everything pertaining to human Will. The third, the horizontal, would be connected with everything pertaining to human Feeling. Let us try once more to get an elementary idea of these things and we shall see that we can arrive at something by this line of thought.

Everything wherein man brings his feeling to expression, whether it be a feeling of greeting or one of thankfulness or any other form of sympathetic feeling, is in a way connected with the horizontal plane. So too we can see that in a sense the will must be brought into connection with the vertical plane mentioned. It is possible to acquire a feeling for these three planes. If a man has done this, he will be obliged to form his conception of the Universe in the sense of these three planes—just as he would, if he only regarded the three dimensions of space in an abstract way, be obliged to calculate in the mechanical-mathematical way in which Galileo or Copernicus calculated the movements and regulations in the Universe. Concrete relations will now appear to him in this Universe. He will no longer merely calculate according to the three dimensions of space; but when he has learnt to feel these three planes, he will notice that there is a difference between right and left, over and under, back and front. In mathematics it is a matter of indifference whether some object is a little further right or left, or before or behind. If we simply measure, we measure below or above, we measure right or left or we measure forward or backward. In whatever position three metres is set, it remains three metres. At most we distinguish, in order to pass from position to movement, the dimensions at right angles to one another. This we do, however, only because we cannot remain at simple measurement, for then our world would shrink to no more than a straight line. If however, we learn to describe Thinking, Feeling and Willing concretely in these three planes, and to place ourselves thus in space as psychic-spiritual beings, with our Thinking, Feeling and Willing—then just as we learn to apply to Astronomy the three dimensions of space as found in man, so do we learn to apply to Astronomy the threefold division of man as a being of soul and spirit. And it becomes possible if we have here (drawing) Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and lastly Earth, then it becomes possible, if we look at the Sun, to observe it in its outer manifestation as something separating, as a dividing element. We must think of a plane passing through the Sun, and we shall no longer regard what is above the plane and what is below as merely dimensional, but must regard the plane as a dividing plane and distinguish the planets as being above or below. Thus we shall no longer say: Mars is so many miles distant from the Sun, Venus so many miles; but we shall learn to apply the knowledge of Man to the knowledge of the Universe, and say: It is no mere question of dimensions when I say that the human head in respect of the nose is at such and such a distance from the horizontal plane which I have called the plane of Feeling, and the heart at such and such a distance; but I shall bring their position and distance above and below into connection with their formation and structure. So too I shall no longer say of Mars and Mercury that the one is at such a distance and the other at such another distance from the Sun, but I shall know that if I regard the Sun as a dividing partition, Mars being above must be of one nature and Mercury being below of another.

I shall now be able to place a similar plane perpendicularly through the Sun. Thus the movements of Jupiter, let us say, or of Mars, will be such that at one time it will stand on the right of this plane and then go across it and stand on the left. If I simply proceed abstractly, according to dimensions, I shall find it is sometimes on the right and sometimes on the left, and such and such a number of miles. But if I study cosmic space concretely, as I must [study] my own being as man, it is not a matter of indifference whether a planet is at one time on the left and at another time on the right, but I say there is the same kind of difference whether it is on the right or left as there is between a left and right organ. It is not sufficient to say that the liver is so many centimetres to the right of the symmetrical axis, the stomach so many centimetres to the left, for the two are dissimilar in formation because the one is a right organ and the other a left. Here it is so, that Jupiter, according as he is on the right or the left, to the eye appears different.

In the same way I might make a third plane, and must again form a judgement in accordance with that. And if I extend my knowledge of Man to the Universe, I shall be obliged, as I connected the one plane with human Thinking, and the second plane with human Feeling, to consider the third plane as connected with human Will.

By all this I wanted only to show how modern cosmogony has no more than a last remnant of external abstraction when it speaks of the three planes perpendicular to one another, to which the positions and movements of the stars are quite indifferently related, and then according to these positions the whole Universe calculated out as a machine. In the astronomical conception of Galileo, only this one thing is taken into consideration for the Universe—abstract space, with its point relationships. This knowledge can however be enlarged to become an active and powerful knowledge of Man. One can say: Man is a thinking, feeling and willing being. As an external being, he is connected by Thinking with one plane, with another at right angles to it by Willing, and with a third at right angles to both by Feeling. This must apply also in the external world. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, man has really known no more than that he extends in three directions; all else is just material collected for observation. A true knowledge of Man must be regained, and indirectly a knowledge of the Cosmos by the same method. Then man will understand how Necessity and Free Will are related, and how both can apply to Man, since he is born from the Cosmos. Naturally if one only takes this last remnant of the human being—the three dimensions at right angles to one another—if that is all one wants to imagine, then the Universe appears terribly poor. Poor, infinitely poor is our present astronomical view of the Universe; and it will not become richer until we press forward to a real knowledge of Man, until we really learn to look into Man.

The anthroposophical conception of the universe leads directly into a real spiritual knowledge of the matter. Do not such things as Thinking, Feeling and Willing appear to human knowledge as terribly bare abstractions? Man does not investigate himself thoroughly enough. He does not ask himself what these things are for him to which he applies the words. So much has become mere phrase. One should really ask oneself conscientiously, when using the word Thinking, whether it presents any clear idea—not to speak of Feeling and Willing. But our speech becomes clear and plain, directly we pass from the mere making of phrases, the using of lofty words, and go back to pictures; even when we take just that one picture for Thinking—putting the finger to the side of the nose! We do not need to do it always, but we know that this gesture is often naturally made when we have to think hard, just as we point the finger to the chin when we want to indicate we are paying attention! We enter this plane precisely because we wish to judge there concerning something to which we are related. We bisect our organism as it were into right and left; for we really act quite differently with our right and left sense-organs. This we can appreciate if we observe that with the left sense-organ we undertake as it were, the handling of outer objects; and in our thinking too, there is a sort of handling or feeling of external objects. With the right sense-organ we as it were ‘feel our feeling’ of them. It is then that they first become our own. We could never have attained to the ego-concept if we were not able to perceive, together with what we experience on the right, also that which we experience on the left. By simply laying the hands one over the other we have a picture of the ego-concept. It is indeed true that by beginning to use clear images instead of living merely in phraseology, man will become inwardly richer and will gain the faculty of visualising the Universe in greater detail.

Having entered on this path, we shall find that the Universe comes to life again for us, and that we ourselves as human beings share in its life. Then we shall learn again how to build a bridge between Universe and Man. When this is done man will be able to perceive whether there is in the Universe an impulse of Natural Necessity for all that is in Man, or whether the Universe in some measure leaves us free; whether it wholly determines us, or leaves us in a certain sense free. As long as we live in abstractions, we cannot build a bridge between Moral and Natural Law. We must be able to ask ourselves how far Natural Law extends in the Universe, and where something enters in which we cannot include under the aspect of Natural Law. Then we arrive at a relation which has its significance for Man too, a relation between what comes under Natural Law and what is Free and Moral. In this way we learn to connect a meaning with the statement: “Mars is a planet far from the Sun, Venus a planet nearer the Sun.” By simply stating their distances in abstract numbers we have said nothing or at least very little, for to define in this way according to the methods of modern Astronomy, is equivalent to saying: I look at the line which passes through man's two arms and hands, and I speak of an organ that is 2.5 decimetres from this line.—Now this organ may be so and so far under the line, and another organ so and so far above it; it is not, however, the distance that makes the difference, but the fact that one organ is above and the other below. Were there no difference between above and below, there would be no difference between the nose or eyes and the stomach! The eyes are only eyes because they are above, and the stomach is only a stomach because it is below, this line. The inner nature of the organ is conditioned by the position.

Similarly the inner nature of Mars is qualified by its position outside the Sun's orbit, and that of Venus by its position within the Sun's orbit. If one does not understand the essential difference between an organ in the human head and an organ in the human trunk—the one lying over and the other under this line—then one cannot know that Mars and. Venus, or Mars and Mercury are essentially different. The ability to think of the Universe as an organism depends on our learning to understand the hieroglyph of the organism we have before us. We must learn to perceive Man as a hieroglyph of the Universe, for he gives us the opportunity of seeing near at hand how different are above and below, left and right, before and behind. We must learn this first in Man, and we shall then find it in the Universe.

Because the modern view of the Universe held by Natural Science really gives a cosmogony omitting Man—recognising him only as the highest of the animals, that is to say an abstraction—because Man is not in it at all, therefore to this conception the Universe appears as a mathematical picture only, in which the universal origin of Freedom and Morality can never be recognised. It is, however, of the utmost importance that we should learn to perceive scientifically the connection between Moral Law and Natural Necessity. Today I have endeavoured to show you, in perhaps rather subtle concepts, how a knowledge of the Universe is to be gained from a Knowledge of Man.

To the doctors I was able to show in a strictly scientific way how this path has to be sought in Medicine, Physiology and Biology. In these lectures it will be our task to perceive how it must be sought if we are to form aright our general understanding of the world; and the social life in which we find ourselves in these times has great need of such understanding.

This is the 1st of 16 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Dornach, and dates from November and December of 1920. The title of this series of lectures is: The Bridge between Cosmic Spirituality and the Physical Constitution of Humans.

I have often spoken of how man's bodily form is an expression of the course of his entire life. Anyone who understands the human head in the right way can recognise that the special moulding, the special formation of the head is connected with former lives which have been passed through by the human being before he descended to his present life on Earth. And when we consider the limb-organisation, extending it—naturally to cover the organs associated with the limbs, then we have something which, after certain metamorphoses, will underlie the formation beyond death of the future human head. At the same time, however, the human form points to man's connection with the Cosmos. As the human being stands before us today, we can certainly say that the particular formation of his head is a metamorphosis of his previous limb-formation. But the fact of his having any such formation of the head as the one he carries around is the result of his cosmic experiences before he set foot on the Earth. In essentials, the head-formation is an outcome of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions; whereas the limb-man is a starting-point for the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolutions. It is only the breast-man, embracing all that belongs to the present rhythmical system, who is the real man of the Earth. Thus we can say: What we have before us in the human head is formed out of the three preceding planetary embodiments of the Earth; and the starting-point for its subsequent embodiments is all that underlies man's limbs today. As a man goes through life between death and rebirth, he is repeating spiritually his experiences during the ages of Saturn, Sun, Moon. He takes his organism back from its earthly form to what it was as Saturn organism, Sun organism, Moon organism. Similarly; his limb-organism, as fashioned on Earth, will be further organised physically, will go through reorganisation, during the embodiments of Earth as Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan.

These things have, therefore, a human earthly aspect and also a cosmic one. Hence we can study the formation of the human head while keeping in mind the relation of man's essential being to the Cosmos. Now what came about during the Saturn-evolution and the Sun-evolution is certainly rather remote from our study of man; and so we are less able to form an opinion of it from our earthly point of view. On the other hand we can form a vivid idea of what took place during the old Moon-evolution, for this is to a certain extent repeated in the interaction between the Earth and the present Moon, and we can therefore study the human head in relation to that. We then come to certain secrets concerning the formation of the human organism.

Let us imagine—in the form of a diagram—a man standing on the Earth; he is thus not in the centre of the Earth but distant from it by the length of the Earth's radius. And if we draw the human head diagrammatically we can say: As the Moon moves round the Earth, it moves also round man's head. Naturally this is expressed diagrammatically and not in the correct proportions.

Now let us assume the Moon, as full Moon, to be here; then the light it is always said to reflect from the Sun will stream to the man. In this way the light of the Sun has an effect upon the man—and when I speak here of the ‘man’ I am always referring to the human head. On the opposite side we have the new Moon, and no light then reaches the man, who on this side is, as it were, left to himself. Less demand is made upon him by the stimulation of the light from outside; hence he is left more to his own inner development. And if you put the first quarter here and the last quarter there—the waxing Moon and the waning Moon—then from these two directions less stimulation is exercised by the light upon the man than from the direction of the full Moon and more than from that of the new Moon. Moreover in its course round the Earth the Moon travels through the Zodiac. Because of this the light is modified in a certain way—I might perhaps say differentiated, for the moonlight becomes different according to whether it comes from a position behind which there is, for example, the Ram, or from one behind which the Virgin stands. The moonlight is therefore differentiated in accordance with the sign of the Zodiac through which the Moon is passing.

Now imagine the diagram in relation to a relevant point in human development: imagine, that is, that through some course of events there establishes itself in the mother's body the spirit-germ of a human being, coming straight from his development between death and rebirth. During this time the Moon is working on the embryo. Then, you have, as a result of the Moon working in from the Cosmos—in connection naturally with other cosmic bodies—the configuration of the human head in the body of the mother. The configuration of the human head is altogether the work of the Moon.

Perhaps you will say, quite rightly : But surely we have not to assume that it is always the full Moon which sheds its rays on eyes or nose, and that the back of the head, which should depend on inner development and not on the external world, is always exposed to the influence of the new Moon? It is true that this is not unconditionally so. In essentials, however, the full Moon is active on some part of the face, whereas the activity of the new Moon is concentrated on the back of the head. In the body of the mother, too, the child has a special position in relation to the Cosmos. According to how the Moon sheds its rays more or less obliquely on that part of the embryo destined to become the face, the human being will have certain of those gifts bestowed upon him which depend upon the head. He will have different gifts, physically, if the bright moonlight sheds its beams on his mouth rather than upon his eyes. This is connected with a person's talents, in so far as they depend on the Cosmos. But the essential thing to be borne in mind today is that during the embryonic development of the human being the chief influences proceeding from the Moon are those that give form to the human ovum, starting with the formation of the head. For in the human being the head is the first thing to take shape. This is brought about by the Moon—that is, by the movement and activity remaining over from the old Moon and from the other previous embodiments of the Earth. You see here how the head is cosmically connected with the external world; how during the development of the embryo the human being is caught up in that cosmic condition to which the tone is given essentially by the Moon and its activity. This comes about through the movement made by the Moon, through the encirclement of the head by the Moon, which occurs ten times during the human being's embryonic development. Thus the Moon first passes by and works upon the formation of the human face—leaving it then in peace to continue its growing. During this period the Moon retires. When the formation of the face has been in abeyance for some time, the Moon re-appears and gives it a fresh impetus. It does this ten times. And during these ten lunar months the human head is formed rhythmically out of the Cosmos. Thus the human being waits for ten times twenty-eight days in the mother's body, under the influence of cosmic forces mediated through the moon.

Now what really happens here? As a being of soul and spirit a man descends to the personality he has chosen out of the whole Cosmos to be his mother. And from that time the Moon takes over the formation of his head. Were he to remain within the mother's body for twelve lunar months, a quite self-enclosed, circular formation would result. But he remains there for only ten lunar months. Hence something of his development is left incomplete, and after birth all that works in out of the Cosmos is occupied with this. Thus, before birth, ten-twelfths of the cosmic forces work upon the forming of the human head, the remaining two-twelfths being left over for the formative work which continues outside the mother's body—though it actually begins during the embryonic period. In addition to the cosmic forces there are others, and these come from the Earth itself: they do not work on the head but on the limb-system.

If you imagine this, here, to be the Earth (diagram above) and this to be a diagram of man's limb-system, then the forces which in the limbs continue their activity inwardly are essentially earthly, telluric. Into arms and hands, in legs and feet, there play forces of the Earth, and this process, continued inwardly, becomes metabolism. But this inward metabolism is outwardly an interchange of forces. When you move your arm or your leg the movement is not simple; it has to do with the forces of the Earth. When you move your legs in walking you have always to overcome the force of gravity, and what happens results from the interplay between these forces of gravity and the forces working inwardly.

Whereas in metabolism these inward forces enter into interplay with the chemical properties of the Earth-substance, there is an interchange between the forces in arms and legs and the forces of the Earth. These activities are connected with temporal conditions different from those prevailing in the mother's womb. In the mother's body we have ten times twenty-eight days—that is, ten moons or 280 days.

Here we have to do essentially with the course of the day. Where the development of the limb-man is concerned we have to do with the course of the year. We see also how in their earliest stage the human limbs are developed with a continually decreasing rapidity. A man needs actually twenty-eight years for their full development, though this is certainly not so evident during the final seven years as it is up to the age of twenty-one. He needs twenty-eight years to develop his limb-system outside his mother's body, though it is within the mother's body that the development begins.

Just as the man of head is connected with the past and is able to come into being because the relation of the Moon to the Earth recapitulates the past evolutions of Saturn, Sun, Moon, so is the limb-man connected with the Earth, but actually with the preparation for the transformations of Earth into Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. Hence a human being cannot form his head directly on the Earth, for over this the Earth has no power. It is only because he brings with him the forces from before birth, before conception, and is then sheltered within the mother's body from his earthly environment, with the Cosmos working upon him by way of the Moon—only because of all this can the head come into being as a higher metamorphosis of the limb-man of the previous incarnation. The man of the limb-system, arising as he does under the influence of the Earth, cannot come to completion; he can do nothing for the head. During Earth-evolution he is incapable of what he will be able to do during the Venus-evolution. Just as the stag casts his antlers, the human being will then dispense with his head, and out of the rest of himself develop a different one—certainly an enviable lot for the Venus-man! But this is what actually appears to spiritual vision as the future condition of the human being. Things that are part of reality appear grotesque compared with those having earthly limitations, but reality far outstrips what is accessible to our narrow earthly understanding. We must face the fact that our earthly power of observation gives us merely part of reality, and that when we observe only earthly conditions we really know nothing of the human being.

Thus in man we have a cosmic being who, it is true, is formed for the main part in the body of the mother; and we have an Earth-being who is formed, configured, differentiated, under the influence of earthly conditions, while the Sun apparently takes its course round the Earth, passing the constellations of the Zodiac on its way. Hence you will recognise in the human being two contrasting conditions, one of a cosmic nature, the other earthly. The cosmic nature works in such a way that the human being would receive from the Cosmos a head that was perfectly round. The face is formed by the sunlight shining upon it by way of the Moon, and when the Sun turns its light away, the basis for the back of the head is created. The spherical form that would have been imparted by the Cosmos is differentiated. Were the kindly Moon not there to give shape to the human head, a human being would be born as an undifferentiated sphere. On the other hand, because the mother is on the Earth, the Earth itself has its effect. The reason why the human being as embryo does not develop only a head is that the Earth is already at work during the time when the head is being given its form. Were he to be subject to the working of the Earth alone, however, and the Cosmos were to have no effect, he would be just a pillar. The human being is at the mercy of these two tendencies—either of being made a pillar, a radius, by the Earth, or of receiving a spherical form from the Cosmos. Circle and radius actually underlie the forming of a human being. The fact that he is not a pillar, that he is not born with feet joined together, with hands joined together, is due to the course of the year being involved, due to winter and summer working in spiritually, indicating the various cosmic relations between the Earth and its surroundings. The difference between winter and summer is like the difference between the new Moon and the full. Just as new Moon and full Moon, in their different ways, determine the nature of the face and of the back of the head, so do those cosmic forces coming to expression in winter and summer, spring and autumn, determine the configuration of our limb-system, so that we have two legs and are not just a pillar. In order that in our head we should not be entirely cosmic, but cosmic toned down by the earthly, and in order that our limb-system should not be entirely of the Earth but something earthly moderated by the cosmic, the yearly course of the Earth is cosmically conditioned. We have therefore a cosmic nature influenced by the earthly and an earthly nature cosmically influenced. Were we not in our cosmic being influenced by the earthly, as man we should be a round ball; were we not, as man of the limb-system, as earthly man, influenced by the Cosmos, we should be a pillar. This combined working of cosmic and earthly is expressed in our human form. No-one understands the human form who has no wish to take into consideration the interplay of Earth and Cosmos. It is wonderful how the human being is an expression of the whole world; an expression of the world of the stars in his form, which is at the same time an image of those forces that stream from the Earth and have a conditioning effect upon him. Imagine man's earthly nature without this cosmic influence: we do not carry this earthly nature within us but it works in us. As a basic influence it streams from the centre-point of the Earth, sending its forces from there. That which makes its appearance in our human strength, working there also as will, has from ancient times been called by a word that might be rendered as ‘strength’ or ‘force’.

The formative influence from the Cosmos, which we have to picture through in the circle underlying especially the form of our head, works in our head without coming to full expression because of being toned down by the earthly element: and this from olden days has been called ‘beauty’. So we see that taken as a whole the influences at work in a human being have a value transcending both the physical and the moral, for they have a value which embraces both. The strength that comes from the Earth and works in us as muscular force is physical and moral at the same time. The beauty shining around us, the beauty underlying our head, appears in our head as the beauty of thoughts, and this, too, is related to both the physical and the moral.

Between these—between, that is, what we are as earthly beings toned down by the Cosmos and what we are as cosmic beings toned down by the earthly—there is the trunk-man. What is this trunk- or torso-man? He is essentially the rhythmic man who causes the cosmic to swing down continually towards the earthly and the earthly to swing up towards the cosmic. We have circling round in us a continuous stream from the limb-system and this finds its way to the head through the breathing, while a stream from the head makes its way through the breathing to the limb system. So that there is always this wave movement, this surging to and fro between limb-system and head. It is brought about by our rhythmic system, working through the heart and lungs and the circulation of the blood. How then does the circulation arise? It comes from the interplay between straight line and circle, receiving its form from the Zodiac and the planets. A force proceeding from the head tends to send the blood round a circular path, while a force from the limb-system tends to keep it in a straight line. From the interaction of these two forces there arises in us, under the impetus of breathing, the particular course followed by the blood. This rhythmical system is the mediator between the cosmic and the earthly in man, so that through it is woven a connecting link in him between the cosmic, or the beautiful, and the strength that is of the Earth. The link thus woven in the trunk-man, understood in terms of soul and spirit, has from ancient times been given the name of ‘wisdom’.

The beauty of the Cosmos projected into the human being is the wisdom living in his thoughts. But the moral force coming from the strength of the Earth by way of heart and soul becomes moral wisdom. In man's rhythmical system, earthly wisdom and cosmic wisdom meet. Man is an expression of the whole Cosmos, and where there is the will to understand this configuration, it can be understood. In so far as man is formed out of cosmic mysteries, he is able to see into them, and can even perceive a certain connection with them in earthly life itself. Consider the cosmic beauty that works into a man by way of his head: there you have the feminine contribution; and you have the male contribution in the force that appears in a man's earthly strength. You are then able to say: In the act of fructification a union is consummated between the cosmic and the terrestrial. There can be no understanding of the nature of man's task on Earth unless we perceive the particular way in which he is formed. For then indeed we see that the head has its form because the earthly forces are at first unable to work on the human being; you see that he brings his pre-natal being into the realm of Earth and that in the mother's body an extra-terrestrial influence works formatively upon him by way of the Moon. Strength or force works from the Earth and forms the limb-system without being able to bring it to completion, so that the limb-system has to pass through death. For the forces in the limb-system have to be spiritualised, imbued with soul. Beyond the Earth, accordingly, between death and a new birth, they develop further by taking on, in soul-spiritual terms, the form of the head. It is only with the help of the Jupiter and Venus forces the head can arise out of the limb-system in this way. Earthly forces are not the determining factor in a man from birth to death. Those that worked previously on Saturn, Sun, Moon have by then become spiritual, and must be developed spiritually between death and rebirth; and that which lies beyond death has to be spiritualised also—then the future can grow out of the past, then man's limb-organisation can become head. We may therefore say : A man dies so that in the spiritual world he can become able to bring to expression the form which, partly toned down by the earthly, can be expressed by virtue of having gone through the conditions of Saturn, Sun and Moon. Here on Earth a man can experience as his limb-system only the earthly nature developed through his rhythmical system. But in his limb-system he is forming the future. This cannot be completed; he has to die and become head again, and the form of his head is prepared at first in pre-earthly spheres. Thus the form of a human being is connected with repeated earth-lives. Because physically he is born as a being who has acquired his form during the conditions on Saturn, Sun and Moon; because he receives from the spiritual world his tendency to express in spherical form his experiences on Saturn, Sun and Moon, his head on Earth—since it is not of the Earth—is continually giving him over to death.

These things which find expression in a man's repeated lives on Earth are intimately connected with cosmic evolution. It is not true that the things we have touched upon today, and shall be going into further tomorrow and the day after, are beyond human understanding. Human beings can understand them, but they have to be investigated through Spiritual Science. Everyone who gives free play to the sound development of thought can understand them. Yet one is always hearing that there can be no immediate understanding of spiritual-scientific matters. if anyone says: ‘These things have been told to me by a spiritual investigator, but I cannot look into them for myself’, it is just as if it were complained that after matriculating a boy could not cope with the differential calculus.—Everyone can learn what Spiritual Science has to say, just as anyone can learn in principle to apply the differential calculus—though the latter is more difficult than the former. It is not true that because we are not clairvoyant we cannot understand these matters. Just as we have no need for clairvoyance to use the differential calculus, we have no need of it to see into the cosmic connection with the external world. We have only to bring sound concepts to bear. The matter is even the reverse of what is so often said. Someone, for; example, may say: One man has a certain conception of the world, another takes a different view : how can one know which is right?—If you are consistent, if you follow up everything, taking note of what has been said, you will find that only one conception is possible. You cannot argue about beauty, wisdom, strength, and what they mean. For each has only one meaning. The fact that the formation of our head has a peripheral character, and that in the rest of us the element of strength is present in radial form these things always have the same meaning. There is nothing here to be discussed, the facts are quite clear. The difficulty in spreading Spiritual Science lies in this—that today here and there some society may organise lectures on Anthroposophy, or perhaps on its social aspect, the Threefold Commonwealth, and people go to hear the lectures, afterwards attending others and still others—without any desire to come to a definite inner decision. They take the content of Spiritual Science as something on a par with that of other movements. But with Spiritual Science this cannot be done though it may be done with other world-conceptions, one being rather better, another worse. They all get a hearing; people, as it were, nibble at them. But that won't do where Spiritual Science is concerned; there one has to make up one's mind, for it goes to the root of things. There is need for that strenuous exertion of the will which leads to decisions; which avoids distractions and is determined to get down to fundamentals. This will not be accomplished by veering between one world-conception and another, nibbling here, nibbling there. Spiritual Science calls for energy and thoroughness and therefore has against it the spirit of the times, all the slovenliness and weakness of the times. It demands a strength and clarity of spirit for which people today have no liking; they find it disturbing, uncongenial. In primeval days men came to these things with instinctive knowledge; and the old documents—which our scholars study without understanding them—are full of indications that their wisdom embraced something like these relationships between man and the Cosmos. Then this faded away. Humanity relapsed into chaos. But from this chaos man must rescue himself through his own will-forces; out of this chaos he must consciously re-discover his connection with the Cosmos—and he can do it. At the beginning of this lecture I told you how the head cannot be understood if its cosmic origin is not taken into account; nor can the limb-man be understood unless his earthly formation is considered. Both find their balance in the breast-man, the rhythmical organisation, which is continually trying to make the straight circular and the circle into a straight line. When you look at the bloodstream you have the straight, and the tendency to make a straight line of the circle, too; how the course of the blood arises depends on the movement of the stars, and so on. The form is connected with the constellations, the movement with the movement of the planets. This has been referred to from other points of view. Now what happens to the human heart and soul when knowledge of this kind is absorbed? We are bound to say that for those who take it in the right way it becomes as clearly evident as the truths of mathematics. These are certainly evident though the higher truths will not be evident to a fifteen-year old boy; and it is the same with the things we have been discussing.

On the other hand these things can have a decisive influence on our feeling and perceiving. Out of this wisdom there arises a feeling for the divine. It is only a knowledge that keeps to the surface of things which can be irreligious, not a knowledge that goes into them deeply. If we look once more at man's connection with the Cosmos, in the starry heavens above all we see beauty as an expression of spiritual entity, and then we become able to imprint the beauty of things on our art. Then in art there will not be merely external nature as seen by the senses, but with this deeply penetrating knowledge we shall in fact reach what Spiritual Science is. And we shall then appreciate something I said in the introductory lecture to this course—how here at the Goetheanum the unity of science, art and religion is sought. What is said by the one from whom the Goetheanum has its name?

He who has art and science too
Will never lack religion;
But he who does not have them both
Then let him have religion!

That means: Let him have the religion that comes from without; but anyone who possesses the essentials of science and art has religion from within—that is Goethe's conviction.

He who has art and science too
Will never lack religion—

hence those who are striving, in the way referred to, for the unity of religion, art and science, do well to call their Building the ‘Goetheanum’. But to comprehend what has arisen here on this foundation is apparently no task for the superficiality of the age, which looks condescendingly on everything and merely nibbles at one thing after another. Spiritual Science calls for decisions—for decisions that are necessary because the spirit of this science has the will to penetrate into the depths of the world. This must be grasped, too, out of the depths of the human heart.