The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Also known as: Archangels and the Living Source of Speech Lecture 2 of 13 from the lecture series: The Human Soul in its Connection with Godly-Spiritual Individualities.

If you will remind yourselves of some of the things I have said in recent lectures, you will, I think, be able to call up a picture of the relationship of man's faculty of speech to those Beings in the spiritual world whom we are accustomed to assign to the Hierarchy of the Archangels. You will remember I explained to you the difference it makes to man whether the words he speaks are formed in such a way as to refer only to material things, in which case speech assumes a materialistic character, or whether in his speaking he unfolds a certain idealism, so that every time he utters a word, the feeling is present in him that he belongs to a spiritual world and that the words that ring in his speaking, coming as they do from the soul, must have some relation to Spirits. According as the one or the other is true, so does man come, between falling asleep and awakening, into a wrong or right relation with the Archangels. If he allows idealism to disappear altogether from his speaking, then he gradually loses the connection, which is so essential to him, with the Archangels. I am reminding you of this, because I want to speak to-day more particularly of one aspect of this relationship of human speech with the hierarchy of the Archangels. Speech, like everything else in evolution that has to do with man, as we have had full opportunity of realising in our study of his being, has had its history. What I want to bring forward does not refer to any one language in particular. The periods of time we have to take into view when we are studying some deep-seated change in speech are so long that even primitive languages show the same character as civilised ones in respect of such matters as we shall be considering. To-day therefore we shall not concern ourselves with the differences that exist between the several languages, but rather with those metamorphoses which human language in general has undergone in the course of the evolution of mankind on Earth.

If we consider the relationship man has to-day to language, we find that the words he speaks are nearly all of them signs for things that are round about him. As you will know, we have in the course of our studies alluded to a more intimate relationship between word and object. In our day however there is hardly any feeling left for this; words are very little more than mere outward signs for the objects indicated. Who is there who still feels, when the word Blitz (lightning) is uttered, something of the same experience he has when lightning actually flashes through space? To-day we are inclined to look on the word merely as a combination of sounds that is a sign for the phenomenon of the flash of lightning. It was not always so. If we go no farther back than to the earlier part of the Greek civilisation, we find that man's relation to language was not then one of thought, where the word is for him a sign and a symbol. The man of olden time entered with heart and soul into the sounds of his words and into the whole way the sounds were formed and arranged. And in the case of the languages of Northern Europe we do not even need to go back so far before we come to a time when the word Pflug (plough) gave man the same inner experience as did the activity of ploughing. This has been lost, and the word has become no more than a sign. But it is scarcely more than 1500 years or so since words were still felt in this way in the Northern parts of Europe. The feeling a man had when he was ploughing was similar to the feeling he had when he heard the word which in those days designated the plough. When anyone was listening to or speaking a word, it was not so much his thinking that partook in the experience as his feeling.

If now we go back into more remote ages, we find something different again; the will takes an intense and active part in the forming of words. But in order to study the times when man's relationship to external Nature was pre-eminently one of will, we must take our thoughts right back to Atlantis. For we have to reckon with long epochs of time when we are considering the evolution of language.

Within language lives the Genius of language. Language is not dependent for its evolution on the decision of man. In language lives the Genius of language. And the Genius of Language belongs to the hierarchy of the Archangels. When man speaks—when, that is, an atmosphere is prepared around the Earth within which can live man's utterances articulated into speech, then that atmosphere of speech and language is the element of the Archangels. Hence are the Archangels the Spirits of the different peoples—the Folk Spirits as we call them. You will know of this from the lectures I gave on the Mission of the Folk-Souls.

The evolution of language on Earth has thus a deep and intimate connection with the evolution of the Archangels. We can go so far as to say that in the evolution of speech and language we are beholding the evolution of the Archangels themselves. For even when we are studying something that has to do with the Earth, it is by no means impossible in the course of that very study to come to a knowledge of the evolution of higher spiritual Beings. We need only learn how to relate particular facts and phenomena to particular higher spiritual Beings, and we can arrive at a clear perception of how the continuous evolution of the Archangels is expressed and revealed in the changes that are to be observed in man's faculty of speech.

Now in those far-off times when an element of will came to expression in man's speech—that is, in the later part of the Atlantean evolution—it was not the same Beings of the Hierarchy who lived in his language as in more recent times. The whole relationship moreover was different. In those remote times man was not yet so interested in the feelings aroused in him at the sight, for example, of the blossoming of flowers or by changes in weather. These feelings interested him, it is true, in another connection, but not in respect of the faculty whereby the word welled up from the depths of his soul. Whether danger threatened him from this or that fact in Nature, summoning him to defend himself, or whether something else had a kindly and favourable influence and he would fain bring it into the orbit of his life, or again whether another object of perception were good or bad for his health,—in effect, how his will was aroused to activity, what he was induced to do under the influence of some fact or other,—this was the aspect of experience that interested him, and he formed his words accordingly. So that in those older times we find words that express how man reacts, what he finds himself impelled to do under the influence of the world around him. The most ancient language of all consisted almost entirely of expressions of will. How do we account for this? It was due to the fact that the Archangels came to language by way of Intuition. Read the descriptions I have given in my books of the nature of Intuition, and you will have a picture of the activity exercised by the Archangels in the later part of the Atlantean evolution, when they bestowed upon man the language of will.

Later, these Archangels moved forward in their own evolution. In my little book, “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind,” I spoke about the evolution of the Leaders and Guides of humanity who live in the spiritual world. To-day we will extend this into a realm to which on that occasion we gave little attention,—the realm of speech and language. The advance made by the Archangels in their relation to language may be described in the following way. In the older faculty of Intuition they were standing within the world of still higher Hierarchies, giving themselves up in devotion to these worlds, so that together with speech they received something of the very being of higher Hierarchies than themselves. So long as it all depended upon Intuition, the Archangels surrendered themselves to the next higher Hierarchy,—Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai. They were within the worlds of this higher Hierarchy, and it was the experience of standing intuitively within this higher Hierarchy that enabled them to put the speech-forming power into human life on Earth.

In the next epoch the Archangels make, as it were, a step forward and then their speech-forming power flows no longer out of Intuition but out of Inspiration. They are not now completely surrendered to the next higher Hierarchy. (What they did still receive through their devotion to this Hierarchy underwent a change; it ceased to be something they could then communicate to man as speech or language). Now they hearken to the Inspirations of the First Hierarchy,—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim,—and from out of this Inspiration they pour down to Earth the speech-forming power.

If we go back to the earliest times of Post-Atlantean evolution, or even only as far as ancient Egypt and Chaldea, we find in every land that the source from which the Archangels drew, in order to communicate speech to man, is Inspiration. Language itself is metamorphosed. Words become an expression before all else of sympathy and antipathy, of every shade of human feeling. Instead of a language of will, as in former times, we have now a language of feeling. We have come to a stage where this feeling, which is called forth in man by an external process or being is the very same as is experienced when the sounds issuing forth from the depths of his being are uttered by the speech organs and articulated into the word.

We have reached a significant phase in the evolution of mankind. The Hierarchy of the Archangels is at first the receiver of Intuitions; and the language of will, brought down as it were out of these Intuitions, is created by these Beings. The Archangels move on further and become the receivers of Inspiration. And what they receive through the inspiration of Beings of the First Hierarchy, gives rise to the language of feeling.

It was out of an extraordinarily deep perception that the well-known scholar and writer on the history of Art, Hermann Grimm, drew a clear line of division between the Greeks and the Romans. When we learn history at school or at the university, we are, he said, exhorted to take pains to understand what we learn; but as we go back over the evolution of mankind, we can only understand history as far back as Roman times. Cicero and Caesar we can still understand, for up to a point they are similar to the man of the present day,—although it must be said that the understanding generally brought to a study of Caesar is far from being free and natural. If we were not so thoroughly drilled and trained to it, we would never take much interest in Caesar! We would leave it to the pupils in military schools. Generally speaking, however, it is possible to trace a continuous stream back from our own day to Rome. A certain element of pedantry, which has gradually been creeping into man's life and has to-day reached a kind of culmination, first began to show itself in Rome. But, thinks Hermann Grimm, if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot claim to understand Pericles or Alcibiades. We understand them in the same way as we understand characters in fairy tales. As a matter of fact, it is only through a deeper study of Anthroposophy that one can come again to an understanding of the soul life of such figures; as you know, we have sought here again and again to enter into the whole way in which a Greek thinks and forms his ideas. Hermann Grimm is aware of the distance that lies between the inner life of a Greek and the inner life of a man of the present day. To the Roman we can still feel ourselves near; then comes a great gulf. The way the Greeks are described in the schools to-day is really deplorable! They are made out to be just like ourselves. They were not so at all, their whole life of soul was of a different character altogether. We need to look round for quite other methods to describe the Greeks. You could not have more striking evidence of this than when the learned Wilamowitz undertakes to translate the Greek tragedians. The whole affair is simply a disgrace. I need hardly say, there is nothing of the Greek tragedies left in his translations, not a trace! And yet people are immensely pleased, quite enchanted with them. Their dramatis personae simply do not exist in the tragedies themselves.

Hermann Grimm showed a true and sure instinct, when he said that we come into an entirely different world when we come to Greece—to say nothing of the Orient. It is really no more than a ridiculous mockery for modern man to imagine he can understand anything of the true Orient out of Deussen's translations. The first thing necessary is to be able to comprehend the change that has come about since then in the very being of man's soul.

And now when we come to consider our particular sphere, the sphere of speech or language, then we find that the language of feeling still prevailed in Greece among the philosophers up to the time of Plato. The first philosophical pedant is Aristotle, the great and universal spirit.¹ It will surprise you that I give him these two appellations, one after the other, but we do not understand Aristotle unless we see in him the first philosophical pedant and at the same time the universal spirit. He is great in a certain aspect but he is in another aspect the first pedant philosopher, for he made out of words categories of thought. It would never have occurred to the Greek of an older time to take words and force them, as it were, to yield categories of thought; he still felt the words as something that is inspired into man, still felt the presence of higher Spirits in speech and language.

Well on into the Greek epoch and—for the man in the street, as we say—as late as the Mystery of Golgotha, we can still detect in the speech-forming power of man the element of Inspiration, as it lives in the soul of the Archangel. True, the ordinary person lags behind the philosopher in certain respects; but in spiritual matters he is often less behind, and in the matter of the speech-forming faculty, he retains the Inspirations longer. Dates can of course be no more than approximate. In one region of the earth Inspiration lasts a longer, in another a shorter, time. In one region, men still feel how the word pulsates in them as the blood pulsates in the body; they feel it in the power of the breath. In the power of the breath as it enfills and surges through the body, they feel the presence of the Archangel, who is himself subject to Inspiration.

Then we come into a time when it is no longer so that the Archangel is yielding to Inspiration when he communicates to man the power of speech, but to Imagination. And language becomes the language of thought. Man begins to speak more out of thoughts; language approaches the abstract. And behind this lies a fact of great significance.

The Archangels, who belong to the Third Hierarchy, received Intuitions from the Second Hierarchy, and Inspirations from Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—the First Hierarchy. Whence do they receive Imagination? There is no Hierarchy beyond the First! The Imaginations cannot at any rate come to them from any one of the Hierarchies named in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. For he tells of no Hierarchy beyond the first. Certain Archangel Beings were therefore obliged to turn to the past for Imaginations, to find in the past the pictures of the speech-forming power,—for that is what the Imaginations are. What came from an earlier time had to be carried on into the future. There was no longer any immediate and present flow of the speech-forming power. And inasmuch as speech now took its source from an earlier stage, into it crept an Ahrimanic element. This is a fact of incalculable significance. And what the Archangels felt above them came to expression in the world of man in a deadening of speech and language. Language became polished and at the same time paralysed, it no longer retained the livingness it had in earlier days.

Try to understand the significance of this change. Something enters into the life of man that in reality requires a higher hierarchy than the First. If we have a right understanding for this event in human development in all its tremendous significance, we shall come to see that a time had arrived when the Gods had to grow out beyond what is contained in the First Hierarchy. There is one thing that up to that time had not yet been achieved by the Gods, and was already present here on Earth in picture. What the Gods had not yet achieved is the passage through Death. You have often heard me speak of this. The Gods who stand above man in the various Hierarchies knew only of changes from one form of life into another. The actual event of death in life had not, up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, been an experience of the Gods. Death came as a result of Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it came, that is, through the agency of Divine Beings who had either remained behind in evolution or pressed forward too quickly. Death had no place in the life-experience of the higher Hierarchies. It enters into their experience in the moment when the Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha—passes, that is, through Death, uniting Himself so deeply with the destiny of Earth Man as to have this also in common with him,—that He passes through Death. The event of Golgotha is accordingly more than an event of the life of Earth, it is an event of the life of the Gods. The actual event that took place in that moment on Earth, and the knowledge of the Event that finds its way into the hearts and minds of men—all this is an image of the infinitely more lofty and sublime and far-reaching Event that took place in the worlds of the Gods themselves. Christ's passing through death on Golgotha is an event whereby the First Hierarchy reached up into a still higher realm. Therefore have I always had to speak to you of the Trinity as standing above the First Hierarchy. In reality It only came there in the course of evolution. Everywhere there is evolution.

And so, if we are speaking of the Hierarchies as described in Dionysius the Areopagite, we have to say that the Archangels lose the possibility of forming Imaginations from above. Consequently Man loses the possibility of continuing to build and fashion his language in a living manner. In the world of the Gods an event takes place of which the Mystery of Golgotha is an earthly reflection. Therefore the Event of Golgotha contains among its many implications also this,—that as men gradually receive into themselves more and more of the Christ Impulse, they receive again through the Christ Impulse the living spring and fountain of language.

We have to-day the various languages that run their course like diverging streams. And if we look at these various languages in a free and unbiassed way, we cannot fail to observe how they carry in them—and more especially, the farther we go Westward—an element of death, how they tend to become mere empty husks. In Asia things have not yet gone so far, but as we go West we find increasingly how the languages show signs of dying.

There is only one way whereby the speech-creating power can be quickened into life,—and that is through men coming to realise the Christ Impulse as a living Impulse. Then the Christ Impulse can become a power in man that can create speech. And among all the facts to be noted if we want to form a true picture of the significance of the Christ Impulse in the whole evolution of mankind, this must also have place, that at the time when man went forward into freedom, he came right out of the Divine and spiritual stream in which he had been steeped hitherto. Had speech remained as it was in the time of ancient Greece, man would not have been able to evolve to freedom. That speech serves the purpose merely of a sign,—this absurdity (for so I must call it) had to come about when the Archangels lost the possibility of forming Imaginations from the present and had to resort to the past. During the time since the Christ first made Himself known to men, during all this time while He has let the Mystery of His Being and His activity be there on record in the Gospels, the knowledge of Christ has not come in its fullness, the knowledge men have had of Him has not been sufficiently spiritual, it has often been merely traditional. But when the word of the Gospel is quickened to life by an understanding of the Christ, an understanding that derives from the Christ Himself as He still works on in the world, continuing to have influence always upon man, then—and only then—will proceed from the Christ Impulse, from the living Christ Impulse, the speech-forming power.

Let us now set down on the blackboard what I have been indicating. Here up above, the Gods grow more and more exalted. Down below an evolution goes on among men. On the one hand they receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom.

And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom. And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ, Who has found His home in the hearts of men on Earth; He enters with His Impulse right into the Imaginations of the Archangels, and these become alive, become quick with immediate present life.

We shall in the future have an altogether different kind of language-forming power. A quite new kind will begin to work. I have spoken of this from other points of view in earlier lectures.

We can describe the evolution that goes on above in the Heavens at the same time as mankind evolves on the Earth below. And we can also describe its copy or reflection on Earth,—the progress from the language of will to the language of feeling and thence to the language of thought or symbol. And we can know that amidst it all Archangels are ascending—or shall we rather say descending—from Intuition to Inspiration and to Imagination. We behold first the evolution of the Archangels and all that takes place in connection therewith among the higher Hierarchies, and when we turn from that to man in his evolution, it is on the evolution of language and of the word that we have to fix our attention. We will consider one particular stream in the whole history of mankind, into which a divine stream was interwoven. It goes back to the origin of all things, the far beginning of all things. “In the Beginning was the Word” where was the word in those distant ages, when mankind had a language of the will? The Word was with God, it had to be sought there by means of Intuition. “The Word was with God ”.

The Archangels had to transpose themselves by means of Intuition into the Being of the Second Hierarchy. The Being that flowed over into Them was the Word. “And a God was the Word”.

In the Beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And a God was the Word.

We see how intimate is the connection of that stream in evolution which finds its culmination in the Mystery of Golgotha with the Logos, the Word. And it is all bound up with the great cosmic event of man's “becoming” and the passage of Christ through death. When those great sentences were uttered: “In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word ”—in those days the Word was felt as moving and weaving in the soul of man. With the Advent of the Mystery of Golgotha came a time when Christ was present in a human body—men beheld Him through the Word. The Word had entered into physical man. “ And the Word became flesh ”.

Deep truths, deep facts of evolution, lie hidden in the ancient writings, but earnest and persistent work is needed to find them again. We must first be able to observe in the spiritual world. Above all, we must approach these ancient writings with reverence, knowing that we shall only be able to deepen our understanding of their content by learning to investigate these sublime matters for ourselves. And as we are able to enter into their deeper meaning we enter also into spiritual life itself.

Well indeed would it be for us in this age, had we a Michael civilisation, a culture and a civilisation fired by what I recently called the Michael thought! This Michael thought should be alive, above all, in the autumn time. The festival of autumn should be filled with it. The leaves have withered and are falling from the branches of the trees, the plants are fading away, life is being mineralised. All the fresh young sprouting life that we saw in the earlier part of the year is receiving death into itself, death and decay, and is fast undergoing mineralisation. Now must the Michael power well up from man's inner being; now must man recognise how, just where the physical and material grows weak and faint and tends to die away,—just there the spiritual enters in! The Autumn Festival of Michaelmas at the end of September should become a festival filled with life and impulse. It has to express how man, while he stands right within the decaying processes of Nature, grows correspondingly active in his soul. When the Michael Festival shall have this character, then all human activity will be fructified from it. And how sore is the need to-day for such fructification! Let me give you an instance.

A short while ago, we heard a great deal about a resolve some people had made to study language. Nothing came of it, nothing at all. All manner of facts about language were collected, but the whole effort was completely lacking in spirituality. It was really so. There you had a group of young people, straight from school. At school of course, they had not yet woken up, but now—they are going to “study language”! They begin to plan it all and think how it will be when they have gone on studying for some time; a dazzling picture floats before their eyes of the fruit of all their labours. Actually all the preliminary steps are there; they could quite well have gone on to a recognition of the great miracle that unfolds before us when we look away from the present-day language of thought, through the language of feeling, to the language of will, and behold there the wonderful working and weaving of the Divine Archangels, behold too how their working and weaving stirs even yet in the language corpses of to-day. Were the life of the First Beginnings to flow again in language, what a sublime greatness were there revealed!

You must understand that the Michael thought is not a thing to be taken easily. You cannot simply say: Let us inaugurate a Michael Festival; it will be wonderful, and we shall then be in the very forefront of progress. The Michael thought has relation to the strongest and deepest impulses of the human will. It must reckon with these innermost impulses, and a Michael Festival cannot be other than a festival which gives a tremendous urge to human life, much as in those olden times, when man had the power to create festivals, the institution of the Christmas Festival or of the Easter Festival gave a new urge and impetus to the whole life of man on Earth.

• 1. Pedant’ seems to be, in this connection, the nearest rendering for ‘Philinter.’ (Note by Translator).

Well, gentlemen, what have you decided?

Question: The various chemical substances have the property of giving certain colors to a flame, for example. On the other hand, many stars also have a color shimmer, like Mars. I would like to know more about this. For example, Mars has a reddish shimmer. Iron, when it oxidizes, rust, also has a reddish color. Are there any connections here?

Dr. Steiner: That is, of course, a very difficult question. First of all, we need to recall what we have already discussed about colours. We have already discussed various aspects of colours. You have to bear in mind that the colour of a body is connected with the whole way in which it is situated in the world. So let us imagine we have some kind of substance. This substance has a very specific colour. Now do you think that this color can possibly express itself quite differently when you bring this substance to the flame, so that you then get a certain coloration of the flame? You must realize that, when the flame arises by itself, the flame already has a certain color and that when we bring a substance into the flame, two colors interact: that of the substance and that of the flame. But there is something very peculiar about the way colors relate to each other in the world. I will tell you something about that now.

You know the usual rainbow. The rainbow has a red band, then it turns orange and yellow, then the band turns green, then blue, then the band turns a little darker blue, indigo blue and then the band turns violet. This is how we get a number of seven colors that the rainbow itself has (see drawing). Of course, people have always observed these seven colors and explained them in a variety of ways, because the seven colors that you get from a rainbow are actually the most beautiful colors that you can see in nature. And besides, you must know that these colors are as if they were floating freely. They arise, as you know, when it is raining somewhere when the sun is shining. Then the rainbow appears on the other side of the sky. So when you see a rainbow somewhere, you have to ask yourself: where is the weather? Yes, on the opposite side, away from the rain, the sun must be. That is how it should be. That is how the seven colors of the rainbow come about.

But these seven colors also occur in a different way. Imagine that we burn a metal-like body, heating it more and more, so that it becomes very hot. Then this metal-like body first, as you know, becomes red-hot, and finally white-hot, as they say. So imagine that we have created a kind of flame by what I might call actually a metal flame. But it is not an actual flame, it is a glowing metal, a metal that glows all over. If you now look at such a metal, which glows all over, through a so-called prism, you do not see a white-hot mass, but you see the same seven colors as in the rainbow.

I will now draw a schematic diagram (see page 72). Imagine that there is this glowing metal, and now I have a prism like this. You know what a prism is. It is drawn here from the side, as a triangular glass. There is my eye. Now I look through it. Now I don't see a white body, but I see the seven colors of the rainbow, the seven consecutive colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. So through the prism I see what is actually white, what is incandescent, in seven colors. From this you can see that what is incandescent can be seen shimmering in the colors of the rainbow.

Now, there is something else that can be done that is extremely interesting. You see, such a white-hot mass can only be produced when a metal, a solid body, is made to glow. But if I have a gas and burn the gas, then when I look through a prism, I don't get the seven colors, I don't get such a seven-color band, but something completely different.

You may ask how you can get a glowing gas. Yes, it is very easy to get a glowing gas. Imagine, for example, that I have ordinary table salt. There are two substances in ordinary table salt: first, a metal-like substance called sodium, and then there is chlorine. This is a gas that, when spread out somewhere, when it is somewhere, immediately hisses sharply into the nose. It is the same gas that is used, for example, to bleach laundry. The laundry items are bleached by letting chlorine brush over them.

So when you have sodium and chlorine together as one body, it is our common table salt, which we use to salt our food. If you take away the chlorine and put the sodium, which is then whitish, into a flame, the flame turns completely yellow. Why is that? Yes, gentlemen, that is because the sodium, when the flame is hot enough, turns into a gas, and then the sodium gas burns yellow, gives a yellow flame. So now we not only have a really glowing metal body, but we also have a gaseous flame. If I now look at this through my prism, it does not become seven-colored in the same way, but essentially remains yellow. Only on one side – and here you have to look very, very sharply – you see something bluish and something reddish. But on the whole you don't really notice that; you only see the yellow.

But that is not the interesting thing yet. The most interesting thing is this: if I set up the whole story here, enter the yellow flame here (see drawing on page 72) and now look through plate s my prism again, what will you say? You will say: when I look through Bee there, I see red, orange, yellow, green and so on. There is yellow there too, you will say. So when I look through it, the yellow will be particularly strong here, you will say, it will be an especially bright yellow, a very luminous yellow. Yes, you see, that is not the case. What is there is that no yellow appears at all, that the yellow is completely eliminated, erased, and there is a black spot. Just as there can be a yellow gas flame, there is also, for example, a blue one. You can also find substances, such as lithium, that have a red flame. Potassium and similar ones have a blue flame. If you now put a blue flame in here, for example, it is not the case that the blue appears stronger here, but again there is a black spot here. The strange thing is this: when you make something glowing, when something glows as a solid and is not gas, but glows, then you get this color band of seven colors. But if you only have a burning gas, then you get more or less a single color, and this single color then extinguishes that in the whole color band, which it itself has as a color.

What I am going to tell you now is something that people have only known for a relatively short time, having only been discovered in 1859. It was only in 1859 that it was discovered that in a seven-color band emanating from a glowing solid body, individual colors originating from glowing gases or burning gases extinguish the corresponding colors.

From this you can already see how extraordinarily complicated one color affects another. And this is why, when you look at the sun, it appears as if it were a white-hot body. It is right that way: if you look superficially through a prism, you also see these seven successive colors in the sun: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. But if you look more closely, then in the sun, in the solar disc, there are not these seven colors, but only approximations of the seven colors, and in between there are nothing but black lines, a whole lot of black lines. So if you look closely at the sun, you don't have a seven-color band, but you have the seven colors, but they are interrupted everywhere by nothing but black lines.

What do you have to say to yourself then? When you don't see the right, uninterrupted band of colors from the sun, but rather a band of colors interrupted by black lines, well, you have to say: Between us and the sun are nothing but burning gases that are always extinguishing the corresponding colors as they pass by. So when I look at the sun instead of at a glowing metal and see the black lines, I have to say to myself wherever I see the black lines: there, in other words always at the respective point, the yellow is being extinguished, for example here by sodium. When I look at the sun and see a black line in the yellow, I have to say: between me and the sun is sodium. And so I see black lines in the sunlight for all metals. So between me and the sun, all kinds of metals are spread out in space in gaseous form.

What can we conclude from this? Gentlemen, we can conclude that space, at least the area surrounding the Earth, is filled with nothing but not just glowing, but burning metals. When you consider that, then you have to realize that basically we cannot speak of the earth standing there and the glowing sun being up there, but what we see actually depends on what is between us and the sun, and the physicists would be very surprised if they could actually get into the sun, because it would not look as they assume it to be, but what one sees actually comes from what is between man and the sun. So you can see from this example how complicated the connection between substances and colors actually is.

So if you have a flame somewhere, and the flame, say a candle flame, has a certain coloration, you first have to ask: Well, what is inside the candle? In the flame, you have those substances in a gaseous state – they usually become gaseous due to the heat of the flame – that are inside the candle in a solid state. If we then look through a prism, as I have done here with the flame: a substance that is gaseous colors the entire flame. For example, the flame turns yellow due to the sodium. If you had a flame somewhere, for example in this room, and then looked at it through a prism, you would see the sodium blackness almost everywhere. You don't even need to add the sodium somehow. If the apparatus are arranged very precisely so that you can see correctly, you will find these black lines everywhere, which should actually be yellow and which basically come from the fact that there are tiny traces of sodium everywhere. There is hardly anything on earth that does not have small traces of sodium. But this proves that sodium is absolutely necessary in nature. Where it is not, we could not live. We also have to have a certain amount, a certain amount of sodium in us at all times, and we have to process the sodium. And it only betrays itself by the fact that it erases the yellow lines everywhere and makes them black.

Now, you have to remember what I told you before: what causes blue and violet colors? What causes red and yellow? - Well, I told you that blue appears in the vastness of space, because out there, where we see the firmament, there is nothing. It is the vast, black space of the universe. So we see the vast black space of the universe. But we do not see it just by looking out in front of us. Between us and this wide black space are the water vapors that are constantly rising. Even when the air is clear, water vapors are constantly in the air. If the Earth is here (he draws a picture), the water vapour is here and the black space is all around, then the sun shines through these vapours. If you were standing down there and looking up, you would not see black, but blue. Through the illuminated you now see the dark space in a blue colour. That means that when I see something dark or gloomy through something illuminated, I see it in blue.

The dawn and dusk are, as you know, yellowish or yellowish-reddish. When the Earth is here (it is drawn), since the vapors are all around and now the sun is coming up here, I see it illuminated. I see a bright spot here, but I see it first through the dark vapors. This makes it yellow for me. When I see a bright color through a dark color, it turns yellow. When I see a dark color through a bright color, it turns blue. Blue is the darkness seen through a bright color, yellow is the brightness seen through a dark color. That's understandable!

If I now have the yellow through the yellow sodium flame, then this yellow sodium flame means that the sodium is a substance that, when it evaporates, becomes bright but at the same time produces something dark around it. So the sodium actually burns like this: when the sodium burns here, the white light shoots up in the middle (diagram, left) and all around it, darkness shoots up, and that's why I see the whole thing yellow. So the sodium radiates light, but all around it, because it radiates light so strongly, it creates darkness.

You should not be surprised that the strongly luminous sodium produces darkness around itself, because if you are a fas t runner and run quite fast and someone else wants to keep up with you, he will just fall behind. That which splashes out is just a fast runner; it therefore appears luminous through the darkness, it appears yellow to me.

With an ordinary candle flame, the particles scatter in such a way that it becomes bright around the edges and dark in the middle. Therefore, if you have an ordinary candle flame, you see the dark through the light. Here the bright dots splash (see drawing, right). Here in the middle it remains dark and therefore appears blue. So if you have a yellow flame, as you do with sodium, it means that it splashes extremely strongly. If you have a blue flame, it means that it does not actually splash strongly, but rather splinters.

This is the fundamental difference between the effects of the substances in the world. Imagine I have a glass tube here; I melt both ends of it. Now, however, I also pump out the air so that I get a completely airless glass tube. Now I do the following: I introduce an electric current here, which ends there, and here [on the other side] too; this is a current that is then closed here. So now the two poles of electricity are facing each other. Between them is the vacuum. Now something very strange happens: on one side electricity is spurting out and on the other side, where it appears bluish, such waves are forming (see drawing on page 78), and these then merge.

There, so to speak, the light continuously splashes into the dark, the light electricity into the dark. So you have the two flames that I showed you separately. You have them on one pole of the electricity and that one on the other pole. What the sodium flame does is done here on one side, what the ordinary candle flame does is done on the other.

If you proceed in the right way, you get different types of rays here, including X-rays, which, as you know, can be used to see solid components, bones and so on, or foreign components that the body has within itself.

So the thing is that there are substances in the world that radiate. There are other substances that do not radiate, but, one can say, that glow and cover themselves on the surface with such waves. The substances that cover themselves on the surface with such waves are bluish; the substances that radiate are yellowish. If a dark body then comes before the yellowish, the yellowish becomes reddish. So if you make the yellowish darker again, it can become reddish.

So you see, gentlemen, we have bodies in the world that partly radiate and thus show the light colors that are on one side of the rainbow, and that on the other hand do not radiate, but send out such waves. This is how you get the bluish colors that are on the other side of the rainbow.

If you know this, then you will say to yourself: There are such stars as, for example, Mars, which radiates yellowish-reddish, or as, for example, Saturn, which radiates bluish. Now you can see from the nature of the star how it behaves. Mars is simply a star that radiates a lot, so it must appear yellowish-reddish. It is a star that radiates a lot. Saturn is a body that behaves more calmly and is covered with waves. You can almost see the waves around it. If you have Saturn, you can still see the waves around it as rings. It appears blue because it is surrounded by waves.

Now, what we observe on the earth's bodies shows us, if we observe them correctly and not indifferently, how the bodies are out in space. But we must be clear about the fact that all of space is filled, as I have told you, with all possible substances, which are always actually in a combustible state.

Now take a body, for example iron: it rusts. That is what you meant by your question, isn't it? Iron rusts, and that makes it redder than it otherwise is. So we have a body that is relatively dark, that rusts and that becomes reddish as a result. Now that we have studied colors, we will be able to provide information about what that actually means: iron becomes reddish when it rusts, that is, when it is constantly exposed to the air. Let's make it very clear to ourselves what that means. Of course I don't have all the colors here, but you can probably imagine what I mean. So let's assume we have the blue iron. Now it is exposed to the air. Now, because it is exposed to the air, it becomes reddish due to rusting.

Now you can tell yourself that the reddish color arises from the fact that you have a bright object that you see through darkness. So a bright object seen through darkness becomes reddish. When I look at the iron as it is in its normal state, it is dark at first, that is, it emits wavy lines. But when I expose the iron to the air for a long time, when the iron is in the air for a long time, then the air comes to the iron; and the iron gradually becomes so in the air that it begins to resist the air internally. It resists the air, begins to radiate. And that which radiates, like the sodium flame here, where there is darkness all around, turns yellowish or reddish. So you can say that the relationship between iron and air is such that the iron begins to tingle on the inside and radiates. The iron becomes tingly and radiates.

Now you know that iron is also present in the human body, and as a very important substance. Iron is contained in human blood, and iron is a very important component of blood. If we have too little iron in our blood, then we are people who cannot walk properly, who quickly become tired, who become weak. If we have too much iron in our blood, then we become agitated people and lash out at everything. So we have to have just the right amount of iron in our blood, otherwise we will feel bad. Now, gentlemen, nowadays people are less concerned with these things, but I have already drawn your attention to the fact that if you investigate how man is connected with the whole world, you find that blood in man is connected with the influence of Mars. Mars, which is moving, actually always stimulates the activity of blood in us. This is due to its affinity with iron. That is why ancient scholars who knew this attributed to Mars the same nature as iron. So in a sense, Mars can be seen as something similar to our iron. But at the same time, it shimmers reddish yellow, that is, it is constantly radiant in its interior. So in Mars we see a body that is constantly radiating within.

This whole thing can only be understood if, on the basis of these studies, we say to ourselves: Mars has an iron-like nature, is an iron-like substance; but it is constantly tingling, it constantly wants to become radiant. Just as iron wants to radiate through the influence of the air, so Mars wants to radiate constantly through the influence of its surroundings. So, in fact, it has a nature that constantly wants to tingle inside, that is, to come to life. Mars constantly wants to come to life. — This can be seen in its entire coloration and in the way it behaves. When dealing with Mars, one must know that it is a world body that actually constantly wants to come to life.

With Saturn it is different. Saturn has a bluish shimmer, that is, it does not radiate, but it surrounds itself with a wavy. It is just the opposite of Mars. Saturn wants to constantly pass into the dead, constantly becoming a corpse. You can see from Saturn that it surrounds itself, so to speak, with brightness, so that we then see its darkness through the brightness bluish.

Now I would like to draw your attention to something: You can have a very nice experience if you ever walk through a willow forest, or a forest with willows, on a not completely dark but very twilight night. Every now and then you might see something that makes you wonder: Gosh, what is glowing over there? What is it that glows like that? Then you go close and the glowing turns out to be rotting wood. So that which is rotting becomes luminous. If you then went very far away and looked at it and behind it, behind this glowing, you would have a dark area, then the glowing would no longer appear luminous to you, but blue. And so it is with Saturn. Saturn is actually constantly decaying. Saturn decays. That is why it has a light color all around, but it itself is dark, and that is why it appears blue, because we look at its own darkness, I might say, through its decay products, which it has around itself. With Mars, we see how it continually wants to live, with Saturn we see how it continually wants to die.

That is the interesting thing, that one can look at world bodies in such a way that one can say of them: the world bodies that appear to you in a bluish glow are perishing, and those that appear to you in a reddish, yellowish glow are only just emerging. And so it is in the world: in one place there is something that is emerging, in another place something that is passing away. Just as in one place on Earth there is a child and in another place an old man, so it is in the universe. Mars is still a young man and wants to live forever. Saturn is already an old man.

You see, the ancients studied that. We have to study it again. But we can only understand what the ancients meant if we find it again. That is why, as I said last time, it is so stupid when people say that anthroposophy only writes down what can be found in old writings. Because you can't understand what you find in old writings! You see, you only understand what is written in the old scriptures and comes from the right ancient wisdom when you have found it again. In the Middle Ages, before America was discovered, there was a saying that was very interesting; almost every single person said it. If you had lived at that time, you would have known the saying too. In the Middle Ages, all kinds of people said the saying, because you still learned the saying the way you learn something today, yes, I don't know, an agitprop slogan.

This slogan is:

Oh Sun, a king of this world!
Luna your gender receives.

Luna is the moon.

Mercury copulates you quickly.
Without Venus you would all be nothing,
The Marten chooses himself to the man.

So Mars.

So the saying implies: Venus, who is also a young figure, has chosen Marten as her husband, Mars. It is thus implied that Mars is a youth out there in the universe.

Without Jupiter's power, you lack everything.

So Jupiter is also hinted at, how he intervenes everywhere. And then it is said at last:

So that Saturn, old and decrepit,
appears in many colors.

Do you see how beautifully this medieval saying contrasts the youth of Mars with the age of Saturn?

Oh Sun, a king of this world!
Luna your lineage receives.
Mercury copulates you quickly.
Without Venus' favor, you all achieve nothing, The Marten to the man chosen.
Without Jupiter's might, you lack everything.
That Saturn, old and decrepit,
In many colors he appears.

So you see, it will not be understood, and that is what people show. Because if a modern scholar reads such a saying, he says: Well, that's a stupid superstition! He laughs at it. If you find what is true in such a saying, he says that it has been copied. So, no, it is impossible to imagine how foolish people actually are, because they cannot understand it. No modern scholar understands what lies in such a saying. But if you can do spiritual research, then you come across it again, only then do you understand it. One must first find these things again oneself, otherwise these old sayings, which are folk wisdom, really remain quite worthless. But it is also wonderful when one finds these things through spiritual research, and then one discovers this tremendous wisdom in simple folk sayings! This just testifies that the old folk sayings are taken from what was taught in ancient schools of wisdom. That is where these sayings come from. Today, people cannot go to their scholars in this way, because today's science does not produce sayings! There is not much that can be applied in life. But there was once a time when people knew such things as I have told you again today. They then wove them into such beautiful sayings. And then, of course, all kinds of things arose from it, sometimes misunderstandings too, of course. Now, this saying that I have just quoted to you about all the planets, yes, that has been forgotten, but other sayings have then been distorted.

Of course it is also significant when, let us say, the animals do this or that. They are connected with the universe. We can tell from the tree frog that something is going on with the weather when it climbs up. Isn't it true that the tree frog is used as a weather prophet when it climbs up or down its ladder? That is because everything that lives is in relationship with the whole universe. Only that was later distorted, and it is of course not completely unjustified when one also has such sayings, which one can make fun of when one listens to them, because stupidity has taken hold of them. For example, if someone says: 'If the cockerel crows on the dung heap, the weather will change or remain as it is' – well, that just shows that you shouldn't mix everything up and you shouldn't mix the stupid with the clever either.

The saying that I have quoted to you is, of course, one that points to secrets in the universe that are related to light and color. On the other hand, what people often say about what the cockerel does and the like can, of course, be ridiculed, as it is in the saying itself that I have quoted to you. But on the other hand, there is sometimes something extraordinarily profound and very wise in the sayings of the peasants, which are gradually being forgotten. And the farmer is not sad when it snows in March, because there are certain connections between the grain seed and the March snow.

In this way, we can see from such things how the whole world can be understood from what we observe on earth. It would be better to stick to what the tree frog can do, which is to climb up and down depending on the weather, than to stick to the marmot, which sleeps, and thus miss out on all the secrets of the universe.

I hope it has become clear to you what I developed in relation to your question. It is complicated, of course, and cannot be said in a few words. So I had to say all that, but you will be able to summarize it. It is quite interesting, isn't it, to see the context in this way.

Next Wednesday.

Anyone called on to look after a very young child—either as a parent or in any other capacity of child care—will experience the great responsibility this task involves. Such people feel morally obligated to lay the best foundations for the child’s future development. Therefore it grieves me deeply that our Waldorf school in Stuttgart can accept only children who have reached the official school age, and it would give me the greatest satisfaction if we could take in the younger children as well. In addition to other difficulties, our goal of opening a nursery has been thwarted by a lack of funds, as happened with so many other anthroposophic activities. This continual shortage of money leaves us with at least the hope that, if we can win support from the general public, we will eventually be able to build a nursery class as an integral part of our Waldorf school.

Very young children are the least accessible to us. The gates to the soul life are absolutely closed to the outer world, and outer influences cannot touch it. Those who take care of infants of this age are powerless when they struggle and cry; these children do what they want. Thus, observant adults must accept the fact that the will of children is beyond their control—even during later stages and occasionally the latest stages of life.

You may know that early in 1894, well before publishing other anthroposophic works, I published Die Philosophie der Freiheit [Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path]. This book was intended to give the world a true assessment of the human quality that develops, within the social context, the impulse toward individual freedom. If you accept its message—the matter of freedom, on the one hand, and destiny, on the other—you can see that it is relevant even to a baby.

If you listen to what lives in the human heart, you find that real human happiness on earth depends on the awareness of human freedom, an appreciation of human values, and a feeling for human dignity. Anthroposophy shows us that—apart from what a person may have developed even before birth or conception while still in the spiritual world and apart from what one will meet again after death—the very purpose of earthly incarnation involves enlivening the impulse toward freedom. This impulse depends completely on plunging into an earthly body. This freedom can be realized only during physical incarnation; we can attain freedom only while living on earth, and when we enter other worlds, we can take with us only the degree of freedom we have attained here on earth.

If you approach young children with such feelings (and feelings are the most potent source for those engaged in the art of education), this question will always be present in your mind as you take charge of an infant: What must I do to enable this child to develop the fullest consciousness of human freedom at maturity? And with this question, a new truth begins to dawn. The outer conditions of life are already clearly pointing at it, and, through anthroposophic insight, it can be understood with inner certainty. It is the fact that, despite one’s freedom, each person has a destiny, or to use the Eastern term, karma.

Let us imagine that, later in life, a man meets a person he has known before, and that this person has a profound influence on the life of this man. Perhaps such people might even begin a partnership for life. At first it may seem to them as if their meeting were simply chance. But when they look back over the years of their lives—even with no knowledge of spiritual science—this man may well discover the strange fact that, during the years before this meeting, he had unconsciously taken numerous steps that eventually led to this other person. Though at first it appeared to be mere chance, hindsight revealed an inherent pattern and underlying plan. Looking back over his life, Goethe’s old friend Nobel spoke these meaningful words from the depths of his soul: “If, in later years, we survey our early life, everything seems to fall into a definite pattern; everything fits together.” Since our will is woven into all our actions, we can see everywhere how destiny confronts us in the events of life. One could quote many others who, through observing ordinary life, reached the same conclusion. When we look at life’s external events, we find confirmation of the hidden truths of karma.

Anyone in charge of young children—especially those who work in children’s homes—who is aware of the activity of destiny, must ask, Have I been specifically chosen for the important task of guiding and educating these children? And other questions follow: What must I do to eliminate as far as possible my personal self, so I can leave those in my care unburdened by my subjective nature? How do I act so I do not interfere with a child’s destiny? And, above all, How can I best educate a child toward human freedom? If you come to understand what happens in a child between birth and the change of teeth—during the first seven years—you will realize how vulnerable young children are and how deeply we can affect their being (I will speak later about the period of embryonic development). The change of teeth represents a decisive turning point in the life of children. Close observation reveals that, after the seventh year, an entirely new interrelationship emerges between the child’s thinking, feeling, and willing.

We have become accustomed to applying certain concepts gained from observing physical processes to the life of the human being. For instance, in natural processes, when we notice the sudden emergence of heat that was imperceptible in a previous state and had not been introduced externally, we say that latent heat is being released. Just as latent heat can be set free by material processes, similarly, soul and spirit forces are set free after the change of teeth, forces that have thus far been bound up with the organism and instrumental for its growth. Freed from processes of growth and nourishment, however, these forces go to work in the child’s soul; they are transformed into soul forces.

Natural science today forms abstract concepts about the relationship between body and soul; theories are invented to explain the effects of one on the other. One speaks of a psychophysical parallelism and so on. Instead of making exact observations, one philosophizes. But all this leads nowhere. If you want to fathom the secrets of human nature, you have to observe it with the same precision used to observe the phenomena of outer nature. Then you will discover that, after approximately the seventh year, forces that were engaged in building the physical organism of the child are now transformed into soul forces that will determine a child’s relationship to the outer world.

If we wish to find out what the soul of a child is like between birth and the seventh year, we must observe the child’s development from the seventh year on. Then, in the child’s soul, we can see the very same forces that were active in the physical organization. And we will find that the hidden, organic activity that molds and shapes the child’s brain and the rest of the organism has a very special significance. Through birth, or conception, children carry into their physical organization what they brought from the worlds of soul and spirit. When children are fully engaged in building up the physical organs in this way, they must be left free to do so, and consequently the doors leading to the outer world remain closed. It is essential that we refrain from interfering in our clumsy ways with these inner activities in children, because they are doing what they have to do and are thus inaccessible to outer will forces.

We must also realize, however, that despite the preoccupation of children with their processes of growth, everything we do around them nevertheless makes deep and distinct impressions on them. I will go into further detail later, but we must not forget that everything at work within the child’s soul after the seventh year was directly involved in the process of building organs up to that age. This means that until the seventh year, the impressions coming from the outer world directly affect their physical constitution—the lungs, stomach, liver, and other organs. In children at this age, the soul has not yet become free of the physical organization, where it is still actively engaged. Because of this, all of the impressions they receive from us through our general conduct have a decisive effect on their future constitution of health or illness.

You came expecting to learn something about our educational principles, but it is the practical application of these principles that is most important. What really matters in education are the mood and soul attitude that teachers carry in their hearts toward the human being. We cannot truly serve the art of education unless we approach the growing human being with real insight. One could even say that teachers are free to approach subjects in their own individual ways, since, in any event, they must prepare their subject material according to what they have learned from life. The important thing is that teachers each carry within themselves a true picture of the human being; if this picture is present to their inner eyes, they will do the right thing, although outwardly each teacher may act in very different ways.

I visited parallel classes as the spiritual guide of the Waldorf school (the large numbers already require parallel classes), and when I saw how the teachers each treat the same subject in very individual ways, I never object or insist that they all follow the same set courses. Even when two versions of the same subject appear contradictory externally, each may nevertheless be correct in its own way. In fact, if one teacher were to copy another, the results could be entirely wrong. There is a good reason that our school is called the “Free Waldorf School.” This is not just because of our independence from the state system, but the name very much reflects the atmosphere of freedom that pervades its entire makeup.

During the previous lecture I pointed out that a suprasensory contemplation of the human being will reveal to us—apart from the physical body—another, finer body that we call the ether body, or body of formative forces. This ether body provides not just the forces that sustain nourishment and growth; it is also the source of memory faculties and the ability to create mental images and ideas. It does not become an independent entity until the change of teeth, and its birth is similar to the way the physical body is born from one’s mother. This means that, until the change of teeth, the forces of the ether body work entirely in the processes of a child’s organic growth, whereas after that time—while still remaining active in this realm to a great extent—those forces partially withdraw from those activities. The released forces of the ether body then begin to work in the soul realm of mental images and memory, as well as in many other nuances of a child’s soul life.

The change of teeth is a unique event. The forces needed to push out the second teeth existed prior to this event, but now they are no longer needed. Once the second teeth have appeared, this particular activity of the ether body becomes redundant. The final activity of pushing out the second teeth is an external manifestation of the sort of activity that is happening within a child’s organism. At the end of the first seven-year period, most of these ether forces are released to flow into a child’s soul and spiritual nature.

One can recognize these seven-year periods throughout the entire human life, and each again can be seen in three clearly differentiated shorter periods. If we observe the gradual withdrawal of some of these ether forces until approximately the seventh year, we see how during the first two and a half years after physical birth the ether body frees itself from the head region; in the next two and a half years, it frees itself from the chest region; and finally, until the change of teeth, it frees itself from the child’s metabolic-limb system. Thus we see three phases in the gradual withdrawal of ether forces. And we clearly recognize how, while the ether body is still connected with the head region, a child rejects any intentional influence coming from outside.

What children learn during this first two-and-a-half-year period is extremely important for their whole life. They do so through an incoming activity and from what they have brought with them from prenatal existence. Just consider how children learn to speak and walk during this first short period. These are two human faculties that are closely connected with maintaining self-confidence, both from a personal and a social point of view. These two important faculties are developed while the ether body is still engaged in shaping the brain and radiating into the rest of the organism. If these ether forces radiate too strongly into the organism and disturb the infant’s delicate processes of metabolism, breathing, and blood circulation—if they become too powerful within a baby’s organism—scarlet fever and similar childhood illnesses may occur even at this young age. Basically, because of all this activity within children at this stage, they remain inaccessible to conscious approaches directed by the will and demands from the outside. They want to be left to work on their own organism.

Being inaccessible to the outer world during the first two and a half years is one significant factor. Another is the fact that children have a fine, instinctive perception for everything going on around them, especially what is happening in people with whom they have established a certain rapport. Anyone caring for such a child naturally belongs to this category. I am not speaking of a child’s ability to use the senses as an older person does. It is not a matter of what children see with their eyes, but a general perception of the most intimate kind that takes in what is happening in their surroundings. This perception, however, excludes anything that seeks to impose itself from outside, against which children will defend themselves instinctively during those first two and a half years.

To get a better understanding of children’s susceptibility to the outer world when their sensory perceptions are still deeply immersed in feeling, it may help to look at animals, the creatures immediately below the human being, because they show a similar, acute sensitivity toward the outer world. I am not contradicting what I said about senility in a previous lecture; one must simply observe accurately. Animals are especially sensitive to their surroundings. I do not know whether those who have come from England or other European countries have ever heard of the horses that, a few years before the war, created a sensation by appearing to do simple mathematical calculations. In Berlin, there was the famous horse of Mr. von Osten, and in Elberfeld there were several horses that could do numeric calculations. Well, I cannot say anything about the Elberfeld horses, but I did make the acquaintance of von Osten’s horse in Berlin, and I was able to observe the close relationship between this horse and its master. It is true that the horse stamped its legs—three times three is nine—which, for a horse, is a very respectable achievement.

All kinds of theories were advanced to explain the horse’s reactions to questions from von Osten. There was one university lecturer—a most erudite man—who even wrote a whole book on this horse. He wrote, “Of course the horse cannot calculate, but whenever Mister von Osten says, ‘Three times three,’ he accompanies his words by barely noticeable facial expressions. He sort of mimes, and when he pronounces the word nine, the horse is capable of observing these facial expressions and stamps accordingly.” His was certainly a learned treatise. He continued, “I myself was unable to detect the miming on von Osten’s face and therefore I cannot guarantee that my theory is correct. But it must have been there and the horse was able to observe it.” It seems to me that the author merely states that he, a university lecturer, considered the horse more capable of observation than he was himself. In my opinion, the crucial point was von Osten’s procedure, for he had large pockets filled with sweets that he shoved into the horse’s mouth, thus maintaining an uninterrupted flow of sensation and gratification. The result was an intimate relationship between master and horse. Everything was immersed in a feeling of sympathy, which made the horse extremely receptive, in keeping with its animal nature, to all that came from its master, even his thoughts and shades of feeling, but hardly the play of mysterious expressions on his face. The processes of calculation going on in von Osten’s mind were transferred to the horse via the taste of sweetness. This phenomenon does not become any less interesting when interpreted this way, but it can teach us a great deal about the relationship of living beings. It cannot be explained hypothetically by observing the facial expressions a horse can detect, though not a university lecturer.

During the first two and a half years, children have a similar rapport with the mother or with others they are closely connected with as long as their attitude and conduct make this possible. Then children become perfect mimics and imitators. This imposes a moral duty on adults to be worthy of such imitation, which is far less comfortable then exerting one’s will on children. Children take in all that we do, such as the ways we act and move. They are equally susceptible to our feelings and thoughts. They imitate us, and even if this is not outwardly noticeable, they nevertheless do this by developing tendencies for imitation that, through their organic soul forces, they press down into the physical organism. Therefore, education during these first two and a half years should be confined to the self-education of the adults in charge, who should think, feel, and act in a way that, when perceived by children, will cause them no harm. Fundamentally, the stage of imitation continues until the change of teeth, and thus children will be strongly influenced by their environment later on as well.

The following example may demonstrate this. Two disconsolate parents once came to me, saying, “Our child has always been good, but now she has stolen money.” Was this really true? At a superficial glance, yes, for she had taken money out of the cupboard where it was always kept by her mother. The child then bought sweets with the money and even gave some to other children. I reassured the parents that their child had not stolen at all, but that she had merely imitated her mother, who regularly took money from the cupboard to buy things. There was never any intention of stealing; this concept did not yet exist in the child’s mind. But children are imitators and will do what mother does. If we wish to avoid confusion, it is up to adults to realize this and act differently in front of the children.

Neither will children learn to walk through our efforts to make them stand and do all sorts of movements. Such instruction belongs in gym much later on. If we intervene by making children stand and walk prematurely, we may do irreparable damage to the nerve processes, which may persist for their whole life. If children see adults in an upright position, as imitator they try to raise themselves to the same position when the time comes. We must always see the human being during the initial stages as an imitator and arrange our child rearing accordingly.

This can certainly be very trying at times, and we all know that there are babies who seem to be yelling all day and, apart from the ear-splitting noise, inflict all kinds of other provocations on the adult. True, there are situations that have to be dealt with, even drastically, to avoid serious damage by a child. But such measures do not really belong to the field of education. Admittedly, it is hard to put up with a screaming child, but when we behave as described, our conduct gradually sinks into the deeper layers of a child’s soul and spiritual forces (which are still closely connected to organic processes) and eventually brings about more positive results.

If we observe small children without preconceived ideas, we find that their screaming and other unpleasant features come from their physical organization. Although the inherent forces in the behavior of intense crying remain with the child, the habit of crying will gradually pass. Such forces are very intense. If we influence the child correctly by setting the proper example and acting morally, the forces behind a baby’s crying will reveal themselves as intensely moral forces in later life. A strong morality later in adult life is an expression of those same forces that lived in the intense crying of a young child. On the other hand, if those close to a child have an immoral attitude—even if only in thoughts—these forces will reappear later as intensely immoral forces. And we must be careful not to harm the development of children while they are learning to speak. This easily happens when we make them say words we choose; this, too, is an imposition of our will on the child. It is best to speak naturally in front of children (as long as we speak in a moral way) so that they have opportunities to hear us. In this way, children find their own way into language.

Now you can appreciate the real point of what has been said so far—that we must not be tempted by a false kind of instinct to make baby talk for the child’s benefit. This is not an instinct but something we may have acquired through misguided customs. Nurses or others dealing with young children should never speak to them in an artificial or childish way. We really do a great wrong when we change our normal way of speaking to “suit” a child, for children always want to imitate us as we really are, not as we pretend to be. They reject anything that approaches them as an expression of another person’s will, such as childish and naive baby talk. Children have to put up with it, but they have a deep inner resentment toward such an approach. The effects of such well-intended folly is so farreaching that it may come to light in later years as a weakened digestion. When an older person is diagnosed as having a weak digestion, it might be nothing but the result of the wrong approach by an over-zealous but misguided nurse during that person’s early childhood.

These are the main points regarding the first third of the first seven-year period, and they need to be kept in mind.

At the age of two and a half, the head organization in children is developed far enough so that the forces of the ether body that have been working on it may be released. This gradual withdrawal continues into the area of the chest until about the fifth year, when breathing and blood circulation have also reached a certain stage of completion. Thus, by the time children learn to speak and walk, the formative forces released from the head (now acting now as soul and spiritual forces) join those being released in the chest region. This change can be recognized externally by the emergence of an exceptionally vivid memory and wonderful imagination, which children develop between two and a half and five. However, you must take great care when children develop these two faculties, since they are instrumental in building the soul. Children continue to live by imitation, and therefore we should not attempt to make them remember things we choose. At this stage it is best to leave the evolving forces of memory alone, allowing children to remember whatever they please. We should never give them memory exercises of any kind, otherwise, through ignorance, we might be responsible for consequences we can see only when viewing the entire course of human life.

Sometimes we meet people who, around the age of forty or later, complain of shooting pains or rheumatism. This may certainly have various causes, but if we carry our research far enough, we may find that the rheumatism was caused by a premature overloading of the memory during early childhood. The pattern of life is indeed very complex, and only by trying to recognize its many hidden links can we engender the love that is the true basis of growing human beings.

Whatever one’s attitude may be, as educators we must respond to the imagination and fantasy of children, which tries to express itself outwardly when they play with toys or join in games with other children. The urge to play between the ages of two and a half and five is really just the externalized activity of a child’s power of fantasy. And if we have the necessary ability of observation for such matters, we can foretell a great deal about the future soul life of children merely by watching them play. The way young children play provides a clear indication of their potential gifts and faculties in later life. The most important thing now is to meet their inborn urge to play with the right toys. People in the past responded to this need according to their own particular understanding.

Perhaps this also happened in the West, but at one time a regular epidemic spread throughout Central Europe of giving children boxes of building bricks, especially at Christmas. From separate cubic and quadrilateral stones, children were expected to build miniature architectural monstrosities. This sort of thing has a far-reaching effect on the development of imagination in children, since it leads to an atomistic, materialistic attitude—a mentality that always wants to put bits and pieces together to form a whole. In dealing with practical life, it is far better to give full freedom to children’s flexible and living powers of imagination than to nurture intellectual capacities that, in turn, encourage the atomistic nature of modern thinking. Imagination in children represents the very forces that have just liberated themselves from performing similar creative work within the physical formation of the brain. This is why we must avoid, as much as possible, forcing these powers of imagination into rigid, finished forms.

Imagine two nurses who are looking after a child between two and a half and five years of age. One of them—she may be very fond of the little girl in her charge—gives her a “beautiful” doll, one that has not only painted cheeks and real hair but eyes that close and a moveable head. I believe there are dolls that can even speak. Well, she gives this doll to the little girl, but since it is finished in every detail, there is nothing left for the child’s imagination to create, and her yearning for creative flexibility remains unsatisfied. It is as if its forces of imagination were put into a straitjacket. The other nurse, who has a little more understanding for the inner needs of the child, takes an old piece of cloth that is of no use for anything else. She winds a thread around its upper end until something resembling a head appears. She may even ask the little girl to paint two black dots on the face or perhaps more, for the eyes, nose, and mouth. Now, because the child’s imagination is stimulated, because she can create instead of having to put up with fixed and finished forms, the child experiences a far more lively and intimate response than she does toward the so-called beautiful doll. Toys, as much as possible, should leave the power of fantasy free in children. And since intellect is not the same as fantasy or imagination, the activity of assembling many parts is really not in harmony with the type of fantasy that is characteristic of children at this age.

Anything that evokes an inner feeling of liveliness and flexibility is always suitable for young children. For example, there are children’s books with cut-outs and nicely colored figures that can be moved by pulling strings attached below, so they will do all kinds of things, such as embracing or thrashing each other. These always stimulate children to invent whole stories, and thus they are very wholesome objects of play. Similarly, games with other children should not be too formal but should leave plenty of scope for children’s imagination.

All these suggestions spring from a knowledge of the human being, based on reality and allowing educators to acquire the necessary understanding, especially in terms of the practical side of life.

When children approach the fifth year, the ether forces of the body—which have thus far been building the breathing and the blood circulation—now become available for other activities. Likewise, up to the change of teeth, ether forces will struggle free and, after completing their task within the metabolic-limb system, become redundant. At that time, new spiritual soul forces gradually awaken and emerge fully after the seventh year (we will study this in more detail later). However, these forces already shine with a dawning light in this third and final period, which concludes the first seven-year period of human life.

When ether forces from the chest area reappear as soul and spiritual forces, children are becoming amenable to exhortations and to a sense of authority. Previously, unable to understand what they should or should not do, they could only imitate, but now, little by little, they begin to listen to and believe what adults say. Only toward the fifth year is it possible to awaken a sense of right and wrong in children. We can educate children correctly only by realizing that, during this first seven-year period until the change of teeth, children live by imitation, and only gradually do they develop imagination and memory and a first belief in what adults say.

Faith in the adult induces a feeling of authority, especially for teachers with whom children have a very close relationship. However, at this stage, children are too young for any formal education. It pains me to know that the sixth year has been fixed as the official school age. Children should not enter elementary school before their seventh year. I was always glad to hear, therefore (and I don’t mind if you consider this uncivilized), that the children of some anthroposophists had no knowledge of writing and reading, even at the age of eight. Accomplishments that come with forces that are available later on should never be forced into an earlier stage, unless we are prepared to ruin the physical organism.

In the next few days I will show you how we try to treat our children without inflicting harm on them when they enter the Waldorf school. Tomorrow I will begin by introducing you to the Waldorf school, though only by speaking of it.

Three Divisions in the Middle Period of Childhood

When we consider the time from the change of teeth to puberty (this important period really sets the standard for our education as a whole), we see that it is divided again into smaller stages. During the first of these, up to the ninth year, children are not in a position to distinguish clearly between self and the outside world; even in the feeling life, the experience of the world as distinguished from I-being is unclear. People today do not generally regard these things correctly. They may observe that a child bumps into the corner of a table and then immediately strikes the table. People then say, “This child thinks the table is alive, and because of this, the child hits it in return.” People speak in terms of “animism” as they do in relation to cultural history, but in reality this is not the situation.

If you look into the child’s soul you can see that the table is not seen as alive; not even living things are considered to be alive as they will be later on. But, just as children see their arms and hands as members of their own being, they view what occurs beyond the self as a continuation of their own being. Children do not yet distinguish between self and world. Consequently, during this stage—the first third of the time between change of teeth and puberty—we must bring everything to the child through fairy tales and legends so that, in everything children see, they will find something that is not separate, but a continuation of their own being.

From a developmental standpoint, the transition from the ninth to the tenth year is vitally important for children, though the precise moment varies from child to child, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. You will notice that around this time, children grow somewhat restless; they come to the teacher with questioning eyes, and these things require that you have a fine feeling. Children will ask things that startle you, very different from anything they had asked before. Children find themselves in a strange situation inwardly. Now it is not a question of giving them all sorts of admonitions in a pedantic and stilted way; it is our task, above all, to feel our way into their own being.

At this stage, something appears in the subconscious being of a child. It is not, of course, anything that the child could express consciously, but we may characterize it in this way: until this time, children unquestioningly accepted as truth, goodness, and beauty whatever the authority, or revered teacher, presented as true, good, and beautiful. They were completely devoted to the one who was their authority. But at this point between the ninth and tenth year something comes over children—in the feelings, not in thinking, since they do not yet intellectualize things. Something comes over them, and it awakens in the soul as a kind of faint, dreamlike question: How does the teacher know this? Where does it come from? Is my teacher really the world? Until now, my teacher was the world, but now there is a question: Does not the world go beyond the teacher?

Up to this point, the teacher’s soul was transparent, and the child saw through it into the world; but now this adult has become increasingly opaque, and the child asks, out of the feelings, what justifies one thing or another. The teacher’s whole bearing must then very tactfully find what is right for the child. It is not a matter of figuring out ahead of time what to say, but of knowing how to adapt to the situation with inner tact. If right at this moment one can find the appropriate thing for the child through an inner, imperceptible sympathy, it will have an immense significance for that child’s whole life right up to the time of death. If a child at this stage of inner life can say of the teacher, “This person’s words arise from the secrets and mysteries of the world,” this will be of great value to the child. This is an essential aspect of our teaching method.

Cause and Effect and Education as a Healing Art

At this point in life, children experience the difference between the world and the I-being. Now you can progress from teaching about plants, as I described yesterday, to teaching about animals. If you do this as I described it, you will make the correct approach to a child’s feeling for the world. Only in the third period—beginning between the middle of the eleventh year and toward the twelfth—will a child acquire any understanding for what we might call a “feeling of causality.” Prior to the twelfth year, you can speak to children as cleverly as you like about cause and effect, but you will find them blind to causality at that age. Just as the term color-blind is coined from color, we may coin the term cause-blind. Connections between cause and effect are not formed in the human being before the twelfth year. Therefore, it is only at this age that we can begin to teach children what they need to know about the physical, mineral realm, which of course involves physics and chemistry, thus going beyond a purely pictorial presentation. Before that age, not only would it be useless but would in fact be harmful.

This also shows us how to approach history lessons. Initially, history should be presented in terms of individual figures through a kind of “painting” of the soul, if I may call it that. Until a child’s twelfth year, you should give the children only living pictures. Anything else would harden their being—it would bring about a kind of sclerosis of the soul. If before the eleventh year you speak to children of the way one epoch prepared another through certain impulses and so on, you create in them a sclerosis of the soul. People who have an eye for such things often see old men and women who learned about cause and effect in history much too early. This can even go into the physical body at this age through the same principles I have described. Physical sclerosis in old people can be traced back to, among other causes, the fact that they were taught too much about causality as children.

We must notice such connections and understand them. They constitute a demand of our civilization and lead us back to what could at one time be found through an instinctive knowledge of human nature—a knowledge that we can no longer use in these times of conscious thought. If we go back to earlier eras, however, even only as far as the early Greek times, we find that the words educator and healer were very closely related to each other, because people knew that when human beings enter this earthly life they have not yet reached their full height; they are beings who have yet to be brought to their highest potential.

This is why the idea of the Fall has such validity—that souls really enter earthly existence as subhuman beings. If they were not subhuman, we not need to educate them any more than we must educate a spider so that later on it can make a web. Human beings must be educated because they must be brought into their full humanity. And if you have the proper idea of how we must lead a person in body, soul, and spirit to become truly human, you will see that this must be done according to the same principles that bring an abnormal human being back to the right path. In the same way, ordinary education has the task of healing a person whose humanity has been injured. Only when we recognize again the natural and spiritual relationship between these two activities will we be able to fructify our education properly through an ethical physiology.

It is extraordinary to think how recently—and how thoroughly—these ideas have been lost. For example, Herder’s Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1791) describes with real inner devotion how illness can teach one to observe the inner human being. When people become ill, it is an attack on their normal course of being, and the way an illness manifests and how it leaves a person demonstrate the laws of human nature. Herder is delighted to discover that through instances of mental as well as of physical illness, he can learn about the inner structure of the human being. He is still clearly aware of the relationship between medicine and pedagogy. It is not so long ago, then, when the old principle still applied—the principle that when a human being enters the world, it is really due to illness caused by sin, and we must heal, or educate, that individual. Admittedly, this is expressed somewhat in the extreme, but there is real truth at its basis. This must be recognized as a demand of contemporary civilization, so that the widespread practice of creating abstractions, which has even penetrated education, will end, and so that we can truly move away from the things I have seen practiced.

Recently, I had to show a man round the Waldorf school, a man who had an important position in the world of education. We discussed the specifics of several pupils, and then this man summarized what he had observed in a somewhat strange way. He said, “If this is what we need to do, then teachers should study medicine.” I replied that such an absolute judgment was unjustified. If it becomes necessary to bring a certain amount of medical knowledge to education, then we must do it. But it is impossible to rely on old traditions and decide that one thing or another must apply. It will happen; it will become a requirement of society that “cultural medicine” and “cultural pedagogy” be brought closer together so they become mutually more beneficial. In many ways, everything that is currently needed is troublesome and awkward, but even life itself has become increasingly troublesome, and the cure will also be a troublesome matter.

In any case, teaching about minerals should, in practice, begin only between the eleventh and twelfth year, and history should also be treated only pictorially before then. During the eleventh or twelfth year, you can begin to consider cause and effect by connecting the various historical eras, and thus present children with a comprehensive survey. You will be able to observe the correctness of this method in this way: If you present causality in describing historical processes too soon, you will find that children do not listen; but if you do it at the proper time, they meet you with inner joy and eager participation.

Indeed, it is impossible to teach anything at all without a child’s inner cooperation. In all education, we must bear in mind how a child will enter life at puberty. Of course, there are also those young ladies and gentlemen who continue their education, and in the Waldorf school we have a university standard, with twelve classes that take them on to their eighteenth or nineteenth year or even farther. But even with these children, we must recognize that after puberty they really do go out into life, and our relationship to those students must be very different from what it was before. We must make every effort to educate in such a way that the intellect, which awakens at puberty, can then find nourishment in the child’s own nature.

If during the early school years children have stored up an inner treasury of riches through imitation, through a feeling for authority, and from the pictorial nature of the teaching, then at puberty those inner riches can be transformed into intellectual activity. From that point on, the individual will be faced with the task of thinking what was willed and felt previously. And we must take the very greatest care that this intellectual thinking does not manifest too early; for a human being can experience freedom only when, rather than being poured in by teachers, the intellect can awaken from within on its own. It must not awaken in an impoverished soul, however. If there is nothing present in a person’s inner being that was acquired through imitation and imagery—something that can rise into thinking from deep in the soul—then, as thinking develops at puberty, that individual will be unable to find the inner resources to progress; thinking would reach only into an emptiness. Such a person will find no anchorage in life; and at the very time when a person should really have found a certain inner sense of security, there will be a tendency to chase trivialities. During these awkward years, adolescents will imitate many things that seem pleasant (usually they are not exactly what would please their elders, who have a more utilitarian perspective); they imitate these things now, because they were not allowed to imitate in an appropriate and living way as younger children. Consequently, we see many young people after puberty wandering around looking for security in one thing or another, thus numbing their experience of inner freedom.

Educating for All of Life and Beyond

In every stage of life we must make sure that we do not educate only for that stage, but educate for all of a person’s earthly life—and, in fact, beyond. People can arrive most beautifully at an understanding of their own immortal human being; after puberty, they can experience for themselves how what poured into their soul as images through imitation is now freed from the soul and rises into spirit. People can feel how it continues to work, from time into eternity, passing through birth and death. It is exactly this welling up of what was instilled in the human soul through the proper education that provides an inner experience of immortality; primarily, it is life experience itself that shows us we had existence before coming down into the physical world. And what the child takes in as picture and imitates through religious feeling, unites with what that child was before descending into the physical realm; thus an inner experience of the kernel of immortality arises.

I use the word immortality, which is in current use; but even though people still believe in it, it is really only half of the question. When we speak of immortality today, we do so out of a certain self-centeredness; it is true, of course, because it represents the fact that we do not perish at death, but that our life continues. But we fail to mention the other side—the “unborn.” In ancient times, those who possessed an instinctive spiritual knowledge still recognized the two sides of eternity—the undying and the unborn. We will understand eternity only when we are able to understand both of these concepts. Eternity will be experienced when children are properly educated. Here again we are confronted by something where materialism should not be considered theoretically.

As I have already shown you, it is bad enough that all kinds of monists go around spreading various materialistic theories. But that is not in any sense the worst. The least harmful is what people only think; the worst is what flows into life to become life itself. And since the art of education has also fallen into the clutches of materialistic thinking, children are unable to experience the things I have mentioned—the experience of time passing into eternity. In this way, they lose their relationship to the eternal aspect of their own being. You can preach as much materialism as you like to those who have been correctly educated, and it will not affect them greatly. They will reply, “I have the sense that I am immortal, and unfortunately this is something that you and your proofs have overlooked.”

It is always a matter of comprehending life itself, and not merely the thoughts. Furthermore, this may seem contradictory, but an indication and a symptom of the materialism of our present age is the very fact that people today are so eager for theories and world philosophies based on ideas and concepts. If we really perceive spirit, we never leave matter. If you pursue your study of anthroposophy, you will see how it makes its way into psychology and physiology, how it speaks of material things and processes in every detail. Anthroposophic physiology addresses the activity of the liver, the spleen, or the lung very differently from today’s abstract physiology.

Abstract physiology thinks it sees the facts, but it really views facts in the same way a man might who, for example, finds a magnet. He does not know what it is, nor what forces are concealed within it, but he finds the magnet while with a woman who knows what a magnet is. He says to himself, “I’ll take this home; it will make a good horseshoe.” The woman says, “You can’t use that as a horseshoe; that is a magnet.” But the man only laughs.

Similarly, a natural scientist laughs when one speaks of the spiritual basis of the liver, spleen, or heart—if one says that spirit in fact lives within those organs. But people who laugh at such things can never deeply enter the reality of material substance. The most harmful aspect of materialism is not that it fails to understand spirit. That will be corrected eventually. The worst thing about materialism is that it is completely ignorant of matter and its activity, because it fails to find spirit in matter.

There was never a time when people knew less about matter than they do now; for you cannot find material substance in the human being without a knowledge of spirit. Consequently, I would say that the error of materialism in education is demonstrated in life when people have no feeling or inner experience of their own eternal nature. If a person has been educated in the right way—that is, if the principles of the education have been read from human nature itself—death will be experienced as an event in life and not merely its end. In this way, one learns that in the relationship between teacher and child (and later between the teacher and the young man or woman) there are not only external things at work; even in the very small child, as I have already told you, intangible forces are at work—things we can neither see nor weigh and measure.

Punishment in the Classroom

We must bear this in mind when we consider punishment as a means of education. (A question was raised in regard to this.) We cannot simply ask ourselves whether or not we should punish. How can we possibly deal with all the mischievous things children do if we completely eliminate punishment? The question of whether to punish or not is really an individual matter. Various methods can be used with some children, whereas others may respond only to punishment. The manner of punishment, however, really depends on the teacher’s temperament.

We must remember that we are not dealing with carved wooden figures but with human beings. Teachers must consider their own nature, as well as the nature of the children. The important thing is not so much what we do, but how—that the only effective punishment is inflicted by a teacher with complete inner calm and deliberation. If a punishment arises from anger, it will be completely ineffective. Here, of course, a teacher can accomplish a great deal through self-development. Otherwise, something like this may happen: A girl makes a mess, and the boy next to her gets upset with her. The teacher then begins to scold the boy, saying, “You should not get angry like that! The child replies, “But grown-up people get angry when unpleasant things happen to them.” Then the teacher says, “If you get angry I’ll throw something at you!”

If you punish in anger this way, you may get a scene like this: a teacher comes into a classroom of fairly young children who are playing. She says, “What an awful commotion you are all making! What are you doing? Why are you shouting and making so much noise?” Finally one child gets up enough courage to say, “You are the only one shouting.” Now, in terms of punishment or admonition, everything depends on the soul mood of the one punishing or admonishing. Whenever a child has done something very naughty, you can even take the precaution of ignoring it for the time being; you could sleep on it and take it up again the next day. At least in this way you may find the necessary inner calm, and however you decide to deal with that child, your admonition or your punishment will be far more effective than anything you do while angry. This method may have its drawbacks as well, but you must always weigh one thing against another and not become too one-sided.

“Reading” the Child

You can see that in this method of teaching and education, based as it is on anthroposophic principles, each particular age of the child must be read, as it were. We must see more in a human being than present scientific thinking wants to see. Of course, such scientific thinking has contributed to wonderful progress, but in terms of human beings, it is as though they had something written in front of them and began to describe the letters of that writing. It is certainly useful and beautiful to have the letters described, but that is not the point; we must read. We do not need to describe the organs and how the soul works in them, which is the modern method, but we must have the capacity to read the human being. Such “reading” for a teacher may be understood by imagining that you have a book in your hand, and, no matter how interesting it may be, if you cannot read it but only look at the printed letters, it will not arouse you very strongly to any inner activity. If, for example, someone has a very interesting novel, but can only describe the letters, then nothing will happen within that person. So it is with the art of education—nothing happens in a person who merely describes the individual organs or the various aspects of the human soul. Educators who can read will find in every child a “book of the soul.”

Children can become reading material of the soul for their teachers, even in very large classes. If this happens, a teacher will sense when, before the ninth or tenth year, children do not differentiate between the world and their own I-being; they will sense how, before this time, children are unable, out of themselves, to write anything in the way of a composition. At most, they will be able to retell something they have heard in fairy tales or legends. Only when children are nine or ten can you gradually begin to present images and thoughts that they can in turn write about from their own free feelings and ideas. The inner thought structure needed by a child before being able to write an essay is not yet present before the twelfth year; they should not be encouraged to write essays before then. (I am speaking of this, because someone asked about it.) If they do this too soon, they will begin to suffer not from “sclerosis” of the soul in this case, but from “rickets” of the soul. Later in life, such a child will become inwardly weak and ineffective.

Only when our study of the human being can lead us to an a unique knowledge of each child will we be able to educate them in the appropriate way; the correct education must enable children to take their place socially in the everyday world. Indeed, children belong to this world, and must enter more and more deeply into it as long as they live on Earth; and after death they will be able to live on properly in the spiritual realm. This experience is indeed a real condition for life in the world beyond the gate of death.

The Capacity to Meet Other Human Beings

Human beings become hardened when they cannot discover how to meet other people in a truly human way; they harden themselves for the life that will face them after death. People have lost the capacity for meeting one another in a human way, and this is yet another dark side to the picture of our time. Nowhere do we find people who can enter with loving feeling into another human being. This is clearly evident due to the amount of talk about social demands these days. Why is this?

The obvious basis of social life—the power to truly feel and experience with another person—has been sadly lost. Whenever demands are urgently presented in any given age, those very demands show us what is missing in that time, because whatever people lack, they demand. Real social life is missing, and this is why the social ideal is so vehemently discussed in our current era. But education for social life is hardly touched, although many enlightened people speak of it. It has retreated increasingly into the background, and in many respects, human beings meet and pass each other without any understanding of one another.

It is indeed a grievous feature of present-day life that when one human being meets another, there is no mutual understanding. You can find clubs and societies with one or another common aim, where people have worked together for years, but they really do not know each other at all. People know nothing about the inner life of those they work with, because they lack a living interest, a living devotion, a living sympathy in relation to the other. But such living interest, devotion, and sympathy will be present if, at the right age, we permeate every area of teaching and education with the principle of imitation and, in its proper place, the principle of authority. This social feeling and understanding for others depends, in a most intimate way, on whether or not we have any sense of what in our world participates in the spiritual realm.

There was a time when human beings knew very little about the Earth; the tools they used were simple and primitive, and the way they represented natural objects in art was sometimes very talented but remarkably undeveloped. We now live in an age when we use complicated tools to master nature, and the most minute details are painstakingly copied, for example, in our works of art. But what we lack today is the power to enter the spirit of nature, the spirit of the cosmos, and the universe as a grand whole. That power must be reclaimed.

Above all, in the astronomical realm we have lost sight of our relationship to the universe. If you look at a plant, you can see how it takes root in the ground—how it arises from a seed, unfolds its first leaves and stem, more leaves and a blossom, and how it then gathers itself together again in the fruit. Goethe described it this way: In the plant you see how it draws out into space, rotates, and then contracts. Goethe was unable to go far enough. He described this expansion and contraction of the plant, but could not come to the point of knowing why this happens. It happens because the plant is exposed to the forces of the Moon and Sun. Whenever the Sun’s forces are active, the plant expands and opens its leaves; when Moon forces act on it, plant life contracts—it develops the stem and then the seed, where the whole plant life is drawn together in a single point. Thus, when we consider this expansion and contraction as Goethe has shown it to us, we see in it the alternation of Sun and Moon forces, and we are led out into the distant spaces of the cosmos. When we can see how the stars are at work in the plant, we do not remain bound and limited.

These Sun and Moon forces that influence plants act in a more complicated way on the human being, and this leads us to think that the human being is not just a citizen of Earth, but of the cosmos as well. We know that when we eat—for example, cabbage or venison—or drink something, whatever relates to life pursues its own course within us. We nevertheless know about such things, because can perceive them. But we have no knowledge of how we are connected with the starry worlds in our soul and spirit—how the forces of contraction live in the sphere of the Moon, the forces of expansion in that of the Sun; we do not know that these forces maintain the balance more or less perfectly in a human being—that melancholic tendencies have their roots in the Moon realm, sanguine tendencies of soul in the Sun, and balance and harmony are brought about by cosmic activity.

A detailed discussion of this in no way diminishes our concept of freedom, nor does it lead to preposterous ideas of any kind. This can all be examined with the same precision used in mathematics. But mathematics, though true, remains abstract. The knowledge of Sun and Moon that I mentioned leads us to see how we receive spiritual nourishment from what flows from the whole galaxy of stars; it becomes a strength within us, a driving force. If we can unite in this way with the spirit of the universe, we will become whole human beings, and the urge will no longer arise to bypass others without understanding, but as true human beings we will find the true human being in others. The more we describe only matter and apply those descriptions to human beings, the more we freeze the life of the soul; but if we can ally ourselves with the spirit, we can serve our fellow human beings with true warmth of heart. Thus, an education that seeks and finds the spirit in the person will lay the foundations for human love, human sympathy, and human service in the proper sense of the word.

In an organism, everything is at the same time a beginning and an end; this is also true of the whole life of the spirit. You can never know the world without practicing a knowledge of the human being—without looking into the self. For the human being is a mirror of the world; all the secrets of the universe are contained in the human being. The fixed stars work in the human being, the moving planets work in the human being, and all the elements of nature work there as well. To understand the human being—to see true being there—is also to find a place in the world in the right way.

Consequently, education must be permeated by a kind of golden rule that quickens all the teacher’s work with the children, something that gives life to that work, just as, in a physical sense, the blood gives life to the physical organism. So out of a worldview permeated with spirit, the lifeblood of the soul must enter the soul of the teacher. Then the soul’s lifeblood will set its imprint on all the methods and practice of the teaching effort and save them from becoming abstract principles. Something will thus live in the educator, which I would like to characterize through these concluding words, as a kind of education for life itself:

To spend oneself in matter
is to grind down souls.
To find oneself in the spirit
is to unite human beings.
To see oneself in all humanity
is to construct worlds.

The first question is as follows:

What is the real difference between multiplication and division in this method of teaching? Or should there be no difference at all in the first school year

The question probably arises from my statement that in multiplication the so-called multiplicand (one factor) and the product are given, and the other factor has to be found. Of course this really gives what is usually regarded as division. If we do not keep too strictly to words, then on the same basis we can consider division, as follows:

We can say: if a whole is divided in a certain way, what is the amount of the part? And you have only another conception of the same thing as in the question: By what must a number be multiplied in order to get a certain other number?

Thus, if our question refers to dividing into parts, we have to do with a division: but if we regard it from the standpoint of “how many times ...” then we are dealing with a multiplication. And it is precisely the inner relationship in thought which exists between multiplication and division which here appears most clearly.

But quite early on it should be pointed out to the child that it is possible to think of division in two ways. One is that which I have just indicated; here we examine how large each part is if we separate a whole into a definite number of parts. Here I proceed from the whole to find the part: that is one kind of division. In the other kind of division I start from the part, and find out how often the part is contained in the whole: then the division is not a separation into parts, but a measurement. The child should be taught this difference between separation into parts and measurement as soon as possible, but without using pedantic terminology. Then division and multiplication will soon cease to be something in the nature of merely formal calculation, as it very often is, and will become connected with life.

So in the first school years it is really only in the method of expression that you can make a difference between multiplication and division; but you must be sure to point out that this difference is fundamentally much smaller than the difference between subtraction and addition. It is very important that the child should learn such things.

Thus we cannot say that no difference at all should be made between multiplication and division in the first school years, but it should be done in the way I have just indicated.

At what age and in what manner should we make the transition from the concrete to the abstract in Arithmetic?

At first one should endeavour to keep entirely to the concrete in Arithmetic, and above all avoid abstractions before the child comes to the turning point of the ninth and tenth years. Up to this time keep to the concrete as far as ever possible, by connecting everything directly with life.

When we have done that for two or two-and-a-half years and have really seen to it that calculations are not made with abstract numbers, but with concrete facts presented in the form of sums, then we shall see that the transition from the concrete to the abstract in Arithmetic is extraordinarily easy. For in this method of dealing with numbers they become so alive in the child that one can easily pass on to the abstract treatment of addition, subtraction, and so on.

It will be a question, then, of postponing the transition from the concrete to the abstract, as far as possible, until the time between the ninth and tenth years of which I have spoken.

One thing that can help you in this transition from the abstract to the concrete is just that kind of Arithmetic which one uses most in real life, namely the spending of money; and here you are more favourably placed than we are on the Continent, for there we have the decimal system for everything. Here, with your money, you still have a more pleasing system than this. I hope you find it so, because then you have a right and healthy feeling for it. The soundest, most healthy basis for a money system is that it should be as concrete as possible. Here you still count according to the twelve and twenty system which we have already “outgrown,” as they say, on the Continent. I expect you already have the decimal system for measurements? (The answer was given that we do not use it for everyday purposes, but only in science.) Well, here too, you have the pleasanter system of measures! These are things which really keep everything to the concrete. Only in notation do you have the decimal system.

What is the basis of this decimal system? It is based on the fact that originally we really had a natural measurement. I have told you that number is not formed by the head, but by the whole body. The head only reflects number, and it is natural that we should actually have ten, or twenty at the highest, as numbers. Now we have the number ten in particular, because we have ten fingers. The only numbers we write are from one to ten: after that we begin once more to treat the numbers themselves as concrete things.

Let us just write, for example: 2 donkeys. Here the donkey is the concrete thing, and 2 is the number. I might just as well say: 2 dogs. But if you write 20, that is nothing more than 2 times 10. Here the 10 is treated as a concrete thing. And so our system of numeration rests upon the fact that when the thing becomes too involved, and we no longer see it clearly, then we begin to treat the number itself as something concrete, and then make it abstract again. We should make no progress in calculation unless we treated the number I itself, no matter what it is, as a concrete thing, and afterwards made it abstract. 100 is really only 10 times 10. Now, whether I have 10 times 10, and treat it as 100, or whether I have 10 times 10 dogs, it is really the same. In the one case the dogs, and in the other the 10 is the concrete thing. The real secret of calculation is that the number itself is treated as something concrete. And if you think this out you will find that a transition also takes place in life itself. We speak of 2 twelves—2 dozen—in exactly the same way as we speak of 2 tens, only we have no alternative like “dozen” for the ten because the decimal system has been conceived under the influence of abstraction. All other systems still have much more concrete conceptions of a quantity: a dozen: a shilling. How much is a shilling? Here, in England, a shilling is 12 pennies. But in my childhood we had a “shilling” which was divided into 30 units, but not monetary units. In the village in I which I lived for a long time, there were houses along the village street on both sides of the way. There were walnut trees everywhere in front of the houses, and in the autumn the boys knocked down the nuts and stored them for the winter. And when they came to school they would boast about it. One would say: “I've got five shillings already,” and another: “I have ten shillings of nuts.” They were speaking of concrete things. A shilling always meant 30 nuts. The farmers' only concern was to gather the nuts early, before all the trees were already stripped! “A nut-shilling” we used to say: that was a unit. To sell these nuts was a right: it was done quite openly.

And so, by using these numbers with concrete things—one dozen, two dozen, one pair, two pair, etc., the transition from the concrete to the abstract can be made. We do not say: “four gloves,” but: “Two pairs of gloves;” not: “Four shoes,” but “two pairs of shoes.” Using this method we can make the transition from concrete to abstract as a gradual preparation for the time between the ninth and tenth years when abstract number as such can be presented.¹

When and how should drawing be taught?

With regard to the teaching of drawing, it is really a question of viewing the matter artistically. You must remember that drawing is a sort of untruth. What does drawing mean? It means representing something by lines, but in the real world there is no such thing as a line. In the real world there is, for example, the sea. It is represented by colour (green); above it is the sky, also represented by colour (blue). If these colours are brought together you have the sea below and

the sky above (see sketch). The line forms itself at the boundary between the two colours. To say that here (horizontal line) the sky is bounded by the sea, is really a very abstract statement. So from the artistic point of view one feels that the reality should be represented in colour, or else, if you like, in light and shade. What is actually there when I draw a face? Does such a thing as this really exist? (The outline of a face

is drawn.) Is there anything of that sort? Nothing of the kind exists at all. What does exist is this: (see shaded drawing). There are certain surfaces in light and shade, and out of these a face appears. To bring lines into it, and form a face from them, is really an untruth: there is no such thing as this.

An artistic feeling will prompt you to work out what is really there out of black and white or colour. Lines will then appear of themselves. Only when one traces the boundaries which arise in the light and shade or in the colour do the “drawing lines” appear.

Therefore instruction in drawing must, in any case, not start from drawing itself but from painting, working in colour or in light and shade. And the teaching of drawing, as such, is only of real value when it is carried out in full awareness that it gives us nothing real. A terrible amount of mischief has been wrought in our whole method of thinking by the importance attached to drawing. From this has arisen all that we find in optics, for example, where people are eternally drawing lines which are supposed to be rays of light. Where can we really find these rays of light? They are nowhere to be found. What you have in reality is pictures. You make a hole in a wall; the sun shines through it and on a screen an image is formed. The rays can perhaps be seen, if at all, in the particles of dust in the room—and the dustier the room, the more you can see of them. But what is usually drawn as lines in this connection is only imagined. Everything, really, that is drawn, has been thought out. And it is only when you begin to teach the child something like perspective, in which you already have to do with the abstract method of explanation that you can begin to represent aligning and sighting by lines.

But the worst thing you can do is to teach the child to draw a horse or a dog with lines. He should take a paint brush and make a painting of the dog, but never a drawing. The outline of the dog does not exist at all: where is it? It is, of course, produced of itself if we put on paper what is really there.

We are now finding that there are not only children but also teachers who would like to join our school. There may well be many teachers in the outer world who would be glad to teach in the Waldorf School, because they would like it better there. I have had really quite a number of people coming to me recently and describing the manner in which they have been prepared for the teaching profession in the training colleges. One gets a slight shock in the case of the teachers of History, Languages, etc., but worst of all are the Drawing teachers, for they are carrying on a craft which has no connection whatever with artistic feeling: such feeling simply does not exist.

And the result is (I am mentioning no names, so I can speak freely) that one can scarcely converse with the Drawing teachers: they are such dried-up, such terribly “un-human” people. They have no idea at all of reality. By taking up drawing as a profession they have lost touch with all reality. It is terrible to try to talk to them, quite apart from the fact that they want to teach drawing in the Waldorf School, where we have not introduced drawing at all. But the mentality of these people who carry on the unreal craft of drawing is also quite remarkable. And they have no moisture on the tongue—their tongues are quite dry. It is tragic to see what these drawing teachers gradually turn into, simply because of having to do something which is completely unreal.

I will therefore answer this question by saying that where-ever possible you should start from painting and not from drawing. That is the important thing.

I will explain this matter more clearly, so that there shall be no misunderstanding. You might otherwise think I had something personal against drawing teachers. I would like to put it thus: here is a group of children. I show them that the sun is shining in from this side. The sun falls upon something and makes all kinds of light, (see sketch). Light is shed upon everything. I can see bright patches. It is because the sun is shining in that I can see the bright patches everywhere. But above them I see no bright patches, only darkness (blue). But I also see darkness here, below the bright patches: there will perhaps be just a little light here. Then I look at something which, when the light falls on it in this way, looks greenish in colour. Here, where the light falls, it is whitish, but then, before the really black shadow occurs, I see a greenish colour; and here, under the black shadow, it is also greenish, and there are other curious things to be seen in between the two. Here the light does not go right in.

You see, I have spoken of light and shadow, and of how there is something here on which the light does not impinge: and lo, I have made a tree! I have only spoken about light and colour, and I have made a tree. We cannot really paint the tree: we can only bring in light and shade, and green, or,

a little yellow, if you like, if the fruit happens to be lovely apples. But we must speak of colour and light and shade; and so indeed we shall be speaking only of what is really there—colour, light and shade. Drawing should only be done in Geometry and all that is connected with that. There we have to do with lines, something which is worked out in thought. But realities, concrete realities must not be drawn with a pen; a tree, for example, must be evolved out of light and shade and out of the colours, for this is the reality of life itself.²

It would be barbarous if an orthodox drawing teacher came and had this tree, which we have drawn here in shaded colours, copied in lines. In reality there are just light patches and dark patches. Nature does that. If lines were drawn here, it would be an untruth.

Should the direct method, without translation, be used, even for Latin and Greek?

In this respect a special exception must be made with regard to Latin and Greek. It is not necessary to connect these directly with practical life, for they are no longer alive, and we have them with us only as dead languages. Now Greek and Latin (for Greek should actually precede Latin in teaching) can only be taught when the children are somewhat older, and therefore the translation method for these languages is, in a certain way, fully justified.

There is no question of our having to converse in Latin and Greek, but our aim is to understand the ancient authors. We use these languages first and foremost for the purposes of translation. And thus it is that we do not use the same methods for the teaching of Latin and Greek as those which we employ with all living languages.

Now once more comes the question that is put to me whenever I am anywhere in England where education is being discussed:

How should instruction in Gymnastics be carried out, and should Sports be taught in an English school, hockey and cricket, for example, and if so in what way?

It is emphatically not the aim of the Waldorf School Method to suppress these things. They have their place simply because they play a great part in English life, and the child should grow up into life. Only please do not fall a prey to the illusion that there is any other meaning in it than this, namely, that we ought not to make the child a stranger to his world. To believe that sport is of tremendous value in development is an error. It is not of great value in development. Its only value is that it is a fashion dear to the English people, and we must not make the child a stranger to the world by excluding him from all popular usages. You like sport in England, so the child should be introduced to sport. One should not meet with philistine opposition what may possibly be philistine itself.

With regard to “how it should really be taught,” there is very little indeed to be said. For in these things it is really more or less so that someone does them first, and then the child imitates him. And to devise special artificial methods here would be something scarcely appropriate to the subject.

In Drill or Gymnastics one simply learns from anatomy and physiology in what position any limb of the organism must be placed in order that it may serve the agility of the body. It is a question of really having a sense for what renders the organism skilled, light and supple; and when one has this sense, one has then simply to demonstrate. Suppose you have a horizontal bar: it is customary to perform all kinds of exercises on the bar except the most valuable one of all, which consists in hanging on to the bar, hooked on, like this ... then swinging sideways, and then grasping the bar further up, then swinging back, then grasping the bar again. There is no jumping but you hang from the bar, fly through the air, make the various movements, grasp the bar thus, and thus, and so an alternation in the shape and position of the muscles of the arms is produced which actually has a healthy effect upon the whole body.

You must study which inner movements of the muscles have a healthy effect on the organism, so that you will know what movements to teach. Then you have only to do the exercises in front of the children, for the method consists simply in this preliminary demonstration.³

How should religious instruction be given at the different ages?

As I always speak from the standpoint of practical life, I have to say that the Waldorf School Method is a method of education and is not meant to bring into the school a philosophy of life or anything sectarian. Therefore I can only speak of what lives within the Waldorf School principle itself.

It was comparatively easy for us in Württemberg, where the laws of education were still quite liberal: when the Waldorf School was established we were really shown great consideration by the authorities. It was even possible for me to insist that I myself should appoint the teachers without regard to their having passed any State examination or not. I do not mean that everyone who has passed a State examination is unsuitable as a teacher! I would not say that. But still, I could see nothing in a State examination that would necessarily qualify a person to become a teacher in the Waldorf School.

And in this respect things have really always gone quite well. But one thing was necessary when we were establishing the school, and that was for us definitely to take this standpoint: We have a “Method-School”; we do not interfere with social life as it is at present, but through Anthroposophy we find the best method of teaching, and the School is purely a “Method-School.”

Therefore I arranged, from the outset, that religious instruction should not be included in our school syllabus, but that Catholic religious teaching should be delegated to the Catholic priest, and the Protestant teaching to the pastor and so on.

In the first few years most of our scholars came from a factory (the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory), and amongst them we had many “dissenting” children, children whose parents were of no religion. But our educational conscience of course demanded that a certain kind of religious instruction should be given them also. We therefore arranged a “free religious teaching” for these children, and for this we have a special method.

In these “free Religion lessons” we first of all teach gratitude in the contemplation of everything in Nature. Whereas in the telling of legends and myths we simply relate what things do—stones, plants and so on—here in the Religion lessons we lead the child to perceive the Divine in all things. So we begin with a kind of “religious naturalism,” shall I say, in a form suited to the children.

Again, the child cannot be brought to anunderstanding of the Gospels before the time between the ninth and tenth years of which I have spoken. Only then can we proceed to a consideration of the Gospels in the Religion lessons, going on later to the Old Testament. Up to this time we can only introduce to the children a kind of Nature-religion in its general aspect, and for this we have our own method. Then we should go on to the Gospels but not before the ninth or tenth year, and only much later, between the twelfth and thirteenth years, we should proceed to the Old Testament.⁴

This then is how you should think of the free Religion lessons. We are not concerned with the Catholic and Protestant instruction: we must leave that to the Catholic and Protestant pastors. Also every Sunday we have a special form of service for those who attend the free Religion lessons. A service is performed and forms of worship are provided for children of different ages. What is done at these services has shown its results in practical life during the course of the years; it contributes in a very special way to the deepening of religious feeling, and awakens a mood of great devotion in the hearts of the children.

We allow the parents to attend these services, and it has become evident that this free religious teaching truly brings new life to Christianity And there is real Christianity in the Waldorf School, because through this naturalistic religion during the early years the children are gradually led to an understanding of the Christ Mystery, when they reach the higher classes.

Our free Religion classes have, indeed, gradually become full to overflowing. We have all kinds of children coming into them from the Protestant pastor or the Catholic priest, but we make no propaganda for it. It is difficult enough for us to find sufficient Religion teachers, and therefore we are not particularly pleased when too many children come; neither do we wish the school to acquire the reputation of being an Anthroposophical School of a sectarian kind. We do not want that at all. Only our educational conscience has constrained us to introduce this free Religion teaching. But children turn away from the Catholic and Protestant teaching and more and more come over to us and want to have the free Religion teaching: they like it better. It is not our fault that they run away from their other teachers: but as I have said, the principle of the whole thing was that religious instruction should be given, to begin with, by the various pastors. When you ask, then, what kind of religious teaching we have, I can only speak of what our own free Religion teaching is, as I have just described it.

Should French and German be taught from the beginning, in an English School? If the children come to a Kindergarten Class at five or six years old, ought they, too, to have language lessons?

As to whether French and German should be taught from the beginning in an English School, I should first like to say that I think this must be settled entirely on grounds of expediency. If you simply find that life is making it necessary to teach these languages, you must teach them. We have introduced French and English into the Waldorf School, because with French there is much to be learnt from the inner quality of the language, not found elsewhere, namely, a certain feeling for rhetoric which it is very good to acquire: and English is taught because it is a universal world language, and will become so more and more.

Now, I should not wish to decide categorically whether French and German should be taught in an English School, but you must be guided by the circumstances of life. It is not at all so important which language is chosen as that foreign languages are actually taught in the school.

And if children of four or five years do already come to school (which should not really be the case) it would then be good to do languages with them also. It would be right for this age. Some kind of language teaching can be given even before the age of the change of teeth, but it should only be taught as a proper lesson after this change. If you have a Kindergarten Class for the little children, it would be quite right to include the teaching of languages but all other school subjects should as far as possible be postponed until after the change of teeth.

I should like to express, in conclusion, what you will readily appreciate, namely, that I am deeply gratified that you are taking such an active interest in making the Waldorf School Method fruitful here in England, and that you are working with such energy for the establishment of a school here, on our Anthroposophical lines. And I should like to express the hope that you may succeed in making use of what you were able to learn from our Training Courses in Stuttgart, from what you have heard at various other Courses which have been held in England, and, finally, from what I have been able to give you here in a more aphoristic way, in order to establish a really good school here on Anthroposophical lines. You must remember how much depends upon the success of the very first attempt. If it does not succeed, very much is lost, for all else will be judged by the first attempt. And indeed, very much depends on how your first project is launched: from it the world must take notice that the matter is neither something which is steeped in abstract, dilettante plans of school reform, nor anything amateur but something which arises out of a conception of the real being of man, and which is now to be brought to bear on the art of education. And it is indeed the very civilisation of today, which is now moving through such critical times, that calls us to undertake this task, along with many other things.

In conclusion I should like to give you my right good thoughts on your path—the path which is to lead to the founding of a school here on Anthroposophical lines.

• 1. It should be noted that before this transition from the concrete to the abstract dealt with above, a rhythmic approach is used in the teaching of the rudiments of number, e.g. the tables, in the lower classes.
• 2. The sketch was made on the blackboard with coloured chalks but it has only been possible to reproduce it in black and white.
• 3. A method of Gymnastic teaching on the lines indicated above was subsequently worked out by Fritz Graf Bothmer, teacher of Gymnastic s at the Waldorf School, Stuttgart.
• 4. This paragraph can easily be misunderstood unless two other aspects of the education are borne in mind. Firstly: Here Dr. Steiner is only speaking of the content of the actual Religion lessons. In the class teaching all children are introduced to the stories of the Old Testament. Secondly, quite apart from the Religion lessons the Festivals of the year are celebrated with all children in a Rudolf Steiner School, in forms adapted to their ages. Christmas takes a very special place, and is prepared for all through Advent by carol singing, the daily opening of a star-window in the “Advent Calendar,” and the lighting of candles on the Advent wreath hung in the classroom. At the end of the Christmas term the teachers perform traditional Nativity Plays as their gift to the children. All this is in the nature of an experience for the children, inspired by feeling and the Christmas mood. Later, in the Religion lessons, on the basis of this experience, they can be brought to a more conscious knowledge and understanding of the Gospels.

Dear friends,

There is something that is always overlooked in this present age, something that has to do with the working, and the wanting to work, of the spiritual world. It is this: that total spiritual activity must include the creative activity to be found in human thought and feeling. What really lies at their foundation has been completely forgotten in this age of materialistic thought; today humankind is fundamentally entirely unaware of it. That is why in this very field a kind of evil mischief is perpetrated throughout our present civilization. You surely know that from every possible center, whatever it may be called, all kinds of instructions go out to people telling how they can enhance their thought power, how their thoughts can become powerful. In this way seeds are strewn in every direction of something that in earlier spiritual life was called—and still is called—“black magic.” Such things are the cause of both soul illnesses and bodily illnesses, and the physician and priest must be aware of them in the course of their work. If one is alert to these things, one already has a clearer perception of the illnesses and symptoms of human soul-life. Moreover one can work to prevent them. This is all of great importance. The intent of instruction about thought power is to give people a power they would otherwise not possess, and this is often used for pernicious reasons. There is every possible kind of instruction today with this intent—for instance, how business executives can be successful in their financial transactions. In this area a tremendous amount of mischief is perpetrated.

And what is at the bottom of it all? These things will simply become worse unless clear knowledge of them is sought precisely in the field of medicine and in the field of theology. For human thinking in recent times, particularly scientific thinking, has come enormously under the influence of materialism. Often today people express their satisfaction over the fact that materialism in science is on the decline, that the tendency everywhere is to try to reach out beyond materialism. But truly this is slight satisfaction for those who see through these things. In the eyes of such people, the scientists or the theologians who want to overcome materialism in a modern manner are much worse than the hard-shell materialists whose assertions gradually become untenable through their very absurdity. And those who talk so glibly about spiritualism, idealism, and the like are strewing sand in people's eyes—and it's going into their own eyes as well.

For what do Driesch¹³ and others do, for instance, when they want to present something that is beyond physical-material events? They use exactly the same thoughts that have been used for hundreds of years to think about the material world alone, thoughts that indeed have no other capacity than to think about the material world alone. These are the thoughts they use to think about something that is supposed to be spiritual. But such thoughts do not have that capacity. For that, one has to go to true spiritual science. That is why such strange things appear and today it is not even noticed that they are strange. A person like Driesch, for instance, recognized officially by the outer world but in reality a dilettante, holds forth to the effect that one must accept the term “psychoid.” Well, if you want to ascribe to something a similarity to something else, that something else must itself be around somewhere. You can't speak of apelike creatures if there are no apes to start with. You can't speak of the “psychoid” if you say there's no such thing as a soul! And this silly nonsense is accepted today as science, honest science, science that is really striving to reach a higher level. These things must be realized. And the individuals in the anthroposophical movement who have had scientific training will be of some value in the evolution of our civilization if they don't allow themselves to be blinded by the flaring-up of will-o'-the-wisps but persist in observing carefully what is now essential to combat materialism.

Therefore the question must be asked: How is it possible for active, creative thinking to arise out of today's passive thinking? How must priests and physicians work so that creative impulses can now flow into the activity of individuals who are led and who want to be led by the spirit? Thoughts that evolve in connection with material processes leave the creative impulse outside in matter itself; the thoughts remain totally passive. That is the peculiar characteristic of our modern thought world, that the thoughts pervading the whole of science are quite passive, inactive, idle. This lack of creative power in our thinking is connected with our education, which has been completely submerged in the current passive science. Today human beings are educated in such a way that they simply are not allowed to think a creative thought—for fear that if they should actually entertain a creative thought they wouldn't be able to keep it objective but would add some subjective quirk to it! These are things that must be faced. But how can we come to creative thoughts? This can only happen if we really develop our knowledge of the human being. Humans cannot be known by uncreative thoughts, because by their very nature they themselves are creative. One must re-create if one wants knowledge. With today's passive thinking one can only understand the periphery of the human being; one has to ignore the inner being.

It is important that we really understand the place humanity has been given in this world. Today therefore, let us put something before our souls as a kind of goal that lies at the end of a long perspective, but that can make our thoughts creative—for it holds the secret for making human thought creative.

Let us think of the universe in its changing and becoming—say in the form of a circle. (Plate VII) We may picture it like this because actually the universe as it evolves through time presents a kind of rhythmic repetition, upward and downward, with respect to many phenomena. Everywhere in the universe we find rhythms like that of day and night: other, greater rhythms that extend from one Ice Age to another, and so forth. If first we confine our inquiry to the rhythm that has the largest intervals for human perception, it will be the so-called Platonic year, which has always played an important role in human thoughts and ideas about the world when these were filled with more wisdom than they are now.

We can come to the Platonic year if we begin by observing the place where the sun rises on the first day of spring, the twenty-first of March of each year. At that moment of time the sun rises at a definite spot in the sky. We can find this spot in some constellation; attention has been given to it through all the ages, for it moves slightly from year to year. If, for instance, in 1923 we had observed this point of spring, its place in the sky in relation to the other stars, and now in 1924 observe it again, we find it is not in the same place; it lies farther back on a line that can be drawn between the constellation of Taurus and the constellation of Pisces. Every year the place where spring begins moves back in the zodiac a little bit in that direction. This means that in the course of time there is a gradual shift through all the constellations of the starry world; it can be seen and recorded. If we now inquire what the sum of all these shifts amounts to, we can see what the distance is from year to year. One year it is here, the next year there, and so on—finally it has come back to the same spot. That means after a certain period of time the place of spring's beginning must again be in the very same spot of the heavens, and for the place of its rising the sun has traveled once around the entire zodiac. When we reckon that up, it happens approximately every 25,920 years. There we have found a rhythm that contains the largest time-interval possible for a human being to perceive—the Platonic cosmic year, which stretches through approximately 25,920 of our ordinary years.

There we have looked out into the distances of the cosmos. In a certain sense we have pushed our thoughts against something from which the numbers we use bounce back. We are pushing with our thoughts against a wall. Thinking can't go any further. Clairvoyance must then come to our aid; that can go further. The whole of evolution takes place in what is encircled by those 25,920 years. And we can very well conceive of this circumference, if you will—which obviously is not a thing of space, but of space-time—we can conceive of it as a kind of cosmic uterine wall. We can think of it as that which surrounds us in farthest cosmic space. (Plate VII, red-yellow)

Now let us go from what envelops us in farthest cosmic space, from the rhythm that has the largest interval of time that we possess, to what appears to us first of all as a small interval, that is, the rhythm of our breathing. Now we find—again, of course, we must use approximate numbers—we find eighteen breaths a minute. If we reckon how many breaths a human being takes in a day, we come to 25,920 breaths a day. We find the same rhythm in the smallest interval, in the human being the microcosm, as in the largest interval, the macrocosm.

Thus the human being lives in a universe whose rhythm is the same as that of the universe itself. But only the human being, not the animal; in just these finer details of knowledge one finally sees the difference between the human and the animal. The essential nature of the human physical body can only be realized if it is related to the Platonic cosmic year; 25,920 years: in that span of time the nature of our physical body is rooted. Take a look in An Outline of Esoteric Science at the tremendous time periods, at first determined otherwise than by time and space as we know them, through the metamorphosis of sun, moon, and earth. Look at all the things that had to be brought together, but not in any quantitative way; then you can begin to understand the present human physical body with all its elements.

And now let us go to the center of the circle, (Plate VII) where we have the 25,920 breaths that, so to speak, place humanity in the center of the cosmic uterus. Now we have reached the ego. For in the breathing—and remember what I said about the breathing, that in the upper human it becomes a finer breathing for our so-called spiritual life—we find the expression of the individual human life on earth. Here, then, we have the ego. Just as we must grasp the connection of our physical body to the large time interval, the Platonic cosmic year, so we must grasp the connection of our ego—which we can feel in every breathing irregularity—to the rhythm of our breathing.

So you see, our life on earth lies between these two things—our own breathing and the cosmic year. Everything that is of any importance for the human ego is ruled by the breath. And the life of our physical body lies within those colossal processes that are ruled by the rhythm of 25,920 years. The activity that takes place in our physical body in accordance with its laws is connected with the large rhythm of the Platonic year in the same way that our ego activity is connected with the rhythm of our breathing. Human life lies in between those two rhythms. Our human life is also enclosed within physical-etheric body and astral body-ego. From a certain point of view we can say that human life on earth lies between physical body-etheric body and astral body-ego; from another point of view, from the divine, cosmic aspect, we can say human life on earth lies between a day's breathing and the Platonic year. A day's breathing is in this sense a totality; it relates to our whole human life.

But now let us consider from the cosmic standpoint what lies between human breathing, that is, the weaving life of the ego, and the course of a Platonic year, that is, the living force out in the macrocosm. As we maintain our rhythm of breathing through an entire day of twenty-four hours, we meet regularly another rhythm, the day-and-night rhythm, which is connected with how the sun stands in relation to the earth. The daily sunrise and sunset as the sun travels over the arch of heaven, the darkening of the sun by the earth, this daily circuit of the sun is what we meet with our breathing rhythm. This is what we encounter in our human day of twenty-four hours.

So let us do some more arithmetic to see how we relate to the world with our breathing, how we relate to the course of a macrocosmic day. We can figure it out in this way: Start from one day; in a year there are 360 days. (It can be approximate.) Now take a human life (again approximate) of seventy-two years, the so-called human life span. And we get 25,920 days. So we have a life of seventy-two years as the normal rhythm into which a human being is placed in this world, and we find it is the same rhythm as that of the Platonic sun year.

So our breathing rhythm is placed into our entire life in the rhythm of 25,920. One day of our life relates to the length of our entire life in the same rhythm as one of our breaths relates to the total number of our breaths during one day. What is it, then, that appears within the seventy-two years, the 25,920 days in the same way that a breath, one inhalation-exhalation, appears within the whole breathing process? What do we find there? First of all we have inbreathing-outbreathing, the first form of the rhythm. Second, as we live our normal human life there is something that we experience 25,920 times. What is that? Sleeping and waking. Sleeping and waking are repeated 25,920 times in the course of a human life, just as inbreathing and outbreathing are repeated 25,920 times in the course of a human day. But now we must ask, what is this rhythm of sleeping and waking? Every time we go to sleep we not only breathe carbon dioxide out, but as physical human beings we breathe our astral body and ego out. When we wake, we breathe them in again. That is a longer inbreathing-outbreathing: it takes twenty-four hours, a whole day. That is a second form of breathing that has the same rhythm. So we have a small breath, our ordinary inhalation-exhalation; and we have a larger breath by which we go out into the world and back, the breath of sleeping-waking.

But let us go further. Let us see how the average human life of seventy-two years fits into the Platonic cosmic year. Let us count the seventy-two years as belonging to one great year, a year consisting of days that are human lives. Let us reckon this great cosmic year in which each single day is a whole human life. Then count the cosmic year also as having 360 days, which would mean 360 human lives. Then we would get 360 human lives x 72 years = 25,920 years: the Platonic year.

What does this figure show us? We begin a life and die. What do we do when we die? When we die, we breathe out more than our astral body and ego from our earthly organism. We also breathe our etheric body out into the universe. I have often indicated how the etheric body is breathed out, spread out into the universe. When we come back to earth again, we breathe our etheric body in again. That is a giant breath. An etheric inbreathing-outbreathing. Mornings we breathe in the astral element, while with our physical breath we breathe in oxygen. With each earth-death we breathe the etheric element out; with each earth-life we breathe the etheric element in.

So there we have the third form of breathing: life and death. If we count life to be our life on earth, and death to be our life between death and a new birth, then we have the largest form of breathing in the cosmic year:

1. Inhalation-exhalation, the smallest breath.
2. Sleeping-waking, a larger breath.
3. Life-death, the largest breath.

Thus we stand first and foremost in the world of the stars. Inwardly, we relate to our ordinary breathing; outwardly, we relate to the Platonic year. In between, we live our human life, and exactly the same rhythm is revealed in this human life itself.

But what comes into this space between the Platonic year and our breathing rhythm? Like a painter who prepares a canvas and then paints on it, let us try painting on the base we have prepared, that is, the rhythms we have found in numbers. With the Platonic year as with smaller time rhythms, especially with the rhythm of the year, we find that continual change goes on in the outer world. Also it is change that we perceive; we perceive it most easily in temperatures: warmth and cold. We need only to think of cold winter and warm summer—here again we could present numbers, but let us take the qualitative aspect of warmth and cold. Human beings live life within this alternation between warmth and cold. In the outer world the alternation is within the element of time; and for so-called nature, changing in a time sequence from one to the other is quite healthful. But human beings cannot do this. We have, in a certain sense, to maintain a normal warmth—or a normal coldness, if you will—within ourselves. We have to develop inner forces by which we save some summer warmth for winter and some winter cold for summer. In other words, we must keep a proper balance within; we must be so continually active in our organism that it maintains a balance between warmth and cold no matter what is happening outside.

There are activities within the human organism of which we are quite unaware. We carry summer within us in winter and winter within us in summer. When it is summer, we carry within us what our organism experienced in the previous winter. We carry winter within us through the beginning of spring until St. John's Day; then the change comes. As autumn approaches, we begin to carry the summer within us, and we keep it until Christmas, until December 21, when the balance shifts again. So we carry in us this continual alternation of warmth and cold. But what are we doing in all this?

When we examine what we are doing, we find something extraordinarily interesting. Let this be the human being (see drawing below).

We realize from simple superficial observation that everything that enters the human being as cold shows the tendency to go to the nerve-sense system. And today we can point out that everything that works as cold, everything of a winter nature, works in the building up of our head, of our nerve-sense organization. Everything of a summer nature, everything that contains warmth, is given over to our metabolic-limb system. If we look at our metabolic-limb system, we can see that we carry within it everything summery. If we look at our nerve-sense functions, we can see that we carry in them everything we receive out of the universe that is wintry. So in our head we always have winter; in our metabolic-limb system we always have summer. And our rhythmic system maintains the balance between the one and the other. Warmth-cold, warmth-cold, metabolic system-head system, with a third system keeping them in balance. Material warmth is only a result of warmth processes, and material cold the result of cold processes. So we find a play of cosmic rhythm in the human organism. We can say that winter in the macrocosm is the creative force in the human nerve-sense system centered in the head. Summer in the macrocosm is the creative force in the human metabolic-limb system.

This way of looking into the human organism is another example of the initiatic medicine of which I spoke when I said it has a beginning in the book¹⁴ that Dr. Wegman worked out with me. The beginning is there for what must more and more become a part of science.

If we climb the rocks where the soil is so constituted that winter plants will grow in it, we come to that part of the outer world that is related to the organization of the human head. Let us suppose that we collect medicinal substances out in the world. We want to make sure that the spiritual forces appearing in an illness that originates in the nerve-sense system will be healed by the spirit in outer nature, so we climb very high in the mountains to find minerals and plants and bring them down for medicines for head illnesses. We are acting out of our creative thinking. It starts our legs moving toward things we must find in the earth that correspond to our medical needs. The right thoughts—and they come out of the cosmos—must impel us all the way to concrete deeds. These thoughts can stir us without our knowledge. People, say, who work in an office—they also have thoughts, at least they sometimes have them—now they are impelled by some instinct to go off on all sorts of hikes. Only they don't know the real reason—but that doesn't matter. It only becomes important if one observes such people from a physician's or a priest's standpoint. But a true view of the world also gives one inspiration for what one has to do in detail.

Now again, if we have to do with illnesses in the metabolic-limb system, we look for low-growing plants and for minerals in the soil. We look for what occurs as sediment, not for what grows above the earth in crystal form. Then we get the kind of mineral and plant remedies we need. That is how observation of the connection between processes in the macrocosm and processes in man lead one from pathology to therapy.

These connections must again be clearly understood. In olden times people knew them well. Hippocrates was really a latecomer as far as ancient medicine is concerned. But if you read a little of what he is supposed to have written, of what at any rate still preserved his spirit, you will find this viewpoint throughout. All through his writings you will find that the concrete details relate to broad knowledge and observation such as we have been presenting. In later times, such things were no longer of any interest. People came more and more to mere abstract, intellectual thinking and to an external observation of nature that led to mere experimentation. We must find the way back again to what was once vision of the relation between the human being and the world.

We live as human beings on the earth between our ego and our physical body, between breathing and the Platonic year. With our breathing we have a direct relation to the day. What do we relate to with our physical body? How do we relate physically to the Platonic year? There we relate to totally external conditions in the evolution of large natural processes—for instance, to climatic changes. In the course of the large natural processes human beings change their form, so that, for instance, successive racial forms appear, and so forth. We relate qualitatively to what happens in the shorter external changes, to what successive years and days bring us. In short, we evolve as human beings between these two farthest boundaries. But in between we can be free, because in between, even in the macrocosm, a remarkable element intervenes.

One can be lost in wonder in pondering over this rhythm of 25,920 years. One is awed by what happens between the universe and the human being. And as one contemplates all this, one realizes that the whole world—including the human being—is ordered according to measure, number, and weight. Everything is wonderfully ordered—but it all happens to be human calculation! And at important moments when we are explaining a calculation—even though it is correct—we always have to add that curious word “approximately.” For our human calculation never comes out exactly right. It is all absolutely logical; order and reason are in everything, they are alive and active, everything “works,” as we say. And yet there is something in all of it, something in the universe that is completely irrational. Something is there so that however profound our awe may be, even as initiates, when we go for an afternoon walk we still take an umbrella along. We take an umbrella because something could happen that is irrational. Something can appear in the life of the universe that simply “doesn't come out right” when numbers are applied to it. And so one has had to invent leap years, intercalary months, all kinds of things. Such things have always had to be used for the fixing of time. What is offered by a well-developed astronomy that has deepened into astrology and astrosophy (for one can think of it in that way) is all destroyed for immediate use by meteorology. This latter has not attained the rank of a rational science; [This lecture was given in 1924.] it is more or less permeated by vision, and will be, more and more. It takes an entirely different path; it consists of what is left over by the other sciences. Modern astronomy itself lives only in names; it is really nothing more than a system for giving names to stars. That is why even Serenissimus came to the end of his knowledge when newly found stars had to have names. He would visit the observatories in his country and let them show him various stars through the telescope, then after seeing everything he would say, “Yes, I know all that—but how you know what that star's name is, that very distant star, that's what I don't understand.” Yes, of course it's obvious, the standpoint you've adopted at this moment when you laugh at Serenissimus. But there's another standpoint: one could laugh at the astronomers. I'd rather you'd laugh at the astronomers, because there's something very strange going on in the world as it evolves.

If you want to inquire into the old way of naming things, Saturn and so forth, you should think back to our speech course,¹⁵ and recall that in olden times names were given from the feeling the astrologers and astrosophers had for the sound of some particular star. All the old star names were God-given, spirit-given. The stars were asked what their names were, because the tone of the star was always perceived and its name was then given accordingly. Now, indeed, you come to a certain boundary line in the development of astrosophy and astrology. Earlier they had to get the names from heaven. When you come to more recent times when the great discoveries were made, for instance, of the “little fellows” (Sternwichten), then everything is mixed up. One is called Andromeda, another has another Greek name. Everything is mixed up in high-handed fashion. One can't think that Neptune and Uranus are as truly characterized by their names as Saturn was. Now there is only human arbitrariness. And Serenissimus made one mistake. He believed the astronomers were carrying on their work similarly to the ancient astrosophers. But this was not so. They possessed only a narrow human knowledge, while the knowledge of the astrosophers of olden times, and astrologers of still older times, came directly out of humanity's intercourse with the gods. However, if today one would return from astronomy to astrology or astrosophy, and thereby have a macrocosm to live in that is rational throughout, then one would reach Sophia. Then one would find too that within this rationality and Sophia-wisdom meteoronomy, meteorology, and meteorosophy are the things that “don't come out right” by our human calculation, and one can only question them at their pleasure! That's another variety of Lady! In ordinary everyday life, one calls a lady capricious. And the meteorological Lady is capricious all the way from rainshowers to comets. But as one gradually advances from meteorology to meteorosophy one discovers the finer attributes of this world queen, attributes that do not come merely from caprice or cosmic emotion, but from the Lady's warm heart. But nothing will be accomplished unless in contrast to all the arithmetic, all the thinking, all that can be calculated rationally one acquires a direct acquaintance with the beings of the cosmos and learns to know them as they are. They are there; they do show themselves—shyly perhaps at first, for they are not obtrusive. With calculations one can go further and further, but then one is getting further and further away from the true nature of the world. For one is only reaching deeds from the past.

If one advances from ordinary calculation to the calculating of rhythms as it was in astrology for the harmony of the spheres, one goes on from the calculating of rhythms to a view of the organization of the world in numbers, as we find them in astrosophy. On the other hand one finds that the ruling world beings are rather shy. They do not appear at once. First they only present a kind of Akasha photography, and one is not sure of its source. One has the whole world to look at, but only in photographs displayed in various parts of the cosmic ether. And one does not know where they come from.

Then inspiration begins. Beings come out of the pictures and make themselves known. We move out of “-nomy” - but just to “-logy.” Only when we push through all the way to intuition does the being itself follow from inspiration and we come to Sophia. But this is a path of personal development that requires the effort of the whole human being. The whole human being must become acquainted with such a Lady, who hides behind meteorology—in wind and weather, moon and sun insofar as they intervene in the elements. Not just the head can be engaged as in “-logy,” but the whole human being is needed.

Already there is a possibility of taking the wrong path in this endeavor. You can even come to Anthroposophy through the head—by coming from anthroponomy, which is today the supreme ruling science, to anthropology. There you just have rationality, nothing more. But rationality is not alive. It describes only the traces, the footprints, of life and it gives one no impulse to investigate details. Yet life really consists of details and of the irrational element. What your head has grasped, you have to take down into the whole human being, and then with the whole human being progress from “-nomy” to “-logy,” finally to “-sophy,” which is Sophia.

We must have a feeling for all this if we want to enliven theology on the one side and medicine on the other through what can truly enliven them both—pastoral medicine. But the essential thing is that first of all, at the very outset of our approach to pastoral medicine, we learn to know the direction it should take in its observation of the world.

• 13. Hans Driesch (1867–1941). Scientist and philosopher.
• 14. Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman, Extending Practical Medicine (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1996).
• 15. Rudolf Steiner, Speech and Drama (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).

Emil Bock: There are a couple of questions, about meanings in the seven sacraments for example, then also about the difference between Luther's idea of salvation and the idea of salvation in Anthroposophy, as seen in Paul's experience of Christ.

Constantin Neubaus asked Dr. Steiner to say something further about meaning in the sacraments and the consecration; he would be grateful to hear more about consecrated water, the Eucharist, the importance of the mass and prayers for the dead, and about celibacy and marriage.

A participant asked, with reference to what Dr. Steiner had related, having seen how the Host acquired an aura during the celebration: how would this be if the priest did not have complete dignity?

Another participant asked for some insight into the communications of the priest with those who have died.

Rudolf Steiner:These questions will all be addressed. In what sense are you referring to this communication with those who have died?

A participant: Like you also have in the Catholic Church, in relation to the priest's help with the dead, with the sacraments of the dying.

Another participant mentioned that the question has been raised several times regarding the cosmic significance of the sun and moon standing still in Joshua.

Another participant declared he had not understood something in the morning's lecture, regarding the statement: "The human beings ever more lost the capability to manifest the divine in themselves" and he wanted to know, what this meant: the divine manifesting itself within.

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: This is only the explanation of a statement which should be taken this way: in olden times the earthly evolution of humanity experienced right into their very own form, that actually, if I could express it this way, their skin enveloped divine wisdom. This became particularly strongly expressed in the terminology being used, which is really a mystery-terminology: Man is a temple of God.—So, this immediate living-within something which originated out of the divine predecessor of human beings, was experienced in human beings. Then came the time when only a few chosen ones were ascribed with the possibility of experiencing such divinity. Actually, those who belonged to the mysteries during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were completely convinced that people in their earthly form could no longer harbour a divine wisdom within, because of the decline gradually taking place up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Because of this, the time epoch can be characterised by saying: the earthly human being would have lost what had been its divine being in olden times, had the Mystery of Golgotha not taken place—in contrast to those with knowledge who said: the last one who comes from outside of this, to fill a human body, would become the first.—Then the earth would have been in a declining evolution, which means plunged into its downfall. This is what can be added as a clarification to the words.

[ 2 ] However, all these things which have been brought forward now—and I ask that you make notes in advance of such questions and remarks—are actually in need of real and factual answers before we can continue to enter into the essence of the sacraments. Allow me, as if by insertion, to enter a little into the essence of the sacraments today. In this way we will possibly find it easier to discover answers regarding the consecrated water, sign of the cross, the Eucharist, mass offering and so on.

[ 3 ] You do know of course that the Catholic Church acknowledges seven sacraments. This adaptation of seven sacraments—and we can only understand the sacramental when we approach them with such preparations as I would like to do now—these adaptations of the seven sacraments is based on the observation that we look at human life in seven stages. It is however impossible to enter into the essence of the sacraments, if you don't adapt a certain process in yourself, which has today more or less disappeared from current consciousness, a process which, I believe, also connects to that which is otherwise extraordinarily significant regarding our discussion content yesterday, because it relates to what I've only up to now fleetingly characterised as the actual foundation of Luther's soul battle.

[ 4 ] Speaking about evolution today, you actually have a one-sided imagination of it, to a certain extent. People believe, when they talk about evolution, they must have some starting point; and this starting point, like a seed, provides the second step, and from the second comes a third and so on. In this way evolution is considered to be a process of actually always going from one previous step resulting in the next one. This evolution concept is quite one-sided in contrast to reality because evolution does not happen this way. When you look at a plant and the condition of having fully developed its leaves, flowers, right up to organs of fruit, you could kind of think how this relates to the characteristics of the evolution concept. (He draws on the blackboard, on the left.) But you can't imagine it in the same way if you start from the root, actually from the seed, and then look for the seed in the flower once again. You have to admit: there is a condition in the unfolding growth process where it involves a greater unfolding outward, and there is another condition where it involves the slightest outwards unfolding. Then a rhythm of unfolding alternates with the reverse, where, in a way, the essence of the thing pulls back so that the outer sense perceptible element becomes the most inconspicuous imaginable, but the full power, so to speak, is concentrated to a point.

If you want to speak in the Goethean sense, you would say: At one stage in the unfolding, the spiritual is withdrawn and the sensory aspect developed in the farthest periphery (he draws on the blackboard) and here where growth has been drawn inward, is where the spiritual develops and the sensory is squeezed into the most inconspicuous germ imaginable. So, we certainly have to take into account that when we speak about a concept of development, we have to speak about rhythms, but we don't come right with the development concept if we actually look at what nature is. In that moment we come up with history, things get a bit more complicated. Take for instance the course of historic development in that time span which I've characterised yesterday, from Augustus to Luther. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Augustus ------------------------------------------ Luther

[ 5 ] It is extraordinarily important to visualise everything that was contributed in this period of time, outwardly and inwardly, in the outer cultural life and the inner spiritual and soul life, towards humanity. Just imagine, that in this time epoch there was also the infinitely significant mystic ... (stenographer record unclear, other than the name containing a B ) ... who lived at this time when the booklet was drafted which played a big role in Luther's point of view, called Theologia deutch, and then we can think about what directly resulted after this time as extraordinary, rising from the foundation of historical development in minds like Paracelsus, and Jakob Böhme, just afterwards. When we look at these things, then we have primarily the impression—we must have an impression—that there was during this period of western development a strong tendency towards turning inwardness. Souls turned inward. If you enter completely into such arguments as sermonized by for instance Johannes Tauler, you will discover an inward striving, a withdrawal from the outer things, a waiting until, one could call it, a sparkle arose which could then renew the human mind. I have also characterised this in my booklet about the Middle Age mystics. When you look at such inner striving as with Tauler, when you notice how he, after years during the course of his life, he had become ever more mature in his internalization, how he in quite a mysterious way met a person and how this person simply through an impression from something out of that already deepened interior was transformed, so that this created the occasion for a sermon which was described in such a way that all who listened in the church were as struck as if by a blow and some fell down as if dead. People were so struck within their souls that they fell into quite a faint.

If you envisage all of this you will find that during this time, an unbelievable internalization was happening in the lives of many people in the west. If I could tell you, my dear friends, in detail, what a roll this played in the entire development, in the reading, in interpretation, yes, even the dramatic performance of the gospel action of the Gospel of Luke, this inner most gospel, and when we look at the pastoral care of this time, then we certainly find the extraordinary characteristic of internalization being poured out over this entire time period. We then discover, as this period came to a close—it had prepared itself already from the 15th century onwards and came out in Luther's time—general culture took on a certain externalisation. In everything there developed the opposite of the internalisation of the Middle Ages. The people's gaze developed towards the outside; methods of observation were directed outward, less and less care and attention was applied to the inner life. So we have—and we are still within this process of externalisation in relation to cultural development—we clearly have historically two successive conditions which differ as much as the unfolded plant does from the plant contracted into the centre. So we have the same thing, in plants as in history, that during such a period of internalisation, like from Augustus to Luther—and this period of internalisation was particularly present despite everything I mentioned this morning—all the power which was inwardly concentrated, later comes out, later unfolds.

[ 6 ] My dear friends! Today we all work in what is outer culture, with forces which had been inwardly developed during the time from Augustinus to Calvin or up to Luther. When we look at developments in this way, then it disintegrates into an evolutionary state—that is the unfolding, it goes outwards—and a state of involution, so that the evolution is followed by involution. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Evolution
Involution

[ 7 ] Only when we do an overall study of the alternate rhythms from evolution to involution, we are able to fully understand development.

[ 8 ] The human being is a complicated being because he is actually a microcosm. What is regarded here as a concept of evolution and involution, takes on the most complicated form in the human being. This most complicated form we must first bring before our souls in a single imagination. Think for instance about birth. (He writes on the blackboard.)

1. Birth

[ 9 ] If we look at the meaning of the event of a birth, regarding the relationship formed out of embryonic life, to what is brought about between conception and actual birth, we have previous steps which were initially soul-spiritual in the human being, moving into the material aspect. There is an integration of the spiritual-soul orientation into the material orientation. This is certainly a complicated process which psychology hasn't yet studied properly, regarding its deeper meaning. I can admit that the development of the germ has not been studied completely. It is usually only studied by starting with the germ cell, briefly, the evolution is followed from the first germinal cell which has been fertilized through its formative elements up to the embryo's maturity when it is then pushed out. What is not fully studied is what actually happens in the mother's body in the Chorion and the amniotic glands as organs which are around the embryo and in their way are most perfect in the beginning of embryonic development but then become more complicated and are pushed out at the birth of the embryo.

What we have here in the germinal cell is certainly the rising evolution, while the involution is through the soul-spiritual of the organs by which they are first established in the mother's body, from the Chorion, from the Amnion, and then gradually moving to the actual egg nucleus, to the actual embryo, so that we have here an involution of the soul-spiritual into matter. This matter becomes pushed out and then we have the continuation of embryonic evolution. The embryo is born and now puts forward its forces, as I've already explained to you, which it had been developing during the embryonic phase. This continues into the development of speech and still remains available in our bodies until later. We carry within our entire earthly lifetime the forces that remain inside us as remnants of embryonic development: the forces of birth. These birth forces develop within us, evolve in us like a gift of nature. This happens, if I may use this expression which sounds somewhat trivial, out of itself. However, immediately, from taking our first breath, from being in contact with the outer world, other processes come into play, processes related to those of dying. From the beginning we also have forces of dying in us. In these forces of dying our soul-spiritual becomes involved in our exchanges with the outer world.

Through observation, through thinking, we allow dying processes to be integrated into us. This is the opposite process of the developmental process at birth. Like humanity developed since the time epoch a bit before and after the Mystery of Golgotha, humanity experienced those changes of which I have spoken, and people had to a certain extent turn the involution processes into something holy, in contrast to the contrasting evolutionary processes. Evolution is natural, it is a gift of nature; that which is given to us at birth and continues to work, is a gift of nature. If we begin to feel the involution process starting to take hold of us as a dying process is, then it must be sanctified since that divination of the world which I spoke to you about this morning, which means, it must be included into what comes out of the Christ impulse. So we see since the development of Christianity something which should be added into the sacraments due to this dying process, and that is the sacrament of baptism. We will still speak about the ritual involved. In order for us to say: what is an evolutionary process at birth, the baptism should take place as a process of involution. We should add to this rhythm in which we are placed in at birth, the repulsion through the pendulum of baptism. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Baptism

[ 10 ] The second evolutionary process which appears in our lives, which shows itself to great effect is when a person reaches puberty, when the physical body and astral body reach a certain development and the astral body starts in its development to introduce something quite particular, when also that which separates in the sleeping state, comes into a new relationship. During the state of sleep the physical body and ether bodies remain in bed while the astral body and ego leave. Human life consists of the intimate relationship between the physical and the ether bodies, but in a more loose connection to both the astral body and ego. While in a state of growing these four members are united, in the state of sleep the astral body and ego goes out so that their relationship is looser. However, this relationship comes into a modification, it only really matures in the 14, 15 or sixteenth year, then it comes in a real alternating process with what happens in sleep with the physical body lying asleep in bed.

The right harmony only appears around the age of 14, 15 or 16. The young person is taken hold of, by an inner strength, through which the physical body is permeated with the soul-spiritual, which means the astral with the ego-being. This is outwardly expressed in adolescence, and it is only an outer revelation while a complete transformation takes place in the whole person. This event which appears as an evolutionary process can be called maturity. (He writes on the blackboard.)

2. Maturity (adolescence)

[ 11 ] This is the evolutionary process. The corresponding process of involution as related to maturity, just as baptism relates to birth, is confirmation. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Confirmation

[ 12 ] Confirmation also has the task—and we will see with this in mind what a fitting ritual it can be—the task in the Christian sense to what can be given to the ego and astral body through which everything has evolved in a modified way between the ego and astral body, between the soul-spiritual and the physical bodily nature, having developed with the coming of maturity.

[ 13 ] We enter with this into an age in life where we have something else in relation to development. Our soul-spiritual becomes immersed in the physical bodily nature. The physical body captures our soul-spiritual; the soul spiritual is as a result connected in a certain way with the physical body. This is the condition of our development, because we, when we want to examine it as an evolutionary process, describe it as the soul-spiritual incorporation into the human being. We could say: the third evolutionary process is the incorporation. (He writes on the blackboard.)

3. Incorporation

[ 14 ] Added to this, if we now look for the corresponding process of involution, then we must above all see, my dear friends, that the human being, through the immersion of his soul-spiritual into the physical body, has evolved an admirable power in his being, continually being in the state of oscillation in which there is a return to the soul-spiritual, in the repetition of the re-immersion into the physical bodily nature so that it contains a rhythm, which threatens him to be either lost in the ecstatic soul-spiritual aspect or to fall back into the animalistic, in complete incorporation. Human beings need something which stand opposite this evolutionary process as a process of involution, and this process is reception to Holly Communion. The process of involution for the incorporation is Holy Communion. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Holy Communion

[ 15 ] In our discussion about evolution and what the case has been up to now, we could say the following. It is so, that the human being in his soul-spiritual nature, confronts the physical bodily nature at every moment; at every moment the human being must take care to move in the correct rhythm so that his or her soul-spiritual nature is not allowed to sink into animalism, or that the physical is left alone and to a certain extent the unworldly rises into the soul-spiritual which would weaken the soul-spiritual. Bringing the altar sacraments into the right rhythm is what the human being must look for in the reception of sacraments.

[ 16 ] With this, not the entire human evolution is given, because the complete human evolution includes that we not only in a single moment stand in this swing between the soul-spiritual and the physical bodily nature, but the complete development includes that we also, in time, could swing back again. We need reminders of previous earthly incarnations and earthly experiences. You only need to look at psychopathology and you will see what it means for people when their normal true recollection is ruined, undermined, somehow erased. These recollections certainly develop early and only those things connected to these recollections, intimately felt completely within, getting to complete grasps with it, only really happens after puberty. This is the difference, which today's modern psychology doesn't consider, between for instance what is present in a child's life of recollections up to 15 and 16 years of age, that it is different to what comes later when memories are again gathered so that through the recollections gathered, the I is actually firmly consolidated. In brief, we see that this becomes more and more consolidated, this which we call life's recollections. It's one of our necessities; it evolves out of our being—as humans. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Life's recollections

[ 17 ] The corresponding process of involution is experienced in Christianity as the sacrament of repentance. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Repentance

[ 18 ] Here the recollections of life are permeated with Christ; the process of recollection being permeated with Christ, lifts it into the moral realm. Not only is the person's I consolidated, but he is—through his complete lifting of his recollections towards bringing them into account in moral terms, through the process of the sacrament and developed through ritual, by developing the process towards the sacrament and asserting it through ritual worship—he is lead to the involution process of repentance. This process in the Catholic Church comprises various stages which all clearly start with a recollection. Repentance in Catholicism exists in the examination of conscience, in repentance, in the serious intention to discard the mistakes of which one has become aware in oneself, in what confession is—we still have to discuss this—and the retribution one imposes on oneself or is imposed by on one of the pastors. Through these steps, complete repentance comes about, and it is the expression for what the process of involution is supposed to be with regard to the process of the totality of memory's evolution, this means, what makes up the power of recollection in the human being.

[ 19 ] Here we have created, my dear friends, processes involved in the evolution of the human being since birth, and then we have that which he now returns to in a natural way as an act of involution. We have a succession of evolutions. Through memory the sequence of evolution enters deeply into inner man. Memory therefore represents an internalisation of what has unfolded outwardly through birth. Here we come to the fifth of a naturally unfolding process of involution; we come to death, which concludes the life of the individual. (He writes on the blackboard.)

5. Death

[ 20 ] Earlier evolutionary processes we've always contrasted with sacramental action and processes of involution; however, the evolutionary processes have gradually become similar to processes of involution. The process of involution during repentance is in a certain way the outer unfolding of quite an inner decisive recollection process; it is the process of involution which is slowly approached by the process of evolution. We need, when we now want the sacramental action for this natural involutionary process of death, to introduce it in a somewhat cultic, ritualistic form, in which something of a spiritual side of nature's knowledge can be perceived, which serve to confront the dying person and manage to do something to the dying person which is simultaneously stimulated in his soul-spiritual life, stirred by the natural processes of his physical bodily being. It shall, expressed in a rhythm, let the physical-bodily aspect disappear upon death, and the soul-spiritual in turn take shape. For certain reasons, which we will still discuss, one can always see in oils, in everything oil-like, that something leads back to the soul-spiritual. In nature as well, oiling processes are regarded as processes of salvation. Therefore, the holy last anointment is performed here. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Last anointment

[ 21 ] We can add, so to speak, the process of evolution to that of involution. [ 22 ] Thus, we have exhausted the individual life of a human being, and there are still two human relationships left that are no longer of an individual nature. The one relationship is where the human being, standing here on earth in his physical bodily being, actually treasures a soul-spiritual relationship in heaven, so that the umbilical cord to his soul spiritual, which had been severed, so to speak, now again is reconnected to the soul-spiritual. This doesn't involve individual people; it involves the relationship of exchange with the heavenly-spiritual. This is something which is present in all people, albeit unconsciously. If we were to be completely severed from the soul-spiritual, we would never find our way back, it is a deep process of involution which is eternally present in us, quite a hidden process, even more hidden than what happens in the inner soul life when the organism passes through death; for this reason it is a process which in the course of individual lives of people do not become conscious at all. For this, an outer evolutionary process must be looked for and this evolutionary process is given in the ritual of priest ordination. As the sixth one, we have a process which is given out of itself, as I said - you could call it a connection—and corresponding as its counter impulse or the outer evolutionary process, in the priest ordination. (He writes on the blackboard.)

6. Reconnection: Priest ordination

[ 23 ] Now as the seventh one we have an image of the earthly relationship given as a relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily: this relationship is in nature's way given as the relationship between a man and a woman. For each true observation of the relationship between a man and a woman it is so, that the balance in the feminine swings more to the soul-spiritual side, and in the male, more to the physical-bodily nature. Yes, it is so. On earth, to a certain extent, the relationship is expressed between the human being and the spiritual world, and it is, I could say, that the woman has made one less step down into the physical life, than the man. One must say it actually differently, one must say: The descent into earthly life can be depicted by a definite boundary; the woman doesn't quite arrive at the boundary while the man crosses over it. This is actually the contrasting difference between a man and woman, expressed in a physical way. There is a certain boundary to reach, the woman doesn't quite manage it and the man crosses over it. Both bear a kind of imperfection within, between them a state of tension exists as a result. When this state of tension which exists naturally in a relationship between a man and woman, searches for a sacramental evolutionary value—this is a deeply hidden process of involution which we are pointing out here, when we indicate the manly and womanly—then we are given the sacrament of marriage. (He writes on the blackboard.)

7. Man and woman: marriage

[ 24 ] This is what has always been in Christian esotericism in relation to sacramentalism, in so far as it is to be applied to man, that man enters this world endowed with values partly through evolution, partly through values of involution, and to this must always be added, through the sacraments, the values of evolution to involution, and values of involution to evolution. Man equally speaks out of the foundation of his experience: the human being steps with his incomplete being fully into earthly existence; he or she must first be made into a complete being. He or she expresses their incompleteness at birth, in puberty, in incarnation, in memory and in death. To these things the human being, in order to live as complete physical-bodily-soul-spiritual beings, has to add, through sacramental ways, the baptism, confirmation, sacrament at the altar, repentance and last anointment.

With regard to the social sphere, man stands in an exceptional state of priesthood, where through outer signs done in a sacramental way, also in the priest ordination, the deeply hidden value of involution is present. In the healing of marriage, the sacrament should express how that which is only given in an incomplete value as involution in a man and a woman, is to be complemented by an external sacramental action.

[ 25 ] I ask you to take what I have initially presented to you not in a one-sided naturalistic way, otherwise you could of course say, it was all presented in a one-sided naturalistic way. If you grasp the outer natural world and the inner moral-religious world as one unit, then we always have a sacramental evolution value for an inner moral-religious value. By contrast, what we have as an expression of an outer form of evolution, is what we need to search for as a value of involution, that means, an internalisation in human beings of the outer evolution. For us it is really necessary to again accomplish the values of involution, through the sacraments.

My dear friends, why do moral and religious truths have so little power for modern man? They have little power because it is necessary that what come to man is not merely admonishment and a commandment, but that he becomes aware in this approach of an actual penetration with the Godhead taking place. This can take place in human consciousness only in sacramental actions.

[ 26 ] So, you have asked me to speak about these sacraments. The questions asked for, today, have largely not been answered, but they were spoken about as thoughts and experiences forming the foundations of what is sacramental. These fundamental experiences and fundamental thoughts as sacramental are alive no longer, basically no longer since the time—obviously, of course, with good reason—since the sacramental has become a subject of discussions. If today it can't be somehow intentional to take up all the sacraments outside the Catholic Church, then it must be considered how to again accomplish a real cult, a real ritual, because only these, as we will still see, actually can have a community building effect.

This is what I wanted to speak about as a foundation. We will go further into the questions which had been asked.

(Blackboard notes:)

1. Birth—Baptism
2. Adolescence—Confirmation
3. Incorporation—holy Communion
4. Life's recollections—Repentance
5. Death—Last anointment
6. Reconnection—Priest ordination
7. Man and Woman—marriage

If you look around in the somewhat more experienced economic literature, you will at least notice in many cases that a certain remark can be found somewhere among the authors, which goes something like this: the economist should not concern himself with how the people are educated or what is good for the people with regard to their needs. From another point of view, I have already pointed this out, he should leave that to the ethicist, the hygienist and so on.

If you take such a remark seriously, then it actually means nothing less than proof of the necessity for the threefold social organism. For what is being said? It is being said: If you think in terms of economics, nothing comes of it that could somehow aim at ethics, at hygiene, but what should aim at ethics, at hygiene, must come from another side.

If we now think of such a remark, which until today was actually only meant theoretically, exploited practically, it is said that it is necessary that economically real judged, that is, that the economy be designed so that only only those things that are purely economic, that disregard all ethics, all hygiene and so on, and that, alongside them, there are real administrations that are there for the ethical permeation, for the hygienic development of social life. These will lie in the free spiritual life.

And for you it will be an important pedagogical-didactic point of view to show that the foundations for this are present everywhere and that, if used in the right way, they lead to conclusions regarding the threefold social order. One can say that economists, if they really think economically, cannot think differently from the way it should be thought in the associative member of the social organism. But the things that are thought in this way do not remain in books; there are instances that also transfer them cleanly into reality.

I mention this today, when I want to point out more methodological things, precisely in a methodological way, to make you aware that wherever the threefold order is mentioned, one can start from things that people have already thought of somehow. Only today no one has the courage to draw the consequences from them. The essential thing for us is to draw the necessary consequences for social life.

Likewise, you will have to deal with other questions if you want to focus on social issues. If you familiarize yourself with the development of economic thought, you will find that a whole series of utopian ideas have emerged in recent times. We need only go back to the eighteenth century to find such utopian ideas, perhaps because the older ones are less relevant to the present day. But since the eighteenth century a whole series of social utopias have been conceived. Why did such utopias arise? This is important for you to know so that you can incorporate it into the overall attitude of your lectures.

You see, the following is available for intellectual life. Basically, it leads back to ancient wisdom and the customs associated with it. Take, for example, what we have in Europe today as a completely decadent intellectual life: on the one hand, Catholicism and, on the other, the highly filtered modern educational life, which is also still fed by ancient religious ideas; they are everywhere. You can follow them right into the materialistic parts of medicine; and they are in philology, these offshoots of theocratic or theological thinking. So if you consider how all modern thinking is thoroughly impregnated with this element that leads back to ancient wisdom, you will understand that in the whole way in which intellectual life, I should now say, administers itself - for it has already has become anarchic in that it has not been drawn into the tight fetters of state life, you will notice that the threads can also be seen in the administrations, which were in the constitution of the territories where ancient wisdom held sway. In the church you see it in the structure of the hierarchies. This leads back to the views of ancient wisdom. In jurisprudence, you may only see it in the struggle that is the struggle of materialism against spiritualism in the external life, in the struggle waged by lawyers and judges against the wearing of robes in court proceedings. In the robes you have the remnants of the old way of thinking; in the fight against the robes you have the modern materialistic way of thinking. And that has a much greater significance than one might think. And if you consider all the formal aspects of the doctoral degrees at some of our universities, you will easily be able to trace the threads back to the old theocratic element. In this respect we have something in it all that people have lost sight of, but which points back to the past, to the fact that people once knew how to manage spiritual life. Even if we no longer have this spiritual life in our present time, we have the forms in it; and I might add, we are even still stuck in them like discarded clothes. We need new forms everywhere. These will be found in the free spiritual life.

The other point is this. In England, for example, the political-democratic element developed out of the church-democratic element. This came about simply because the ecclesiastical background was stripped away and the democratic form of thinking was revealed. But in fact the political-legal element has gradually emerged everywhere from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element. It is just that it is no longer noticed so clearly in other places. For example, there is a secret connection between the entire system of civil servants, at the top of which one can imagine the absolute ruler “by the grace of God”, which latter reveals the origin from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element, because only the one who was appointed by spiritual authorities was “by the grace of God”. The entire body of civil servants is simply the ecclesiastical hierarchy that has become secularized. But the other side, which basically also developed out of the theocratic-ecclesiastical element, is the military. This is perceived as paradoxical by people today. But the military is only that which, like the shadow of an illuminated object, follows the whole organization of the state. And so, I might say, a certain way of handling the state has gradually emerged during the separation of the secular element from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element. This can be seen in all its details when we consider the transition of the forms of administration, as they were still clearly manifested in their theocratic-hierarchical form in those times when Charlemagne attached importance to being crowned by the Pope in Rome, how ecclesiastical life then passed over into the profane, how, as a latecomer to this transition, for example, the first state posts in France were filled by cardinals. If you consider this, you will be able to grasp everywhere the emergence of this modern political-legal element in the handling of the theocratic-ecclesiastical element and the independence of its administration. One could handle these things independently.

Now modern economic life is pushing its way into this, which has indeed produced instinctive practices, but so far not something that has been as internally permeated as the old hierarchical-ecclesiastical and state-militaristic elements. These two elements have brought the world to a tight uniform. By contrast, it was only in recent times that the urge arose to consciously penetrate what has become the predominant feature of modern life, namely the complex economic life, which in older times did not need to be thought about because it was drawn from inexhaustible sources. It is true that the necessity has arisen to find a certain way of handling economic life. But this way of handling has not yet been found.

And basically, the first attempt to bring something into economic life that can be paralleled to the state and the church element, is the associative principle. It is the first attempt to really found something organically in economic life. Because that has not happened before. And the most diverse theoretical attempts to develop a way of thinking, to organize economic life as such, these are the utopian theories, which were always infected by what had been inherited from the past. People still thought: If you organize, you have to organize in the same way as it is in the ecclesiastical-hierarchical or state element - after all, people were not aware of this.

And the practical expression of this in the outer world is the appearance of economic liberalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Why did this economic liberalism appear? What is it? It is an appeal to the efficiency of individual economic personalities. It was the same in the theocratic-hierarchical element. Before an organization could be found, it was necessary to appeal to the leading individuals. The same applied to the state element. Before passing over to a parliamentary system, it was necessary to appeal to those who had the ability to administer the affairs of the state. Economic liberalism is nothing more than this appeal to the individual efficiency of the personality in the economic field. It is only because things in the world have developed more rapidly that it has become necessary to find something that really paralyzes the harmful effects of the absolutist individual.

Surely you only need to study the constitution of the Catholic Church to see that in this Catholic Church, which simply preserves an ancient administration of spiritual life, you will find everywhere that the institutions and organizations are aimed at banishing the harmfulness of individuality. It is precisely through this that individuality can come into its own in a certain way.

I once attended a conversation in Vienna in which a professor at the Viennese theological faculty, who had somewhat liberal tendencies, but only indulged them in the most cautious way, complained that Rome was choking him completely and not allowing him to express anything from the lectern. It was discussed at length why, for example, in Innsbruck, where the same subject was taught by a Jesuit, he was allowed to express himself on the same topics in the freest manner. And those who were experienced in such matters said to themselves: Yes, it does not matter to the Catholic Church, for example, that exegesis is not also freely taught at the university, but rather that the individuals within it give an absolute assurance that, despite their liberal views, they are firmly within the organization, and of course the Jesuit is particularly good at achieving this, firmly within the organization. Then he is also allowed to take his special liberties. For the organization does not destroy individuality. It is not destroyed at all. The individual personality is free to a high degree in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Catholicism. But those who take things similar to Protestantism are choked, who take things so that they take dogmatics seriously; the Catholic only takes symbolism seriously. For them, there is always the danger of throwing off the robe. But that must not be. Within the church, anything can happen; outside the church, no one may place himself.

Of course, something like this cannot be imitated. But it can be cited as a characteristic example of what has been found on the other side: older times appeal to individuality, but have such an organization that individuality cannot be harmful. In the life of the state, the time has also passed when it was realized that these two sides must be present.

In economic life, it is a matter of finding the transition from economic liberalism to the principle of association. We are only in the middle of what needs to be done. This is what the world-historical moment actually reveals to us in this respect: the principle of association in economic life means nothing other than what must necessarily come about in the face of the degenerations of economic liberalism. And in modern times, precisely because thinking is inactive in a certain sense, people have not yet found the courage to move on to action, to move from liberalist thinking to active thinking. But the attempt has been made everywhere. If you pay attention, you can see some interesting experiences.

Recently I picked up the little economics book from the Göschenschen collection. It talks about economic liberalism and says: “It became necessary to move from an individualistic economic system to a kind of social economic system.” And so it was necessary to transfer more and more of the individualistically established to the state administrations: state socialism! So no trace of an understanding of the necessity of the association principle, but: state socialism! And in another part of this little book by Göschenen, which was also written by a fox, but not such a bad one, I found the following sentence: And the World War has shown us how right this way of thinking was; he means: to gradually transfer what individuals have achieved to the state. I said to myself: Now I have to turn to the title page. In which year is it still possible for a person to write that? I found: 1918! It was the last date when one could write this without being called a fool. [Interjection: Excuse me, Doctor: 1920! - Mr. Blume shows the latest edition]. It is questionable whether it is still in the latest edition. This is marked “reprint.” If it is still in there, it is because things would have remained in their folly even in 1920. Indeed! He did not feel the need to correct the matter after two years! They are not clever, these foxes. I opened to the title page, “1918,” and said: Could conditions still be such that one could believe that the transfer of what emerged from the old system as a world economy into a state economy or even into a city economy - I would like to remind you that the municipalities in particular are on the verge of ruin and will all collapse soon - was absolutely right?

What I am trying to suggest is that modern thinking has not yet found the real, correct transition from liberalist economics to associative economics.

Perhaps it will not be possible at all for anyone to grasp the associative principle correctly if they do not at the same time fully embrace the threefold social order. For in the unified state, what works properly in the threefold social organism will actually have a harmful effect. And this must be emphasized, at least in the nuance that you give to your lectures, that, for example, anyone who comes and says, “Yes, we want to leave spiritual life to the state. We don't want threefolding.” But twofolding – something similar was even proposed in the Weimar National Assembly – yes, but twofolding! It is possible to separate economic life! But it is not possible for the reason that a separated economic life, organized associatively, would in fact contain within the associations people who are completely dependent on the state and who have not grown out of the free spiritual life, and these people would then influence economic life in the state's interest. Thus the whole of economic life would take on the state mentality.

Likewise, we would never establish truly independent schools like the Waldorf School if we admitted that teachers were taken from state institutions, that the state license of the teachers would have to be taken along with the teachers. If one says that we could establish an independent school but could only achieve it if we found state-approved teachers, then that shows that one does not understand the matter. For that means nothing other than this, that one sticks to the old and just spruces it up in the modern sense, thus throwing dust in people's eyes. And the times are too serious for that. What should be advocated in terms of threefolding is what the real threefolding holds, even at the risk that the practical arrangements cannot be made immediately because of people's resistance. The most important thing today is to get the idea of threefolding into as many minds as possible. This is the quickest way to bring it into practical realization.

And now a few words about the method by which you cannot present the idea of threefolding without taking as a basis, in a tactful and didactically correct way, spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy. This can be clearly seen from the development of thinking in the social life of modern times.

There have been all kinds of utopian ideas, and the system that has become popular in the broadest sense among the proletarian population has developed: the Marxist system. Of course, this Marxist system has taken many forms. Revisionism on the one hand, Leninism on the other. This is a kind of radicalism that says: We know full well that Marxism does not solve the social question, but it works towards the radical destruction of everything that exists, and then another humanity will come along to rebuild it. But the Marxist system is at the root of all this. Karl Marx knew how to find his way into the souls of the modern proletarian world. And that is why it is also possible for the leaders of the proletarian world to influence the proletarian world with Marxist ideas. In a sense, it must even be said that this Marxism – not so much as it lived as a theory with Karl Marx, but rather as it lives in the views of the broadest proletarian masses – is, in terms of its form, the most modern social conception of life in terms of world view. The others, regardless of whether they are advocated by practitioners or university professors, are actually always somewhat backward.

Precisely because Marxism is the most modern form, it must also be sharply envisaged by those who now want something really radical. Today, one cannot simply speak to the masses without having a clear, at least intuitive, understanding of what Marxism means. The essential thing about it is that Marxism is the Weltanschhauung and outlook on life which best corresponds to the whole social situation of the modern proletarian. It is simply adapted to the whole social outlook on life of the modern proletarian. And if you fight Marxism purely theoretically, you are actually doing something that does not correspond to reality. They fight against Marxism without realizing that they have allowed the reality to develop in such a way that the modern proletarian has become what he is. This can be traced back to the carelessness of the rest of the population. But by allowing him to become what he has, he could do nothing but take Marxism as his world view and outlook on life. For this Marxism contains within itself, for the proletariat's conception, the threefold order of human social life. By becoming a Marxist, the worker has, from Marxism, his view of the threefold order of social life, which is appropriate for his class. That's what he has in there.

For you see, in modern times it has become more and more the custom to distract from consumption and its understanding and to look at mere acquisition. In doing so, one only had to let enough of this acquisition go so that the social organism could still be administered. One was only interested, whether aristocrat or bourgeois, in as much of the proceeds of the acquisition as one got and had to give up so that the whole thing could be held together at all. How did this work out for people who, through old privileges or other circumstances, were inside the real social organism? They tried to get as much as possible out of their earnings. They did not care about consumption and only grudgingly paid the taxes necessary for the cohesion of the whole. What did the modern proletarian do? He just stood at the machine and was outside of capitalism. He categorically refused to pay certain taxes if they were not knocked down. For he had no interest in the reality of the old social organism; he was only interested in what remained from the acquisition. Since he was not involved in the administration of capital, this only became the subject of a critique of what he calls surplus value. The proletarian's relationship to surplus value, criticizing it, is the same as the bourgeois's, when he grudgingly approves the taxes. By approving the tax, the bourgeois has not progressed to what lies behind it. The proletarian has not progressed either. But he has practiced critique. He has looked the surplus value in the eye and practiced critique. This shows, then, that the point is to add the positive to critique. That would, of course, be the associative principle. But it is in the theory of surplus value that which, within a worldview and conception of life, embodies the economic element for the proletarian.

The second thing that lives in Marxist theory, insofar as it is the proletarian's conception of life and worldview, is the class struggle, which, in his view, must be. That is the political and legal element. Through the class struggle, he wants to fight for his rights, he wants to organize labor, and so on. So the second area of social life is included. It is only the flip side of what it is like for the bourgeois and the aristocrats. They cannot get out of their class. They do not have the talent to go from the class-based to the general human. The worker does this consciously, but of course he takes his class with him. So in Marxism we also have what has developed in modern life as the political and legal element, which has not yet found the transition to the truly democratic element, which has not been carried out anywhere, but to which we must come, where, on the basis of the state-legal sphere of the social organism, all people who have come of age are equal before the law. That is more or less what the classes concerned have always meant until now. When, say, before the French Revolution, there was essentially an aristocratic element, this was quite democratic among itself, but below its class, the human being simply ceased to exist, he was no longer a human being in the fullest sense of the word. Then the bourgeoisie came along. That, too, was quite democratic among itself. But below that, the human being ceased to exist. What everything tends towards in modern times is general democracy. The one who stood outside the social organism, like the proletarian, constituted his own class against the others in the place of the general human, which can be defined in such a way that in all that is to be democratically parliamentarized, all people, whatever they may represent, all people who have come of age, face each other as equals. Thus, I would say, we also have in the class struggle that which we must characterize something like this: the proletarian knows that something completely different must come, he is modern in this respect, something must come that is quite different from what has existed so far. But he has not learned the general human. Therefore, he starts from his class instead of from the general human.

And within the Marxist philosophy and outlook on life, the proletarian also has a place for the spiritual. This is the materialistic view of history. In the materialistic age and in the whole education of the modern proletarian, who only comes into contact with the mechanism of life and not with the psyche and the spirit, this spiritual life quite naturally became the materialistic conception of history in the proletarian's view. But this represents the spiritual element in the world and in life.

So, in proletarian Marxism, you have the ultimate radical expression of what modern humanity actually wants and in which it does not know how to help itself. And you have to counter this with something that is just as well-founded as proletarian Marxism is for the proletariat. What is the essence of this proletarian Marxism as a worldview? The essence of proletarian Marxism as a worldview is disbelief in man.

This disbelief in man was justified in the times of the original wisdom of mankind, for then it was divine powers that sat within the human being and guided him. People knew they were dependent on what they unconsciously recognized from the depths of their souls as the revelations of the gods as guiding forces for life. Then there was disbelief in man and faith in the gods. When the state-administrative and the official-military elements had been separated out from the old theocratic-ecclesiastical element, this unbelief in man still existed. For then arose the belief that man as such cannot direct the destinies after all, the state must do that. The state became an idol, a fetish. And this led man, who was now harnessed into the state system, to disbelief in man, to belief in the external fetish. Of course, as soon as God comes down, he becomes more and more of a fetish. Proletarian Marxism is the third and final stage of disbelief in man. For the proletarian says to himself in his materialistic philosophy of history: it is not man who directs fate, but “the forces of production” that direct him. We stand there powerless as human beings with our ideology. The course of history is determined by the course of the production processes. And what human beings are within these forces of production is only the result of the forces of production themselves. Disbelief in man and real belief in the tangible fetish! There is no fundamental difference between the African savage, who has reached decadence in a different way, worshipping an external block of wood, making it into a fetish, or the European proletarian, who regards the means and processes of production as directing history. In principle, there is no difference in logic; it is our magic superstition! And we must look at this sufficiently. In various ways, people have come into decadence. In Africa, there was also an original wisdom. Then it deteriorated in administration; we see this in Egypt. Then it decays. Fetishism is not what stands at the starting point, but what occurs in decadence. At the starting point, pure belief in the gods is everywhere, and only in the decline does fetishism arise. Within the civilized areas, instead of worshipping external wooden blocks, the “forces of production” were worshipped. The prayers were, of course, also arranged differently. But “the forces of production” and “production processes” were made into idols. It is the last phase of unbelief in man, the phase of economically superstitious thinking. There is no difference in principle between an African savage who goes to his idol with a magic spell and a modern proletarian gathering to thrash out Marxist phrases. The prayer sounds different, but one must be clear about what the inner essence of the matter is.

This must be contrasted with what is now not unbelief in man, but faith in man. And ultimately it is essential that faith in man be found, the faith that the directing forces for life reveal themselves within man. Man must come to himself, to full self-awareness. He must find the possibility to say to himself: All externals are superstition. Only the directing forces within oneself are to intervene in life!

But for this, courage is needed to go beyond mere passive prayer and to have an active prayer in the grasp of the divine in the will. This transition to active prayer, to inner activity in general, this transition from disbelief in humanity to faith in humanity, is what must be present in your hearts and souls as enthusiasm. You must feel that you are at the turning point in history, where people must be led from disbelief in humanity to faith in humanity.

You don't need to tell people, but you must go on the podiums with this awareness, with the awareness that you have to teach humanity that the guiding forces of life must be actively grasped within, that life in the future must be organized in such a way that people say to themselves: I must be the one to do things.

It was the last superstition of civilization that people did not have faith in themselves, but that they had faith in “the forces of production” arranging life. And from this superstition arose the terrible worship of the rear in the East, where an attempt was made to imbue with willpower that which is not determined by willpower. The personality that ideally unites two unrelated things, inner passivity in conviction and activity in action, whereby one destroys the other, is Lenin. Lenin is the personality that most purely crystallizes in new times that which comes from ancient times. He most purely crystallizes what the real impossibility, the real destructive urge, the real ruinous urge has become.

What leads to construction, what leads to the re-imbibition of real life forces into social life, is, if we can find the possibility, to create in man out of disbelief in man, belief in man, a belief that ultimately expresses itself as follows: Whatever I experience as luck or misfortune, or as social institution, or as something in the outer life, I myself will make!

You cannot instill this in people without at the same time steeling them with your words. You have to bring people to have confidence, to have faith in their own being. And that is what you must strive for, at least in your heart. How you do it may depend on your abilities today. But if you devote yourself to the matter with good will, it will soon no longer depend on these abilities, but the necessity of the time will take hold of your abilities. And you will rise above yourself precisely in bringing this belief to people, so that in the place of unbelief in people, faith in people must come.

That is what I wanted to say to you before you go out to give your lectures. Feel the strength that can lie in saying to yourself: I have to bring about the conviction that the last doubt and disbelief in man in relation to man will be transformed into faith in man, into the inner activity of the human being! Because this is what matters when striving for real progress. Everything else will only lead to the propagation of that which is decadent. Do not uphold what is destructive, but rather apply Nietzsche's words to me: Let it still be pushed so that it perishes more quickly! But love what is not of yesterday and today, but what is of tomorrow!

I want you, my dear friends, to go out as people of tomorrow and to shape your words in the coming weeks from the consciousness of the people of tomorrow.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Are there any questions?

Written question: Mars is near the earth. What effect does that have upon the earth? What is known about Mars?

Dr. Steiner: There has been a great deal of talk recently about the nearness of Mars to the earth, and the newspapers have made utterly futile statements without even a rudimentary understanding of what this means. We must not attach prime importance to these external circumstances in the planetary constellations due to the relative positions of earth and sun, because the influences arising from them do not really amount to very much. It is interesting that there has been all this talk about the proximity of Mars, because every planet, including the moon, is constantly coming nearer to the earth, and the planets are undergoing a process that will finally end in all of them uniting again with the earth, forming a single body.

Of course, if it is imagined, as most people imagine today, that the planets are solid bodies just like the earth, the expectation could well be that if they were to unite with the earth, this would mean the end of all life on our globe! But no such thing will happen, because the degrees of density of the various planets are not the same as that of the earth. If Mars, for instance, were actually to come down and unite with the earth, it would not be able to lay waste the land but only to inundate it. For as far as investigation is possible—it can never be done with physical instruments but only through spiritual science, spiritual vision—Mars consists primarily of a more or less fluid mass, not as fluid as our water but, shall we say, more like the consistency of jelly, or something of that kind. There are also dense components, but they are not as densely solid as those of our earth. Their consistency would be more comparable to that of the antlers or horns of our animals, which form out of the general mass and dissolve back into it again. So we must realize that the constitution of Mars is entirely different from that of our earth.

Now a great deal is said about “canals” existing on Mars. But why “canals”? There is nothing to be seen except lines, and these are called canals.¹⁸ In one sense that is correct, but in another, incorrect. As Mars is not solid to the degree that the earth is solid, one cannot, of course, speak of canals as we know them on the earth. But it can be said that on Mars there is something rather similar to our trade winds. You know that the warm air from the Torrid Zone of the earth, from Africa, streams toward the cold North Pole, and the air from the cold North Pole streams back toward the central region of the earth. So that if looked at from outside, such lines would indeed be seen, but they are the lines of the trade winds, of the air currents in the trade winds. There is something rather similar on Mars. Only everything on Mars is much more full of life than on the earth. The earth is a dead planet in a far stronger sense than Mars, on which everything is still more or less living.

I want to mention something that can help you to understand the character of Mars' relation to the earth. We know that the sun, to us the most important of all the heavenly bodies, is the sustainer of a very great deal on the earth. Think of the sun as we know it from day to day. At night you see the plants drawing in their blossoms because the sun is not shining on them. By day they open again to be irradiated by the sun. Very many things depend upon the spread of sunlight over one part of the earth and the spread of darkness over another part when the sun is not there. But if you think of a whole year, you could not conceive of the plants growing in the spring if the sun's power did not return. Again, when the sun loses power in the autumn, the plants fade away, all life dies and snow falls.

Quite obviously, life on the earth is connected with the sun. Indeed, we humans would be unable to breathe the air around us if the sun were not there, if the rays of the sun did not make the air suitable for us to breathe. The sun is undeniably the most important heavenly body for us. Just think what a different story it would be if the sun were not-as it appears-to go around the earth every twenty-four hours but instead took twice that time! All life would be slower. So all life on earth depends upon the revolution of the sun around the earth. In reality, of course, the sun does not revolve around the earth, but that is how it appears.

The influence of the moon is of less significance for man, but nevertheless it is there. When you remember that the tides ebb and flow according to the moon, that they have the same rhythm as the moon's revolution, you will realize with what kind of power the moon works upon the earth. And then it will also be clear that the time of the moon's rotation around the earth has a definite significance. If you were to investigate how the plants develop when the sun has shone upon them, you would also find evidence of the influence of the moon. Thus the sun and the moon have a tremendous influence upon the earth. We can recognize the lunar influence from the time of the rotation, that is, from the time it takes for the moon to become full moon, new moon, and so on. We can recognize the influence of the sun from its rising and setting, or from the fact that it acquires its power in the spring and loses it in the autumn.

And now let me tell you something. You all know of the existence of the grubs of cockchafers. These little worm-like creatures are particularly harmful when they eat up our potatoes. There are years when the potatoes are unharmed by these troublesome little maggots, and then there are years when simply nothing can be done because the grubs are everywhere at work. Well now, suppose there has been a year when the grubs have eaten nearly all the potatoes—if you wait now for four years, the cockchafers will be there in great numbers, because it takes them four years to develop from the grubs. There is a period of approximately four years between the appearance of the grubs—which, like all insects, first have a maggot form before becoming a chrysalis—and the fully developed insect. The grub needs four years to develop into the cockchafer. Naturally, there are always cockchafers, but if there are only a few grubs some year, four years after that there will only be a few cockchafers. The number of cockchafers depends upon the number of grubs that were present four years earlier.

We can see quite clearly that this period of time is connected with the rotation of Mars. The course of propagation of certain insects shows us the kind of influence that Mars exercises upon the life of the earth. But the influence is rather hidden. The influence of the sun is quite obvious, that of the moon not obvious to the same extent, and the influence of Mars is hidden. Everything for which intervals of years are needed on the earth—as in the case of grubs and cockchafers—is dependent upon Mars. So there you see a significant effect of Mars.

Of course someone may say that he doesn't believe this. Well, gentlemen, we ourselves can't possibly make all the experiments, but anyone who doesn't believe what I've said should do the following: he should take the grubs he has collected in a year when they are very numerous and force their development artificially in some container. Within the same year he will find that the majority of them do not develop into cockchafers. Such experiments are never made because these things are not believed.

However, we come now to the essential point. The sun has the most powerful influence of all. But it exerts its greatest influence upon everything on the earth that is dead, that must be called to new life every year—while the moon influences only what is living. Mars exerts its influence only upon what exists in a more delicate form of life, in the sentient realm. The other planets have their influence upon what is of the nature of soul and spirit. The sun, then, is the heavenly body that works the most strongly; it works into the very minerals of the earth. In the minerals the moon can do nothing—nor Mars. If the moon were not there, no animal creature could live and move about on the earth; there could only be plants on the earth, no animals. Again, there are many animal creatures that could not have intervals of years between the larva-stage and the insect if Mars were not there. You see how closely all things are connected.

For instance, we might ask ourselves: When do we human beings become fully grown? When do we stop in the process of our development? Obviously very early, at the age of about twenty or twenty-one. And yet even then something continues to be added. Most people do not actually grow any more, but something is added inwardly. Until about our thirtieth year we do really “increase”; but then, for the first time, we begin to “decrease”. If we compare this with happenings in the universe, we get the time of the rotation of Saturn.

So the planets exercise their influence upon the more delicate conditions of growth and of life. Hence we can say: When, like all the planets, Mars comes near the earth, we must not attach primary importance to this outer nearness.

What is of far greater importance is how things in the universe are connected with the finer, more delicate states and conditions of life.

You must remember that the constitution of Mars is quite different from that of the earth. As I said, Mars is not densely solid in the sense in which today the earth is solid, But I described to you quite recently how the earth too was once in a condition when mineral, solid matter took shape for the first time, how there were then gigantic animals which, however, had as yet no solid bones. Mars today is in a condition similar to that of the earth in that earlier epoch and therefore also has upon it those living beings, those animal beings which the earth had upon it at that time. And “human beings” on Mars are as they were on the earth at that time—still without bones. I described this to you when I was speaking of an earlier period of the earth. These things can be known. They cannot become known by the means employed in modern science for acquiring knowledge; nevertheless it is possible to know these things. If, then, you want to have an idea of what Mars is like today, picture to yourselves what the earth was like in a much earlier age: then you will have a picture of Mars.

You know that on the earth today, the trade winds blow from the south to the north, from the north to the south. These streamings were once much denser than the air; they were currents of fluid, watery air: so it is on Mars today. The air currents on Mars are much more full of life, much more watery.

Jupiter consists almost entirely of air, but again somewhat denser than the air of the earth. Jupiter today represents a condition toward which the earth is now striving, which it will attain only in the future.

And so in the planetary system we find certain states or conditions through which the earth also passes. When we understand the planets in this sense, we understand them rightly.

Has anyone something else to ask about this subject? Perhaps Herr Burle himself?

Herr Burle: I am quite satisfied, thank you!

Question: In one of your last lectures you said that the scents of flowers are related to the planets. Does this also apply to the colors of flowers and colors of stones?

Dr. Steiner: I will repeat very briefly what I said. It was also in answer to a question that had been asked. I said that flowers, and also other substances of the earth, have scent—something in them that exercises a corresponding influence upon man's organ of smell. I said that this is connected with the planets, that the plants and, similarly, certain substances, are “big noses,” noses that perceive the effects coming from the planets. The planets have an influence upon life in its finer, more delicate forms-here, once again, we must think of the finer forms of life. And it can be said that the plants really do come into being out of the scent of the universe, but this scent is so rarefied, so delicate, that we human beings with our coarse noses do not smell it.

But I reminded you that there can be a sense of smell quite different from that possessed by man. You need think only of police dogs. A thief has stolen something and the police dog is taken to the spot where the theft has been committed; it is conveyed to him in some way that a thief has been there and he picks up the scent; then he leads the police on the trail and the thief is often found. Police dogs are used in this way. All kinds of interesting things would come to light if one were to study how scents that are quite imperceptible to a human being are perceptible to a dog.

People have not always realized that dogs have such keen noses. If they had, dogs would have been used earlier to assist the police. It is only rather recently that this has been discovered. Likewise, people today still have no conception of what indescribably delicate noses are possessed by the plants. As a matter of fact, the entire plant is a nose; it takes in the scent of the universe, and if its structure is such that it gives back this cosmic aroma in the way that an echo gives back a sound, it becomes a fragrant plant. So we can say: The scents of flowers, of plants in general, and also other scents on the earth, do indeed relate to the planetary system.

It has been asked whether this also applies to the colors of plants and flowers. As I said, the plant takes shape out of the aroma of the universe and throughout the year it is exposed to the sun. While the form of the plant is shaped by the planets out of the cosmic fragrance, its color is due to the sun and also to some extent to the moon. The scent and the color of plants do not, therefore, come from the same source; the scent comes from the planets, the color from the sun and moon. Things don't always have to come from the same source; just as one has a father and a mother, so the plant has its scent from the planets and its colors from the sun and moon.

You can see from the following that the colors of plants are connected with the sun and moon. If you take plants that have beautiful green leaves and put them in the cellar, they become white, they lose every trace of color because the sun has not been shining on them. They retain their structure, their form, because the cosmic fragrance penetrates everywhere, but they don't keep their color because no sunlight is reaching them. The colors of the plants, therefore, undeniably come from the sun and, as I have said, also from the moon, only this is more difficult to determine. Experiments would have to be made and could be made, by exposing plants in various ways to moonlight; then one would certainly discover it.

Does anyone else want to say something?

Herr Burle: I would like to expand the question by asking about the colors of stones.

Dr. Steiner: With stones and minerals it is like this. If you picture to yourself that the sun has a definite influence upon the plants every day, and also during the course of a year, then you find that the yearly effects of the sun are different from its daily effects. The daily effects of the sun do not bring about much change in the color of the plants; but its yearly influence does affect their color.

However, the sun has not only daily and yearly effects; it has other, quite different effects as well. I spoke to you about this some time ago, but I will mention it again.

Imagine the earth here. The sun rises at a certain point in the heavens, let us say in the spring, on the twenty-first of March. If in the present epoch we look at the point in the heavens where the sun rises on the twenty-first of March, we find behind the sun the constellation of the Fishes (Pisces). The sun has been rising in this particular constellation for hundreds of years, but always at a different point. The point at which the sun rises on the twenty-first of March is different every year. A year ago the sun rose at a point a little farther back, and still farther back the year before that. Going back through a few centuries we find that the point at which the sun rose in spring was still in the same constellation, but if we go back as far as the year 1200 AD. we find that the sun rose in the constellation of the Ram (Aries). Again for a long time it rose in spring in the constellation of the Ram. Still earlier, however, let us say in the epoch of ancient Egypt, the sun rose in the constellation of the Bull (Taurus); and earlier than that in the constellation of the Twins (Gemini), and so on. So we can say that the point at which the sun rises in spring is changing all the time.

This indicates, as you can see, that the sun itself moves its position in the universe; I say it moves its position—but only apparently so, for in reality it is the earth that moves its position. That, however, does not concern us at the moment. In a period of 25,915 years, the point at which the sun rises in spring moves the whole way around the zodiac. In the present year—1924—the sun rises at a certain point in the heavens. 25,915 years ago, that is to say, 23,991 years before the birth of Christ (25,915 minus 1924) the sun rose at the same point! Since then it has made one complete circuit. The sun has a daily circuit, a yearly circuit, and a circuit that takes it 25,915 years to complete. Thus we have a sun-day, a sun-year and a great cosmic year consisting of 25,915 years.

That is very interesting, is it not? And the number 25,915 is itself very interesting! If you think of the breath and remember that a man draws approximately 18 breaths a minute, you can reckon how many breaths he draws in a day. Eighteen breaths a minute, 60 x 18 in an hour = 1,080 breaths. How many breaths, then, does he draw in a day, that is to say, in 24 hours? Twenty-four times 1,080 = 25,920, which is approximately the same as this number 25,915! In a day, man breathes as many times as the sun needs years to make its circuit of the universe. These correspondences are very remarkable.

Now why am I telling you all this? You see, to give color to a plant, the sun needs a year; to give color to a stone, the sun needs 25,915 years. The stone is a much harder fellow. To bestow color on a plant the sun makes a circuit lasting one year. But there is also a circuit which the sun needs 25,915 years to complete. And not until this great circuit has been completed is the sun able to give color to the stones. But at any rate it is always the sun that gives the color. You will realize from this how widely removed the mineral kingdom is from the plant kingdom. If the sun did not move around yearly in the way it does, if it only made daily circuits as well as the great circuit of 25,915 years, then there would be no plants, and instead of cabbage you would be obliged to eat silica—and the human stomach would have to adjust itself accordingly!

Question: Do the herbs that grow on mountains have greater healing properties than those that grow in valleys? If so, what is the explanation?

Dr. Steiner: It is an actual fact that mountain-plants are more valuable as remedies than those that grow in valleys, particularly than those we plant in our ordinary gardens or in a field. It is a good thing that this is the case, for if the plants growing in the valleys were just like those on the mountains, every foodstuff would at the same time be a medicine, and that would not do at all! The plants that have the greatest therapeutic value are indeed those that grow on the mountains. Why is this? All you need to do is to compare the kind of soil in which mountain-plants grow with that in which valley-plants grow.

It is a very different thing if plants grow wild, in uncultivated soil, or are artificially cultivated in a garden. Think of strawberries! Wild strawberries from the woods are tiny but very aromatic; garden strawberries have less scent, are less sharp in taste, but they can grow to an enormous size—why, there are cultivated strawberries as large as eggs! How is this to be accounted for? It is because the soil in the low-lying ground of valleys is not so full of stones that have crumbled away from the rock of the mountains. It is on mountains that really hard stone is to be found—the real mineral. Down in the valleys you find soil that has already been saturated and carried down by the rivers and is therefore completely pulverized. On the mountains there is also, of course, pulverized soil, but it is invariably permeated with tiny granules, especially, shall we say, of quartz, feldspar, and so on. Everywhere there are substances which can be used for healing. Very, very much can be achieved if, for example, we grind down quartz (silica) and make a remedy of it. We are then using these minerals directly as remedies.

The soil in low-lying valleys no longer contains these little stones. But on the mountains the stones are all the time crumbling from the rocks, and the plants draw into their sap the tiny particles of these stones, and that makes them into remedial plants.

Now the following is interesting. The so-called homeopaths—they're not right about everything, but they're right about a good many things—these homeopaths take substances and by grinding them finer and finer, obtain medical remedies. If the substance were used in its crude state it would not be a remedy. But you see, the plants themselves are the most precious homeopaths of all, for they absorb tiny, minute particles from all these stones, which otherwise would have to be refined and pulverized when a medicine is being prepared. So because nature does this far better than we could, we can take the plants themselves and use them directly for healing purposes. And it is a fact that the plants and herbs growing on mountains have far greater healing properties than those in the valleys.

You know, too, how the whole appearance of a plant changes. I spoke about the strawberry: the wild strawberry absorbs a large quantity of a certain mineral. Where does the wild strawberry thrive best? Where there are minerals that contain a little iron. This iron penetrates the soil and from that the strawberry gets its fragrant smell. Certain people whose blood is very sensitive get a rash when they eat strawberries. This is due to the fact that their blood in its ordinary state has sufficient iron and it is getting too much when they eat strawberries. If, then, some people with normal blood get a rash from eating strawberries, one can certainly advise someone whose blood is poor, to eat them! In this way their remedial value is gradually discovered. As a rule, the soil in gardens where the giant strawberries are growing contains no iron; there the strawberries propagate themselves without any impetus from iron. But people are rather short-sighted in this connection and don't follow things up for a sufficiently long time. It is a fact that by growing strawberries in soil that doesn't contain much iron, one can get huge berries, for the reason that the plants do not become fully solid. For think of it—if the strawberry has to get hold of every tiny bit of iron there may be in the soil, then it must have plenty of leeway! But that is a characteristic of the strawberry.

Suppose you look at soil. It contains very minute traces of iron. The strawberry growing in the soil draws these traces of iron to itself from a long way off, for its root has a strong force and attracts the iron from some distance away. Now take a wild strawberry from the woods. It contains a very strong force. Put this strawberry into a garden: there is no iron in the soil, but the strawberry has acquired this tremendous force already, it has it within itself. It draws to itself everything it possibly can, in the garden cultivation too, from a long way away, and nourishes itself exceedingly well. In a garden it does not get iron, but it draws everything else to itself because it is well able to do so. And so it becomes very large.

However, as I have said, people are very short-sighted; they do not observe things thoroughly. So they do not notice that although with garden cultivation they can produce huge strawberries for a number of years, this will only last for a certain time. The fertility then dies away, and they must bring in new strawberry plants from the woods. Fertility cannot be promoted entirely by artificial means; there must be knowledge of things that are directly connected with Nature herself

The rose is the best illustration of this. If you go out into the countryside you will see the wild rose, the dog rose, as it is called, Rosa canina. You know it, I'm sure. This wild rose has five rather pale petals. Why is it that it has this form, produces only five petals, remains so small and at once produces this tiny fruit? These reddish rose hips—you know them—develop from the wild rose. Well, this is due to the fact that the soil where the rose grows wild contains a certain kind of oil—just as the soil of the earth in general contains different oils in its minerals. We get oils out of the earth or out of the plants which have themselves absorbed them from the earth. Now the rose, when it is growing wild out there in the country, must work far and wide with its roots in order to collect from the minerals the tiny amount of oil it needs in order to become a rose. Why is it that the rose must stretch out so far, must extend the drawing power contained in its root to such a distance? The reason is that there is very little humus in the country soil where the rose grows wild. Humus is more oily than the soil of the countryside. Now the rose has a tremendous power for drawing oil to itself.

When the rose is near soil which contains humus, this is fortunate for it; it draws a great deal of oil to itself and develops not only five petals but a whole mass of petals, becoming the luxuriantly-petalled garden rose. But it no longer develops real rosehips because that would need what is contained in the stony soil out in the country. So we can make the wild rose into the ornamental garden rose when we transplant it into soil that is richer in humus, where it can easily get the oils from which to produce its many petals. This is the opposite of what happens with the strawberry: it is difficult for the strawberry to find in the garden what it finds out in the woods. The rose finds a great deal in the garden that is scarce along the roads and so it develops luxuriant petals; but then in fruit formation it remains behind.

So when we know what a particular soil contains, we know what will grow on it. Naturally, this is tremendously important for plant cultivation, especially for the plants needed in agriculture. For there, through manure and the substances added as fertilizers, the soil must be restored so that it will produce what is required. Knowledge of the soil is of enormous importance to the farmer. These things have been more or less forgotten. Simple country farmers used to apply the proper manure by instinct. But nowadays in large-scale agriculture not much attention is paid to the matter. The consequence is that in the course of the last decades nearly all our foodstuffs have greatly deteriorated in quality from what they were when those of us who are now elderly were children.

Earlier this year there was an interesting agricultural conference at which farmers expressed their deep concern for what will become of the plants, of the foodstuffs, if this tendency continues. And indeed, gentlemen, it will continue! In the coming century foodstuffs will become quite unusable if a certain knowledge of the soil is not regained.

We have made a beginning with agriculture in the domain of anthroposophical spiritual science. Recently I gave a course of lectures on agriculture near Breslau,¹⁹ and an association has been formed that will take up this work. And we too have done something here to help the situation. We are only at the very beginning but the problem is being tackled. Thus anthroposophy will gradually penetrate into practical life.

There are still some sessions to make up, so let us meet again next Friday.²⁰

• 18. See Rudolf Steiner, Occult History, Lecture V: “... so-called canals on Mars. There it is a matter of certain streams of force which correspond to an earlier stage of the earth ...”
• 19. At Koberwitz, June 7–16, 1924. See Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture.
• 20. This lecture was postponed to Saturday, Sept. 13

Today we would like to share some information with you about our friend Christian Morgenstern, who passed away recently. First, I will speak about Christian Morgenstern's career as it developed before he joined our society as a member; then Ms. von Sivers will recite some of his poems from this pre-Theosophical period. After the recital of these poems, I will then take the liberty of speaking to you, so to speak, about Christian Morgenstern's time as a member of the Anthroposophical Society, and Ms. von Sivers will essentially recite poems by Christian Morgenstern from his Anthroposophical period, which will be presented to the public in a forthcoming collection of poems by our friend.

Not only can we talk about Christian Morgenstern as a loyal, dear and energetic member of our society and our intellectual movement, we can also talk about Christian Morgenstern in this branch for the simple reason that he was connected to it in the sense that the chairman and leader of this branch, Dr. Ludwig Noll, was a friend and doctor to him in a loyal, friendly, devoted manner for many years.

In 1909, I received an objectively amiable and modest letter from Christian Morgenstern, in which he applied for membership of our society, the society in which he then expressed that he hoped to find that which had been working in his soul throughout his life in terms of feeling and emotion, and which had always formed the basic tone and nuance of a large part of his poetic work. And it is fair to say that when we consider the overall mood of Christian Morgenstern's soul, we see that hardly any other member of our world in 1909 could have connected with us more fully, more wholeheartedly, than Christian Morgenstern.

Christian Morgenstern has found his way into this incarnation on Earth so that one can literally see from the way he found his way how this soul strove from spiritual heights to find the kind of embodiment that was appropriate for this particular individuality. One would like to recognize in Christian Morgenstern a soul that could not fully decide to find its way into the directly materialistic life of the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, a soul of which one would like to say that it imposed a certain reserve on itself at the time of embodiment, as it were, to remain behind in the spiritual world with certain powers and to look at the world of the earth, always imbued with that point of view that arises when one is half rooted in the spiritual world. So Christian Morgenstern could hardly find a more suitable succession of generations here on this earth than that of his painting ancestors. His father was a painter and came, in turn, from a family of painters. The family was accustomed to viewing what the Earth's orbit offers from the standpoint of the spiritualized artist, and they loved all the beauties of nature and everything that human life produces as its blossoms, even if the foundations are materialistic. And so Christian Morgenstern was placed, as it were, in a hereditary substance, through which a certain relationship to nature developed in him, since he came from a family of landscape painters. Thus, what I would call the relationship to nature was placed in him, which was particularly strengthened by the fact that he was allowed to travel with his parents as a small child. And so we see Christian Morgenstern growing up, and the poetic urge awakening in him early on. We see him developing this poetic urge to such an extent that he, I would say, withdraws with his soul life to a lonely island and looks at everything around him from the perspective of this lonely island. Then verses flow from this poetic soul, tender verses that seem to be born out of the soul itself, which still rests half in the spiritual, and other verses that easily show, when one looks into such a soul, that they must also flow from the same soul; other verses that have absorbed all the disharmony that one encounters when one looks at the external life of our present time. Thus, in addition to the poems that rise up in the mood of prayer, there have also arisen poems that the outer world knows almost only from Christian Morgenstern: those sarcastic, ironic, humoristic poems that such a soul must breathe out, just as the physical lungs must breathe out carbonated air in addition to inhaling pure air. Thus, in this twofold breathing process of the spiritual life, such a soul had to rise, as it were, in prayer to the most sublime wisdoms and beauties of existence in the world, while on the other hand it had to look at the unnaturalness, the discrepancies, the disharmony in the world around it, which struck such a spiritual soul so powerfully that she can do nothing but rise above this discrepancy with a light, fleeting humor.

Christian Morgenstern will be one of those artists by whom it will be recognized how intimately connected the prayerful moment on the one hand and the slightly humorous on the other are, especially in the spiritually attuned soul. Indeed, through this prayer-like quality, which elevates his poetry to the point of being prayer-like in mood, Christian Morgenstern was predestined to ultimately connect his life's journey with the life's journey of our spiritual movement. This prayer-like mood in all its scope and meaning is already evident in the poems from his earliest youth. Christian Morgenstern's prayer-like mood is threefold in its structure towards the world.

What soul can pray? One might be inclined to ask, and this is often the case with Christian Morgenstern's soul. And so he feels the answer to this question of the soul: that soul can pray which is capable of letting the greatness, the sublimity, the divine spirituality of the universe have such an effect on it that the mood of saying yes to this greatness, this sublimity, this fullness of wisdom escapes it. And that then, from this saying yes to the lofty phenomena of the world, the second link is added in the soul, which can be called: to merge with one's own soul in the universe, to submerge oneself in the greatness and beauty and wisdom of existence. — The third link is added, which Christian Morgenstern felt when he brought the idea before his soul: to be blessed by the greatness, sublimity and wisdom and the love content of the universe! - To be able to say yes, to be able to merge into the universe, to feel blessed as an individual soul by the wisdom, beauty and love content of the universe: that is the mood that Christian Morgenstern as a poet already knew how to breathe into many of his earlier poems.

He was sixteen years old when his contemplative mind was confronted with the question that has occupied us so thoroughly in our spiritual movement: the great question of the repeated lives of the human soul. He relentlessly struggled for clarity in this area.

When he was twenty-one years old, all that emerged from Nietzsche, the great questioner, from the personality that so tragically and yet fruitlessly wrestled with all the riddles that confronted man in the last third of the nineteenth century if he really took life and time seriously. Christian Morgenstern himself says that he felt a passionate love for Nietzsche's struggle for many years. Then he came across another mind, a mind of which he speaks the beautiful words: “The year 1901 saw me through the ‘German Writings’ of Paul de Lagarde. He appeared to me... as the second most influential German of the last decades, which was also true in that his entire nation had gone its way without him.” Now Christian Morgenstern immersed himself in Lagarde's ‘German Writings,’ those writings that are not written in Nietzschean style. One would like to say that they are not written in the manner that turns away from life in order to somehow gain a standpoint outside of life and to observe life from there, but Christian Morgenstern also found the other side, which is embodied in Paul de Lagarde: the side that directly engages with life. Lagarde is a mind that, with a keenly penetrating soul, comprehended everything that struggles in the present for reform, for transformation, in order to restore health to this life. And the thoughts that Lagarde, out of his erudition and deep experience of life, tried to shape in order to help the life of the German spirit are endlessly ramified. This has an effect on minds like Christian Morgenstern's, who in their loneliness feel alone with minds like Nietzsche and Lagarde. Nietzsche has since become popular, Lagarde has not yet become popular, but Christian Morgenstern felt a shared loneliness with this mind. So we can understand that when yet another mood was added to his loneliness, Christian Morgenstern found strange words for what he longed for in his future and the future of those with whom his soul felt a kinship in this incarnation.

The uniqueness of his soul then led Christian Morgenstern to immerse himself in the great Nordic mystery-seekers. He became acquainted with Ibsen, the mystery-seeker; he translated “Peer Gynt” and “Brand” and felt so intimately connected in his soul to the great mystery-seeker of the North.

But he also felt elevated above what directly surrounded him in German culture. It is truly permissible to discuss such things on anthroposophical ground and to assume that the dear listeners will set aside all one-sided political or patriotic sentiment and feel transported into a higher sphere when one points to words in which Christian Morgenstern foresaw what he foresaw for his future and the future of those he loved, even though he felt isolated from them. That is why the words that Christian Morgenstern wrote six years later, in 1907, after he had met Paul de Lagarde and a few years after he had immersed himself in Ibsen and translated some of his works, in 1907, have such a profound effect:

I want to be buried in Niblum,
on the edge between marsh and geest.

I want to rest in Niblum
“from all of the present.
And there, on my stone house, write for me
only the name and: “Lest Lagarde!”
Yes, just the two things small and large:
This request and then just my name.
Only the name and: “Lest Lagarde!”

The islet of the motherland there, no,
I will not disdain that.
Why not let the North Sea take me home there soon
with steep, tumbling seas
the mother sea, the mother flood...
oh how good it will be to rest down there,
far away from German events!

That was the soul, which then gradually grew, grew into that mood that overcame him at the time, when he was thirty-five years old, where he felt within himself: man and nature are of the same spirit.

Then came an evening, as though arranged by karma, one would say, when the Gospel of St. John lay before this soul. A new mood came over Christian Morgenstern, for only now, after this preparation, did he believe he really understood the Gospel of St. John. Now this soul was in a mood that it could say of itself: I feel incorporated into the broad, wide stream of the spiritual universe; I feel that which has gone through all times as a symbol of this feeling and must touch us quite particularly in modern times, since we feel something of the deepest basis of the world and of man. Contemplating the world around, the soul can break out, if it is prepared, into the deeply significant words: That art Thou! From the Gospel of St. John the wisdom of “That art Thou” flowed for the soul of Christian Morgenstern. He could say of himself, sitting in a kaflehouse: “So, from his marble table, his cup in front of him, to contemplate those who come and go, sit down and talk, and to see through the mighty window those outside drifting back and forth, like a school of fish behind the glass wall of a large container, - and then and when to indulge in the idea: That's you! And to see them all, not knowing who they are, who is talking to himself there, as she, and who recognizes her as herself from my eyes and only as her from her own eyes! “

Then another mood arose, a mood that many would wish would spread throughout the world. By then, Christian Morgenstern was already known as a poet in his late thirties. He lived as a person who had learned to empathize with the “That's you” and then felt a mood come over his soul, which he expressed in the words: “And yet such knowledge was only a surface knowledge and therefore ultimately still doomed to infertility.”

Do you feel, my dear friends, the humility, the inner, true humility of the soul, which only this soul really prepared to penetrate into the secrets of life!

Christian Morgenstern felt he had become two people. He stood at the gates of spiritual science. He stood at the gates of spiritual science and called everything that had gone before a “superficial knowledge” that was therefore “doomed to be ultimately fruitless”.

First listen to the sounds that that Christian Morgenstern's soul wrested from itself in his pre-anthroposophical period, then I will say a few words about his anthroposophical period, about what he spoke of in the very last days of his life on earth, that he had the only thing in him that never failed him in life, and of which he knew that he could never fail.

Recitation by Marie von Sivers:

Mittagsstille - Eins und alles - An die Wolken
Sommernacht im Hochwald - Präludium - Mondenstimmung
Morgenandacht - Inmitten der großen Stadt

On April 4 of this year, we had to hand over Christian Morgenstern's earthly remains for cremation near our Dornach building in Basel. As I spoke the words on that occasion before Christian Morgenstern's cremation, many conversations came vividly to mind that had taken place after Christian Morgenstern had found himself in our society in 1909, under the aforementioned conditions, of which I spoke earlier. In those conversations, there were often words that passed from him to me and vice versa that touched on profound questions of existence, as far as they can touch people. At the same time, these questions – and this was connected with Christian Morgenstern's recent entry into our movement – pointed to the great problems of existence, but which, on the other hand, through the struggles through the struggles and the struggles that Christian Morgenstern's soul had gone through, had a directly individual character. There again emerged all the feelings that Christian Morgenstern had gone through, for example, in his present earthly career, when for years he wanted to orient himself on Nietzsche, I may say, for the great questions of life.

From many a word he spoke in intimate conversation, one could see how the understanding of a human spirit like Christian Morgenstern, who himself had to struggle so titanically, differs from that of a soul that passes over the struggles of other souls on earth more superficially. And I may well say, without committing any kind of immodesty: I was allowed to believe that I could talk to Christian Morgenstern about Nietzsche in the way that Christian Morgenstern's soul might have desired, despite the fact that his thoughts, which he had also expressed about Nietzsche, had emerged from the depths of his soul. After all, it had taken me fourteen years, from 1888 to 1902, to gain some clarity in my own soul through Nietzsche. I knew myself what struggles and conquests it takes to gain orientation about all that a mind like Nietzsche has thrown into our time. I knew the tones that the soul struck, from the mockery and scorn itself, to much of what Nietzsche expressed, to loving admiration – I knew all the struggles and overcoming that one has to go through. And again, when Christian Morgenstern spoke about his beloved Paul de Lagarde, I was allowed to have my say there too. I had a soul before me that had found support in Lagarde in many ways. I may say that almost twenty years before, indeed even more than twenty years before, I had been able to see how Lagarde's “German Writings” affected at least a small group of people, so that these people received inner soul substance through Lagarde. I had, however, seen how Paul de Lagarde was drawn into a kind of national politics in this circle, but I had also been able to see the strength of Lagarde's thoughts, how the power of his thoughts could find its way into human souls when these souls needed direction and purpose in life. That had long since passed for me, when the lonely soul, the soul that Paul de Lagarde shared with me, encountered Christian Morgenstern.

And so I was able to get to know Christian Morgenstern's soul really, really well at that moment, when it stood at the gates of anthroposophy. It was at that time that Christian Morgenstern, after having enthusiastically participated in various of our anthroposophical events, also joined us on a trip up to his beloved North Country. I could then see how the severe collapse of his health and body approached. Often he had to think again and again, and he did so reluctantly, about how he could help his body to survive for a few more years on earth. Then came the time when he had to be withdrawn from us, when he lived for some time in the high mountains of Switzerland to find relief from his suffering in the fresh, free mountain air. He had previously found a wife who was also deeply involved in our movement and who now accompanied him into his involuntary solitude – for now he would have liked to have been sociable, would have liked to have been with our movement. Then came the time when one was allowed to think – while we were trying to communicate what had been allotted to us to the human souls – that up there in the Swiss high mountains lived one who ceaselessly sought to marry his poetic power to that which was to come to light in our spiritual current, that up there lived one in whom, in an individually unique way, what we are trying to experience in our spiritual-scientific movement, was reborn from the power of poetry. A connecting link was the wife, who in the end was the only link on the physical plane between his lonely soul life in the Swiss high mountains and our society. He could see how his wife brought messages from him down and carried up what she had taken in when he repeatedly asked her to stop by at this or that event so that he too could participate in what is to be conveyed through spiritual science to the culture of our time and to human spiritual life in general. He had indeed found the direct refreshment for his soul in the soul of his faithful and devoted friend and wife, who so deeply understood him. Through her, he saw the world of the physical plane. And it was strengthening for those who were allowed to participate in his soul life that especially in this soul found such an artistic-poetic response to what moves through our souls and what we believe is so important to humanity.

Then, after we had arranged this, I met him in Zurich when I returned from a lecture tour in Italy. The destruction of his body was so advanced that he could only speak softly. But in Christian Morgenstern's soul lived something that, I would like to say, almost made the physical plane dispensable, even for external speech. That was what was so very much before one's mind, even at the moment when one saw the transfigured soul of Christian Morgenstern escape from earthly existence in April of this year. That soul, which has been set free, set free in the development of its spiritual powers precisely through death, has truly not been lost to itself and to us: it has been truly ours ever since. But one thing could stand before us painfully, for that we had indeed lost: that peculiar language that spoke from those eyes that bore witness to such intimacy, which so wonderfully expressed in mute language the intimacy with which one would so like to see the spiritual scientific world view imbued. And the other was the sweet, intimate smile of Christian Morgenstern, which beamed out to you as if from a spiritual world, and which bore witness in every feature to the deep intimacy with which he was connected with all that is spiritual, especially where the spiritual expresses itself intimately and deeply.

When I met him in Zurich, he was able to give me those of his poems that arose, so to speak, from the marriage within him of his poetic power with the anthroposophical spiritual current. And again one saw, again one heard from Christian Morgenstern's poetry the great insights into world evolution, into past embodiments of the earth, into the revival of the forces and entities of past world bodies on our earth body, - brought into poetic form that which is striven for within our spiritual current. He himself had attained that which appears to us as the pinnacle of our anthroposophical research, speaking from his tender, intimate and yet so strong soul: the being imbued with Christ, of whom an idea is gained through the spiritual-scientific tradition. Truly, there lived, embodied in this frail earthly body, our world view, strong and powerful, inspired and spiritualized. And truly, deeply true, the words that Christian Morgenstern spoke about his relationship to this world view appear, after he first remembers the legacy of suffering that was inherited from his mother, that made him physically weak in life, that made him weaker and weaker in the end. After he has remembered all this, he speaks the words: “Perhaps it was the same power that, after leaving him on the physical plane, accompanied him spiritually from then on and, what she could not give him in the physical world, she now gave him from the spiritual world with a loyalty that did not rest until she had seen him not only high up in life, but also up to the heights of life, on the path where death had lost its sting and the world had regained its divine meaning.

So he was with us, and so he was ours. And so he wrote those poems that we will hear about later, which are to be introduced by a poem from his earlier period, in which his predestination for the world view that was then revealed to him is atmospherically expressed, when he had so intimately connected with us in terms of his views and spirit.

And then he appeared again, somewhat strengthened, at our anthroposophical events. We were able to experience the joy that at the end of last year in Stuttgart, his poems, which were closest to his heart, could be spoken by Fräulein von Sivers in his presence, and we were able to witness what was going on in his soul, which, I may say, made such a moving impression on me when we were still able to talk about him and recite his poetry in his presence. It was then that he found the moving words in a letter he addressed to Miss von Sivers:

“It was about four weeks ago, when I was selecting appropriate pieces from my various earlier collections, that I was overcome by a feeling that was very close to me at the moment. I said to myself – in view of the loss of my voice and in view of the fact that right now invitation after invitation is approaching me to read publicly – that these little songs and rhythms would probably never reach human ears as I had felt them. For I relived the wondrous bliss with which each truly vital stanza had been allowed to come into existence, and I said to myself: this state of mind will never again be conjured up by me, or by anyone else. At that time, as so often, I forgot the loving understanding of kindred souls, who are able to create a similar state within themselves, simply out of warmth for the work of art in question and the intuitive perception that they have for the impulses from which and under which it may have formed. On that unforgettable November 24, 1913, you punished me for my terrible forgetfulness in the most beautiful and tender way. For someone had entered that isolated circle of which our dear doctor spoke, had willingly followed the 'lonely one' to his 'island' and could now, as it were, with his own voice, reproduce the artless melodies that were found there and presented themselves.

From now on, I can be confident that one or another of my modest productions may also come to people as living sound – since I received it from you for the second time and thus a greeting from my youth and, on the other hand, a reminder to always serve you pure and high people and the ideals, which want to become truth under the constant sacrificial help of our beloved teacher through you, better and stronger.

With heartfelt veneration and gratitude!

Christian Morgenstern.

After all that we have since experienced, you will understand, my dear friends, that we would very much like to become faithful executors of his intentions with regard to the point that Christian Morgenstern touches on in this letter.

Then it was again in Leipzig, when we were able to give him a New Year's greeting, three months before his death. I spoke then, after once again letting the poems of his last period take effect on my soul, some of which you will hear about later – I spoke then a word that arose in me directly as an actual feeling from the poems. I spoke a word that I would like to repeat as follows: I could see how Christian Morgenstern, with his whole spirit, one might say, lived full of content in our world view, which had taken on a very individual form in him, so that what he gave was a gift for us, and we would never have had to think that he received it from us: we felt so happy in the mood that he gave us back from within himself what our world view had inspired in him. But not only that, something else also radiated from his poems. And I could not express it any differently than by saying: his poems have an aura! One feels the anthroposophical life and anthroposophical way of thinking directly flowing out of them like an aura. One also experiences something that lies not in the words but between the words, between the lines, and is directly auric life. — I was able to express it at the time as a feeling that actually arose for me: these poems have an aura!

I now know why, only now, why I said this word back then. And some of you, or perhaps all of you, my dear friends, who listened to the words of my lecture yesterday, will know why I only now know the “why”. These poems, yes, they have an aura – that is what I had to say when I was allowed to speak about him for the second time on the occasion of the reading of his poems in our circle in Leipzig in his presence. At that time, just at the beginning of this year, it was a happy time for Christian Morgenstern, I may say so. When I saw him in his room in Leipzig, it was strange to see how - yes, how healthy, how inwardly strong this soul was in this rotten body, and how this soul felt so healthy, so healthy in the spiritual life at that very time, as never before. Then it was that the words came to me that I had to speak before his cremation: “This soul truly testifies to the victory of the spirit over all corporeality!”

He worked towards achieving this victory throughout the years in which he was so closely connected with us through our spiritual movement. He achieved this victory not in arrogance, but in all modesty. Looking up to him, as his soul was released from earthly life, I was allowed to speak the words in Basel: “He was ours, he is ours, and he will be ours!” At that time, when I spoke of him for the third time, karma, I may say, brought about in a remarkable way that I was precisely at the place where he was laid to rest, in the vicinity of our building at Dornach, when his earthly remains were committed to the elements.

And so, after he had written those words, he had passed away from his lonely grave, still in his earthly life, through our spiritual current. And truly, one can perhaps feel it if, with a small change, reference may be made to the words that were shared earlier, which were spoken by him years ago, before he united with our spiritual current. We can now rightly say: we seek him in the spiritual realm, to which we

are seeking the path. 'We found a path' is also the title of his last

collection of poems, which will be published soon. In the spirit land we see him safe. We look up to him. We want to learn gradually, we want to learn to recognize what an important individuality was embodied in him. But that is not to be spoken of today. But what we feel deeply, as if it were written on his spiritual tombstone, which we want to set for him in our hearts, that will be the name we have come to love, with which we want to associate many, many things. It may stand as the only emblem on his spiritual gravestone. We will associate much with this name after he has become ours, after we have recognized him. Therefore, my dear friends, you will feel that I am being sincere when I say, building on the previous words:

In the spiritual realm we find him embedded,
at the edge, between the earthly and the spiritual.
There he works, there he does not rest,
there he continues to work as a spirit among spirits,
for all the present.

But we write on his spiritual house his name, which has become dear to us, and the words that we want to feel deeply:

Read Christian Morgenstern!

I myself would like to express this request in connection with the name Christian Morgenstern:

Read Christian Morgenstern!

He found his motherland there in spiritual heights, the spiritual world, the mother flood, brought him home. He has returned to his homeland, but to the homeland in which our soul is rooted with its strongest powers, rooted even in the moments, in the celebratory moments of life, when it must feel distant from all mere sensual events.

This is what I would like to say here, in words that arise from my own spiritual contemplation of Christian Morgenstern, before I present the lecture of the poems that he left us as a beautiful emblem of the effectiveness of our world view in a human soul that has wrestled and fought a great deal, that has fought as a spirit for victory over the body, that has experienced many people and has experienced many people and many world views, and who, even in the last days of her life here on earth, was able to speak the words:

“Actually, there is only one thing in which I have not, not even in the slightest, gone astray...”

Christian Morgenstern meant the world view to which we also profess ourselves.

But we want to be convinced, my dear friends, that this view remains with him for the life in the spirit that he leads and to which we want to look up.

Recitation by Marie von Sivers:

Sunrise Prayer · To a doubter · Moon at noon · Of two roses · Waterfall at night · Light is love · How do I break free from YOUR spell · There, take this · I lift up my heart for you · I am born of God like all being.