The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been considering the human form, human life, the inner life and the human spirit in relation to the cosmos. Looking back on the different aspects considered, we are able to produce a kind of extractof it all and say: Deep down in the to produce a kind of extract of it all and say: Deep down in the depths of human nature lies the will (Fig. 37).

In a number of ways it is the most “mysterious” element in human nature, if I may put it like this. When we think of the moral sphere, it inevitably strikes us that our aberrations, tendencies in us which are often entirely hostile to the world, arise from the moral sphere as if from unfathomable depths, and that all pricks of conscience and self-reproaches we may feel stream up from the depths of the will.

We also know that this sphere of the will is mysterious by nature because in many respects there is something indefinite about it, something over which we have little control. It is an element which pushes us hither and thither on the billows of life, and we are not always able to say that we relate to it with our conscious impulses. In another respect, relating to our understanding, I have always stressed that the true nature of the will impulse lies outside our conscious awareness, being at the same level as experiences made in deep, dreamless sleep. In this respect, too, will intent is an indefinite, mysterious element which has been poured into human nature.

Considering the human mind and spirit, we are not able to say that human beings have it only when awake, say, or consciously forming ideas; we also have it in sleep and in the part of us into which will intent have been poured and where we are in the equivalent of deep sleep. We can imagine, therefore, that mind and spirit are also present when we sleep.

With reference to our will intent, two things can be distinguished. In the first place there is the will intent which induces us to be active from the time we wake up until we go to sleep—unless, of course, we are real lay-abouts. We are unable to perceive the nature of this will intent, but its effects come to awareness because we are able to form ideas of them. We do not know how our will impulse works when we take a step, but we can see that we have taken a step forward. We form an idea about the effects of our will intent and in our waking life we thus have an idea and awareness of those effects. This is one aspect of our will intent.

Another aspect is that the will is active in us even while we sleep. Internal processes occurring while we sleep are also effected by the will. We merely do not perceive them. Just as the sun also shines at night—on the other half of the earth, where we do not live—so will intent streams through our inner nature while we sleep, though we are not aware of this. It does, however, show itself afterwards, when we look back on the state of sleep.

We may thus distinguish between two kinds of will intent, an inner and an outer one.

Our will intent may be said to be down in the ocean depths of soul, rising up in waves. Since we had to agree that it is active also during sleep, when our living body is merely involved in organic activity, with no soul element streaming through it nor the light of mind and spirit illumining it, we also have to say: Our sleeping will intent has to do with organic activity, for organic, or vital, processes occur in us that are essentially connected with the will. They continue when we are awake and our will intent is in full flow. Will intent is revealed in internal metabolic processes, another area where we can speak of organic activity.

Out of the depth of this will ocean in human nature rise the waves of what comes to expression in our feelings. We know that in feeling, human nature works at a dimmed-down level (Fig. 37), with the intensity of conscious awareness reduced to the level of dreams. It is, however, less dim than our will intent. Something from the depths of human nature rises up into the light. Human beings bring light into their inner nature through feeling. In the process, the two aspects of will intent rise up into the more intensive level of conscious awareness; both inner and outer will extent can rise up and come to conscious awareness.

We therefore distinguish two kinds of feeling. One is the feeling which rises up from the sphere of the will and is related to the sleeping state in us. It comes to expression mainly in the antipathies of which we have so many. The kind of will intent which makes us active in the outside world when it rises up into our feeling, bringing us together with the world in sympathy, comes to expression in all the sympathies we feel for the world. In this region of the soul, therefore, we have dreamlike feeling experience coming to expression in sympathy and antipathy, sympathies and antipathies which go all the way up to our feeling for beauty, sympathies and antipathies relating to forms in life, both man-made and natural forms, and also the sympathies and antipathies which we have thanks to our organs of smell or taste, as we perceive odours and tastes, finding them good or repellent. All this rich and varied activity is the actual activity of the soul. Will intent is therefore revealed in organic activity, feeling in soul activity (Fig. 37).

If we study soul life from this point of view we can learn a great deal. We perceive that the waking state rouses us to be in sympathy with the world around us. Our antipathies essentially come from more unconscious levels. They rise from the sleep level of our will. It is as if our sympathies were more on the surface and as if our antipathies entered into them from unknown depths. Antipathies reject. With them, we put the world around us at a distance, isolating and shutting ourselves off. Egotism is mainly based on antipathies rising up inside us. The more egotistical a person, the more is the element of antipathy active inside. Egotists want to isolate themselves and be as far as possible by themselves.

In ordinary life we are not aware of the interplay of sympathies and antipathies in the inner life. We do become aware of it when our relationship to the outside world becomes abnormal and our defensive reactions, using our antipathies which come from the realm of sleep, also become abnormal. This happens, for instance, when our breathing is out of balance during sleep and we have nightmares. Inwardly we experience this as antipathy used to defend us against something that wants to invade us, reducing the experience of our egoity.

We get a glimpse of deep secrets in human life. When someone develops very powerful antipathies which then also enter into waking life, antipathy may enter into everything, even the astral body. The astral body then lets antipathetic nature stream out in front, rather like an abnormal aura. It may happen that the individual feels even people with whom he normally has a neutral relationship to be antipathetic and indeed people he normally loves. All the different kinds of persecution mania arise from this kind of situation. When we experience antipathetic feelings that cannot be explained by external circumstances, they come from overflowing antipathies in the soul. The pole arising from the realm of sleep in the life of the soul has undergone abnormal development in this case.

If this antipathetic element gains the upper hand, we get someone who hates all the world. And this can go to extremes. All education and all work done together in the social sphere should be designed to prevent people from developing this hatred. But just consider, if the element which rises up from the depths of human nature can make people into such egotists when it becomes too powerful, what must the inner will intent be like which is at the sleep level and which is mercifully hidden from us! We never come to realize the all-pervading presence of this sleeping will intent in the whole of our organism and our limbs. At most, highly unusual dreams may make some people a little aware of what lives in the will intent which restores the organism when we are sleeping. This element—I have shown it from another point of view in earlier lectures³⁴—is rightly beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness. When you come to know it, you come to know everything in human beings which can take them to an extreme degree of badness. It is a profound mystery of life that our organic activity is balanced out by powers which would make a person a criminal, a bad character, if they were to gain the upper hand in conscious life.

Nothing in the world is in itself evil or good. Something which is thoroughly evil when it comes up into conscious life, also regulates our organic functions and restores our used up powers of vitality during sleep, which is the right place for it to be used. If you enquire into the nature of the powers which restore used-up vitality, you have to say: It is evil. Evil has its function. When human beings gain spiritual insight and see this element it is an element about which spiritual scientists of earlier times also said: Its true nature must not be described, for sinful are the lips which utter it, sinful the ears which hear it. People must know, however, that life is a dangerous process and that evil is very much present down in the depths, a much-needed power.

The waves also rise higher than this, into the forming of ideas. When the sleeping inner will intent which brings light in the sphere of feeling rises into the forming of ideas, light is shed, but at the same time the quality of our ideas is reduced through abstraction. Feelings of antipathy still have living intensity in human experience. When they rise up into the sphere of ideas, they live in all the negative, dismissive attitudes people have (Fig. 37). Everything we dismiss in this way, every “negative judgement”, as logicians call it, is due to antipathetic feeling, or sleeping will intent, rising up into the life of ideas.

When the sympathetic feelings which have their origin in wide awake, outside-related will intent, rise into the sphere of ideas we get positive attitudes. As you can see, we now have merely abstract images. In our feelings of sympathy and antipathy we still have something very much alive. In the opinion-based attitudes formed in the sphere of ideas we are standing still, as it were, and observing the world. We take a positive or negative stance. We are not as intensely involved as in antipathy, we merely say no. This is an abstract process. Instead of developing the heat of antipathy we simply say no. Instead of developing the warmth of sympathy we say yes. In contemplative calm we are above any relationship to the outside world to the point of forming an abstract judgement. Activity is merely at image level, therefore, and we are able to say, especially in the light of what was said yesterday: Here (Fig. 37) is the activity of mind and spirit, but will intent, feeling and judgement, or the forming of ideas, rise even further, into the sphere of the senses. What becomes of a negative opinion when it enters into the sphere of the senses? It becomes a situation where we perceive nothing. In terms of the most notable form of sensory perception, vision, we may call it a situation in which we see nothing and experience darkness: Experience of darkness. A positive judgement on the other hand means experience of light. We might of course just as well speak of experience of dumbness, experience of sound, etc. We could put this into words for every one of the twelve senses.

We may now ask ourselves what kind of activity we have in the sphere of the senses. We have considered organic activity, activity of the soul, and activity of mind and spirit. The last of these is entirely image-based, but still our own activity. The processes which occur between our senses and the outside world, on the other hand, really are no longer our own activity, for the world is influencing us. It is perfectly possible to draw the eye schematically, making it an independent entity, as it were. What happens in the eye is that the outside world penetrates into the organism as if through a bay. Here we are not engaged in our own activity in the world, but our position in the world is such that we may say: It is the activity of the gods. This is active throughout the whole world around us which in darkness inclines towards negative judgement and in light inclines towards positive judgement. Wise minds of the second post-Atlantean age had a particularly strong feeling for this activity of the gods influencing human beings in their relationship to the world. They had a powerful feeling for God in the light and God in the dark. God in the light is the divine principle with luciferic bias, God in the dark with ahrimanic bias. This is how people of the ancient Persian civilization experienced the world around them. To them, the sun represented that outside world—Sun as source of divine Light: second post-Atlantean age.

The sphere which lies between judgement and feeling was the main sphere of experience for the third post-Atlantean civilization, which is the Egyptian and Chaldean civilization. People then experienced the divine principle not so much in light and darkness outside but in the area where ideas come together with feelings. The influence of the gods on Egyptians and Chaldeans caused people to pour something of their antipathies into their negative judgements and something of their sympathies into their positive attitudes. We need to be able to read the images and other documents which have survived from that period to see how everything arose from positive sympathies and negative antipathies. Looking at figures from Egyptian tombs and elsewhere you can sense something in them that was artistically created out of positive sympathies and negative antipathies. You cannot create a sphinx without bringing in ideas alive with sympathy and antipathy. People then experienced not only light and darkness but the living quality inherent in feelings of sympathy and antipathy. The Sun was experienced as the source of divine Life.

During Greco-Latin times people had largely lost the direct connection with the outside world. In my Riddles of Philosophy³⁵ I have shown how people still experienced thoughts the way we experience sensory perceptions today but were gradually progressing to the state in which we are today. Due to I development, we essentially no longer have a real relationship to the outside world in which our I is in effect asleep in the body, and we tend towards the sleeping state. This was not so highly developed in ancient Greece, though it had already become quite powerful. The ancient Persians had not entered deeply into their physical nature. They did not really see themselves living fully in their bodies, particularly if they were sages. It was their belief that they moved and were active throughout the whole universe on the waves of light. The ancient Greeks had already reached a stage where they were asleep inside their bodies where this cosmic aspect was concerned. When we are actually asleep, our I and astral body are outside us; but compared to the wakefulness of the ancient Persians, even our waking state is one of sleep. The wakefulness, or let us say the “waking up”, of the ancient Persians which I have characterized in my Occult Science was like entering into the human senses, with light itself coming in at the same time.

We are no longer aware of the fact that on awakening we bring light into our eyes. Light is a shadowy element outside us. This meant that the Greeks were no longer able to perceive the sun as the true source of life but as something which penetrated them inwardly. To them, the element in which the sun lives inwardly in human beings was the element of Eros, love. Eros, the sun-element in man, was the true inner experience of the Greeks. Thus the sun was seen as the source of divine love.

Then, from about the 4th century onwards—I have spoken of various aspects of its specific nature on other occasions—came the age when the sun was experienced as no more than a physical body, a sphere of vapour, out there in space. The sun had, in fact, become obscured for humanity. Persians truly felt the sun to be the reflector of the light which billowed and lived in space with tremendous vigour. The Egyptians and Chaldeans saw it as life billowing and pulsing through the universe. The Greeks experienced it as something which instilled love into organic nature, as Eros guiding them through the waves of the emotions. Entering more and more into the human being, experience of the sun vanished into the deep down depths of soul. Today we carry the sun element down in those depths. We are not meant to reach it, because the Guardian of the Threshold stands before it, and because it is in the depths of which it was said in the ancient mysteries that no utterance should be given, for sinful were the lips which uttered it, and sinful the ear which heard it. Schools existed in the 4th century who essentially taught, to allow Christianity to spread: The Sun Mystery must not be revealed; a civilization has to come where the Sun Mystery is not known.

Behind everything which happens in the physical world are the inner powers which, I’d say, are teaching out of the universe. The Roman emperor Constantine (306–337) was one of the instruments of those powers. Under him, Christianity took the form in which the sun is denied.

Another emperor, Julian the Apostate,³⁶ took less account of developments in his day but let himself be guided by his enthusiasm for the last remnants of the old instinctive wisdom learned from his mystery teachers. He was murdered because he sought to restore the old tradition of the threefold Sun Mystery. The world did not want to take that road.

Today we have to realize that the old, instinctive wisdom needs to be revived in conscious wisdom. Wisdom which has gone down to subconscious levels, into mere organic, and even sub-organic, activity needs to be brought back to consciousness. The Sun Mystery must be found again.

When the Sun Mystery was in the process of being lost, Julian, who still wanted the world to be aware of it, made the most terrible enemies who finally killed him. Today we have enemies who are against the new Sun Mystery which anthroposophy must give to the world. Historical evolution now follows the opposite trend. The 4th century brought the decline; today we need the rise.

In this respect Constantine and Julian are symbols of historical evolution. Julian may be said to have stood on the shattered ruins of the past, wanting to rebuild the forms of the old wisdom out of those ruins. The old forms had been destroyed by Christianity, which initially, under Constantine, had taken materialistic form. Countless works of art, works of ancient wisdom and written works were destroyed, anything that might give people even a hint of the old Sun Mystery.

It is true that in order to achieve freedom, humanity had to come to believe that a sphere of gases moved through the universe out there, though physicists who would be able to go there would be really surprised, for instead of a sphere of gases they would find an empty space, indeed less than space. They would discover that the sun out there is not a sphere of luminous gases—which is a nonsense—but in the first place just a reflector (Fig. 39), unable to radiate light and at most merely reflecting it. In the spirit, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus and the moon radiate light. Physically the sun appears to be shining on them, but in reality they radiate light towards the sun, which acts as a reflector. This is the physical reality. The ancient Persians were still able to perceive the sun as the source of light for the earth, but not an actual source but a reflector. Later it became the reflector of life and the reflector of love.

Julian the Apostate wanted people to understand this and was got rid off because of this. To achieve freedom, humanity had to go through superstitious belief in a sphere of gases radiating light—something we see represented as the absolute truth in modern physics textbooks. Now we must penetrate to the truth of the matter again.

In this respect, therefore, Constantine and Julian are very much like two symbols. Julian wanted to preserve the old traditions so that the true Sun Mystery might still reach people. During the early centuries, the Christ was still an Apollo or Sun figure.

The Sun Mystery was seen as the most precious jewel humanity possessed. It was symbolized in the Palladium,³⁷ which was said to have been kept in Troy, where the mystery priests used it to reveal the true nature of the sun to people in ritual, sacramental form. It was then taken to Rome, and part of the secret knowledge held by Roman initiates was that the Palladium was in safe keeping in Rome. Essentially the initiate priests of ancient Rome, and also the early emperors of Rome, above all Augustus,³⁸ based their actions on the knowledge that the greatest jewel the world possessed, or at least its physical symbol, was in Rome. The Palladium had been placed beneath the foundations of the most highly esteemed temple in Rome, a fact only known to those who knew the deepest secrets of Roman life. Through the spirit, it had, however, also become known to those whose role it was to bring Christianity to the world. The early Christians went to Rome because of this. So there was a definite spiritual element.

When Christianity was secularized under Constantine, the Palladium was removed from Rome. Constantine founded Constantinople and had the Palladium put in the ground under the column he erected to himself. The further development of Roman Christianity was that the Sun mystery was taken away by the very emperor who established the rigid forms, rigid mechanisms, of Christianity in Rome. With this, Christendom has lost the wisdom of the world, the outward sign of this being the transfer of the Palladium from Rome to Constantinople.

In some parts of the Slavonic world—people always put their own interpretation on this—it was believed until the beginning of the 20th century that in the not too far distant future the Palladium would be taken from Constantinople to another city, in their belief a Slav city.

Whichever way this may be, the Palladium—you may take the whole as an outer symbol, but it is the inner aspect which matters—is waiting to go forth from Constantinople, which is casting darkness on it, to a place where it will be totally obscured. The Palladium is thus taken to the East, where the old wisdom lives in decadence and growing obscurity. Just as the Sun is a reflector of light given to it from the universe, everything depends on it in the further evolution of the world that the Palladium be illumined by a wisdom arising from the treasury of insight gained in the West. The Palladium, heirloom of the past taken from Troy to Rome and then to Constantinople, and to be taken even further into the darkness of the East, the Palladium, jewel of the Sun, must wait until in the West grows in mind and spirit and is able to release it from the dark, obscured treasury of insight limited to the natural world. Our mission for the future is thus linked to the most sacred tradition of European development.

To this day, then, legends are still alive for those initiated into these mysteries, some of them very plain, simple people who walk about on this earth. Legends are still alive of the Trojan Palladium being taken to Rome, of the Palladium jewel of wisdom, being taken to Constantinople when Roman Christianity became worldly and superficial, and that it shall be taken to the East one day when all the old wisdom will have been stripped away in the East, having fallen into utter decadence, and legends that speak of the need to bring new light from the West to this Sun jewel.

The Sun has vanished into the depths of human nature. We have to find it again by developing the science of the spirit. Humanity must find this Sun again, or the Palladium will vanish into the obscurity of the East. Today it is sinful to utter words that are wrong: “Ex oriente lux”. The light can no longer come from the East, which has fallen into decadence. Yet the East, which will have the Sun jewel, however obscured, is waiting for the light of the West. Today, people walk in the darkness, arrange to meet in the dark, their eyes turned to—Washington.³⁹ Salvation, however, will only come from Washingtons able to speak out of the mood of the spiritual world in such a way that they not only open economic gates for China, looking for the darkness which surrounds the Palladium. Salvation will only come when conferences held in the West decide to take light to the East, letting the Palladium shine out again. Like a fluorescent body, the Palladium in itself is dark; it shines out when light streams into it. The same holds true for the wisdom of the East. Dark in itself, it will be illumined and fluoresce when the wisdom of the West, the light of the spirit from the West, enters into it.

The people of the West are as yet unable to see this. The legend of the Palladium needs to be placed in the bright light of consciousness. We must feel the right kind of compassion for Julian the Apostate who wanted to close his eyes to the age when the light of freedom would be able to germinate in the darkness, who wanted to preserve the instinctive wisdom of old and therefore had to perish. We have to realize that Constantine took the light of wisdom from the Romans by giving them a worldly Christianity, sending Christianity into the darkness. We have to realize that the light which will let the Palladium shine out again must be sought in modern science. Only then will an important step in world history come to fulfilment. Only then will the Palladium, which became Western the moment the Greeks burned down Troy and which still holds the light that shone from Troy, become Western and Eastern. It is now in the dark and must be brought out of the dark. Light must be brought to the Palladium.

We can win enthusiasm from historical evolution if our hearts are in the right place. If they are, in the sense of what I have been presenting today, we shall also be able to find the right response to the impulses which are the true impulses of the science of the spirit.

I’ll continue with this on Friday.

• 34. See the lectures given on 23 and 24 September 1921—Cosmosophy Vol. 1. (GA 207)
• 35. Steiner R. Riddles of Philosophy (GA 18), tr. by F. C. A. Koelln. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1973.
• 36. Flavius Claudius Julianus (c. 331–363), half-brother of Constantine, Roman emperor (361–363).
• 37. In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an image of the goddess Pallas Athene which had come from heaven and was “the luck of Troy”. Stolen by Odysseus and Diomedes, it was thought to be in Argos, Athens or Sparta. According to the Romans, Anaeas had taken it to Rome.
• 38. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (63 BC–AD 14), first Roman emperor.
• 39. Washington Conference (21 November 1921 - 6 February 1922) to discuss naval disarmament and the Far East. Led among other things to American-British-French-Japanese agreement to guarantee each other’s territories and a collective guarantee of China’s independence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It can therefore be said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would be very sorry if anything I have said here were to be taken dogmatically or to become one-sided in some way. That spiritual science can be fruitful for education is the basis of everything I have said. Anthroposophy could help teaching and education to gain a more living character, and the general directions I have described here can be put into practice in many ways. It would be good if there were an exchange of opinions among the listeners as well as others who are interested in some way in the further development of education as it is conceived here. It is important to arrive at what is necessary in our time through a living comprehension of human development as a whole and of present developments in education. We are not concerned with developing a new formal basis for education, but rather with extending the circle of people who have an interest in the perspective presented with regard to human development.

What is the state of the development of humanity today? What must we teach children if we are to take into account the perspective of the present state of humanity today and of the near future? If we do not recognize what has recently occurred as a clear indication of the need of a renewal in education, we do not understand our present time.

Of course there are an uncountable number of details to mention. Consider for a moment how appropriate it would be to include my characterization of arithmetic—to place analytical methods alongside synthetic methods, and to work with the sum and products and not simply from adding and factoring—along with what is normally done. You can see how appropriate it would be to treat fractions and everything connected with them from this perspective. When we move from working with whole numbers to working with fractions, we move in a quite natural way into the analytical. Moving from whole numbers to fractions means just that: analyzing. It is therefore appropriate to bring in another element when working with fractions than we use when working with whole numbers.

We certainly cannot object to the fact that in the nineteenth century computing machines were introduced into schools. Nevertheless computing machines should not lead to an overly materialistic valuation of illustrative materials. While we should be clear about the value of examples, what is important is that human capacities be developed through teaching. The primary task of the period from the change of teeth until maturity is to develop memory. We should avoid underestimating the value of examples as a basis for forming memory as well as the value of memory when viewing examples. We should begin in a simple way—and here for those who are capable of teaching in a living way, the ten fingers on our hands are sufficient—by presenting the number ten in all kinds of ways that show the various arithmetic operations. In doing so, however, we should present arithmetic in a way that is appropriate to life, to the life of the soul in a human being. There are certainly detailed discussions in philosophy, whole sections of philosophy, concerning what a number or fraction really is. This shows that as children, we may learn about numbers or fractions, but in later life, even if we were philosophers, we could say that we now need to research what a number signifies in reality, or what a fraction is in reality. It is not necessary to go into all kinds of minute details if we want to make this process clear to children. Instead we need to bring many other things to children that then become part of their memory and which only can be studied in more detail later, when they are mature enough. I have already spoken about such things from another perspective.

Working with fractions is another question. Since fractions are in a certain sense analytical, we need to take the need for analysis into account, as I mentioned in some of the previous lectures. For that reason, we would do well to make working with fractions as visual as possible. We could perhaps divide a large cube into smaller cubes, for example, taking a large cube and dividing it into sixteen smaller cubes. From that, we can go on to the concept of a quarter by dividing the large cube first into quarters, then each quarter again into a further quarter. In this way you can show the children all kinds of relationships between a sixteenth or an eighth and so forth. If, later, you give each of the portions a different color, you can then place the various fractions of the larger cube together again in different way, which then gives a very pretty picture.

I do not want to make the transition from normal fractions to decimal fractions in some irrational way, in a way that does not correspond to reality. From the very beginning, the children should gain a feeling that the use of decimal fractions is based upon human convention or convenience. They should also gain a feeling that the way we write decimal fractions is nothing more than a continuation of the way in which we write normal numbers: we first count to ten and then, when we go on to twenty, which is twice ten, the first series of ten is included in that so that by going to twenty, we have simply added a new series of ten, and so forth. If we work toward the left using the same principle that we used when working with decimal numbers to the right, the children will realize that all this is relative and that it would form a unity if I set the decimal point two places to the right. From the very beginning, we should teach children about these conventions, which are hidden in the way we divide things. In this way many other kinds of conventions then fit into the social fabric. Many erroneous beliefs in authority would disappear if we show the children that everything that is based simply upon tradition is nothing more than social convention. Most important, however, is that through a spiritual-scientific permeation of education, we attempt to work with children during the period from the change of teeth until puberty by taking into account everything that I have said here about that period of life and how different capacities appear in different periods.

In addition, we need to give children an idea of the practicalities of life. Each topic in our teaching should be used to guide the children to a view of practical life. If we understand children properly, we will begin to teach them about physics and chemistry at around the age of twelve as well as teaching them about minerals in the way I have discussed here. At about the same time, or perhaps one year earlier, we might attempt to present arithmetic similarly to the way we would teach about minerals, physics, or chemistry, namely, by always taking the practical into account. In arithmetic, the children should gain an idea about how monetary exchange rates work—what a discount rate is, how financial accounts are held. They should learn about writing letters describing business and financial practices or relationships with another business. Instruction from the ages of twelve until about fourteen or fifteen needs to be arranged that by the time children are fifteen years old and leave grammar school to go on to a higher school or into life, they have a real and practical idea about the most important areas of life.

Some may object by saying, where are we to find the time for all this? How are we to find time to give children a real idea of how paper or soap or cigars or such things are manufactured? If we are well-organized, we can take typical examples, such as typical industries or typical methods of transportation. We can enable children to go out into the world with an understanding of all the major areas in the environment that confront them. We can certainly see how children from the city have not the slightest idea of the difference between rye and wheat. We can also see how children who do not live near a soap factory do not have the slightest idea of how soap is made. But even children who live near a soap factory still have no idea how soap is manufactured because they have been taught nothing about what is in their neighborhood.

Consider how many people today step onto or leave a streetcar without having even the dimmest idea of how a streetcar is made or how it moves and so forth. Generally speaking, today we use the products of our culture without having the slightest idea of what these products actually are.1 For this reason we have become anxious. If we are continuously surrounded by things we do not understand, we become confused, and that confusion has an effect upon our subconscious. Of course it is not possible for people to understand everything in modern life in all details. But everything that is not directly connected with our own jobs or professions should not remain a mystery. If a person is not a bookkeeper, generally accounting is a mystery. Or if a person is not a teacher, how school is held is a mystery. All those things that fragment our modern society need to be overcome. We need to understand one another again.

We should not allow children’s capacities to understand practical life to lie fallow. During the period beginning at the age of twelve, when the capacities for human reason develop, it is possible to teach children about the most important aspects of practical life. I do not know what the subjects for essays are here in Switzerland (though I have read the school curriculum), but in the former monarchical countries, instead of writing essays about frivolous subjects such as the monarch’s birthday, essays should be written that somehow involve business life, sales practices, or industrial questions.

This is certainly not an area that should be based upon idealism or some intellectual perspective. A spiritual perspective does not need to continuously emphasize ideals and how they should be taught. Instead a spiritual attitude can be held by having the students work out of a spiritual impulse, that is, by allowing that which desires to arise out of the spirit from year to year to rise to the surface. In that way the overall perspective is connected with the individual details.

I have been asked whether it is possible to explain the late eruption of the wisdom teeth from a spiritual-scientific perspective. Is the growth of wisdom teeth connected with the freeing of certain cognitive forces in the same way as the regular change of teeth?

The change of teeth indicates that certain forces, which previously permeated the entire organism and gave it strength, have now become free and have become, as I have explained to you earlier, the forces of independent thinking. We certainly cannot strictly encapsulate everything that occurs in the organism, as that would certainly be contrary to the way things develop. The things that are primary during one period of human development continue to exist, but to a much lesser extent. We grow wisdom teeth much later because at a later time in the life of our organism there is something that continues to work that was particularly active up to the age of seven. Some small amount must still remain. If everything were suddenly completed, then people would experience a very strong jolt every time they would want to begin thinking of something. When we begin to think about something, we voluntarily activate those forces that were involuntarily active in the organism before the age of seven. Those things must exist as a bridge between the separated realms of the spirit soul. What was organic at that time must continue to exist to a certain extent. For imaginative thinking we need to become independent, but at the same time we still need to be connected to our organism. That is what is expressed by the late eruption of the wisdom teeth. Some of the strength that is freed for imaginative thinking still remains in organic development. We could discover all kinds of things in human development that are similar to the situation with wisdom teeth.

Another interesting question was posed: to what extent is it possible for teachers working out of a spiritual-scientific pedagogy to help children recognize their capacities and find their right place in social life?

From the perspective of spiritual science, such questions are of little importance, since they are based upon rationalistic and materialistic thinking. In fact we have to protect children from situations where they might pose such abstract questions as, how can I find my proper place in life based upon my own capacities? Children need to slowly come to such decisions through all the stages associated with feeling. If some day the abstract question of how can we utilize our capacities in the service of humanity should arise in our soul, that is actually an illness of the soul. We need to grow slowly into our relationship to the development of humanity and to other human beings. We will do that if we have been brought up in the way I described here. In that case, we would never fall into the unwholesome situation of asking, how can I be of social service with my specific capacities? We would have a healthy, practical understanding by the time we leave grammar school, so we would recognize that life itself will present us with our position in it. The fact that such questions arise and are seriously discussed shows how much we have fallen into an intellectual and materialistic way of thinking in our time.

For that reason, I would like to mention how concrete general rules can always be developed into practical action if we have the will to do so. I would therefore like to answer in detail a question given to me about what we should do about those who are weak in spelling where the weakness arises in words where what is written is not clearly indicated, for example, whether an h or an e is in the word to form a longer sound.

As I already mentioned, training in clear listening is the basis of proper spelling. Training in proper hearing will support proper spelling. Clear hearing, if trained properly, will also train precise seeing. The different capacities support one another. If one capacity is developed in the proper way, the others will also have to develop properly. If we accustom ourselves to exact listening, we will tend to retain the appearance of the word as such, that is, its inner appearance. Exact listening supports exact seeing. For words that appear to have an arbitrary spelling, such as those that have silent letters that make the preceding vowel long, we can support the child’s proper spelling by having the child repeat the syllables of the word clearly and with varying emphasis.

I would ask you not to take what I have just said in a dogmatic way. Instead you should take it so that it can be used in many various ways. For example, someone may view the position of the Greeks in the general course of Western culture differently than I did in my discussion of teaching history a few days ago. Someone could have a very different perspective but could nonetheless present it with the same methods I used. For me, it is not important to say something dogmatic about the Greeks. I wanted to show how a particular perspective about one topic or another could be taught through a symptomatological understanding of history. I believe that it is particularly necessary for teachers today to be aware of how much we need to allow the spirit and the influences of the spiritual upon the totality of human activity to flow into teaching. We need to look without prejudice at what children bring with them if we are to raise them as they need to be raised so that the next generation will move past the social ills that have such a terrible effect upon us at present.

If you objectively observe human life, you will see that by developing the intellect in children, something that is so terribly characteristic of human nature arises: the desire for comfort, even laziness. What is necessary in order to develop intellect is—and you may laugh at this paradox—the development of will. Children will have a healthy intellect if we develop a healthy will in them through the methods I previously discussed; that is, through an introduction to art at the earliest possible time in elementary school, since art strengthens the will. We develop the will and thus in a quite particular way take care of the intellect. The reverse is also true. If we widen the view of the child by presenting broad and noble pictures, as it is possible to do in teaching history and religion, we will also have an effect upon the will.

Strangely, the proper development of intellect activates the will, and the proper development of will activates the intellect. Because of the terrible materialism of the last few centuries, an enormous dark cloud has spread over such things. Today we hardly notice how in the depths of human nature there is a certain kind of inner laziness in the soul that acts against the development of thinking. We should study egotism because it has such a subtle yet strong effect on the development of feeling today. That is something we always need to be aware of. People can develop a strong will in the proper way only if we continue to enlarge their perspective and direct them toward those things that act spiritually in the world, those things coming from the stars that have a spiritual effect upon world history and upon the depths of the human heart. It is only when people’s worldview includes the spiritual that they can properly activate their wills.

We need to move beyond certain things. In the attitudes that we have toward teaching, there is still much too much Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe and everything connected with him is characteristic of all the narrow-mindedness, all the pedantry of life. Robinson Crusoe was created for the hard-hearted middle class worldview of the eighteenth century and was then imitated everywhere else afterward. The English Robinson was barely there and then came the Czech, Polish, German, even a Croatian Robinson? There are Robinsons in every European language. Robinson Crusoe is a person who is not actually a person, because in a certain way he is a person who was mechanically placed in a situation of need and left alone so that out of his own inner activity and out of his external circumstances only those things necessary for healthy human development could develop piece by piece.

We could go through page by page of the Robinson Crusoe story and show the narrow-mindedness that is expressed through his character. We could show the weakness of a rationalistic religious worldview, which says that God is a unity and that human beings are good only when they are not spoiled through one thing or another. This unimaginative view completely puts aside the fact that human beings need a living spirit, one that permeates their souls, one that can be found everywhere in history and which has an effect right up to the stars. This Robinson Crusoe view lives even where the book is not read as the general attitude. This narrow-minded attitude must be removed from humanity, as it has subtly formed life as it is today,so that we find everywhere only a sense for what is mediocre, and people today can no longer rise above a certain level. It is Robinson Crusoe who has brought about this feeling for only the average, for nothing that is special or spectacular.

By pointing to Robinson Crusoe and his imitators and by making people aware of the intellectual adventures of the European- American civilization that overvalues the Robinson Crusoe ideal, I realize I am going against the feelings of many people. We need to leave people with that feeling a little bit, the feeling that they have moved into a little bit of the realm in which they grew up. People grew up with a Robinson Crusoe attitude and now need to think about it a little, in order to rid themselves of that part of this attitude that has permeated modern humanity.

In one sense Robinson Crusoe was a kind of protest against something that has developed more and more in Christianity. Although this is not the original Christian impulse, Christianity has developed in such a way that it assumes human nature is spoiled. Rationalism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment out of which Robinson was conceived and written assume that human nature is still good and that all that is needed is for its evil enemies to be removed so that that goodness can come forth. Both of these positions are terribly one-sided. It is certainly understandable that a prejudice toward the basic goodness of human nature arose to oppose the prejudice of the basic evil of human nature. Basically, it is nothing more than the last remains of narrow-mindedness, but a very severe form of narrow-mindedness in which Jean- Jacques Rousseau3 lives. It is essentially the opinion that if we allow people to grow as some child of nature, they will do everything just as Robinson Crusoe did in the best and most conscientious way (even though they may be under the influence of some French Baptist minister). That is about what people think.

From the present point of cultural development, we cannot progress if we allow ourselves to fall into either of these one-sided perspectives. This one-sidedness needs to be resolved through a normal synthesis. Human beings are certainly naturally good; human nature is good. Children as they enter the world as imitative beings certainly show that they unconsciously believe in the goodness of the world that has accepted them. Nevertheless, although it is true that human beings in their nature are good, it is just as true that human beings are a product of living. Fresh meat is good, but after eight days it is no longer good. It is bad because it then stinks, and something must be done to improve it if we are still to enjoy eating it after a week. Human beings are in their nature basically good. However, if they remain as they are when they entered the physical world from their pre-earthly existence, they become bad if the strength is not awakened in them to improve themselves.

There you have both: human beings are in their original nature good, but strengths must be awakened in them in order to retain the good. They are not bad in their origins, but can be spoiled if we do not awaken the forces in them that can enable them to retain their original strengths. It is just as erroneous to say that the good would shine through if we allowed people to be as they like as it is erroneous to say that people are basically not good. What is correct to say is that human beings by their nature are good, but the forces must be reawakened in them that enable what is good within to develop. If it is not supported with guidance toward the good, human nature will spoil.

We should always carry this attitude within us in regard to human development. It will be transferred to children when we tell a fairy tale or describe a ladybug or a star in such a way that it is possible to perceive, either in the details or in the general context, that we are convinced that human beings have something which is good. However, this goodness must be continuously cared for; the goodness of the world depends upon our care for human beings. It is the responsibility of human beings to participate in the formative development of the world.

In this regard we have moved away from the wisdom of our ancestors. This kind of wisdom genuinely exists in humanity. It is curious how even in ancient Greece, not to mention Egypt, it was common practice for all instruction, all activities of the priests or other religious people with the general population, to be connected with healing. In ancient times, providing knowledge was closely connected with healing. I could even say that in essence a physician was just another kind of priest and a priest another kind of physician. (Even today we find a deep-seated feeling among people that being a doctor is somehow connected with making better. “Dr. Mammon” is, of course, simply a product of the present.) All things connected with learning or understanding and providing it to others, such as being a teacher or a physician, were one in the original instincts of humanity, and the concept of healing was connected with all of them. Why is that? It was based upon a particular perspective, a perspective that we today in our materialistic times unfortunately no longer have, but one toward which we must turn again. It is the perspective that to the extent that natural forces play a role in the historical development of humanity, there is an element of demise, an element that leads toward decadence, and human beings are called upon out of their own strength to transform that decline continuously into ascent.

Culture continually threatens to become ill. Through teaching and activity, humans continually need to heal what tends to become ill in culture. History contains forces of decline, and we cannot expect these forces of decline to support humanity. The fact that Marxism today lives from the idea that everything is based upon economic forces and that which is spiritual is only a superstructure is fundamentally based upon the materialism of the past centuries. What would occur if these purely economic forces were left to themselves, if people did not continuously attempt to improve? Those forces would only make social life ill. Trotskyism and Leninism only mean to make the entire cultural development of Europe ill. If Marxism is realized, if Marxism permeates schools, then the East will become an artificial illness of European culture. It assumes that culture can develop only out of those things lying outside of human beings. But culture can only develop when human beings continuously heal what exists outside of humanity and which tends to decline.

We must revive the idea that a teacher, when he or she enters the school, acts as a kind of physician for the development of the human spirit and provides the medicine for cultural development to developing children. It is neither vanity nor arrogance when a teacher feels herself to be a physician for culture. If this is felt in the proper way, it gives us a feeling, particularly if we are teachers, to look toward those things that have always been of greatest interest to humanity. The teacher’s view cannot be broad enough. The teacher’s importance cannot be high enough. If we are aware of what education should achieve for humanity, the high-mindedness of the educator’s view will always bring with it the necessary sense of responsibility and humility.

During these lectures, you will have seen that I have attempted to make true for a spiritual-scientific foundation of education something Herbart said: he could not imagine instruction that was not at the same time upbringing, nor could he think of any upbringing without instruction. It is important to permeate ourselves with enough spirit that is sufficiently alive that we bring all the material available to us about the progressing development of humanity into school, so that in our hands it becomes an upbringing for the children. Humanity as a whole has given us a very high task. We need to recognize what humanity has achieved and transform it so that it is appropriate for even the youngest child. We can do this if we comprehend the spirit with such liveliness as it is presented in spiritual science, and as it should be perceived here when we speak of a fructification of education through spiritual science.

I do not want to bring these lectures to a conclusion with some kind of summary. Rather I prefer to let them resound with something that I say without sentimentality, but which arises out of what I have attempted to present to you. Education can only be properly practiced if it is understood as healing and when educators are aware that they are also healers. If these lectures have provided some insight toward deepening an awareness of education so that we can all again feel how we are healers; and how we must become physicians of the spirit if we are to teach and educate in the highest sense, then these lectures will have at least achieved a hint of their goal. I hope only for what the chairman of this conference has already spoken of, namely, for a working through of the material of these lectures. I am, of course, always ready to do what you wish so that what I have presented in an incomplete form in these fourteen lectures, and which I wish so much to enter into the awareness of humanity, can be realized so that it continues to pervade our consciousness.

My dear friends:

After almost two years of Waldorf education, and in view of the opening of yet another important class in September, we shall again consider a number of curriculum issues. I shall, however, leave this till tomorrow. Today I shall take a look at the results of our work so far. New ideas may arise from this review that could further improve our teaching.

In order to prevent a possible misunderstanding of what I am going to say today, I can assure you that I have noticed and appreciated the progress made during these two years. The way you are teaching—the presentation of subjects—is already such that it can be said: You have progressively come to grips with your tasks. You have, in an extraordinarily healthy way, fused with the goals of these tasks.

But it behooves us to consider such details as can provide the basis for a positive development of our work. I believe that in reviewing your work, all of you will have this initial feeling that our work with the children has kept helping us to improve our methods. There is, however, something we might have missed—perhaps with a degree of pain. It is relatively easy to mediate the subject matter to the children, to give them a momentary understanding for what we teach them. But we have not yet succeeded in making the subject matter last for them, in making it a part of their whole being, so that it can stay with them throughout their lives, so that we may achieve the same results with our teaching as with our talks at special festive occasions.

Our teaching must live. It must reach beyond the ideas, images, feelings, and skills the children have acquired. We must give them something that can—depending on their dispositions and possibilities—continue into their adult lives.

Just as the limbs of any living creature are developing during the growing stages, are becoming bigger and more complicated, so also should the ideas, feelings, and skills we give our children be not fully formed but rather capable of growth and development. We must see to it that our teaching does not remain rigid, static, but that it can grow with them, change as they change during the course of development, so that at the age of thirty or forty they will still have the benefit of what they learned at seven or eight, because the learning has grown and developed as their complicated limbs have developed, because it has slowed down at the appropriate time, and so forth. Our teaching must enter the children’s being deeply, so that it can continue to develop with them, can live or fade away. This means that the children will have to absorb whatever we present to them and make it their own. The question arising from this realization is: How can we achieve this? The answer will come from assumptions quite different from those we generally make.

My dear friends, what we need to do is to make every effort at understanding the human being in his or her totality—in our case, this is the child—as a being consisting of body, soul, and spirit. Such understanding will allow us to comprehend the inner processes in the children when we teach them various subjects, and, as a result, we shall learn to adjust our work to these processes. Today, therefore, we shall concentrate on gaining a complete picture of how we ought to teach and educate.

To begin, let me draw your attention to the many erroneous ideas that are current regarding the human being. Teachers, especially, are convinced that what and how we teach—be it through visual perception or stories or activities—will increase children’s skills, ideas, and concepts, will strengthen their feeling, and that the increase and strengthening will last throughout the children’s lives. But this is not so. Let us proceed by example. We give the children certain ideas and mental images—in a history lesson, in the history of literature, in mathematics, or in geography—assuming that they will retain them as lasting possessions. It is generally assumed that such concepts descend somewhere into the lower regions of the soul, into the sub- or unconscious spheres, and that there they remain in one way or another, to be called upon whenever a situation arises. This is the function of memory, so they say.

But this assumption is not true. The ideas, the mental images, which we produce in the children and which, with us, they elaborate and develop, immediately change when the children occupy themselves with other things after the lesson. In no way does a concept swim about in the unconscious in its original form, to be called up at random. This is certainly not the case. The ideas and concepts we produce in the children are, when the children are no longer thinking about them, no longer present anywhere. They are not swimming about; they are no longer there. The process by which children later recollect is quite different from what is generally assumed—namely, that the ideas and concepts are called forth from the unconscious.

Not only may the processes taking place in recollecting and perceiving be compared; in a certain respect, they may be considered as one and the same. When we perceive something, when in the case of children we direct their soul activity to some outer object and develop with them an idea or concept, the activity will certainly be the children’s very own; they are preoccupied, are working with the idea or concept. We call this process perception.

When the children remember something, the same process is involved, but now it is directed inward. Something is happening within the children. The children are working with, developing, something in the same way as in the perception of an outer object. These inner processes that continue when the original mental images of perception are no longer directly present are extremely complicated. It is very difficult to describe in any specific instance how a mental image prepares to reconnect with the human being in order to emerge as memory—so that the image may again be perceived, this time as an inner event. But when we remember, we really perceive inner events in the same way we perceive outer objects.

It is really not all that important to have an exact knowledge of these processes. We need to be aware of something else. We need to know that the continuing effects of mental images and ideas that, later, emerge in memory actually take place in the sphere of our feelings. It is our life of feelings—with its joys, pains, pleasures, displeasures, tensions, and relaxations—that is the actual vehicle for the enduring qualities of the ideas and mental images that we can recall at a later stage. Our mental images change into stirrings of feeling, and it is these stirrings of feeling that we later perceive and that enable us then to remember.

It is important for us to understand this process because we must pay special attention to it in education. If in line with the convictions of most teachers today, we merely present to the children things to be looked at, to be accurately perceived by the senses, we are not giving them anything that will help them to remember later in life. Their memory will be greatly enhanced, however, if we put feeling into our words, if we teach with warmth, if we spice our lessons with the possibility of allowing the children to experience corresponding emotions, if we make them smile or feel sad, if we endeavour to go beyond the merely intellectual aspects to the life of feeling. I cannot overemphasize the importance of such an approach. It is, of course, more difficult. It demands great presence of mind. Mere intellectual instruction is easier than a teaching that wishes to stimulate the children’s feeling, that makes for an inner connection with a subject. We need not be pedantic in this teaching, need not necessarily always connect feeling directly to the subject taught. We may refer to something else in order to stimulate feelings. The important thing is that the children’s feelings are engendered during a lesson. Such stirrings of feeling aid memory. And this fact we must not lose sight of. Even in the driest of subjects, such as physics or geometry, we should try to appeal to the children’s feelings. If, for example, we interrupt a thought process and ask a child, “If you were to do this and something unexpectedly were to happen …?”—we add feeling to the lesson. We add tension, expectation, and relaxation that will permeate and benefit the thought process.

Never underestimate the effect of the unknown or half known. The effect of such on feeling is extremely important. If toward the end of a lesson we say, “and tomorrow we shall do this…”—the children need not know anything about “this”; their expectation and curiosity will still be aroused. If, for example, I have taught the properties of the square before those of the triangle and I conclude the lesson by saying, “Tomorrow we shall learn about the triangle”—the children do not yet know anything about the triangle, but it is exactly this fact that causes a certain tension, an expectation of what is to come, a looking forward to the next day’s lesson. The effect will carry the day. We ought to make use of the unknown or half known in order to facilitate the children’s effort at fitting the details into a totality. We really must not ignore such matters.

As we get used to working in this way we shall, on the one hand, in a quite elementary way, connect teaching with education and, on the other hand, feel the need to make ourselves ever more familiar with the nature of the human being, the child. And then, as out of our anthroposophical knowledge we ponder this nature, this wisdom of the human being, much will become clear to us and lead to increased teaching skills.

Developing such wisdom and teaching skills will ever more be of the gravest importance. It will allow the subject matter to fuse with the children, to become their very own possession. We have not yet achieved enough here.

Essentially our lessons consist of two interacting parts. We instruct, we exhort the children to participate, to use their skills, to be physically active. Be it in eurythmy, music, physical education, even writing or the mechanical processes in arithmetic—we try to engender activity. The other part of our lessons is concerned with contemplation. Here we ask the children to think about, to consider the things we tell them.

Although these two aspects always interact, they are fundamentally different. It is not generally appreciated how much the teacher of a contemplative subject, such as history, owes to a colleague who is more concerned with skills and aptitudes. Concentrating merely on contemplation leads the children to a stunted, prosaic adult life, with a tendency to boredom. They will have a superficial view of life, will not feel inclined to observe accurately, will not pay attention to events around them. Children who are trained predominantly in contemplation become benumbed, confused adults. We really owe a great deal, as teachers of contemplative subjects, to the teachers of handwork, music, and eurythmy. We can go so far as to say that the history teacher actually lives off the music or singing teacher and that, vice versa, the singing and music teachers live off the contemplative elements in history, and so forth.

In a situation that calls for directing the children’s attention to something of a contemplative nature, when they are sitting on their chairs listening to and concentrating on a story or on something that demands their judgment—however great our efforts may be to get them to think for themselves, if they merely sit and listen, this is no more than, if I may use the paradox, a “waking sleeping activity.” The children are, in a certain sense, outside the body with the soul and spirit, and it is only because the separation is not as complete as in sleep that the body’s participation continues. Indeed, especially during a contemplative lesson, we can observe the same phenomenon that is present in sleep—namely, an ascending organic activity. In children who are merely listening to stories, organic processes are called forth that are identical to those occurring during sleep, when the metabolic processes ascend to the brain. Making the children sit and listen, we engender in them, in the organism, a delicate sleep-like activity.

It is generally assumed that sleep strengthens and replenishes the organism. Waking up with a headache could correct this view. We must be clear about the fact that the unhealthy parts of our organism are kept back by the awake activity of the upper organs, so that they cannot ascend. But during sleep they rise, ascend. And this rising upward of what is amiss in the organism is continuously engendered by our insistence on making the children listen, think, and contemplate. When, on the other hand, we teach them eurythmy, when we make them sing, or play instruments, when we employ them in physical activities, as in handwork and gymnastics, even when we make them write something—when they are in fact doing things, the organic processes thus stimulated are an intensification of waking activity.

Even if the effect is not noticed, singing and eurythmy are hygienic, even therapeutic activities. This cannot be denied. This hygienic, therapeutic activity will perhaps be the healthier the less we approach it in an amateurish medical way, the more we simply do it out of our healthy imaginative conception of life.

Still, it is good for the teachers to know that they cooperate as partners, that the children owe the healthy ascent of their body fluids—essential during a contemplative lesson such as history—to the singing or eurythmy lesson of the previous day. We can only benefit from such a comprehensive overview of education, which will encourage us, should a problem arise, to cooperate with our colleagues. We shall discover that we can advise each other if, for example, as a teacher of history I can discuss a child with the music teacher.

Little, if anything, will happen if this consultation takes place in a didactic, routine way. Positive results will be achieved only when—from the comprehensive overview—we feel the urge to discuss a problem with a colleague. Then we may be convinced that when the physics teacher notices a problem and talks it over with the singing teacher, the problem will be lessened or solved when the appropriate steps are taken in singing. The singing teacher will know better what to do than the physics teacher and will be grateful to that teacher for having drawn attention to the problem. Only in this way will we establish a fruitful cooperation as teachers. Only in this way will we be enabled to consider the totality of the human being. The rest will follow, one thing developing from another.

This greater mobility in education will result also in something we cannot do without—humor. We need humor not only for thinking, at the right moment, of the unknown or half known, through which we evoke tensions and relaxations as memory aids, but for something else as well. As we make our teaching ever more mobile, as we get used to considering the whole human being instead of merely the subject matter, we shall in time learn to enlarge certain aspects of our lessons. This widening of subject in all directions is again of enormous importance, especially when it occurs in the direction I shall shortly speak about.

Consider a physics lesson. We are certainly not in favor of having apparati in our classrooms or of methodically developing experiments. Such methods can be employed, can even be very intelligent. It could be asserted that such an approach has proved itself and that a great deal is achieved by it. But the effect is short-term, and we cannot be concerned merely with short-term effects. What we intend to do is to provide the children with something that will benefit them throughout life. To succeed in this intent, we have continuously to enlarge concepts. We must, of course, teach the phenomena in optics and hydraulics. But we must also learn to be ready, at appropriate moments, to relate certain aspects of lessons to other things in life.

Let me give you an example. We could, at a given opportunity, spontaneously refer to the weather, to climatic conditions, to phenomena occurring across the globe in a distant country, so that the students realize that there are connections everywhere in the world. They will then experience the feelings that arise when we are led from one phenomenon to another; the tensions and relaxations that result will allow them to identify with the subject, grow together with it, make it their very own possession.

The most important connection we can establish is the one with the human being. We should never miss an opportunity for making this connection. Every situation—be it during a discussion of an animal, of a plant, or of the phenomenon of warmth—every situation presents an opportunity, without losing sight of the subject, without diverting the students from it, to connect with the human being. What, indeed, is there to prevent us, when talking about the phenomenon of warmth, from mentioning fever? What is to prevent us, when talking about elastic balls in physics, from mentioning the phenomenon of vomiting, a process similar to the repulsion in elastic balls? Vice versa, what is there to prevent us, during a lesson on reflexes in the human organism, from mentioning the simple phenomenon of repulsion in elastic balls, and so forth?

Such connections to life in general can be established already in the lower grades, can gradually get the children used to seeing the human being as the confluence of all world phenomena. When we teach the things that lie outside the human being as natural phenomena, they will always tend to be forgotten. When, on the other hand, we relate them to the human being, when we consider the corresponding phenomena in the human being, we shall notice another tendency: that it is really impossible to regard something that is connected with the human being without feelings. We cannot describe the functions of the ear or of the heart without evoking feelings in the children. By relating the outer world to the human being we always stimulate their feelings—and this is so very important.

Making this connection is, therefore, so very important in subjects treating the objective world, subjects that are usually taught “objectively,” as unconnected with the human being. We should always try to find such connections, and in fact, the most objective subjects are the ones that lend themselves most easily to our doing so, because all the world can be found within the human being.

Again, we have the means of aiding the children’s memory. We can be quite sure that the children will soon forget facts learned by rote in physics. They will not identify with them; the facts will not become inner possessions. But as soon as we relate such facts to the human being, demonstrate what is happening for the human being, the facts will remain, will become an intrinsic part of the children’s experience. What is explained to the human being about the human being becomes the human being’s very own possession. It is necessary for us to avoid abstractions, on the one hand, and on the other hand, what Schlegel referred to as the “crude-material-concrete.” Both should be avoided, especially in our lessons and education.

Let me give you another example. Recently I observed a lesson on comedy and tragedy in class eight. It is relatively easy to think of quite persuasive definitions of the comical, the humorous, the tragic, the beautiful, and so on. They can be found in current literature. But most, if not all, of them are abstractions and will not allow living mental images to arise. What actually happens is that our experience of a tragic, a sad event affects our metabolic processes, slows them down. Our experience of tragedy is, indeed, connected with our physical processes, as though something in our stomach cannot be digested, cannot pass into the intestine.

A deeply sad experience has the effect of literally hardening our metabolism, even though these processes are delicate. Indeed, if you happen to be unhappy, sad, or depressed, you are working against your digestion. The experience is identical to the feeling one has when food lies like a lump in the stomach, a crudely material but qualitatively comparable phenomenon. In a healthy digestion, the food passes naturally from the stomach to the intestine, is absorbed by the villi, passes into the blood, then penetrates the diaphragm, so that it can be distributed in the upper organism. This physical process is, qualitatively understood, identical to the effect of laughing, when we artificially induce the vibrations of the diaphragm. Laughing is a process that makes us organically healthy; its effect is similar to that of a healthy undisturbed digestion.

Such knowledge will allow us to relate the humorous to the digestive processes. We are learning to think in the way the ancient Greeks did, are beginning to understand the Greeks’ concept of hypochondria, of abdominal ossification. An objective observation will confirm this connection. Living toward the upper organism, getting the diaphragm into movement, stimulated by a healthy digestion and passing to the world outside—this physical process does, indeed, provide the connection of a humorous, happy mood to the physical body. By avoiding such abstract explanations as “humor allows us to rise above a situation,” we shall succeed in establishing the confluence of the abstract with the concrete. We establish a totality. We show the children how to combine, in their minds, spirit and soul with the physical, corporeal. We repress the absolutely harmful modern ideas of continuously teaching the human cultural aspects—soul and spirit—without relating them to the physical and, vice versa, at the other pole of the pendulum, of speaking about the physical in crudely materialistic ways. Taken separately, neither approach is truthful; for the ideas interact, flow into each other.

It behooves us to evoke total, comprehensive ideas and images, by binding humor and tragedy not to abstract concepts but to the diaphragm. A possible objection is that doing so might encourage a materialistic view of the world. This is certainly not so. It is exactly by showing how spirit and soul are living in the physical that we bring people to the point of seeing that the whole of the material world owes its existence to soul and spirit. As soon as we can imagine—when somebody is laughing, when somebody experiences laughter in the soul and spirit—that the event is connected with the diaphragm, we shall also gradually arrive at the idea of the effects of spirit and soul in rain, thunder, and lightning. We are led to these realizations by relating everything to the human being.

In relating everything to the human being it is important not to dwell too much on the egocentric—because much or exclusive self-interest, egocentricity, would result in contemplative egotism. If, on the other hand, in our contemplative lessons, we connect everything to the human being, we produce in the human being—simply by making one see oneself as consisting of body, soul, and spirit—a disposition that provides the best basis for one’s working from the depths of one’s being during physical activities. If our lessons allow the contemplative thinking elements to connect with the human being, we shall educate our students through history, geography, physics to become singers, to become truly musical people. Affecting our students in such a way that we let them think what they themselves physically want, we produce something in them which we really ought continuously to be creating.

In order to achieve this creation, we must acquire certain concepts. As you well know, it is not possible to remain well fed without the need of eating again. We cannot feed a person and say: “This is it, you need no longer be hungry!” Living processes proceed in rhythms. This truth applies to music, to everything in life. A human being must live in rhythmic alternations, so that one’s “being led back to oneself” is subjected to the highest tension and, in turn, to relaxation. The concepts we teach our students about stomach, lungs, and liver will produce in them a disposition that will again be offset in singing, in the way hunger alternates with eating—a rhythmic process. Only rhythm maintains life. The correct handling of the contemplative subjects will produce faculties that will correspondingly manifest in the other subjects.

If instead of merely enumerating Julius Caesar’s actions, successes, and failures, we would at the same time give the children imaginative pictures of the man, paint as it were a historical situation, so that the children feel impelled to have in their imagination a kind of shadowy picture of him, see him walk, follow his walk in their minds—if they were to imagine Julius Caesar in such a way that they did not merely copy the image in a painting but actually modeled it in their minds, and if they then proceeded to a handwork lesson, you may be absolutely sure that they would knit better than they would have without Caesar.

Such connections are as mysterious as those between hunger and satiation. Ignoring the connections produces different results. For example, if we teach for an hour without stimulating the imagination of the children, their stomachs will be filled with acid, will have excessive pepsin. This cannot be avoided in a contemplative lesson. It is, however, not only a matter of acidifying the food in the stomach; there is also a spiritual dimension. All matter is at the same time spirit. When the children are singing, the pepsin’s role is to produce in them the inner prickling they should feel during singing. This prickling cannot occur if the pepsin remains stuck in the folds of the stomach. And it does remain there if one only talks, without stimulating the imagination. When the imagination is stirred, the pepsin is distributed throughout the body, with the result that the singing teacher will be confronted by children whose organs are permeated by this prickling, this effervescent sensation. Without such experience—especially in the speech organs—the children will be lethargic and lazy, and they will sing without enthusiasm.

I tell you these things so that you can appreciate the importance of considering the totality of the school organism, of seeing it as a unit. Interfering in things that do not concern one does not help. Of course, each teacher must feel free to do what he or she thinks best. But one will gradually acquire the necessary skills by studying the nature of children and by appealing to their imagination. The children long for this attention, need it. And the teacher will greatly benefit from a preoccupation with this aspect of education.

A lively interest in human nature is, of course, the condition for succeeding in this endeavor. Such interest can be developed, and anthroposophy will provide you with all the hints you need. What I especially recommend to you—from a direct pedagogical/didactic point of view—is that you avoid getting stuck in abstractions when you develop your own concepts. You should instead endeavor to understand the human being in regard to organization.

You must actually become pioneers in a certain sphere, must tell yourselves: “We have today, on the one hand, the abstract sciences—history, geography, even physics, and so on. They are practiced in the most abstract ways. People acquire concepts. On the other hand, we have the sciences of the human being—anatomy, physiology—by means of which we learn about the human being, as though the organs were cut out of leather and reassembled.” Truly, as cut from leather—because there is really no difference between the descriptions of living organs presented by our anatomists and cut-out leather pieces. The human being is not described as a totality. The spirit is ignored.

You can, however, be pioneers. You can contribute positively to education by making use of both the abstractions, the lifeless concepts propagated today, and the crudely materialistic approach. You may teach both, but only in order to combine them in a living way, by interweaving them. You could teach history in such a way that it enlivens anatomy, and anatomy in order to bring life to history. The function of the liver could, for example, give you an idea for treating the history of the later Egyptian culture, because the nuance, this special nuance in the presentation, the (let me say) aroma one has to spread across the later stages of Egyptian history, one acquires during the contemplation on the function of the liver in the organism. The effect is the same.

By interweaving subjects in this way you will not only give humanity something that is culturally interesting; you will also meet an educational need by bringing together the so-called physical, which does not as such exist, and the abstract spiritual, which again has no meaning as such. Thus you may enter the classroom in such a way that your words carry weight and, at the same time, acquire wings. You will not torture the children with words that merely fly away, nor will you teach them skills and aptitudes that weigh them down.

In yesterday’s introduction I wanted to show the importance of the teacher’s understanding of the human being and of the school as organic unit. Everything else really depends on this understanding. Today I shall touch on several issues that may then be further developed.

If we wish to have a correct picture of the human being, what really matters is that we rid ourselves of all the prejudices in the current scientific world conceptions. Most people today—even those who are not materialists—are convinced that the processes in logical thinking are carried out by the soul, an inner organism, and that the brain is used as a kind of mechanism for carrying out these processes. All logical functions and processes, they say, are cerebral. The attempt is then made to explain these processes in three stages—the forming of mental images, judgments, and conclusions. It is true, is it not, that we must apply these processes in our lessons, that we must teach and practice them?

We have been so conditioned to this way of thinking that all logic is a function of the head that we have lost sight of the real, the actual nature of logic. When we draw people’s attention to the truth of the matter they demand proofs. The proof, however, lies in unprejudiced observation, in discovering the development of logic in the human being. Of the three stages—mental images, judgments, conclusions—only in the first is the head involved. We ought to be conscious of this: The head is concerned only with the forming of mental images, of ideas, and not with judgments or conclusions.

You may react by saying that spiritual science is gradually dismissing the head and diminishing its functions. But this is in accordance with the truth in its most profound meaning. The head really does not do all that much for us during our life between birth and death. True, in its outer appearance, its physical form, it is certainly the most perfect part of our body. But it is so because it is a copy of our spiritual organism between death and rebirth. It is, as it were, a seal, an impress of what we were before birth, before conception. Everything that was spirit and soul impressed itself on the head, so that it represents the picture of our prenatal life.

It is really only the etheric body—besides the physical—that is fully active in the head. The astral body and the I fill the head, but they merely reflect their activity in it; they are active for their own sake and the head merely reflects this. In the shape of the head we have a picture of the supersensible world. I indicated as much during last year’s lectures when I drew your attention to the fact that we are really carrying our heads as special entities on the top of our bodies. I compared the body to a coach or horse and the head to the passenger or rider. The head is indeed separated from the world outside. It sits, like a parasite, on the body; it even behaves like a parasite. We really must get away from the materialistic view of the head that attaches too much importance to it. We need our head as a reflecting apparatus, no more. We must learn to see the head as a picture of our prenatal spirit and soul organism.

The forming of mental images and ideas is indeed connected to the head. But not our judgments. These are actually connected to arms and hands. It is true—we judge with our arms and hands. Mental images, ideas we form in our heads. But the processes leading to judgments are carried out by the mechanism of arms and hands. The mental images of a judgment do, as its reflection, take place in the head.

You can develop a feeling for this distinction and then recognize its important didactic truth. You can tell yourselves that the task of our middle organism is to mediate the world of feelings. The rhythmical organism is essentially the basis for the mediation of feelings. Judgments are, you will agree, deeply related to feelings, even the most abstract of judgments. When we say “Carl is a good boy,” this is a judgment, and we have the feeling of confirmation. The feeling of confirmation or negation—any feeling actually that expresses the relation between predicate and subject—plays a major role in judgments. It is only because our judgments are already strongly anchored in our subconscious that we are not aware of our feelings’ participation in them.

There takes place for us as human beings, inasmuch as we judge, a phenomenon that we must understand. The arms, although in harmony with the rhythmic organism, are at the same time liberated from it. In this physical connection of the rhythmical organism with the liberated organism of the arms, we can see a physical, sense-perceptible expression of the relation between feelings and judgments.

In considering conclusions, the drawing of conclusions, we must understand the connection to legs and feet. Our contemporary psychologists will, of course, ridicule the idea that it is not the head that draws conclusions but the legs and feet. But it is true. Were we, as human beings, not oriented toward our legs and feet, we could never arrive at conclusions. What this means is that we form ideas and mental images with the etheric body, supported by the head organism; we make our judgments—in an elementary, original way—with our astral body, supported by our arms and hands; and we draw conclusions in our legs and feet—because we do this with our ego, and the ego, the I, is supported by legs and feet.

As you can thus see, the whole of the human being participates in logic. It is important to understand this participation. Our conventional scientists and psychologists understand but little of the nature of the human being because they don’t know that the total human being is employed in the process of logic. They believe that only the head participates in it. We must now understand the way in which the human being, as a being of legs and feet, is placed on the earth—a way quite different from that of the human head being. We can illustrate this difference in a drawing.

By imagining the outline of the human being we may arrive at the following concept. Let us assume that the person in the diagram is lifting a weight by hand, in our case a heavy object weighing one kilogram. The object is lifted by hand. Let us now ignore the person and, instead, tie the object (A) to a rope, pass the rope over a pulley, and tie another object of either identical or heavier weight to the other end (B). If B happens to be heavier, it will draw the original weight (A) up. We have here constructed a mechanical device the achievement of which is identical to that of hand and arm. I can replace hand and arm with a mechanical device—the result is the same. I unfold my will and, in so doing, I accomplish something that can equally be achieved by some mechanical device, as shown in the illustration.

What you can see in this diagram is a happening that is quite objective. The employment of my will does not alter the outer picture. With my will I am fully placed into the objective world. I impart myself into the objective world; unfolding my will, I no longer differentiate myself from it.

What I have demonstrated can be observed especially clearly when I take a few steps or use my legs for something else. What the will accomplishes during the use of my legs and feet is a process that is quite objective, something that takes place in the world outside. As seen from without, there is no difference between a mechanical process and my own personal effort of will. All my will does is to direct the course of events. This is most strongly the case when I employ functions that are connected with my legs and feet. I am then really outside myself, I flow together with the objective world, I become part of it.

The same cannot be said of the head. The functions of the head tear me away from the world. What I call seeing and hearing, what ultimately leads to the forming of ideas and mental images, cannot in this objective way impart itself to the world outside. My head is not part of that world; it is a foreign body on earth, a copy of what I was before I descended to earth.

Head and legs are extreme opposites and, between them, in the center—because there the will is already active, but in conjunction with feelings—between them we have the organization of arms and hands. I ask you to keep in your mind this picture of the human being—through the head, as it were, separated from the earth, having brought the head from the spiritual world as a witness, the proof of belonging to the spiritual world. One imparts oneself into the physical world by adapting the organs of will and the feelings to the outer laws, to environment and institutions. There is no sharp boundary between outer events and the accomplishments of the will. But a sharp boundary is always drawn between outer events and the ideas and mental pictures mediated to us through the head.

This distinction can give us an even better understanding of the human being. The head develops first in the embryo. It is utter nonsense to regard it as being merely inherited. Its spherical shape tells you that it is truly a copy of the cosmos, whose forces are active in it. What we inherit enters the organism of our arms and legs. There we are our parents’ children. They relate us to the terrestrial forces. But our heads have no access to the earth’s forces, not even to fertilization. The head is organized by the cosmos. Any hereditary likeness is caused by the fact that it develops with the help of the other organism, is nourished by the blood that is affected by the other organism. But it is the cosmos that gives the head its shape, that makes it autonomous and individual. Above all, the work of the cosmos—inasmuch as it is connected to the head—can be seen in those things that are part of the nerve-sense organism. We bring our nerve-sense organism with us from the cosmos, allowing it to impart itself into the other organism.

This knowledge is important because it helps us to avoid subscribing to the nonsensical idea that we are the more spiritual the more we ignore the physical and to avoid talking in abstractions about spirit and soul. We become truly spiritual when we learn to see the connection between the physical/corporeal and the soul and spirit, when we understand that our head is a product of the cosmos, is organized by it, makes us part of it. The organism of our legs is inherited; there we are our parents’ and grandparents’ descendants.

This knowledge, being true, will affect our feelings, while all the current concepts—be they about spirit or matter—are abstract, in no way related to reality. They leave us cold, cannot stir our feelings. I would therefore like to ask you to take to your hearts, to ponder deeply, and to develop for your educational work the fact that there is really no difference whether the human being is regarded as a physical/corporeal being or as a being of spirit and soul. Once we have learned to observe spirit and soul in the correct way we shall see them as creative elements from which flows the physical/corporeal. We shall recognize spirit and soul in their creative activity. And if, as artists, we reflect on this activity in the right way, we shall gradually lose sight of the material altogether as it becomes spirit all by itself. The physical/corporeal transforms into spirit in our correct imagination.

When one stands firmly on the ground of spiritual science, of anthroposophy, it no longer matters if one is a materialist or a spiritualist. It really doesn’t matter. The harm done by materialism is not the study of material phenomena. If this study were performed thoroughly, the phenomena would transform into spirit and all the materialistic concepts would be recognized as absurdities. The harm done is the feeble-mindedness that results when we do not complete thought processes, when we do not concentrate enough on what the senses perceive. We thus lose sight of reality. If we were to pursue thoughts about the material world to the end, we would arrive at the picture, the idea of the spirit.

As for spirit and soul, as long as we enter their reality when we reflect on them, they will not remain as the abstractions we are given by our current sciences but will assume form, will become visible. Abstract understanding becomes an artistic experience that will ultimately result in our seeing spirit and soul as material, tangible reality.

Be one a materialist or a spiritualist both perspectives will lead to the same result, provided the thought process is completed. Again, it is not the spirit that is the problem in spiritualism but rather this uncompleted thought process that so easily turns the spiritualist into an idiot, a nebulous mystic, a person who causes confusion and who can only vaguely come to grips with reality.

There is yet another essential and important task for you. Equipped with a sound understanding of the nature of the child, you must develop an eye for distinguishing the child with a predominant cosmic organism from the one with a predominant terrestrial/physical organism. The former will have a plastically formed head, the latter a plastically structured trunk and, especially, limbs.

What now matters is to find the appropriate treatment for each. In the more earthly child, the hereditary forces are playing a major role; they permeate the entire metabolic limb system in an extraordinarily strong way. Even when the child does not appear to be melancholic, there is, nonetheless, alongside the apparent temperament a nuance of melancholy. This is due to the child’s earth nature, the “earthiness” in the child’s being.

When we notice this trait in a child, we shall do well to try to interest him or her in music that passes from the minor to the major mood, from the melancholic strains of the minor to the major. The earthly child especially can be spiritualized by the movements demanded by music and eurythmy. A child with a distinct sanguine temperament and delicate melancholic features can easily be helped by painting. And even if such a child appears to have but little talent for music or eurythmy, we should still try our best to develop the disposition for it that is certainly there.

A child with a distinctly pronounced head organism will benefit from subjects such as history, geography, and the history of literature. But care must be taken not to remain in the contemplative element but, as I already pointed out yesterday in another context, to evoke moods, feelings, tension, curiosity that are again relaxed, satisfied, and so on.

Again, it is a matter of habitually seeing the harmony between spirit and body. The ancient Greeks had this knowledge, but it got lost. They really always saw in the effects of a work of art on human beings something they then also applied to the physical. They spoke of the crisis in an illness, of catharsis, and they spoke in the same way of the effects of a work of art and of education. The Greeks observed the processes that I described yesterday, and it is up to us to rediscover them, to learn to unite soul and spirit with the physical/corporeal in our thinking.

It is thus important that we use all our own temperamental energies, in order to teach history with a strong personal accent. Objectivity is something the children can develop later in life. To worry about objectivity, when we tell them about Brutus and Caesar, at the expense of expressing the feeling engendered in us during the dramatic presentation of their differences, their polarities—this would be bad teaching. As teachers, we must be involved. We do not need to wax passionate, to roar and rage, but we do need to express at least a delicate nuance of sympathy or antipathy toward Caesar and Brutus in our characterization. The children must be stimulated to participate.

History, geography, geology, and so on must be taught with real feeling. The latter subject is especially interesting—to feel deeply about the rocks beneath the earth. Goethe’s essay on the granite can here be of great help. I strongly recommend it to you. Read it with feeling, in order to see how a person could humanly relate—not merely in thinking, but in his whole being—to the primal father, the age-old, holy granite. This approach must, of course, then be extended to other subjects.

If we cultivate these responses in ourselves, we shall also make it possible for the children to experience and participate in them. This is naturally a more difficult approach, as it takes greater effort. But our teaching will be alive, a living experience. Believe me, everything we mediate to the children via feelings allows their inner life to grow, while an education that consists of mere thoughts and ideas is devoid of life, remains dead. Ideas and thoughts are no more than mirror images. With them we merely address the head, whose value lies in its connection with the past, its time in the spiritual world. When we give the children images and ideas that are made living through our strong feelings, we make a connection to what is significant for the earth, to the elements contained in the blood.

Let me give you an example. It is absolutely necessary for us to develop the appropriate feeling for the hostile, destructive forces in an airless space. The more graphically we show this—after the air has been pumped out—the more dramatically we can describe this terrible airless space, the more we shall achieve. In earlier times people referred to it as horror vacui. They experienced this horror streaming from it; their language contained it, and we must learn to discover this feeling again. We must learn to see a connection between an airless space and a thin, dried up person. Shakespeare indicated this in Julius Caesar:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

It is the well-padded whom we trust, rather than the lean, skinny, bald-headed person with cold intellect. We must feel this relation of a lean person or a spider to airless space. Then we shall be able to pass on to the children, through imponderables, the cosmic feeling that must be an integral part of the human being.

Again and again, when speaking of education, we must emphasize the necessity of connecting the totality of the human being to the objective world, because it is only then that we can bring a healthy element also to those aspects in education that are so harmfully influenced by materialistic thoughts. We cannot, my dear friends, be as outspoken as Herr Abderhalden who—after having been invited to a eurythmy performance where in my introduction I also mentioned the hygienic and other aspects of physical education—said: “As a physiologist I cannot see anything in physical education that is physiologically justified. On the contrary, physical education is, in my opinion, the most harmful activity imaginable; it has no educational value whatsoever. It is a barbarity.”

We cannot afford to be so direct. We would be attacked from every side, as happens today. It is so, isn’t it, when you really think about it, that all the exercises and activities of physical education, wherein the worst of materialistic concepts are applied to the physical body, have become idols, fetishes—be they systems concentrating on the strongly physical, the superphysical, or the subphysical; be it the Swedish method or the German. What the systems and methods have in common is the belief that the human being is no more than a physical organism—a belief resulting from the very worst ideas developed by the age of materialism, not in accord with the thoughts I have outlined.

The exercises are generally based on an assumption describing the ideal posture for the human being—the correct curvature of the spine, the form of the chest, the manner of moving the arms and hands. What we actually get from the exercises is certainly not a human being but merely the picture these people have made themselves of the human being. No wonder there are so many diagrams in the manuals. This picture of the human being lends itself to being modeled in a papier-mâché figure. Everything that is said of the human being in Swedish gymnastics can be found in such a papier-mâché doll. The living human being can then be used like a sack and made to imitate the lifeless dolls. The real human being is ignored, is lost sight of in such practices. All we have are papier-mâché figures.

In spite of the fact that they have become so popular and influential, these practices must be seen as infamous, really quite reprehensible, because of this exclusion of the real human being. The human being is theoretically excluded in the sciences; in modern gymnastics the human being is practically excluded, reduced to a papier-mâché figure. Such practices should never find their way into education. In good physical education, the students should only carry out movements and assume postures that they can also actually experience within. And they do experience them.

Let’s take a look at the breathing processes. We must know that we must bring the children to the point where the breathing- in bears a faint resemblance to tasting some favorite food. This experience should not go so far as to the actual perception of taste but merely to a faint resemblance of it; the freshness of the world ought to be experienced when breathing in. We should try to get the child to ask: “What is the intrinsic color of the air I am breathing in?” We shall indeed discover that as soon as breathing is correctly experienced, the child will have the feeling that “it is greenish, really actually green.” When we have brought a child to the point of experiencing inbreathing as greenish we have accomplished something. Then we shall also always notice something else: that the child will ask for a specific posture when breathing in. The inner experience stipulates the correct corresponding posture, and the right exercises will follow from it.

The same procedure will lead to the experience of the corresponding feeling in breathing out. As soon as the children, when breathing out, can feel that they really are fine, efficient boys and girls, as soon as they experience themselves as such, feel their strength, ask to apply their strength to the world outside, then they will also experience, in a way that is healthy and appropriate to their age, the corresponding abdominal movement, the movement of the limbs and the bearing of the head and arms. This rich feeling during breathing out will induce the children to move correctly.

Here the human being is employed. We can see the human being before us, no longer allowed to be a sack, imitating a papier-mâché figure. We are moving in accordance with the soul that then pulls the physical body after it. We adapt the physical movements to the children’s needs, to their inner, soul and spirit experience.

In the same way, we should encourage the inner experience the children’s physical nature asks for in other areas—in the movements of arms and legs, in running, and so forth. We can thus really connect physical education directly to eurythmy, as it should be connected. Eurythmy makes soul and spirit directly visible, ensouls and spiritualizes everything that moves in us. It makes use of everything human beings have developed for themselves during their evolution.

But—also—the physical can be spiritually experienced. We can experience our breathing and metabolism if we advance far enough in our efforts. It is possible to do this—to advance to the point that we can experience ourselves, including our physical organism. And then, what the children are—on a higher level, I would say—confronting in eurythmy can pass into physical education. It is certainly possible to connect the two activities, to build a bridge from the one to the other. But this kind of physical education should be based on the development of movements not from the mere experience of the physical/corporeal but rather from the experience of soul and spirit, by letting the children adapt the physical/corporeal to their experiences.

Of course, in order to achieve this we ourselves must learn a great deal. We must first work with these ideas before we apply them to both ourselves and especially before we apply them to our teaching. They don’t easily impress themselves on our memory. We are not unlike a mathematician who cannot remember formulae or theorems but who, at a given moment, is able to redevelop them. Our situation is the same. We must develop these ideas about the total human being—spirit, soul, and body—and we must always make them livingly present. Doing so will stand us in good stead. By working out of the totality of the human being we can have a stimulating effect on the children.

Again and again you will find that when you have spent long hours in preparing a lesson, when you have grappled with a subject and then enter the classroom, the children will learn differently than they would when taught by a “superior” lecturer or instructor who spent as little time as possible in preparation. I actually know people who on their way to school quickly read up the required material. Indeed, our education and teaching are deeply affected by the way we grapple not only with the immediate subject matter but also with all the other things connected to skills and methods. These things, too, should be worked and grappled with.

There are spiritual connections in life. If we have first heard a song in our mind, in the spirit, it will have a greater effect on the children when we teach it to them. These things are related. The spiritual world works in the physical. This activity, this work of the spiritual world, must be applied especially to education and didactics. If, for example, during the preparation for a religion lesson, the teacher experiences a naturally pious mood, the lesson will have a profound effect on the children. When such a mood is absent, the lesson will be of little value to them.

You will now see the gradual emergence of the subjects on which you were good enough to put questions, in the course of these lectures. But there must be a certain foundation for rational answers to these inquiries. Now, it is my intention to start from the point to which we advanced yesterday, namely from the significance of splenetic functions in the human organism. These functions must be regarded as actually the main factors in regulating the subconscious life of the soul; so it is a misunderstanding of the whole nature of man, to regard the spleen as an organ of minor importance. This error may often occur, however, because of the case with which the spleen's functions can be taken over by its etheric equivalent, and this for the very reason that it is a highly spiritualised organ; and also because other organs may be called in to help do its work. Nevertheless the activity of the spleen becomes more remarkable, if raised out of the subconscious sphere into some degree of awareness. This brings us to the consideration of a remedial method which has aroused much interest of recent years. It is significant that we arrive at its consideration by way of the spleen. You may convince yourselves by experiment that mild massage in the region of the spleen regulates and benefits the instinctive activities in mankind. In a certain way, the patient thus treated obtains better instincts for suitable food and sounder and more beneficial organic habits;. Note that this method of local massage has strict and close limitations. In the moment that the massage becomes too vigorous it becomes apt to undermine completely the life of instinct. So that we must be most careful to observe the zero point. The gentle massage must not go too far.

Gentle massage of the regions round the spleen, brings something into those regions which is not there as a rule. In a sense, the consciousness of the person massaged is projected as it were into those regions. And very much depends on this displacement of consciousness, this letting it stream in, although it is often difficult to define these delicate workings of our organism in the crude terms of our speech. However strange the statement may appear, there is a powerful interaction between the unconscious activities of reason of which the splenetic functions rather than the spleen itself are the mediators, and the actual conscious functions of the human organism. What precisely are these conscious functions of the human organism? All those processes in the organism whose nature involves that their physical occurrences are accompanied by the higher processes of consciousness, especially by the conceptual processes, are toxic activities in the organism. This must not be overlooked. The organism poisons itself continually precisely through its conceptual activity; and counteracts these toxic conditions continually through the operation of the unconscious will. The centre for these conditions of the unconscious will is the spleen. If we stimulate the spleen and imbue it with a certain awareness, by means of massage, we take action against the powerful toxic effects caused by our higher consciousness. And this massage may be applied not only externally but from within as well. You may dispute the term massage in this connection, but you will understand what I mean. Let us take an individual case, in which we perceive an excessive inner organic activity caused by toxic conditions. The abnormal state of splenetic consciousness can be beneficially affected by the following advice, “Do not confine your intake of food to the chief meals of the day, but rather eat as little as you can at those meals, and take other nourishment in between meals; spread out your consumption of food, so that you eat little at a time but frequently, at short intervals.” The abnormal consciousness of the spleen can be influenced in this way. For to eat little and often is essentially an internal massage of the spleen, which considerably alters the activity of that organ. Of course, there is a “but”; all that concerns the organic processes under discussion has its “buts.” In our age of haste and hurry in which almost everyone is caught up in some exhausting external activity, the spleen and its functions are extraordinarily liable to impairment through this ceaseless round of work. Mankind does not follow the example of certain animals who keep themselves sound and “fit,” by lying down to rest after food, so that their digestive processes are not disturbed by external activity. These animals are really taking care of their spleen. Man does not take care of his spleen if occupied in some hurried activity at the expense of nervous energy. And therefore the splenetic function in the whole of modern civilised peoples gradually becomes thoroughly abnormal; so that especial significance attaches to its relief and recovery through the sort of remedies I have just indicated.

Such delicate processes as massage of the spleen, whether external or internal, draw attention to the relationship between those organs of mankind which transmit the unconscious experience. They illuminate the whole significance of massage. Massage has a certain definite significance and under some circumstances a powerful remedial effect, but above all it influences and regulates rhythm in man. The regulation of human rhythmic processes is the main office of massage. And to massage successfully, one must know the human organism well. You will find the way if you consider the following. Think for a moment of the immense difference between arms and legs in the human frame, as distinct from the animal. The arms of man, which are liberated from the oppression of weight and can move freely, have their astral body far less closely bound to the physical, than in the case of the feet. To the feet the astral body is closely bound. In fact we may say that in the case of the arms, the astral body acts from and inwards through the skin, enveloping arms and hands and working centripetally. In the legs and feet, the will works through the astral body very strongly in a centrifugal direction radiating powerfully outwards, from within. Therefore, if massage is applied to the legs and feet in man, the process is essentially different from that of massage applied to the hands and arms. If the arms are treated by massage, the astral element is drawn from outside inwards, and the arms become very much more instruments of the will than they would otherwise be. Through this there is a regulative effect on internal metabolism, especially on that part of the metabolic process taking place between intestine and blood vessels. In short, massage of the upper limbs acts to a great extent on the formation of the blood. If, on the other hand, the feet and legs are massaged the physical element is transmuted rather into something of a conceptual nature and a regulative action follows on the metabolism that is concerned with processes of evacuation and excretion. The extreme complexity of the human organism is most clearly revealed in these indirect and secondary effects of massage whether starting from the arms and mainly affecting the upbuilding internal processes of metabolism, or starting from the legs and feet and affecting the disintegrating processes of metabolism. If you investigate rationally, you will indeed find that every bodily region and part has a certain connection with other regions and parts; and that the efficacy of massage depends on an adequate insight into these interrelationships. Massage of the lower body will always be of benefit even to the function of breathing; a circumstance of special interest. And in fact the farther we go from above downwards, we find that the organs above the centre benefit progressively. For example, massage directly below the cardiac region influences respiration; if we go farther down, the organs of the throat are influenced. It is a reversed process; the farther we descend from the centre, in massage of the trunk, the greater the effect on the upper organs, and strangely enough, massage treatment of the arms is much helped by massage of the upmost region of the trunk. These facts illustrate the interlocking of the individual regions and limbs of the human body. This interaction of upper and lower organs, which may be quite distant but are nevertheless akin to another, is especially evident in such ailments as, e.g., migraine.

Migraine or sick headache is nothing but a transference to the head of the digestive activities in the rest of the organism. All conditions of special organic stress, such as the monthly period in women, are apt to influence migraine. When a digestive activity wholly foreign to the head thus takes place, the head nerves are loaded with a burden from which they should be, and normally are, free. If the normal digestive activity, i.e., only the absorption of substance, goes on in the head, then the local nerves are permitted to become sensory and perceptive. They are deprived of this character if there is a disorderly digestive activity in the head, as just indicated. They become, therefore, inwardly sensitive, and their receptivity for processes to which the internal organism should be quite indifferent is the basis of the pain typical of migraine and of its characteristic symptoms. It is easy to understand what the sensations must be, if someone is suddenly compelled to be aware of the interior of his own head, instead of the external environment. And true comprehension of the condition will mean that the best remedy can only be sought in “sleeping it off.” For all other “remedies,” which are applied and which one is sometimes obliged to apply, are actually harmful. Let us suppose you use the popular allopathic preparations; what is achieved is merely the culling and blunting of the sensitiveness of the over-stimulated nervous apparatus, that is to say, you lower its activity. Take an instance: suppose an attack of migraine occurs just before the sufferer has to appear in public, on the stage; he prefers to inflict some injury on himself rather than to break what should really not be blunted or dulled, can be especially well observed. In such cases it becomes obvious how extremely delicate our human organism is, and how we often through the pressure exercised by social life, are compelled to offend against the needs of our organism. That is an obvious and important factor which must not be forgotten and one is sometimes compelled to accept a harm, simply arising through the social conditions of the patient, and merely to cure its sequelæ.

The delicacy and sensitiveness of our bodily organisation become evident also by objective and systematic study of light and color treatment for disease. This use of light and color should be more considered in the future than it has been in the past. One must learn to distinguish here, between color which appeals exclusively to the upper sphere of the human being and light proper which has a more objective tendency and appeals to the whole human being. If we simply take the person into a room lit in a certain way, or even expose a portion of the body to the objective influence of color or light—we act directly on the human organs. We then have indeed an influence wholly external. But if the “exposure” is made in such a way as to affect consciousness through the sensation of color—as when instead of irradiation with colored light, the person is brought into a room draped and furnished throughout in a certain colour—the effect penetrates all the organs adjacent to those of consciousness. This “subjective color therapy” always works upon the ego; while in “objective color therapy,” the influence is primarily on the physical system, and through the physical vehicle on the ego, indirectly. Do not raise the objection that it is useless to bring a blind person into the environment of a room furnished in one color, because the patient can receive no visual impression and the result must be nil. Such is not the case. In such conditions the sensory effects which work under the sensory surface, so to speak, are very powerful. There is a difference to a blind person, according to whether a room is entirely red, or entirely blue. The difference is considerable. Take a blind person into a room with blue walls: the effect is to draw or deflect all functional activity from the head to the rest of the organism. If the same person is taken into a completely red room, the effect is reversed; the organic functions are deflected towards the head. From this it is evident that the main effect lies in the rhythm of changing the colour in the environment. The changes of color are the main factor rather than the colors themselves. The isolated influence of a blue room or red is less significant than the contrast in reactions, when the individual who has been in a red environment is brought into a blue, or after being surrounded with blue, into a red. This is significant. Suppose we see a patient, and diagnose the need of improving his upper organic sphere by stimulation of the functions of the head; we should take the patient into a blue room and afterwards into a red. If we wish to act indirectly, through the rest of the organism upon the head function, we should take the person out of a red environment into a blue.

In my opinion much importance should be attached to these methods in a not distant future. Color therapy, not only light treatment, will soon play a great part. The interplay of conscious and unconscious elements is important in itself, and should be given scope. Through this interplay, we shall also be able to form a sound judgment of the special effects of medicinal substances as administered in baths: there is a great difference according to whether the external application of any substance to the human organism produces the sensations of warmth or cold. If anything, whether compress or bath, acts in a cooling way upon me then the effect is to be ascribed mainly to the substance employed; if a cure follows, it will be due to the substantial remedy employed. But if the application produces a sensation of warmth, e.g., a warm compress, its effects are not due to the substance used, for that is almost a matter of indifference, but to the action of warmth itself; and the action of warmth is identical from whatever quarter it may operate. In applying cold compresses, care should be taken to mix the particular liquid employed, whether water or not with this or that substance. These substances can be made efficasious, if they are soluble at low temperatures, when used in cold water. On the other hand—with the exception of ethereal [etheric] substances which are powerfully aromatic and exercise their specific effects even at high temperatures—there will be little specific substantial effect in the case of materials which are easily soluble when in solid form. They do not easily operate even in warm compresses and hot baths. Substances which are phosphoric or sulphuric, as, e.g., sulphur itself, used as accessories to warm baths, exercise their peculiar healing properties most fully.

Such interactions as those I have just cited, must be minutely observed. And in this connection it will be of great service to you to establish a sort of “Primary Phenomena.” This method of establishing a kind of primary phenomena was much in use during the ages when the practice of medicine had its source in the Mysteries. Knowledge was not then expressed theoretically but in primary phenomena, as for instance: “If thou takest into thyself honey or wine, thou dost thereby strengthen from within the forces of the cosmos working into thee from outside.” This might be expressed in other terms: “by doing so thou strengthenest the actual forces of the ego”:—the meaning would be the same. This way of putting things makes them very easy to survey. “But if thou dost rub thy body thoroughly with an oily stuff thou dost weaken thereby the harmful action of the forces of earth”: that is to say, of the forces opposed to the action of the ego, within the organism. And these ancients, these physicians of old, have also said: “If thou findest the right measure between the strengthening by sweetness from within, and the weakening by oil from without, then thou shalt live long.” We might say: “Let the action of oil avert from your organism the harmful influence of earth; and if you are able to do so and not constitutionally too feeble, let the forces of your ego be strengthened with wine or honey; then you strengthen the forces that lead you to a green old age.” Such are the prescriptions and statements in axiomatic form. The aim was to guide mankind aright through facts, not doctrines. And we must return to this method. For among the multitudinous and various materials of the external world we can find our way far better in the light of primary phenomena than by abstract laws of nature, which always let the student down when he has to approach some concrete case.

Now some of these primary phenomena are most easily enunciated, and I should like to give you some examples; here is one: “Put your feet in water and you will stimulate forces in the lower abdomen, which will promote the formation of blood.” This is one which is full of suggestion. “If you wash your head you stimulate forces in the lower abdomen, which regulate evacuation.” Such rules are illuminating for they embrace law, reality. The human being is there, when I express something of this sort; for the things are of course meaningless unless one is thinking of the human being, and it is essential to keep man in mind in the case of all these things.

These matters are more connected with the spatial and regional interactions of forces in the human organism. There is, however, also an interaction in time which is unmistakably conspicuous in cases where a man has received such mistaken treatment during childhood or early youth, that throughout the whole of life, what should have been developed in childhood and youth, remains lacking, and only that is evolved which should be evolved in the adult. To put it in another way. It is the nature of man that he develops certain forces in early youth which then become formative for the organism. But not everything formed in the youthful organism finds its right use and place in life during the years of youth. We form and build up our bodies in youth, in order to obtain and conserve some things which can only be active and evident in later life. Thus, in childhood certain organs;—as I would call them—are built up, which are not meant for use during childhood; but in later life they can no longer be acquired. They are therefore held in reserve, so to speak, for use in adult age. Let us assume that no heed is paid to the fact that until the teeth are cut a child should be educated by imitation, and that after dentition, education and teaching should attach great importance to authority. If both imitation and authority are thus ignored, the organs which appertain to the adult may be used prematurely. Of course the materialistic attitude of today may deprecate the use of imitation or authority as principles of education. But their significance is great, because of their effects, and they reverberate throughout the organism. It must, however, be understood that the child must live with his whole soul within the act of imitation. Here is an example. Suppose you educate the child in liking and eating some wholesome food, by accustoming it to copy the adult's enjoyment of that food: in this manner you will combine the principle of imitation by action, with the cultivation of an appetite for suitable food. The imitative act is continued into the organism. The same suggestions holds good with respect to authority in education. If those organs (they are naturally subtle organisations) which should normally remain latent till the later age are called into activity during childhood, then the dreadful Dementia Præcox may result. That is the true origin of Dementia Præcox. And a sound objective education is a splendid remedial method. We are at present making efforts in this direction at the Waldorf School, but cannot as yet extend them to an earlier stage of growth before the sixth or seventh year. But when we are at last in a position to put the whole educational process at the service of the knowledge that spiritual science offers—on the lines of my booklet Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy, Dementia Præcox will be on the way to disappear. For such educational methods will avert the danger of premature and precocious employment of organs essential to the adult. So much for the general principles of sound education.

There is also the opposite phenomenon. It consists in this: we also tend to accumulate and conserve what should only be unfolded as an activity of the organs in youth. Throughout life there are, to be sure, calls on the organs which are destined to function mainly in childhood and youth; but this continued activity must become less vigorous, or harm may ensue. Here is the domain in which owing to different causes such theories as that of psychoanalysis have been able to confuse the whole of human thinking. Indeed it is true that the most harm in life is not done by the greatest mistakes, for such great errors can soon be refuted, but by conceptions containing a grain of truth, for this grain of truth is accepted, exaggerated and abused.

What are the facts which support the rise of conceptions of psycho-analytic lines? Because of the current habits of life today (which are in many respects opposed to nature, and in no way give man the necessary adaptation to the external environment)—much that makes a deep impression on the human mind in childhood, is not worked up. Thus there remain in the life of the soul, factors not adequately embodied by the organism; for all that operates in the soul's life, however slightly, has its continuance, or should have it, in some effect on the organism. Our children, however, receive many impressions so contrary to normal conditions that they remain confined to the soul, they cannot forthwith transmute themselves into organic impressions. Thus they remain, as it were, in the soul where they are and as they do not share in the whole development of man, they remain as isolated impulses of the soul. Had they kept pace with man's whole organic development, had they not remained isolated impulses, they would not take possession, at a later stage, of the organs which are destined only to function at maturity and which have no longer the task of turning to account the impressions of youth. Something wrong is thus brought about in the whole human being. He is obliged to let the soul's isolated impulses work upon organs which are no longer fitted for it. There then result the manifestations which may certainly be diagnosed by means of a psychoanalytic method, wisely employed. Careful interrogatories will bring to light certain things in the life of the soul which are simply not worked up, and which have a devastating effect on organs already too old for such working up. But the main thing for consideration is that by this route it is never possible to effect a cure, but only to diagnose a condition. If we keep to the purely diagnostic use of psycho-analysis, we are employing a method which has its justification when used with due discretion. Note well, with due and honourable discretion, so that there may be no such occurrences as I can testify have happened in some cases and for which there is corroborative written evidence. Such occurrences, for example as the employment of servants and attendants, as spies to furnish intimate particulars which are then used as bases for catechising the patients in question. That kind of thing happens sufficiently often to constitute a grave danger and gross abuse. But apart from this—for after all, in these matters so much depends on the ethical standard of the persons concerned—we can admit that from the standpoint of diagnosis, there is some truth in psycho-analysis. But it is impossible to achieve therapeutic results on the lines laid down by psycho-analysts. And that is again linked up with a characteristic of the present age.

It is the tragedy of materialism, that it leads directly away from the knowledge of matter; that it hinders the comprehension of the properties of matter. Materialism is in fact not so detrimental to the proper recognition of the spiritual as it is to the recognition of the spiritual in matter. The repudiation of the conception that spiritual activity is everywhere at work in matter, represses so much that must not be repressed if we are to form a sound conception of our human life. If I am a “materialist” I cannot possibly ascribe to matter all the characteristics we have discussed in these studies. For it is ruled out as merely preposterous to ascribe all those qualities to substances which they in fact possess. That means one is estranged from the knowledge of the material sphere. One no longer talks of phosphoric manifestations, saline manifestations, and so forth, because “all that sort of thing” is dismissed out of hand, as nonsense. This loss of the knowledge of spiritual factors in material substances deprives us of the systematic study of formative processes, and above all, it means the loss of the perception that every organ of man has actually a twofold task, one related to an orientation to consciousness, the other, its opposite, to an orientation to the purely organic process.

The recognition of this fact has been particularly obscured in a matter with which we must now briefly deal: in the study of teeth. From the materialistic point of view the teeth are more or less regarded as mere chewing implements. But they are more than that. Their double nature is easily apparent, for if they are tested chemically, they appear to be part of our bone system; but ontogenetically, they emerge from the skin system. The teeth have a double nature and office, but the second of the two is deeply hidden. Compare, for a moment, a set of human teeth with that of an animal. You will find most conspicuous in the latter what I pointed out in the first of our lessons here, the heavy down-draw weight, the massiveness characteristic of the whole skeleton, which I pointed out in the case of the ape. In man, on the other hand, the teeth themselves show in a certain way the effect of the vertical line. This is because our teeth are not only implements for chewing, they are also very essential implements of suction; they have a mechanical external action, and also an extremely fine, spiritualised inward sucking action. We must inquire: what is it that the teeth draw into the body by means of this suction? So long as they are able to do so, they suck in fluorine. Our teeth suck in fluorine. They are instruments of suction for that substance. Man needs fluorine in his organism in very minute amounts, and if deprived of its effects—here I must say something which will perhaps shock you—he becomes too clever. He acquires a degree of cleverness which almost destroys him. The fluorine dosage restores the necessary amount of stupidity, the mental dullness, which we need if we are to be human beings. We require constant dosage with fluorine in very small amounts as a protection against excessive cleverness. The premature decay of the teeth, which is caused by fluorine action, points to excessive demands on the process of fluorine suction. This indicates that man is stimulated to self-defence against dullness through some agency, with which we shall deal presently, although time forbids detailed treatment. Man as it were disintegrates his teeth so that the fluorine action should not go beyond a certain point and make him dull. The interactions of cause and effect are very subtle here. The teeth become defective in order that the individual may not become too stupid! Such is the intimate connection between what is of benefit to man on the one hand, and what tends to cause harm on the other. Under certain circumstances we have need of the action of fluorine, in order not to become too clever. But we can injure ourselves by excess in this respect, and then our organic activity destroys and decays the teeth.

I beg you to consider these suggestions thoroughly; for they are connected with things of the greatest significance in the human organism.

In the short time available to us for this therapeutic portion of our meeting, it will naturally only be possible to speak in a general way about specific therapeutic measures. On the other hand, it is always questionable whether one should speak in detail about specifics, especially in medicine, if one is not speaking to a purely professional audience, as was the case when I gave a series of lectures in the spring (see Note 1). For the future development of humanity, it will indeed be necessary that the widest circles are familiar with the guiding principles of healing in order that a trusting relationship, well-grounded in facts, may develop between physician and patient. Though it will be necessary for such an understanding of the guidelines for medicine and social hygiene to be sought in the widest circles, it will nevertheless remain undesirable for an excessively dilettantish and lay judgment to intervene in medical matters; due to the state of medicine in modern times, this happens far too frequently today.

It must be firmly stressed that I have absolutely no intention of encouraging any kind of quackery. Within our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science we must instead strive to bring spiritual scientific knowledge into a true medical art based on a methodical study of medical science. We therefore will not align ourselves with those who, out of an unlimited ignorance concerning what they are actually speaking about, attack nearly everything they call academic medicine and the like. We should certainly not align ourselves with these people.

Something else must also be considered in discussing matters like those that will be raised today. Though in a certain sense this has been the case for a long time, something has permeated medicine particularly in modern times; this aspect has asserted itself in our time with all the vehemence with which matters tend to assert themselves in our chaotic social order: this is the formation of partisan groups even within the medical field. And these parties struggling among themselves are no better than political parties. In general it is quite clear that this cannot support the development of medicine. The battle between the allopaths and the homoeopaths, between the so-called academic physicians and those using natural remedies and so on, has generated a great deal of confusion in the understanding of medicine that is required in the wider circles of humanity. I needed to make these introductory remarks today so that what I have to say will not be placed on false ground.

I have already directed your attention to how, on the one hand, the soul-spiritual stands within the human process of organization; this then proliferates, as it were, in the physical processes of illness so that the soul-spiritual cannot work separately from the physical organ, as it should, thus wreaking havoc in it. When this happens we are faced with all those illnesses that tend toward new formations in the organism .

By contrast, we are also concerned with illnesses in which the soul-spiritual develops in such a way that it does not take sufficient hold of the physical organism, whereupon certain parts of the physical organism are abandoned, not to processes taken hold of by the human organization but to subordinate processes of natural existence. In this way organs “physicalize”—if I may use such a word—to an excessive degree rather than permeating themselves soul-spiritually. The soul-spiritual then flows out without being encompassed in the right way by the ego-consciousness, and as a result all the forms of illness arise that we designate inaccurately as mental illnesses (see Note 2).

This view must be modified, however, the moment one proceeds from a sound physiology to a sound pathology and therapy; it must he modified by being developed still more precisely. It must incorporate the view of the nature of the human being that has been presented here repeatedly, though in very different connections from those we require today: this is the view of the threefold nature of the human organism.

On the one hand we have to do with a threefold nature of the soul being: in forming mental images, in feeling, and in will impulses. This threefold nature of the soul being, however, corresponds very precisely with a threefolding of the physical-bodily being: a kind of head system or nerve-sense system, a rhythmic system, and a metabolic-limb system. I must stress particularly that this constitution of the human organism must not be understood merely intellectually but through inner perception. A person would be unable to comprehend how matters actually stood if he remained with an external picture, if he understood the head system as something that simply ends at the neck, the circulatory or rhythmic system as being encompassed by the trunk, while the digestive system encompasses the limb system, the sexual system.

What is important here is that while the nerve-sense system is located primarily in the head, it nevertheless extends over the entire remaining organism as such. We may thus say that when we speak here with an anthroposophical purpose about the nerve-sense system, it is the system of functions in the human organism (for we are concerned here not with spatial limitations but functional limitations) that is located essentially in the head; nevertheless the head activity extends over the entire human being so that in a certain sense the whole human being is head. The same is true for the other systems. It was thus mere foolishness when a superficial professor of medicine, who did not intend really to study these matters but only wished to discredit them to the world, spoke about the “belly-system” in order to ridicule what is actually referred to by the metabolic system. He has merely shown his total lack of understanding for how the threefold constitution of the human being is functional, and not defined by spatial limitations.

When an individual really understands this constitution of the human being—about which many lectures could be given to describe it in full detail—he reaches the point of being able to perceive clearly the distinctions between the head system, and therefore the nerve-sense system, on the one hand, the metabolic-limb system on the other hand, and the mediating system, the rhythmic system, whose essential role is to bring about the balance between the two other systems.

If we thus wish to encompass the entire nature of the human being, we must consider the following. The actual conceptual and perceptual activity of the human being has as its basis—one cannot even say as its tool, but as its physical basis—everything that takes place physically in the nerve-sense system. It is not the case, as is suggested by modern psychology and physiology, that those processes connected primarily with the feeling and willing systems also take place in the nerve-sense system. Such an opinion does not hold up before a more precise study of the issue. You will find such a precise study, at least suggested in its outlines, in my book, Riddles of the Soul (see Note 3).

Much detailed work must still be done in this regard, however. Then what spiritual science has to say with certainty from its side will be elaborated from the other side, from the physical-empirical side. It will become clear that man's feeling is not connected in a primary way with the nerve-sense system but with the rhythmic system, that just as the nerve-sense system corresponds to mentally active perception, so the rhythmic system corresponds to feeling. Only through the interaction of the rhythmic system with the nerve-sense system, by the roundabout route of the rhythm in the cerebral fluid, pulsating against the nerve-sense system, is the nerve-sense system engaged as the carrier of the conceptual life. Then, if we raise our feelings to mental images, the dull, dreamlike life of feelings is perceived and pictured by us in an inner way. Just as the life of feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic system and is indirectly mediated by it, so the life of will is connected directly with the metabolic system. This connection in turn acts in a secondary way, since metabolism takes place also in the brain, of course, so that the metabolic system in its functions presses against the nerve-sense system. In this way we are able to bring forth the mental images of our will impulses, which otherwise would unfold in a dull sleep-life within our organism.

Thus you can see that in the human organism we have three different systems that carry the soul life in different ways. These systems do not simply differ from one another; they actually oppose each other (as I said, I can only sketch these matters today) so that on one side we have the nerve-sense system and on the other side all that constitutes the functions of the metabolic system, the metabolic-limb system (see drawing). Regarding the connection of the metabolism with the limbs, you can arrive at appropriate images if you simply consider the influence of the moving limbs on the metabolism. This influence is much greater than is ordinarily assumed in outer consciousness.

These two systems, however, the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system, are in opposition, are polar opposites in a certain way. This polar opposition must be studied carefully in order to arrive at a sound pathology and therapy, particularly a pathology that could lead organically over into therapy; it must be studied carefully in all its countless individual details. If one enters into the detailed effects, it becomes evident that what I suggested yesterday is truly the case.

Within everything connected with the head system or nerve-sense system, we have breakdown processes, so that while our conceptual activity takes place in the waking state, when we perceive and form mental images, this activity is not bound up with growth and upbuilding processes but with breakdown processes, processes of elimination. This can be grasped if one looks in a sound way at what empirical-physiological science has already presented concerning this. There is already empirical evidence or to express it better, empirical corroboration—for what spiritual science provides through its perception. You need only pursue what certain inspired physiologists are able to present about the physical processes in the nervous system, which unfold as parallel phenomena to perceiving and forming mental images. You will see then that this assertion is certainly well supported, the assertion that when we think, when we think and perceive wakefully, we have to do with processes of elimination and breakdown, not with upbuilding processes. By contrast, where the will processes are mediated for the human being in the metabolic-limb system we are concerned with upbuilding processes.

All individual functions in the human being definitely interact with one another, however. If we look at the matter correctly, we must say that the upbuilding processes from below work up into the breakdown processes, and that the breakdown processes from above work down into the upbuilding processes. Then if you pursue this logically you have the rhythmic processes as a balancing system, as functions introducing the balance between the upbuilding processes and the breakdown processes, rhythmic processes that press breakdown into build-up and build-up into breakdown.

If we do not study the matter purely outwardly, we see that in the so-called blood circulation of the heart, in the aeration of the human body, we have everywhere special processes, as it were, that are somehow interrupted. I cannot go further now into this interruption, which has its purpose, but everywhere we have a specialization of this rhythmic curve that I have sketched here (see drawing). The course of breathing is a special aspect of this curve, the process that you draw if you follow the course of the blood from the heart upward toward the head or respectively toward the lungs and down to the rest of the body. Thus you have a specialization of these processes. In short, if you enliven what is suggested here, you penetrate into the functional tissue of the human organism, not in the dead way that is customary but in a living way. To do so you must enliven your own mental images. A mobile image of the human organism can thus be pictured. The human organism cannot be encompassed with static, abstract mental images, as modern physiology and pathology would like to encompass it today; it must instead be grasped with mental images in movement, with mental images that can really penetrate into the working of something that has inner movement, that is in no way merely a mechanical interaction of organs situated at rest in relation to one another.

We thus can see that within the human organism there is basically a continuous interaction between the breakdown processes, the deadening processes, and the upbuilding processes, the growth or proliferative processes. The human organization cannot be grasped without this activity.

What is actually present there, however? Let's look at the matter more precisely. If the breakdown process of the nerve-sense organization works into the metabolic-limb system through rhythm, something is present there that works against the metabolic-limb system, something that is a poison for this metabolic-limb system. The reverse is also the case, that what is present in the upbuilding system, working into the head system in rhythm, is a poison for the head system. And since, as I have indicated, the systems are spread out over the entire organism, a poisoning and unpoisoning are continuously taking place everywhere in the human organism, and this is brought into balance by the rhythmic processes.

We are therefore unable to regard such a natural process as taking its course one-sidedly, in the way that one normally pictures things, so that healthy processes are simply designated as normal. Rather we look into two processes working against one another, where one is a process that is thoroughly illness-engendering for the other. We simply cannot live in the physical organism at all without continuously exposing our metabolic-limb system to the causes of illness from the head system and exposing the head system to the causes of illness from the metabolic system. A scale that is not balanced properly is thrown out of balance by entirely natural laws so that the beam does not rest on the horizontal; similarly life, because it is in constant movement within itself, does not simply exist in a state of balanced rest but rather exists in a state of balance that can deviate in both directions toward irregularities.

Healing, then, means simply that if the head system, for example, is working in a way too strongly poisonous on the metabolic system, its poisoning effect is relieved, its poisonous effect is taken away. If, on the other hand, the metabolic-limb system is working in a way too strongly poisonous on the head system, which means working over abundantly: then its poisonous effect must also be removed.

It is possible to arrive at a comprehensive view of this realm, however, only if one now extends what can be observed in the human being to the observation of all nature, if one is able to grasp all nature in a spiritual scientific sense. If you look at the plant-forming process, for example, you can see clearly and macroscopically the upward striving of plant-forming processes, a striving away from the center of the earth. You may make a stimulating study of this metamorphosing formative striving of the plants, at least in a rudimentary way, on the basis of the guidelines offered in Goethe's Metamorphosis of the Plants. In Goethe's Metamorphosis of the Plants there is a sketchy rendering of the first composition, the first elements that are to be studied about the nature of the plant in this direction, but the direction of such a study must be developed further. The initial guidelines must be pursued, for then we may obtain a living view of everything involved in plant growth: when rooting in the soil the plant's upward-striving develops in a negative direction in the root; the plant begins to grow, then grows upward, overcoming the force of attraction of the earth prevailing in the root; then it wrestles through other forces in order to come ultimately to blossom, fruit, and seed formation. A great deal takes place upon this path.

On this path, for example, an opposing force once again intervenes. The opposing force that intervenes can be well observed if you study, simply to take an example, the common birch, betula alba. Pursue very precisely the process that takes place from the root formation through the trunk formation, particularly the bark formation. Consider how, on the basis of everything that works together in the trunk and bark formation, there develops what later comes into manifestation in the leaf formation. This can be studied particularly well in a spiritual scientific way if the still-brownish young birch leaves are studied in the spring.

If this is studied vividly, one also receives a view of forces self-metamorphosing, forces that are active there within the plant. One receives a view of how, on the one hand, there is a formative force active in the process of plant formation that works from below upward. On the other hand it is also possible to behold the force that retards, which in the root still, works strongly as the force of gravity but which, as the plant wrestles itself free from the earthly substance out into the air, is able to work together in another way with the upward-striving force. We then reach an interesting stage, a stage very helpful in understanding how in plant formation during this upward-striving process certain salts, potassium salts, are deposited in the birch bark; this is simply the result of the interaction of the forces working downward with the forces working upward, tending toward protein-formation, you could say, toward what I would like to designate as the albuminizing force formation.

In this way it is possible to penetrate into the plant-forming process. I can only indicate this here. By looking at how the potassium salts are deposited in the birch bark, how something wrestles itself free from this force drawing downward (a process somewhat comparable to what happens when a salt precipitates out of a solution), coming to the process that takes place when the solution rids itself of the salt, we come to see, to grasp in a living way, the process of protein formation, the process I would designate as the albuminizing process. We thus have a path to study what outwardly surrounds the human being, to study it vividly.

Then when we look back at the human being, we can see how, fundamentally speaking, the human being has the same form of forces in him—if we consider the breakdown process working from above downward—that work from below upward in the plant. We can see that in what is active in the forces working downward from the head system toward the metabolic-limb system there is something like an inverted plant element active within us. We can see that in fact those forces that we see sent upward in plant growth work in a downward direction in the human being. If the human being inappropriately holds back this process of plant formation active within him, so that he doesn't permeate the bodily life in the right way with what is active in the head—the astral, the ego-being—and if this then penetrates the bodily nature, this penetration expressing itself within the body, then something is held up there, something that should proceed into the human organism. We thus have to do with a pathological phenomenon like that which confronts us, for example, in cases of rheumatism or gouty conditions. If we study what is brought about in the human organism when this breakdown process is dammed up in a certain way, we discover its effects in the process of rheumatism, in the process of gout-formation, and so on.

Let us now shift our gaze again from within the organism to a process of plant formation like the one we have in the betula alba. From this we can arrive at the following. We look on the one hand into what takes place in salt formation and on the other hand into protein formation. We find, if we understand this process of protein formation in the right way, that the opposite process is within it and is held up there. We find held up in the organism that process which should take place in a way similar to the correct process of albuminizing in the leaves of the birch. We are thus able to come to the relationship between those processes that take place in the birch leaves, for example, and the processes within the organism if we process what is in the birch leaves into remedies. We can then give these remedies to the human being, by means of which we can bring about a healing, because the remedy correctly opposes this damming-up process that occurs in rheumatism and gout. In this way we look both at what is taking place outside in nature and at what takes place within the organism, and then we arrive at an idea of how we should guide the healing forces.

On the other hand we can see instances when the breakdown processes proceed in such a way that the organism cannot restrain them so that they pour themselves downward, and the rhythmic system does not press them back in the right way; they thus reach the periphery of the body pressing outward, as it were, toward the skin. Then we get inflammatory conditions on the outer portion of the human being, we get skin eruptions and the like. If we now look hack again to our plant, to the betula alba, we find the opposing process in the disposition of the potassium salts in the birch bark: we thus become able to see how we can fight against the process of skin eruption, which is an excessive function of exudation within the human being, by preparing a remedy from the birch bark.

We are therefore able to study how plant processes, how mineral processes, are active, and we grasp the connections between what is outside in nature and what is active within the human being. In other words, medical empiricism, therapeutic empiricism, ascends to what Goethe calls in his sense—not now in the intellectual sense but in his sense the rational stage of science. We arrive at a science as therapy, which is able really to penetrate into the connections.

These things are not so simple, for one must study things in detail, at least in accordance with certain types, at first in accordance with secret types of the human personality and in accordance with secrets of natural existence. It should not be assumed that if the process has been studied in an example such as the betula alba, an overview has already been reached of what needs to be considered. In each different plant-forming process—for example in the horse chestnut or whatever—these formative processes will manifest themselves in an essentially different way. What has been indicated here should not in any way lead to a generalized twaddle but to a very serious and extensive study.

Now I wish to direct my words particularly to the students here. If this study is undertaken in a rational way, it need not drive you into a panic regarding the extent of study necessary, for if everything now present as examination-ballast falls away—to speak in Paracelsus' terms—and is replaced by something active, leading in this way to a rational view of a therapeutic pathology and a pathological therapy, students will have to study not more but less. And because this study will permeate you with life, it will bring forth a much greater enthusiasm than what leads you to the human being today, yielding only the ability to see organs. Such organs are by no means at rest and can be understood only if they are grasped in their living function and in their interaction with other organs, can be understood only if this organization is studied and if one strives to enter completely into the functional element. We need an outer natural science that is also striving to reach the functional element.

It is absolutely necessary to study in parallel the inner process in the human being, that peculiar process taking place as poisoning and poisoning effects that have fallen out of balance, and those processes that take place in the natural order. And because the outer relates itself in a polar way to the inner, the outer processes must be used in a certain way polarically. By this means we can be guided into pathology, or, said better, into a therapeutic pathology and a pathological therapy.

I have only been able to suggest here what is necessary to direct the steps needed to heal medical study, and was only able to suggest how spiritual science wishes to work into this medical study. This evening I will give you a few more examples, to show you how intuitively looking together at the outer workings of nature and the workings of the inner organism can lead to therapy and to knowledge of pathology. At that time I would like to go into particular substances.

During the brief time available to me here, I have only been able to indicate the principle, as it were, concerning the example of betula alba, and this evening I will give some further indications, but in every instance I will try to hold myself to indicating only what can add to a general understanding of the human being. Proceeding from this, the physician must move into further specialization. He must enter into the specifics. To deal with specifics always requires an individual evaluation, and here it is only necessary, out of the laymen's understanding of medical directions, of medical principles, for an understanding to grow of what the physician has to undertake within the outer world.

If you consider rightly the course that an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wishes to pursue in medicine—and I will speak more about this tonight—you will really be able to say that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not wish to encourage quackery and dilettantism; rather it wishes above all to work toward a healing of science, toward a true, serious science that will itself engender social effects.

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Note 1:

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, twenty lectures given to physicians in Dornach, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.

Note 2:

In German, the illnesses, are called Geisteskrankheiten, diseases of the spirit as opposed to those of the body. As Steiner is speaking here of the role of the spirit in bodily-phenomena, it may be helpful to keep in mind the thought of spiritual illnesses, though in the translation we have chosen the more commonly used English equivalent, mental illnesses.

Note 3:

Rudolf Steiner, Von Seelenraetseln, 1917. Excerpts of this are published in English under the title, The Case for Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970.

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