The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] In the social movement of the present day there is a great deal of talk about social institutions, but very little about social and unsocial human beings. Very little regard is paid to that “social question” which arises when one considers that institutions in a community take their social or anti-social stamp from the people who work them. Persons of a socialistic turn of thought expect to see in the control of the means of production by the community what will satisfy the requirements of a wide range of the people. They take for granted that, under communal control, the co-operation between men will necessarily take a social form as well. They have seen that the industrial system ordered on lines of private capitalism has led to unsocial conditions. They think that, when once this industrial system has disappeared, the anti-social tendencies at work in it will also necessarily be at an end.

[ 2 ] Undoubtedly, along with the modern private capitalist form of industrial economy there have arisen social evils—evils that embrace the widest range of social life; but is this in any way a proof that they are a necessary consequence of this industrial system? Now, an industrial system can, of its own proper nature, effect nothing beyond putting men into situations in life that enable them to produce goods for themselves or for others in a useful, or in a useless, manner. The modern industrial system has brought the means of production under the power of individual persons or groups of persons. The achievements of technical science were such that the best use could be got out of them by a concentration of industrial and economic power. So long as this power is employed in the one field—the production of goods alone—its social working is essentially different from what it is when this power oversteps the bounds and trespasses on the other fields of civil rights or spiritual culture. And it is this trespassing on the other fields, which, in the course of the last few centuries, has led to those social evils for whose abolition the modern social movement is pressing. He who is in possession of the means of production acquires economic dominion over others. This economic dominion has resulted in his allying himself with the forces to be found in the governments and parliaments through which he could procure other posts of vantage also in society, as against those who were economically dependent on him: posts of vantage which, even in a democratically constituted state, bear in practice the character of rights. Similarly, this economic dominion has led to a monopolizing of the life of spiritual culture by those who held economic power.

[ 3 ] Now, the simplest thing seems to be to get rid of this economic predominance of individuals, and thereby do away with their predominance in rights and spiritual culture as well. One arrives at this “simplicity” of social conception when one fails to remember that the combination of technical and economic activity, which modern life demands, necessitates allowing the most fruitful possible expansion to individual initiative and personal worth within the business of economic life. The form which production must take under modern conditions makes this a necessity. The individual cannot make his abilities effective in business if in his work and schemes he is tied down to the will of the community. However dazzling the thought of the individual producing not for himself but for society collectively, yet its justice within certain bounds should not hinder one from also recognizing the other truth, that society collectively is incapable of originating economic schemes that permit of being realized through individuals in the manner desirable. Really practical thought, therefore, will not look to find the cure for social ills in a reshaping of social life that would substitute communal production for private management of the means of production. The endeavour should rather be to forestall evils that may spring up along with management by individual initiative and personal worth, without impairing this management itself. This is only possible if the relations of civil right amongst those engaged in economic industry are not influenced by the interests of industrial and economic life.

[ 4 ] It cannot be said that those who manage the business of economic life can, although occupied by economic interests, yet preserve a sound judgment as to relations of right, and that, because their experience and work have made them well acquainted with the requirements of economic life, they therefore will be able to settle best the life also of civil rights that should grow up in the round of economic business. To hold such an opinion is to overlook the fact that out of any special sphere of life man can only develop the interests peculiar to that sphere. Out of the economic sphere he can develop economic interests only. And if out of this sphere he is called on to produce moral and civil interests as well, then these will merely be economic interests in disguise. Genuine moral and civil interest—interests of Rights—can only spring up upon a ground specially devoted to the life of Rights, where the only consideration will be, what the rights of a matter are. Then, when people proceed from considerations of this sort to frame rules of right, the rule thus made will take effect in economic life. It will then not be necessary to place restrictions on the individual in respect of acquiring economic power; for such economic power will only result in his rendering economic services proportionate to his abilities—not in his using it to obtain special rights and privileges in social life.

[ 5 ] A similar objection is, that relations of right after all show themselves in people’s dealings with one another in business, so that it is quite impossible to conceive of them as something distinct and apart from economic life. Theoretically that is right enough, but it does not necessarily follow that in practice economic interests should be paramount in determining these relations of right. The manager who spiritually directs the business must necessarily occupy a relation of Right towards the manual workers in the same business; but this does not mean that he, qua business manager, is to have a say in determining what that relation is to be. But he will have a say in it, and will throw his economic predominance into the scales if business co-operation and the settlement of relations in Right take place in one common field of administration. Only when Rights are ordered in a field where business considerations cannot in any way come into question, and where business methods can procure no power as against this system of Rights, will the two be able to work together in such a way that men’s sense of right will not be injured, nor economic ability be turned into a curse instead of a blessing for the community as a whole.

[ 6 ] When those who are economically powerful are in a position to use their power to wrest privileged rights for themselves, then amongst the economically weak there will grow up a corresponding opposition to these privileges; and this opposition will, as soon as it has grown strong enough, lead to revolutionary disturbances. If the existence of a special province of Rights makes it impossible for such privileged rights to arise, then disturbances of this sort cannot occur. What this special province of Rights does is to give constant orderly scope to those forces which, in its absence, accumulate within men, until at last they vent themselves violently. Whoever wants to avoid revolutions should study to establish an order of society which shall accomplish in the steady flow of time what otherwise will seek accomplishment in one epoch-making moment.

[ 7 ] People will say that the social movement of modern times is immediately concerned, not with relations of Right, but with the removal of economic inequalities. To such objection one must reply that the demands stirring within men are in nowise always correctly expressed in the thoughts they consciously form about them. The thoughts thus consciously formed are the outcome of direct experiences ; but the demands themselves have their origin in complexes of life that are much deeper-seated, and that are not directly experienced. And if one aims at bringing about conditions of life which can satisfy these demands, one must attempt to get down to these deeper-seated complexes. A consideration of the relations that have come about between industrial economy and civil right shows that the life of civil rights amongst men has come to be dependent on their economic life. Now, if one were to try superficially, by a lopsided alteration in the forms of economic life, to abolish those economic inequalities that the dependence of rights on economics has brought with it, then in a very short while similar inequalities would inevitably result, supposing the new economic order were again allowed to build up the system of rights after its own fashion. One will never really touch what is working itself up through the social movement to the surface of modern life until one brings about social conditions in which, alongside the claims and interests of the economic life, those of Rights can find realization and satisfaction on their own independent basis.

[ 8 ] It is in a similar manner, again, that one must approach the question of the spiritual life and its bearings on that of civil rights and of industrial economy. The course of the last few centuries has been such, that the spiritual life has been cultivated under conditions which only to a very limited extent allowed of its exercising an independent influence upon the political life—that of civil rights—or upon industrial economy. One of the most important branches of spiritual culture—the whole manner of education and public instruction—took its shape from the interests of the civil power. According as State-interests required, so the human being was trained and taught; and State-power was reinforced by economic power. If anyone was to develop his capacities as a human being within the existing provisions for education and training, he had to do so on the ground of such economic power as his sphere in life afforded. Accordingly, those spiritual forces that could find scope within the life of political rights or of industrial economy acquired entirely the stamp of this life. Any free spiritual life had to forego all idea of making itself useful within the sphere of the political state, and could only do so within the industrial economic sphere, in as far as this remained outside the sphere of the political state’s activities. In industrial economy, after all, the necessity is obvious for allowing the competent person to find full scope—since all fruitful activity in this sphere dies out when left solely under the control of the Incompetent whom circumstances may have endowed with economic power. If, however, the tendency common among people of a socialistic turn of thought were carried out, and economic life were administered after the fashion of political and legal ideas, then the result would be that the culture of the free spiritual life would be forced to withdraw altogether from the public field. But a spiritual life that has to develop apart from civil and economic realities loses touch with life. It is forced to draw its substantial contents from sources that are not in live connection with these realities, and in course of time works this substance up into such a shape as to run on like a sort of animated abstraction alongside the actual realities, without having any useful practical effect upon them. And so two different currents arise in the spiritual life. One of them draws its waters from the life of political rights and the life of economics, and is occupied with the requirements which come up in these from day to day, trying to devise systems by which these requirements can be met—without, however, penetrating to the needs of man’s spiritual nature. All it does is to devise external systems and harness men into them, without paying any heed to what their inner nature has to say about it.

The other current of spiritual life proceeds from the inward craving for knowledge and from ideals of the will. These it shapes to suit man’s inward nature. But knowledge of this latter kind is derived from contemplation: it is not the gist of what has been taught by the experience of practical life. These ideals have arisen from conceptions of what is true and good and beautiful; but they have not the strength to shape the practice of life. Consider what conceptions of the mind, what religious ideals, what artistic interests, form the inward life of the shopkeeper, the manufacturer, the government official, outside and apart from his daily practical life; and then consider what ideas are contained in those activities which find expression in his bookkeeping, or for which he is trained by the education and instruction that prepare him for his profession. A gulf lies between the two currents of spiritual life. The gulf has grown all the wider in recent years because that particular mode of conception that in natural science is quite justified has become the standard of man’s relation to reality. This mode of conception sets out to acquire knowledge of laws in things and processes that lie beyond the field of human activity and human influences; so that man is as it were a mere spectator of that which he comprehends in a scheme of natural law. And though in his technical processes he sets these laws of nature working, yet hereby he himself does no more than give occasion for the action of forces which lie outside his own being and nature. The knowledge that he employs in this kind of activity bears a character quite different from his own nature. It reveals to him nothing of what lies in cosmic processes in which his own being is interwoven. For such knowledge as this he needs a conception of the universe that unites in one whole both the world of man and the world outside him.

[ 9 ] It is a knowledge such as this for which that modern spiritual science is striving that is directed to Anthroposophy. Whilst fully recognizing all that the natural science mode of conception means for the progress of modern humanity, anthroposophical science yet sees that all that can be arrived at by the natural science mode of knowledge will never embrace more than the external man. It also recognizes the essential nature of the religious conceptions of the world, but is aware that in the course of the new-age evolution these conceptions of the world have become an internal concern of the soul, not applied by men in any way to the reshaping of their external life, which runs on separately alongside.

[ 10 ] It is true that, to arrive at such a form of knowledge, spiritual science makes demands upon men to which they are as yet but little inclined, because in the last few centuries they have grown habituated to carrying on their practical life and their inner soul-life as two separate and distinct departments of their existence. This habit has resulted in the attitude of incredulity that meets every endeavour to make use of spiritual insight in forming an opinion about life’s social configuration. People have in mind their past experience of social ideas, that were born of a spiritual culture estranged from life: and when there is any talk of such things, they recall St. Simon, Fourier, and others besides. And the opinion people have formed about ideas of this sort is justified, inasmuch as such ideas are the outcome of a tendency of learning which acquires its knowledge not from living experience but from a process of reasoning. And from this people have generalized and concluded that no kind of spirit is adapted to produce ideas that bear sufficient relation to practical life to admit of being realized. From this general theory come the various views which in their modern form are all more or less traceable to Marx. Those who hold them have no use for ideas as active agents in bringing about satisfactory social conditions. Rather they maintain that the evolution of the actual facts of economic life is tending inevitably to a goal of which such conditions are the result. They are inclined to let practical life take more or less its own course, on the ground that in actual practice ideas are powerless. They have lost faith in the strength of spiritual life. They do not believe that there can be any kind of spiritual life able to overcome the remoteness and unreality which characterize the form of it that has predominated during the last few centuries.

It is a kind of spiritual life such as this, nevertheless, which is pursued by anthroposophical science. The sources from which it seeks to draw are the sources of actual reality itself. Those forces which sway the inmost nature of man are the same forces that are at work in the actual reality outside man. The natural science mode of conception cannot get down to these forces, being engaged in working up an intellectual code of natural law out of the experiences acquired from external facts. Nor are the world-conceptions, founded on a more or less religious basis, any longer at the present day in touch with these forces. They accept their traditions as handed down to them, without penetrating to their fountain-head in the depths of man’s being. Spiritual science, however, seeks to get to this fountainhead. It develops methods of knowledge which lead down into those regions of the inner man where the processes external to man find their continuation within man himself. The knowledge that spiritual science has to give presents a reality actually experienced in man’s inner self. The ideas that emerge from it are not the outcome of reasoning, but imbued through and through with the forces of actual reality. Hence such ideas are able to carry with them the force of actual reality when they come to give the lines for social aim and purpose. One can well understand that, at the first, a spiritual science such as this should meet with distrust. But such distrust will not last when people come to recognize the essential difference that exists between this spiritual science and the particular current recently developed in science, and which to-day is assumed to be the only one possible. Once people come to recognize the difference, they will cease to believe that one must avoid social ideas when one is bent on the practical shaping of social facts. They will begin to see, instead, that practical social ideas are obtainable only from a spiritual life that can find its way to the roots of human nature. People will clearly see that in modern times social facts have fallen into disorder because people have tried to master them by thoughts which these facts were constantly eluding.

[ 11 ] A spiritual conception that penetrates to the essential being of man finds there motives for action which in the ethical sense too are directly good. For the impulse towards evil arises in man only because in his thoughts and sensations he silences the depths of his own nature. Accordingly, social ideas that are arrived at through the sort of spiritual conception here meant must by their very nature be ethical ideas as well. And being drawn, not from thought alone, but from life, they possess the strength to lay hold upon the will and to live on in action. In the light of a true ethical conception, social thought and ethical thought become one. And the life that grows out of such a spiritual conception is intimately linked with every form of activity that man develops in life—even in his practical dealings with the most insignificant matters. So, through this spiritual conception, social instinct, ethical impulse, and practical conduct become interwoven in such a way as to form a unity.

[ 12 ] This kind of spirit, however, can thrive only when its growth is completely independent of all authority except such as is derived directly from the spiritual life itself. Legal regulations by the civil state for the nurture of the spirit sap the strength of the forces of spiritual life. Whereas a spiritual life that is left entirely to its own inherent interests and impulses will reach out into everything that man performs in social life. It is frequently objected that mankind would need to be completely changed before one could ground social behaviour on the ethical impulses. People do not reflect what ethical impulses in men wither away when they are not allowed to grow up from a free spiritual life, but are forced to take the particular turn that the politico-legal structure of society finds necessary for carrying on work in the spheres it has mapped out beforehand. A person brought up and educated under the free spiritual life will certainly, through his very initiative, bring with him into his calling much of the stamp of his own personality. He will not let himself be fitted into the social works like a cog into a machine. But, in the long run, what he thus brings into it will not hamper, but increase, the harmony of the whole. What goes on in each particular part of the communal life will be the outcome of what lives in the spirits of the people at work there.

[ 13 ] People whose souls breathe the atmosphere created by a spirit such as this will put life into the institutions needed for practical economic purposes, and in such a way that social needs too will be satisfied. Institutions that people think they can devise to satisfy these social needs will never work socially with men whose inner nature feels itself out of unison with their outward occupation. For institutions of themselves cannot work socially. To work socially requires human beings, socially attuned, working within an ordered system of civil rights created by a living interest in this Rights system, and with an economic life that produces in the most efficient fashion the goods required for actual needs.

[ 14 ] If the life of the spirit be a free one, evolved only from those impulses that reside within itself, then civil life will thrive in proportion as people are educated intelligently, from real spiritual experience, in the adjustment of their civil relations and rights. And then, too, economic life will be fruitful in the measure in which men’s spiritual nurture has developed their capacity for it.

[ 15 ] Every institution that has grown up in men’s communal life is originally the result of the Will that dwelt in their aims; and their spiritual life has contributed to its growth. Only when life becomes complicated in form, as it has under the technical methods of production of the modern age, then the Will that dwells in the thoughts loses touch with the actual social facts. These latter then take their own automatic course. And man withdraws himself in the spirit to a corner apart, and there seeks the spiritual substance to satisfy the needs of his soul.

It is from this mechanical course of affairs, over which the will of the individual spirit had no control, that those conditions have arisen which the modern social movement aims at changing. It is because the spirit that is at work within the civil life of rights and in the round of industry is no longer one through which the individual spiritual life can find its channel, that the individual sees himself in a social order which gives him, as an individual, no scope civically nor economically.

People who do not clearly see this will always raise an objection to the conception of the body social as an organism consisting of three systems, each to be worked on its own distinct basis—i. e., the Spiritual life, the State for the administration of Rights, and the round of Industrial Economy. They will protest that such a differentiation will destroy the necessary unity of communal life. To this one must reply that right now this unity is destroying itself in the effort to maintain itself intact. The life of rights, that grows up out of economic power, in its actual working undermines this economic power, because it is felt by those economically inferior to be a foreign body within the social organism. That spirit coming to be dominant in civil rights and economic life, when these control its workings, condemns the living spirit—which in each individual is working its way up from the soul’s depths—to powerlessness in the face of practical life. If, however, the system of civil rights grows up on independent ground out of the sense of right, and if the Will of the individual dwelling in the spirit is developed in a free life of the spirit, then the Rights system and Spiritual force and Economic activity all work together into a unity. They will be able to do so when they can develop, each according to its own proper nature, in distinct fields of life. It is just in separation that they will turn to unity; whereas, shaped from an artificial unity, they become estranged. [ 16 ] People of a socialist way of thinking will, many of them, dismiss such a conception as this with the phrase that it is not possible to bring about satisfactory conditions of life through this organic formation of society; that it can only be done through a suitable economic organization. In so saying they overlook the fact that the men at work in their economic organization are endowed with wills. If one tells them so, they will smile, for they regard it as self-evident. Yet their thoughts are busy constructing a social edifice in which this “self-evident” fact is left out of account. Their economic organization is to be controlled by a communal will. But this, after all, must be the resultant of the individual wills of the people united in the organization. These individual wills can never find scope, if the communal will is derived entirely from the idea of economic organization. But the individual wills can expand untrammelled if, alongside the economic province, there is a civil province of Rights, where the standard is set, not by any economic point of view, but by the sense of right alone; and if, alongside both the economic and civil provinces, a free spiritual life can find place, following the impulsion of the spirit alone. Then we shall not have a social order going by clockwork, to which individual wills could never permanently be fitted. Then human beings will find it possible to give their wills a social bent, and to bring them constantly to bear on the shaping of social circumstances. Under the free spiritual life the individual will will acquire its social bent. Under a self-based civil state of Rights, these individual wills, socially attuned, will result in a communal will that works aright. And the individual wills, socially centred, and organized by the independent system of rights, will exert themselves within the round of industrial economy, producing and distributing goods as social needs require. [ 17 ] Most people to-day still lack faith in the possibility of establishing a social order based on individual wills. They have no faith in it, because such a faith cannot come from a spiritual life that has developed in dependence on the life of the State and of industrial economy. The kind of spirit that does not develop in freedom out of the life of the spirit itself, but out of an exterior organization, simply does not know what the potentialities of the spirit are. It looks round for something to guide and manage it—not knowing how the spirit guides and manages itself, if it can but draw its strength from its own sources. It would like to have a board of management for the spirit as a sort of branch department of the economic and civil organizations, quite regardless of the fact that industrial economy and the system of rights can only live when permeated with the spirit that follows its own leading.

[ 18 ] For the reshaping of the social order, goodwill alone is not the only thing needful. It needs also that courage which can be a match for the lack of faith in the spirit’s power. A true spiritual conception can inspire this courage: for such a spiritual conception feels able to bring forth ideas that not only serve to give the soul its inward orientation, but which, in their very birth, bring with them the seeds of life’s practical configuration. The will to go down into the deep places of the spirit can become a will so strong as to bear a part in everything that man performs.

[ 19 ] When one speaks of a spiritual conception having its roots in life, quite a number of people take one to mean the sum-total of those instincts in which a man takes refuge who travels along the familiar rails of life and holds every intervention from spiritual regions to be a piece of cranky idealism. The spiritual conception that is meant here, however, must be confounded neither with that abstract spirituality which is incapable of extending its interests to practical life, nor yet with that spiritual tendency which as good as denies the spirit directly it comes to consider the guiding lines of practical life. Both these modes of conception ignore how the spirit rules in the facts of external life, and therefore feel no real urgency for consciously penetrating its rulings. Yet only such a sense of urgency brings forth that knowledge which sees the social question in its true light. The experiments now being made to solve the social question afford such unsatisfactory results because many people have not yet become able to sec what the true gist of the question is. They sec this question arise in economic regions, and they look to economic institutions to provide the answer. They think they will find the solution in economic transformations. They fail to recognize that these transformations can only come about through forces that are released from within human nature itself in the uprising of a new spiritual life and life of rights in their own independent domains.

How many people are there to-day who, as they walk through the streets at this season and see all the preparations made for the Christmas Festival, have any clear or profound idea of what it means? How seldom do we find evidence of any clear ideas of this Festival, and even when they exist, how far removed they are from the intentions of those who once inaugurated the great Festivals as tokens of what is eternal and imperishable in the world! A glance at the ‘Christmas Reflections’ as they are called, in the newspapers, is quite sufficient proof of this. Surely there can be nothing more dreary and at the same time more estranged from the subject than the thoughts sent out into the world on printed pages in this way.

To-day we shall try to bring before our minds a kind of summary of the knowledge revealed to us by Spiritual Science. I do not, of course, mean any kind of pedantic summary; I mean a gathering-together of all that the Christmas Festival can bring home to our hearts if we regard Spiritual Science not as a dull, grey theory, not as an outer confession, not as a philosophy, but as a real and vital stream of life pulsating through and through us.

The man of to-day confronts Nature around him as a stranger. He is far more of a stranger to Nature than he thinks, far more even than he was in the time of Goethe. Is there anyone who still feels the depth of words spoken by Goethe at the beginning of the Weimar period of his life? He addressed a Hymn, a kind of prayer to Nature with all her mysterious powers:

“Nature!—we are surrounded and embraced by her; we cannot draw back from her, nor can we penetrate more deeply into her being. She lifts us unasked and unwarned into the gyrations of her dance and whirls us away until we fall exhausted from her arms ... All men are within her and she in all men ... We are obedient to her laws even when we would fain oppose them ... She (Nature) is all in all. She alone praises and she alone punishes—herself, Let her do with me what she will; she will not cherish hatred for her created work. It was not I who spoke of her, Nay, it was she who spoke it all, true and false. Hers is the blame for all things, hers is the credit ...”

Verily, we are all Nature's children. And when we think we are least of all obedient to her, it may be that just then we are acting most strictly in accordance with the great laws which pervade the realm of Nature and stream into our own being. Again, there are so few who really feel the depth of other pregnant words of Goethe in which he tries to express the feeling of communion with the hidden forces common to Nature and to the human being. I refer to that passage in Faust where Goethe addresses Nature, not as the dead, lifeless being conceived of by materialistic thinkers of to-day, but as a living Spirit:

“Spirit sublime, Thou gav'st me, gav'st me all
For which I prayed. Not unto me in vain
Hast thou thy countenance revealed in fire.
Thou gav'st me Nature as a kingdom grand,
With power to feel and to endure it. Thou
Not only cold, amazed acquaintance yield'st,
But grantest, that in her profoundest breast
I gaze, as in the bosom of a friend.

The ranks of living creatures thou dost lead
Before me, teaching me to know my brothers
In air and water and the silent wood.
And when the storm in forests roars and grinds,
The giant firs, in falling, neighbour bough
And neighbour trunks with crushing weight bear down,
And falling, fill the hills with hollow thunders,—
Then to the cave secure thou leadest me,
Then show'st me mine own self, and in my breast
The deep, mysterious miracles unfold.”

Translation by BAYARD TAYLOR

This was the mood of soul which Goethe's knowledge and feeling for Nature awakened in him and these words were an attempt to bring to life again a mood which filled men's hearts in an age when wisdom itself was still organically united by living ties to Nature. And it was as tokens of this ‘feeling at one’ with Nature and the universe that the great Festivals were inaugurated.

The Festivals have become abstractions, matters of indifference to modern people. The word as a medium of strife and blasphemy often means more than the Word conceived as the power by which the world itself was created. Yet the alphabetical word ought to be the representative, the symbol of the Word Creative in Nature around us, in the great universe and within us too when self-knowledge awakens, and of which all mankind can be made conscious by those who truly understand the course of Nature. It was for this that the Festivals were instituted and with the knowledge we have gleaned from Spiritual Science we will try to understand what it was that the wise men of old set out to express in the Christmas Festival.

Christmas is not a Festival of Christendom only. In ancient Egypt, in the regions we ourselves inhabit, and in Asia thousands and thousands of years before the Christian era we find that a Festival was celebrated on the days now dedicated to the celebration of the birth of Christ.

Now what was the character of this Festival which since time immemorial has been celebrated all over the world on the same days of the year? Wonderful Fire Festivals in the northern and central regions of Europe in ancient times were celebrated among the Celts in Scandinavia, Scotland and England by their priests, the Druids. What were they celebrating? They were celebrating the time when winter draws to its close and spring begins. It is quite true that Christmas falls while it is still winter, but Nature is already heralding a victory which can be a token of hope in anticipation of the victory that will come in spring—a token of confidence, of hope, of faith—to use words which are connected in nearly every language with the Festival of Christmas. There is confidence that the Sun, again in the ascendant, will be victorious over the opposing powers of Nature. The days draw in and draw in, and this shortening of the days seems to us to be an expression of the dying, or rather of the falling asleep of the Nature-forces. The days grow shorter and shorter up to the time when we celebrate the Christmas Festival and when our forefathers also celebrated it, in another form. Then the days begin to draw out again and the light of the Sun celebrates its victory over the darkness. In our age of materialistic thinking this is an event to which we no longer give much consideration.

In olden times it seemed to men in whom living feeling was united with wisdom, to be an expression of an experience of the Godhead Himself, the Godhead by Whom their lives were guided. The solstice was a personal experience of a higher being—as personal an experience as when some momentous event forces a man to come to a vital decision. And it was even more than this. The waxing and waning of the days was not only an expression of an event in the life of a higher Being, but a token of something greater still, of something momentous and unique.

This brings us to the true meaning of Christmas as a Festival of the very highest order in cosmic and human life. In the days when genuine occult teaching was not disowned as it is today by materialistic thought but was the very wellspring of the life of the peoples, the Christmas Festival was a kind of memorial, a token of remembrance of a great happening on the Earth. At the hour of midnight the priests gathered around them their truest disciples, those who were the teachers of the people, and spoke to them of a great Mystery. (I am not telling you anything that has been cleverly thought out or discovered by a process of abstract deduction but was actually experienced in the Mysteries, in the secret Sanctuaries of those remote times). This Mystery was connected with the victory of the Sun over the darkness. There was a time on the Earth when the light triumphed over the darkness. And it happened thus: in that epoch, all physical, all bodily life on Earth had reached the stage of animality only. The highest kingdom upon the Earth had only reached a stage at which it was preparing to receive something higher. And then there came that great moment in evolution when the immortal, imperishable soul of man descended. Life had so far developed that the human body was able to receive into itself the imperishable soul. These ancestors of the human race stood higher in the scale of evolution than modern scientists believe, but the higher part of their being, the divine ‘spark’ was not yet within them. The divine spark descended from a higher planetary sphere to our Earth which was now to become the scene of its activity, the dwelling-place of the soul which henceforward can never be lost to us.

We call these remote ancestors of humanity the Lemurian race. Then came the Atlantean race and the Atlantean race was followed by our own—the Aryan race. Into the bodies of the Lemurian race the human soul descended. This descent of the divine ‘Sons of the Spirit,’ this great moment in the evolution of mankind was celebrated by the sages of all times as the victory of the light over the darkness. Since then the human soul has been working in the body and bringing it to higher stages of development but not at all in the way that materialistic science imagines. At the time when the human soul was quickened by the Spirit, something happened in the universe, something that is one of the most decisive events in the evolution of mankind.

In those remote ages—and this is contrary to what modern science teaches—certain constellation of Earth, Moon and Sun was in existence. It was not until then that the Sun assumed the significance it now has in the process of man's growth and life upon the Earth and of the other creatures belonging to the Earth—the plants and animals. Before that time, the beings on Earth were adapted to the conditions then obtaining upon the planetary body. Only those who are able to form a clear idea of the process of the development of the Earth and of mankind will understand the connection of Sun, Moon and Earth with the human being as he lives upon the Earth. There was a time when the Earth was still united with Sun and Moon, when Sun, Moon and Earth were still one body, The beings who dwelt upon this planet were different in appearance from those who inhabit the Earth to-day; they lived in forms which were suited to the conditions of existence as they were on the planetary body consisting of Sun, Moon and Earth.

The form and essential being of everything that lives upon our Earth is determined by the fact that first the Sun and then, later, the Moon separated from the Earth. The forces and influences of these two heavenly bodies henceforward played down upon the Earth from outside. This is the basis of the mysterious connection of the Spirit of man with the Spirit of the universe, with the Logos in Whom Sun, Moon and Earth are all contained. In this Logos we live and move and have our being. Just as the Earth was born from a planetary body in which the Sun and Moon were also contained, so is man born of a Spirit, of a Soul which belongs alike to Sun, Moon and Earth. And so when a man looks up to the Sun, or to the Moon, he should not only see external bodies in the heavens, but in Sun, Moon and Earth he should see the bodies of Spiritual Beings.

This truth is utterly lost to the materialism of the age. Those who do not see in Sun and Moon the bodies of Spiritual Beings cannot recognise the human body as the body of the Spirit. Just as truly as the heavenly bodies are the bodies of Spiritual Beings, so is the human body the bearer of the Spirit. And man is connected with these Spiritual Beings. Just as his body is separate from the forces of the Sun and Moon and yet contains forces which are active in the Sun and Moon, so the same spirituality which reigns in Sun and Moon is contained within his soul. Man has evolved on Earth into the being he is, and he is dependent upon the Sun as the heavenly body from which the Earth receives her light.

And so in days of old, our forefathers felt themselves to be spiritual children of the great universe and they said: “We have become men through the Sun Spirit, through the Sun Spirit from Whom the Spirit within us proceeded. The victory of the Sun over the darkness commemorates the victory of the Sun when it shone down upon the Earth for the first time. The immortal soul has been victorious over the forces of the animal nature.” It was verily a victory of the Sun when, long, long ago, the immortal soul entered into the physical body and penetrated into the dark world of desires, impulses and passions. Darkness preceded the victory of the Sun and this darkness had followed a previous Sun Age. So it is with the human soul. The soul proceeds from the Divine but it must sink for a time into the darkness, in order, out of this darkness, to build up the vehicle for the human soul. By slow degrees the human soul itself built up the lower nature of man in order then to take up its abode in the dwelling-place of its own construction. You have a correct simile for the entry of the immortal soul of man into the human body if you imagine an architect devoting all his powers to the building of a house in which he then lives. But in those remote ages the soul could only work unconsciously on its dwelling-place. The descent is expressed by the darkness; the awakening to consciousness, the lighting-up of the conscious human soul is expressed in this simile as a victory of the Sun. And so to those who were still aware of man's living connection with the universe, the victory of the Sun signified the great moment when they had received the impulse which was all-essential for their earthly existence. And this great moment was perpetuated in the Christmas Festival.

And now try to think of the course of human life in connection with the harmony of the universe. Man seems to become more and more akin to the great rhythms of Nature. If we think of all that encompasses the life of the soul, of the course of the Sun and everything that is connected with it, we are struck by something that closely concerns us, namely, the rhythm and the marvellous harmony in contrast to the chaos and lack of harmony in the human soul. We all know how rhythmically and with what regularity the Sun appears and disappears. And we can picture what a stupendous upheaval there would be in the universe if for a fraction of a second only the Sun were to be diverted from its course. It is only because of this inviolable harmony in the course of the Sun that our universe can exist at all, and it is upon this harmony that the rhythmic life-process of all beings depends. Think of the annual course of the Sun.—Picture to yourselves that it is the Sun which charms forth the plants in spring time and then think how difficult it is to make the violet or some other plant flower out of due season. Seed-time and harvest, everything, even the very life of animals is dependent upon the rhythmic course of the Sun. And in the being of man himself everything that is not connected with his feelings, his desires and his passions, or with his ordinary thinking, is rhythmic and harmonious. Think of the pulse, of the process of digestion and you will feel the mighty rhythm and marvel at the wisdom implicit in the whole of Nature. Compare with this the irregularity, the chaos of man's passions and desires, especially of his ideas and thoughts. Think of the regularity of your pulse, your breathing, and then of the irregularity, the erratic nature of your thinking, feeling and willing. With what wisdom the powers of life are governed where the prevailing rhythmic forces meet the challenge of the chaotic! And how greatly the rhythms of the human body are outraged by man's passions and cravings! Those who have studied anatomy know how marvellously the heart is constructed and regulated and how wonderfully it is able to stand the strain put upon it by the drinking of tea, coffee and spirits.

There is wisdom in every part of the divine, rhythmic Nature to which our forefathers looked up with such veneration and the very soul of which is the Sun with its regular, rhythmic course. And as the wise men of old looked upwards to the Sun, they said to their disciples: ‘Thou art the image of what the soul born within thee has yet to become and what it will become.’ The divine cosmic Order was revealed in all its glory to the sages of old. And again, in the Christian religion we have the ‘Gloria in excelsis.’ The meaning of ‘gloria’ is revelation, not ‘glory’ in the sense of ‘honour.’ Therefore we should not say: ‘Glory (honour) to God in the highest,’ but rather: ‘To-day is the revelation of the Divine in the heavens!’ The birth of the Redeemer makes us aware of the ‘Glory’ streaming through the wide universe.

In earlier times this cosmic harmony was placed as a great Ideal before those who were to be leaders among their fellow-men. Therefore in all ages and wherever there was consciousness of these things, men spoke of Sun Heroes. In the temples and sanctuaries of the Mysteries there were seven degrees of Initiation. I will speak of them as they were known in ancient Persia.

The first stage is attained when a man's ordinary feeling and thinking is raised to a higher level, where knowledge of the Spirit is attained. Such a man received the name of ‘Raven.’ It is the ‘Ravens’ who inform the Initiates in the temples what is happening in the world outside. When medieval poetic wisdom desired to depict in the person of a great Ruler an Initiate who amid the treasures of wisdom contained in the Earth must await the great moment when newly revealed depths of Christianity rejuvenate mankind—when this poetic wisdom of the Middle Ages created the figure of Barbarossa, ravens were his heralds. The Old Testament, too, speaks of the ravens in the story of Elijah.

Those who had reached the second stage of Initiation were known as ‘Occultists’; at the third stage they were ‘Warriors,’ at the fourth, ‘Lions.’ At the fifth stage of Initiation a man was called by the name of his own people: he was a ‘Persian,’ ‘Indian,’ or whatever it might be. For that man alone who had reached the fifth degree of Initiation was regarded as a true representative of his people. At the sixth stage a man was a ‘Sun Hero’ or one who ‘runs in the paths of the Sun.’ And at the seventh stage he was a ‘Father.’

Why was an Initiate of the sixth degree known as a Sun Hero? To reach this level on the ladder of spiritual knowledge a man must have developed an inner life in harmony with the divine rhythms pulsating through the cosmos. His life of feeling and of thinking must have rid itself of chaos, of all disharmony, and his inner life of soul must beat in perfect accord with the rhythm of the Sun in the heavens. Such was the demand made upon men at the sixth degree of Initiation. They were looked upon as holy men, as Ideals, and it was said that if a Sun Hero were to deviate from the divine path of this spiritual harmony, it would be as great a calamity as if the Sun were to deviate from its course. A man whose spiritual life had found a path as sure as that of the Sun in the heavens was called a ‘Sun Hero,’ and there were Sun Heroes among all the peoples.

Our scholars know remarkably little about these things. They are aware that Sun myths are connected with the lives of all the great Founders of religions, but what they do not know is that at the Initiation Ceremony it was the custom for the leading figures to be made into Sun Heroes. It is not really so surprising that materialistic research should rediscover these things. Sun myths have been sought for and found in connection with Buddha and with the Christ.

The Sun-Soul was the great example for the way in which a man's life must be ordered. How did the ancients conceive of the soul of a Sun Hero who had reached this inner harmony? They pictured to themselves that no longer did a single individual human soul live within him, but that forces of the cosmic Soul were streaming into him. This cosmic Soul was known in Greece as Chrestos, in the sublime wisdom of the East as Budhi. When a man no longer feels himself a single being, as the bearer of an individual soul, but experiences something of the universal Soul, he has created within himself an image of the union of the Sun-Soul with the human body and he has attained something of the very greatest significance in the evolution of mankind.

If we think of these men with all their nobility of soul, we shall be able to some extent to visualise the future of the human race and the relation of the future to the ideal of mankind generally. As humanity is to-day, decisions are arrived at by individuals who amid quarrelling and strife finally reach a measure of unity in majority-resolutions. When such resolutions are still regarded as the ideal, this is evidence that men have not realised what truth really is. Where in us does truth exist? Truth lives in that realm of our being where we think logically. It would be nonsense to decide by a majority vote that 2 x 2 = 4, or that 3 x 4 = 12. When man has once realised what is true, millions may come and tell him it is not so, that it is this or it is that, but he will still have his own inner certainty.

We have reached this point in the realm of scientific thinking, of thinking upon which human passions, impulses and instincts no longer impinge. Wherever passions and instincts mingle with thinking, men still find themselves involved in strife and dispute, in wild confusion, for the life of instincts and impulses is itself a seething chaos. When, however, impulses, instincts and passions have been purged and transmuted into what is known as Budhi or Chrestos, when they have developed to the level at which logical, dispassionate thinking stands to-day, then the ideal of the ancient wisdom, the ideal of Christianity, the ideal of Anthroposophy will be realised. It will then be as unnecessary to vote about what is held to be good, ideal and right as it is to vote about what has been recognised as logically right or logically wrong.

This ideal can stand before the soul of every human being and then he has before him the ideal of the Sun Hero, the ideal to which every aspirant at the sixth stage of Initiation has attained. The German Mystics of the Middle Ages felt this and expressed it in the word ‘Vergöttung’—deification. This word existed in all the wisdom-religions, What does it signify? Let me try to express it in the following way.—There was a time when those whom we look upon to-day as the ruling Spirits of the universe also passed through a stage at which mankind as a whole now stands -the stage of chaos. These ruling Spirits have wrestled through to the divine heights from which their forces stream through the harmonies of the universe. The regularity with which the Sun moves through the seasons, the regularity manifested in the growth of plants and in the life of animals—this regularity was once chaos. Harmony has been attained at the cost of great travail. Humanity stands to-day within the same kind of chaos but out of the chaos there will arise a harmony modelled in the likeness of the harmony in the universe.

When this thought takes root in our souls, not as a theory, not as a doctrine, but as living insight, then we shall understand what Christmas signifies in the light of anthroposophical teaching. If the glory, the revelation of the divine harmony in the heavenly heights is a real experience within us, and if we know that this harmony will one day resound from our own souls, then we can also feel what will be brought about in humanity itself by this harmony: peace among men of good-will. These are the two thoughts or, better, the two feelings which arise at Christmastide. When with this great vista of the divine ordering of the world, of the revelation, the glory of the heavens, we think of the future lying before mankind, we have a premonition even now of that harmony which in the future will reign in those who know that the more abundantly the harmony of the Cosmos fills the soul, the more peace and concord there will be upon the Earth. The great ideal of Peace stands there before us when at Christmas we contemplate the course of the Sun. And when we think about the victory of the Sun over the darkness during these days of Festival there is born in us an unshakable conviction which makes our own evolving soul akin to the harmony of the cosmos—light over the darkness had always been commemorated.¹ And so Christianity is in harmony with all the great world-religions. When the Christmas bells ring out, they are a reminder to us that this Festival was celebrated all over the world, wherever human beings knew what it signified, wherever they understood the great truth that the soul of man is involved in a process of development and progress on this Earth, wherever in the truest sense man strove to reach self-knowledge.

We have been speaking to-day, not of an undefined, abstract feeling for Nature but of a feeling that is full of life and spirituality. And if we think of what has been said in connection with Goethe's words: “Nature! we are surrounded and embraced by thee ...” it is quite obvious that we are not speaking here in any materialistic sense, but that we see in Nature the outward expression, the countenance of the Divine Spirit of the Cosmos. Just as the physical is born out of the physical, so are the soul and the Spirit born out of the Divine Soul and the Divine Spirit. The body is connected with purely material forces and the soul and Spirit with forces akin to their own nature. The great Festivals exist as tokens that these things must be understood in their connection with the whole universe; our powers of thinking must be used in such a way that we realise our oneness with the whole universe. When this insight lives within us, the Festivals will change their present character and become living realities in our hearts and souls. They will be points of focus in the year uniting us with the all-pervading Spirit of the universe.

Throughout the year we fulfil the common tasks and duties of daily life, and at these times of Festival we turn our attention to the links which bind us with eternity. And although daily life is fraught with many a struggle, at these times a feeling awakens within us that above all the strife and turmoil there is peace and harmony.

Festivals are the commemoration of great Ideals, and Christmas is the birth feast of the very greatest Ideal before mankind, of that Ideal which man must strain every nerve to attain if he is to fulfil his mission. The birth festival of all that man can feel, perceive and will—such is Christmas when it is truly understood.

The aim of Spiritual Science is to stimulate a true and deep understanding of the Christmas Festival. We do not want to promulgate a dogma or a doctrine, or a philosophy. Our aim is that everything we say and teach, everything that is contained in our writings, in our science, shall pass over into life itself.

When in all that pertains to his daily life man applies spiritual wisdom, life will be filled with it and from all pulpits, far and wide, godlike wisdom, the living wisdom of the Spirit will resound in the words that are spoken to the ‘faithful.’ It will then be unnecessary to utter the actual words ‘Spiritual Science’ at all. When in Courts of Law the deeds of human beings are viewed with the eyes of spiritual perception, when at the bed of sickness the doctor spiritually perceives and spiritually heals, when in the schools the teacher brings spiritual knowledge to the growing child, when in the very streets men think and feel and act spiritually, then we shall have reached our Ideal, for Spiritual Science will have become common knowledge. Then too there will be a spiritual understanding of the great turning-points of the year and the everyday experiences of man will be truly linked with the spiritual world. The Immortal and the Eternal, the spiritual Sun will flood the soul with light at the great Festivals which will remind man of the divine Self within him. The divine Self, in essence like the Sun, and radiant with light, will prevail over darkness and chaos and will give to his soul a peace by which all the strife, all the war and all the discord in the world will be quelled.

• 1. We cannot here enter into the details of the wisdom-teachings of Christianity itself which will form the subject of a later lecture. But this much shall be said to-day: that nothing could be more correct than to place at this time the Birth Festival of that divine Individuality Who is to the Christian a guarantee and an assurance that his divine soul will ultimately prevail over the darkness in the outer world.

In the past I have spoken here on a variety of subjects concerning spiritual life. It may be permissible today, therefore, for me to touch upon a more prosaic theme from the standpoint of spiritual science. Problems of nutrition undoubtedly offer a more mundane subject than many we have heard here. It will be seen, however, that particularly in our age spiritual science has something to say even concerning questions that directly affect everyday life.

On the one hand, spiritual science stands accused, by those who know it only from the outside, of aspiring too loftily to spiritual realms, thus losing the firm ground under its feet. On the other hand, the opposite can perhaps also be heard again from those who have become acquainted with spiritual science or anthroposophy through only a single lecture or brochure. This consists in the statement that anthroposophists are entirely too concerned with, and talk too much about, questions of what they should eat and drink. In some respects these critics might well be called idealists in that they believe they view the common aspects of life from a certain exalted level. They raise this objection particularly by taking a stand that can be expressed in the following way. “What man eats and drinks is unimportant. It does not matter what food one takes, rather must one rise above the material dimension by the strength of one's spirit.” Even a well-intentioned idealist might level this objection against anthroposophists.

Well, at a time when these questions are being widely discussed from other angles, it might be interesting to hear what spiritual science has to say about them.

It was a German philosopher, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, to whom the phrase, “A man is what he eats,” is attributed. Many thinkers of consequence have agreed with Feuerbach that what man produces is basically the result of foods ingested by him and his actions are influenced by the food absorbed in a purely materialistic way through his digestion. With so much discussion of eating going on, somebody might get it into his head to believe that man is indeed physically nothing more than what he eats. Now, we shall have several things to say on this point.

We must understand each other precisely as to the purpose of today's lecture and the intention behind it. We are not agitating in favor of particular tendencies, nor are we trying to be reformative. The spiritual scientist is obliged to state the truth of things. His attitude must never be agitatorial, and he must be confident that when a person has perceived the truth of what he says, he will then proceed to do the right thing. What I have to say, therefore, does not recommend one course as opposed to another, and he who assumes that it does will misunderstand it completely. Merely the facts will be stated, and you will have understood me correctly if you realize that I am not speaking for or against anything.

Bearing this in mind, we can raise the question from the standpoint of spiritual science as to whether the statement, “A man is what he eats,” does not have a certain justification after all. We must continually bear in mind that the body of man is the tool of the spirit. In discussing the various functions the body has to perform, we see that man utilizes it as a physical instrument. An instrument is useless if it is not adjusted correctly so that it functions in an orderly manner, however, and similarly our bodies are of no use to our higher organism if they do not function properly. Our freedom can be handicapped and intentions impeded.

When we as spiritual scientists consider our organism, we can ask ourselves if we do not make our bodies unfit for the execution of the intentions, aspirations and impulses of our lives if we become bound by and dependent upon our bodies through an unsuitable diet. Is it not possible to mold the body in such fashion that it turns into a progressively more suitable instrument for the impulses of our spiritual life? Will we lose our freedom and become dependent upon our bodies if we ignore what is the right nourishment for us? What must we eat so that we are not merely the product of what we eat?

By asking such questions, we come to look at the problem of nutrition from another perspective. You all know, and I only need allude to this generally familiar fact, that speaking purely materialistically, people continuously use up the substances that their organisms store and they therefore must take care to replenish them with further nourishment. Men must concern themselves with replenishment. What, then, could be more obvious than to examine those substances that are necessary for the human organism, that is, to find out what substances build up the animalistic organism, and then simply see to it that the organism is given them. This approach, however, remains an extremely materialistic one. We must rather ask ourselves what the essential task of a man's food is and in what way it is actually utilized in his organism.

I must stress that what I say about man is applicable only to him, since spiritual science does not consider man to be so closely connected with the animals as does natural science. Otherwise, one could simply state that the human organism is composed of proteins, fats, carbohydrates and mineral substances, and consequently search for the best method to satisfy man's nutritional needs of them. But spiritual science holds to the principle that every material occurrence, everything that takes place in the physical sense world, is only the external aspect of spiritual processes. Indeed, even the nutritional processes cannot be purely physical, but as material processes they are really the external aspects and expressions of spiritual processes. Similarly, man is a unity even though the composition of his physical body appears to be a conglomeration of chemical events.

Our attention has frequently been focused on how the ascent from the purely physical to the spiritual realm can be made. We have often heard that the physical body is sustained by the etheric body. This is the architect of the physical body, which must not be viewed as if only chemical processes took place in it. We will be wrong if, by observing only the chemical processes, we simply ask in a materialistic fashion what happens to the chemical substances. Beyond the etheric body, we must remember, is the astral body. Through it are expressed the instinctive feelings and in certain respects the various aspects of the soul. When we behold man from the standpoint of spiritual science, we find that his etheric body as well as his physical body are inter-penetrated by his astral body. We must not see only one side but also perceive the astral body beyond the physical. Added to these is the ego, the fourth member of the human being. We have the total man before us only when we see in him this fourfold being. Only with the total fourfold man before us can we do justice to the scope of the problem of nutrition. Only then can answers be given to the question of how these four members of man's organism react to the influences of various diets.

Now, you all know that men eat food derived from the vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms, and with it they sustain their bodies. Let me emphasizes again for the sake of those who are more narrowly inclined toward the care of the inner life that I am not speaking to mystics nor to anthroposophists who are striving to develop themselves spiritually in particular, but to all men. Men take their sustenance from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. We must realize that plants represent the direct antithesis of men, and the animals represent the mean between the two. The external physical expression of this contrast is to be found in the breathing process. It is a familiar fact that men inhale oxygen, assimilate it and subsequently combine it with carbon that is finally exhaled as carbon dioxide, while in plants, which absorb carbon to sustain themselves, the reverse is true. In a sense, plants also breathe but their breathing process has a completely different significance for them. Hence, we can say that in a spiritual respect plant and man stand opposite each other.

We can become even more aware of this relationship by bearing in mind the influence of light on plants. The effect of deprivation of light on plant life is well-known. The same light that maintains life in plants makes it possible for us to perceive the light-filled world of our surroundings. Light is also the element that maintains life in plants. This is physical light but it is also something more. Just as there is a spiritual counterpart to everything physical, so there is spiritual light in the physical light that rays down on us. Each time a man rejoices over the brilliance of physical light he can say to himself, “Just as when I see another person and it dawns on me that in this man there lives a spiritual counterpart, so also I can imagine that in light there lives a spiritual counterpart.” Indeed, the spiritual light that permeates the physical sunlight is of the same kind and being as the invisible light that dwells within the human astral body. A portion of the spiritual light that permeates the cosmic realm lives within the astral body. It is, however, physically invisible and in this it can be seen that it is the opposite or complement of physical light.

The invisible light lives within us and fulfills a definite task. We might say that since they are opposites, it is to physical light what negative magnetism is to positive magnetism. We perceive it in its external expression when we realize the relationships existing between physical body, etheric body and astral body, which, in turn, is permeated by the ego. It has often been explained that throughout life the etheric body fights against the deterioration of the physical body. Men as well as animals also possess an astral body and hence the inner light. Now, the function of this inner light is the opposite of that of external light. When external light shines on a plant, the plant builds up its living organism by producing proteins, carbohydrates, etc. Conversely, the task of inner light is to break down, and this process of disintegration is part of the activity of the astral body. There is indeed a continuous dissolution and destruction of the proteins and other substances that we consume so that these substances are utilized in a sense to direct counter-effects against what external light has built up. Without this activity of inner dissolution a man could not be an ego being, and it is only by virtue of his ego nature that he can have inner experiences. So, while the etheric body is concerned with the preservation of the physical body, the astral body takes care that the food a man consumes is constantly built up and again destroyed.

Without this process of disintegration within the physical body, the astral body, in which the ego is incorporated, could not live a full life within the material world. As we have seen, there is an alternating process obtaining between men and plants, that is, exhalation of carbon dioxide in men and absorption of carbon dioxide by plants; exhalation of oxygen by plants and inhalation of oxygen by men. These processes reach such extremes only between men and plants. Animals do not have individual egos as is the case with men, but they have collective group egos. Thus, the animals of a species have one common group ego that governs them from without. The significant difference between men and animals is found in the fact that the disintegration processes within animals are directed by an entity external to them, whereas the same processes in men are conducted by their individual inner egos. Moreover, a man's individual ego can gradually become master over what takes place within him.

Let us consider how the ego can gradually take a central position within the bodily functions. Let us examine what the astral body does when it dissolves the substances assimilated by men. In regard to nourishment an entirely different viewpoint must be stressed. The body permeated by the ego performs an action in disintegrating substances, and through this action something is created inwardly. The inner activity of consciousness particularly comes about through the astral body's processes of dissolution. Actions, activities are called forth by the process of destruction. First, inner warmth is produced and second, something that is less noticeable than inner body heat the physical expression of inner light. Just as the internal warmth that permeates the blood is the result of the dissolution of proteins, so the activity of the nervous system is the expression of this inner light. In regard to its inner activity the nervous system is also a result of the disintegration process not the nerves themselves but the activity of the nerves, the actions within the nerves, that which makes possible imagination and calls forth thinking. It is this activity that can be called the physical expression of the invisible light and that is brought about through the degeneration and dissolution of substances.

Basically, as has been said, inner body heat is generated by the disintegration of protein. Inner light is produced within the organism as a result of protein. Inner light is produced within the organism as a result of processes involving fats, carbohydrates, starches and glucose that are also utilized in the production of warmth and inner movement. In all this is contained the expression of the activity originating from the astral body. Men do not nourish themselves properly simply by ingesting the correct quantity of food, but rather when these inner processes can be carried out in the right way. The inner life is founded on them. Men are beings continually occupied inwardly with movement and liveliness and their inner life consists of these. If this inner life is not produced in the right way, it cannot react properly and a man then becomes ill.

The right kind of inner flexibility offers the foundation for the right solution of the nutritional problem. This statement points to the fact that all internal processes that men must execute must be carried on in the opposite direction from the processes of plants. A man must begin his processes where the plant processes leave off. A specific example will clarify what this means. When a man eats vegetarian food, it demands a great deal of his organism. Plant food does not combine much fat. The human organism, which is able to produce fats, is thus required to produce fat from something that in itself contains no fat. In other words, when a man eats vegetarian food, he must produce an activity within himself and make an inner effort to bring about the production of fats. He is spared this task when he eats ready-made animal fats. The materialists would probably say that it is advantageous for a man to store up as much fat as possible without having to make too much of an effort. Yet, speaking from the spiritual viewpoint, the unfolding of this inner activity signifies the unfolding of the actual inner life. When a man is forced to produce the forces that make it possible for him to produce fat on his own, then, through his inner flexibility, the ego and the astral body become master of the physical and etheric bodies. When a man eats fat, he resultingly is spared the task of producing fat himself. Yet, if he takes the opportunity to unfold his own inner activity through producing his own fat, he is made free and thus becomes lord over his body. Otherwise, as a spiritual being he remains a mere spectator. Everything that takes place in him in such wise that he remains a passive spectator becomes a heavy weight in him and hinders his urge to let the astral body come to full life. Thus, the astral body's inner flexibility comes up against an internal obstacle if it is denied the opportunity to produce its own fat.

The essential question now to be asked is what internal activities are aroused by what substances. Here we shall try to throw light on the relationships of vegetable and meat substances in human diets, and thereby to gain some idea of the manner in which animal and vegetable foods react in the human organism.

For a man to eat animal protein is not the same as for him to eat plant protein. Up to a certain point the inner processes of the animal are quite similar to those of the human organism, since the animal also possesses an astral body. Even though the animal astral body causes the dissolution of the synthesized substances of its physical body the human organism carries the processes a bit beyond the limits reached by that of the animals.

In reflecting upon the animals around us and by looking spiritually into their ways and characteristics, we shall, by comparing men with the multitudes of animals, find distributed among the animals the various and manifold characteristics of men. In spite of the fact that one can point out great human differences between the various peoples, one must still conclude that each individual man represents a species. Men appear to be the spiritual consolidation of all that can be observed distributed in the various animals forms. If one were to picture all the individual characteristics of the various animal species as being mutually complementary, one would arrive at the essence of what is contained in appropriate moderation in each individual man. Each individual animal one-sidedly contains within itself something of the forces that are harmonized within men, and its whole organism is constructed accordingly. Everything down to the most minute structure of substances is so organized in the animal kingdom that it is like a tableau of human characteristics spread out before one.

If a man is to find the physical expression of the characteristics of his astral body, he must strive to utilize all its forces. He must become master of his own inner processes and activate his astral body in such wise that the plant processes will be continued inwardly. In the food we consume from the animal kingdom, we not only take into ourselves the physical meat and fat of the animal but also the product of its astral body contained in these substances. When, through a vegetarian diet, we enlist the virginal forces of our astral body, we call forth our whole inner activity. In a meat diet part of this inner activity is forestalled.

We can now proceed to consider the relationships of these two types of diet from a purely spiritual basis.

If a man desires to gain an increasing mastery over the inner processes of his body, it is important that he become correspondingly active in the external world. It is important for him to unfold certain external qualities such as stamina, courage and even aggressiveness. To be able to do [so], however, it is possible that a man may not yet find himself strong enough to entrust everything to his astral body and may have to fall back upon the support of a meat diet.

It can be said that man owes everything that liberates him internally to the substances derived from plants. Faculties, however, that enable him to be actively engaged in earthly life, need not necessarily grow out of the virginal nature of his astral body. These qualities can also be derived from a meat diet. This fact that men are to become progressively freer while at the same time needing qualities that they can acquire with the help of impulses found spread out in the animal kingdom, has induced them to resort to nourishment in animal food. If the eating habits of the people of those militant nations that have striven to develop qualities enabling them to unfold their physical forces are investigated, it will generally be found that they eat meat. Naturally, there are exceptions. On the other hand, a preference for an exclusively vegetarian diet will be found to prevail among people who have developed an introverted and contemplative existence. These two aspects of the problem should be kept in mind. A person, of course, can adopt either diet as a panacea if he wishes to propagandize rather than to act out of knowledge. Nevertheless, it is not without reason that a mixed diet has become acceptable to many people. To some extent it had to happen. We must admit, however, that even though a vegetarian diet might indeed be the correct one for some people purely for reasons of health, the health of others might be ruined by it.

I am speaking here of human nature in general, of course, but men must be considered as individuals if they are to find the right path to satisfy their needs with a vegetable or meat diet. Today, an extreme diet of meat naturally brings its corresponding results. If by eating meat a person is relieved of too large a portion of his inner activities, then activities will develop inwardly that would otherwise be expressed externally. His soul will become more externally oriented, more susceptible to, and bound up with, the external world. When a person takes his nourishment from the realm of plants, however, he becomes more independent and more inclined to develop inwardly. He will become master over his whole being. The more he is inclined to vegetarianism, the more he accepts a vegetarian diet, the more he will be able also to let his inner forces predominate. Thus, the more apt he will be to develop a sense for wider horizons and he will no longer restrict himself to a narrow life. The person who is fundamentally a meat eater, however, limits himself to more narrow vistas and directs himself more rigidly toward one- sidedness.

Naturally, it is the task of men today to concern themselves with both aspects so as not to become impractical. A man also can be so completely unprejudiced as to have no judgment at all. Still, it is a fact that everything that limits men and leads them to specialization is derived from a diet of meat. A man owes to a vegetarian diet the impulses that lift him above the narrow circles of existence. An extreme diet of meat is definitely connected with a man's increasing dogmatism and his inability to see beyond the confines into which he was born. In contrast, if men would show more interest in the food coming from the realm of plants, they would discover that they are able more easily to lift themselves out of their narrow circles. The person who abandons the task of fat formation by eating meat will notice that the activity thus forestalled erects a sort of wall around his astral body. Even if one is not clairvoyant but judges these matters only with common sense, he can tell from the look in a person's eyes whether or not he produces his own fat. It can be seen in the eyes of a person whether or not his astral body is obliged to call forth the forces necessary to produce its own fat.

Now it can be seen how two opposing conditions of character are created when a person takes his nourishment from either the plants or animals. We find that we indeed penetrate into the world through our organism and must again rise above it by means of the right kind of food. A time will come when a vegetarian diet will be valued much more highly than is the case today. Then thinking will be so flexible that men will be willing to investigate such matters knowing that what they believe today to be foolishness could, viewed from another standpoint, also have its merits. They will realize then that their whole physical and spiritual horizon can be widened through a vegetarian diet, thus counteracting the rigor of specialization within them. Particularly in certain areas of science would perspectives be widened if vegetarian diets should become prevalent.

Let me mention a few more examples to demonstrate that men are indeed what they eat and drink.

Consider, for example, alcohol, which is obtained from plants. It would take too long to explain the spiritual scientific reason showing that alcohol produces physically and in an external way out of the plant, just what a man should develop physically within himself through his ego being centered within him. It is a fact inwardly perceived through spiritual science that when a person drinks alcohol, it takes over the specific activity that otherwise belongs wholly to the person's ego. A person who drinks much alcohol needs less food and his body will require less nourishment than is normally required in the process of combustion.

It calls forth forces that otherwise would be called forth by the ego's inner penetration. Thus, a person can externalize the activity of his ego by infusing his body with alcohol. Consequently, alcohol imitates and copies the activity of the ego, and you can understand why it is that people turn to it. To the extent, however, that a man replaces his inner self with such a substitute, to that extent does he become its slave. If otherwise qualified, a man will be better able to unfold the best forces of his ego when he abstains from alcohol altogether. By drinking alcohol an inner hindrance is created behind which something takes place that actually should and would be accomplished through the activity of the ego itself if the hindrance had not been produced.

Some foods have a specific effect of their own on the organism. Coffee is an example. The effect of coffee becomes manifest through its influence on the astral body. Through caffeine and the after-effects of coffee, our nervous systems automatically perform functions that we otherwise would have to produce through inner strength. It should not be claimed, however, that it is beneficial under all circumstances for a man always to act independently out of his astral body. Men are beings who are not dependent on themselves alone. Rather are they placed within the whole of life.

Coffee is also a product of the plant kingdom that externally has raised the specific plant process up a stage. Consequently, coffee can take over a certain task of man. Trained insight perceives that everything in the activity of our nerves that has to do with logical consistency and drawing conclusions is strengthened by coffee. Thus, we can let coffee take over in making logical connections and in sticking to one thought, but this, of course, is in exchange for a weakening of our specific inner forces. What I mean can be seen in the tendency of gossips at a coffee break to cling to a subject until it is completely exhausted. This is not only a joke. It also demonstrates the effects of coffee.

Tea works in a totally different and opposite way. When large quantities are drunk, thoughts become scattered and light. It might be said that the chief effect of tea is to let witty and brilliant thoughts, thoughts that have a certain individual lightness, flash forth. So we can say, coffee helps those, such as literary people, who need to connect thoughts in skilled and refined ways. This is the positive aspect of the matter. The negative aspect can be observed in coffee table gossip. Tea, which tears thoughts asunder, is the opposite. This is why tea is not without justification a popular drink of diplomats.

It might be of interest to cite as a last example a food that plays an important part in life, that is, milk. Milk is completely different from meat in that it expresses in the weakest possible form the animalistic process brought forth by the astral body of the animal. Milk is only partly an animal product and the animal or human astral forces do not participate in its production. For this reason milk is one of the most perfect foods. It is suitable for people who want to abstain completely from meat but who do not yet possess sufficient strength to work entirely out of the inner forces of the astral body. Even from a purely external standpoint it can be seen that milk contains everything a man requires for his organism. Although this applies only in a restricted sense, it has little to do with the individual characteristics of a man.

Weak as well as strong organisms can gain support from milk. If a person were to live exclusively on milk for a time, then not only would his regular forces be awakened but it would also go beyond this. He would receive from it an influx of forces giving him additional strength. A surplus of forces would be acquired that could be developed into healing forces. In order to possess a force, it must first be acquired, and in milk we see one means of developing certain forces in ourselves. Those who are moved by the earnestness of life to develop certain psychic healing forces, can train themselves to attain them. Naturally, we must remember that what is suitable for one, is not suitable for all. This is a matter for the individual. One person is able to do it, another not. A man can if he wishes build up his organism in a wise manner. He can contribute toward the unfolding of free, independent inner forces. So through spiritual science we come back to the saying of Feuerbach mentioned at the beginning, “Man is what he eats!”

Man can nourish himself in such fashion that he undermines his invisible independence. In so doing he makes himself an expression of what he eats. Yet he ought to nourish himself in such a manner that he becomes less the slave of his nutritional habits. Here spiritual science can direct him.

The wrong food can easily transform us into what we eat, but by permeating ourselves with knowledge of the spiritual life, we can strive to become free and independent. Then the food we eat will not hinder us from achieving the full potential of what we, as men, ought to be.

[ 1 ] I should like to make an observation to-day at the beginning of this lecture in connection with the end of yesterday's lecture. I have seen that some of our respected listeners have given a certain importance to the fact — and one can very well understand it — that, in the sketch which I made each planet stood in a line with the Sun, that a sort of general relationship had been drawn, but I must expressly observe to you that this has no importance, and has nothing to do with that which concerns us here. It will be considered later on. We must not get wrong ideas.

[ 2 ] First, we draw the Sun, in accordance with the Copernican system; then, that which is called Mercury to-day — but which is esoterically called Venus; then Venus — which is Mercury in the esoteric sense. Then (according to the Copernican system), comes the earth, with its moon. Then comes the orbit of Mars, of Jupiter, ending up with the orbit of Saturn.

[ 1 ] This then would be the world system of Copernicus. Now, as I have said, I should like to put the thing before you as it was taught in a school of Zarathustra. Zarathustra however was not always himself the teacher; these are elementary truths which were taught in the Zarathustra schools. [ 3 ] If we suppose that here is the constellation Gemini, we take these points which simply lie in this line (from x or Gemini, to the Sun), and join the Sun with the constellation of Gemini, whether there is such a conjunction or not does not matter. I have drawn this here only to show the orbits of the planets, not the points where they stand. These are the boundary marks for the different Hierarchies. [ 4 ] Now, if we want, for instance, to designate the realm of Saturn, we must think of the earth and not the Sun as the centre, and we must draw a sort of circle — which in reality is not circular but egg-shaped, so that the earth becomes the centre point. We must do the same with the other heavenly bodies. I beg you not to take the things of secondary importance in this drawing for the chief thing. The chief thing consists in getting into your minds the figures, which agree with the corresponding realms of power, of the Hierarchies.

[ 5 ] To-day we shall consider more in detail the nature of those members of the Hierarchies, standing immediately above man. It is good to study this and to begin for once with man. For only if we have quite clearly in our minds all that has been repeatedly said about the nature of man and of his developments, can we rise to the consideration of the nature of the members of the higher Hierarchies.

[ 6 ] We know that man, as he first appeared upon earth, and as he has developed, consists essentially of four parts. These four members are the physical, the etheric, the astral body and the ‘I.’ We will draw these schematically to-day, as we have need. First we draw the human physical body as a circle, the same with the etheric body, the astral and lastly the ‘I’ or Ego as a small circle. You know how the development of man proceeds. During the course of his earthly evolution man begins to work on his astral body, with his Ego.

Generally speaking we may say: as much of his astral body as man has developed by the help of his ‘I’, so that this refashioned part of his astral body is completely ruled by the ‘I’, so much of it is called Manas or Spirit self, this — as has been often said — must not be looked upon as something new that has entered man, but simply as a transformed product of the astral body. It must be carefully noted that all that has just been said applies to man only. It is important that we should not generalise, but make it clear to ourselves that the Beings of the universe differ very much from each other. [ 7 ] Let us then draw the fifth part of man the transformed astral body, that is to say Manas, as a separate circle: in reality it ought to have been drawn inside the astral body. In the same way we must draw above it the transformed etheric body. The transformed part of the etheric body, we designate Budhi or life spirit: when the whole of it is transformed it becomes completely Budhi. In the same way the physical body is transformed into Atma, when we consider man in his perfected state, which he will attain in the course of his development through Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. Thus when man will have reached his highest perfection in the Vulcan condition, we might make a schematic drawing of him in the following way: we could say that we have here his Atma, Budhi, Manas, the ‘I’ or Ego, the astral body, the etheric and the physical body. And we would see in Diagram I that the most characteristic thing we have to observe in man is, that with his seven principles he is an entire being, that these seven principles are all within each other. This is the most important thing.

[ 8 ] When we now turn to the members of the next Hierarchy, the Angels, the case is different. This scheme applies to man, but not to the angels.

Here, in Diagram II, we must say that the Angel has developed physical body (1) etheric (2) and astral body (3). But now the Ego (4) must be drawn as separated from these, then come Manas (5) Budhi (6) and Atma (7). If you want to be clear about the nature of an Angel you must think that his higher parts to which he seeks to develop himself float above that part of him which is in the physical world; at first he has really only Manas completely developed, the other two parts he will develop later. If one wanted therefore to study the nature of an Angel one would have to say that the Angel has not an Ego which dwells on earth as the man has. Nor is he developing his Manas present stage of evolution upon earth. Therefore, that which there is of him upon earth, does not look as if it belonged to a spiritual Being. When you meet a man and you look at him, you see he has his principles in him, therefore all his parts are organised within him. If you want to look for an Angel, you must keep in mind that his physical part is something like a mirrored reflection of his spiritual principles, which are to be found only in the spiritual world. In flowing and running water, in mists dissolving into water, also in the winds and the lightning flashing through the air, in all these, you have to look for the physical body of Angelic beings. The difficulty for man consists in his fixed idea that a physical body must necessarily have a definite outline. It is difficult for a man to say to himself: I see fog rising, I see a stream of water dissolving into spray, I stand in the blowing wind, I see lightning dart from the clouds, and I know that all these are revelations of Angels; behind this physical body, which is by no means so limited as the human one I have to recognise the spirit. [ 9 ] Man has to develop all his principles enclosed within him; because of this he cannot realise that a physical body can be so liquid and evanescent that it does not even have to be enclosed or outlined with precision. You must realise that eighty Angels may be associated with and have the most solid part of their physical body in some one sheet of water. The physical body of an Angel need not be understood as having any boundary; one piece of water may belong to it here, and far away another piece. In short, all that surrounds us as the water, fire, and air of the earth, we have to imagine as containing the bodies of the Hierarchy which stands next above man. One has to look clairvoyantly into the astral world in order to perceive the Angel's Ego and his Manas that gazes down on us from the higher world.

The realm of the solar system which we must investigate when we seek the Angels, is that whose limits are marked by the Moon. With the Angels, investigation is still comparatively easy, for their condition is such, that if for instance, we have an Angel's physical body in a piece of water or the like, and we consider that water or that wind clairvoyantly, we find within it an etheric or astral body. Hence, in the drawing these three are represented together. Of course, we must not only see the material image in the rushing wind, the flowing or broken water, which common perception sees; the etheric and astral parts of the Angels live in the most varied way in water, air, and fire. But if you want to look for the spiritual being, the soul of the Angel, you must seek it in the astral realm, you must seek it clairvoyantly.

[ 10 ] The next stage, that of the Archangels, is again different. That which we have drawn here as the astral body is, in the case of the Archangels, not at all united with the etheric and physical bodies. The lowest part of them which we can find, we must draw like this: physical body, etheric body (Diagram III – 1,2); this they have separated off, and all the higher principles are above in the higher worlds, so that we can only have a complete image of the Archangel when we look for it in two places, and realise, that it is not the same as with man who unites all in one being. The spiritual part is above, and at the same time it mirrors itself below. A physical and etheric body can only unite when the physical consists of air or fire. For instance you could not perceive the physical bodies of these Archangels rushing along in the water; you could recognise them only in air and in fire, and you would have to find clairvoyantly, and only in the spiritual world, the spiritual counter-part of that rushing wind and that fire. This is joined neither to his physical, nor to his etheric body.

[ 11 ] And then we come to those Beings whom we designate as Archai, Primeval Beginnings or Spirits of Personality. Here below, we can draw only the physical body (Diagram IV); all the rest is above in the spiritual world. Such a physical Body can live only in fire; only in flames of fire can you recognise the physical body of the Archai. Whenever you see the flashing fire of the lightning you may say to yourselves: in it is contained something of the Archai; but in the spiritual world above I shall find the spiritual counter-part which, in this case is separated from its physical body.

It is specially in the Archai or Spirits or Personality that the clairvoyant can accomplish this with comparative ease.

These Spirits of Personality have a realm which reaches up to the astronomical Venus (Mercury in the occult sense of the Mysteries). Let us imagine that someone has progressed so far that he is able to observe what is evolving up there on Venus. (Occult Mercury). There he can recognise these highly evolved Beings, the Spirits of Personality. When he directs his clairvoyant vision to Venus so as there to observe the assembly of the spirits of Personality, and then sees the lightning flash through the clouds, he sees in that flash of lightning the reflection of the Spirits of Personality, for in it they have their physical body.

[ 12 ] Now we come to yet higher spiritual Beings, to those who reach up to the Sun. These Powers, these Exusiai, or Spirits of Form interest us less at the present time; only it must be kept in view that the beings of Venus and of Mercury are their organs of execution, the beings of Venus who have their physical body in fire, and those of Mercury who have it in air. Translate this so that you say: the Beings who live in the Sun make use of the spirits of Venus (occult Mercury) in the fire flames, and the spirits of Mercury (occult Venus) in the rushing wind as their executive. ‘And God makes flames of fire into his servants and winds into his messengers.’ Sayings such as these found in ancient religious documents are taken absolutely from spiritual facts, and correspond with what the clairvoyant is able to observe.

[ 13 ] Thus we see that the three hierarchies who stand next above us are closely attached to our own existence. Man is the being he is, because he has partaken of solidity from the earth. This separates him from other Beings, it makes him into a self-contained being composed of separate organs. On the Moon, man was still a being like others; there he passed through transformations, just as the masses of water do which have a body that is ever in a state of transformation. On the earth man was for the first time imprisoned, as it were, within his skin; and became a self-contained being, so that it is possible to say, man is composed of a physical, etheric, astral body and an Ego. This isolation really originated not so very long ago. If we return to the first epoch of old Atlantean times, we find a man who did not yet feel his Ego completely within him, who was still waiting to receive his Ego. And if we go still further back in earthly evolution we find that what there is of man down on earth consists as yet only of a physical, etheric and astral body. And if we go back to Lemurian times, we find a man who in his way has no more of a physical, etheric and astral body down here upon earth than the Angels have. From this point of time, with the growth of the Ego the union begins, and continues through post-Atlantean times. In Lemurian times men walked the earth who had only a physical, and etheric and an astral body. But these were not men who could think, in the sense of to-day, or who could develop humanly — in the sense of to-day.

[ 14 ] And now something very remarkable happened upon earth. Those men of Lemuria who had only physical, etheric and astral bodies were helpless, they could not help themselves, they did not know what they had to do on earth. From heavenly regions the inhabitants of astronomical Venus first came down to the earth, to these helpless beings; because they had a certain relationship, to the physical body, they were enabled to send their light through, and ensoul the physical body of the first inhabitants of the earth. Thus, we find some among the Lemurians, who passed among the mass of humanity in quite a remarkable way; they had a different physical body to the others. A man, so particularly graced, had not an ordinary physical body, but a body ensouled by a spirit of Venus, a Spirit of Personality. Because that man of ancient Lemuria moved about with a spirit of Venus within his physical body, he had a powerful influence on all his surroundings. Such Lemurians did not appear different from their companions externally; but because a Spirit of Personality was translated into their bodies, these selected individuals acted suggestively, in the highest sense of the word, upon their surroundings. To-day, there is nothing to compare to the obedience, the reverence and awe that was felt for them. All the attempts at colonisation which were undertaken, to people the different regions of the earth, were led by such Beings, into whom a Spirit of Personality had descended. No speech was needed — for there was no speech then — no signs were needed, but the fact alone that such a Spirit of Personality was there, sufficed. And when it was held necessary that large masses of people should be led from one place to another, those masses simply followed without thinking about it. Thought did not exist, it only developed later.

[ 15 ] Thus the Spirits of Personality came down to earth, as Spirits of Venus, in ancient Lemurian times. And we can say, that the distinctive features of these messengers from Venus — such as the human countenances of that time could wear — signified something quite new with regard to the whole Universe. If we take their cosmic significance, it reaches as far as Venus, and their actions had a meaning, an influence on the whole concatinations of the Solar System. They could lead the people from one place to another, for they knew the connections that can only be known by those, who are acquainted with the surroundings of the earth, and not only with the Earth itself.

[ 16 ] The development of humanity progressed further. The necessity arose that Archangels, spirits of astronomical Mercury, should act upon the human development. These were now obliged to ensoul and give life to that which dwelt below upon earth. This was principally in Atlantean times. At that time the Archangels, or Spirits of Mercury descended upon earth, and inspired the physical and etheric bodies of the men of that period. So in Atlantis there were also men who were not outwardly very different from the others, but whose physical and etheric bodies were ensouled by an archangel. And if you remember what was said yesterday, that the Archangels have the task of directing whole nations, you will understand that a man who had an Archangel within him could actually give to the whole Atlantean race those laws which he received directly from heaven. [ 17 ] The great leaders of old Lemurian times, when it was still necessary to act much more generally, were ensouled by Spirits from Venus. Those who, in Atlantean times had to direct smaller masses of people, were ensouled by Archangels. Those who are called the priest-kings of Atlantis, were in truth — Maya. They were not at all what they outwardly appeared to be. An Archangel lived in their physical and etheric bodies, he was the real active agent..

If we go back to Atlantean times, we can seek out the secret stations of these leaders of mankind. From these hidden centres they worked, there they investigated the mysteries of Space One might ascribe the name of ‘Oracle’ to what was investigated, and commanded from those ancient Atlantean places of the Mysteries, even though this word originated in later times. The name ‘Place of the Oracles’ is quite suitable to these centres of instruction, and government. From them the great teachers worked, so that others might there be trained to become priests and servants of men.

[ 18 ] It is important that one should know that there were men in ancient Atlantis who in reality were Archangels, bearing an Archangel incarnated within their physical and etheric bodies. If such a man had been seen by someone endowed with clairvoyance, the latter would in fact have seen a physical man and behind him an enormous figure, rising high above him, and losing itself in indefinite regions — the figure of the inspiring Archangel. Such a personality was of a two-fold nature, as if behind the physical man, growing out of indefinite Space, was the inspiring Archangel. When such men died, the physical body was destroyed according to the laws of Atlantis. That physical body, which had been naturally ensouled by the Archangel, dissolved, but the etheric body did not dissolve. There is a spiritual economy which demands exceptions to the general truths expounded by Anthroposophy. We say — and in general it is correct — that when a man dies, he lays aside his physical body and after a certain time also his etheric body, which dissolves with the exception of an extract. But this is only generally the case. There is an enormous difference between an etheric body like that of the Initiates of the Atlantean Oracles, which was permeated by an Archangel, and an ordinary etheric body. Such a precious etheric body is not lost, but is preserved in the spiritual world. In the first place, the great leader of the Atlantean Oracles preserved the seven most important etheric bodies of the seven great initiators of these Oracles. These ether bodies were originally built up through being inhabited by Archangels, who, at their death, naturally returned to the higher worlds. Such things are certainly not preserved in boxes, but according to spiritual laws. The Atlantean Initiate of the Sun-Oracle is no other than Manu, who has been often mentioned, and who guided the remnant of the Atlantean nation over to Asia to establish the new post-Atlantean civilisation. He took his little handful of people with him and led them over to Asia. He trained the people through generations, and when the seven most adaptable ones had been bred and educated sufficiently, he wove into their individual etheric bodies the substance of the seven preserved etheric bodies, which had been woven by Archangels in ancient Atlantis. Those seven, who were sent down by the great Leader, to lay the foundation of the first Post-Atlantean civilisation, were the seven holy Rishis of ancient India; they bore within their etheric garment, the etheric bodies of the great Atlantean Leaders, who had themselves acquired these bodies through the Archangels. Thus the past, the present, and the future acted in harmony. Those seven men who are called the holy Rishis would have appeared to you as simple people, for with their astral body and their Ego, they had not reached the height of their etheric bodies.

All that they were capable of was interwoven with their etheric bodies. There were certain hours during which inspiration acted within their etheric bodies, and then they spoke of things which they themselves could never have known. Then from their lips flowed that which had been inspired into their etheric bodies. Thus they were simple, plain people when they were left to their own understanding; but in their hours of inspiration, when the etheric body was active, they spoke of the greatest mysteries of our solar system and of the whole universe.

[ 19 ] In the post-Atlantean times men had not yet advanced so far that they could do without help from above, inspiration was still necessary; and a sort of ensouling still took place from above. We have seen how such ensouling occurred in Lemurian times, because a spirit of Personality ensouled the physical. body; in the Atlantean times the physical and the etheric bodies were ensouled by Archangels, and now the great leaders of the post-Atlantean times were ensouled through an Angel descending into their physical, etheric and astral bodies. The great leaders of humanity in the post-Atlantean times did not possess merely a physical, etheric and astral body, but an Angel also lived within them. Therefore, these great leaders could look back into their former incarnations. The ordinary man cannot do so as yet, because he has not yet developed. his Manas; he must himself first become an Angel. These leaders, who were born out of the ordinary inhabitants, carried an Angelic Being within their physical, etheric and astral bodies, who ensouled and, interpenetrated them. This is again Maya, again we have Beings who are something different from what they appear to be on earth. The great leaders of humanity of grey antiquity were quite different from what they outwardly seemed to be. They were personalities in whom an Angel dwelt and gave what they needed, so that they might become Teachers and Leaders of men. The great founders of religions were men possessed by Angels. Angels spoke through them. [ 20 ] The affairs of the world have to be described indeed as entirely regular, but the processes of development always slide one within the other, they overlap. That which we describe as exhibiting complete regularity does not work itself out with such regularity. It is certainly true that, as a general principle, Spirits of Personality did speak through human entities in the Lemurian times, Archangels in the Atlantean, and Angels in the post-Atlantean times. But such beings arose, also even in the post Atlantean times, who were penetrated by a Spirit of Personality down to their physical body, who, therefore, were in the same position, although they lived in the post Atlantean times, as were those beings through whom in Lemuria the Spirits of Personality spoke. Thus it was possible to have men also in the post-Atlantean times, who bore externally all the characteristics of their nation, but who, because humanity still needed such great leaders, carried within them a Spirit of Personality — and who were the external incarnation of such a Spirit. Then there were also men in the post Atlantean times who had an Archangel, a Spirit of Mercury, within them, who ensouled their physical and etheric bodies. And lastly, a third category of men was ensouled, inspired in their physical, etheric and astral bodies by an Angel Being, one through whom an Angel spoke. [ 21 ] In the spirit of the Eastern Teaching such personalities received particular names. Thus a personality who outwardly resembles a man of our post-Atlantean times, but who really is the bearer of a Spirit of Personality, who is ensouled by that Spirit down to his physical body, is called Dhyani-Buddha in the Eastern Teaching. Dhyani-Buddha is a generic name for human individualities in whom the Spirits of Personality are active, even as far as their physical body.

Those personalities who are ensouled down to their etheric body, who were bearers of Archangels in the post-Atlantean times, are called Bodhi-Sattva And those who are the bearers of an Angel, who are, therefore, ensouled in their physical, etheric and astral bodies, are called human Buddhas

Thus we have three degrees: that of the Dhyani-Buddha, the Bodhi-Sattva and the human Buddha. This is the true teaching of the Buddhas, of the classes and categories of Buddhas, which we have to recognise in connexion with the whole manner and means by which the Hierarchies fulfil their ends. [ 22 ] This is the marvel which meets us, when we look back to earlier undeveloped men, that among these men we find those, through whom the Hierarchies speak The great Hierarchies speak out of the Cosmos downwards into the Planets, and only by degrees do these Spirits of the higher Hierarchies, who were active before the appearance of our earth, emancipate the planetary men who live down here, when they have reached the necessary degree of ripeness. Here we gaze into unfathomable depths of wisdom. And what is of extraordinary importance is, that we understand this wisdom exactly as it was taught in all the ages, when primeval wisdom was taught to men.

[ 23 ] Thus, when you hear of the Buddhas, for they do not speak of the one Buddha only in the Eastern teaching, but of many, among whom there are naturally different grades of perfection — give attention to the fact: a Buddha walks on earth, but behind the Buddha, was the Bodhi-Sattva and even the Dhyani-Buddha.

Matters, however, might be so, that the Dhyani-Buddha or the Bodhi-Sattva did not reach so far as to ensoul the physical body, but that the Bodhi-Sattva descended only as far as to be able to ensoul the etheric body, so that you can imagine a Being who does not reach so far as to ensoul and inspire the mans physical body, but only the etheric body. It can, however, happen when such a Bodhi-Sattva is not physically visible (for when he appears only in an etheric body he is not physically visible, and there were such Bodhi-Sattva who were physically invisible) that he can, as a higher Being, inspire quite exceptionally the human Buddha. So that we have the human Buddha, who is already inspired by an Angelic Being, being further inspired in his etheric body by an Archangel Being. [ 24 ] It is essential that we should look into this wonderful complexity of the human nature. Many Individualities to whom we look back into former times can only be understood, when we accept them as the meeting point of different higher Beings, who proclaim and express themselves through the man. For, in truth, many periods do not possess a sufficient number of great men to be inspired by the Spirits who have to be active. Thus sometimes one single personality has to be ensouled by different individualities of the higher Hierarchies. And sometimes it is not only the inhabitants of Mercury who speak with us, when we have a certain personality standing before us, but the inhabitants of Venus also.

Such ideas lead us to the understanding of human evolution, so that we may recognise the true nature of those personalities who, when met as physical men, represent merely Maya. [ 25 ] To-morrow we shall begin by trying to comprehend the origin of each individual planet, which up to now we have considered only as boundary marks, and then we shall gain an idea of them as the dwelling-places of the corresponding spiritual Beings.²

• 2. EDITORIAL NOTES —
  A Spirit of Personality enters the Physical and the entity is called a Dyani-Buddha in Post-Atlantis.
  An Archangel enters the Physical and Etheric and the entity is called a Bodhi-Sattva in Post-Atlantis.
  An Angel enters the Physical, Etheric and Astral and the entity is called a human Buddha in Post-Atlantis
  But there are different degrees of each, and it is possible for a being to be inspired by all three Spiritual Beings. The student should avoid making hard and fast rules. There is much overlapping and also some departure from diagrams.

In the lecture yesterday I drew your attention to the fact that very diverse Powers intervene in the course of human evolution. For this reason, and also because one mighty stream of influence intersects another, certain periods of ascent and equally of decline occur in definite spheres of civilisation. While older civilisations are still waning, while they are so to say passing over into external forms, the creative impulses which are to inaugurate later civilisations, to inspire them and bring them to birth, are being slowly and gradually prepared. So that in a general way the course of man's cultural life may be described briefly as follows.—We find cultural life rising from unfathomed depths and ascending to certain heights; then it ebbs, and indeed more slowly than it ascended. The fruits of a particular civilisation-epoch live an for a long time, penetrate into later streams and into folk-cultures of the most diverse character and lose themselves like a river which instead of flowing into the sea trickles away over lowlands. But while it is trickling away the new civilisations—which were still imperceptible during the decline of the old—are in preparation, in order eventually to begin their development and ascent, and to contribute in the same or a similar way to the progress of humanity. If we want to think of an eminently characteristic example of progress in culture we can surmise that it must be one in which the principle of the universal-human, the weaving of the ego in the ego, appeared in the most striking form. This, as we have shown, was the case in the culture of the ancient Greeks. We have there a clear illustration of a civilisation running its own characteristic course; for the achievements of the three preceding civilisation-epochs and of the epoch following that of Greece are modified in a quite different way by forces outside man. Hence what lies in the human being himself, whereby he makes his mark upon the world, everything which, proceeding from super-sensible powers, is able to express itself in him in the most characteristically human way—this is exemplified in the middle, the Fourth civilisation-epoch.

But in regard to this Greek civilisation, the following must also be said. It was preceded by the Third epoch, which then ebbed away, and during this period of decline Greek culture was being prepared. During the decline of the Babylonian culture, which streamed from the East towards the West, there was enshrined in the little peninsula of Southern Europe we know as Greece the seed of what was to sink into humanity as the impulse of a new life. True though it is that this Greek life brought pre-eminently to expression the essentially human element, that which man can find entirely within himself, it must not be thought that such things need no preparation. What we call the essentially human element—that, too, had first to be taught to men in the Mysteries by super-sensible Powers, just as now the still higher freedom which must be prepared for the Sixth civilisation-epoch is sustained and taught in super-sensible worlds by the Beings who lead and guide human evolution.

We must therefore realise that when Greek culture appears to outer observation. as if everything sprang from the essentially human element, it already has behind it a period when it was, so to speak, under the influence of the teachings of higher spiritual Beings. It was through these higher spiritual Beings that Greek culture was able to rise to the heights it achieved in bringing the essentially human element to expression. For this reason Greek culture too, when we trace it backwards, is lost sight of in the darkness of those prehistoric ages when, as its basis, there was cultivated in the Mystery-sanctuaries the wisdom which then, like a heritage, was clothed in majestic poetic form by Homer, by Aeschylus. And so, in face of the grandeur of there unparalleled figures, we must conceive that these men did indeed elaborate something that was entirely the product of their own souls, of the weaving of the ego in the ego, but that it had first been laid by higher Beings into these souls in the temple-sanctuaries. That is why the poetry of Homer and of Aeschylus seems so infinitely profound, so infinitely great. The poems of Aeschylus should not on any account, however, be judged from the translation by Wilamowitz, for it must be realised that the full greatness of what lived in Aeschylus cannot be conveyed in modern language, and that there could really be no worse approach to an understanding of his works than that tendered by one of the most recent translators.

If, therefore, we study Greek culture against the deep background of the Mysteries, we can begin to divine its real nature. And because the secrets of the life in super-sensible worlds were conveyed in a certain human form to the artists of Greece, they were able in their sculptures to embody in marble or in bronze, what had originally been hidden in the secrecy of the Mysteries. Even what confronts us in Greek philosophy clearly shows that its highest achievements were in truth ancient Mystery-wisdom translated into terms of intellect and reason. There is a symbolic indication of this when we are told that Heraclitus offered up his work, On Nature, as a sacrificial act in the temple of Diana at Ephesus. This means that he regarded what the weaving of the ego in the ego enabled him to say as an offering to the spiritual Powers of the preceding epoch with whom he knew himself to be connected. This is an attitude which also sheds light an the profound utterance of Plato, who was able to impart a philosophy of such depth to the Greeks and yet found himself compelled to affirm that all the philosophy of his time was as nothing compared with the ancient wisdom received by the forefathers from the spiritual worlds themselves.³⁶ In Aristotle everything appears as though in forms of logic—indeed, here one must say that the ancient wisdom has become abstraction, living worlds have been reduced to concepts. But in spite of this—because Aristotle stands at the terminal point of the ancient stream—something of the old wisdom still breathes through his works.³⁷ In his concepts, in his ideas, however abstract, an echo can still be heard of the harmonies which resounded from the temple-sanctuaries and were in truth the inspiration not only of Greek wisdom but also of Greek art, of the whole folk-character. For when such a culture first arises, it takes hold not only of knowledge, not only of art, but of the whole man, with the result that the whole man is an impress of the wisdom and spirituality living within him. If we picture Greek civilisation rising up from unknown depths even during the decline of Babylonian culture, then, in the age of the Persian Wars we can clearly perceive the effects of what the Greek character had received from the old temple-wisdom. For in these Persian Wars we see how the heroes of Greece, aflame with enthusiasm for the heritage received from their forefathers, fling themselves against the stream which, as an ebbing stream from the East, is surging towards them. The significance of their violent resistance, when the treasures of the temple-wisdom, when the teachers of the ancient Greek Mysteries themselves were fighting in the souls of the Greek heroes in the battles against the Persians, against the waning culture of the East—the significance of all this can be grasped by the human soul if the question is asked: What must have become of Southern Europe, indeed of the whole of later Europe, if the onset of the massive hordes from the East had not been beaten back at that time by the little Greek people? What the Greeks then achieved contained the seed of all later developments in European civilisation up to our own times.

And even the outcome in the East of what Alexander subsequently carried back to it from the West—albeit in a way that from a certain point of view is not justifiable—even that could develop only after what was destined to decline in respect also of its physical power had first been thrust back by the burning enthusiasm in the souls of the Greeks for the temple-treasures. If we grasp this we shall see how not only the teaching concerning Fire given by Heraclitus, not only the all-embracing ideas of Anaxagoras and of Thales, work on, but also the actual teachings of the guardians of the temple-wisdom in prehistoric Greek civilisation. We shall feel all this as a legacy of spiritual Powers who imbued Greek culture with what it was destined to receive. We shall perceive it in the souls of the Greek heroes who defied the Persians in the various battles. This is how we must learn to feel history, for what is offered us in the ordinary way is, at its best, only an empty abstract of ideas. What works over from earlier into later times can be observed only when we go back to what was imparted to the souls of men through a period lasting for thousands of years, taking definite forms in a certain epoch.

Why was it that in this upsurge of the old temple-treasures something so great could be imparted to the Greeks The secret lay in the universality, the comprehensiveness, of these temple treasures, and in their aloofness from anything of lesser account. It was something that was given as a primal source, something that could engross the whole man, bringing with it, so to say, a direct forte of guidance.

And here we come to the essential characteristic of a culture which is rising towards its peak. During this period, everything that is an active stimulus in man—beauty, virtue, usefulness, purposiveness, what he wishes to achieve and realise in life—all this is seen as proceeding directly from wisdom, from the spiritual. Wisdom embraces virtue, beauty and everything else as well. When man is permeated by, inspired by, the temple-wisdom, the rest follows of itself. That is the feeling which prevails during these times of ascent. But the moment the questions, the perceptions, fall asunder—the moment when, for example, the question of the good or the beautiful becomes independent of the question of its divine origin—the period of decline begins. Therefore we may be sure that we are living in a period of decline when it is emphasised that, independently of a spiritual origin, this or that must be especially cultivated, this or that must be the main consideration. When man lacks the confidence that the spiritual can bring forth of itself everything that human life requires, then the streams of culture, which an the arc of ascent form a unity, fall apart into separate streams. We sec this where interests outside wisdom, outside the spiritual impetus, begin to infiltrate Greek life; we see it in the political life, we see it, too, in that part of Greek life which especially interests us, in the spiritual life immediately preceding Aristotle. Here, side by side with the question: What is the true?—which embraces the question: What is good and practically effective?—the latter question begins to be an independent one. Men ask: How should knowledge be constituted in order that one can attain a practical goal in life? And so in the period of decline we see the stream of Stoicism arising. With Plato and Aristotle the good was directly contained in the wise; impulses of the good could proceed only from the wise. The Stoics ask: What must man do in order to become wiser in the practice of living, in order to live to some purpose? Goals of practical life insert themselves into what was formerly the all prevailing impetus of truth.

With Epicureanism comes an element that may be described as follows.—Men ask: How must I prepare myself intellectually in order that this life shall run its course with the greatest possible happiness and inner peace? To this question, Thales, Plato and even Aristotle would have answered: Search after the truth and truth will give you the supreme happiness, the germinating seed of love.—But now men separate the one question from the question of truth, and a stream of decline Sets in. Stoicism and Epicureanism are a stream of decline, the invariable consequence being that men begin to question truth itself and truth loses its power. Hence, simultaneously with Stoicism and Epicureanism in the period of decline, Scepticism arises—doubt in regard to truth. And when Scepticism and doubt, Stoicism and Epicureanism, have exercised their influence for a time, then man, still striving after truth, feels cast out of the World-Soul and thrown back upon his own soul. Then he looks around him, saying: This is not an age when Impulses flow into humanity from the on working stream of the spiritual Powers themselves. He is thrown back upon his own inner life, his own subjective being. In the further course of Greek life, this comes to expression in Neo-Platonism, a philosophy which is no longer concerned with external life, but looks within and strives upwards to truth through the mystical ascent of the individual. One stream of the cultural life is mounting, another declining, stage by stage. And what has developed during the ascent peters slowly and gradually away, until with the approach of the year 1250 there begins for humanity an inspiration not easy to observe but no less great for all that, which I characterised yesterday in a certain way. This again has been petering away since the 16th century. For since then all the specialised questions have again arisen by the side of those concerning truth itself; again an attitude is taken which wants to separate the question of the good and of the outwardly useful from the one supreme question of truth. And whereas those leading personalities in whom the impulses of the year 1250 were working contemplated all human currents in their relation to truth, we now see coming into prominence the fundamental separation of the questions of practical life from those that are intrinsically concerned with truth. At the portal leading to the new period of decline, the period which so clearly signifies the downward surge in spiritual life—at this portal stands Kant. In his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he says expressly that he had to set limits to the striving after truth in order to make room for what practical religion requires.³⁸ Hence the strict separation of Practical Reason from Theoretical Reason: in Practical Reason, the postulate of God, Freedom and Immortality is based entirely on the element of the good; in Theoretical Reason, any possibility of knowledge penetrating into any spiritual world is demolished. That is how things are, when viewed in the setting of world-history. And we may be sure that the striving for wisdom in our age will follow in the wake of Kant. When our own spiritual Movement points to the ways in which the capacity for knowledge can be so extended and enhanced as to enable it to penetrate into the super-sensible, we shall for a long, long time continue to hear from all sides: “Yes, but Kant says! ...” The historical evolution of mankind takes its course in antitheses of this kind. In what arises instinctively, like a dim inkling, we can see that underneath what is pure maya but accepted as the truth, underneath the stream of maya, human instincts do hit upon things which to a great extent are right. For it is extraordinarily interesting that in certain inklings arising out of folk-instincts for practical life, we can perceive the descending course of human evolution until the Greco-Latin epoch and the re-ascent now demanded of us.

What picture, then, must have come before the minds of men who had a feeling for such things When they looked back to the great figures of history in pre-Christian times—or, we had better say, pre-Grecian times—how must they have thought of all those whom we described as the instruments of Beings of the higher Hierarchies They must have said to themselves—and even the Greeks still did so: This has come to us through men who were played into by superhuman, divine forces.—And in all the ages of antiquity we find that the leading personalities, down to the figures of the Hermes, and even Plato, were regarded as “sons of the gods”; that is to say, when men looked back to olden times, heightening their vision more and more, they saw the divine behind there personalities who appeared in history; and they regarded the beings who appeared as Plato and in the Hermes as having come down, as having been born from, the gods. That is how they rightly saw it—the sons of the gods having united with the daughters of men, in order to bring down the spiritual to the physical plane. In those ancient times men beheld sons of the gods—divine men, that is to say, beings whose nature was united with the divine. On the other hand, when the Greeks came to feel: Now we can speak of the weaving of the ego in the ego, of what lies within the human personality itself—then they spoke of their supreme leaders as the Seven Sages, thus indicating that the nature of those who once were sons of the gods had now become purely and essentially human.

What was bound to come about in the instincts of the peoples in post-Grecian times? It was now a matter of indicating what man elaborates on the physical plane, and how he carries the full fruit of this into the spiritual world. Thus, while the feeling in much earlier times was that the spiritual must be recognised as taking precedence of the physical man and the physical man regarded as a shadow-image, and while during the Greek epoch there were the sages in whom the ego works in the ego, in the epoch after Greece attention was turned to personalities who live on the physical plane and rise to the spiritual through what is achieved in the physical world. This concept developed out of a certain true instinct of knowledge. Just as the pre-Grecian age had sons of the gods and the Greeks had sages, the peoples of the post-Grecian age have saints—human beings who lift themselves into the spiritual life through what they carry into effect on the physical plane. Something is alive there in the folk-instinct, enabling us to glimpse how behind maya itself there is a factor which impels humanity forward.

When we recognise this, the impulses at work in the epochs of time throw light upon the individual human soul, and we understand how the group-karma is inevitably modified by the fact that men are at the same time instruments of the process of historical evolution. We are then able to grasp what the Akasha Chronicle reveals—for example, that in Novalis we have to see something that goes back to Elijah of old. This is an extraordinarily interesting sequence of incarnations.³⁹ In Elijah the element of prophecy comes strongly to the fore, for it was the mission of the Hebrews to prepare that which was to come in later time. And they prepared it during the period of transition from the Patriarchs to the Prophets, via the figure of Moses. Whereas in Abraham we see how the Hebrew still feels the working of the God within him, in his very blood,⁴¹ in Elijah we see the transition to the ascent into the spiritual worlds. Everything is prepared by degrees. In Elijah there lives an individuality already inspired by what is to come in the future. And then we see how this individuality was to be an instrument for preparing understanding of the Christ Impulse. The individuality of Elijah is reborn in John the Baptist.⁴⁰ John the Baptist is the instrument of a higher Being. In John the Baptist there lives an individuality who uses him as an instrument, but in order to enable him to serve as such an instrument, the lofty individuality of Elijah was necessary.

Then, later on, we see how this individuality is well fitted to pour impulses working towards the future into forms that were made possible only by the influence of the Fourth Post-Atlantean culture-epoch. However strange it may seem to us, this individuality appears again in Raphael, who unites in his paintings what is to work in all ages of time as the Christian impulse, with the wonderful forms of Greek culture. And here we can realise how the individual karma of this entelechy is related to the outer incarnation. It is required of the outer incarnation that the power of an age shall be able to come to expression in Raphael; for this power the Elijah-John individuality is the suitable bearer. But the epoch is only able to produce a physical body bound to be shattered under such a power; hence Raphael's early death.

This individuality had then to give effect to the other side of his being in an age when the single streams were dividing once more; he appears again as Novalis. We see how there actually lives in Novalis, in a particular form, all that is now being given us through Spiritual Science. For outside Spiritual Science nobody has spoken so aptly about the relation of the astral body to the etheric and physical bodies, about the waking state and sleep, as Novalis, the reincarnated Raphael.⁴² These are things which show us how individualities are the instruments of the onflowing stream of man's evolution. And when we observe the course of human development, when we perceive this enigmatic alternation in the happenings of history, we can dimly glimpse the working of deep spiritual Powers. The earlier passes over into the later in strange and remarkable ways.

To some of you I have already said⁴³ that a momentous vista of history is revealed by the transition from Michelangelo to Galileo. (Mark well, I am not speaking of a reincarnation here; it is a matter of historical development.) A very intelligent man once drew attention to the striking fact that the human spirit has woven into the wonderful architecture of the Church of St. Peter in Rome what he calls the science of mechanics. The majestic forms of this building embody the principles of mechanics that were within the grasp of the human intellect, transposed into beauty and grandeur. They are the thoughts of Michelangelo! The impression made by the sight of the Church of St. Peter upon men expresses itself in many different ways, and perhaps everyone has felt something of what Natter, the Viennese sculptor,⁴⁴ experienced, or what was experienced in his company. He was driving with a friend towards St. Peter's. It was not yet in sight, but then, suddenly, the friend heard Natter exclaim, springing from his seat and as though beside himself: “I am frightened!”At that moment he had caught sight of St. Peter's ... afterwards he wanted to obliterate the incident from his memory. Everyone may experience something of the kind at the sight of such majesty And now, in a professorial oration, a very clever man, Professor Müllner, has made the point that Galileo, the great mechanistic thinker, taught humanity in terms of the intellect what Michelangelo had built into spatial forms in the Church of St. Peter. So that what stands there in the Church of St. Peter like crystallised mechanics, principles of mechanics grasped by the human mind, confronts us once again, but now transposed into intellectuality, in the thoughts of Galileo. But it is strange that in this oration the speaker should have called attention to the fast that Galileo was born on the day Michelangelo died (18th February, 1564). Hence there is an indication that the intellectual element, the thoughts coined by Galileo in the intellectual forms of mechanics, arise in a personality whose birth occurs on the same day as the death of the one who had given them expression in space. The question therefore inevitably arises in our minds: Who, in reality, built into the Church of St. Peter, through Michelangelo, the principles of mechanics only subsequently acquired by humanity through Galileo?

My dear friends, if the aphoristic and isolated thoughts that have been presented in connection with the historical development of humanity unite in your hearts to produce a feeling of how the spiritual Powers themselves work in history through their instruments, you will have assimilated there lectures in the right way. And then it could be said that the feeling which arises in our hearts from the study of occult history is the right feeling for the way in which development and progress occur in the stream of time. To-day, at this minor turning-point of time, it may be fitting to direct our meditation to this feeling of the progress of men and of gods in the flow of history. If in the heart of each one of you this feeling for the science of occult progress in time were to become clear perception of the weaving, creative activity in the becoming of our own epoch, if this feeling could come alive within you, it might perhaps also live as a New Year's wish in your souls. And at the close of this course of lectures, this is the New Year's wish that I would fair lay in your hearts: Regard what has been said as the starting-point of a true feeling for time. In a certain way it may be symbolical that we should have been able to use this minor transition from one period of time to another as an opportunity for allowing ideal which embrace such transitions in their sweep, to take effect in our souls.

• 36. Timaeus, 22, 23. “In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the River Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais. ... To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them an to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world. ... Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. ... just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilised life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education, and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. ...”
• 37. World-History in the light of Anthroposophy, p. 102.
• 38. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). “I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief”Preface to the 2nd ed. of the Critique of Pure Reason. (Tr. J. M. D. Meiklejohn, p. xxxv. London, 1860.)
• 39. See Rudolf Steiner, Earthly and Cosmic Man, Lecture IV.
• 41. See Rudolf Steiner, Deeper Secrets of Human History in the light of the Gospel of St. Matthew. Lectures II and III.
• 40. See Rudolf Steiner, Earthly and Cosmic Man, Lecture IV.
• 42. See inter alia, Hymns to the Night, the most recent translation of which is by Mabel Cotterell, with an introduction by August Closs, published by the Phoenix Press, London, 1948. Translations were made at the end of the 19th century of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, The Disciples at Sais, of many “Fragments,” and other “Songs.” Carlyle's Essay on Novalis is well known. Apart from there publications, however, the English reader will have some difficulty in finding works in his own language that will enable him to acquire any real insight into the writings of Novalis. A great deal, of course, has been and is continuing to be written in Germany of the one of whom Tieck wrote in 1846: “Few authors have ever produced so great an impression on the world of German thought as Novalis.” The biography by Friedrich Hiebel, Novalis, der Dichter der blauen Blume, is of great value. Students of Spiritual Science will be particularly interested in Novalis in anthroposophischer Betrachtung by Monica V. Miltitz, published in 1956. But Rudolf Steiner alone was able to unveil the mystery enshrouding the personality of Novalis. Among many passages occurring in his lectures, the following is of outstanding importance: “... A deeply shattering event in life made him (Novalis) aware, as by a magic strike, of the relation between life and death and, as well as the great vista of past ages of the earth and cosmos, the Christ Being Himself appeared before his eyes of Spirit. ... In the rase of Novalis we cannot really speak of a self-contained lifc, for his was actually like a remembrance of an earlier incarnation. The initiation he had received as it were by Grace, brought to life within him experiences of an earlier incarnation; there was a certain mysterious consolidation of the fruits of insight acquired in an earlier life. And because he looked back through the ages with his own awakened eyes of spirit, he was able to say that to him nothing in life was comparable with the momentous event when in his inmost self he had discovered what Christ truly is. This experience was like a repetition of the happening at Damascus, when Paul, who had hitherto persecuted the followers of Christ and rejected their message, received in higher vision the direct proof that Christ lives, that He is present! ...” This quotation is from Rudolf Steiner's lecture entitled, The Christinas Mystery. Novalis the Seer. Not yet printed in English. Berlin, 22.XII.08.
• 43. The lecture, not yet printed in English, was entitled: The Human Spirit and the Animal Spirit, Berlin, 17.XI.10.
• 44. Heinrich Natter 1846–92).

Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science is based on occult science, as we have often emphasised, which brings us knowledge of the forces underlying the various epochs, and also enables us to understand what is at work in the cultural periods of our own epoch. So we must speak of these inner forces of our own time, whenever and wherever we meet, in order to understand the tasks of Spiritual Science in relation to what is at work beneath the surface of life, and so that occult research can help us direct our lives in harmony with the great goals of mankind.

In order to speak about contemporary occult trends it would be a good thing to start from the point where deep, occult research can lead us to what is also taking place in the super-sensible world in our time. By way of introduction we must also take into account what we have right in front of us at present, though we can only give a general sketch of it and not go into any details. Many things can only be spoken of without embarrassment in Anthroposophical gatherings, for ours is a time of dogmatism and abstraction. The strange thing is that this basic characteristic is not recognised in exoteric life, and people believe generally that their thoughts and actions are free from dogma, when in fact they are extremely dogmatic. They think they are basing themselves on reality, although they are really lost in the wildest abstractions. Therefore it is worthwhile bringing Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science, with its realities, to the attention of wider circles, to open up the possibility for an understanding of our epoch, though it will probably be a long time before the outside world wants to develop a deeper understanding for these things. We do not see how tied up in dogmas and abstractions our civilisation is, until we stop looking at it from the abstract point of view and begin seeing it in a really living way. One then finds a trend of thought whose chief characteristic consists in the laying down of ready-made dogmas that enlightened people are required to accept, whilst imagining they are being genuinely discriminating. Something of the sort is evident in the so-called monistic movement, though it is not justified in calling itself monistic. It gets its chief dogmas from modern natural science, in fact that particular branch of it which, strictly speaking, likes drawing its knowledge by means of purely external methods. If this natural science were to keep to its own field of activity, it could do important work; instead of this it leads to the formation of a new religion. Men take the facts of materialistic natural science and turn them into abstract dogmas. And anyone who is of the opinion that he is right because he is convinced of these dogmas himself, believes that the others have lagged a long way behind. They completely ignore the whole life of human individuality, and strive only to cram their heads with what the external world outlook considers as dogmas, and to regard the conclusions drawn from abstractions as the most important thing. This leads to the formation of sects whose adherents cling to expert opinions, principles and dogmas which they then advocate as the thing.

All that comprises the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual movement represents the opposite of this. This movement does not set out to follow a number of doctrines but to place the worth of the human individuality in the foreground.

Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science leads to the kind of social life that is based on a mutual interchange founded on the sort of confidence that each personality has in the other. Human beings should and will come together who have trust in one another. And in joint tasks one ought to say: You are the right person, not because you adhere to this or the other principle, but because you can achieve this or that and do not disturb the other people in the course of your work. Nothing could be worse than this, that the bad modern habit of forming sects should take hold of Anthroposophical life. It is not only when you are in full agreement with your neighbour that you should listen to him, but, if you are not, you should still reserve freedom and mobility for yourself and for him, and, with this recognition of individualities, work educationally in the Anthroposophical movement. Our time has very little understanding for this sort of thing. It aims at generalities. What is right for one can make the other man appear a fool. In the Anthroposophical movement we must make a clean sweep of that. If this attitude were not prevalent in the outside world of materialism, men would hasten of their own accord to understand human individualities in our own way, and then a scientific spirituality would soon appear that would be bound to lead to a world conception of a spiritual kind. But men are rigid with dogmas and therefore cannot reach it.

If you look into the principles that are upheld in monistic gatherings, you would soon see that none of these principles and dogmas are based on the outlook and results of present day science but on those of fifteen to twenty years ago. Thus, for instance, a personality distinguished in modern scientific circles said at a recent scientific meeting in Koenigsberg: ‘Facts of physics are all tending in a certain direction. People always used to speak of the ether as being in matter and outside, and it was taken for granted without taking the other known material sciences into account. But, after all, this has gradually met with justified doubt, and therefore we must now ask what the physicists should assume to be there in place of the ether.’ The answer was: Purely mathematical constructions, Hertz' and Maxwell' equations, conceptual formulae. According to these, light does not spread through space by means of ether vibrations, but, assuming them not to be there, it overcomes the non-material space as a vacuum in the sense of the equations referred to, so that according to this the transmission of light appears to be bound to concepts and ideas. It could quite easily happen that anyone who pointed to such hypotheses of the most up-to-date science in a monistic meeting could be mistaken for a mad theosophist, making the absurd proposition that thoughts are the bearers of light. Yet Max Planck³⁷ of Berlin, a respected authority on natural science, declared this to be his scientific opinion. If, therefore the monists wanted to make progress in science, they would also have to accept this opinion of the experts. As this is not the case, a monistic religion will only be possible if its supporters believe they have a scientific basis, but do not know that their assumptions have long been superseded. People who think in a monistic way are only held together by the results of so-called intellectual research and its world conception, or the biased dogmas arising out of this. Whereas the Anthroposophically orientated theosophist complies with facts that cannot deprive anyone of his freedom or lead to the formation of sects, and each individuality can remain free.

An important aspect of the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual movement is that it gives an impulse for self-education in a way that hardly has its equal at the present time. We must understand what we ourselves are as a movement, and realise that this movement is based on foundations that can only be found within this movement and nowhere outside.

Facts of real life can show us this. There are many people who think we ought to take what Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science has to offer and give it out in philosophical terms, in the style of official science, to make Spiritual Science more acceptable to the representatives and followers of officialdom. But that cannot be done, because it is impossible to make compromises between the occult stream of Spiritual Science and any other movement that arises out of the characteristic outlook of our times, like the monistic one, for instance—that is, one that has a completely different basis. To bring about compromises between the two, even if only in form, is impossible. It is much more a matter of aiming at bringing a new impulse into the culture of the times. The others cannot even understand or explain their own basic facts, nor judge them one single step ahead, because they lack the courage to draw the conclusions arising from these facts. On closer examination we find incomplete thought processes in every sect, including scientific circles, and Spiritual Science must see these for what they are, for we know that a half truth or a quarter truth is worse than a total fallacy because it deceives the outside world which is not competent to judge. The Anthroposophist must enter the very nerve of the spiritual movement in order to understand the materialistic movement that sets the pace in the outside world, because it sometimes works with facts that are tending in the direction of spiritual truth, but are not fully developed.

If the medical branch of natural science means to go seriously into bodily research, it cannot ignore the sphere, the concepts and the results of occult investigation. The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud³⁸ in Vienna, which enjoys a large and still growing circulation, gives us an instructive example of the difficulties arising in this sphere. It began by investigating the life of the soul in both the physically and the mentally ill, in an attempt to discover certain psychic causes there, in the long-forgotten early years, for example, because there was a definite feeling that what is still there in the unconscious has its lasting effect on later life too. An ingenious doctor of this school, Dr. Breuer,³⁹ tried to put the patients into a condition of hypnosis, and then let them make a kind of confession, so that he could probe into the depths of their souls. You all know that it is a great relief to talk about what is oppressing you. People were often cured by these hypnotic confessions, or they were well on the way to it. Even without hypnosis Freud often achieved the same results by means of well chosen questions. Apart from this he discovered that happenings of a largely unconscious kind are revealed in dream life, and out of this a kind of dream interpretation arose in the school of psychoanalysis. If someone were now to say that here is a good opportunity to strike a compromise between Spiritual Science and the results of these efforts, such an opinion can only be called a fallacy, because despite the quarter truth contained in it he would soon become aware that the direction in question leads to the wildest errors and that it would be preferable to keep to purely materialistic interpretations. Spiritual Science, when properly understood, has to reject such things. The point is that the ideas about the soul's dream life and the resulting theory are steeped in coarse, sense-bound thinking, and it is therefore not possible on this basis to turn it into a spiritual truth. For in order to do that one needs the spiritual foundations that Spiritual Science has to offer, otherwise one gropes around in obscure hypotheses and theories and explains them in a materialistic way. And that is the way things have turned out in the Freudian school. They certainly got as far as the symbolism of dreams, but wove into them the thoughts of the materialistic age, whilst Schubert's⁴⁰ and Volkelt's⁴¹ correct conception could be started on in Leipzig but not developed. They thought of the dream as a symbol of sexual life, because our time is incapable of realising that this area is the lowest revelation of innumerable worlds that rise far above our world in spiritual significance. By so doing they are turning it into something that gives an irresponsible flavour to a whole field of investigation, and, in consequence, brings about the most serious errors. Therefore the only thing that Spiritual Science can say about the Freudian school is that it has to reject its research on the grounds that it is dilettante. If it would first of all make itself thoroughly acquainted with spiritual investigation, these truths would produce quite different results. People would then begin to see that our age is an intellectual age, an age of dogma, that drives people into a wild chaos of instincts and passions and is satisfied with what is merely intellectual and abstract.

In the example of the Freudian school therefore, we see an area of soul life being shown in a wrong light and dragged down by the worst kind of materialism by trying to relate all the phenomena to sex, a procedure of which one could say that it arose out of the personal inclination of the scientists themselves, only they are not conscious of it, and it is dilettante into the bargain.

We must feel how necessary it is that spiritual investigation rejects half and quarter truths and only adopts those it can defend with its own principles, for we realise that Spiritual Science can work out of its own strength. It is important to stress that my first books did not grow out of theosophy, yet people outside find it strange that I nevertheless became a theosophist later on. That is a short-sighted, narrow-minded view, however. The books have this about them that despite their strictly scientific attitude they do not have dealings with what is regarded as official science, or assume the style that believes itself capable of making general definitions.

Spiritual Science should draw abundant life from the foundations of occultism, make no compromises and show a courage that is lacking in the domains outside. Whoever refuses to make any compromises of this kind, acquires a reputation of being inadequate in the eyes of those people who always want one to give way, but do not do so themselves. As opposed to this, Spiritual Science stands in the world as a spiritual movement firmly established on its own basis, and its members must always be conscious of this fact, and see it to be a vital element of this spiritual movement. It sometimes happens that people with special interests come into Spiritual Science, but where Spiritual Science and spiritual investigations are concerned it is not a case of special interests. Each individual can follow these up for himself, and he should not expect Spiritual Science to follow after him. Spiritual Science must penetrate into our whole cultural situation and have the courage to carry out its task in life with consistency in an age that is justifiably called intellectual.

But do not let us imagine that this intellectuality ought to merge, as such, with spiritual life, for we have to take our start from facts that are reached by clairvoyant means. We find, then, that the life of the soul has three basic elements. There is, firstly, the life of concepts, intellectuality, which to begin with only comes to expression in perception. When we consider intellectuality by itself, we notice that it is bound in the widest sense to the material world from which man draws his mental images. These images themselves, of course, are super-sensible. From the very connection between the life of mental imagery and the life of perception we see that the former is connected with the physical plane. If we involve ourselves in difficult thoughts and think to such an extent that we get tired, then we sleep well, provided that only the life of thought and not the life of feeling was engaged in the activity. Therefore we can grasp the statement that the life of thought is a super-sensible process, and is connected with the next element, the astral world. It is from the astral plane that those forces come that awaken and maintain the life of thought in the human soul.

The second element consists of the waves of feeling that pass through our soul, such as pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, sorrow, love, dislike, and so on. The flow of thought and feeling is intimately connected with our ego, and these rob us of our sleep because their emotional unrest prevents us entering the astral plane. We can understand therefore that this brings us into connection with lower Devachan, which does not accept our emotions if they are impure but rejects them from that part of the astral world that is lower Devachan.

Morality and will impulses are the third element. The man who can look back on good deeds in his day's review can experience a moment of bliss before falling asleep. He is in the pleasant situation in which he can say: If only it were possible to prolong it, to enjoy the enlivening power of it, and that it could take hold of our whole soul life as a fructifying force! This enables us to understand what occult investigation tell us: That will impulses refer us to higher Devachan, where they are accepted only if they issue from a pure will and are suitable for this spiritual world. Thus our life of mental images and concepts, our intellectuality, is closely connected with the astral world, our life of feeling with lower Devachan and our life of will with higher Devachan.

In addition to these we have our life of sense perception on the physical plane. These four elements develop at a different rate in human incarnations during the various cultural epochs.

When we consider the occult background, we see how the life of perception comes to the fore in the Greco-Roman era, how the Greek and the Roman was completely attuned to the physical world that he esteemed so highly. Our time, the fifth cultural epoch, is that of thinking, of intellectuality. This is why the abstract sciences are flourishing. The coming sixth age will retain intellectual life, in the same way as we in the fifth have retained the life of perception, and will in addition express itself in the feeling life of the soul. The environment will affect people so that it causes them pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, sympathy and antipathy, to a degree that as yet can only be felt by the occultist who is capable of overcoming mere intellect, and understanding certain connections of life with real feeling, without lengthy logical reasoning. The occultist feels displeasure over illogical things, joy and peace of soul over logical things. If he defends something that he immediately sees to be right, he has to prove it nowadays with a lengthy argument, in order to be understood. The occultist feels pain especially vividly when he reads the newspaper, because it is just in the daily papers that one frequently finds illogicality incarnate. You have to read them, nevertheless—choosing as carefully as you can—in order to keep in touch with the outside world. You should not choose in the way the professor of the Chinese language did, who told his colleague one day, in a great state of agitation: I have just this moment discovered—it was the year 1870–71—that Germany has been at war with France for half a year, because I only read the Chinese newspapers.

In the last post-Atlantean epoch, the seventh era, the sense for morality will develop, that is, the sense for the will impulses. Remarkable progress will come about through this. Occult investigations, even those of the present-day, show us that someone can be very clever and intellectual without being moral. Nowadays intellectuality and morality exist alongside each other. Little by little, however, the curious fact will emerge that a person's cleverness will be killed off by his immorality, so that in the far future an immoral person will actually be stupid or will have to become so. A moral era is coming in which the morality of our whole soul life and the intellectuality of those later times will become one.

Although man has within his soul all the four elements mentioned, sense perception predominated over all others in the Greco-Roman era, and intellectuality is added to this to a greater degree in the present; in the one before the last, the sixth period, emotion will predominate, and in the seventh, the last cultural epoch, it will be morality, and in a way we can only dream of today. We cannot even imagine what it will be like as Socrates could, who considered that virtue could be both taught and learnt. All this, however, will become reality by the seventh epoch, for the tendencies that are already clearly perceptible in occultism foretell this.

Intellectuality, then, is the chief spiritual characteristic of our age, but there is a difference between the way it comes to expression in the materialistic thinking of the world and in Spiritual Science. Man is connected through his intellect with the astral plane, but he will only be conscious of this—and he will only make the right use of it—when he has developed clairvoyance. This will begin in an ever-increasing number of human beings in the course of the twentieth century. Progress will only be made in this direction when men not only develop a heightened intellect for themselves but also lift it up into the astral world. The human being who has advanced to intellectual clairvoyance in this way can and will approach the etherically visible Christ more and more clearly in the course of the next three thousand years. In bygone times, however, when man was mainly connected with the physical plane, Christ could only appear in physical incarnation. In the present age of the intellect He can appear only in etheric form. Spiritual Science wishes to prepare mankind for this in such a way that it acquires a proper understanding and makes proper use of the clairvoyant faculties that are slowly appearing and will be used for vision later on, in the course of natural development. And this will ensure that in the second half of our intellectual age the Christ will be seen clairvoyantly in His etheric form.

The age of feeling will develop the soul further in a different respect, enabling it to enter the lower Devachanic world in a conscious way. Christ will appear as a form of light to a number of human beings in the lower Devachanic world, revealing Himself through sound, and from His astral body of light He will fill their receptive souls with the Word that was active in astral form in the beginning, as is expressed by John in the opening words of his Gospel.

In the age of morality a number of human beings will perceive the Christ revealing Himself from higher Devachan in His true Ego that surpasses all human egos in inconceivable greatness, and with such splendour that It can bestow on man the highest possible moral impulses. Such is the connection between the impulses of the different cultural epochs and the soul of man. From higher and ever higher worlds will come the forces that flow into man and become active within him.

Perception in the physical world is wonderful indeed; even more wonderful is the intellect when it attains predominance and forms a connection with the astral world, and even greater still are the feelings and morality that are connected with the Devachanic world.

Thinking this through logically you will realise the logic in this course of development, because life confirms it on all sides. The Anthroposophist faces these stages of development consciously, not only in broad sweeps and universal truths but also in the individual details of human development. In the abuses of the outer world the striving towards dogma of the intellectual element is very prominent, but in spiritual knowledge the intellect has to become spiritualised so that it can understand the more advanced results of occult investigation. This is more clearly illuminated in the fact that in the Greco-Roman era, through the Mystery of Golgotha, we are presented in physical form with that which then developed further so that with its impact on the human soul it could lead humanity upwards. It is necessary above all that man learns to understand what this Christ Impulse signifies for our world. It has to be stressed that this Christ Impulse is a living reality that is streaming into mankind, and that Christ did not give the world a doctrine or a theory but the impulse for new life. Let us take a serious look at this.

Since the Saturn stage, throughout the Sun and Moon stage, man has developed his physical, etheric and astral bodies. The ego could only appear on earth in a body that was sufficiently prepared for it and then develop further under the nurturing influence of the Christ Impulse because Christ is macrocosmically what our ego is to us microcosmically. The four principles of the macrocosm are connected in manifold ways with our four lower principles including the most important of these, the ego. In our present cultural period the higher human principles can already be glimpsed in our development. Life-spirit, spirit-self and spirit-man will be developed in us out of the higher spirit worlds through the macrocosmic principles. Not through the fourth macrocosmic principle, however, but through the help of beings that have no macrocosmic significance of their own but only microcosmic significance, really working as teachers among mankind, as they have themselves advanced by one or more principles beyond man himself. On the other hand Christ is a macrocosmic being at the fourth stage of His macrocosmic development, as man is microcosmically at the fourth stage.

So you should keep macrocosmic and microcosmic principles apart, but be clear about the fact that the four first macrocosmic principles include of course all the higher microcosmic principles. Thus the microcosmic beings work as teachers and seek to carry mankind forward through their teaching, whereas Christ, working as a macrocosmic reality, is not a teacher like the other teachers of humanity, for He united Himself with the earth as a reality, as power, as very life.

The loftiest teachers of the successive epochs are the so-called Bodhisattvas who already in the pre-Christian era pointed to Christ in His full reality of being; again in the Christian era they point to Him as a power Who is now united with the earth. Thus the Bodhisattvas work both before and after Christ's physical life on earth. He, who was born as the son of a king in India 550 years before Christ, lived and taught for twenty-nine years as a Bodhisattva, and then ascended to the rank of Buddha; thereafter he was never again to appear on the earth in a body of flesh, but from then onwards he worked from the spiritual world. When this Bodhisattva became Buddha he was succeeded in that very moment by the new Bodhisattva whose mission it is to lead mankind to an understanding of the Christ Impulse. All these things had come to pass before the appearance of Christ on the earth, for about the year 105 BC. there was living in Palestine a man still to this day defamed in rabbinical literature, Jeshu ben Pandira, and he was an incarnation of this new Bodhisattva. Jesus of Nazareth is an essentially different Being, in that when He reached the age of thirty He became the bearer of Christ at the baptism by John in the Jordan.

It was Jeshu ben Pandira from whom the Essene⁴² teachings were mainly derived. One of his pupils bore the name of Matthew, and he too pointed to the Mystery of Golgotha. Jeshu ben Pandira was stoned by his enemies and his corpse was hung on a cross as a further mark of contempt. His existence can be established without the help of occult research for plenty is said about him in rabbinical literature, although the information is either misleading or deliberately falsified. He bore within him the individuality of the new Bodhisattva and was the successor of Gautama Buddha. The name of his pupil Matthew passed over to later pupils, and the content of the Gospel known by that name had already been in existence since the time of the first Matthew, in the form of a description of the rituals contained in the ancient mystery-scripts. In the life of Christ Jesus the essential content of these mysteries became reality on the physical plane. What were previously only pictures from the mysteries, seeds as it were of subsequent happenings, now became reality. Thus the Christ Mystery had already been known prophetically, had indeed been enacted in the ceremonies of the ancient mysteries, before it became, once and once only, an actual event on the physical plane.

The Bodhisattva who once lived as Jeshu ben Pandira comes down to the earth again and again in a human body and will continue to do so in order to fulfil the rest of his task and particular mission which cannot as yet be completed. Although its consummation can already be foreseen by clairvoyance, no larynx exists that is capable of producing the sounds of the speech that will be uttered when this Bodhisattva rises to the rank of Buddha. In agreement with oriental occultism, therefore, it can be said: Five thousand years after Gautama Buddha, that is to say, towards the end of the next three thousand years, the Bodhisattva who is his successor will become Buddha. But as it is his mission to prepare human beings for the epoch connected paramountly with the development of true morality, when, in the future, he becomes Buddha, his spoken words will contain the magic power of goodness. For thousands of years, therefore, oriental tradition has predicted: Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha who is to come, will be a bringer of goodness by way of the word. He will then be able to teach men the real nature of the Christ Impulse, and in this age the Buddha stream and the Christ stream will flow into one. Only so can the Christ Mystery be truly understood.

• 37. Max Planck: 1858 – 1947, founder of the quantum theory. ‘Die Stellung der neureren Physik zur mechanischen Naturanschaung’ (The Position of Modern Physics with respect to the Mechanical World outlook), lecture held on 23.9.1910 at the 82nd session of German natural scientists and doctors in Konigsberg; Leipzig, 1910.
• 38. Sigmund Freud: 1856 – 1939, founder of psychoanalysis.
• 39. Dr. Breuer: Joseph Breuer, Viennese surgeon. See Rudolf Steiner ‘An Autobiography’, Steinerbooks, New York, 1977, and also lecture of 10th November 1917 in ‘Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy’, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1946.
• 40. Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert: 1780 – 1860, natural philosopher. ‘Die Geschichte der Seele’ (History of the Soul) Stuttgart. 1839.
• 41. Johann Volkelt: 1848 – 1930: ‘Die Traum-Phantasie’ (Dream Pictures) Stuttgart 1875. See also Rudolf Steiner ‘Riddles of Philosophy’, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, New York, 1973.
• 42. Essene teachings: Essenes, Jewish secret Order, about 150 BC. to 70 AD. See also Rudolf Steiner ‘The Fifth Gospel’; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1968.

If you follow the spirit of the studies we have made here during the last few days, you will find it comprehensible that not only a guiding and directing of the events on our Earth and above all in human evolution takes place through the Beings and forces of the various hierarchies, but that the Beings of these hierarchies themselves go through a sort of evolution, a sort of development. In the last lectures we spoke of how the Beings of this or that hierarchy intervene and guide, how for instance the Spirits of Form in normal and abnormal development organize the races.

Now let us ask ourselves the following: Do these spiritual Beings with whom we are now dealing also progress in their own development? As regards certain spiritual Beings we can during our own period of evolution witness the spectacle that they are, so to speak, progressing a stage further in their own development. Since the Atlantean catastrophe, ever since the post-Atlantean development began, we are living in an age in which certain Archangels, certain Beings of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi are ascending into the Hierarchy of the Archai, or Spirits of the Age. It is extremely interesting to notice this, for when we observe how the Folk-spirits, the Folk-souls whom we designate as Archangels ascend to a higher rank, then only do we obtain a correct conception of what is actually going on in the great world. This ascent is connected with the fact that into that distribution of humanity, which we must look upon as the division into races, there has been sent, since the Atlantean epoch, a second stream of humanity, of peoples. We must, as a matter of fact, look back very far indeed, back to early Atlantean times, if we want to find the period when the division into the five principal races of which we have spoken took place, if we wish to enquire when those men came to that particular spot in Africa where they then formed the black or Ethiopian race; when those other peoples came to Southern Asia, who compose the Malay race. We should have to look back to early Atlantean times. But later on other streams were sent after these early ones.

While therefore the Earth was already colonized with the foundations of these races, others were sent afterwards to those colonized parts of the Earth. Thus we have to do with a later stream, with a stream which came in later Atlantean times. If we wish to comprehend what was thus accomplished in Europe, Africa and America, in the way of the division of races, whilst Atlantis was gradually crumbling away, and what was then sent later on, towards the end of the Atlantean epoch, and part of which was only sent during the post-Atlantean evolution,—then we must clearly understand that we are dealing with that mighty stream of humanity which pushed forward into Asia, into Indian territory, and that, as has often been pointed out, bodies of people remained at the different points, from which then the various peoples of Asia, Africa and Europe arose. We have to deal therefore with an earlier division and a later advance,—with a second stream. The purpose of this second stream was, that companies of peoples who were each under the guidance of an Archangel were sent out from the West to the East. But these Archangels who were the guiding spiritual powers of these tribes that were sent out, were at different stages of development, in other words, they were nearer to or further away from the rank of a Spirit of the Age.

We have to look in the Far East for that stream of peoples whose Archangel was the first one to attain the rank of a Spirit of the Age. It was that stream of peoples who formed the ruling class of that land and laid the foundations of the first post-Atlantean civilization after their Archangel had become the Spirit of the Age, after he had been promoted to the first Spirit of the Age or Archai of the post-Atlantean age of civilization. Now this Spirit of the Age guided the primal sacred culture of India and made it the leading one in the first post-Atlantean age of civilization. The other peoples of Asia who were gradually developing, were for a long time under the guidance merely of Archangels.

Those peoples of Europe who had remained behind when the migration from West to East took place, were also under the guidance of Archangels for a long time after the Archangel of India had risen to the rank of an Archai and then acted through intuition upon those great Teachers of India, the Holy Rishis, who because they were aided by this exalted and important Spirit were able to fulfill their high mission in the manner already described. This Spirit of the Age worked on for a long time, whilst the people lying to the north of ancient India were still under the guidance of the Archangel. When the Spirit of the Age of India had fulfilled his mission, he was promoted to the guidance of the entire evolution of post-Atlantean humanity.

At the time which we designate as the Old Persian age, we have that Spirit of Personality, the Spirit of the Age, who was the guide or intuitor of the great Zarathustra or Zoroaster, the Zarathustra of ancient times. This again is an example of how an Archangel, a Folk-soul, rises to the rank of a Spirit of the Age, that is the very spectacle which, as we stated at the beginning of our lecture to-day, we are experiencing in our own time, that the Archangels work themselves up, through the mission they accomplish, to the rank of guiding and ruling Spirits of the Age.

A later rise in rank resulted from the Egyptian people and its Archangel on the one hand and from the Chaldean people and its Archangel on the other. Then took place the event in which the Archangel of the Egyptian people rose to the rank of a guiding Spirit of the Age, and undertook, so to speak, the guidance of that which formerly devolved upon the Chaldean Archangel; so that the leader in the Chaldæan-Egyptian age became the third mighty guiding Spirit of the Age who had gradually evolved himself up from the rank of the Egyptian Archangel. But that was also the age when another important development took place, which ran parallel with the Egyptian-Chaldæan civilization and with which is connected that to which we had to draw special attention in our last lecture.

We have seen that everything belonging to the Semitic tribes assumed special significance, and that from these Jahve or Jehovah had chosen one in particular and made that His own people. Hence, because He had elected one particular race to be His special people, He employed at first, while this race was gradually growing up, a sort of Archangel to be His representative with the people; so that in ancient times the gradually growing Semitic people had an Archangel who was under the continuous inspiration of Jahve or Jehovah, and who then later on grew up into a Spirit of the Age. Hence, besides the ordinary, evolving Spirits of the Age of the Old Indian, Old Persian and Old Chaldean peoples, there was yet another one who played a special part by working in a single people.

Thus we have a Spirit of the Age who in a certain respect appears in the mission of a Folk-spirit, one whom we must call the Semitic Folk-spirit. His was a very special task. This will be comprehensible to you if you call to mind that in reality this particular people was lifted out of normal evolution and had a special guidance, that so to say, special arrangements were made for the guidance of this people. Through these special arrangements this people had received a mission which was really of quite special importance and significance for the post-Atlantean epoch, and which was distinguished from the missions of all other peoples. One can best understand this mission of the Semitic people by taking it in connection with the missions of the various other peoples of the post-Atlantean epoch.

There are two spiritual currents in mankind. The one must be called, if we wish to designate it rightly, that which proceeds from plurality, which we might also say proceeds from Monadology, which therefore conceives the origin and source of existence as consisting primarily of a number of Beings and forces. You may look round wherever you will in the world, and you will see that, in some way or other, the peoples of the post-Atlantean epoch started from several gods. Begin with the trinity of ancient India, which was later expressed as Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. Look at the German mythology; there you find the trinity of Odin, HSnir, LSdur, and so on. Everywhere you will find a trinity and this again divided into a larger number. You find this peculiarity not only where myths and teachings about the gods appear, but also in the philosophies, in which we meet with the same thing again as monadology. This is the current which, because it proceeds from a number, may assume the greatest possible variety. We might say, that in the post-Atlantean epoch, from the farthest East in India and in a wide curve through Asia across to Europe, this worship of a number,—which on the whole is expressed in our Anthroposophy by our recognition of a number of different Beings belonging to the various hierarchies,—has acquired its manifold representations and forms.

This worship of many had to be opposed by a synthetic, all-comprising movement which proceeded strictly from the Monon, Monism. The actual inspirers, the impulse-givers of all Monotheism and Monism, of the worship of a single Divinity, are the Semitic peoples. It is in their nature, and if you remember what was said in the last lecture you will know that it is in their blood, to represent the one god, the Monon.

If man were however to look out into the great cosmos, he would not get very far if he were always to emphasize that there is only unity, a Monon at the foundation of the world. Monism or Monotheism, considered alone, can only represent a final ideal, but it would never lead to a real understanding of the world, to a comprehensive and exact view of it. Nevertheless in the post-Atlantean age the current of Monotheism had also to be represented, so that the task was given to one people to introduce the impulse, the ferment for this Monotheism. This task was given to the Semitic people. Hence you see how the Monistic principle is represented by this people with a certain abstract severity, with an abstract relentlessness, and how all the other peoples, in so far as their different Divine Beings are comprised in unity, received the impulse for this from them. The Monistic impulse has always come from that quarter. The other peoples have pluralistic impulses.

It is extremely important that this should be borne in mind, and one who examines the continuation of the old Hebrew impulse can still see at the present day Monotheism ruling in its greatest extreme among the learned Rabbis, in their learned Rabbinism. It is the task of this particular people to give as an impulse that the world-principle can only be unity. Therefore we might say: All the other nations, peoples, and Spirits of the Age had an analytic task, the task of representing the world-principle as being composed of different Beings; for example, the most extreme abstraction of the Monon in India was soon divided into a trinity, as the one god of Christianity is divided into Three Persons. All the other peoples have the task of analyzing the foundations of the world and thus to fill their several parts with rich contents, to fill themselves with rich material for conceptions that may lovingly comprehend the phenomena. The Semitic people has the task of ignoring all plurality and synthetically devoting itself to the unity; hence, for example, through this very impulse, the power of speculation, the power of synthetic thought is the greatest imaginable in the Kabbalistic studies.

All that could possibly ever be spun out of the unity by the synthetic, inclusive activity of the ‘I’, has been spun out by the Semitic Spirit in the course of thousands of years. That is the great polarity between Pluralism and Monism, and that is the significance of the Semitic impulse in the world. Monism is not possible without Pluralism, and the latter is not possible without the former. Therefore we must recognize the necessity for both.

The objective language of facts often leads to quite different knowledge from that to which the sympathies or antipathies which reign here or there lead. Therefore we must thoroughly understand the several Folk-spirits. Whereas the leaders of the several peoples over in Asia and Africa had long since risen to the rank of Spirits of the Age or Spirits of Personality and some of them were even already expecting to transform themselves from Spirits of the Age to the next higher stage, to Spirits of Form,—just as for instance that Spirit of the Age who was active in old India had in certain respects already risen to the rank of a Spirit of Form,—the several peoples of Europe were still for a long time guided by their several Archangels. It was only in the fourth post-Atlantean age that the Archangel of Greece raised himself out of the various peoples of Europe (who were being guided by their Archangels), to a leading position, by becoming the chief Spirit of the Age of the fourth, the Greek age of the post-Atlantean epoch; so that we see the Archangel of Greece rise to the rank of an Archai, a Spirit of Personality. That for which this Archangel of Greece had prepared himself became manifest, when he had become the Spirit of the Age, in Asia, Africa and Europe, whose centre the Greek people had become. The Archangel of the Greeks developed into an Archai, the active Zeitgeist of the Egyptians and also that of the Persians had risen to be a sort of Spirit of Form. What we are now coming to is something exceptionally interesting in the course of post-Atlantean evolution. As a result of all the development which the Archangel of the Greeks had formerly gone through, he could pass comparatively quickly through that which enabled him to take a specially prominent position as Spirit of the Age. Hence, however, something of the greatest significance occurred in the fourth age of post-Atlantean civilization.

We know that at that time the event occurred which we describe as the reception by humanity of the Christ-impulse. The Christ-impulse was received, the Mystery of Golgotha took place. The impulse then given was, in the course of the following centuries and thousands of years, gradually to spread over the whole earth. This required not only the fact that this event took place, but it required certain guiding and directing Beings from the ranks of the hierarchies; and then occurred the most remarkable and interesting event, that—at a definite moment of time, which practically coincided with the coming to Earth of the Christ-impulse—the Greek Spirit of the Age renounced for this our present period his ascent into the region of the Spirits of Form, which would at that time have been possible to him, and became the guiding Spirit of the Age, who then acts on through the ages. He became the representative guiding Spirit of exoteric Christianity; so that the Archai, the guiding Spirit of the Greeks, placed himself in front of the Christ-impulse. Hence the Greek nation crumbled away so quickly at the time when Christianity developed, because it resigned its guiding Spirit of the Age that he might become the leader of exoteric Christianity. The Spirit of the Age of Ancient Greece became the missionary, the inspirer, or rather the ‘intuitor’ of the out-spreading exoteric Christianity. Here therefore we have before us the spectacle of a renunciation such as we have spoken of, in a concrete case. The Spirit of the Age of the Greeks, because he had fulfilled his mission in the fourth post-Atlantean age of civilization so exceptionally well, might have risen into a higher sphere, but he renounced that, and by so doing became the guiding Spirit of the out-spreading, exoteric Christianity, and in that capacity he worked further among the various peoples.

Another such renunciation occurred on another occasion, and this second renunciation is particularly interesting, especially to those who call themselves Anthroposophists. Whereas over in Asia and right down to the Egyptians and Greeks the several Archangels develop into the Spirits of the Age, we have on the whole in Europe various peoples and tribes who are guided by their several Archangels. Thus whereas the corresponding Archangels who were once upon a time sent from the West towards the East, had ascended to the rank of Spirits of the Age, we still have an Archangel in Europe who worked in the Germanic and above all in the Celtic peoples; in those peoples who, at the time when Christianity started, were still spread over a great part of Western Europe, as far as the present Hungary, across South Germany and the Alps. These peoples had the Celtic Folk-spirit for their Archangel. The peoples belonging to the Celtic Spirit were also spread far up towards the north-east of Europe. They were guided by an important Archangel who, soon after the Christian impulse had been given to humanity, had renounced becoming an Archai, a Spirit of Personality, and decided to remain at the stage of an Archangel and to be subordinate in future to the various Spirits of the Age who should arise in Europe. Hence also the Celtic peoples as one combined people dwindled away, because their Archangel had practiced a special resignation and had undertaken a special mission. That is a characteristic example of how in such a case the ‘remaining-behind’ helped to inaugurate special missions.

Now what became of the Archangel of the Celtic peoples, when he had renounced becoming a Spirit of Personality? He became the inspiring Spirit of esoteric Christianity; and in particular of those teachings and impulses which underlie esoteric Christianity; the real true esoteric Christianity comes from his inspirations. The secret, hidden place for those who were initiated into these Mysteries was to be found in Western Europe, and there the inspiration was given by this guiding Spirit, who had originally gone through an important training as Archangel of the Celtic people, renounced his further ascent, and had undertaken another mission, that of becoming the inspirer of esoteric Christianity, which was to work on further through the Mysteries of the Holy Grail, through Rosicrucianism. Here you have an example of a renunciation, a remaining behind of one of these Beings of the hierarchies, and at the same time you have a concrete example in which you can at once recognize the significance of thus remaining behind. Although this Archangel could have risen to the rank of an Archai, he remained in that of an Archangel and was able to lead the important current of esoteric Christianity, which is to work on further through the various Spirits of the Age. No matter how these Spirits of the Age may work, this esoteric Christianity will be a source for everything which may again be changed and metamorphosed under the influence of the various Spirits of the Age. Thus we have another example of how such a renunciation taken place, whilst on the other hand we are experiencing in our age the mighty spectacle of Folk-spirits being promoted to the rank of Spirits of the Age.

Now in Europe we have the various Germanic peoples. These peoples who originally were guided by one Archangel, were destined to come gradually under the guidance of many different Archangels, in order to form individual peoples in various ways. It is of course exceedingly difficult to speak impartially of these things,—difficult only for the reason that in certain respects passion and jealousy may easily be aroused. Hence certain mysteries belonging to this evolution can only be lightly touched upon. From among the number of those Archangels proceeded the Archai who is the guiding Spirit of the Age of our fifth age of civilization in the post-Atlantean epoch. He took the precedence long, long after one of the Archangels of the Germanic peoples had gone through a certain training. The Spirit of the Age who was the Folk-spirit in the Græco-Latin age became that Spirit of the Age who, as you know, was at a later time occupied in spreading exoteric Christianity. Later Roman history was also guided by a kind of Spirit of the Age, who had risen from having been the Archangel of the Roman people and had united his activity with that of the Christian Spirit of the Age. Both of these were the teachers of that Archangel who guided the Germanic peoples, who had been one of their guiding Archangels and had then raised himself to be the Zeitgeist, or the Spirit of the Age of the fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization.

There was a great deal to be done, but above all it was necessary that a strong individualizing and intermingling of the various folk-elements should take place in Europe. This was only possible because, whilst over in Asia and Africa the Archangels had long since ascended to Spirits of the Age, in Europe the guidance was still carried on by the Archangels themselves, because the several small peoples were guided by their Folk-souls and, without troubling about the Spirits of the Age, were completely devoted to the impulses of the Folk-spirits themselves. At the time when the Christian impulse passed over humanity, there was in Europe an intermingled activity of several Folk-spirits who were filled with a sense of freedom; every one of them went his own way and therefore made it difficult for a guiding Spirit of the Age to arise for the fifth age of civilization, to lead the several Folk-spirits. In order to make possible that people which occupies the country of France there was an intermingling of the Roman, Celtic and Frank folk-elements, and on account of this the whole guidance naturally assumed a different form. It passed from the several guiding Archangels,—who had received other tasks,—over to others. (In the case of the guiding Archangel of the Celts, we have said what his mission was; and in the same way we could state what were the missions of the Archangels of the other peoples.) Hence among the peoples which arose through such interminglings came other Archangels, who entered upon their office when the various elements intermingled. Thus in fact for a long time even in the Middle Ages, in Central and Northern Europe the leadership was chiefly in the hands of the Archangels who were only gradually influenced by that common Spirit of the Age who went in front of the Christ-impulse. In many cases the several Folk-spirits in Europe became the servants of the Christ Spirit of the Age. The European Archangels placed themselves in the service of this universal Christ Spirit of the Age whilst the several peoples were hardly in a position to allow any of the Archangels to rise to the rank of a Spirit of the Age. Only in the sixteenth to the seventeenth century (beginning from about the twelfth century), was preparation made for the development of the guiding Spirit of the Age of the fifth post-Atlantean age, under whose guidance we still are to-day. He belongs just as much to the great directing Spirits of the Age, as those who were the great directing Spirits of the Age during the Egyptian-Chaldæan-Babylonian, Old Persian, and Indian ages of civilization. But this Spirit of the Age of our fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization worked in a very unique manner. He had to make a kind of compromise with one of the old Spirits of the Age who worked before the Christian-impulse, viz., the Egyptian Spirit of the Age, who, as we have heard, had in a certain respect risen to the rank of a Spirit of Form. Thus it comes about that our fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization, in which we now are, is really ruled by a Spirit of the Age who is in a certain way very much under the influence and impulses of the old Egyptian civilization, and of a Spirit of Form who is only at quite an elementary stage.

That caused the many rifts and divisions in our age. Our Spirit of the Age in the fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization is striving in a certain respect to raise himself up to spiritual heights and to raise the fourth post-Atlantean age of civilization to a higher stage. But that includes the materialistic tendency and inclination, and according as the various Archangels, the various Folk-souls, have greater or less inclination towards this materialistic tendency, does a more or less materialistic people arise under the guidance of this Spirit of the Age of the fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization, and the people itself gives a more or less materialistic shade to the Spirit of the Age. On the other hand an idealistic people is one which gives the Spirit of the Age a shade which is in the direction of Idealism.

Now from the twelfth to the sixteenth century something gradually developed, something which in a certain respect worked beside the Christian Spirit of the Age,—who is the on-working Greek Spirit of the Age,—so that in fact, in a wonderful manner, that which we call the Christian Spirit of the Age,—who was united with a real Archai of the fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization,—streamed into our culture; and besides this, the influence of old Egypt was also active, whose Spirit of the Age had raised himself to a certain rank among the Spirits of Form. Now for the very reason that such a triad is at work in our whole culture, it has become possible for the many different kinds of culture and the various Folk-souls to appear in our fifth age. It became possible for the Spirit of the Age to manifest the most varied colors and shades in his activity. The Archangels, who received their orders from the Spirit of the Age, worked in very many different ways.

Those of you who dwell in the North will be interested in something which in our next studies we shall have to go into more closely. The following question will especially interest you: How did that Archangel work, who was once upon a time sent up to Norway with the northern, the Scandinavian peoples, and from whom the various Archangels of Europe—especially those of Western, Central and Northern Europe—received their inspirations? In the world outside it would be reckoned as folly that the very spot in the continent of Europe should be indicated, from whence at one time the greatest impulses streamed forth in all directions, the spot which was the seat of sublime Spirits before the Celtic Folk-Spirit as Celtic Archangel had founded a new Centre in the noble citadel of the Grail. From that spot which in ancient times was the centre for the outpouring of the spirituality of Europe, there also streamed forth that which was first of all given to the Archangel of the Northern peoples as his mission. To the external world it would, as I say, appear folly, if we were to indicate the spot from which radiates that which works into the various Germanic tribes, as that part which now lies over Central Germany, but is really situated above the earth. If you were to draw something like a circle, so that the towns of Detmold and Paderborn were to lie within it, you would then arrive at that neighborhood from whence poured forth the mission of the most exalted Spirits who extended their mission to Northern and Western Europe. Hence, because the great centre of inspiration was there, later on the Saga said that Asgard had actually been situated on this part of the earth's surface. There, however, in the distant past, was that great centre of inspiration, which later on transferred its chief activity to the centre of the Holy Grail.

The peoples of Scandinavia, with their first Archangels, were at the same time given quite different tendencies, tendencies which at the present time are really only still expressed in the unique form of the Scandinavian mythology. If we compare, in the occult sense, the Scandinavian mythology with other mythologies which have reigned upon the earth, we may know that this Scandinavian mythology represents the primal tendencies of the Archangel who was sent up here to the North, the primal tendencies which have retained their original form, such as we would have to see in a child, when particular talents, latent genius, etc., remain at the stage of childhood. In the Archangel who was sent to Scandinavia we have those tendencies which were expressed later in the unique form of the Scandinavian mythology. Hence the great significance of the Scandinavian mythology for the comprehension of the real, inner being of the Scandinavian Folk-soul. Hence also the great significance which the understanding of this mythology has for the further development of this Archangel, who certainly had within him, in a certain way, the tendency to rise to the rank of an Archai. But to that end several things are necessary. It is necessary that in quite a definite way those tendencies should develop which in certain respects have to-day withdrawn behind the dim and shadowy influence of that Spirit of the Age who had placed himself in front of the impulse of Christianity. Although several things in the Germanic-Scandinavian mythology may appear curiously like the presentations of the Greek mythology, it must nevertheless be said that there is no other mythology on the earth which, in its remarkable construction and unique development, gives a more significant or a clearer picture of the evolution of the world than this Scandinavian mythology, so that this picture may be taken as a preparatory stage for the Anthroposophical picture of the evolution of the world.

In the way in which it has been developed out of the tendencies of the Archangel, Germanic mythology is in its pictures most significantly like that which, as the Anthroposophical picture of the world, is gradually to grow for humanity. The point in question will be, how those tendencies which once upon a time an Archangel brought with him into the world, may be developed after he has had the advantage of being educated by the Christ—Spirit of the Age. These tendencies will be able to become an important part in the guiding Spirit of the Age, if at a later stage in its development, this people understands how to bring to perfection the tendencies it has received at an earlier epoch.

This gives only a slight indication of an important problem, an important evolution of a European Archangel; we have indicated, in how far he has the foundations for a Spirit of the Age. At this point we shall stop for a little while, and then continue our studies in such a manner that, from the configuration of the Folk-soul, we shall endeavor to enter into an esoteric study of Mythology; and, in doing so, the description of the very interesting character of the Germanic and especially also of the Scandinavian mythology, will be brought before us as a special chapter.

If we wish to study the development of Germanic-Nordic history and the spiritual impulses embodied therein, we must first of all bear in mind the fundamental character of Teutonic mythology. In the last lecture I pointed out that this Teutonic mythology, despite its many points of similarity with other mythologies, is nevertheless something quite unique. It is true, however, that among the Germanic peoples and tribes of Europe there was a large measure of agreement on fundamental conceptions of mythology so that in the regions far to the South it was possible for a uniform view of mythology to exist and, on the whole, a similar understanding of the kindred relationships between those mythologies. At one time there must have been identical understanding of the unique character of the Teutonic mythology throughout all the countries where this mythology, in one form or another, existed. The common features of Teutonic mythology are very different from the essential characteristic of Greek mythology, to say nothing of the Egyptian. Everything in Teutonic mythology is interrelated and differs widely from the substance of Graeco-Roman mythology. At the present time it is not easy to understand this essential element because—on account of certain intellectual assumptions which are outside the scope of the present lecture—there is a general tendency today to embark on the study of comparative religion. But this is a field in which it is possible to perpetuate the greatest nonsense. What happens as a rule when a person compares the mythologies and religions of various peoples with one another? He compares the superficial aspects of the stories of the gods and attempts to demonstrate that the figure of a particular god which appears in one mythology is also found in a like manner in another mythology, and so on. To anyone who knows the real facts this comparative study of religions shows a most disquieting trend in the anthropological studies of the present day, because it is everywhere the practice to compare externals. The impression created by the comparative studies of religions upon one who knows the facts is comparable to the impression made by someone who declares: “Thirty years ago I made the acquaintance of a man; he wore a uniform consisting of blue trousers, red coat, and some kind of head-gear, and so on.” Then he rapidly adds: “Twenty years ago I became acquainted with a man who wore the same uniform and ten years ago I met another who also wore the same uniform.” Now if the person in question were to believe that, because the men with whom he became acquainted thirty, twenty and ten years ago wore the same uniform, they could therefore be compared with one another in respect of their essential being, he could be greatly mistaken, for a totally different person might be wearing that uniform at those different times. The essential thing is to know what sort of man is concealed behind the uniform. This parallel may seem farfetched, yet in comparative religion it is tantamount to comparing Adonis to Christ. One is merely comparing externals. The apparel and the characteristics of the Beings in the various legends may be very similar or even alike, but the point is to know what is the nature of the divine-spiritual Beings concealed behind them. If completely different Beings are present in Adonis and in Christ, then we are merely comparing externals and the parallel has only superficial value. Nevertheless this comparative method is extremely popular at the present day. Therefore the results of the extensive research in the comparative study of religion with its purely external approach are not of the least consequence. The point is, rather, that one should learn to know to some extent from an understanding of the specific differences of the Folk Spirits the manner in which a particular people arrived at its mythology or other teachings about the gods, or even at its philosophy.

We can scarcely understand the fundamental character of Teutonic mythology unless we review once more the five successive ages of civilization in the post-Atlantean epoch. These five ages of civilization were brought about by migrations from West to East, so that at the end of these migrations the most mature, the most advanced human beings pushed forward into Indian territory and founded there the sacred primeval Indian civilization. The next civilization, and nearer to our own age, was the Persian which was followed by the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian, then the Graeco-Latin civilization and finally by our own.

The essential nature of these five civilizations can only be understood if one realizes that in past ages those who participated in them, including also the Angels, the Folk Spirits or Archangels and Time Spirits, were all quite different from one another. Today we propose to devote more attention to the way in which the human beings who participated in these civilizations differed from one another.

The men who, in ancient India for example, founded the ancient Indian civilization—which then found its literary expression in the Vedas and later Indian literature—were totally different from the Graeco-Latin peoples. They were different from the Persian, from the Egypto-Chaldean peoples and most of all from those peoples who were being prepared in Europe for the fifth post-Atlantean civilization. In what respect did they differ? The entire make-up of the members of the ancient Indian peoples was completely different from that of the inhabitants of all the countries lying further West. The peoples of ancient India had reached a high stage of evolution before they developed the ‘I’. In all other aspects of evolution they had made great strides. Behind them lay a very long period of development, but they had lived through it in a kind of dim consciousness. Then the ‘I’ entered in—they awoke to consciousness of the ‘I’. Amongst the Indians this came comparatively late, at a time when the people was already to a certain extent very mature, when the had already undergone what the Teutonic peoples still had to undergo when they had developed their ego. Bear this carefully in mind. The Teutonic peoples had to experience with their fully developed ‘I’ what the inhabitants of ancient India had passed through in a dim state of consciousness, without a developed ego-consciousness.

Now what was the nature of the development which humanity could undergo in the post-Atlantean epoch? In the old Atlantean times human beings were still endowed with a high degree of the old dim clairvoyance with which they saw into the divine spiritual world. They had an insight into the hidden workings of that world. Now imagine yourselves for a moment in old Atlantis before the migrations towards the East had begun. The air was still permeated with water vapour and misty exhalations. The soul of man was different too. He could not yet differentiate between the various external sense perceptions; at that time he found the spiritual content of the world seemingly diffused around him like a spiritual aura. Thus he possessed a certain natural clairvoyance which he had to overcome. This was achieved by the operation of the forces to whose influence human beings were subject when migrating from West to East. In the course of these migrations man underwent many different stages of spiritual development. There were peoples who, during their migration eastward, at first slept through, as it were, the period of emergence from the old clairvoyance and had already reached a higher stage of development when their ego was still in a dim state of consciousness. They went through various stages of development, but their ‘I’ was still in a dull, dreamlike condition. The Indians were the furthest evolved when their ego awoke to full self-consciousness. They were so far advanced that they possessed a rich inner soul-life which no longer showed any traces of that elementary stage in soul development which still persisted for a long period of time in the peoples of Europe. The Indians had already undergone that elementary stage a long time before. They awoke to self-consciousness when they were already endowed with spiritual powers and spiritual capacities which enabled them to penetrate deeply into the spiritual worlds. Whence all the activity and positive influence of the various Angels and Archangels on the human souls had become a matter of complete indifference to the more advanced members of the Indian people in their efforts to emerge from their old twilight conditions of clairvoyance. They had no direct consciousness of the work of the Archangels and Angels and all those spiritual Beings who were active, particularly in the folk spirit. All the work of these higher Beings upon their souls, upon their astral and etheric bodies, was accomplished at a time when they were not yet ego-conscious. They awoke to ego-consciousness when their souls had already reached a very high stage of development. The most advanced among them were able, after a brief development, to read again in the Akashic Record all that had formerly taken place in the evolution of humanity, so that they gazed out into their spiritual environment, into the Cosmos, and could read in the Akashic Record what was taking place in the spiritual world and what they had undergone in a dim twilight state of consciousness. They were unconsciously guided into higher spheres. Before their ego-consciousness had awakened they had acquired spiritual capacities that were much richer than those of the Western peoples. Thus the spiritual world could be directly observed by these men. The most advanced among those who guided the Indian people had risen to such high spiritual levels that, at the time when their ego awoke, they were no longer dependent upon the ego in order to observe how human development sprang forth, so to speak, from the Spirits of Form or Powers, but were more intimately associated with the Beings we call Spirits of Movement or Mights and those above them in the second Hierarchy, the Spirits of Wisdom or Dominions. These Beings were of special interest to them. The spiritual Beings of lower rank were, on the other hand, Beings whose domain they had already shared in former times and who therefore were no longer of particular importance to them. Thus they looked up to what later on they called the sum-total of the Spirits of Movement and of the Spirits of Wisdom, to that which was later characterized by the Greek expressions Dynamis and Kyriotetes. They beheld again these Beings and called them “Mula-prakriti”, the sum-total of the Spirits of Movement, and “Maha-purusha”, the sum-total of the Spirits of Wisdom, that which lives as if in a spiritual unity. They could attain to this vision because those who belonged to this people became ego conscious at such a late stage of development. They had already undergone what the later peoples still had to experience through their ‘I’.

The peoples belonging to the ancient Persian civilization were less highly developed. Their development was such that through their peculiar cognitive capacity, and through the awakening of their ‘I’ at a lower stage of evolution, they looked to the Powers or Spirits of Form. With these they were especially familiar; they could understand them to some extent and they were particularly interested in them. The peoples belonging to the Persian communities awakened to ego-consciousness one stage lower than the Indians, but it was a stage which the peoples of the West still had to reach. Hence the Persians were conversant with the Powers or Spirits of Form, known collectively as the ‘Amshaspands”. They were the radiations which we know as Spirits of Form or Powers and which, from their point of view, the peoples of the Persian civilization were specially fitted to perceive clairvoyantly.

We then come to the Chaldean peoples. They were already aware of the Primal Forces, the directing Time Spirits, the Spirits of Personality. Now the peoples of the Graeco-Latin age also had a certain consciousness of these Primal Forces or Spirits of Personality, but in a different form. In their case there was an additional factor which may help to clarify our understanding. The Greeks were nearer to the Germanic peoples. They became ego-conscious at a higher stage than the Germanic-Nordic peoples. The working of the Angels and the Archangels in the human soul which the Northern peoples still experienced was no longer directly experienced by the Graeco-Latin peoples, though they still had a distinct recollection of it. The difference between the Germanic and Graeco-Latin peoples is that the latter still preserved a memory of the participation of Angels and Archangels in the development of their soul-life. On the whole they had no clear recollection of this stage for they were still in a state of diminished consciousness. But now in clairvoyant memory they recalled this experience quite distinctly. The creation of this whole world, the working of the Angels and Archangels, both normal and abnormal, in the human soul was known to the Greeks. They preserved in their souls vivid memory pictures of what they had experienced. Now memory is much clearer, takes on sharper outlines than the immediate experiences of the present moment. It is no longer so fresh, no longer so youthful; memory or recollection has sharper contours, sharper outlines. Greek mythology is a memory-picture in bold, clear outlines of the influence or positive activity of the Angels and Archangels upon the human soul. If we do not approach Greek mythology in this way, if we simply compare Greek names with other names in the various mythologies, if we do not take into account the influence of special forces, nor understand the Significance of the figures that appear as Apollo and Minerva and so on, then we are making a superficial study of comparative religion; we are only comparing externals. The manner or mode of perception in those days is the important point.

When we have grasped this, we realize that Greek mythology was built up from conscious memories. The Egyptians and Chaldeans had only a dim recollection of the activity of the Angels and Archangels, but they were able to perceive the world of Primal Forces. It seemed as if they were beginning to lose the memory of Angelic beings. Persian mythology, on the other hand, had completely forgotten the world of the Angels or Archangels, but at the same time men were able to look into the world of the Powers or Spirits of Form. That which is to be found in Greek mythology had been forgotten by the Persians and totally forgotten by the Indians. When they looked into the Akashic Record they perceived again the entire sequence of events of the earlier epochs and created pictures of the earlier events out of their knowledge which however was divine knowledge which they owed to more highly developed spiritual powers. This also helps to explain the great difficulty which the peoples of the East experienced in understanding the spiritual life of the West and that superior attitude which they adopted towards the spiritual life of the West. They arc prepared to accept the materialistic civilization of the West, but the spiritual culture of the West—unless they come to it indirectly through Spiritual Science—remains more or less closed to them. They had already reached a high stage of evolution at a time when Christ Jesus had not yet descended upon Earth. He only incarnated in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. That is an event which could no longer be grasped with the forces which the Indian people had developed. In order to apprehend the coming of Christ one needed faculties belonging to a less lofty station of the ‘I’—a dwelling of the ‘I’ in more humble forces of the human soul.

The Teutonic peoples not only preserved a memory of the working of the Angels and Archangels into the soul of man, but even at the time when Christ Jesus walked upon Earth were aware that they were still subject to these influences and that they participated in the activity of the Angels and Archangels who were still active in their souls. When they underwent these inner experiences of the soul the Graeco-Latin peoples recalled something which they had gone through in former times. The Germanic peoples responded to these experiences more personally. Their ego had awakened at the stage of existence when the Folk Spirits and those spiritual Beings who were still subject to the Folk Spirits were still active in their souls; hence these peoples were nearest to the events that took place in old Atlantis.

In old Atlantis man beheld the spiritual Powers and spoke of a kind of unity of the Godhead, because he enjoyed direct perception into the old primeval states of human evolution. At that time one could still perceive the dominion of the Spirits of Wisdom and of the Spirits of Movement, a dominion which the Indians of a later epoch perceived again in the Akashic Records. These Germanic peoples of the West had raised themselves one stage above this level of perception, so that they experienced directly the transition from the old perception to the new. They perceived an active weaving of real spiritual powers at a time when the ego was not yet awake. But at the same time they saw the gradual awakening of the ‘I’ and the penetration of man's soul by the Angels and Archangels. They were aware of this direct transition. They preserved a clairvoyant memory of an earlier weaving life, when everything was seen through the dim mists of Atlantis and when, from out of this sea of mist, there emerged what we have come to know as the divine-spiritual Beings immediately above man. The old Gods, however, who were active before the Gods intervened in the life of the human soul, and who could now be seen and with whom men felt themselves to be united, those divine Beings who were active in the very far distant past at the time of old Atlantis, were called the Vanir. After Atlantis men saw the weaving of the Angels and Archangels whom they called the Aesir. They were the Beings who as Angels and Archangels were concerned with the ‘I’ of man which then awoke at an elementary level. These Beings took over the leadership of the Germanic peoples. What the other peoples of the East had “slept through”, namely, the perception of how the soul, the inner life, was gradually developed by means of the various forces which were bestowed upon it by the normal and abnormal Angels and Archangels, this had to be experienced by the peoples of Europe beginning from the lowest stage. They had to be fully conscious in order that these soul-forces might gradually develop.

Thus Nordic man perceived the figures of the Gods, the divine Beings working directly upon his soul; he saw the human soul wresting its way out of the Cosmos. This was direct experience to him. He did not recall in retrospect how the souls of men had been ‘in-formed’ into their bodies; rather did he see all this as an immediate and present happening. He was there with his own ego; he was a conscious witness of it. Even until the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries AD he retained this feeling, this understanding of how the forces of the soul are gradually formed and crystallized into the body. In the first place he beheld the Archangelic Beings who worked in his soul and endowed him with his psychic potentialities, and the greatest of these Archangels was Wotan or Odin.¹ He saw him at work upon his soul and he saw how he worked into his soul. How did he perceive Wotan or Odin? Who or what was he? In what form did Nordic man learn to love Odin and above all to understand him? He learned to recognize him as one of those Archangels who in the past had decided to renounce their development to higher stages. He came to know Odin as one of the abnormal Archangels, as one of the great figures of renunciation in ancient times, who had assumed the office of Archangel when they took upon themselves the important task of working into the souls of men. Nordic ma experienced the activity of Odin at a time when he was still in the process of giving the gift of language to the incarnating soul of man. The manner in which Odin himself worked upon his peoples in order to endow them with language has survived in a remarkable way. It was described as a Divine Initiation. The means by which Odin acquired the power to give the gift of language to the Teutonic peoples is described as follows: before acquiring this capacity Odin had undergone Initiation by drinking at the spring of Mimir the magic draught of the Gods, that magic draught which once upon a time in the primeval past had been the draught of the Giants. This draught embodied not merely a generalized form of wisdom, but represented the wisdom that lives directly in the spoken sounds of speech. At his Initiation Odin won power over that wisdom which lives in sound. He learned how to make use of it when he underwent a long Initiation which lasted nine days and from which he was then released by Mimir, the ancient bearer of wisdom. Thus Odin became Lord of the power of language. This explains why the later saga traces the language of the bards or skalds back to Odin. Runic lore which in olden times was thought to be much more closely related to language than later literature and letters was also traced back to Odin. Therefore the manner in which the soul, indirectly through the etheric body, and interpenetrating the physical body, acquired the power of speech through the appropriate Archangel is expressed in the wonderful stories about Odin.

Similar Archangels are to be found amongst the companions of Odin: Hönir who gave the power of thought and Lödur who gave that which is intimately connected with race, namely pigmentation and the character of the blood. These two Beings, therefore, are Archangels more in the normal line. In Vili and Ve, on the other hand, we have Archangels of abnormal development. They are Beings who work more in the inner life, in the hidden recesses of the soul as I pointed out in the last lecture. But an ego which is itself at an abnormal stage of evolution when it witnesses the cultivation of the subordinate forces of the human soul, feels itself to be intimately related to an abnormal Archangel. Odin, therefore, is not regarded as an abnormal Archangel, but rather as the kind of Archangel whose renunciation is akin to that of the Western peoples who arc more aware that their inner development had been deferred, whereas the Eastern peoples by-passed certain stages of their psychic development until they awakened to ego-consciousness. Hence there lives especially in the soul of the Teutonic peoples all that is associated with the Archangelic forces of Odin stirring in the primitive depths of the human soul.

When we stated that the Angels are responsible for transmitting to the individual human beings the achievements of the Archangels, so also an ‘I’ which awakens at such an elementary level of soul-life is particularly concerned in seeing that the intentions of the Archangels are communicated to that ego. Hence Germanic-Nordic man has an interest in an Angel-being who is endowed with special power, but who at the same time is closely related to the single human being and his individuality. And that Being is Thor.² We can only recognize Thor when we see in him a Being who could have risen to far higher rank had he followed the normal course of evolution, but who renounced advancement comparatively early and remained at the stage of a Angel in order that, at the time when man awoke to ego-consciousness in the course of his soul's evolution, he could become the guiding Spirit in the spiritual life of the Teutonic peoples. What gives the immediate feeling that Thor is related to the individual human ego is that what was to be transmitted to every individual ‘I’ from the spiritual world could, in fact, be transmitted. If we bear this in mind we shall also understand more clearly the fragmentary information that has come down to us. It is important to have a right understanding of these individual Gods. Germanic-Nordic man perceived and himself experienced this imprinting of the soul in the body. He witnessed the integration of the ego into the body and the birth of ego-consciousness.

Now we know that the ego is incarnated in the pulsation of our blood and that everything within has its counterpart without, that everything microcosmic has its parallel in the macrocosmic. The work of Odin who gave speech and runic wisdom, who worked indirectly through the breathing, has its counterpart in the movement of the wind in the macrocosm. The regular inhalation of the air through our respiratory organs which transform the air into words and speech corresponds to the movements and currents of the wind in the macrocosm outside. Just as we feel within ourselves the power of Odin in the transformation of air into words, so too we must perceive his presence and activity in the ambient winds. But those who still preserved a certain degree of clairvoyance really saw the presence of Odin everywhere in the cosmic element of the air, saw how he formed speech by means of his breath. This Nordic man perceived as a unity. Just as that which lives in us and organizes our speech—that is to say, in the form in which speech existed amongst the Nordic peoples—penetrates into the ego and sets the blood pulsating so too the inner organization of speech in man finds its parallel in the macrocosm in thunder and lightning. The gift of speech precedes the birth of the ego in man. Hence the ‘I’ is everywhere felt to be the son of Odin to whom we owe the gift of speech. Thor plays an active part in the implanting of the individual ego, and in the microcosm the pulsation of the blood corresponds to the thunder and lightning in the macrocosm. Thus, in the macrocosm, the parallel to the pulsation of the blood in man is the thunder and lightning in the sighing winds and the weaving clouds. Germanic-Nordic man sees this clairvoyantly as a unity; he perceives that the soughing of the wind and the flashing of the lightning are intimately related to the breathing. He sees how the air he inhales passes into the blood stream and sets the ‘I’ pulsating. Today this is looked upon as a physical process, but to Germanic-Nordic man it was an astral experience. He felt the kinship of the inner fire of the blood and of outer lightning. He felt the pulse-beat in his blood and knew it to be the pulse-beat of the ‘I’. He was aware of this inner pulsation and knew that it would recur. But he paid no heed to the external physical process. All this was seen clairvoyantly. He felt that it was the deed of Thor which caused the pulse to beat and made the blood return again and again to the same source. He felt the Thor-force in his ‘I’ as the hammer of Thor returning ever and again into his hand; he felt the power of one of the mightiest Angels who had ever been honoured or revered, because he was a mighty Being who was seen to have remained behind at the Angel stage.

The way in which the spiritual force holds together the physical body is described in the Teutonic mythology where it says that the ‘I’ is that which holds together the soul and body in the formative stage. Germanic-Nordic man sees the weaving of the body and soul from within, and in later years he still understands how, originating in the astral, his inner life becomes integrated, how the inner answers, so to speak, to the outer. He could still respond when he learned from the Initiates that man was built out of the Cosmos. He was able to look back to earlier stages, to what had been told him about the events which reflected the relationship between the Angels and the Archangels, to those earlier stages when man was born out of the macrocosm in physical-spiritual form. He was able to perceive how the individual was built up out of the macrocosm and how he was an integral part of it. He sought in the macrocosm for those occurrences which are reflected in the microcosm. He could distinguish in the human microcosm, the microcosmic North, the cool realm where human thoughts are woven and whence the body is supplied with the twelve cranial nerves. He sees the weaving spirit in what he calls Nebelheim or Niflheim; he sees the twelve rivers which converge to form physically the twelve cranial nerves. He sees how the forces that issue from the microcosmic South, from the human heart, counteract the forces from above. He looks for them outside in the macrocosm and understands when he is told that they are called Muspelheim. Thus, even in the Christian era, it was still possible for him to comprehend the microcosm in terms of the whole macrocosm. And one could go back further still and show him how man gradually originated out of the macrocosm as extract of the whole world. He was able to look back into that time and he could understand that these events have a long ancestry, which he himself still sees as a working of the Angels and Archangels into his soul. He realizes that these events have a long ancestry and the conceptions he thus acquires we encounter in the old Teutonic Genesis, as the origin of mankind out of the entire macrocosm.

From Ginnungagap, the primeval abyss of Teutonic mythology, a new Earth emerges after having passed through the three earlier incarnations of Old Saturn, Old Sun, and Old Moon. The emergent world without form and void comes forth again out of Pralaya where the kingdoms of nature are not yet differentiated and men are still undivided and completely spiritual beings. It was then clear to Nordic man how the later conditions have developed out of this original abyss.

Now it is interesting to see how the events of those times are portrayed in Teutonic mythology in the form of imaginative pictures, events which we in our anthroposophical teachings describe in more sophisticated terms, using concepts in place of images. In Anthroposophy we are given a description of the events which took place when the Sun and Moon were still united, of the separation of the Moon and of the evolutionary transition to the later “Riesenheim”. Everything which existed during the Atlantean epoch is described as a continuation of earlier epochs and as the particular concern of the Teutonic or Germanic people.

Today I only wanted to give an idea of how the Germanic peoples awakened to the ego while still at an elementary stage of evolution and how Nordic man perceived in full consciousness the Folk Soul, the soul of Thor and so on. I wanted to show how, as an ego-being, he was able to respond immediately to the in-weaving of still higher Beings who, however, come from an entirely different realm from those we find among the Eastern peoples.

Tomorrow we shall attempt to explore the lesser-known branches of Teutonic mythology. We shall discover how they are harbingers of that which dwells in the Folk Souls and we shall see what is the nature of our Western Folk Souls.

• 1. See Appendix.
• 2. See Appendix.

Let us continue with our studies which are to bring us closer and closer to a deeper understanding of man's being and task in the world. You will remember that in one of the group lectures held here this winter (10th November) we spoke about the four different ways in which it is possible for the human being to be ill, and we indicated that illnesses arising as the actual result of karma would not be discussed until later. Today we want to talk about at least a certain part of this karmic cause of illness.

We explained before that the division of man's being into four members, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, enables us to have a kind of survey of the phenomena of illness in so far as each of these members comes to expression in certain organs and organ complexes of the physical body itself. That is, the ego has its chief physical equivalent in the blood, the astral body in the nervous system, the etheric body in all that comes under the heading of the glandular system, and the physical body represents itself. Then we presented the illnesses arising out of the ego as such, and which therefore have their physical manifestation in irregularities in the functioning of the blood. We indicated that what originates in irregularities in the astral body manifests in irregularities in the nervous system, and what originates in the etheric body manifests in the glandular system, and that it is in the physical body that we have to look for those illnesses that primarily have external causes. All this, however, only points to that aspect of illness that is connected with the span of one human lifetime. Now anyone who is able to look at world existence in a spiritual scientific way has an inkling that illness must also depend to some extent on a person's karma, on that great law of causes which show the spiritual connections between man's various incarnations. But the ways of karma are very intricate and manifold, and we must study the more detailed composition of karmic connections before we can understand anything about them. Let us talk today about a few aspects of something that is very interesting for people to know, namely, how illnesses are connected with causes made by man himself in earlier lives. In order to do this we must say a few introductory words on the subject of how the law of karma works in human life. We shall be referring to some things most of you know from other lectures, but it is essential to have an exact picture of how the karmic causes of one life become the effects in the next. Therefore we shall have to say a few words about what actually happens to man spiritually in the period after death.

We know that on passing through the portal of death man first of all has the kind of experiences that come about because he is now in an entirely different situation from anything met with in life. His ego and astral body are connected with the etheric body, but without the physical body being there. He has, as it were, laid that aside. This only happens in exceptional circumstances in life, as we have often mentioned. During life, when man is asleep, he lays his etheric body aside as well as his physical body, hence this combination of ego, astral body and etheric body exists only after death, and then for a short while only, just a matter of days. The experiences that follow immediately after death have also been mentioned; man's feeling of growing larger and larger beyond the space he previously occupied, until he encompasses all things. We have mentioned the picture of his past life standing before him as a great tableau. Then, after a number of days that varies individually, the second corpse, the etheric body, is laid aside and absorbed by the general world ether, except in those cases we mentioned whilst discussing intimate questions of reincarnation, when the etheric body is preserved in a certain way for use in the future. Nevertheless an extract of the etheric body is kept, being the fruit of life experience. Then follows the life that is determined by the combination of ego and astral body without man being bound to a physical body. This is the period we call Kamaloca in anthroposophical literature, and often describe it, too, as the period of learning to do without the physical body and physical existence altogether.

We know that when man has just passed through the portal of death he still has all those forces in his astral body which were there at the moment of death. For he has laid aside only the physical body, the instrument of enjoyment and action. This he has no longer, but the astral body he still has. He still has the bearer of passions, instincts and desires. He still hankers for the same things—out of habit you might say—that he hankered for in life. Now whilst he was alive it was through the instrument of the physical body that man satisfied his desires. After death he no longer has this instrument, thus he is deprived of the possibility of satisfaction. This is felt as a kind of thirst for physical life until man has grown accustomed to live solely in the world of the spirit and to have solely what can be acquired out of the spirit. Until man has learnt to do this, he continues living in what we call the period of breaking himself of his habits, or Kamaloca.

We have already described the remarkable way in which this period of life runs its course, and we know that at this stage of his existence man's life flows backwards. This is something that is difficult for newcomers to anthroposophy to understand at first. Man passes through the Kamaloca period which lasts roughly a third of the length of his earthly life—in reverse sequence. Assuming that a man dies in his fortieth year, he will pass through all the experiences he has gone through in life in the reverse order, beginning with his thirty-ninth year, then the thirty-eighth, the thirty-seventh, the thirty-sixth, and so on. He really does go through his whole life backwards, right to the moment of birth. This is what is behind the beautiful words of Christ, when He was speaking of man's entry into the spiritual world or the kingdom of Heaven: ‘Except ye ... become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven!’ In other words, man lives backwards as far as his first moments and being absolved of everything, he can then enter Devachan or the kingdom of Heaven, and be in the spiritual world from then onwards. This is difficult to imagine, as we are so very accustomed to time being absolute, like it is on the physical plane. It requires considerable effort to get used to this, but it will come.

Now we must picture to ourselves what man actually does in Kamaloca. We could say a great deal about it, of course. Today, however, we shall concentrate solely on what concerns the question of the karmic cause of illnesses. So what I am about to say must not be taken as the only kind of experience in Kamaloca, but as one among many.

We can visualise first of all what use man makes of this time in Kamaloca for his future by imagining that the man who died at forty had done something in his twentieth year that hurt someone else. When somebody has done something like this that hurt another person, it has a certain effect on his whole life. Any action of man that hurts another being or creature or the world in general, hinders the doer in his development. This is what the pilgrimage of life means for me, that the primary force of the soul, as it goes from incarnation to incarnation, is set for further development. And this development progresses in such a fashion that man as it were is always putting obstacles in his own path. If this primary force were the only thing that were active—it is this very force that is to bring the soul back to the spiritual—man would need only a very short time on earth. But in that case the whole of earth evolution would have taken an entirely different course; it would also have failed to achieve its purpose. You must not think that man would be better off if he put no obstacles in his own way. It is only by setting himself these handicaps that he grows strong and acquires experience, for it is the very eradicating and overcoming of these hindrances that will make him the strong being he must become by the end of earth evolution. It is thoroughly in keeping with earth evolution that he puts stones in his own path. If he did not have to muster the strength to remove these obstacles he would not acquire this strength at all. Then the world would be the poorer. We must altogether disregard the good and evil connected with these hindrances and look solely at the wisdom of the world that intended, right from the beginning, that man should have the possibility of setting himself hindrances in earthly evolution so that in removing them he could acquire strength for later. We could even say that the wise guidance of the world allowed man to become evil and gave him the possibility of doing harm, so that in repairing the harm and overcoming the evil he can become stronger in the course of karmic development than he would have become had he reached his goal without effort. This is how we should understand the significance and justification of obstacles and hindrances.

When, therefore, whilst living his life backwards in Kamaloca after death, a man encounters some harm he did to a fellow man in his twentieth year, he experiences this harm just as much as the joy and good he brought to others. Only now it is in his own astral body that he experiences the harm he did to someone else. Supposing he hit someone when he was twenty, so that it really hurt. In his reverse journey through life he feels it in his own astral body in exactly the same way the other person did when it happened. You experience objectively in the spiritual world everything you yourself did in the external world, and in the process you acquire the strength and the inclination to compensate for the pain in one of your future incarnations. Your own astral body tells you what it felt like, and you realise you have laid an obstacle in the way of your further development. This has to be cleared away, otherwise you cannot get beyond it. This is the moment you form the intention of getting rid of the obstacle. So when you have lived through the Kamaloca period, you arrive back in your childhood filled with the intention of getting rid of all the hindrances you created in life. You are full of intentions, and it is the force of these intentions that brings about the special character of your future lives on earth.

Let us suppose that in his twentieth year B hurt A. He now has to feel the pain himself, and resolves to recompense A in a future life, that is, in the physical world, where the injury was done. The force of this good resolution forms a bond of attraction between B and A and brings them together in the next life. That mysterious force of attraction that brings people together in life springs from what they have acquired in Kamaloca. Our experiences there lead us to those people in life whom we have to recompense or with whom we have any kind of connection. Now you will realise that the Kamaloca forces we have taken into ourselves for the righting of wrongs in life can by no means always be worked out in a single life. It can then happen that we form connections with a great number of people in one life, and that next time we are in Kamaloca we have the possibility of meeting them again. Now this depends, too, on the other people, whether we meet them again in the following life. That spreads itself over many lives. In one life we correct this, in another life that, and so on. You must certainly not imagine that we can immediately put everything right in one life. It depends entirely on whether the other person also develops in his soul the corresponding bond of attraction.

Now let us take a closer look at the working of karma, by examining a particular example. In Kamaloca we form the intention of carrying out a certain thing in the next or one of our future lives. This force planted in our soul remains in it and does not leave it. We are born again with all the forces we have mustered. This is inevitable. Now life consists not only of those things we have to put right in our karmic connections although what we are about to say can also be related to that. We may have put hindrances in our path, lived in a one-sided way, not made proper use of our life, living only for particular pleasures and tasks and allowing other possibilities that life offered us to pass us by, so that other faculties have remained dormant. This also calls forth karmic causes in Kamaloca, and we bring this with us into life. Then we are born again as babies. Suppose we live to be ten or twenty. Our souls contain all the forces we have mustered, and when they have become mature they make their appearance. During a certain period of our lives an inner necessity will doubtless arise urging us to carry them out. So let us suppose that in our twentieth year we feel an inner urge to carry out a particular deed, because we made the resolution in Kamaloca. For the sake of simplicity, let us keep to the example of feeling the urge to recompense someone. The bond of attraction has brought us together, and there he is. As far as the external situation goes, we can quite well do the deed. Yet there can still be an obstacle. The compensating deed could be one to which our own organism is not equal. Our organism is also dependent on the forces of heredity. This makes for disharmony in any life. Man is born on the one side into these forces of heredity. His physical and etheric body inherit the qualities that can be passed down through the generations. This hereditary stream is, of course, bound to have some measure of external connection with the karma our soul has set itself. For as it comes down from the spiritual world our soul is attracted to the kind of parents through whom it can inherit those qualities that come closest to our requirements. They never, however, entirely correspond, for in the body this cannot be so. There is always a certain discrepancy between the forces of heredity and what the soul brings with it from the past. Now it all depends on whether the soul is strong enough to overcome all the obstacles in the line of heredity, and is capable of re-forming the organism during the course of a lifetime, so that it overcomes what does not suit it. People vary a great deal in this respect. Some souls have acquired great strength in the course of previous incarnations. A soul of this nature has to incarnate in the most suitable body possible, though it will not be absolutely suitable. Yet this soul might be strong enough more or less to overcome everything not suited to it, though this is not necessarily always the case. Let us follow this up in detail by looking at the brain.

This instrument of our life of concepts and ideas is inherited externally through our line of heredity. Its delicate convolutions are formed in one way or another according to this line of heredity. The soul will always to some extent have the inner strength to overcome what does not suit it and bring its instrument into harmony with its own forces, but only to a certain extent. The stronger the soul is the better it can do this. And if circumstances are such that it becomes impossible for the soul forces to overcome the resistance in the composition of the brain, the brain cannot be used properly. And then there occurs what we call mental defectiveness, mental illness. A melancholic temperament arises too, because the soul forces are not strong enough to overcome certain things in the organism. In the middle of life—it is different at the beginning and at the end—the forces of our soul always encounter a certain unsuitability in their instrument. This is the secret that always lies hidden behind the inner conflict and disharmony in human nature. What men often imagine to be the reason for their discontent is usually just a mask. In reality the reasons for it are as we have described. Thus we see the relationship between what the soul takes with it from incarnation to incarnation and what it receives from the line of heredity.

Now let us suppose we are reborn, and when we are twenty our soul feels the urge to compensate for a particular deed. We have also encountered the person concerned, yet our soul is not capable of overcoming the inner resistance necessary for doing the deed. We always have to set our forces in motion when we have a deed to do. A person does not usually notice anything happening within him, and, to begin with, he does not need to notice. The following might easily happen: There is a person who, at the age of twenty, feels the urge in his soul to compensate for something. External circumstances are favourable, but his inner strength cannot take hold of his organs and carry out what he should do.

A person does not need to know about all this, yet he will be aware of its effect. This effect appears in the form of some illness, and here lies the karmic connection between what happened in a previous life and the illness. The spiritual cause of the illness will guide the whole process in such a way that the person thereby becomes capable of carrying out the deed of compensation the next time he has the opportunity. To put it another way, in our twentieth year we are not capable of doing a particular deed. The urge is there, nevertheless, and the soul wants to do it. What does the soul do instead? It struggles, as it were, with its unusable organ, attacks it and destroys it. When the organ that should have been instrumental in carrying out the deed externally has been destroyed by these soul forces, then comes the inevitable reaction, which we call the process of healing, and the forces of the organism have to be called up to restore the organ. This organ, which was destroyed because it was unfit to perform the task, is rebuilt through the illness so as to be capable of performing it, although by the time the illness is over it might well be too late. But then the soul has now gained the strength to mould the growth and development of this organ in the course of life in such a way that in the next incarnation the deed can be carried out. Thus illness can be the very thing that makes us fit to carry out our karmic obligations in another life.

Here we have a secret karmic connection between illness and further development, for in reality illness is a process of further development. In order that the soul develops the power to form an organ in the way it needs, the unsuitable organ has to be destroyed and rebuilt again by the soul forces. Here we come upon a law in human life that has to be described somewhat as follows: Man has to acquire his strength by overcoming obstacles in the world, one after another. Strictly speaking all our strength was acquired by the overcoming of obstacles in previous incarnations. Our present capacities are the result of our illnesses in earlier lives.

To make this especially clear, let us imagine that a soul is not yet capable of making use of the mid-brain. How can it acquire the capacity to use it properly? It can only do this by becoming conscious of the incapacity, destroying the mid-brain and rebuilding it, and in this process of rebuilding it the capacity is acquired. We become capable of everything that we ourselves have taken through the process of destroying and rebuilding. This has been felt to be true by all those people who, in the various religions, have connected a very exalted being with this process of destroying and rebuilding. In the religious beliefs of the Indians ‘Shiva’ represents the ruling powers that destroy and then restore things to life again.

That is one of the ways in which karma instigates a process of illness. In the case of illnesses that concern mankind in general rather than man as an individual, we find something else that gives them a more general character. For instance we see typical cases of children's diseases appearing at certain times. These show nothing else than that the child is learning inner control of a certain part of his organism, after which he can then be in control of it in all his future incarnations. We should regard illness as a process that makes a person capable. We shall then come to think of illness in quite a different way. We must not, of course, conclude from this that if someone is knocked down by a train it should be explained in the same way. That sort of thing does not come under the same heading as illness nor what we have just been discussing. But there is another kind of karmic cause of illness which is just as interesting, and which we shall only understand if we look at it in greater detail.

Suppose you learn one or another thing, the sort of thing you learn in life. First of all you have to learn it, for the most important accomplishments in life have first to be learnt. The process of learning is absolutely necessary. But that is not the end of it, for learning is only the most external part. The learning of a thing is still a long way short of all that we shall experience through it. We are born into life with definite capacities acquired partly through heredity and partly through our earlier incarnations. The range of our capacities is after all limited. In the course of each incarnation we increase our store of experience. This acquired knowledge is not so closely connected with us as the temperament and disposition and so on that we have brought with us into life. What we learn in life to begin with in the way of memory and habit is less closely connected with us, and therefore it also makes its appearance in life in a more fragmentary manner. Not until after death does it appear in the etheric body in the great memory tableau. Then we have to incorporate this into us and make it part of ourselves.

Let us assume then that we have learnt something in life and are then born again. In our new life it can well be that because of hereditary or other conditions, or perhaps because our learning has not been harmonious, and although we have learnt something, it was not sufficient to have the whole thing at our finger tips, then on reincarnating, we develop what we have learnt in one direction but not in another. Let us assume we learnt something in life that necessitates having a certain part of our brain organised in a particular way or having a certain characteristic in the blood circulation in a succeeding life, and then let us assume that we had failed to learn the other things that are a necessary part of this. This, however, is not necessarily an immediate drawback. Man has to take forward leaps in life, and he has to learn from experience that he has done something in a one-sided way. Now he is born again with the fruits of what he has learnt, but he lacks the possibility of developing himself in such a way that everything can come to expression, and what he has learnt from life can really be carried into effect. A man might for instance have received a certain degree of initiation into the great mysteries of existence in one of his incarnations, and when he is born again these forces that were planted in him want to come to expression. But let us assume it has been impossible for him to develop certain forces which could produce the necessary harmony in the organism. At a certain point in his life it will inevitably happen that what he previously learnt wants to come to expression. But an essential organ is missing. So what happens? An illness has to occur that could have a very, very deep-seated karmic cause. And again part of the organism has to be destroyed and rebuilt afresh. And by means of this rebuilding of the organ the soul senses which are the right forces in the other direction, and it takes this feeling along with it. When this is acquired this way, or even through initiation, it usually happens that the fruits show themselves in that same incarnation. That is, an illness occurs in the course of which the soul experiences what it lacks. And then, for instance, something can take place immediately after the illness that otherwise would not have been achieved. It could be that a person would have been able to reach a certain stage of enlightenment in his previous life, but he could not get through to part of his brain, and he did not develop the strength to break through the resistance. Then this offending organ must inevitably be destroyed, and a severe illness can result. Then comes the rebuilding, whereby the soul becomes aware of the forces necessary to overcome the blockage, and the awaited enlightenment ensues. The process of suffering an illness can definitely be regarded as a sign that something important is to follow.

Now we are touching on matters that our profane world would certainly sneer at. Yet many a person will have noticed a kind of perpetual discontent, as though part of the soul could not come to expression and life becomes impossible. A severe illness breaks out, and the overcoming of this illness brings an entirely new impulse, like a feeling of release that the blockage has really gone and the organ can be used. This was all due to the organ being unusable. In the life cycles of the present, people still have a lot of these blockages, of course, and they cannot all be overcome at once. We must not necessarily think of spiritual enlightenment every time; this kind of thing also happens in connection with many less significant life processes.

Thus we see that on the one hand we are faced with the necessity of developing some particular quality, and on the other hand the course of karma triggers off illness. Therefore we should never really be satisfied with remarking in a trivial sense: ‘If I get ill I have brought it upon myself through my karma.’ For we should not only think of karma in the past and of illness as being the settlement, but we should actually think of illness as just the second stage, which arises in order to produce creative strength and ability in the future. We thoroughly misunderstand illness and karma if we only look at the past; this turns karma into a merely accidental law of fate. But when we can look through present karma into the future, then karma becomes a law of action and of fruitfulness in life.

All this points to a significant law governing human existence. And in order to get at least some idea of it today—we shall return to it in greater detail later—let us look back into that ancient time in which man came into being in his present form, the Lemurian epoch. Man gradually descended from divine-spiritual existence into today's external existence, cladding himself first of all in his sheaths, and set out along the path of incarnations in the outer world, moving forward from incarnation to incarnation until the present time. Before man began to incarnate, the possibility was not there for him to engender illness within himself in the way he can today. Not until man had acquired the ability to control his relationship with the outside world was he capable of doing wrong and therefore also capable of producing wrong formations of his organs and of engendering the possibility of illness. It was impossible before that for man to give rise to the process of illness in himself. Whilst divine influence was still supreme, and it was not yet in man's own hands to conduct his own life, there was no possibility of illness. Then this possibility of illness arose. If this is how it was, where can we best learn the way to heal? The best way of doing this is to look back into those times when divine-spiritual powers sent their influence into man and endowed him with perfect health, with no possibility of illness, that is, before his first incarnation. People who have had any knowledge of this have always felt this way. Bearing this in mind, I would now like you to try and look beneath the surface at the kind of thing expressed in mythologies. I will not actually draw your attention to the source of medical science proper in the Egyptian Hermes cult, but only to the Greek and Roman cult of Aesculapius.

Aesculapius, the son of Apollo, is so to speak the father of Greek physicians. And what does Greek mythology tell us about him? While still a boy his father takes him to the mountains where he can become the pupil of the centaur Chiron. It is Chiron the centaur who teaches Aesculapius, the father of pharmacy about the healing forces in the plants and elsewhere on the earth. What kind of being is Chiron the centaur? He is a being of the kind that existed before man descended in Lemurian times: a being half man and half animal. This myth tells us that Aesculapius is taken to the particular Mystery where he is shown those forces of health which were the source of man's health before man came down into his first incarnation.

Thus we find this important law expressed in a Greek myth, too; this great spiritual fact, that must be of particular interest to us, coming as it does at the start of man's earthly pilgrimage. The myths, in particular, will only be recognised as pictures of the deepest happenings of life when human beings get beyond the ABC of spiritual science. Myths, especially, are pictures of the deepest secrets of human existence.

When the whole of life is looked at in this way, it will be judged accordingly, and—this must be stressed more and more—spiritual science will grow into something that will become part of everyday life. Men will live spiritual science, and not until that time comes will the original intention of spiritual science come to realisation. Spiritual science will become the great impulse for the ascent of mankind, for mankind's real welfare and real progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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