The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From the descriptions given yesterday you will have gathered that man has gradually to acquire freedom in the present period of world and human evolution. On looking back into the past evolution of the world, we find how, in respect of his most important activities, his walking, speaking, thinking, man has been prepared from above by divine-spiritual Beings. We see how, in order to ensure that what these divine Beings have accomplished in man during his earthly existence shall take effect, if only unconsciously, he is always led between death and rebirth into association with these Beings.

You will remember that I spoke of a man being led through the forces of Sun and Moon, and then, in the realm of the Sun, through Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, into the world of the stars, spiritually understood. To this I would add that when a man in the life between death and rebirth has, so to say, to retrace his steps after, as at present, progressing in the region of the planetoids to a perception of the Saturn impulses, on this return journey he comes into relation with the most sublime divine-spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. These are spiritual Beings whose impulses extend over both spiritual and natural existence. While entering into the laws of nature and infusing them with life and with spirit, they have the purpose of bringing about enduring harmony between these laws of nature and the moral life of the whole Cosmos. They are Beings who have never appeared in any physical form, yet in the spiritual world they exercise a scarcely conceivable power upon the Earth, and make it possible for moral law to be brought into continuous harmony with natural law. And so, because a man during his existence beyond the Earth is able constantly to give new life to impulses of the past, he reaches a point in his evolution when he can work in accordance with these extra-earthly impulses.

In the present epoch of the evolution of world and of man, however, we are faced with the task of taking under our own free control everything that in the past was more or less a matter of compulsion, determined for all human beings by higher Powers.

When we survey this evolution of world and of man we find that at a certain definite time man encountered difficulties which had to be overcome on his way from being led exclusively by divine-spiritual Beings to the conscious work of raising himself to knowledge of these Beings and so to the gaining of human freedom. This point of time, which in a certain sense signifies the greatest crisis in the whole evolution of man, came approximately 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha. Such dates are only approximate owing to time being reckoned in various ways. According to our present reckoning, it was 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha that this crisis came about.

If we look back at this critical moment, we can describe it more or less in the following way. If the evolution of mankind and that of the Earth itself had continued as they were doing, if men had remained under the guidance of the divine-spiritual Beings who had been leading them up to that time, then, since it was intended by those Beings that men should acquire freedom, it would have been achieved—but with what result? At that time it would have meant upsetting the balance between the two parts of the human astral body.

Think of the connection between the physical body and the astral body: we will keep to the astral body first. Before the year 333 the greater part of the astral body had been active essentially in the upper man, and its smaller part in his lower body—the middle man being between the two. And because in those times the upper part of the astral body was the more powerful, it was through it that divine-spiritual Beings exercised upon man their greatest influence. In accordance with the plan for mankind, human evolution has proceeded in such a way that up to about 3,000 years before Christ those conditions for the astral body held good, but by 1,000 years before Christ the lower part of the astral body was becoming larger and the upper part relatively smaller, until, in the year 333, the two parts had become equal. This was the critical situation 333 years after the coming of Christ, and since then the upper part of a man's astral body has been continuously decreasing. That is the course taken by his evolution.

It is impossible to follow the evolution of man in its reality unless we are able to understand what happens to the human astral body in the course of earthly evolution. If human beings had not undergone this decrease in the upper part of the astral body, their Ego would never have been able to gain sufficient influence and they could never have become free. This decrease in the astral body therefore contributes to the evoking of freedom. I have already said that there is no sense in asking why the Gods have not arranged everything to give human beings pleasure. The Gods had to create a universe that was inherently possible. Much that gives men the greatest pleasure rests on that, besides other things which, until they are enlightened, they do not find at all agreeable. This decrease of the astral body is connected with something else, for on the size of the astral body in the upper part of man—not on its size as a whole—depends his power to control, with his Ego and astral body, his physical and etheric bodies. Hence all men are likely to have their health gradually impaired by this decrease in the astral body. We can form a true conception of human evolution only if we recognise that freedom has to be paid for on Earth by a general weakening of health. Not, of course, in the form of cholera or typhus, but freedom is not to be gained without bringing ill-health of some kind along with it.

If all human forces after the year 333 had remained as they were, men on Earth would have become weaker and weaker, increasingly powerless. And earthly life would have come to an end through this complete decadence of mankind.

At this point there took place what I should like to describe as follows. At a gathering of those divine-spiritual Beings I spoke of as belonging to the Sun, it was decided to send down to the Earth their representative, the Christ, there to go through something that the divine Beings connected with mankind would be experiencing for the first time. Birth and death are certainly not what materialists imagine them to be, but they are part of man's earthly existence. None of the divine-spiritual Beings above man—Angels, Archangels, and so on up to the highest—had ever known death, but only metamorphoses. They change from one form to another, but they are not born and do not die. A man, too, changes form, but at the same time he lays aside his physical and etheric bodies, thus making birth and death a more radical change than any change experienced by the higher Hierarchies. So the leaders in the harmonies and impulses of the Sun resolved to send down to Earth the Christ, as a Being who had not yet experienced birth and death, so that He might go through this purely human destiny. The Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, is not merely the concern of mankind; it is also a concern of the Gods, and this can be put into words such as these: The Sun Gods met and held counsel together as to the steps they should take for warding off from mankind the danger of becoming weaker and weaker through the decline of the astral body.

And so the Christ was sent down to Earth and went through birth and death—naturally not as a human being but as a divine Being. The consequence was that through the Mystery of Golgotha, through the fact of Christ's death, forces came into Earth-evolution for the healing of those other forces which, in the sense already described, were the cause of sickness. Thus Christ became for mankind, in very truth, the great cosmic and terrestrial Healer of mankind. In other words, His forces entered everything that has to be healed in human beings, so that man, having his tendency to decadence on the one hand, but on the other the saving forces of Christ, can find his way to freedom. Therefore, provision was made in world-evolution to ensure that, 333 years before the great crisis, the Mystery of Golgotha should take place.

Human evolution on Earth, accordingly, could not have gone forward without this threat of disastrous universal sickness, to begin in the year 333. Then, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came the great universal healing. Everything therefore done by man without Ego-consciousness, everything that derives from the deeper forces tending to his future downfall, can be healed through association with the Christ. That is what the Mystery of Golgotha means for earthly and human evolution.

The situation I have just been explaining was known, until the fourth century after the coming of Christ, to certain men who still had some knowledge of the facts through having absorbed the spiritual life of their time. In all ages before the Mystery of Golgotha there had been old Mysteries, where the pupils were instructed concerning men's past earthly evolution, the coming of Christ, and what was to take place in mankind's future evolution. They were shown in great and powerful pictures the connection of men on Earth with the spiritual Beings of the higher worlds. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there were still isolated individuals here and there who, though scarcely more advanced than the old Mystery pupils, had preserved some knowledge of these matters—a knowledge later called Gnosis. They were scattered through Western Asia, Africa, Southern Europe. Their knowledge, their wisdom, extended to the source of events in the evolution of Earth and man, and to the mighty part played by the Mystery of Golgotha for dwellers on the Earth. But these men, who still had knowledge of the old Mystery secrets, were filled with anxiety. They knew that a crisis was coming for mankind. They knew that in the future human understanding would no longer be able to fathom the depths of earthly and human evolution.

Thus, in certain personalities of the first four Christian centuries it is possible to discern anxiety—not about earthly affairs but about the whole course of world-evolution. Will men be truly ripe enough, they asked, to receive what the Mystery of Golgotha has brought? This, in the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, was the great question for those we might call successors of the old Initiates.

From among those who in these first centuries were still initiated in Christian Mysteries there came, for example, a wonderful poem. It told of the coming of Christ to Earth, but it also gave in impressive dramatic form—although as a whole the poem was epic—powerful pictures of the men of the near future, who would no longer be able to understand the need for a healing element in human evolution. After these pictures had revealed something of what the Gods had decreed from the Sun—in the way I mentioned—and the descent of Christ into the man Jesus had been impressively described, the poem went on to picture how in human evolution there was to be, in a new, metamorphosed form, a revitalising of the old Demeter-Isis being. It was shown how this being was to be revered in a special, powerfully depicted human form, coming in the future as a solemn promise to mankind.

These poet-priests, as I might call them, of the first four Christian centuries, or at least the most outstanding among them, described how in the further evolution a certain cult was to arise, practised by all who were to attain to learning and a life of the spirit. For such men a sacrificial act of some kind would be established.

The epic pictured a younger man who was to enter into the whole way in which human evolution at that time was understood. It was shown how he was to pass from youth to maturity by developing a cult of the Virgin. This ritual observance, this sacrificial act, shown as necessary for all who were becoming learned and wise, if humanity was to find connection with what had come to men through the Mystery of Golgotha, was portrayed in vivid colours. A mighty poem, full of colour, came into being in those early centuries of Christianity. And among those living more or less in the atmosphere of this poem there were also painter-priests, who, it is true, painted these scenes in the simple way understood by ordinary folk; but their pictures had power and went straight to the heart.

This is what that poem accomplished. But together with all that came definitely from the Gnosis, it was rooted out later by the Church. We have only to remember how it was merely by so-called chance that later on the writings of Scotus Erigena were saved, and it will not seem absurd when spiritual research claims that this greatest of poems, evoking the New Testament, was exterminated root and branch by the later Church, so that nothing of it was left in the following centuries. Yet this poem had been there. It was rooted out, together with all the simple but impressive paintings connected with it. Concealed in it was all the anxiety felt at the time by the successors of the old Initiates. There rang through this poem the grave tones of an elegy.

Now, among those who did not follow Augustine into a quite different stream, a number of people retained the capacity to understand these things right into the fourth century, even up to the beginning of the fifth. But this understanding could not remain as vivid as it had once been; the spiritual forces of people in Southern Europe were no longer adequate for that. So the fundamentals of understanding became crystallised in the dogmas that have endured, though this could not have happened if the dogmas had not been preserved in a language growing ever more lifeless—the Latin language. This carrying on of Latin into the Middle Ages by learned men had the effect of benumbing a once living understanding, so that finally all that was known about Christ becoming man, about the sending of the Spirit, and about the great healing of which I have spoken, had become rigidified in dogmas. These dogmas were propagated through the Latin tongue, the very words of which had nothing more to do with the true content of the teaching. Thus, in the spreading of Western scholarship through the medium of Latin, there took place a gradual drying-up of the fiery, phosphoric element which had permeated that exterminated poem.

Then came all the youthful peoples of the North, stirred up more from the East, and they received the Christ Impulse in the Latinised form through which it was losing vitality.

We must picture this Christ Impulse coming up from the South, and the peoples who spread over the North accepting a dried-up Christianity because their youthful spiritual forces lacked power to give fresh life to the greatness underlying the frozen dogmas. The aftermath of all this is still with us to-day. Even now in those Northern regions there can apparently be found—for all this is only apparent—forces that seem to have been too late in receiving the Christ Impulse, already rigid in dogma, but are called upon, out of direct knowledge of the spirit, to rediscover all the secrets of the fact of Golgotha and of Christ's entry into earthly life—all of which has, however, to be re-discovered in complete freedom. For even the fact that after the year 333, Christianity, in its benumbed state, made its way up out of Italy, and young races of men swept down, whose successors are now spread throughout Russia, Sweden, Norway, Middle Europe, England, still living under that same influence—all this came about so that, ultimately, human beings should be able to lay hold of the Christ Impulse in freedom.

It is the present task of those peoples who, as representatives of a civilisation, are the first to whom Anthroposophy has to be brought, to accept all that is connected with Christ Jesus, and to recognise that without the Christ Impulse all men would have become mere “pillars of salt”. We can use these physical terms, for the Christ Impulse goes into the physical—right into the healing of the physical. Christ has become the great spiritual Phosphorus working to overcome the salt-forming processes in man. Christus verus Phosphorus—this phrase could be heard on all sides in the first three centuries of Christianity. It was also a leading motif in the lost poem I have described.

So, between past and future, we must take our place in the present, and by the same token be able to look back. Naturally, I have no wish to urge upon you dogmatically what I have just been relating about a lost poem and a forgotten teaching. That is far from my intention. But the methods leading to investigation of man's true spiritual course bring us knowledge of such facts, no less reliable than the facts discovered by modern science and far more reliable than its hypotheses. Just as nobody can be compelled to interest himself in matters which, influenced by present-day materialism, he has always rejected, so will nobody who is as sure of them as of his own life be deterred from speaking of them to those who, with a sound feeling for the whole course of human evolution, are able to perceive the reality of such an impulse at work therein.

After the fourth century of Christianity, the poem referred to no longer existed, but in certain circles many details of it were passed on by word of mouth, and lived on in memory. But the members of these circles were prevented by the growing power of the Church from speaking publicly of any such occurrences during the early Christian centuries. One of those who still had some notion of the poem—though they knew of it only in a greatly changed and weakened form—and some idea of the mood from which it arose, was the teacher of Dante. It may indeed be said that Dante's Commedia, though dogmatically inclined, owed some of its inspiration to what had been there in the first few Christian centuries.

Naturally I am well aware of the objections that can be made to such an interpretation of history—I could make them myself. But recognising, as one must, the care taken by authors of the history taught in our schools, and with all respect for the precision that relies on records and conscientious historical criticism, what is it all worth? It cannot claim to be true history, real history, for it takes no account of those records which have been side-tracked in the course of time. Hence, though documents may be subjected to the most conscientious criticism, true history will be revealed only in the same way as true knowledge of nature and of the heavens—through spiritual investigation. Men must therefore find courage not only to speak about the world of the stars, as we have been doing during our time here, but also to introduce into the usual presentation of history all that it lacks because it was in the interest of certain circles to deprive posterity of relevant documents. But the impulses in those destroyed documents live on in the souls of human beings; live on in those who have come later and crave for the impulses no longer recorded but once so alive in mankind. Hence it will not only be necessary for men—if they wish to reach in their evolution the future intended for them—to transform, to a certain extent, many of their concepts; they will have also to transform their attitude to the truth.

To speak fundamentally: we must find our way again to Christ. Christ must come again. This assumes that during the present century there will be men able to understand in what way Christ will announce His presence, in what guise He will appear. Otherwise terrible disturbances may be stirred up by people who, having in the subconscious depths of their being a premonition of this coming of Christ in the spirit, will represent it to others in a shockingly superficial way. Clear vision into man's evolution during the early future will be possible only when an ever-increasing number of people are sufficiently ripe to see how spiritual research can make real progress; people who are able to discover in the spiritual world what men need for the right shaping of their further course. Failing this, we shall become more and more implicated in all that hinders our approach to the spiritual—not so much where ideas and concepts are concerned, as in our general attitude.

In the ideas and concepts of to-day there is much which looks like a movement towards what must be the true goal of knowledge in our time. In fact, however, this serves somewhat to hinder men from seeing the findings of natural science in the right light. They are left groping for the facts, as it were, in the dark. Observe how to-day—with the general spreading of scientific, medical conceptions—we hear of men who in their later life begin to suffer from nervous troubles that affect their whole physical constitution and lead to genuine symptoms of illness. Our present-day physicians realise, then, how powerless they are to get the better of these symptoms in any obvious way, or to proceed from pathology to therapy. As an immediate contemporary of the outstanding Viennese physician, Breuer, I remember his having a patient in whom physical examination could detect no pathological condition. It was decided to have recourse to hypnosis, which was becoming very popular at that time. Under hypnosis, the patient was found to have had, at an earlier period in his life, a terrible experience, overwhelming him with horror. As far as could be made out, this experience had been repressed into the realm of the subconscious, the unconscious, creating there a “hidden province” of the soul. Though the man himself knew nothing of this, it was there in his life and threatened his health. A man can thus have within him something which, beginning as a soul-experience, has disturbing after-effects; it sets up in his soul an isolated region of which he is unconscious.

It was thought that if the patient recalled his experience, and so became fully conscious of it, this very awareness would lead to his cure.

Cases such as this will be found with increasing frequency in life to-day. But if we are to understand why people are afflicted so often in this way, spiritual knowledge must teach us what happens when the upper part of the astral body decreases, while in its lower part there is a tendency to accumulate subconscious provinces of the soul. We must rise from knowledge of man's soul to the historical knowledge of the spirit, to cosmic spirit-knowledge, in order to explain such phenomena. I knew Breuer well; he was a man of depth; and, because he felt that with our present degree of knowledge no progress was to be made in these matters, he gave up this line of research. He then became involved with other interests, particularly with those of Freud and his followers. Out of that grew psycho-analysis, which rests upon something true, for the phenomena certainly exist. The origin of physical symptoms must be searched for in the soul; the idea is quite right. But the knowledge needed to master the phenomena is not to be found here, for it has to become spiritual knowledge.

Hence this psycho-analysis, which has to do with the quite natural, historical decrease in man's upper astral body, is in the hands of people who are not only amateurs at investigating soul and spirit, but also amateurs in the investigation of the physical body, not knowing how to follow the working of spirit there. So we have two forms of dilettantism coming together; they are really alike, for these people know just as little of the real life of man's soul and spirit as they do of his physical and etheric life. The two extents to which they are dilettante coincide; and when two similar quantities work on each other, they multiply: axa=a², or dxd=d²; thus dilettantismxdilettantism=dilettantismsquared. So it really comes about that something right, based on true foundations, appears amateurish because of the weakness of present-day research. In all this, however, we can see a striving in the right direction. Anything like psycho-analysis should not, therefore, be treated as an invention of the devil, but as an indication that this age of ours wants something it is unable to achieve, and that anything like psychoanalysis will prosper only when founded on spiritual research. Otherwise psycho-analysis will come to us in the strange form to which Jung's logic has driven it.

Jung is indeed capable of writing, for example, a sentence such as this: One can say that through the “hidden provinces” of the soul, man was at one time disposed to assume the existence of a Divine Being. Jung then adds (he is, of course, inclined to atheism): It is obvious that such a Being cannot exist. Psycho-analysis, however, argues that man, having this disposition to believe, must assume the existence of a Divine Being in order to preserve the balance of his soul. For a conscientious person—and I would never fail to recognise that a man such as Jung is both conscientious and precise—this really means: You are obliged to live with an untruth because you are unable to live with the truth. There is no truth in theism, but you have to live with it. In our state of development to-day such things are not taken in earnest; they must, however, be taken with all possible earnestness.

So on all sides, without it being realised, these subconscious yearnings arise. Those of you who have heard or read other lecture-cycles of mine will know that I have often pointed out, from spiritual perception, how it is not right to say: Light streaming from the Sun, for example, goes out endlessly into the infinity of cosmic space, always decreasing in intensity with the square of the distance.

I have repeatedly said that spiritual perception gives a different picture. The idea that light from a centre streams out into endless distance is not correct. Just as a bow-string when drawn can be stretched only to a certain point, and will then spring back, so light goes only to a certain point and always returns. It does not only expand; it is also elastic, rhythmical. Hence the Sun not only radiates light but is all the while receiving it back; for at the end of their outward course the intensity of the rays is different and their course can be changed. I want merely to indicate this as revealing itself in connection with higher cognition, with cosmic knowledge of the world—the true knowledge of Spiritual Science.

Please do not take these remarks as indicating any lack of respect for science on my part. I appreciate science fully; it cannot be sufficiently praised, and one must recognise the high level of intelligence it brings into life to-day. But its statements about light, for example, are amateurish compared with the truth. It is important that the truth should be reached, if only to bring into all these prevailing ideas, which men do not know how to deal with, the impulse that could raise present-day research into the spiritual realm.

In certain occult circles there is a wrong practice: the student is given various occult teachings, but is never brought to the point of being shown whence they derive. The teachings are given in pictures, and the student is not led on to the realities which are imaged in the pictures. Hence his soul is surrounded by a world of pictures, and he never comes to see that through the pictures he ought to be learning about the whole Cosmos.

For this reason, after my Theosophy had appeared, it had to be followed by Occult Science. Here the pictures given in Theosophy are led on into the reality of the starry world, into the evolution of the Earth through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so on. The two books are complementary to each other.

When in any sphere men are given nothing but pictures, they are hemmed in by them. Persons who practise a wrong kind of occultism do this with a student they are not sure of, and by this means they lead him into what is called “occult imprisonment”. He is then encircled by confusing pictures from which there is no escape—a veritable prison of pictures. That is how much occult harm has been practised, and is still practised to-day. There are even spiritual beings who drive certain people into this occult captivity; but for the soul the phenomenon is just the same. These spiritual beings are let loose in nature when nature is not understood spiritually, but viewed as though atomic processes were part of nature. The spirit in nature is thus denied. Those spirits who are always striving to work against man—the Ahrimanic spirits—then become active in nature, encompassing man with pictures of every kind, so that in this case, too, human beings are occultly imprisoned.

A great part of what to-day is called the scientific outlook—not the facts of science, for they can be relied on—consists of nothing else than pictures of the general occult captivity threatening to overtake mankind. The danger lies in the surrounding of people everywhere with atomistic and molecular pictures. It is impossible, when surrounded by such pictures, to look at those of the free spirit and the stars; for the atomistic picture of the world is like a wall around man's soul—the spiritual wall of a prison house.

This prospect can show us, in the light of Spiritual Science, what should be rightly striven for to-day. The facts of natural science are always fruitful and lead out into the wide realms of the spirit, if they are not approached with the prejudices of the occult prison in which, fundamentally, science is at present confined. These things must be a deep inward experience for us, if we wish to take our right place in the evolution of the Earth and mankind, in accordance with its past and its future. It is all this that speaks to us when in some region we have before our eyes the evidence of human aspiration in the past and are now able to see it in the full light of spirit and of soul.

When here we climb the hills and come upon the Druid stones, which are monuments to the spiritual aspirations of those ancient times, it can be a warning to us that the longings of those people of old who strove after the spirit, and looked in their own way for the coming Christ, will meet with fulfilment only when we, once again, have knowledge of the spirit, through the spiritual vision that is our way of looking for His coming. Christ must come again. Only thus can mankind learn to know Him in His spiritual form, as once, in bodily form, He went through the Mystery of Golgotha.

This is something that here, where such noble monuments of the past have been preserved, can be felt in a particularly living way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dear friends! Once again, we will begin by our allowing the word to sound forth, which may resound within the soul of each and every human being, given a proper understanding of the world, of the entirety of what is near and far in the cosmos. Before this word speaks to our souls, however, I really must say at least a few words, once again, to clarify the significance of this school, for once again gathered here today there are many new members of the esoteric school.

I will make my remarks today quite brief, but what must absolutely be included in this clarification, is that this school must be seen to be such, that it conveys its information out of the spiritual world and down to human souls, so that what lives here in the school, what is brought here in the school to human souls, is seen intrinsically as a communication from the spiritual world itself. In this context, one can see that membership in the school must be seen, in the highest degree, as something to be taken seriously.

Such gravity, which must be present throughout this school, has certainly only become possible through the constitution of the Anthroposophical Society since the Christmas Conference. Ever since the Christmas Conference, the Anthroposophical Society configured as such has been an entirely open institution, but at the same time an open institution through which flows an esoteric impulse. It is an esoteric impulse for the hearts of today, which is certainly more approachable and engaging than the more exoteric impulse that was present previously.

From members of the Anthroposophical Society as such, no more is required than that they feel themselves to be listeners to anthroposophical wisdom. Beyond that no more is demanded than would ordinarily be expected of every decent human being.

Membership in the School entails something more, however, for members of the school should accept the stipulations, the serious stipulations of the school. And the most basic stipulation is just this, that each member belonging to the school should comport himself or herself in life, so that on every side and in every circumstance he or she is a representative of anthroposophical matters before the world.

In being a representative of anthroposophical matters before the world, it is of course also necessary, that in regard to all that one does or wishes to do that is somehow related to anthroposophical matters, be it ever so distantly related, that one engaged in these things seek an interrelationship with the leadership of the school, meaning the esoteric Executive Council at the Goetheanum. And this, for all intents and purposes, will allow the school to assume a real leadership role in the Anthroposophical Movement, represented as it is today by the Anthroposophical Society.

And so even now, it is necessary that membership in the school should come to be so regarded, that those affiliated with the school will take up Anthroposophy with their whole human nature, with their whole being, and with the feeling that they themselves are linked limbs of the real stream that will flow forth from the Goetheanum. As this is fulfilled and put in place, my dear friends, it cannot be seen as a curtailment of one’s human freedom in any way, for membership in the school is based on reciprocity. Within the school the leadership must have the freedom to do what they are appointed to do, to do what they hold to be the right things to do. And just as one need not be a member of the school, or become a member of the school, without freedom, and must remain thoroughly free, just so must the leadership of the school be able to remain in place in freedom, without anyone being able to say anything to the contrary, so that their free will is not compromised in any way. It is a covenant of freedom between the leadership and those who will be members.

In order, on the other hand, to be truly in earnest in maintaining the earnest nature of the school, and it simply and at least cannot be otherwise, the leadership of the school should take up and maintain their right to revoke someone’s membership, for whatever reason they hold to be necessary. And as testament to the strength with which the leadership has taken this on, my dear friends, is the fact that in the comparatively brief existence of the school sixteen members of the school as a whole have been suspended for some time, sometimes briefly and sometimes for a longer period of time. And I must emphasize once again, this measure must be, certainly as we in plunge ever deeper and deeper into esoterica, this measure must remain uncompromisingly strong in the future, regardless of whomever the personalities are who are so affected.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.
Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?
Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?
Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

My dear friends, we have been imbued with what should come to us from the spiritual world as mantric verses, up through to those mantric verses in which we feel about within the esoteric situation. This esoteric situation certainly involves representing to ourselves in meditating, how at first the being standing there at the abyss of existence speaks to us.

Therefore, picture it once again, for we cannot call this up before our souls often enough. A person sees all around himself, immediately around about himself in earthly existence, the realms of nature. He looks about at the sublime stars. He sees the clouds in motion. He sees all that is around about him in wind, weather, lightning and thunder. He sees all from the lowliest worm up to the most sublime display of the twinkling starry heavens. Only a false asceticism, which is not a part of genuine esotericism, can somehow disdain what belongs to the sensory world. Any person who has the will to be a proper human being cannot do otherwise than take it all in, in the most intimate manner, all reality that is sensed and made sense of, from the lowliest worm to the majestic, awe-inspiring, twinkling stars.

Then in solitude the moment comes, in which deep in his innermost soul a person can grasp, the moment in which he must say to himself, “All that you see around you is grand, vast, beautiful, sublime, and magnificent. You should not disdain it. You should appreciate it. Step by step you should march forward through the world, in order to be able to see ever more and more what your eyes alight upon, what your ears resound with, what the other senses discern, what you can grasp with your sense of reason. But while you look around near and far, and within the marching movement of time, in spite of all the grandeur, beauty, and sublimity in your surroundings, in this territory is not to be found just what the innermost nature of your own existence itself is.” And you will have to say to yourself, “The innermost source of your own existence is to be sought elsewhere.” That is the power that can be take hold of us in such a thought!

That which then proceeds for the soul can only be portrayed in imaginative conceptions. These imaginative conceptions initially lead us as if to a broad field, in which is spread out all the things of earth, sensory-material things. We find it to be drenched in sun, we find it brightly illuminated, but as we look all around nowhere do we find the essence of our own being. Then we look around more carefully. And bordering on this sun-drenched field, in which for the senses all is beautiful and grand and sublime, in which we ourselves are not, but bordering on this is a dark, night-bedecked wall. We have a sense that within the darkness there is the possibility of light being shed on the source of our true being, but we cannot gaze within.

And in that we are following the path this far, the abyss of existence appears before us. This is the threshold to the spiritual world. We still have to cross over this abyss. There stands the Guardian, who warns us that we must be prepared, in order to cross over the abyss. For with our customary habits, our customary ways of thinking, feeling, and willing in the physical-sensory world, we will not cross over this abyss of existence into the true spiritual world, in which our true essential being primarily stands.

The very first spirit form that we encounter there is the Guardian of the Threshold. Every night when we sleep, we are within this spiritual world. But a sort of darkness surrounds us in our essential “I am” nature and in our astral body, for we can enter into this spiritual world only when ready. The Guardian of the Threshold warns us about entering unprepared. Now however, as we approach him, he sends us his great admonitions. And these admonitions confront us in the mantric verses that have formed the content of these esoteric lessons up to now.

Those who do not yet have these mantric verses can most certainly obtain them from other members of the school. To obtain them with the proper decorum, however, it must be kept in mind that not the one receiving them, but rather the one giving them must ask if they can be given.

These verses have not only shown us that we should involve our heart when we wish to cross over the abyss of existence, they have also already shown us, as we ourselves find out for ourselves in our condition of soul, once we have flown over the abyss and are gradually starting to sense about, not yet gazing, but just sensing about, that the darkness, that initially confronted us night-bedecked, that this darkness gradually clears. Initially one feels that it clears, and one feels that the elements, the earthen, the watery, the aeriform, and the fiery, become something else over there, that we are living in another world. And this world, in which we will come to know our own essential being, and thereby the true form of the elements, is quite another world.

The last time, through the meditation parading before our souls, we formed the conception of the Guardian standing at the abyss of existence and of ourselves already across and on the other side of the abyss, just feeling, not yet seeing, and that the darkness was lightening. There the Guardian speaks to us, after he previously of course clarified for us just how we should comport ourselves in regard to the elements. The Guardian speaks to us about how the elements have now changed for us. He puts forth questions to us.

Who answers? The hierarchies themselves answer these questions, from one aspect the Third Hierarchy, the Angels, Archangels, and Archai, from the next aspect the Second Hierarchy, and from the third aspect the First Hierarchy.

The Third Hierarchy, the Angels, Archangels, and Archai, answers when the Guardian of the Threshold asks us, “What becomes of earth’s firmness?” The Second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes, answers when the Guardian of the Threshold asks us, “What becomes of water’s forming force,” the formative force that works in us and really gives us our inner organization. And the First Hierarchy, the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim, answers when the Guardian of the Threshold asks us what becomes of our breath, of the air’s quickening power, which really wakes us from dim plant-like existence-awareness into a consciousness of existence filled with feeling and empathy.

And such mantric verses certainly possess the wherewithal to permeate our soul, our heart, so that we feel drawn into the whole situation. The Guardian of the Threshold puts each searching, admonishing question to us. The hierarchies answer.

Guardian: What becomes of earth’s firmness, that supported you?
Angels: Sense, as we sense in your thinking.
Archangels: Experience, as we experience in your feeling.
Archai: Behold, as we behold in your willing.

Guardian: What becomes of water’s forming force, that permeated you?
Exusiai: Know spirit-world-construction in human-body-construction.
Dynamis: Feel spirit-world-life in human-body-life.
Kyriotetes: Will spirit-world-process in human-body-existence.

Guardian: What becomes of air’s stimulation, that waked you?
Thrones: Grasp inner existence knowingly in your god’s-world-existence.
Cherubim: Warm yourself on inner life in your god’s-world-life.
Seraphim: Wake inner light in yourself in your god’s-world-light.

That, my dear brothers and sisters, it the warning word emerging from the company of the Guardian of the Threshold with the Hierarchies, that brings our souls gradually further and ever further along, when we experience them in the right way ever and ever again.

The manner of proceeding, which must be the case for people today and for people in the future, and has been described in the holy mysteries of old, is for the student to say he was guided into the essential nature of the elements of earth, water, and air.

But all-pervasive warmth, which is also an element, is within the earth element, supporting us personally with its firmness, and within the water element, forming us personally, contouring our organs, bringing them into existence, into motion and into growth. Warmth lives within this water element. Warmth also lives within the air element, through which once upon a time the spirit of Yahweh blew into humanity its being of soul, and through which even today a person awakens his soul-being out of dull plant-like existence. Warmth lives within this aeriform element. Warmth lives all around and within all. We must become acquainted with it as the all-pervasive element. As the all-pervasive element, we must dive into it. We certainly feel ourselves to be very, very close to it.

We feel remote from the fixed element in earth, even though we sense its support in the earth. Even from the watery element we feel remote. The aeriform element, however, presses into us in intimate coexistence. Sometimes the aeriform element is not quite in harmony with us, as when we have too much, or too little air, when this shows just how inwardly our life is connected with the aeriform element. Having too much air evokes fear and anxiety. Having too little air makes one faint. We are certainly deeply touched by the element of air.

We feel, though, that our most intimate uniting is with the warmth element. Whether warmth or cold is in us, it is we ourselves who are warm or cold. In order to live, we must produce a certain degree of warmth within ourselves. We remain intimately close to the warmth element. In order to approach it even more closely, not just one hierarchy must speak, but the admonishing words of the different hierarchies must sound forth together.

To this end the Guardian of the Threshold also addresses words of warning, a question, to warn us about the element of warmth. The answer emerges from the world-all, from the cosmos, but is now something quite different. The Guardian of the Threshold puts his question:

What becomes of fire’s cleansing,¹ that inflamed for you the I?

We are already familiar with the form of the question. Now the question concerns our being guided into the element of warmth, or fire.

Not just one Hierarchy answers, or one group of beings within a Hierarchy, but rather what answers is a chorus of Angels, Exusiai, and Thrones. Seconding this, a chorus of Archangels, Dynamis, and Cherubim answer the question. Thirdly, the Archai, Kyriotetes, and Seraphim answer. In this way the three answers ring forth from choir-groups of the three hierarchies speaking together, concerning the generalities of the element of warmth.

We must so form this as a conception, while we are pondering the admonishing question of the Guardian of the Threshold concerning the warmth element, so that at this moment sounding forth from our “I” answers emerge, but answers inspired by the hierarchies, and so the answers sound forth admonishingly. As if from all sides the Angels, Exusiai, and Thrones speak forth first. Secondly the Archangels, Dynamis, and Cherubim speak. Thirdly the Archai, Kyriotetes, and Seraphim speak. Always all three Hierarchies speak, always an ordered group from the three Hierarchies speaks. And this confronts us cosmically in conjunction with the question.

The Guardian speaks:
What becomes of fire’s cleansing, that inflamed for you the I?

The Angels, Exusiai, Thrones:
Wake² in world’s etheric reaches the life-flaming-script.

All three Hierarchies admonish us to think about how all that approaches us during life on earth is carried over in the world ether, and we see it carried over in the world ether when we have gone through the portal of death. Standing there in the spiritual world, after we have crossed over through the portal of death, we look back on our life on earth, but also look out on the wide etheric reaches, where is inscribed what we have accomplished by thinking, feeling, and doing during life on earth. It is a unity, the flaming script of your life.

The Archangels, Dynamis, and Cherubim, answering within us:
Establish³ in time’s circling waves the soul-atoning-forces.

Here we are made mindful of the second stage which we undergo when we have passed through the portal of death. There we experience backwardly, in mirror-images, that is to say, in its just atonement, in making amends, in becoming one with world-all again, all that we have accomplished here in life. If we behaved toward a person in some manner, we then experience backwards in the time-stream what the other experienced through us. And just so, as I have delineated, do the Archangels, Dynamis, and Cherubim inform us in warning about just what this second stage is that we experience between death and a new birth.

But at just what happens in working out the details of our karma in the third stage, at just what happens as we are working together as souls with other human souls and with the beings of the higher Hierarchies, about this we are advised, in warning, by:

The Archai or primal powers, by the Kyriotetes, and by the Seraphim:
Invoke⁴ in eternal being’s deeds the spirit-savior-powers.

We must allow ourselves to be drawn into the situation so as to feel the Guardian of the Threshold speaking, his earnest bearing reaching out to us, admonishing us, and out of the far reaches of the world, ringing out and over us, our hearts embrace what unites us with the mysteries of life. [The fourth part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

The Guardian speaks:
What becomes of fire’s cleansing, that inflamed for you the I?

Angels, Exusiai, Thrones:
Wake in world’s etheric reaches the life-flaming-script.

Archangels, Dynamis, Cherubim:
Establish in time’s circling waves the soul-atonement-forces.

Archai, Kyriotetes, Seraphim
Invoke in eternal being’s deeds the spirit-redeemer-powers.

What stands before us is a black, night-bedecked darkness, since for the eyes of soul it is not yet suffused with light. But we have the feeling, as we remain standing there in this black, night-bedecked darkness, that as we are feeling about, that everywhere we feel the beginnings of glimmerings of light. And we find that we are able to maintain an awareness of it, of this glimmering light that we can only feel. We feel our way toward the Guardian of the Threshold. Of course, we really only beheld him so long as we were over there in the sensory world. Then we stepped initially into darkness and heard his admonishing, questioning word.

But this admonishing, questioning word has led us along, so that now we feel a bit of the moving, working light, the gentle, moving, working light. Seeking help in the moving, working light we turn to the Guardian of the Threshold. And it is a singular experience. Not yet light, although the illumination allows itself to be felt. In this felt illumination the Guardian of the Threshold reveals himself, as if now he would be more intimate with us, as if here he would approach us more closely, as if we would also approach closer to him.

And what he says from this point on works extremely effectively, as it might work on you in life if someone were to whisper something in your ear in confidence. Continuing on, what initially resounded meaningfully as an admonishing earnest word from the Guardian of the Threshold, trumpeted, mighty, majestic, from all sides out of the cosmos, and impinging on our hearts, as it continues on it becomes an intimate conversation in moving-working light with the Guardian of the Threshold, for now it is no longer as if he were speaking to us, but rather as if he were whispering.

Has your spirit understood?

And our inner being is warmed by this confidential communication of the Guardian of the Threshold, by his saying, “Has your spirit understood?” Our inner being is warmed. It experiences itself in the warmth. And it feels itself driven, impelled, this inner being to answer. Devoutly it answers, and so we envision it in meditation, devoutly it answers, calm, unassuming:

The world-spirit in me
Held his breath
And its presence
May illuminate my I.

Our “I” answers the question, “Has your spirit understood.” The answer is neither haughty nor expectant. The answer is not “I have understood,” but rather, the “I” feels that divine existence penetrates into the innermost aspect of human nature, divine breath in man it is, that peacefully abides and prepares the way for understanding. [The first stanza of the new mantra was now written on the board.]

The Guardian:
Has your spirit understood?

“I”:
The world-spirit in me
Held his breath
And its presence
May illuminate my I.

And seconding this, the Guardian asks, confidentially:

Has your soul accepted?

The “I” answers:

The world-souls in me
Lived convened in stars
And their harmonies
May soundly form my I

Again, it is not some sort of haughty answer that the “I” feels building, when the Guardian asks, “Has your soul accepted,” but rather the soul is aware that there are divine souls speaking within, the souls of the beings of the higher Hierarchies, and that in what is said lives not merely an individual, but rather an entire council, an advisory assembly, such as when the coursing stars of a planetary system reciprocate in sending out their forces of illumination. In this manner the world souls send out the council’s conclusions. They are taken up by the soul innately. And out of the harmonies the soul hopes that the “I” will become sound, so that in a fashion appropriate for human beings the becoming I is an echo of world-harmonies. As in the wandering planets of the solar system, the world-souls in the world-spirit-forum deliberate together in harmony, and the harmony of this concurrence sounds on into the human soul.[The second stanza was now written on the board.]

The Guardian:
Has your soul accepted?

“I”:
The world-souls in me
Lived convened in stars
And their harmonies
May soundly form⁵ my I.

And the third confidential question that the Guardian directs to human beings in this situation, is this:

Has your body experienced?

The soul feels that world-forces live in this body, as everywhere else, concentrated in a point in space. But now these universal powers do not appear as physical powers. The soul has finally become aware that those powers that appear externally as functioning, physical powers, as gravity, electricity, magnetism, heat, and light, that these powers, when appearing in human bodies, are moral powers, transformed powers of the will. The soul perceives the world-forces as the eternal powers of world-justice, constituted throughout the happenstances of earthly life. The soul perceives them as rectifying powers, rectifying powers that in their words of truth weave the threads of karma, and thereby the true essential “I”.

When the Guardian of the Threshold asks confidentially,

Has your body experienced,

then the person feels impelled to answer, full of humility, although fully in accord with world-justice:

The world-forces in me
Rectify⁶ human deeds
And their words of truth
May guide for me the I. [The third stanza was now written on the board.]

The Guardian:
Has your body experienced?
“I”: The world-forces in me
Rectify human deeds
And their words of truth
May guide⁷ for me the I.

In this manner the soul becomes, after having experienced, together with the Guardian of the Threshold and the Hierarchies, the transformation, the metamorphosis of the universal elements, in this manner the soul becomes inwardly devoted to these three questions of the Guardian, the soul becomes interwoven with the particular spiritual beings who have poured themselves out in response, and the soul in turn comes a little further along in response to the enigmatic word, “O Man, know yourself!”

And now just today let us put side by side the opening word with what we come upon in feeling the warmth-element. The warmth element itself approaches us in a reverent voice concerning the spiritual content of the cosmos, and then we feel how much further we have progressed in following the great admonition, “O Man, know yourself!” We will see how we as human beings remain in the middle between this resounding call, from all events and all universal beings, between this call and the mantric verse parading directly in front of our souls by means of today’s lesson.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

What becomes of fire’s cleansing, that inflamed for you the I?
Wake in world’s etheric reaches the life-flaming script.
Establish in time’s circling waves the soul-atonement-forces.
Invoke in eternal being’s deeds the spirit-redeemer-powers.

Has your spirit understood?
The world-spirit in me
Held his breath
And its presence
May illuminate my I.

Has your soul accepted?
The world-souls in me
Lived convened in stars
And their harmonies
May soundly form my I.

Has your body experienced?
The world-forces in me
Rectify human deeds
And their words of truth
May guide for me the I.

• 1. Des Feuers Reinigung
• 2. erwecke: The prefix er- in erwecke makes it an inner waking (inspiration, excitement, arousal), Wecken is transitive, to wake someone or something (wachen, to awaken, is intransitive and is not used here).
• 3. erschaffe: The prefix er- in erschaffe makes it more than just schaffe (make, create, bring forth).
• 4. erbitte: The prefix er- in erbitte makes it more than just bitte (ask, pray, entreat, implore).
• 5. schaffen
• 6. richten
• 7. lenken

I may say that the question of how one should speak about the arts is one with which I have actually wrestled throughout my whole life, and I will take the liberty of taking as my starting point two stages within which I have attempted to make some headway with this wrestling. It was for the first time when, at the end of the 1880s, I had to give my lecture to the Viennese Goethe Society: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic.” What I wanted to say at the time about the essence of the arts made me feel like a person who wanted to speak but was actually mute and had to use gestures to express what he actually had to point out. For at that time it was suggested to me by certain conditions of life to speak about the nature of the arts through philosophical judgments. I had worked my way out of Kantianism into Herbartianism in philosophy, and this Herbartianism met me in Vienna in a representative personality, in the esthetician Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had completed his great History of Aesthetics as a Philosophical Science a long time before. He had also already presented to the world his systematic work on Aesthetics as a Science of Form, and I had faithfully worked my way through what Robert Zimmermann, the Herbartian aesthetician, had to communicate to the world in this field. And then I had this representative Herbartian Robert Zimmermann in front of me in the lectures at the University of Vienna. When I met Robert Zimmermann in person, I was completely filled by the spirited, inspired, excellent personality of this man. What lived in the man Robert Zimmermann could only be extraordinarily and deeply appealing. I must say that, although Robert Zimmermann's whole figure had something extraordinarily stiff about it, I even liked some things about this stiffness, because the way this personality, in this peculiar coloring that the German language takes on in those who speak it from German-Bohemia, from Prague German, from this linguistic nuance, was particularly likeable. Robert Zimmermann's Prague German was exceptionally appealing to me in a rare way when he said to me, who was already intensively studying Goethe's Theory of Colors at the time: Oh, Goethe is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! A man who couldn't even understand Newton is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! And I must say that the content of this sentence completely disappeared behind the flirtatious and graceful manner in which Robert Zimmermann communicated such things to others. I was extremely fond of such opposition.

But then I also got to know Robert Zimmermann, or perhaps I already knew him, when he spoke as a Herbartian from the lectern. And I must say that the amiable, likeable person completely ceased to be so in aesthetic terms; the man Robert Zimmermann became a Herbartian through and through. At first I was not quite clear what it meant when this man entered, even through the door, ascended the podium, laid down his fine walking stick, strangely took off his coat, strangely walked to the chair, strangely sat down, strangely removed his spectacles, paused for a moment, and then, with his soulful eyes, after removing his spectacles, let his gaze wander to the left, to the right, and into the distance over the very small number of listeners present, and there was something striking about it at first. But since I had been intensively studying Herbart's writings for quite some time, it all became clear to me after the first impression, and I said to myself: Oh yes, here we are entering the door to Herbartism, here we are putting down the fine walking stick of Herbartism, here we are taking off our Herbartism coat, here we are gazing at the audience with our glasses-free eyes. And now Robert Zimmermann, in his extraordinarily pleasant dialect, colored by the Prague dialect, began to speak about practical philosophy, and lo and behold, this Prague German clothed itself in the form of Herbartian aesthetics.

I experienced this, and then, from Zimmermann's subjective point of view, I understood well what it actually meant that the motto of Zimmermann's aesthetics on the first page was the saying of Schiller, which was indeed transformed into Herbartianism by Robert Zimmermann: The true secret of the master's art lies in the annihilation of material by form – for I had seen how the amiable, likeable, thoroughly graceful man appeared to be annihilated as content and reappeared in Herbartian form on the professorial chair. It was an extraordinarily significant impression for the psychology of the arts.

And if you understand that one can make such a characterization even when one loves, then you will not take amiss the expression that I now want to use, that Robert Zimmermann, whom I greatly admired, may forgive me for using the word ” Anthroposophie', which he used in a book to describe a figure made up of logical, aesthetic and ethical abstractions, that I have used this word to treat the spiritualized and ensouled human being scientifically. Robert Zimmermann called his book, in which he carried out the procedure I have just described, “Anthroposophy”.

I had to free myself from this experience, in which the artistic, so to speak, appeared to be poured into a form without content, when I gave my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. I was able to accept the fully justified part of Zimmermann's view, that in art one is not concerned with content, not with the what, but with what is made out of the content of what is observed and so on through the imagination, through the creativity of the human being. And from Schiller we also saw Herbart taking form. I could well see the deep justification for this tendency, but I could not help but contrast it with the fact that what can be achieved as form by real imagination must be elevated and must now appear in the work of art in such a way that we get a similar impression from the work of art as we otherwise only get from the world of ideas. To spiritualize what man can perceive, to carry the sensual into the sphere of the spirit, not to extinguish the material through form, that was what I tried to free myself from at the time, from what I had absorbed in a faithful study of Herbart's aesthetics.

However, other elements had also been incorporated. A philosopher of the time, whom I liked just as much as Robert Zimmermann, who is extremely dear to me as a person, Eduard von Hartmann, he wrote in all fields of philosophy, and at that time he also wrote about aesthetics, about aesthetics from a partly similar, partly different spirit than Robert Zimmermann had written. And again, you will not interpret the objectivity that I am trying to achieve as if I were being unkind for that reason. Eduard von Hartmann's aesthetics can be characterized by the fact that Eduard von Hartmann took something from the arts, which were actually quite distant from him, and called it aesthetic appearance. He took what he called aesthetic appearance from the arts, just as one would roughly proceed by skinning a living person. And then, after this procedure, after he had, so to speak, skinned the arts, the living arts, Eduard von Hartmann made his aesthetics out of them. And the skinned skin — is it wonderful that it became leather under the hard treatment it then received at the hands of the aesthete, who was so far removed from the arts? — That was the second thing I had to free myself from at the time. And I tried to include in my lecture at the time what I would call the mood: the philosopher, if he wants to talk about the arts, must have the renunciation to become mute in a certain respect and only through chaste gestures to hint at that which, when speaking, philosophy can never quite penetrate, before which it remains unpenetrating and must hint at the essential like a silent observer.

That was the mood, the psychological characterization, from which I spoke at the time in my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

Then later on I was given the task of making a second stop on the way to the question that I characterized at the beginning of my present consideration. It was when I spoke to anthroposophists about the “essence of the arts”. And now, in view of the mood of the whole environment at that time, I could not speak in the same way. Now I wanted to speak in such a way that I could remain within artistic experience itself. Now I wanted to speak artistically about art. And I knew once more that I was now on the other side of the river, beyond which I had stood at the time with my lecture “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. And now I spoke in such a way that I carefully avoided slipping into philosophical formulations. For I felt that slipping into philosophical characterization immediately takes away the actual essence of art from the words. The inartistic quality of mere concepts used to stir up the forces from which speech arises. And I tried to speak about the arts from that mood, which in the strictest sense avoids slipping into philosophical formulations. Today I am supposed to speak about the psychology of the arts again.

It is not particularly easy, after having lived through the other two stages, to stop at any other point. And so I could not help but turn to life with my contemplation. I sought some point through which I could enter into life through my contemplation of the artistic. And lo and behold, I found the amiable romantic Novalis as if he were something self-evidently given. And when, after this glimpse of Novalis, I ask myself: What is poetic? What is contained in this special form of artistic experience in poetic life? — the figure of Novalis stands before me alive. It is strange that Novalis was born into this world with a peculiar basic feeling that lifted him above the external prosaic reality throughout his entire physical life. There is something in this personality that seems to be endowed with wings and floats away in poetic spheres above the prose of life. It is something that has lived among us humans as if it wanted to express at one point in world history: this is how it is with the external sensual reality compared to the experience of the truly poetic. And this personality of Novalis lives itself into life, and begins a spiritual and thoroughly real love relationship with a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. And all the love for the girl, who is still sexually immature, is clothed in the most magnificent poetry, so clothed in poetry that one is never tempted to think of anything sensually real when considering this relationship. But all the fervor of human feeling that can be experienced when the human soul floats freely above prosaic reality, as in poetic spheres, all the fervor of this feeling lives in this love of Novalis for Sophie von Kühn. And this girl dies two days after her fourteenth birthday, at the time when other people are so strongly touched by the reality of physical life that they descend into the sexuality of the physical body. Before this event could happen to Sophie von Kühn, she was transported into spiritual worlds, and Novalis, out of a stronger consciousness than the instinctive-poetic one that had been with him before, decided to die after Sophie von Kühn in his living soul experience. He lives with the one who is no longer in the physical world. And those people who approached Novalis after that time with the most intimate human feelings say that he, walking around alive on earth, was like someone who had been transported into the spiritual worlds, who was talking to something that is not of this earth, does not really belong to this earth. And within this poetic reality, transported into prose, he himself feels that what other people see only in the control of external forces, the fullest expression of the will, merging into reality, already appears within the poetic-ideal world, and he speaks of “magical idealism” to characterize his direction in life.

If we then try to understand everything that flowed from this wonderfully formed soul, which was thus able to love without touching reality, external reality, which was thus able to live with what was truly wrested from it before a certain stage of external reality was reached, if we open ourselves to all that then flowed from this Novalis soul, then we receive the purest expression of the poetic. And a psychological question is resolved simply by immersing oneself in the artistic stream of poeticization that flows from Novalis's poetic and prose writings.

But then one has a strange impression. One has the impression, when one delves psychologically into the essence of the poetic in this way, into a reality of life, into that of Novalis, that one then has something floating behind the poetic that resonates through everything poetic. One has the impression that this Novalis emerged from spiritual and soul spheres, bringing with him what, with poetic radiance, showered the outwardly prosaic life. One has the impression that a soul has entered the world that has brought with it the spiritual and soul in its purest form, so that it has inspired and spiritualized the whole body, and that it has absorbed space and time into the state of mind, which was spiritual and soul, in such a way that space and time, stripping off their outer being, reappeared poetically in the soul of Novalis. In Novalis' poetry, space and time seem to be devoured.

You see, with a strong soul and a strong spirit, poetry enters the world, and out of its strength it integrates space and time. But it overwhelms space and time, melting space and time through the power of the human soul, and in this melting of space and time through the power of the human soul lies the psychology of poetry. But through this process of melting space and time in Novalis, something resounds that was like a deep fundamental element within it. You can hear it everywhere, you can hear it through everything that Novalis has revealed to the world, and then you cannot help but say to yourself: What soul, what spirit is, it came to light there, to remain poetic, to poetically melt space and time by appropriating space and time. But there remained at first something as the foundation of this soul, something that lies most deeply within the human soul, so deeply that it can be discovered as a creative power by shaping the deepest inner conditions of the human organism itself, by living in the innermost being of the human being as soul. Musicality, the musical, the sounding artistic world, was a fundamental element in all of Novalis's poetry. This reveals itself out of the harmony of the world and is also what creates artistically out of the cosmos in the most intimate aspects of the human being.

If we try to enter the sphere in which the spiritual and soul-life in man create most intimately, then we come to a musical form within the human being, and then we say to ourselves: Before the musician sounds his tones out into the world, the musical essence itself has taken hold of the musician's being and first embodied, shaped into his human nature the musical, and the musician reveals that which the world harmony has unconsciously placed in the depths of his soul. And that is the basis of the mysterious effect of music. That is the basis for the fact that, when speaking about music, one can really only say: The musical expresses the innermost human feeling. — And by preparing oneself with the appropriate experiences for contemplation, by entering into this Novalis poetry, one grasps what I would call the psychology of music.

And then one's gaze is drawn to the end of Novalis's life, which occurred in his twenty-ninth year. Novalis passed away painlessly, but surrendered to the element that had permeated his poetry throughout his life. His brother had to play for him on the piano as he died, and the element that he had brought with him to infuse his poetry was to take him back when he died, passing from prosaic reality into the spiritual world. To the sound of the piano, twenty-nine-year-old Novalis died. He was searching for the musical homeland that he had left in the full sense of the word at his birth, in order to take the musicality of poetry from it.

So one settles in, I think, from reality into the psychology of the arts. The path must be a tender one, the path must be an intimate one, and it must not be skeletonized by abstract philosophical forms, neither by those that are taken from rational thinking in the Herbartian sense, nor by those that are a bone from external observation of nature in the Gustav Fechnerian sense.

And Novalis stands before us: released from the musical, allowing the musical to resonate in the poetic, melting space and time with the poetic, not having touched the external prosaic reality of space and time in magical idealism, and then drawing it back into musical spirituality.

And the question may arise: What if Novalis had been physically organized to live longer, if what had musically resonated and poetically spoken in the inner effective psychology of the human soul and human spirit had not returned to its musical home at the age of twenty-nine, but had lived on through a more robust physical organization, where would this soul have found itself? Where would this soul have found itself if it had had to remain within the prosaic reality from which it had departed at the time when it was still time, without contact with outer space and outer time, to return to the spaceless world of music?

I have no desire to give this answer in theoretical terms. Again, I would like to turn our gaze to reality, and there it is; it too has played itself out in the course of human development. When Goethe had reached the age at which Novalis withdrew from the physical world out of his musical and poetic mood, the deepest longing arose in Goethe's soul to penetrate into that artistic world which had brought it to the highest level in the development of that entity which can express itself in space and time. At this stage of his life, Goethe felt a burning desire to go south and to discern in the works of art of Italy something of that from which an art was created that understood how to bring the genuinely artistic into the forms of space and time, especially into the forms of space. And when Goethe stood before the Italian works of art and saw that which could speak not only to the senses but to the soul from out of space, the thought escaped his soul: here he realizes how the Greeks, whose work he believed he recognized in these works of art, created as nature itself creates, and which natural creative laws he believed he was tracking down. And he was overwhelmed by the spiritual and the soul-stirring that met him in the forms of space, the religious feeling: There is necessity, there is God. — Before he had moved to the south, he had searched for God together with Herder in the reading of Spinoza, in the spiritual and soul-stirring expression of the supersensible in the external sensual world. The mood that had driven him to seek his God in Spinoza's God together with Herder had remained. He had not found satisfaction. What he had sought in Spinoza's philosophy about God was awakened in his soul when he stood before the works of art in which he thought he could again discern Greek spatial art, and the feeling escaped him: There is necessity, there is God.

What did he feel? He apparently felt that in the Greek works of art of architecture and sculpture, what lives in man as spiritual and soulful has been created, what wants to go out into space and what gives itself to space, and when it becomes pictorial, also spatially to time. And Goethe has experienced the other thing psychologically, which is on the opposite pole to the Novalis experience. Novalis has experienced how, when man penetrates into his innermost being in space and time and wants to remain poetic and musical, space and time melt away in human comprehension. Goethe experienced how, when the human being works and chisels his spiritual soul into the spatial, the spatial and temporal does not melt away, how it surrenders in love to the spatial and temporal, so that the spiritual soul reappears from the spatial and temporal in an objectified way. How the spirit and soul of the human being, without stopping at the sensory perception, without remaining seated in the eye, penetrates to get under the surface of things and to create the architecture out of the forces that prevail under the surface of things, to shape the sculpture, experienced Goethe in those moments that led him to the saying: “There is necessity, there is God.” There is everything that is of divine-spiritual existence in the human subconscious, that man communicates to the world without stopping at the gulf that his senses form between him and the world. There is that which man experiences artistically when he is able to impress, to chisel, to force the spiritual-soul into the forces that lie beneath the surface of physical existence. — What is it in Novalis that makes him, psychologically, musical-poetic-creative? What is it in Goethe that impels him to feel the utter necessity of nature-making in the plastic arts, to feel the utterly unfree necessity of nature-making in 'the spatial, in the material works of art? What is it that urges him, despite the feeling of necessity, to say: there is God?

At both poles, with Novalis and with Goethe, where at the one pole lies the goal that the path to the psychological understanding of the poetic and the musical must take, and where at the other pole lies the goal that the psychological understanding must take if it grasp the plastic-architectonic. At both poles lies an experience that is inwardly experienced in the field of art, and in relation to which it is its greatest task of reality to also carry it outwardly into the world: the experience of human freedom.

In ordinary mental, physical and sensual experience, the spiritual and soul-like penetrates to the organization of the senses; then it allows the senses to glimpse what external physical and material and in the senses, external physical-material reality encounters inner spiritual-soul existence and enters into that mysterious connection that causes so much concern for physiology and psychology. When someone is born into life with the primal poetic-musical disposition, which is so self-sustaining that it seeks to die out under the sounds of music, then this spiritual-soul-like does not penetrate to the sensory organs Then it permeates and spiritualizes the whole organism, shaping it like a total sensory organ, and then it places the whole human being in the world in the same way as otherwise only the individual eye or the individual ear is placed in the world. Then the soul-spiritual takes hold within the human being, and then, when this soul-spiritual engages with the material world externally, it is not absorbed into the prosaic reality of space and time, but space and time are dissolved in the human perception. That is how it is at one pole. There the soul lives poetically and musically in its freedom, because it is organized in such a way that it melts the reality of space and time in its contemplation. There the soul lives without touching the ground of physical prosaic existence, in freedom, but in a freedom that cannot penetrate into this prosaic reality.

And at the other pole, there lives the soul, the spiritual part of man, as it lived, for example, in Goethe. This soul and spiritual part is so strong that it not only penetrates the physical body of man right down to the sense openings, but it penetrates these senses and extends even beyond the senses. I would say that in Novalis there is such a delicate soul-spirituality that it does not penetrate to the full organization of the senses; in Goethe there is such a strong soul-spirituality that it breaks through the organization of the senses and beyond the boundaries of the human skin into the cosmic, and therefore longs above all for an understanding of those areas of art that carry the spiritual-soul into the spatial-temporal. That is why this spirituality is organized in such a way that it wants to submerge with that which extends beyond the boundaries of the human skin, into the ensouled space in sculpture, into the spiritualized spatial power in architecture, into the suggestion of those forces that have already internalized themselves as spatial and temporal forces, but which can still be grasped externally in this form in painting.

So it is here too a liberation from necessity, a liberation from what man is when his spiritual and soulful self is anchored in the gulfs of the sensory realm. Liberation in the poetic-musical: freedom lives in there, but it lives in such a way that it does not touch the ground of the sensual. Liberation in sculptural, architectural, and pictorial experience: but freedom is so strong that if it wanted to express itself in any other way than artistically, it would shatter the external physical-sensual existence because it dives below the surface.

This is felt when one truly engages with what Goethe so powerfully said about his social ideas, let us say in “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”. What cannot be entrusted to reality, if it is to be shaped in freedom, becomes musical-poetic; what in contemplation one must not bring to the reality of sensual physical imagination, if it is not to destroy external reality, what must be left in the formation of spatial and temporal forces, must be left in the mere reproduction of the block of wood, because otherwise it would destroy the organic, to which it is death, becomes sculpture, becomes architecture.

No one can understand the psychology of the arts without understanding the greater soul that must live in the sculptor and the architect than in normal life. No one can understand the poetic and musical without penetrating to the more that lives in the spiritual and soul life of a human being, who cannot allow this spiritual more, this spiritual projection of the physical organization to the physical and sensual, but must keep it behind it in freedom. Liberation is the experience that is present in the true comprehension of the arts, the experience of freedom according to its polar opposites.

What is man's form is what rests in man. This form is permeated in human reality by what becomes his movement. The human form is permeated from within by the will and from without by perception, and the human form is initially the external expression of this permeation. Man lives in bondage when his will, his inwardly developed will, which wants to enter into movement, must stop at the sphere in which perception is taken up. And as soon as man can reflect on his whole being, the feeling comes to life in him: There lives more in you than you, with your nervous-sensory organization, can make alive in your intercourse with the world. Then the urge arises to set the dormant human form, which is the expression of this normal relationship, in motion, in such movements that carry the form of the human form itself out into space and time. Again, it is a wrestling of the human interior with space and time. If one tries to capture it artistically, the eurhythmic arises between the musical-poetic and the plastic-architectonic-picturesque.

I believe that one must, in a certain way, remain inwardly within the arts when one attempts to do what still remains a stammering when talking about the arts and about the artistic. I believe that not only is there much between heaven and earth that human philosophy, as it usually appears, cannot dream of, but that what lies within the human interior, when conditions with the physical body enter into, first brings about liberation within the artistic towards the two poles. And I believe that one cannot understand the artistic psychologically if one wants to grasp it in the normal soul, but that one can only grasp it in the higher spiritual soul of the human being, which goes beyond the normal soul and is predisposed for supersensible worlds.

When we look at two such eminently artistic natures as Novalis and Goethe, I believe the secrets of the psychology of the arts reveal themselves to us phenomenally, out of reality. Schiller once felt this deeply when he spoke the words at the sight of Goethe: Only through the dawn of the beautiful do you enter the realm of knowledge. In other words, only by artistic immersion into the full human soul can you ascend into the regions of the sphere toward which knowledge strives. And it is a beautiful, I believe an artist's saying, when it is said: Create, artist, do not speak — but a saying against which one must sin, because man is, after all, a speaking being. But just as it is true that one must sin against such a word: “Form, artist, do not speak” – it is also true, I believe, that one must always atone for this sin, that one must always try, if one wants to talk about the arts, to form in speaking. Artist, do not speak; and if you are obliged to speak about art as a human being, then try to speak in a creative way, to create through speech.

Yesterday I wanted to show how we must come to an education, steeped in artistic form. I drew attention to how in earlier times the teacher took his start from the artistic, which he did in higher education by treating as arts what today has become entirely abstract and scientific, namely, grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. This was done in such a way that the young human being started by recognizing in his teacher: This man can do something which I cannot do. And through this alone the right relationship was established between the younger and the older generations. For this relationship, my dear friends, can never develop along the path of intellectuality. As soon as one stands consciously on the ground of the intellect or without the ideas inwardly revealed in the intellectual or mind soul, there is no possibility of differentiating between human beings. For human nature is so constituted that when it is a matter of making something clear through the consciousness soul, everyone thinks that the moment he has concepts he is capable of discussing them with anyone. Thus it is, with the intellect. For the intellect neither man's maturity nor his experience comes into consideration; they only do so when it is a question of ability. But when their elders have ability the young quite as a matter of course pay tribute to maturity and experience.

Now, in order to understand these things thoroughly we must consider from a different point of view the course taken by mankind's evolution. Let me tell you what spiritual science has discovered about the course of history, with regard to the intercourse between men.

External documentary history can go back only a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha and what is to be found can never be estimated rightly because spiritual achievements, even in the time of ancient Greece, cannot be grasped by modern concepts. Even for the old Grecian times quite other concepts must be used. Nietzsche felt this. Hence the charm of his brief, unfinished essay on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, where he deals with philosophy in connection with the general development of Greek culture up to the time of Socrates. In Socrates he saw the first flicker of pure intellectuality; everything philosophical in the tragic age of Greek development proceeded from wide human foundations for which, when expressed in concepts, these were only the language through which to convey what was experienced. In the earliest times philosophy was quite different from what it later became. But I only want to mention this in passing.

I really want to point out that with spiritual Imagination, and especially with Inspiration, we can look back much further into human evolution and, above all, into men's souls. Then we find when we go very far back, some seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, that the young had a natural veneration for great age. This was a matter of course. Why? Because what exists today only in earliest youth existed then for the whole evolution of man.

If we look at the human being with less superficiality than is often done today, we find that the whole evolution of the human soul changes at about the change of teeth, during the sixth, seventh or eighth year. Man's soul becomes different, and again it changes at the time of puberty. I have discussed this fully in my book The Education of the Child from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science. On occasion it is noticed that man's soul becomes different in the seventh year and again in the fourteenth or fifteenth. But what people no longer notice is that changes still take place at the beginning of the twenties, at the end of the twenties, in the middle of the thirties, and so on.

Whoever is able to observe the life of soul in a more intimate way knows such transitions in man, that human life runs its course in rhythms. Try to perceive this, let us say, in Goethe. Goethe records how he was cured of certain childlike religious ideas by the Lisbon earthquake, thus about the time when he was changing his teeth, and how puzzling everything was for him. He tells how as a small child he began to reflect: Is there a good God ruling the world, when one sees that countless people have been swept away through these terrible fiery forces in the earth?—Especially in these decisive moments of his life, Goethe was prone to let external events work upon his soul so as to be conscious of its changes. And he says concerning this period of his life that he became a strange kind of pantheist, how he could no longer believe in the ideas imparted by the older people in his home and by his parents. He tells how he took his father's music-stand on which he set out minerals, placing on top a little candle that he lit by holding a burning-glass to catch the first rays of the morning sun. In later life he explained that he had wanted to bring an offering to the great God of Nature by lighting a sacrificial fire, kindled from Nature herself.

Take the first period of Goethe's life, then the following one, and so on till you piece together this whole life out of parts of about the length of his childlike episode, and you will find that with Goethe something always happened during such times fundamentally to change his soul. It is extraordinarily interesting to see that the fact of Schiller's urging Goethe to continue Faust only found fruitful soil in Goethe because at the end of the eighteenth century, he happened to be at a transitional period of this kind. It is interesting too that Goethe re-wrote Faust at the beginning of a following life-period. Goethe began Faust in his youth in such a way that he makes Faust open the book of Nostradamus. There we have the great scene:

“What powers celestial, lo! ascend, descend
Each unto each the golden vessels giving!”

But turn the page and there we find:
“Thou, Spirit of the Earth, to me art nearer.”

Goethe rejects for Faust the great tableau of the macrocosm and allows only the earth-spirit to approach him. And when at the beginning of the nineteenth century he was persuaded by Schiller to revise Faust he wrote the “Prologue in Heaven.” Anyone who observes his own life inwardly will discover that these changes hold good. Nowadays we only notice them when we deliberately train ourselves to look deeply into our own life.

In ancient times, six thousand, seven thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, these changes were so noticeable that they were experienced in the life of soul as the change of teeth or puberty is today. And, indeed, approximately up to the middle of life, up to the thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, life was on the up-grade. But then it began to decline. People experienced the drying-up of life. But while certain products of metabolism become deposited through sluggishness in the organism and the physical organism becomes increasingly heavy and lethargic, it was also felt that up to the greatest age the soul and spirit were on the ascent, how the soul is set free with the drying up of the body. And people in olden days would not have spoken with such ardour of the patriarchs—the word itself only arose later—had they not noticed externally in men: True, he is getting physically old, but he has to thank his physical aging for lighting-up his spirit. He is no longer dependent on the body. The body withers, but the soul becomes free.

In this modern age it is most unusual that such a thing happens, for instance, as occurred at the Berlin University. Two philosophers were there, the one was Zeller—the famous Greek scholar—and the other Michelet. Zeller was seventy years old and thought he ought to be pensioned off. Michelet was ninety and lectured with tremendous vivacity. Eduard von Hartmann told me this himself. Michelet is supposed to have said: “I don't understand why that young man doesn't want to lecture any more.” Michelet was, as I said, ninety years old!

Today people seldom keep their freshness to such a degree. But in those times it was so, especially among those who concerned themselves with spiritual life. What did the young say when they looked at the Patriarchs? They said: It is beautiful to get old. For then one learns something through one's own development that one cannot know before. It was perfectly natural to speak in this way. Just as a little boy with a toy horse wants to be big and get a real horse, so, at that time, there was the desire to get old because it was felt that something is then revealed from within.

Then came the following millennia. It was still experienced up to a considerable age, but no longer as in the old Indian epoch—in the terminology of my Occult Science. At the zenith of Greek culture, man still had living experience of the change occurring in life in the middle of the thirties. Men still knew how to distinguish between body and spirit, and said: At the age of thirty, the physical begins to decline, but then the spiritual begins to blossom forth. This was experienced by the soul and spirit in the immediate presence of men. The original feeling of the Greeks was based upon this, not upon that phantasy of which modern science speaks. To understand the fullness of Greek culture, we should bear in mind that the Greeks were still able in consciousness to come to thirty, five-and-thirty, six-and-thirty years, whereas a more ancient humanity grew in consciousness to a far greater age. Herein consists the evolution of humanity. Man has more and more to experience out of Nature unconsciously what is for a later time; this requires him to experience it consciously for consciously it must again be experienced. Whoever observes himself can recognize the seven-yearly changes; the length of time is not pedantically exact, but approximate. A man who looks back to the period of his forty-ninth, forty-second, thirty-fifth years can recognize quite well: At that time something happened in me by which I learnt something which out of my own nature I could not previously have done, just as I should not have been able to bite with my second teeth before I had them. To experience life concretely is something that has been lost in the course of man's evolution. And today if anyone does not inwardly train himself to observe, these epochs from the thirtieth year onwards are completely blurred. Comparatively speaking, an inner transformation can still be noticed at the beginning of the twenties—even up to the end of the twenties, though it is then rather less noticeable. But with the present human organization man receives something from his natural evolution only up to his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year, and this limit will recede more and more. In earlier times men were not free in their organization, destined as they were to have these experiences out of their own nature. Freedom has become possible only by the withdrawal of Nature. To the extent Nature ceases freedom becomes possible. Through his own striving, through his own powers, man must arrive at finding the spiritual, whereas formerly, the older he became the more did the spiritual thrive.

Today emphasis is no longer placed on what the old become merely by growing older. Intellectualism is left which, between the eighteenth and nineteenth years, can develop so that from then onwards one can know with the intellect. But as far as intellectuality is concerned, one can at most reach a greater degree of proficiency but make no qualitative progress. If one has fallen a victim to the desire to prove or to refute everything intellectually, one cannot progress. If someone puts forward what is the result of decades of experience but wants to prove it intellectually, an eighteen-year-old could refute him intellectually. For whatever is possible intellectually at sixty is equally possible at nineteen, since intellectuality is a stage during the epoch of the consciousness soul which in the sense of deepening is of no help to progress, but only to proficiency. The young may say: “I am not yet as clever as you are; you can still take me in.” But he will not believe the other to be his superior in the sphere of intellect.

These things must be emphasized to become intelligible. I do not wish to criticize. I am saying this only because it is part of the natural evolution of humanity; we should be clear about the following characteristic of our age, namely, that if man does not strive out of inner activity for development and maintain it consciously, then with mere intellectualism at his twentieth year he will begin to get rusty. He then receives stimuli only from outside, and through these external stimuli keeps himself going. Do you think that if things were not like that people would flock to the cinema? This longing for the cinema, this longing to see everything externally, depends on the human being becoming inwardly inactive, on his no longer wanting inner activity.

The only way to listen to lectures on Spiritual Science, as meant here, is for those present to do their share of the work. But today that is not to people's liking. They flock to lectures or meetings with lantern slides so that they can sit and do as much as possible without thinking. Everything just passes before them. They can remain perfectly passive.

But our system of teaching is ultimately of this character, too, and anyone who on educational grounds objects to the triviality of the modern object lesson is said to be behind the times. But one has to oppose it, for man is not a mere apparatus for observing, an apparatus that wants simply to look at things. Man can live only by inner activity. To listen to Spiritual Science means to invite the human being to co-operate with his soul. People do not want this today. Spiritual Science is an invitation to this inner activity, that is to say, it must lead all studies to the point where there is no more support in external sense-perception because then the inner play of forces must begin to move freely. Not before thinking moves freely in this inner play of forces can Imagination be reached. Thus the basis for all Anthroposophy is inner activity, the challenge to inner activity, the appeal to what can be active when all the senses are silent and only the activity of thinking is astir.

Here there lies something of extraordinary significance. Just suppose you were capable of this. I will not flatter you by saying that you are. I only want to ask you first to assume that you are capable of it, that you can think in such a way that your thoughts are only an inner flow of thoughts. What I called pure thinking in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was certainly not well named when judged by outer cultural conditions. For Eduard von Hartmann said to me: “There is no such thing, one can only think with the aid of external observation.” And all I could say in reply was: “It has only to be tried and people will soon learn to be able to make it a reality.” Thus take it as a hypothesis that you could have thoughts in a flow of pure thought. Then there begins for you the moment when you have led thinking to a point where it need not be called thinking any longer, because in a twinkling—in the twinkling of a thought—it has become something different. This rightly named pure thinking has at the same time become pure will, for it is willing, through and through. If you have advanced so far in your life of soul that you have freed thinking from outer perception, it has become at the same time pure will. You hover with your soul, so to speak, in a pure flight of thought. But this pure flight of thought is a flight of will. Then the exercise or the striving for the exercise of pure thought begins to be not an exercise in thinking only but also an exercise of the will, indeed an exercise of the will that goes right to the center of the human being. For you will make the following remarkable observation. It is only now, for the first time, that you can speak of thinking, as it is in ordinary life, as an activity of the head. Before this you really have no right to speak of thinking as an activity of the head, for you know this only as external fact from physiology, anatomy, and so on. But now you feel inwardly that you are no longer thinking so high up, you begin for the first time to think with the heart. You actually interweave your thought with the breathing process. You actually set going of itself what the Yoga exercises have striven for artificially. You notice that as thinking becomes more and more an activity of the will it wrenches itself free first from the breast and then from the whole human body. It is as though you were to draw forth this thinking from the extremity of your big toe! And if with inner participation you study what has appeared with many imperfections—for I make no claims for my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—if you let it work upon you and feel what this pure thinking is, you will experience that a new man is born within you who can bring out of the spirit an unfolding of the will.

Does man know before this that he has a will? He really has no will, for he is given up to instincts connected with his organic development. He often dreams that he does this or that out of an impulse of the soul, but he really does it because of the good or bad condition of his stomach. But now you know that you have permeated the physical organism with what fills it with consciousness. You do not need to be a clairvoyant for this. All you need do is to be interested in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and let it work upon you. For this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity cannot be read as other books are today. It must really be read so that once you get into the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you have the feeling that it is an organism, one member developing out of another, that you have found your way into something living. People immediately say: Something is going to get into me which will take away my freedom. Something is entering me that I do not want to have.

People who entertain such thoughts are like those who were to say that if the human being at two or three years has to get used to speaking a certain language, he will thereby lose his freedom. The human being ought to be warned against language for he will no longer be free when brought into this chance association of ideas. He ought to be able to speak at will now Chinese, now French, now German. Nobody says this because it would be too absurd, and life itself refutes such nonsense. On the other hand there are people who either hear or see something of Eurythmy and say that it, too, rests upon the chance association of the ideas of individuals. But one should be able to assume that philosophers would say: One must look into this Eurythmy and see if in evoking gestures we may not have the foundations of a higher freedom and find that it is only an unfolding at a higher level of what is in speech.

So one need not be surprised—for really nothing that goes beyond intellectualism is regarded without prejudice today—that people get goose-flesh when one tells them that a certain book must be read quite differently from other books, that it must be read in such a way that from it something is really experienced. What is it that must be experienced? It is the awakening of the will out of the spiritual. In this respect my book was intended as a means of education. The intention was not only to give it content but to make it work educationally. Hence you find in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an exposition on the art of forming concepts, a description of what takes place in the soul when one does not keep with one's concepts to the impressions from outside, but lives within the free flow of thoughts.

That, my dear friends, is an activity which aims at knowledge in a far deeper sense than the external knowledge of Nature, but it is at the same time artistic, wholly identical with artistic activity. So that the moment pure thinking is experienced as will, man's attitude becomes that of an artist.

And this, my dear friends, is like-wise the attitude we need today in the teacher if he is to guide and lead the young from the time of the change of teeth to puberty, or even beyond puberty. The mood of soul should be so that out of the inner life of soul one comes to a second man, who cannot be known as is the outer physical body, which can be studied physiologically or anatomically, but who must be livingly experienced and may rightly be called, in accordance with the real meaning of the terms, “life body” or “ether body”. This cannot be known through external perception but must be inwardly experienced. To know this second man a kind of artistic activity must be unfolded. Hence there is this mood in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which most people never discover—everywhere it touches the level of the artistic. Only most people do not discover this because they look for the artistic in the trivial, in the naturalistic and not in free activity. Only out of this free activity can education really be experienced as art, and the teacher can become an artist in education when he finds his way into this mood. Then in our epoch of the consciousness soul all teaching will be so arranged as to create an artistic atmosphere between teacher and pupil. And within this artistic atmosphere there can develop that relation between led and leader which is an inclining towards the leader, because he can do something which he is able to show forth artistically, and one feels that what he can do one would like to be able to do oneself. Thus no opposition is aroused because it is felt that one would destroy oneself by opposing.

Because of the way writing is taught today, it often happens that even as a child—for in the child there is always a being who is cleverer than the teacher—one asks: Why should I be bothered to write? I have no kind of relationship to writing—which is really what the North American Indians felt when they saw European script. They felt the black signs to be witchcraft. The feeling of the child is very similar. But let us awaken in the child what it means to look at black, red, green, yellow, white. Let us call up in him what it is when we surround a point by a circle. Let us call up the great experience contained in the difference there is when we draw two green circles and in each of them three red circles, then two red and in each of them three green, two yellow with three blue ones in them, then two blue containing three yellow circles. We let the children experience in the colors what the colors as such are saying to the human being, for in the world of color lives a whole world. But we also let the children experience what the colors have to say to one another, what green says to red, what blue says to yellow, blue to green and red to blue—here we have the most wonderful relation between the colors. We shall not do this by showing the child symbols or allegories, but we shall do it in an artistic way. Then we shall see how out of this artistic feeling the child gradually puts down figures out of which the letters then develop as writing once developed from picture-script. How foreign to the child today are B, G, or any other sign that has developed through inner necessity to its present form. What is a G, K, or U to a seven-year old? He really has not the slightest kinship with it. it has taken the human being thousands of years to acquire this relationship. The child must acquire an aesthetic relation to it. Everything is exterminated in the child because the written characters are not human; and the child wants to remain human.

In order to understand youth in its relation to the older generation we must go right into the art of education. The cleft between age and youth must be bridged not by hollow phrases but by education that is an art, education which is not afraid to find its support in real spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is why I said a few days ago: Where does this art lead to? It leads to experience of the real spiritual. And where goes what the age has gradually developed in such a way that it believes it must be given as a matter of course to the young? Where does that lead? It does not lead to the Spirit but to that which is devoid of Spirit. It is regarded a sin to bring the Spirit into what goes by the name of knowledge and science.

Science does not leave the human being alone even in earliest childhood. It cannot very well be otherwise. For the teacher is so drilled in systematized botany (and many books are entirely given over to systematized botany) that he believes he is committing a sin if he speaks to the children about botany in a way that is not scientific. But what is found in a botanical textbook cannot mean anything to a child before he is ten, and it is not until he is at least eighteen or nineteen that it can acquire any real significance for him.

Such is the situation. Now I have no intention of creating another intellectual theory about education. The aim is to create an artistic atmosphere between the older and the younger. But when this comes about, something happens which must occur if young people are to grow into the world in a healthy way. What the human being of today grows into can be described quite concretely. Between the ninth and tenth years an undefined feeling lives in the soul of every human being who is not a psychopath. There need not necessarily exist either a clear or unclear concept of this. But it begins to live within the human being from his ninth or tenth year. Up till then what is called the astral body alone is concerned with man's life of soul. But from that time onwards the force of the ego nature first begins to stir. It is not formulated in concepts. But in the life of feeling, deep within the soul, there lives unconsciously a question in the heart of the growing human being. This question takes different forms in different people. But a question arises which put in the form of a concept might be expressed as follows: Up to now the astral body has believed in other human beings; now I need something that somebody says to me so that I may believe in him or in others in my environment. Those who as children have most resisted this are those who need it most. Between the ninth and tenth years the human being, to strengthen his ego, begins to be dependent on an older person in whom he can trust—without this trust needing to be drummed in—in whom he can believe with the help of the artistic atmosphere that has been created. And woe betide it if this question which may still be one for many children up to their sixteenth or seventeenth year and sometimes even to the years I mentioned yesterday, the eighteenth or nineteenth—woe betide it if nothing happens to enable this question of the young to be answered by the old so that the young say: I am grateful that I have learnt from the old what I can learn only from the old; what he can tell me, he alone can tell me, for it will be different if I learn it when I am old.

Through this can be created something in an educational way which, applied in the right way, can be of the greatest significance for the epoch of the consciousness soul, which, in fact, in the earliest times of the Patriarchs, was already alive between young and old. Then, every young person said to himself: The old man with his snow-white hair has experiences which can only come when one is as old as he. Before then the necessary organs are not there. Therefore he must tell his experiences to us. We are dependent on what he relates because he alone can relate it. Certainly I shall one day be as old as he. But I shall not experience what he tells for thirty-five or forty years. The times will have progressed by then and I shall experience something different. But what I want to learn is only to be learnt from him.

Here is something in the spiritual realm which may be compared with feeding at the mother's breast. Just as the infant might say: “I too shall one day give the breast to a child, but now it is my mother who must give it to me”—so it is in the spiritual life. In the foundations of the spirit life of the world it is as though a chain were there, reaching from the past over into the future, which must be received by each generation into itself, must be carried onwards, re-forged, perfected. This chain has been broken in the age of intellectualism. This was generally felt among those growing up about the turn of the nineteenth century. Try to feel that you did experience something of the kind, even if at the time you were not able to express it. Try to sense that by feeling this, you were feeling about it in the right way. And if you sense this you will realize the true significance of the youth movement today, the youth movement which has, and must have, a Janus-head, because it is directed towards experience of the spiritual—an experience of the spiritual which carries thought so far that it becomes will, that it becomes the innermost human impulse.

We have been seeking now for will at its abstract pole where it is thought. In the days to follow we will seek it in the deeper spheres of man's being.

During the epoch of the consciousness soul the most abstract elements come consciously to life in the inner being of man, yet also in the subconscious, in what man desires of life, most concrete things are seeking to find their way into existence.

The human being who is growing into the epoch of the consciousness soul is held fast today in the abstract ideas of the head. But there lives outside man's head, if I may so express myself, the desire to experience more than the head is able to. To begin with man has only a connection with Nature formed between her and his head. Everything he absorbs in science, so far as he regards it as valid, is acquired from Nature through the head. Between man and Nature today there always stands man's head. It is as though everything that comes to the human being from the world were to pour itself into the head, as though the head were entirely choked up so that it lets nothing through its dense layers that could bring about a relation with the world. Everything remains stuck fast in the head. Man thinks everything through only with his head. But he cannot, after all, live merely as a head. For joined to the head there is always the rest of the organism. The life of the rest of the organism remains dull, unconscious, because everything is directed towards the head. Everything stops short there. The rest of man receives nothing from the world because the head allows nothing to reach it. The head has gradually become an insatiable glutton. It wants everything that comes from the world outside, and man is obliged to live, where his heart and the rest of his organism is concerned, as if he had nothing whatever to do with the surrounding world.

But these other parts of the organism develop wish, will, capacity for desire; they feel themselves isolated. For instance, the eyes catch colors and allow only scanty remains to be experienced in the head, so that the colors cannot work down, they cannot reach the blood nor the nervous system in the rest of the body. It is only in his head that man still knows something about the world. But he has all the more capacity for intensely desiring with the rest of his organism to meet the outside world. This again is something living in the maturing human being—this desire to find some kind of connection with the world not only with the head but with the rest of the organism; to learn to think not only with the head but with the whole man; to learn to experience the world with the whole man and not only with the head.

Now human beings today still have the capacity of learning to experience the world with the whole man at an early age. For what I have just been saying refers to the grown man. Before the change of teeth a child still has the faculty of grasping the world with his whole being. This is shown, for example, in the fact that it would be a mistake to suppose that the baby's experience when sucking milk is as abstract as an adult's. When we drink milk we taste it on our tongue, and perhaps round our tongue. But we lose the experience of taste when the milk has passed our throat. People ought to ask why their stomach should be less capable of tasting than the palate—it is not less but equally capable of tasting; only the head is a glutton. In the grown man the head claims all taste for itself. The child, however, tastes with its entire organism and therefore with its stomach. The infant is all sense-organ. There is nothing in him that is not sense-organ. The infant tastes with his whole being. Later this is forgotten by man; and this tasting is impaired by the child learning to speak. For then the head which has to take part in learning to speak begins to stir and develops the first stage of insatiability. The head in return for giving itself up to learning to speak reserves for itself the pleasures of tasting. Even as regards “tasting the world,” connection with the world is very soon lost. Now this “tasting the world” is of no particular importance, but the relation of the whole human being with the world is.

You see, we can get to know an important philosopher such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, in various ways. Every way is right. I do not wish to stress any one of the following in particular. It is wonderful to go deeply into the philosophy of Fichte—which not many people do nowadays because they find it too difficult—and much is gained from it, yet they would have gained far more if with strong feeling they had walked behind Fichte and had seen him appear, planting the whole sole of his foot and especially his heels firmly on the ground. The experience of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's walk, the curious way he stumped his heel on the ground, is something of tremendous power. For those able to experience each step with the whole being, this would have been a more intensive philosophy than all Fichte was able to say from the platform. It may seem grotesque, but perhaps you will feel what I am trying to say.

Today such things have been entirely lost. At most a man, who not twenty but fifty years ago was a boy, can remember how some philosophy of this kind still existed among the country folk. In the country people still got to know each other in this way and many expressions with the wonderful plasticity of dialect reveal that what today is seen only with the head was then seen with the whole man.* (An incident is quoted here which is untranslatable because of the Austrian idiom.)

As I have said, these things have been lost. Human beings have reduced themselves to their head and have forced themselves to believe that the head is their most valuable part. But this has not brought them to an ideal condition, because the rest of human nature asserts its claims in the subconscious. Experiencing through something other than the head is lost today with the change of teeth in early childhood. If you have an eye for these things you can see the walk of the father or the mother in the son or daughter decades later. So exactly has the child lived itself into the adults around him that what he has felt becomes part of his own nature. But this living ourselves into something no longer spells culture with us. Culture is what the head observes and what can be worked out by means of the head. Sometimes people dispense with the head, and then they write down everything and put it in the archives! Then it goes out of the head into the hair where it cannot be retained because at thirty they no longer have any hair!

But really I am not saying this as a joke, nor for the sake of being critical, for this is all part of the necessary development of humanity. Men had to become like this to find through inner effort, inner activity, what they can no longer find in a natural way; in other words, to experience freedom.

And so today, after the change of teeth, we must simply pass over to a different way of experiencing the surrounding world from the way of the child who experiences it with his whole being. Therefore primary school education in future must proceed by way of the artistic I described yesterday, so that through the outer man the soul-nature of another human being is experienced. If you educate the human being by what is abstract and scientific, he experiences nothing of your soul. He only experiences your soul if you approach him through art. For in the realm of the artistic everyone is individual, each one is a different person. It is the ideal of science that everyone should be alike. It would be quite a thing—so say people today—were everyone to teach a different science. But that could not be, for science confines itself to what is the same for all human beings. In the realm of the artistic each human being is an individuality in himself. But because of this there can come about an individual, personal relation of the child to the man who is alive and active artistically, and this should be so. True, one does not come to the feeling for the whole man as outer physical being as in the first years of childhood, but to a feeling for the whole man in the soul of the one who is to lead.

Education must have soul, and as scientist one cannot have soul. We can have soul only through what we are artistically. We can have soul if we give science an artistic form through the way it is presented, but not through the content of science as science is understood today. Science is not an individual affair. Hence during the primary school age it establishes no relation between teacher and pupil. All instruction must therefore be permeated by art, by human individuality, for of more value than any thought-out curriculum is the individuality of the teacher and educator. It is individuality that must work in the school. What grows between teacher and pupil from the change of teeth to puberty—what is the link between them?

What binds them together is solely what man brings with him into his earthly existence from super-sensible, spiritual worlds, from his pre-earthly existence. My dear friends, it is never the head that recognizes what man brings with him out of his pre-earthly life. The head is made for the purpose of grasping what is on the earth. And on the earth there is only the physical part of man. The head understands nothing of what confronts one as the other human being and comes from pre-earthly existence. In the particular coloring the artistic impulse gives to the human soul there lives and weaves what the human being has brought down from pre-earthly existence; and between the period of the change of teeth and puberty the child is particularly disposed to feel in his heart what meets him in the teacher as coming out of pre-earthly existence. A young child has the tendency to feel the outer human form in its earthly shape; from his seventh to his fourteenth or fifteenth year he seeks—not through theoretical concepts but through the living-together with human beings—what does not lend it self to be grasped in concepts but is manifested in the teacher; and it resists conceptual form. Concepts have form, that is to say, external limits. But human individuality in the sense described has no external limits, only intensity, quality; it is experienced as quality, as intensity, very particularly in the period of life referred to. It is experienced, however, through no other atmosphere than that of art.

But we are now living in the epoch of the consciousness soul. The first treasures we acquire for the soul in this epoch consist in intellectual concepts, in abstractions. Today even the farmer loves abstractions. How could it be otherwise, for he indulges in the most abstract reading—the village newspaper and much else besides! Our riches consist really in abstractions. And therefore we must free ourselves from this kind of thinking, through developing what I spoke of yesterday. We must purify our thinking and mould it, into will. To this end we must make our individuality stronger and stronger, and this happens when we work our way through to pure thinking. I do not say this out of idle vanity, but because that is how I see it. Whoever works his way through to pure thinking as I have described in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity will find that this does not bring him simply to the possession of a few concepts which make up a philosophic system, but that it lays hold of his own individuality, of his pre-earthly existence.

He need not suddenly become clairvoyant; that will only happen when he is able to behold the pre-earthly. But he can confirm it by gaining the strength of will that is acquired in the flow of pure thoughts. Then the individuality comes forth. Then one does not feel happy with a philosophic system in which one concept proceeds from another and everything has rigid outlines. But one feels compelled to have one's being in a living and weaving world. We acquire a special kind of life of soul when we experience in the right way what is meant by the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Thus it is a bringing down of pre-earthly existence into the life of the human being. But it is also the preparation for the vocation of teacher, of educator. Through study we cannot become teachers. We cannot drill others into being teachers, because each one of us is already a teacher. Every human being is a teacher, but he is sleeping and must be awakened, and Art is the awakener. When this is developed it brings the teacher, as a human being, nearer to those whom he would educate. And as a human being he must come near to them. Those who are to be educated must get something from him as a human being. It would be terrible if anyone were to believe it possible to teach just because he knows a great deal. This leads to absolute absurdity. This absurdity will be apparent to you if you think about the following picture.

Now take a class in a school. There are perhaps thirty pupils in the class. Among these pupils there are, let us say, two geniuses, or only one, for that is enough. If we have to organize a school we cannot always give the post of teacher to a genius just for a future genius to be able to learn all he should be able to learn. You will say that this would not matter in the primary school. If the child is a genius he will go on to a higher school and there certainly find geniuses as teachers. You would not say this because experience does not bear it out—but you must admit the case may arise that the teacher is faced with a class in which there are children predestined to become cleverer than he is himself. Now our task of teacher consists in bringing the children not merely to our degree of cleverness, but to the full development of their own powers.

As teachers, therefore, we may come into the position of having to educate somebody who will be greater than we. It is impossible to provide schools with enough teachers unless one holds to the principle that it does not matter if the teacher is not as clever as the pupil will be some day. Nevertheless he will still be a good teacher because it does not depend on the giving out of knowledge but on activating the individuality of the soul, upon the pre-earthly existence. Then it is really the child who educates himself through us. And that is the truth. In reality we do not educate at all. We only disturb the process of education when we intervene too energetically. We only educate when we behave in such a way that through our own behavior the child can educate himself. We send the child to primary school in order to rid him of troublesome elements. The teacher should see to it that the troublesome elements are got rid of, that the child escapes conditions under which he cannot develop. So we must be quite clear upon this point: we cannot cram anything into a human being through teaching and education. What we can do is to see to it that the human being, as he grows up, should succeed in developing the abilities within him. That we can do, but not through what we know but through what stirs inwardly within us in an artistic way. And even if the rare thing should happen that as teachers we are not particularly endowed with genius—one should not say this, but in spite of your youth movement you are old enough for me to say it—if the teacher has only a kind of instinctive artistic sense he will offer less hindrance to the growth of the child's soul than the teacher who is inartistic and tremendously learned. To be tremendously learned is not difficult.

These things must for once be said most emphatically. For even when spoken clearly, our age does not hear them. Our age is terribly unreceptive for such things. And regarding those who assure one that they have understood everything, after thirty years it is often apparent that they have understood nothing whatever. Thus the configuration of soul in the human being is what is essential in practical pedagogy, in instruction and education, during the child's life between the change of teeth and puberty. And after this the human being enters a period of life in which, in this age of the consciousness soul, still deeper forces must work up out of human nature if men are to give anything to one another.

You see, the feeling with which one man meets another is tremendously complicated. If you wanted to describe the whole round of sympathies and antipathies, and the interworking of sympathies and antipathies with which you meet another man, you would never come to an actual definition. In fifty years you would not succeed in defining what you can experience in five minutes as the relations of life between man and man. Before puberty it is pre-eminently an experience of the pre-earthly. The pre-earthly sheds its light through every movement of the hands, every look, through the very stressing of words. Actually it is the quality of the gesture, the word, the thought, of the teacher that works through to the child and which the child is seeking.

And when as grown-up people—so grown-up that we have reached the age of fifteen or sixteen or even beyond!—we meet other human beings, then the matter is still more complicated. Then, what attracts or repels others in a human being actually veils itself in a darkness impenetrable to the world of abstract concepts. But if, with the help of Anthroposophy, we investigate what one can really experience in five minutes but cannot describe in fifty years, we find that it is what rises up from the previous earth-life or series of earth-lives into the present life of the soul, and what is exchanged. This indefinite, indefinable element that comes upon us when we meet as adults is what shines through from earlier lives on earth into the present. Not only the pre-earthly existence but everything the human being has passed through in the way of destiny in his successive earth-lives.

And if we study what is working upon the human being we find how today, in the epoch of the consciousness soul—because everything is pushed into the head and what we take in from the outer world cannot get through to man as a whole—our head culture sets itself against what alone can work from man to man. Human beings pass one another by because they stare at each other only with the head, with the eyes—I will not say, because they knock their heads together! Human beings pass one another by because only what plays over from repeated earth-lives can work between man and man, and modern culture does nothing to develop a sense for this. But this must also be brought into our education; we should be able to experience what is deeper down in man, what plays over from previous earth-lives. This will not be achieved unless we draw into our education the whole life of man as it is lived out on earth.

Today there is only a feeling for the immediate present. Therefore all that is asked of education is that it shall benefit the child. But if this is the only thing that is asked, very little service is rendered to life. Firstly, because the question is put one-sidedly, one gets a one-sided answer; and secondly, the child should be educated for the whole of life, not only for the schoolroom or the short period after school so that he does not disgrace us. But we need an understanding for the imponderable things in life, an understanding for the unity in man's life as a whole as it unfolds on earth.

There are human beings whose very presence, at a certain age, is felt by those around them as a benediction. There are such human beings. If we were to look for the reason why such people, not through their acts but through their being, have become a blessing to those around them, we would find that as children they were fortunate to have been able in a natural way to look up to someone in authority whom they could revere. They had this experience at the right time of life. And because they were able to revere, after many years they become a blessing to the world around them. It can be expressed concisely by saying: There are human beings who can bless. There are not many who can bless. But it is a question of the power to bless. There are men who certainly have the power to bless. They acquire it in later life, because in their childhood they have learnt to pray. Two human gestures are causally connected: the gestures of praying and blessing; the second develops from the first. No one learns to bless who does not learn it from prayer. This must not be understood sentimentally or with the slightest tinge of mysticism, but rather as a phenomenon of Nature is observed—except that this phenomenon is nearer to us in a human way.

Now we have to care for a child hygienically so that he can grow in accordance with nature. If you were to devise an apparatus for a child that would keep him a certain size so that he could not grow, so that even the size of his arm would not change and the young human being would remain as he is all his life, this would be terrible. The human being must be treated in such a way that he can grow. What would it be like were the little child not to change, were he to look no different ten years hence? It would be dreadful were he to remain as he is at four or five. But in school we supply the children with concepts and cherish the notion that they should remain unchanged for the whole of the children's lives. The child is supposed to preserve them in memory; fifty years hence they are to be the same as they are today. Our school text-books ensure that the child remains a child. We should educate the child so that all his concepts are capable of growth, that his concepts and will-impulses are really alive. This is not easy. But the artistic way of education succeeds in doing it. And the child has a different feeling when we offer him living concepts instead of dead ones, for unconsciously he knows that what he is given grows with him just as his arms grow with his body.

It is heart-breaking to witness children being educated to define a concept, so that they have the concept as a definition only. It is just the same as if we wanted to confine a limb in an apparatus. The child must be given pictures capable of growth, pictures which become something quite different in ten or twenty years. If we give him pictures that are capable of growth, we stimulate in him the faculty through feeling to find his way into what is often hidden in the depths of the human individuality. And so we see how complicated are the connections We learn to come to a deeper relation to human beings through the possibility being given us in our youth for growth in our life of soul.

For what does it mean to experience another human being? We cannot experience other people with dead concepts. We can comprehend them only if we meet them in such a way that they become for us an experience which takes hold of us inwardly, which is something for our own inner being. For this, however, activity in the inner being is needed. Otherwise our culture will reach the point which it is fast approaching. People go out to luncheons, dinners and teas, without knowing much about one another. Yet it is about themselves that, relatively speaking, modern people know most. And what do they instinctively make of their experiences? Suppose they go about among the people they meet at lunch or dinner. At most they think—Is he like me or is he different? And if we believe him to be like ourselves, we consider him a fine fellow; if he is not like ourselves, then he is not a fine fellow and we do not trouble ourselves about him any longer. And as most men are not the same as ourselves, the most we can do is sometimes to believe—because really it would be too boring to find no fine fellow anywhere—that we have found someone like ourselves. But in this way we do not really find another human being but always ourselves. We see ourselves in everyone else. For many people this is relatively good. For if they were to meet somebody who in their opinion was not altogether, but yet to a certain extent, a fine fellow, and were really to comprehend him, this would be so overwhelming an experience that it would quite drown their own manhood, and by a second encounter their ego would be drowned still more deeply. In the case of a third or fourth there would be no approaching him at all, for by that time he would certainly have lost himself! There is too little inner strength and activity, too little kernel, too little inner individuality developed, so that people for fear of losing themselves dare not experience the other human being. Thus men pass one another by.

The most important thing is to establish an education through which human beings learn once again how to live with one another. This cannot be done through hollow phrases. It can be done only through an art of education founded upon a true knowledge of the human being, that art of education referred to here. But our intellectualistic age has plunged the whole of life into intellectuality. In our institutions we actually live very much as if no longer among human beings at all, we live in an embodied intellect in which we are entangled, not like a spider in its own web, but like countless flies which have got themselves caught.

When we meet anyone, do we feel in any sense what this human being can become for us? Do we judge today as humanly as this? No, for the most part we do not—present company is always excepted—for the most part we do not but we ask—well, perhaps on the door of a certain man's house there will be a little plate with an inscription “Counselor at Law,” conveying a concept of some kind. So now we know something about this man. In another case the inscription is “Medical Practitioner.” Now we know that the man can cure us. In another case the inscription is “Professor of English.” And now we know something about him—and so on and so forth. If we want to know something about chemistry, how do we set about it? We have no other means than to enquire if somewhere there is a man who is a qualified chemist. What he can tell us then is chemistry. And so we go on. We are really caught up in this spider's web of concepts. We do not live among human beings. We trouble ourselves very little about human beings. We only concern ourselves with what is on paper. For many people that is their only essential fact. How else should they know what kind of man I am unless it is written down somewhere on paper!

This, of course, is all rather an overstatement, and yet it does characterize our epoch. Intellectuality is no longer merely in our heads but it is woven around us everywhere. We are guided by concepts and not by human impulses.

When I was still fairly young, at Baden near Vienna I got to know the Austrian poet Hermann Rollett, long since dead. He was convinced that the right thing was development towards intellectualism, that one must develop more and more towards the intellectual. At the same time, however, he had an incurable dread of this, for he felt that intellectualism only takes hold of man's head. And once when I visited him with Schröer, we were talking with him and he began to speak in poetical fashion about his incurable fear in regard to culture. He said: When one looks at human beings today, they cannot use their fingers properly; many of them cannot write; they get writer's cramp, their fingers atrophy. When it is a question of sewing on trouser buttons, only tailors can do that! It is dreadful; the limbs are atrophying. The fingers and the limbs will not only get less skillful but they will also get smaller, they will wither away and heads will get larger and larger. That is how he described his poet's dream and then he said he thought the time would come when only balls, balls which are heads, would be rolling about over the surface of the earth.

That was the cultural dread I met with in this man in the last third of the nineteenth century. Now he was also a child of his age, that is to say, he was a materialist, and that was why he had so great a dread that at some point in the future such living heads would be rolling about on the earth. Physical heads will not do this. But to a serious extent the etheric and astral heads do it already today. And a healthy education of the young must preserve human beings from this, must set human beings upon their legs again, and lead them to the point where, if they are pondering over something, they will feel the beating of their heart again and not merely add something to their knowledge. With this we must reckon if in preparation for man's future, we penetrate ourselves with the art that must enter education. What more there is to be said on this subject I shall try to develop for you tomorrow.

Originally published in Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 15, Number 3, Autumn 1970.

In the lectures given here just before the burning of the Goetheanum I spoke to you of man’s connection with the course of the year and of other related subjects.¹ As a continuation of those lectures I want to take your minds back again today to an epoch of history which we have often studied and which must be thoroughly understood if genuine insight into the present phase of the evolution of humanity is to be acquired.

We have heard that certain processes taking place in the human being can be recognised in the ever-repeated happenings of the course of the year. I also said that it was the aim of earlier Mystery-science, Initiation-science, to spread such knowledge among persons able to accept it. By spreading this knowledge the aim was to strengthen man’s thinking, feeling and willing, to strengthen his foothold and position in the world.

We may ask: Why was it that in earlier times human beings were able by their very nature to understand the relation of man the microcosm, to the great world, the macrocosm, as this relation is expressed in the seasonal course of the year? For there was indeed such understanding. This was because in those ancient times man’s inner life, his life of soul, was more closely linked with the etheric or formative forces body than is the case today.

You will remember from the outline which I was able to give in the lectures of the so-called French Course,² that when man has passed through the supersensible life between death and a new birth, when he has sent down to Earth the spirit-seed of his physical body, while he himself, as a being of soul-and-spirit before conception, has not yet descended, he gathers together from the Cosmos the forces of the cosmic ether and with them builds his etheric body which he thus possesses before he unites with his physical body. Thus as man descends from the supersensible worlds as a being of soul-and-spirit, he first envelops himself with an etheric body. Then he unites the physical body given him through the physical stream of inheritance by the father and mother.

In earlier ages of evolution the union into which man could enter with the etheric body before his actual earthly life was far more intimate than it was in later times and is today. And it was because of this more intimate union with the etheric body that it was possible for an earlier humanity to understand what was meant when from the Mysteries it was proclaimed: the physical Sun seen by the bodily eyes is the physical expression of a spiritual reality. Men understood what was meant by the ‘Sun Spirit’. They understood it because when that intimate union between the human soul-and-spirit and the etheric body was still present it would have seemed absurd to expect man to believe that somewhere up in universal space there hovered that physical globe of gas of which modern astrophysics speaks today. To those human beings of an earlier epoch it would have seemed a matter of course that to this physical phenomenon there belongs a spiritual reality and it was this spiritual reality which in all the ancient Mysteries was recognised and revered as the Sun Spirit.

We can point to the fourth century after Christ as the epoch when human beings descending from the supersensible world were no longer united in this intimate way with the etheric body. (These details are only approximately accurate, although in essentials they are correct). There was now a looser union and for this reason the time drew nearer and nearer when in their earthly life too men could use only the physical body when gazing at the Heavens. In earlier times when they looked up to the Heavens they too beheld the Sun but an impulse arose from within them not to see this Sun as a merely physical phenomenon but to recognise soul-and-spirit in the Sun. After the fourth century A.D., however, men could use only the physical body, the physical eyes, when they gazed at the Sun, for their sight was no longer borne and sustained by the power of the etheric body. Hence as time went on they saw merely the physical Sun and to teach of a Sun Spirit was possible only because this had been known by men in earlier epochs and the tradition still survived.

Julian the Apostate was one who learnt from his teachers of the Sun Spirit. But we know that in the Mystery of Golgotha this Sun Spirit came down to the Earth. He transferred the course of His heavenly life to the Earth, changed it into a course of earthly life. For since the Mystery of Golgotha His activity has been concerned with guiding the evolution of mankind in the sphere of the Earth.

You will notice that the two points of time do not coincide. The Mystery of Golgotha tells us, when we look back at it today, that it was then that Christ, the sublime Sun Being, united Himself with Earth-existence. Popularly expressed: since that point of time, Christ has been on the Earth.

Vision of the Sun Spirit was possible to men until the fourth century A.D., because up to then they were still intimately united with the etheric body, as I have already said. And although Christ Himself was already on the Earth, until well into the fourth century the etheric body still enabled men to behold His after-image in the Sun. Just as in the physical world when we gaze at some object and then shut our eyes, the eyes retain an after-image, so in personalities in whom this faculty had remained, the etheric body retained an after-image of the great Sun Spirit when such men looked up into the Heavens. Hence those human beings who were still closely united with their etheric body – and there were many, especially in the regions of Southern Europe, Northern Africa and Asia Minor – realised from actual experience: The Sun Spirit is to be seen when our eyes gaze into the heavenly expanse. And they could not understand what it meant when the teachers and leaders of those other Mysteries of which I spoke during the French Course declared that Christ was on the Earth.

You must remember that nearly four centuries had elapsed since the Mystery of Golgotha, during which time, for the reason I have just given, a large number of sound human beings were unable to make anything of the declaration that Christ had appeared on Earth. What had taken place in Palestine was for them an insignificant event, just as insignificant as it was for the Roman writers who merely mentioned it as an aside. The death of an individual of no importance had taken place under unusual circumstances. The men of whom

I am speaking simply did not understand the depths of the Mystery. It can be said that these men did not need the Christ on Earth for in the old sense He was still there for them in the Heavens. For them He was still the Cosmic Spirit, the Spirit working in the light. For them He was the all-embracing illuminator of mankind. There was still no need for them to look into the human being and seek Him in the ego.

A man who could not grasp why Christ should be sought in a human being on the Earth since He was obviously to be sought in the Heavens, living in the light which from sunrise shines daily upon the Earth and ceases to shine at sunset – such a man was Julian the Apostate. For him, and others of his kind, what had taken place in Palestine was an event on a par with any other historical event, but altogether insignificant. For such men it was an ordinary, actually unimportant event, for the need for Christ was not yet alive in them.

When was it that the need for Christ began to live in men? This is what we shall be thinking about today. When could the need for Christ arise in mankind at all?

Let us now think of the successive epochs of earthly evolution after the great Atlantean catastrophe. The catastrophe took place in the eighth/ninth millennium before Christ and after it we come to the first post-Atlantean civilisation-epoch which in the book Occult Science I called the ancient Indian epoch. In that ancient time man lived paramountly in his etheric body. His union with the etheric body was so close that we can say quite simply: man lived in the etheric body. His life was such that the physical body was really more like a garment for him, something quite external. He looked out into the world far more with his etheric eyes than with his physical eyes.

The second period was the ancient Persian epoch. Man now looked into his environment mainly through the sentient body. In the third, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, he looked into the world with the help of the Sentient Soul, and at length, in the fourth, the Graeco-Latin epoch, he looked into the world with the powers of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul.

In our own fifth civilisation-epoch since the fifteenth century, which we may call the historic present, man looks into the world with the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul. This brings about the results I have described in their historic sequence in the Natural Science Course.³

But we must now be clear about what this really signifies. The soul makes itself felt to begin with in the etheric body. In the first epoch man is still living altogether in the etheric body. Then he lives in the sentient body. But this, in reality, is still immersed in the etheric body. Only in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch does he begin to live in the soul itself, but even now the soul is still living in the etheric body. In this epoch, when man experiences himself inwardly as a being of soul, he still feels half immersed in the etheric body.

It is in the Graeco-Latin epoch that in his life of soul man grows out of and beyond the etheric body. The etheric body is still within him, of course, until about the year A.D. 333. Then he begins to grow beyond the etheric body in such a way and to such an extent that his soul is only loosely united with it; there is no longer a strong, inner union. In the outer world the soul feels deserted, being obliged to go out into the world without the support of the etheric body. And it is now that the need for Christ arises. Man’s soul is no longer united with the etheric body so he no longer sees the great Sun Spirit, does not even see His afterimage when he looks out into the Heavens.

But world-evolution is a very gradual process, lasting for long, long periods of time. From the fourth century onwards the soul was as it were inwardly emancipated from the etheric body but not yet strengthened in itself; it was still inwardly weak. And if we survey the centuries, the fifth, sixth and seventh, right on into the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, even on into our own time (but we will consider primarily the period until the fifteenth century) we find the human soul inwardly emancipated, it is true, but weak and ineffectual. It feels the need for something but is not strong enough yet to meet this need from its own inner forces, not strong enough yet to seek the Christ, not, as formerly, in the Sun, but now in the Mystery of Golgotha; to seek Him, not in cosmic space but in the course of Time. The soul of man had to grow inwardly strong enough to develop forces within itself. Through all the centuries until the fifteenth, man was not strong enough to develop inner forces whereby he could have acquired understanding of the world through his own soul. Hence he was content to gather knowledge from the writings left by the ancients, from surviving traditions.

This is something we must bear in mind. The soul of man had to grow strong. In the fifteenth century it had reached the point of being able to experience as its own what it was no longer able to experience through the etheric body or through the etheric body out of the physical body, namely, the mathematical domain which it could now experience as abstraction. With this experience mankind has not yet achieved a great deal. But as you will be aware, it is now a totally different kind of experience. It is the impulse, out of the innermost soul itself, to arrive at something which mankind had not been able to reach in ancient times by using the etheric body with which the soul had been so intimately united.

Men had to grow inwardly strong enough to reach the Christ, whereas in earlier times the etheric body had enabled them to behold Him s He appeared in the Sun. We may therefore say that up to the fourth century A.D. it was precisely the most highly cultured men who were unable to make anything of the tidings about the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha.

It is interesting to be able to say that neither the Emperor Constantine’s adoption of Christ nor the Emperor Julian’s rejection of Him was based on any firm ground. The historian Zozimus even goes so far as to declare that Constantine himself went over to Christianity because he had committed so many crimes against his family that the priests of the old religion refused to pardon him. He therefore broke away from the old Paganism and its priests, the Christian priests having promised him that they would be able to forgive his iniquities. This was hardly a very valid foundation for the adoption of Christianity. Indeed one can truly say that it was by no means out of a deep or intense need for Christ that Constantine turned his allegiance to Him.

In Julian’s case it only required initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries – an initiation which by that time was a very external matter – to fill him with enthusiasm for the Sun Spirit in the form in which that Spirit had been known. In his case too, therefore, the foundation of it was not really profound, although Julian did indeed acquire remarkable insight through his initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis. But in regard to the Christ question, neither the pros nor the cons were at that time really powerful or profound, for men simply did not know the meaning of the statement that Christ must now be sought for in history, in the body of a man.

And again, from the fourth century onwards, when their souls were inwardly emancipated but not strong enough as yet, men could find no other way to the Christ or indeed to any explanation of the world – for this had to be entirely recast – than through historical tradition, written and oral tradition, largely oral tradition, since few were cognisant of the written traditions and interpreted them to others by word of mouth.

This state of things remained for many centuries, indeed so far as perceptive understanding of Christ is concerned it remains so to this day. But it is of great significance that the soul had become free. Although in history it is true that every change has its preliminaries and its after-effects, nevertheless the year A.D. 333 can be cited as the point of time when the emancipation of the soul became a reality in the more advanced men. But the soul was still too lacking in strength to acquire any inner knowledge by its own efforts. In those times, when a man pondered earnestly and deeply about the surviving traditions and teachings, he could say: ‘Quite a short time ago there were people who still beheld divine-spiritual reality in the Sun. But I see nothing. Those to whom this divine-spiritual reality was revealed drew from it a wealth of other knowledge – mathematical knowledge, for example. My soul does indeed feel itself independent but it cannot yet muster its own forces to acquire such knowledge.’

In the fifteenth/sixteenth century the important symptom was that people began at least to for-mulate mathematical-mechanistic knowledge by using the forces of the soul itself. And Copernicus was the first to apply to the structure of the Heavens what he experienced through an emancipated soul. All earlier cosmologies had been evolved by souls not yet emancipated from the etheric body, who were still using the faculties of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul and who were thus able to apply the powers of the etheric body to look out into the Universe. The Intellectual or Mind-Soul was still active until well into the fifteenth century, but men could make use only of the physical body, the physical eyes, when they gazed upwards to the Heavens. These are the reasons why through all the centuries to this very day, knowledge of Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha could be transmitted only by scripture or oral tradition.

And now – what have we gained as yet through the soul which has become gradually stronger since the fourth/fifth century? External mechanistic knowledge, physical knowledge, of which I spoke in the Course on Natural Science. But now the time has come when the soul must become even stronger; for whereas in earlier days, when gazing up into the Heavens with the help of the etheric body the soul beheld in the physical Sun the Spirit Sun, so now, gazing inwardly into the ego it must feel, behind the ego, the Christ. By physical eyes the physical Sun is seen and by the eyes belonging to the etheric body, the Sun Spirit, the Christ, is seen.

When man looks into himself today he finds the ego. He is aware of the ego, has a feeling of the ego, but it is very shadowy. This feeling of the ego was an experience which first arose in the emancipated soul. Formerly man had looked out into the world; now he must look into his own inner being. Gazing out into the world brought him into touch with the Sun and with the Christ, the Sun Spirit; gazing inward has brought him, so far, into touch only with the ego. He must now reach the stage of finding behind the ego the reality of being which in ancient times the Sun revealed to him. The Christ he once experienced in the light from sunrise to sunset, the illuminator of his life, he must now feel radiating as a light from within himself, from his own ego. In Christ he must find the strong support of his ego.

And so we may say: Formerly man gazed outwards to the Sun and found the Christ-filled light. Now he feels his way into his own being and must learn to recognise and experience the Christ-filled ego. True, we are at the very beginning of this development and we must remember what Anthroposophy tells mankind, namely that the centuries since the fourth century A.D. have been an intermediate period. In the previous centuries men were able to look out into the Heavens and find the Christ as the Sun Spirit in outer space. Now that these intermediate centuries are past a new humanity must arise. Men must find the way into their own inmost being and along this path find the inner Sun, the Christ; for He now appears when the ego is experienced as in former ages He was revealed in the Sun. He who was once the Sun Spirit is now the pillar and support of the ego.

With the fourth century, in that humanity which was gradually evolving out of the Graeco-Latin races, there began the need for Christ which at first could find satisfaction only through written or oral tradition. But today, especially for the more advanced members of humanity, this written and oral tradition has lost its power of conviction. Today, therefore, men must learn to find the Christ inwardly, even as a humanity of olden times found Him outwardly through the Sun and its light. It is important to understand the intermediate centuries during which the soul of man was independent but in a certain sense empty of content. When the soul looked out into the Universe while endowed with the power of the etheric body, it could not possibly perceive in the phenomena of the Heavens that mechanistic-mathematical system which subse-quently became the Copernican system. Everything was perceived in far closer union with the human being. And the result was not some arbitrary cosmic system abstracted entirely from the human being, but the system which then, already decadent, became known as the Ptolemaic.

But when the soul began no longer to be rooted in the cosmic ether with its own etheric body, a new mental attitude in man was gradually being prepared. And this mentality subsequently pro-duced a science of the stars in which it was a matter of indifference whether man is related or is not related to the Heavens. The one and only tribute paid by this transformed mentality to ancient times was that men placed the starting-point of the new system in the Sun. Through Copernicus, the Sun was made the centre of the Universe – not of the spiritual but of the physical Universe. This indicates the existence of a dim feeling that once upon a time the Sun, with the Christ, was felt to be the centre of the Universe. We must not, as has gradually become the custom nowadays, study the external aspect of history only; we must also pay attention to the development of inner feelings, inner perceptiveness, in human beings.

If we really understand how to read Copernicus, in whom this element of feeling was obviously present, we realise that he did not merely calculate. He was aware of an urge to restore to the Sun something of the old glory. This inner impulse led him to the discovery of three laws, the third of which actually makes everything that is said in the first and second, questionable and uncertain. For Copernicus had formulated a third law, which subsequent astronomy, reducing everything to a mechanistic system, simply omitted. This was a law according to which the movement of the Earth around the Sun was by no means described in such absolute terms as it is today. For today, as I have often said, the whole matter is regarded as a simple fact of observation, as if one were to place a gigantic chair far out in cosmic space, view the Sun from there with the Earth circling around it. But the chair would have to be far out in cosmic space and sitting on it the pedant, observing the system from outside. This could not, of course, be regarded as a result of observation at all. Copernicus himself, if I may put it so, had a conscience in these matters not quite as stubborn or hardened as those who later on mechanised the whole structure of the Universe. Moreover he cited phenomena which indicate that this movement of the Earth around the Sun is not, after all, absolute and unconditional. But as I said, this third law was simply ignored and suppressed by later science. The scientists confined themselves to the first two laws – the rotation of the Earth on its own axis and around the Sun – thus obtaining a very simple system which in this form was gradually introduced into the schools. Needless to say, there is no question here of raising opposition to the Copernician system. Its advent was a necessity in the course of evolution. But today the time has come when we must speak of these matters as I tried to do in the Course of lectures on Natural Science and Astronomy, given in Stuttgart.⁴ I showed that we must think about these things quite differently from what is possible in the field of materialistic science today.

In Copernicus himself, in the whole conception of his system, there is still an element of feeling. After all, he did not wish to apply a purely mathematical system of co-ordinates to our solar system with the Sun at the centre. He wanted to give back to the Sun what had been taken away from it because men were no longer able to behold the Christ in the Sun.

Such things as these should show you how necessary it is to observe not only the external facts and the change in men’s thinking in the course of history, but also the change in their feelings. This was especially striking when the mechanistic principle came decisively to the fore. In Copernicus, and notably in Kepler, these elements of feeling are still perceptible and in Newton very emphatically so. A few days ago in the lectures on science I explained how Newton subsequently became rather ill at ease with his mathematical natural philosophy. To begin with he had conceived of space as being permeated with purely mathematical-mechanistic forces, but later on, after reading through what he had written he became uneasy about such an abstract conception, and he thereupon declared that what he had thus posited as abstract space with the three abstract dimensions, was in reality the Sensorium Dei – the Sensorium of God. Newton had grown a little older. These ultra-mathematical ideas pricked his conscience and he now declared space to be the most important realm in the brain of God: the Sensorium.

It was not until later that men of knowledge were judged entirely as thinkers, the element of feeling being ignored altogether. But this ought not to have happened in the case of Newton, above all not in that of Leibnitz and the natural scientists of that time. And anyone who reads a life of Galileo will find on every page how human nature in its fullness was at all times active. Man as a thinking apparatus, feeding himself as such with the results of experiment and observation as any steam-engine is fed with coal, man as a thinking apparatus does not appear on the scene until a later time, and only then becomes the authoritative leader in science which is said to be free of a priori premises. And it is indeed free of a priori premises of true knowledge.

The soul is no longer the empty soul which it became in the fourth century of the Christian era. It is no longer empty for it has filled itself with a multitude of mathematical-mechanistic ideas. But to all this, something must be added: the inner light must be found within the ego, which in order to avoid speaking merely in a figurative or symbolic sense, we should call the Being who is the pillar and support of the soul.

And here we come to something that became more and more apparent in the course of the cen-turies and is strong today but is cast by men who have dulled their senses to sleep into the sub-conscious foundations of their souls. It is: the need for Christ. Only a spiritual knowledge, a knowledge of the spiritual Universe, can satisfy this need for Christ. A characteristic of our own age, the twentieth century, is the need for Christ and with it the inner effort of the soul to muster the power to find the Christ in the ego, or behind the ego, even as in past times He was found in the Sun.

The relation of men to the Sun Spirit in the Graeco-Latin epoch was in the state of evening twilight. For it was in the ancient Indian epoch that men beheld the Sun Spirit with full clarity of vision. We ourselves are living in an age when we should be aware of a dawn – the dawn of the true knowledge of Christ won by man’s own forces. The ancient knowledge of the Sun Spirit which Julian the Apostate still wished to galvanise into new life, can no longer afford any satisfaction to mankind. Even the endeavours of Julian were in vain because of the march of evolution. But the epoch of the first four centuries of our era, when men did not know what to make of Christ and the following epoch when they already felt the need for Him but could satisfy this need only through written or oral tradition – these epochs must be followed by the new age in which there is understanding for words in the Gospel such as these: ‘I have yet many things to say unto you but ye cannot bear them now.’

An age must come which understands what Christ meant when He said: ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of earthly time.’ For verily Christ is not dead; He is alive and He speaks not through the Gospels only. He speaks for the eye of Spirit, when the eye of Spirit opens again to the mysteries of man’s existence. Then He is present at all times, speaks and reveals Himself. Truly it is a feeble humanity that will not strive for the time when men can be told what they could not be told two thousand years ago because they were not then able to bear it. As souls they were still in a condition which made it impossible for them to understand what Christ was offering to humanity. Certainly, those immediately around Him could understand something of it. But the Gospel was given for all beings and the saying just quoted resounds through the whole world.

We must strive to promote a humanity which puts the living Christ in the place of mere tradition. But even without discrediting tradition, nothing could be more unchristian than repeatedly to declare that only what has actually been written down has validity, thus ignoring the revelation of Christ that comes from the spiritual world today, speaking to our thinking as it strives for illumination, to our feeling heart, and to the fullness of manhood in our will.

• 1. English translation published by Anthroposophic Press, Inc. New York, with the title: Man and the World of Stars. The spiritual Communion of Mankind.
• 2. Ten lectures given from 6 to 15 September 1922. A précis of the contents written by Dr. Steiner himself is translated into English and published with the title: Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy.
• 3. A Course of nine lectures given in Dornach during December 1922 and January 1923, entitled: Natural Science in the History of the World. Its moment of origin and subsequent development. A translation by George Adams is contained in Anthroposophical Movement, vols. VI (1929) and VII (1930).
• 4. Eighteen lectures, January 1921, entitled: The Relation of the different Sciences to Astronomy. When the German text is published by the Nachlassverwaltung, the bibliographical number will be 323. A provisional translation is available in typescript only.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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