The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of the last week we reflected on a number of considerations suited to throw light on the spiritual condition of the present and the immediate future. Recently, we have referred in particular to the decisive turning point of humanity's development in Europe in the fourth century. Earlier, at least in the south of Europe, people understood the Mystery of Golgotha to some extent on the basis of Oriental wisdom. They still grasped with a certain comprehension something that is viewed today with such antipathy by some circles, namely, the Gnosis. The Gnosis was indeed the final remnant of Oriental primeval wisdom, that primeval wisdom which, though proceeding from instinctive forces of human cognition, did penetrate deeply into the nature of the world's configuration. With the aid of the conceptions and feelings acquired through Gnostic knowledge, people were able to have insight into what had taken place in the Mystery of Golgotha. But the Christian stream that increasingly flowed into the Roman political system and took on its form was actively involved in destroying this Gnostic world outlook. Except for a few quite insignificant remainders from which little can be gained, this Christian stream eradicated everything that once existed as Gnosis. And, as we have seen, nothing was left behind of ancient Oriental wisdom in the consciousness of mankind in Europe except for the simple narrations, clothed in material events, about what took place in Palestine at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

To begin with, these narrations were clothed in the form that originated in ancient paganism, as you can see in the Heliand. They were adopted by European civilization. But there was less and less of a feeling that these stories should be penetrated with a certain cognitive force. People increasingly lost the feeling that a profound world riddle and secret should be sought for in the Mystery of Golgotha. For concerning the one who had been united with Jesus as Christ dogmas determined by council decisions had been established. The demand had been raised that people believe in these established dogmas; thus, gradually all living knowledge that had still existed up until the time of the fourth Christian century passed over into the solidly structured system of doctrines of the Roman State Church.

Then, if we have an overview of this whole system of the Occidental Christian church stream, we see that the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha was enveloped in certain firm, rigid, and more and more incomprehensible doctrines, and that any living spiritual knowledge was in fact eradicated.

We are faced with a strange factor in European evolution. One might say that the fertile, living Oriental wisdom flowed into the doctrines adopted by the Roman Church and became rigid. In dogma, it continued on through the ensuing centuries. This dogma existed. One must remember that there were some people who to some extent knew what to make of these dogmas, but it had become impossible for the general consciousness of humanity to receive anything but a dead form. Certainly, we encounter a number of splendid minds. We need only to recall some of those who came from the Irish centers of knowledge; we need only recall Scotus Erigena who lived at the court of Charles the Bald.¹ In individuals like him, we have people who received the doctrines and still sensed the spirit in them, or discovered it more or less. Then we have scholasticism, often mentioned here in a certain connection, which attempted in a more abstract form to penetrate the doctrines with its thinking. We face the fact that an extensive system of religious content was present in rigidified doctrines and was handed down from generation to generation; it survived as a system of dogmas. On the one hand, there were the theological dogmas, on the other, the narrations concerning the events of Palestine clothed in materialistic pictures.

Now, if we wish to comprehend our modern age, we must not forget what these Roman-Catholic dogmas couched in Roman political concepts are fundamentally all about. Among them are doctrines of great significance, splendid doctrines. There is, above all, the doctrine of the Trinity, which, in other terminology of later times, points to the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. An ancient and profound primordial wisdom was frozen into this doctrine, something great and mighty that human perception once possessed instinctively. Yet, only the brilliant, inspired insight of a few could fathom what is contained in such a doctrine.

Running through the various council resolutions, there was what finally rigidified into the dogma of the two persons of Christ and Jesus in one man. There were dogmas concerning the birth, the nature of Christ Jesus, the death, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. Finally, there were dogmas establishing the various festivals; and all this was basically the skeleton, the silhouette of a wondrous, ancient wisdom. Now this shadowy image, this skeleton, continued on through the centuries. One particular reason why it was able to go on was that it assumed a certain form of ancient cults. The content of what was thus expressed in dogmas, in the most sublime dogmas, such as the dogma of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, could spread because it was clothed in the form of an ancient, sacred cult, namely, the Sacrifice of the Mass. The ancient cult was just altered a bit but as such continued on. The various metamorphoses of the Christian festivals lived on through the whole ecclesiastical year. Those aspects lived on that you know as the sacraments. They were intended to lift the human being out of the ordinary material life through the agency of the Church, so to speak, into a higher, spiritual sphere. Because of all this and because of its link with the impulse of Christianity, this content lived on throughout the centuries of historical development in Europe. Side by side with this, as I have said, existed the humble narration of the events in Palestine, but garbed in materialistic formulas.

Because of its significant content and because people basically had nothing else with which to establish a relationship to the super-sensible worlds, all these doctrines together were something that affected minds striving for such higher knowledge. Due to the ritual and the simple narration of the Gospel, however, these doctrines could also unfold that form of activity that gained influence over the broad masses of Europe's population.

In addition to this, another separate and different cult system spread, one that counted less on Christianity as such but frequently accepted it. It was basically not organically connected with Christianity but proceeded more from older cults. This other system culminated in the dogma of present day Freemasonry, which, indeed, had and still has only a superficial relationship to Christianity. As you know, the element that clothed itself in the form of Roman-Catholic dogmatism and the element that in Masonic tradition is linked to other cults and symbolism fight each other tooth and nail to this day.

This development can be traced more or less if only we focus our soul on the historical facts with some sense. But what presents itself can be fully comprehended only when we look to that turning point of European evolution in the fourth Christian century that, in a sense, sank all the ancient spiritual wisdom and its aftereffects into a sort of abyss. Due to that, people in Europe knew little of Oriental primeval wisdom throughout the ensuing centuries.

As I pointed out yesterday, the inner faculties that enabled human beings in ancient times to experience weight, number, and measure in their own being had gradually disappeared. Measure, numbers, and weight then turned into abstractions. With these abstractions, people then established in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch what has today become our natural scientific world view, something that could not include human beings in its sphere and stopped short of them, unable in any way to comprehend them. By means of the abstractions of weight, number, and measure, it did, however, grasp the external natural phenomena with a certain excellence and arrived at a kind of culmination point in the nineteenth century.

People today do not yet have enough distance from these matters; they do not yet realize that a quite special point in time was actually reached in European development in the middle of the nineteenth century. Intellectual striving, pure rational effort, attained to its fullest and greatest unfolding at that time. It was the trend that resulted from those same sources from which the modern natural scientific views have been flowing since the first third of the fifteenth century. Yet, at the same time, this was the trend that ultimately could no longer make anything of the cult that had spread; indeed, this trend basically had been unable for a long time to do anything with the ritual and dogmatic formulas established by the Church councils. Merely a few vestiges had survived, a few remnants; for example, the vestige of the Council of 869,² where it had been resolved that the human being consists not of body, soul, and spirit, but merely of body and soul, with the latter possessing a few spiritual qualities. This vestige remained and lived on in the modern philosophical views that believed themselves to be objective but actually only reiterated what had originated in this Catholic dogmatism.

The modern mood of European civilization, which tended increasingly to a purely intellectual, rational view of the universe, formed out of all these directions. Having been prepared for centuries, this mood reached its culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. How can we understand this culmination if we observe the human being from a soul-spiritual standpoint? We have to focus on human nature, as it was in ancient times and as it has gradually changed. We have done this already from a number of different viewpoints and shall do so again today from yet a certain other standpoint.

Let us place the human being schematically before us. Take, first of all, man's physical body (red). As I said, I am making a schematic drawing.

This is man's etheric body (blue); that is the human astral body (yellow); here we have man's ego. Let us first consider the human being as he was in ancient times, those ancient times when instinctive clairvoyance still existed, which then faded, withered, and gradually disappeared. The ego is basically a product of the earth and we need to give it less consideration. But we must be clear about the fact that the whole world actually dwells in man's physical, etheric, and astral bodies. We can say, in this physical body lives the element that represents the whole world. The corporeality is born out of it and continues to reconstruct itself through the intake of nourishment. In the etheric body, the whole world lives as well; in the most diverse ways, influences enter constantly into it and send their effects into the human being in a superphysical manner, effects that express themselves in the forces of growth, for example in the circulation of the blood, in the breath, and so on. They are by no means identical with the forces that are present in the intake of food and in digestion. In addition, there are all the influences living in our astral body that receive impressions from the world through the senses, and so forth. It is like this to this day and was like this in the days when the human being still lived with his ancient instinctive clairvoyance, but in that age, he was more intimately connected with his physical body, his etheric, and astral bodies than he is today. When he woke up in the morning, he submerged with his ego and astral body into his physical and etheric bodies. A close connection developed between his ego and astral body and his etheric body and physical corporeality. And he not only dwelled in his physical body, he also lived in the forces that worked within the latter.

Let me give you a vivid description of this. Imagine that a person possessing ancient clairvoyance ate a plum. It seems almost grotesque to a human being of today when something like this is described, but it is profoundly true. Assume that such an ancient clairvoyant ate a plum; this plum contains etheric forces. If a person eats a plum today, he is not aware of what goes on within this plum. The ancient clairvoyant ate a plum; it was then in his stomach, was digested, and he experienced how the etheric forces in the plum passed over into his body. He cosmically participated in this experience. When he inwardly made comparisons between the various things he ingested into his stomach, he saw that all the relationships in the outside world continued inside the human being, and he perceived them inwardly. From waking in the morning to going to sleep at night, such a person was filled with the vivid inner perception of the life lived outside by the plums, by the apples, and by much else that he ate. Inwardly, through the breathing process, he was aware of the essential, spiritual being of the air. Through the warmth that coursed through his circulation process, he was familiar with the warmth forces of the cosmos in his surroundings. He did not stop short at merely sensing the light in his eyes. He felt how the light rays streamed in through the nerves of his eyes; how, in his own etheric body, they encountered the physical limbs and dwelled within them.

Such a person experienced himself quite concretely within the cosmic element. While it was a dim consciousness, it was present. During the day, it was muted by what a person perceived outwardly even in those days. But even in the early times of Greek civilization, it was true that human beings still retained an aftereffect of what is possessed today only by creatures other than man. I have already mentioned several times that it is most interesting to look with spiritual sight upon a meadow where cows are lying down and digesting. This whole activity of digestion is a cosmic experience for the cows. It is even more so the case with snakes; they lie down and digest and do indeed experience cosmic events. Out of their organism, something blossoms and sprouts that is “world” to their perception. Something arises out of their inner being that is much more beautiful than anything we are ever able to see with our eyes from outside. Something like this was present as an underlying mood in human beings who still possessed ancient, instinctive clairvoyance. While it was muted throughout most of the day by external perceptions, when these people fell asleep, they carried with them what they had thus experienced and received into their astral body and ego. Then, when their ego was alone with its astral body, these experiences arose powerfully in the form of true dreams. Then, in the form of true dreams, these people experienced after the fact what they had only dimly experienced during the day.

You see, I am referring you to the inner soul-bodily manner of experiencing on the part of human beings of ancient times; because they were able to experience in this way, they had cosmic experiences. It was in this that they found their cosmic, super-sensible perception. Then, when people in the Orient drank the Soma drink,³ they knew the nature of the Spirit of the Heights. This Soma drink permeated, surged, and wove through their inner being, enlivening their blood. When these people subsequently fell asleep and the ego and astral body, which had been active in the blood, took along the forms that had come into being through the digestion of the Soma drink, then their being widened out in the widths of space and, in their nocturnal experience, they felt the spiritual beings of the cosmos.

Such an experience was still present in those among whom the ancient Zarathustra found willing listeners in the ancient Persian epoch. If one is unaware of these things, one does not understand what finally came down to us from the Oriental scriptures that have survived. This living cosmic perception gradually became extinguished. Already in the historical Egyptian age, little of it can be found, only its aftereffects are still present. And except for final vestiges that have always been retained among primitive human beings, it then disappeared in the fourth Christian century. From then on, the intellect, the rational element, increasingly struggled to come to the fore in the human being, the element that is completely tied to the mere physical body in its isolation from the world.

If you have a pictorial imagination and enter into your body, you cannot help but experience something cosmic. If you have retained something of the inner quality of numbers and enter into your body with it, you cannot help but experience the number element of the cosmos. The same is true for the ratios of weight. However, if you enter into the human organism with the power of the ego, which is active as a purely rational, intellectual element, then you immerse yourself only in the isolated human body, in what the human body is by virtue of its own nature, without its relationship to the cosmos. You enter into the earthly human body in its total isolation. Thus, if I would try to sketch this from the point of view of the intellect, I would have to do it like this:

The etheric body, the astral body, and the ego (see above, blue, yellow, and shape in the middle) are present there too. But the ego no longer experiences anything of the cosmic element here within the human being. It only has a dim experience of its own existence, of its own immersion in the isolated human organism. Therefore, when this purely intellectual ego goes into its surroundings in sleep, it takes nothing along. The fact that it takes along nothing is the reason that at most reminiscences, dream images of an unrealistic kind, can arise in the human being, and that this ego can in no way be permeated by anything from the cosmos. Basically, from the moment of falling asleep until awakening, the human being experiences nothing of significance, because his whole manner of experiencing is calculated for the isolated human organism, which in turn affects the ego with those forces that have nothing to do with the cosmos. This is why the ego is dulled from the moment of falling asleep until waking up.

Indeed, it must be so, for though instinctively clairvoyant ancient human beings possessed cosmic vision and dwelled in instinctive Imaginations, Inspirations, and Intuitions, they possessed no independent rational thinking. If this independent rational thinking, this actual intellectual thinking, is to develop, it has to make use of the instrument of the isolated human body. It has to be dull during sleep and therefore brings nothing along when it awakens. The ancient human being, on the other hand, having carried his experiences in the body out into the cosmos, brought with him what he had experienced in the encounter of the cosmic aftereffects with the actual spiritual-cosmic occurrences out there. Again, he brought back aftereffects of what he had experienced there and thus enjoyed a lively relationship with the cosmos. What is attained by the human being through intellectual thinking is acquired in the period from waking up until falling asleep and dims down after sleep begins. Human beings now have to depend on the time when they are awake.

We come across the strange phenomenon that in ancient times the human being was bound more to his body than he is today, but that he experienced in this body the spiritual aspect of the cosmos. Modern man has lost this experience in the body. The human being today is more spiritual but he has the most rarefied spirit; he lives in the intellect and can dwell in the spirit only from the time he awakens until he falls asleep. When he enters the spiritual world with his completely rarefied intellectual spirit, his consciousness is dimmed.

Why have we developed materialism? And why did ancient humanity not have materialism? The ancients did not have it because they dwelled within the matter of the body; modern men have materialism because they dwell only in the spirit, because they are completely free of a cosmic connection to their body. Materialism actually comes about because the human being became spiritual, but spiritual in a rarefied manner. People were most spiritual during the mid-nineteenth century. But they lied to themselves in an ahrimanic way inasmuch as they did not recognize that it was the rarefied spirit in which they dwelled. Into the most spiritual element possible for the human being, he only absorbed the concept of materiality. The human being had turned into a completely spiritual vessel, but into this vessel he only let flow the thoughts of material existence. It is the secret of materialism that human beings turned to matter because of their spirituality. This is modern man's negation of his own spirituality. The culmination point of this spiritual condition was in the middle of the nineteenth century, but human beings did not grasp this condition of spirituality.

As I said, this developed slowly through the centuries. The ancient instinctive spirituality had slowly died down in the fourth Christian century; beginning in the first third of the fifteenth century, the new spirituality dawned; the time between is in a sense an episode of purely human experience. Now, however, after this point in time in the first third of the fifteenth century and after that century as a whole this dependence of man on his isolated physical body made itself felt. Now he no longer developed any relationship to what was frozen into dogmatic council doctrines and what, although rigidified, still possessed a grandiose content. Now, too, human beings basically could no longer find any relationship to the humble narrations of Palestine. For a while yet, they forced themselves to connect some meaning with them. However, meaning can be connected with them only when they are penetrated by knowledge. In particular, modern human beings no longer could connect any meaning with the cults, the ritual itself. The Sacrifice of the Mass, a religious act of the greatest cosmic significance, turned into an external, symbolic act because it was no longer understood. The sacrament of the Transubstantiation, which had survived through the Middle Ages and which has profound cosmic significance, became part of purely intellectual disputes. Certainly it goes without saying that when people began to question with their isolated intellect how the Christ could be contained in the sacraments of the altar, they could not comprehend it, for these matters are not suited for comprehension by the intellect. But now human beings began to try to understand them by means of the intellect.

This then led to the emergence of debates of great importance in world history known as the “Eucharist-Dispute,”⁴ and linked to names like Hus⁵ and others. The most progressive individuals in Europe, those most advanced in the rational comprehension of the world, then arrived at the various forms of Protestantism. It is the intellect's reaction against something that had emerged from a much broader, much more intense power of cognition than is the intellect itself. The powers that had developed in the modern soul as intellectual faculties and what dwelled in the rigid dogmas yet containing something great and mighty, these two confronted each other as two alien views! Protestant confessions of the greatest variety arose as compromises between the intellect and the ancient traditions. The sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries passed, and in the middle of the nineteenth century the human being reached the culmination of his intellectual development. He became a spiritual being through and through.

With this spirituality, he could comprehend what exists in the outer, sensory world, but he did not comprehend himself as spirit. People hardly had an inkling any longer of the meaning of a sentence such as the one by Leibnitz that states, “Nothing dwells in the intellect that did not dwell earlier in the senses, except for the intellect itself.”⁶ Modern people completely omitted the phrase at the end and acknowledged only the sentence, “Nothing dwells in the intellect that did not dwell earlier in the senses,” whereas Leibnitz clearly discerned that the intellect is something totally spiritual at work in the human being quite independently of all aspects of the physical corporeality.

As I have said, the intellect was active but did not recognize itself. Thus, it has been our experience that human beings are now in the transition to another phase of development in their life, and, so to speak, they carry nothing out with them into the night. For what is intellectually acquired is attained through the body and has no relationship to what is outside the body. People now have to work their way anew into the spiritual world. The possibility distinctly exists for them to look into this spiritual world. What people earlier had attained from their physical and etheric bodies as well as from their astral body in regard to an instinctive view of the cosmos can be attained again today. We can come to Imaginations and by means of them we can describe the world evolution from Saturn, Sun, Moon, to earth, and so on. We can behold what dwells in the nature of numbers, namely, the being of numbers. Through Inspirations, we can receive insight into how the world is shaped out of cosmic spirituality according to the laws of numbers. It is entirely possible that we can have insight into the world in this way through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

Most people will say: If we have not ourselves become clairvoyant, we can at most study these matters. Good and well, but one can study them, and it has been said again and again that the ordinary intellect can grasp them. Today, I shall add the reason why the ordinary intellect is able to grasp these matters. Assume that you are reading something like An Outline of Occult Science. Imagine that you try to place yourself into these descriptions with your ordinary intellect. You take it in with the intellect, which is only linked to the isolated human body. But you do take something in that you could not receive through this intellect, since throughout the past few centuries this intellect did not comprehend itself. Now you take something in that is incomprehensible on the basis of those concepts that the intellect derives from the external sense world. It does become comprehensible, however, when the intellect on its own makes the effort to understand it, initially neither agreeing nor disagreeing but only comprehending. After all, the emphasis is on understanding these things.

Initially, you need simply understand them. If you do, then you create something with the insight the ego has gained that extends into the night. Then, during the night, you no longer remain dull as is the case with the merely intellectual attitude towards the world; then, from the time of falling asleep until waking up, you dwell in a different content in the delicately filtered spirituality. Then, you awaken and find that the possibility has been added—small though it is each time—of inwardly acquiring what you have struggled to understand intellectually. With each passing night, every time we sleep, something of an inner relationship is added, we acquire an inward connection. Each time, upon falling asleep, we bear the aftereffect of our daytime comprehension with us into the world beyond corporeality. In this way, we acquire a relationship to the spiritual world, a relationship acquired completely out of reality. This, however, is the case only if the human being does not ruin this relationship by means of something with which he so frequently ruins it today. I have mentioned these means for ruining spirituality quite often. As you know, many people are intent on acquiring a certain state of sleepiness prior to going to sleep; they consume as many glasses of beer as it takes to have the necessary degree of sleepiness. This is a quite common practice, especially among “intelligent” people. In that case, the faculties I just mentioned certainly cannot develop.

Spirituality can be researched, however, and this spirituality can indeed be experienced as well in the manner just described. The human being has grown away from spirituality. He is capable of growing into it again. Today, we are only at the beginning of this process of growing into spirituality. In the past few centuries, from the fifteenth century into the nineteenth century when the intellect had reached its highest level, a certain spirituality has developed, in particular among the most progressive people in Europe, albeit a spirituality that has as yet no content. For it is only when we turn to Imagination that this spirituality receives its first content. This spirituality, which is filtered to the extreme, must first receive its content.

At this point in time, this content is being rejected by the majority of the people. The world wishes to remain with the filtered spirituality; it wishes to produce a content derived from the outer material world. People do not wish to struggle with their intellect to comprehend the results of insight into the spiritual world offered. The confessions that follow the Gospel are, after all, compromises between the intellect and ancient traditions; they have lost the connecting link. Ritual means nothing to them. This is why the latter has gradually disappeared within these confessions. People arrived at abstract concepts instead of a living comprehension of, for example, the Transubstantiation. At most, the simple stories can be told, but no meaning other than the one that is compatible with a materialistic theology can be connected with them, namely, that one is dealing with occurrences that can be linked to the humble man from Nazareth, and so forth. All this can no longer lead to a content; it is something that loses all connection with spirituality.

Thus, the situation in the world today is such that there is, first of all a faith that has rejected the intellect and did not strike any compromise. Due to this, in vast segments of the population a relationship has been retained, albeit an instinctive one, to the doctrines and dogmas, the content of which is no longer accessible to human beings but did flow out into these dogmas. This segment of the populace also has retained its living relationship to the cult, to the ceremonial ritual; it has retained its link to the sacraments. As depleted as all this is, the ancient spirituality—the spirituality to which there is still a connection through dogmas—did once dwell in what has become a skeleton, a shadow. Among the more recent Protestant confessions, where a compromise is being tried out, such a connection is no longer alive. And then we have those who call themselves quite enlightened and dwell only in the intellect, which is spiritual but does not wish to grasp the spirit.

These are the three streams we confront. In regard to the future, we cannot count on the fruitfulness of those streams that only tried to make an external compromise; we cannot count on mere intellectuality that cannot arrive at any content and therefore can only lose itself since it does not want to understand itself. We can only count on the direction in which these streams are gradually heading, and they are more and more clearly heading there, namely, we can count on what has been poured into ancient doctrines and is represented in the surviving Roman-Catholic Church. We can count on the attitude that takes the new intellectuality seriously and deepens it Imaginatively, Inspiratively, and Intuitively, thus arriving at a new spirituality. The modern world is becoming divided and estranged in these two contrasting directions. On the one hand stand people with their intellect. They are inwardly lazy and do not wish to utilize this intellect, but they need a content. So they refer to the dead dogmas. Particularly among intelligent people, who are, however, mentally indolent, who are in a certain respect intellectual and Dadaistic, a neo-Catholic movement is making itself felt that is trying to take hold of the old traditions that have rigidified in dogmas and that is trying to receive a content from outside, through historical phenomena but that rigidifies in historical forms. Based on the intellect, this trend tries desperately to make some sense of the ancient content; thus we have intellectual battles that, by means of the old content, try to prepare their rigidified doctrines in a new way for the use of human beings.

To cite an example, on many pages in the newest edition of the magazine Tat,⁷ we can observe an intellectual, cramped tendency towards rigidified doctrines. After all, the publisher, Diederichs, does everything; he puts everything into categories and on paper. Thus, he has now dedicated a whole edition of Tat to the neo-Catholic movement. It allows us to discern how cramped people's thoughts are today, how people are developing inwardly cramped thinking so that they can avoid having to rouse themselves and can remain mentally lazy in order to grasp with the intellect whatever moves forward most indolently.

People experiment with all this in order to be able to reject this life-filled striving out of modern intellectuality towards spirituality, a striving that can and must be grasped. More and more, things will come to a head in such a way that a powerful movement with a fascinating, suggestive, hypnotic effect on all those wishing to remain lazy within the intellect permeates the world. A Catholic wave is even pervading the world of intelligent people who wish, however, to remain lazy within their intelligence. The drowsy souls just do not realize it. But it must remain unfruitful to strive for what Oswald Spengler described so vividly in his Decline of the West.⁸ One can turn the Occident Catholic, but one will thereby slay its civilization. This Occident has to concern itself with waking up, with becoming inwardly active. Its intelligence must not remain lazy, for this intelligence can rouse itself; it can fill itself inwardly with an understanding for the new view of the spirit.

This battle is in preparation; in fact, it is here—and it is the main point. In the future, everything else concerning world views will become crushed between these two streams. We must turn our attention to this, for what is coming to expression conceals itself in any number of formulas and forms. Nobody is living fully in the present who believes that he can make progress with something that people were perhaps still dreaming about at the beginning of this century. He alone lives fully in the present who develops an eye for what dwells in the two streams described above. We have to be aware of this. For everything I have discussed a week ago when I said that nowadays a great number of people love evil and, purely due to their tendency towards evil, indulge in slander in the way I described—all this is what must come before our souls. We must bear in mind that inner untruthfulness, which expresses itself in the facts—as I told you—that people, who are supposed to be strengthened in their Catholic faith, are sent to the Catholic church in Stuttgart to attend a lecture by General von Gleich, and that this Catholic general concludes with a hymn by Luther! There, the two tendencies come together that care nothing about the confessions but only try to stream together in the proliferation of lies.

These things must be noticed today. If this is not done, then one is asleep and does not participate in what alone can make the human being today truly human.

• 1. Johannes Scotus Erigena, A.D. 810–877, Irish philosopher of scholasticism in Paris.
• 2. Council of 869: See Johannes Geyer, “Ein Konzilbeschluss and seine kulturgeschichtlichen Folgen” in Die Drei, vol. X (1922) and Alfred Schuetze, “Das Konzil 869 zu Konstantinopel and die Verleugnung des Geistes” in Die Christengemeinschaft, vol. I and II.
• 3. Soma drink (Sanscrit): The fermented juice of the soma plant, a leafless vine (sarcostemma acidum), mixed with milk or barley, whose intoxicating and enthusing power was worshipped as the God, “Soma.” Concerning the occult significance of “Soma” see also H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol. I and II.
• 4. Eucharist-Dispute: The dogma of the Transubstantiation, the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ (Fourth Lateran Council, A.D. 1215), was rejected by the Reformation.
• 5. Johannes Hus: around 1370–1415, early Czech reformer from Bohemia, banned by the Church in 1410 and burned as a heretic in 1415.
• 6. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, 1646–1716, German philosopher.
• 7. “Die Tat”—Monthly Magazine for the Future of German Culture. VIII, 1921, vol. 1.
• 8. Oswald Spengler, 1880–1936, German philosopher of culture.

In recent days, we have dealt with the development of European civilization and we shall try to add a number of considerations to what has been said. In this, it is always our intention to bring about an understanding of what plays into human life in the present age from the most diverse directions and leads to comprehension of the tasks posed by our time.

When you look at individual human life, it can indeed give you a picture of mankind's development. Nevertheless, you must naturally take into consideration here what has been mentioned in regard to the differences between the development of the individual and the overall development of humanity. I have repeatedly called attention to the fact that whereas the individual gets older and older, mankind as a whole becomes younger and younger, advancing, as it were, to the experience of younger periods of life. While keeping in mind that in this regard the life of the whole human community and that of the individual are direct opposites, at least for the sake of clarification, we can still say that individual human life can be a picture for us of the life of all humanity. If we then view the single human life in this way, we find that a quite specific sum of experiences belongs with each period of life. We cannot teach a six year-old child something we can teach a twelve-year-old; in turn, we cannot expect that the twelve-year-old approaches things with the same comprehension as a twenty-year-old. In a sense, the human being has to grow into what is compatible with individual periods in life. It is the same in the case of humanity as a whole.

True, the individual cultural epochs we have to point out based on insight into humanity's evolution—the old Indian, the old Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, the Greco-Roman epoch and then the one to which we ourselves belong—have quite specific cultural contents and the whole of mankind has to grow into them. But just as the individual can fall behind his potential of development, so certain segments of mankind can do the same. This is a phenomenon that must be taken into consideration, particularly in our age, since humanity is now moving into the evolutionary state of freedom. It is, therefore, left up to mankind itself to find its way into what this and the following epoch put forward. It is, as it were, left up to human discretion to remain behind what is posed as goals. If an individual lags behind in this regard, he is confronted by others who do find their way properly into their tasks of evolution. They then have to carry him along, in a manner of speaking. Yet, in a certain sense, this can frequently signify a somewhat unpleasant destiny for such a person when he has to become aware that in a certain way he remains behind the others who do arrive at the goal of evolution.

This can also take place in the life of nations. It is possible that some nations achieve the goal and that others remain behind. As we have seen, the goals of the various nations also differ from each other. First of all, if one nation attains its goal and the other falls short of what it is supposed to accomplish, then something is lost that could only have been achieved by this laggard nation. On the other hand, this backsliding nation will adopt much that is really not suitable for it. It appropriates contents it receives by imitating other nations that do attain their goal. Such things do take place in the evolution of mankind, and it is of particular significance for the present age to pay attention to them.

Today, we shall summarize a number of things, familiar to us from other aspects, and throw light on them from a certain standpoint. We know that the time from the eighth pre-Christian century until the fifteenth century A.D. is the time of the development of the intellectual or rational soul among the civilized part of humanity. This development of the intellectual or rational soul begins in the eighth pre-Christian century in southern Europe and Asia Minor. We can trace it when we focus upon the beginnings of the historical development of the Greek people. The Greeks still possess much of what can be termed the development of the sentient soul that was particularly suited to the third post-Atlantean age, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. That whole period was devoted to the development of the sentient soul.

During those times, human beings surrendered to the impressions of the external world, and through these impressions of the outer world they received at the same time everything they then valued as insights and that they let flow into the impulses of their will. With all their being people were in a condition where they experienced themselves as members of the whole cosmos. They questioned the stars and their movements when it was a matter of deciding what to do, and so on. This experiencing of the surrounding world, this seeing of the spiritual in all details of the outer world, was the distinguishing feature of the Egyptians at the height of their culture. This is what existed in Asia Minor and enjoyed a second flowering among the Greeks. The ancient Greeks certainly possessed this faculty of free surrender to the outer surroundings, and this was connected with a perception of the elemental spirit beings within the outer phenomena.

Then, however, something developed among the Greeks, which Greek philosophers call “nous,” namely, a general world intellect. This then remained the fundamental quality of human soul developments until the fifteenth century. It attained a kind of high point in the fourth Christian century and then diminished again. But this whole development from the eighth pre-Christian century up until the fifteenth century actually developed the intellect. However, if we speak of “intellect” in this period, we really have to disregard what we term “intellect” in our present age. For us, the intellect is something we carry within ourselves, something we develop within ourselves, by virtue of which we comprehend the world. This was not so in the case of the Greeks, and it was still not so in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, when people spoke about the intellect. Intellect was something objective; the intellect was an element that filled the world. The intellect arranged the individual world phenomena. People observed the world and its phenomena and told themselves: It is the universal intellect that makes one phenomenon follow the other, places the individual phenomena into a greater totality, and so forth. People attributed to the human brain no more than the fact that it shared in this general universal intelligence.

When we work out of modern physics and physiology and speak about light, we say that the light is within us. But even in his naive mind nobody would believe that light is only in our heads. Just as little as today's naive consciousness claims that it is dark outside and light exists only in the human head would a Greek or even a person of the eleventh or twelfth century have said that the intellect was only in his head. Such a person said, The intellect is outside, permeating the world and bestowing order on everything. Just as the human being becomes aware of light owing to his perceptions, so he becomes aware of the intellect. The intellect lights up in him, so to speak.

Something important was connected with this emergence of cosmic intelligence within the human cultural development. Earlier, when the cultural development ran its course under the influence of the sentient soul, people did not refer to a uniform principle encompassing the whole world. They spoke of the spirits of plants, of spirits that regulate the animal kingdom, of water spirits and spirits of the air, and so on. People referred to a multitude of spiritual entities. It was not merely polytheism, the folk religion, that spoke of this multitude. Even in those who were initiates, the awareness was definitely present that they were dealing with a multitude of actual beings in the world outside. Due to the dawn of the rational soul age, a sort of monism developed. Reason was viewed as something uniform that enveloped the whole world. It was not until then that the monotheistic character of religion developed, although a preliminary stage of it existed in the third post-Atlantean epoch. But what we should record scientifically concerning this era—from the eighth pre-Christian to the fifteenth century A.D.—is the fact that it is the period of the developing world intellect and that people had quite different thoughts about the intellect than we have nowadays.

Why did people think so differently about the intellect? People thought differently about the intellect because they also felt differently when they tried to grasp something by means of their intellect. People went through the world and perceived objects through their senses; but when they thought about them, they always experienced a kind of jolt. When they thought about something, it was as if they were experiencing a stronger awakening than they sensed in the process of ordinary waking. Thinking about something was a process still experienced as different from ordinary life. Above all, when people thought about something, they felt that they were involved in a process that was objective, not merely subjective. Even as late as the fifteenth century—and in its aftereffect even in still later times—people had a certain feeling in regard to the more profound thinking about things, a feeling people today do not have anymore. Nowadays human beings do not have the feeling that thinking about something should be carried out in a certain mood of soul. Up until the fifteenth century, people had the feeling that they produced only something evil if they were not morally good and yet engaged in thinking. In a sense, they reproached themselves for thinking even though they were bad persons. This is something we no longer experience properly. Nowadays people believe, In my soul I can be as bad as I want to be, but I can engage in thinking. Up to the fifteenth century, people did not believe that. They actually felt that it was a kind of insult to the divine cosmic intelligence to think about something while in an immoral soul condition. Hence, already in the act of thinking, they saw something real; in a manner of speaking, they viewed themselves as submerged with their soul in the overall cosmic intellect.

What was the reason for that? This came about because in this period from the eighth pre-Christian century to the fifteenth century A.D., and particularly in the fourth century, human beings predominantly employed their etheric body when they engaged in thinking. It was not that they decided to activate the ether body. But what they did sense—their whole soul mood—brought the etheric body into movement when thinking occurred. We can almost say: During that age, human beings thought with their etheric body. And the characteristic thing is that in the fifteenth century people began to think with their physical bodies. When we think, we do so with the forces the etheric body sends into the physical body. This is the great difference that becomes evident when we look at thinking before and after the fifteenth century. When we look at thinking prior to that time, it runs its course in the etheric body (see drawing, light-shaded crosshatching); in a sense, it gives the etheric body a certain structure. If we look at thinking now, it runs its course in the physical body (dark). Each such line of the ether body calls forth a replica of itself, and this replica is then found in the physical body.

Since that time, what occurs in human beings when they think is, as it were, an impression of the etheric activity as though of a seal on the physical body. The development from the fifteenth to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was mainly that human beings increasingly have taken their thinking out of the etheric body, that they adhere to this shadow image brought about in the physical body by the actual thought impulses originating in the etheric body. We therefore deal with the fact that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch people really think with the physical body but that this is merely a shadow image of what was once cosmic thinking; hence, since that time, only a shadow image of cosmic thinking dwells in mankind.

You see, everything that has developed since the fifteenth century, all that developed as mathematics, as modern natural science and so on, is fundamentally a shadow image, a specter of former thinking; it no longer contains any life. People today actually have no idea of how much more alive an element thinking was in former times. In those ancient days, the human being actually felt refreshed while thinking. He was glad when he could think, for thinking was a refreshment of soul for him. In that age, the concept did not exist that thinking could also be something tiring. Human beings could become tired out by something else, but when they could truly think, they experienced this as a refreshment, an invigoration for the soul; when they could live in thoughts, they also experienced something of a sense of grace bestowed on them.

Now, this transition in the soul condition has occurred. In what appears as thinking in modern times, we are confronted with something shadowy. This is the reason for the difficulty in motivating a human being to any action through thinking—if I may put it like this. One can tell people all sorts of things based on thinking, but they will not feel inspired. Yet this is the very thing they must learn. Human beings must become aware of the fact that they possess shadow images in their current thinking. They have to realize that it must not be allowed to remain thus; that this shadow image, i.e. modern thinking, has to be enlivened so that it can turn into Imagination. It becomes evident, for example, in such books as my Theosophy or my An Outline of Occult Science that the attempt is always made to change modern thinking into Imagination, that pictures are driven everywhere into our thinking so that thinking can be aroused to Imagination, hence, to life. Otherwise, humanity would be laid waste completely. We can disseminate arid scholarliness far and wide, but this dry scholarliness will not become inflamed and rouse itself to will-filled action, if Imaginative life does not once more enter into this shadowy thinking, this ghost of thinking which has invaded mankind in recent times.

This is indeed the profound and fateful challenge for modern civilization, namely, that we should realize that, on the one hand, thinking tends to become a shadowy element into which human beings increasingly withdraw and that, on the other hand, what passes over into the will actually turns only into a form of surrender to human instincts. The less thinking is capable of taking in Imagination, the more will the full interest of what lives outside in society be abandoned to the instincts. Humanity of former times, at least in the epochs that bore the stamp of civilization—you have been able to deduce that from the previous lectures—possessed something, out of the whole human organism that was spiritual. Modern human beings only receive something spiritual from their heads; in regard to their will, they thus surrender to their impulses and instincts. The great danger is that human beings turn more and more into purely head-oriented creatures, that in regard to acting in the outer world out of their will, they abandon themselves to their instincts. This then naturally leads to the social conditions that are now spreading in the East of Europe^T1 and also infect us here everywhere. This comes about because thinking has become but a shadow image. One cannot stress these things often enough.

It is on the basis of precisely such profound insight that the significant strivings of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will be understood. Its aim is the shadow image once again become a living being, so that something will be available again to mankind that can take hold of the whole human being. This, however, cannot take place if thinking remains a shadow image, if Imaginations do not enter into this thinking once more. Numbers, for example, will have to be imbued again with life in the way I outlined when I pointed to the sevenfold human being, who is actually a nine-membered being, where the second and the third, the sixth and the seventh parts unite in such a way as to become in each case a unity, and where seven is arrived at when one sums up the nine parts. It is this inner involvement of what was once bestowed on man from within that must be striven for. We have to take very seriously what is characterized in this regard by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

From a different direction, an awareness came about of the fact that thinking is becoming shadow like; for that reason, a method was created in Jesuitism that from a certain aspect, brings life into this thinking. The Jesuit exercises are designed to bring life into this thinking. But they accomplish this by renewing an ancient form of life, above all, not by moving in the direction of and working through Imagination, but through the will, which particularly in Jesuit exercises plays an important role. We should realize—yet realize it far too little—how in a community such as the Jesuit order all aspects of the life of soul become something radically different from what is true of ordinary people. Basically, all other human beings of the present possess a different condition of soul than those who become Jesuits. The Jesuits work out of a world will; that cannot be denied. Consequently, they are aware of certain existing interrelationships; at most, such interrelationships are noticed also by some other orders that in turn are fought tooth and nail by the Jesuits. But it is this significant element whereby reality enters into the shadowy thinking that turns a Jesuit into a different kind of person from the others in our modern civilization. These think merely in shadow images and therefore are actually asleep mentally, since thinking no longer takes hold of their organism and does not really permeate their nervous system.

Nobody, I believe, has ever seen a gifted Jesuit who is nervous, whereas those imbued with modern scholarliness and education increasingly suffer from nervousness. When do we become nervous? When the physical nerves make themselves felt. Something then makes itself felt that, from a physical standpoint, has no right at all to make itself felt, for it exists merely to transmit the spiritual. These matters are intimately connected with the wrongness of our modern education. And from a certain standpoint of imbuing thinking with life—a standpoint we must nevertheless definitely oppose—Jesuitism is something that goes along with the world, even though, like a crab, it goes backwards. But at least it moves, it does not stand still, whereas the form of science in vogue today basically does not comprehend the human being at all.

Here, I would like to draw your attention to something. I have already mentioned repeatedly that it is actually painful to witness again and again that modern human beings, who can think all sorts of things and are so very clever, do not stand in a living manner with a single fiber of their lives in the present age, that they do not see what is going on around them, indeed, that they are unaware of what is happening around them and do not wish to participate in it. That is different in the case of the Jesuit. The Jesuit who activates his whole being is well aware of what vibrates through the world today. As evidence, I would like to read to you a few lines from a current Jesuit pamphlet from which you can deduce what sort of life pulsates in it:

For all those who are serious about the fundamental Christian principles, those to whom the welfare of the people is truly a concern of the heart, whose soul was once profoundly touched by the words of the Savior, “Miseror super turbam,”^T2 for all those the time has now come when, borne by the ground swell of the Bolshevist storm tide, they can work with much greater success for the people and with the people. There is no room for timidity. Hence, as a matter of policy, we advocate the all out struggle against “capitalism,” against the exploitation of the people and profiteering at their expense, stricter emphasis on the duty to work even for the higher classes, the procurement of decent housing for millions of fellow citizens, even if such procurement necessitates making use of palaces and larger houses, utilization of natural resources and energy gained from water and air for the general welfare, not for trusts and syndicates, enhancement and education of the masses of people, participation by all segments of the people in government and administration, utilization of the concept of the system of soviets for the purpose of developing class representation having equal rights alongside parliamentary mass representation in order to prevent “the isolation of the masses from the state apparatus” as censured justifiably by Lenin ... God has given the goods of the earth to all human beings, not to a few so they can live on the fat of the land while millions languish in poverty, which is degrading both physically and morally ...¹

You see, this is the fiery mind that does sense something of what is happening. Here is a person who, in the rest of his book, sternly opposes Bolshevism and naturally wishes to have nothing to do with it. But, unlike somebody who has made himself comfortable in a chair today and is oblivious to the conflagration in the world all around him, he does not remain in such a position. Instead, he is aware of what is happening and knows what he wants because he sees what is going on.

People have gone so far as to merely think about the affairs of the world, and otherwise let things run their course. This is what has to be stressed again and again, namely, that the human being has more in him than mere thoughts with which to think about things while really not paying attention to the world's essential nature. As an example we need only indicate the Theosophical Society. It points to the great initiates who exist somewhere, and indeed, it can do so with justification. But it is not a matter of the initiates' existence; what is important is the manner in which those who refer to them speak of them. Theosophists imagine that the great initiates rule the world; in turn, they themselves sit down and produce good thoughts, which they let stream out in all directions. Then they talk of world rule, of world epochs, of world impulses. However, when the point is reached where something real, such as anthroposophy, has to live within the actual course of world events because it could not be otherwise, people find that uncomfortable since then they cannot really remain sitting on their chairs but have to experience what goes on in the world.

It must be strongly emphasized that the intellect has turned into a shadow in humanity, that it was earlier experienced in the etheric body and has now slipped, so to speak, into the physical body where it leads only a subjective existence. However, it can be brought to life through Imagination. Then it leads to the consciousness soul, and this consciousness soul can be grasped as a reality only when it senses the ego descends out of soul-spiritual worlds into incarnation and then passes through the gate of death into soul-spiritual worlds. When this inner soul-spiritual nature of the ego is comprehended, then the shadow image of the intellect can in fact be filled with reality. For it is through the ego that this has to be accomplished.

It is necessary to realize that living thinking exists. For what is it that people know since the fifteenth century? They know only logical thinking, not living thinking. This, too, I have pointed out repeatedly. What is living thinking? I shall take an example close at hand. In 1892, I wrote the The Philosophy of Freedom. This book has a certain content. In 1903, I wrote Theosophy; again, it has a certain content. In Theosophy, mention is made of the etheric body, the astral body, and so on. In Philosophy of Freedom, there is no mention of that. Now those who are only familiar with the logical, dead thinking come and say, Yes, I read the Philosophy of Freedom; from it, I cannot extract any concept of the etheric and astral body; it is impossible; I cannot find these concepts from the concepts contained in the book. But this is the same as if I were to take a small, five-year-old boy and fashioned him into a man of sixty by pulling him upwards and sideways to make him taller and wider!

I cannot put a mechanical, lifeless process in place of something living. But picture the Philosophy of Freedom as something alive—which indeed it is—and then imagine it growing. From it, then develops what only a person who tries to cull or pick out something from concepts will not figure out. All objections concerning contradictions are based on just this, namely, that people cannot understand the nature of living thinking as opposed to the dead thinking that dominates the whole world and all of civilization today. In the world of living things, everything develops from within, A formerly black-haired person who has white hair has acquired the latter not because the hair has been painted white; it has turned white from within. Things that grow and wane develop from within, and so it is also in the case of living thinking. Yet, today, people sit down and merely try to form conclusions, try to sense outward logic. What is logic? Logic is the anatomy of thinking, and one studies anatomy by means of corpses. Logic is acquired through the study of the corpse of thinking. It is certainly justified to study anatomy by means of corpses. It is just as justified to study logic through the corpses of thinking. But one will never comprehend life by means of what has been observed on the corpse!

This is what is important today and what really matters if we wish with all our soul to take part in a living way in what actually permeates and weaves through the world. This side of the matter has to be pointed out again and again, because insofar as the positive world development and evolution of mankind are concerned, we need to invigorate a thinking that has become shadowy. This process of thinking becoming shadow-like reached its culmination in the middle of the nineteenth. century. For that reason, the things that, so to say, beguiled humanity most of them fall into that period. Although in themselves these things were not great, if placed in the right location, they appear great.

Take the end of the 1850's. Darwin's Origin of the Species,² Karl Marx's The Principles of Political Economy,³ as well as Psycho-Physics by Gustav Theodor Fechner,⁴ a work in which the attempt is made to discover the psychic sphere by means of outward experiments, were published then. In the same year, the captivating discovery of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff⁵ and Bunsen⁶ is introduced; it demonstrates, as it were, that wherever one looks in the universe the same materiality is discovered. It is as if everything were being done in the middle of the nineteenth century to beguile human beings into believing that thinking must remain subjective and shadow-like, that it must not interfere in the world outside so that they could not possibly imagine that there might be reason, nous, in the cosmos, something that lives in the cosmos itself.

This is what caused this second half of the nineteenth century to be so unphilosophical. Basically, this is also what made it so devoid of deeds. This is what caused the economic relationships to become more and more complicated while commerce became enlarged into a world economy so that the whole earth in fact turned into one economic sphere, and particularly this shadow-like thinking was unable to grasp the increasingly complex and overwhelming reality. This is the tragedy of our modern age. The economic conditions have become more and more complex, weighty, and increasingly brutal; human thinking remained shadowy, and these shadows certainly could no longer penetrate into what goes on outside in the brutal economic reality.

This is what causes our present misery. Unfortunately, if a person actually believes that he is more delicately organized and has need of the spirit, he may possibly get into the habit of making a long face, of speaking in a falsetto voice and of talking about the fact that he has to elevate himself from brutal reality, since the spiritual basically can be grasped only in the mystical realm. Thinking has become so refined that it has to withdraw from reality, that it perishes right away in its shadowy existence if it tries to penetrate brutal reality. Reality in the meantime develops below in conformity with the instincts; it proliferates and brutalizes. Up above, we see the bloated ideas of mysticism, of world views and theosophies floating about; below, life brutally takes its course. This is something that must stop for the sake of mankind. Thinking must be enlivened; thought has to become so powerful that it need not withdraw from brutal reality but can enter into it, can live in it as spirit. Then reality will no longer be brutal. This has to be understood.

What is not yet understood in many different respects is that a thinking in which universal being dwells cannot but pour its force over everything. This should be something that goes without saying. But it appears as a sacrilege to this modern thinking if a form of thinking appears on the scene that cannot help but extend to all different areas. A properly serious attitude in life should be comprised of the realization: In thinking, we have been dealing with a shadow image, and rightly so, but the age has now arrived when life must be brought once again into this shadow image of thought in order that from this form of thought life, from this inner life of soul, the outer physical, sensory life can receive its social stimulus.

Tomorrow, we shall continue with this.

• T1. This is a reference to what was happening in Russia.
• T2. Latin for “I have compassion on the crowd” (Matthew 15:32).
• 1 . “Bolshevism” in pamphlets of Stimmen der Zeit (“Voices of the Times”), 6, 3rd edition Freiburg i. Br., 1919 by Bernhard Duhr, S. J. (1852–1930), historian.
• 2 . Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, natural scientist.
• 3 . Karl Marx, 1818–1883.
• 4 . Gustav Theodor Fechner, 180–1887, natural scientist and philosopher.
• 5 . Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, 1824–1887, physicist.
• 6 . Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, 1811–1899, chemist.

In the course of these lectures we have seen that the middle of the nineteenth century is an important time in the development of Western humanity. Attention was called to the fact that in a sense the culmination of the materialistic way of thinking and the materialistic world view occurred during this time. Yet it also had to be pointed out that this trend that has emerged in the human being since the fifteenth century was really something spiritual. Thus, it can be said that the characteristic of this developmental phase of recent human evolution was that simultaneously with becoming the most spiritual, the human being could not take hold of this spirituality. Instead, human beings filled themselves only with materialistic thinking, feeling, and even with materialistic will and activity. Our present age is still dominated by the aftereffects of what occurred in so many people without their being aware of it, and then reached its climax in mankind's development. What was the purpose of this climax? It occurred because something decisive was meant to take place in regard to contemporary humanity's attainment of the consciousness soul stage.

In focusing on the evolution of humanity from the third post-Atlantean epoch until approximately the year 747 (see sketch) before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that a process runs its course that can be called the development of the sentient soul in humanity. Then the age of the rational or mind soul begins and lasts roughly until the year 1413. It reaches its high point in that era of which external history has little to report. It must be taken into consideration, however, if European development is to be comprehended at all. This culmination point occurs approximately in the year 333 after Christ. Since the year 1413, we are faced with the development of the consciousness soul, a development we are still involved in and that saw a decisive event around the year 1850, or better, 1840.

A.D. 333

 ----------747-----------/-------------1413----------1840 Sentient Soul........Rational Soul....Consciousness Soul 

For mankind as a whole, matters had reached a point around 1840 where, insofar as the representative personalities of the various nations are concerned, we can say that they were faced with an intellect that had already assumed its most shadowy form. (Following this, we shall have to consider the reaction of the individual nations.) The intellect had assumed its shadowlike character. I tried yesterday to characterize this shadow nature of the intellect. People in the civilized world had evolved to the extent that, from then on it was possible on the basis of the general culture and without initiation to acquire the feeling: We possess intellect. The intellect has matured, but insofar as its own nature is concerned, it no longer has a content. We have concepts but these concepts are empty. We must fill them with something.

This, in a sense, is the call passing through humanity, though dimly and inaudibly. But in the deep, underlying, subconscious longings of human beings lives the call, the wish to receive a content, substance, for the shadow nature of rational thinking. Indeed, it is the call for spiritual science.

This call can also be comprehended concretely. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the human organization, in the physical part of which this shadowy intellect is trained, had simply progressed to the point where it could cultivate this empty shadowy intellect particularly well. Now, something was required for this shadowy intellect; it had to be filled with something. This could only happen if the human being realized: I have to assimilate something of what is not offered to me on the earth itself and does not dwell there, something I cannot learn about in the life between birth and death. I actually have to absorb something into my intellect that, although it was extinguished and became obscured when I descended with the results of my former earth lives out of spiritual soul worlds into a physical corporeality, nevertheless rests in the depths of my soul. From there, I have to bring it up once again, I have to call to mind something that rests within me simply by virtue of the fact that I am a human being of the nineteenth century.

Earlier, it would not have been possible for human beings to have practiced self-awareness in the same manner. This is why they first had to advance in their human condition to the point where the physical body increasingly acquired the maturity to perfect and utilize the shadowy intellect completely. Now, at least among the most advanced human beings, the physical bodies had reached the point where one could have said, or rather, since then it is possible to say: I wish to call to mind what it is that I am seeking to bring up from the depths of my soul life in order to pour a content into this shadowy intellect. This shadowy intellect would have been filled with something and in this way the consciousness soul age would have dawned. Therefore, at this point in time, the occasion arose where the consciousness soul could have unfolded.

Now you will say: Yes, but the whole era prior to that, beginning with the year 1413, was the age of the consciousness soul. Yes, certainly, but at first it has been a preparatory development. You need only consider what basic conditions existed for such a preparation particularly in this period as compared to all earlier times. Into this period falls, for example, the invention of the printing press; the dissemination of the written word. Since the fifteenth century, people by and by have received a great amount of spiritual content by means of the art of printing and through writing. But they absorb this content only outwardly; it is the main feature of this period that an overwhelming sum of spiritual content has been assimilated superficially. The nations of the civilized world have absorbed something outwardly which the great masses of people could receive only by means of audible speech in earlier times. It was true of the period of rational development, and in the age of the sentient soul it was all the more true that, fundamentally speaking, all dissemination of learning was based on oral teaching. Something of the psycho-spiritual element still resounds through speech. Especially in former days, what could be termed “the genius of language” definitely still lived in words. This ceased to be when the content of human learning began to be assimilated in abstract forms, through writing and printed works. Printed and written words have the peculiarity of in a sense extinguishing what the human being brings with him at birth from his pre-earthly, heavenly existence.

It goes without saying that this does not mean that you should forthwith cease to read or write. It does mean that today a more powerful force is needed in order to raise up what lies deep within the human being. But it is necessary that this stronger force be acquired. We have to arrive at self-awareness despite the fact that we read and write; we have to develop this stronger faculty, stronger in comparison to what was needed in earlier times. This is the task in the age of the development of the consciousness soul.

Before taking a look at how the influences of the spiritual world have now started to flow down in a certain way into the physical, sensory world, let us pose the question today, How did the nations of modern civilization actually meet this point of time in 1840?

From earlier lectures we know that the representative people for the development of the consciousness soul, hence for what matters particularly in our age, is the Anglo-Saxon nation. The Anglo-Saxon people are those who through their whole organization are predisposed to develop the consciousness soul to a special degree. The prominent position occupied by the Anglo-Saxon nation in our time is indeed due to the fact that this nation is especially suited for the development of the consciousness soul. But now let us ask ourselves from a purely external viewpoint, How did this Anglo-Saxon nation arrive at this point in time that is the most significant one in modern cultural development?

It can be said that the Anglo-Saxon nation in particular has survived for a long time in a condition—naturally with the corresponding variations and metamorphoses—that could perhaps be described best by saying, Those inner impulses, which had already made way for other forms in Greek culture, were preserved in regard to the inner soul condition of the Anglo-Saxon people. The strange thing in the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C. is that the nations experienced what is undergone at different periods, that the various ages move, as it were, one on top of the other. The problem is that such matters are extraordinarily difficult to notice because in the nineteenth century all sorts of things already existed—reading, writing—and because the living conditions prevailing in Scotland and England were different from those in Homeric times.

And yet, if the soul condition of the people as a nation is taken into consideration, the fact is that this soul condition of the Homeric era, which in Greece was outgrown in the tragic age and changed into Sophoclism, has remained. This age, a kind of patriarchal conception of life and existence, was preserved in the Anglo-Saxon world up until the nineteenth century. In particular, this patriarchal life spread out from the soul condition in Scotland. This is the reason why the influence proceeding from the initiation centers in Ireland did not have an effect on the Anglo-Saxon nation. As was mentioned on other occasions, that influence predominantly affected continental Europe. On the British isle itself, the predominant influence originated from initiation truths that came down from the north, from Scotland. These initiation truths then permeated everything else. But there is an element in the whole conception of the human personality that, in a sense, has remained from primordial times. This still has aftereffects; it lingers on even in the way, say, the relationship between Whigs and Tories develops in the British Parliament. The fact is that fundamentally we are not dealing with the difference between liberal and conservative views. Instead, we have to do with two political persuasions for which people today really have no longer any perception at all.

Essentially, the Whigs are the continuation of what could be called a segment of mankind imbued with a general love of humanity and originating in Scotland. According to a fable, which does have a certain historical background, the Tories were originally Catholicizing horse thieves from Ireland. This contrast, which then expressed itself in their particular political strivings, reflects a certain patriarchal existence. This patriarchal existence retained certain primitive forces, which can be observed in the kind of attitude exhibited by the owners of large properties toward those people who had settled on these lands as their vassals.

This relationship of subservience actually lasted until the nineteenth century; nobody was elected to Parliament who did not possess a certain power by virtue of being a landowner. We only have to consider what this implies. Such matters are not weighed in the right manner. Just think what it signifies, for example, that it was not until the year 1820 that English Parliament repealed the law according to which a person was given the death penalty for having stolen a pocket watch or having been a poacher. Until then, the law decreed that such misdeeds were capital offenses. This certainly demonstrates the way in which particular, ancient, and elementary conditions had remained. Today, people observe life in their immediate surroundings and then extend the fundamental aspects of present-day civilization backwards, so to speak. In regard to the most important regions of Europe, they are unaware of how recently these things have developed from quite primitive conditions.

Thus, it is possible to say that these patriarchal conditions survived as the foundation and basis of a society that was subsequently infused with the most modern impulse, unimaginable in the social structure without the development of the consciousness soul. Just consider all the changes in the social structure of the eighteenth century due to the technological metamorphosis in the textile industry and the like. Note how the mechanical, technological element moved into this patriarchal element. Try to form a clear idea of how, owing to the transformation of the textile industry, the nascent modern Proletariat pushes into the social structure that is based on this patriarchal element, this relationship of landowner to subjects. Just think of this chaotic intermingling, think how the cities develop in the ancient countryside and how the patriarchal attitude takes a daring plunge, so to say, into modern, socialistic, proletarian life.

To picture it graphically, we can actually say that this form of life develops in the way it existed in Greece approximately until the year 1000 B.C. (see drawing). Then it makes a daring jump and we suddenly find ourselves in the year A.D. 1820. Inwardly, the life of the year 1000 B.C. has been retained, but outwardly, we are in the eighteenth century, say 1770 (see arrows). Now everything that then existed in modern life, indeed, even in our present time, pours in. But it is not until 1820 that this English life makes the connection, finds it necessary to do so (see drawing); it is not until then that these matters even became issues, such as the abolition of the death penalty for a minor theft. Thus we can say that, here, something very old has definitely flown together with the most modern element. Thus, the further development then continues on to the year 1840.

Now, what had to occur specifically among the Anglo-American people during this time period, the first half of the nineteenth century? We have to recall that only after the year 1820, actually not until after 1830, it became necessary to pass laws in England according to which children under twelve years of age were not allowed to be kept working in factories for more than eight hours a day, no more than twelve hours a day in the case of children between thirteen and eighteen years of age. Please, compare that with today's conditions! Just think what the broad masses of working people demand today as the eight-hour day! As yet, in the year 1820, boys were put to work in mines and factories in England for more than eight hours; only in that year was the eight-hour day established for them. The twelve-hour day still prevailed, however, in regard to children between twelve and eighteen.

These things must certainly be considered in the attempt to figure out the nature of the elements colliding with each other at that time. Basically, it could be said that England eased its way out of the patriarchal conditions only in the second third of the nineteenth century and found it necessary to reckon with what had slowly invaded the old established traditions due to technology and the machine. It was in this way that this nation, which is preeminently called upon to develop the consciousness soul, confronted the year 1840.

Now take other nations of modern civilization. Take what has remained of the Latin-Roman element; take what has carried over the Latin-Roman element from the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, what has brought over the ancient culture of the intellectual soul as a kind of legacy into the epoch of the consciousness soul. Indeed, what had remained of this life of the intellectual soul reached its highest point, its culmination, in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. We note that the ideals, freedom, equality, and brotherhood appear all at once in the most extreme abstraction. We see them taken up by skeptics such as Voltaire,¹ by enthusiasts such as Rousseau;² we see them emerge generally in the broad masses of the people. We see how the abstraction, which is fully justified in this sphere, affects the social structure

It is a completely different course of events from the one over in England. In England, the vestiges of the old Germanic patriarchal life are permeated by what the element of modern technology and modern materialistic, scientific life could incorporate into the social structure. In France, we have tradition everywhere. We could say that the French Revolution has been enacted in the same manner in which a Brutus or a Caesar once acted in the most diverse ways in ancient Rome. Thus, here also, freedom, equality and brotherhood surfaced in abstract forms. Unlike in England, the old existing patriarchal element was not destroyed from the outside. Instead, the Roman juridical tradition, the adherence to the ancient concept of property and ownership of land, inheritance laws, and so on, what had been established in the Roman-juristic tradition was corroded by abstraction, driven asunder by abstraction.

We need only consider the tremendous change the French Revolution brought to all of European life. We only need remind ourselves that prior to the French Revolution those who, in a sense, distinguished themselves from the masses of the nation also had legal privileges. Only certain people could aspire to particular positions in government. What the French Revolution demanded based on abstraction and the shadowlike intellect was to make breaches into that system to undermine it. But it did bear the stamp of the shadowy intellect, the abstraction. Therefore, the demands that were being made fundamentally remained a kind of ideology. For this reason, we can say that anything that is of the shadowy intellect immediately turns into its opposite.

Then we observe Napoleonism; we watch the experimentation in the public and social realm during the course of the nineteenth century. The first half of the nineteenth century was certainly experimentation without a goal in France. What is the nature of the events through which somebody like Louis-Philippe, for example, becomes king of France, and so on—what sort of experimenting is carried out? It is done in such a way that one can recognize that the shadowy intellect is incapable of truly intervening in the actual conditions. Everything basically remains undone and incomplete; it all remains as legacy of ancient Romanism. We are justified in saying that even today the relationship to, say, the Catholic Church, which the French Revolution had quite clearly defined in abstraction, has not been clarified in France in external, concrete reality. And how unclear was it time and again in the course of the nineteenth century! Abstract reasoning had struggled up to a certain level during the Revolution; then came experimentation and the inability to cope with external conditions. In this way, this nation encountered the year 1840.

We can also consider other nations. Let us look at Italy, for instance, which, in a manner of speaking, still retained a bit of the sentient soul in its passage through the culture of the intellect. It brought this bit of the sentient soul into modern times and therefore did not advance as far as the abstract concepts of freedom, equality, and brotherhood attained in the French Revolution. It did, however, seek the transition from a certain ancient group consciousness to individual consciousness in the human being. Italy faced the year 1840 in a manner that allows us to say, The individual human consciousness trying to struggle to the fore in Italy was in fact constantly held down by what the rest of Europe now represented. We can observe how the tyranny of Habsburg weighed terribly on the individual human consciousness that tried to develop in Italy. We see in the 1820's the strange Congress of Verona³ that tried to determine how one could rise up against the whole substance of modern civilization. We note that there proceeded from Russia and Austria a sort of conspiracy against what the modern consciousness in humanity was meant to bring. There is hardly anything as interesting as the Congress of Verona, which basically wished to answer the question: How does one go about exterminating everything that is trying to emerge as modern consciousness in mankind?

Then we see how the people in the rest of Europe struggled in certain ways. Particularly in Central Europe, only a small percentage of the population was able to attain to a certain consciousness, experiencing in a certain manner that the ego is now supposed to enter into the consciousness soul. We notice attempts to achieve this at a certain high mental level. We can see it in the peculiar high cultural level of Goethe's age in which a man like Fichte was active;⁴ we see how the ego tried to push forward into the consciousness soul. Yet we also realize that the whole era of Goethe actually was something that lived only in few individuals. I believe people study far too little what even the most recent past was like. They simply think, for example the Goethe lived from 1749 until 1832; he wrote Faust and a number of other works. That is what is known of Goethe and that knowledge has existed ever since.

Until the year 1862, until thirty years after Goethe's death, with few exceptions, it was impossible for people to acquire a copy of Goethe's works. They were restricted; only a handful of people somehow owned a copy of his writings. Hence, Goetheanism had become familiar only to a select few. It was not until the 1860's that a larger number of people could even find out about the particular element that lived in Goethe. By that time, the faculty of comprehension for it had disappeared again. An actual understanding of Goethe never really came about, and the last third of the nineteenth century was not suited at all for such comprehension.

I have often mentioned that in the 1870's Hermann Grimm gave his “Lectures on Goethe” at the University of Berlin.⁵ That was a special event and the book that exists as Hermann Grimm's Goethe is a significant publication in the context of central European literature. Yet, if you now take a look at this book, what is its substance? Well, all the figures who had any connection with Goethe are listed in it but they are like shadow images having only two dimensions. All these portrayals are shadow figures, even Goethe is a two-dimensional being in Hermann Grimm's depiction. It is not Goethe himself. I won't even mention the Goethe whom people at the afternoon coffee parties of Weimar called “the fat Privy Councillor with the double chin.” In Hermann Grimm's Goethe, Goethe has no weight at all. He is merely a two-dimensional being, a shadow cast on the wall. It is the same with all the others who appear in the book; Herder—a shadow painted on a wall. We encounter something a little more tangible in Hermann Grimm's description of those persons coming from among the ordinary people who are close to Goethe, for example, Friederike von Sesenheim who is portrayed there so beautifully, or Lilli Schoenemann from Frankfurt—hence those who emerge from a mental atmosphere other than the one in which Goethe lived. Those are described with a certain “substance.” But figures like Jacobi and Lavater are but shadow images on a wall. The reader does not penetrate into the actual substance of things; here, we can observe in an almost tangible way the effects of abstraction. Such abstraction can certainly be charming, as is definitely the case with Hermann Grimm's book, but the whole thing is shadowy. Silhouettes, two-dimensional beings, confront us in it.

Indeed, it could not be otherwise. For it is a fact that a German could not call himself a German in Germany at the time when Hermann Grimm, for example was young. The way one spoke of Germans during the first half of the nineteenth century is misunderstood, particularly at present. How “creepy” it seems to people in the West, those of the Entente, when they start reading Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation today and find him saying: “I speak simply to Germans, to Germans as such.” In the same way, the harmless song “Germany, Germany above all else”^T1 is interpreted foolishly, for this song means nothing more than the desire to be a German, not a Swabian, a Bavarian, an Austrian, a Franconian, or Thuringian. Just as this song referred only to Germans as such, so Fichte wished simply to address himself to Germans, not to Austrians, Bavarians, those from the province of Baden, Wuerttemberg, Franconia, or Prussia; he wanted to speak “to Germans.” This is naturally impossible to understand, for instance, in a country where it has long since become a matter of course to call oneself a Frenchman. However, in certain periods in Germany, you were imprisoned if you called yourself German. You could call yourself an Austrian, a Swabian, a Bavarian, but it amounted to high treason to call yourself a German. Those who called themselves Germans in Bavaria expressed the sentiment that they did not wish to look up merely to the Bavarian throne and its reign within Bavaria's clearly defined borders, but implied that they also wished to look beyond the borders of Bavaria. But that was high treason! People were not permitted to call themselves Germans.

It is not understood at all today that these things that are said about Germans and Germany, refer to this unification of everything German. Instead, the absurd nonsense is spread that, for example, Hoffmann's song refers to the notion that Germany should rule over all the nations of the world although it means nothing else but: Not Swabia, not Austria, not Bavaria above all else in the world, but Germany above all else in the world, just as the Frenchman says: France above all else in the world. It was, however, the peculiar nature of Central Europe that basically a tribal civilization existed there. Even today, you can see this tribal culture everywhere in Germany. A Wuerttembergian is different from a Franconian. He differs from him even in the formulation of concepts and words, indeed, even in the thought forms disseminated in literature. There really is a marked difference, if you compare, say, a Franconian, such as cloddy Michael Conrad—using modern literature as an example—with something that has been written at the same time by a Wuerttembergian, hence in the neighboring province.

Something like this plays into the whole configuration of thoughts right into the present time. But everything that persists in this way and lives in the tribal peculiarities remains untouched by what is now achieved by the representatives of the nations. After all, in the realm commonly called Germany something has been attained such as Goetheanism with all that belongs to it. But it has been attained by only a few intellectuals; the great masses of people remain untouched by it. The majority of the population has more or less maintained the level of central Europe around the year A.D. 300 or 400. Just as the Anglo-Saxon people have stayed on the level of around the year 1000 B.C., people in Central Europe have remained on the level of the year A.D. 400. Please do not take this in the sense that a terrible arrogance might arise with the thought that the Anglo-Saxons have remained behind in the Homeric age, and we were already in the year A.D. 400. This is not the way to evaluate these matters. I am only indicating certain peculiarities.

In turn, the geographic conditions reveal that this level of general soul development in Germany lasted much longer than in England. England's old patriarchal life had to be permeated quickly with what formed the social structure out of the modern materialistic, scientific, and technological life first in the area of the textile industry, and later also in the area of other technologies. The German realm and Central Europe in general opposed this development initially, retaining the ancient peculiarities much longer. I might say, they retained them until a point in time when the results of modern technology already prevailed fully all over the world. To a certain extent, England caught up in the transformation of the social structure in the first half of the nineteenth century. Everything that was achieved there definitely bypassed central Europe.

Now, Central Europe did absorb something of abstract revolutionary ideas. They came to expression through various movements and stirrings in the 1840's in the middle of the nineteenth century. But this region sat back and waited, as it were, until technology had infused the whole world. Then, a strange thing happened. An individual—we could also take other representatives—who in Germany had acquired his thinking from Hegelianism, namely, Karl Marx, went over to England, studied the social structure there and then formulated his socialist doctrines. At the end of the nineteenth century, Central Europe was then ready for these social doctrines, and they were accepted there. Thus, if we tried to outline in a similar manner what developed in this region, we would have to say: The development progressed in a more elementary way even though a great variety of ideas were absorbed from outside through books and printed matter.

The conditions of A.D. 400 in central Europe continued on, then made a jump and basically found the connection only in the last third of the nineteenth century, around the year 1875. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon nation met already the year 1840 with a transformation of conditions, with the necessity of receiving the consciousness soul, the German people continued to dream. They still experienced the year 1840 as though in a dream. Then they slept through the grace period when a bridge could have been built between leading personalities and what arose out of the masses of the people in the form of the proletariat. The latter then took hold of the socialist doctrine and thereby, beginning about the year 1875, exerted forcible, radical pressure in the direction of the consciousness soul. Yet even this was in fact not noticed; in any case it was not channeled in any direction, and even today it is basically still evaluated in the most distorted way.

In order to arrive at the anomalies at the bottom of this, we need only call to mind that Oswald Spengler, who wrote the significant book The Decline of the West, also wrote a booklet concerning socialism of which, I believe, 60,000 copies or perhaps more have been printed. Roughly, it is Spengler's view that this European, this Western civilization, is digging its own grave. According to Spengler, by the year 2200, we will be living on the level of barbarism. We have to agree with Spengler concerning certain aspects of his observations; for if the European world maintains the course of development it is pursuing now, then everything will be barbarized by the time the third millennium arrives. In this respect Spengler is absolutely correct. The only thing Spengler does not see and does not want to see is that the shadowy intellect can be raised to Imaginations out of man's inner being and that hence the whole of Western humanity can be elevated to a new civilization.

This enlivening of culture through the intentions of anthroposophical spiritual science is something a person like Oswald Spengler does not see. Rather, he believes that socialism—the real socialism, as he thinks, a socialism that truly brings about social living—has to come into being prior to this decline. The people of the Occident, according to him, have the mission of realizing socialism. But, says Oswald Spengler, the only people called upon to realize socialism are the Prussians. This is why he wrote the booklet Prussianism and Socialism. Any other form of socialism is wrong, according to Spengler. Only the form that revealed its first rosy dawn in the Wilhelminian age, only this form of socialism is to capture the world. Then the world will experience true, proper socialism.

Thus speaks a person today whom I must count among the most brilliant people of our time. The point is not to judge people by the content of what they say but by their mental capacities. This Oswald Spengler, who is master of fifteen different scientific disciplines, is naturally “more intelligent than all the writers, doctors, teachers, and ministers” and so on. We can truly say that with his book about the decline of the West he has presented something that deserves consideration, and that, by the way, is making a most profound impression on the young people in Central Europe. But next to it stands this other idea that I have referred to above, and you see precisely how the most brilliant people can arrive today at the strangest notions. People take hold of the intellect prevalent today and this intellect is shadowy. The shadows flit to and fro, one is caught up in one shadow, then one tries to catch up with another—nothing is alive. After all, in a silhouette, in a woman's shadow image cast on the wall, her beauty is not at all recognizable. So it is also with all other matters when they are viewed as shadow images. The shadow image of Prussianism can certainly be confused with socialism. If a woman turns her back to the wall and her shadow falls on it, even the ugliest woman might be considered beautiful. Likewise, Prussianism can be mistaken for socialism if the shadowlike intellect inwardly pervades the mind of a genius.

This is how we must look at things today. We must not look at the contents, we must aim for the capacities; that is what counts. Thus, it has to be acknowledged that Spengler is a brilliant human being, even though a great number of his ideas have to be considered nonsense. We live in an age when original, elementary judgments and reasons must surface. For it is out of certain elementary depths that one has to arrive at a comprehension of the present age and thus at impulses for the realities of the future.

Naturally, the European East has completely slept through the results of the year 1840. Just think of the handful of intellectuals as opposed to the great masses of the Russian people who, because of the Orthodox religion, particularly the Orthodox ritual, are still deeply immersed in Orientalism. Then think of the somnolent effect of men like Alexander I, Nicholas I, and all the other “I's” who followed them! What has come about today was therefore the element that aimed for this point in which the consciousness soul was to have its impact on European life.

We shall say more tomorrow.

• 1. Francois de Voltaire (actually d'Arouet), 1694–1778, French philosopher of the Enlightenment.
• 2. Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1778, French philosopher and pedagogue.
• 3. Congress of Verona: Congress of the “Holy Alliance” (1822) to which all the European powers belonged with the exception of England and the Vatican. Under Metternich, it pursued a clearly reactionary course.
• 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814, German philosopher.
• 5. Hermann Grimm, 1828–1901, German art historian and literary critic.
• T1. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the German national anthem.

Yesterday I tried to outline the various preparations of different nations for the significant point in humanity's development in the middle of the nineteenth century that then, in a sense, flowed from that time on into our present age. All this can be illustrated through descriptions of the connections between external phenomena and the inner spiritual course of development. Today, we shall bring together several facts that can throw some light on the actual underlying history of the nineteenth century. After all, it is true that the middle of that century is the point when intellectual activity completely turned into a function, an occupation, of the human physical body. Whereas this activity of the intellect was a manifestation of the etheric body during the whole preceding age; from the eighth century B.C. until the fifteenth century A.D., it has increasingly become an activity of the physical body since that time. This process reached a culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. Along with this, the human being has in fact become more spiritual than was previously the case.

The insights into the spiritual world that had come about earlier and had diminished since the beginning of modern times were derived, after all, from the more intensive union of the physical body with the etheric body. Simply because they were now in a position to carry out something completely nonphysical with their physical body, namely, intellectual activity, human beings thus became completely spiritual beings in regard to their activity. But as I already pointed out yesterday, they denied this spirituality. People related what they grasped mentally only to the physical world. And as I attempted to characterize it yesterday, the different nations were prepared in different ways for this moment in the development of modern civilization.

From this earlier characterization, the fundamental difference between the soul condition of the Roman-Latin segment of Europe's population and that of the Anglo-Saxon part will have become clear. A radical difference does indeed exist in regard to the inner soul constitution. This radical difference can best be characterized if certain spiritual streams that have run their course in humanity's evolution since ancient times and have been recognized long ago are juxtaposed to the contrast between France, Spain, Italy, and the inhabitants of the British Isles and their American descendants. This can be characterized in the following way. Everything that was part of the Ahura-Mazdao cult in the ancient Persian culture, mankind's looking up to the light, encountered in a diminished form in the Egypto-Chaldean civilizations and, even more diminished, in Greek culture, finally became abstract in the Roman culture. All this left residual traces in what has been preserved throughout the Middle Ages and the modern era in the Romance segment of the European population. The last offshoot of the Ormuzd or Ahura-Mazdao culture has remained behind, as it were, whereas, on the other hand, the stream that was considered the ahrimanic one in the ancient Persian world view emerges as modern culture. Indeed, like Ormuzd and Ahriman, these two cultures confront each other in recent times. We find poured into this Ormuzd stream everything that comes from the Roman Church. The forms Christianity assumed by enveloping itself with the Roman-juristic forms of government, by turning into the papal church of Rome, are the last offshoots. We have indicated much else from which these forms originated, but together with all these things they are the last offshoots of the Ormuzd cult. These last traces can still be detected in the offering of the Mass and all that is present in it. A proper understanding of what lies at the basis of these traces will be attained only if less value is placed on insignificant aspects as compared to the great streams of humanity, only if in studying these matters the true value is sought in the forms of thought and feeling that hold sway.

In regard to external civilization, modern impulses came to expression in a tumultuous way in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. As I indicated yesterday, there lived in it though in abstractions, the appeal addressed to the individual, the conscious human being. We might actually say, like a counterblow against what continued to survive in Romanism, these abstractions of freedom, equality, and brotherhood came into being out of the world of ideas. We must distinguish between what found its way into the Roman forms of thought and feeling out of ancient spiritual streams, and the element that originated from human nature. After all, we must always distinguish the essence of a single nationality from the ongoing stream of humanity in general. We shall see how a light that clearly points to the characteristic moment in humanity's evolution in that century also takes shape precisely in the French civilization later on in the nineteenth century. But the national element in the French, Spanish, and Italian cultures contains in itself the continuation of the Ormuzd element in those times in which this element—naturally transformed through the Catholicity of Christianity—appears as a shadow of an ancient civilization. Therefore, we see that despite all aspirations towards freedom Romanism became and has remained the bearer of what the Roman Church in its world dominion represents.

You really do not understand much of the course of European development, if you do not clearly realize in what sense Roman ecclesiasticism continues to live in Romanism to this day. Indeed even the thought forms employed in the struggle against the institutions of the Church are in turn themselves derived from this Roman Catholic thinking. Thus, we have to distinguish between the general stream of humanity's evolution, which has assumed abstract character and flows through the French Revolution, and the particular national, the Roman-Latin stream, which is actually completely infected with Roman Catholicity.

Out of this stream of Roman Catholicity, a remarkable phenomenon arises in the beginning of the nineteenth century. This phenomenon and its significance for the development in Europe is given far too little attention. Most people who spend their lives being asleep to the phenomena of civilization know nothing of what has been living in the depths of European culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century and is still fully grounded in Roman Catholicity. All this is concentrated, I should say, in the first third of the nineteenth century in the activities of a certain personality, namely, de Maistre.¹ De Maistre is actually the representative of the Catholicity borne by the waves of Romanism, Catholicity that has the aspiration to lead the whole of Europe back into its bosom. With de Maistre, a personality of the greatest imaginable genius, of compelling spirituality but Roman Catholic through and through, appears on the scene.

Let us now give some consideration to something that is completely unfamiliar to those who think along Protestant lines, yet is present in a relatively large number of people in Europe. It is not commonly known that a spiritual stream does in fact exist that is quite unknown to what has otherwise developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century, but that is itself well-acquainted with the effects of this new mentality of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

Let us try to characterize the world view in the minds of those for whom de Maistre was a brilliant representative in the first third of the nineteenth century. He himself has long since died, but the spirit that inspired him lives on in a relatively large number of people in Europe. Our present is the time in which it is coming to life again, assuming new forms and seeking to gain larger and larger dimensions. We shall characterize the world view at its roots in a few sentences. This view holds that since the beginning of the fifteenth century the course of human life on earth is going downhill. Since that time, only dissipation, godlessness, and vapidity have proliferated in European civilization; the mere intellect focusing on usefulness has gripped humanity. Truth, on the other hand, which is identical with the spirituality of the world, expresses something different since time immemorial. The problem is that modern man has forgotten this ancient, sacred truth. This primordial, sacred truth implies that man is a fallen creature. The human being has cause to appeal to his conscience and remorse in his soul so that he can lift himself up, so that his soul will not fall prey to materiality. But inasmuch as European humanity utilizes materiality since the middle of the fifteenth century, the European civilization is falling into ruin and with it the whole of mankind.

That is the world view whose main exponent is de Maistre. According to this view all of humanity falls into two categories, one representing the kingdom of God, the other representing the kingdom of this world. The followers of this view look upon the earth's population and distinguish those who they say belong to the kingdom of God. They are the ones who still believe in the ancient truths, who, in fact, have vanished in their true form since the beginning of the fifteenth century. Their noblest aftereffects can still be detected in the views of Augustine,² who also differentiates between human beings who are predestined to salvation and those predestined to damnation. The adherents of de Maistre claim that when one encounters a person in this world, he either belongs to the kingdom of God, or to the kingdom of this world. It only appears as though human beings were all mixed together. In the eyes of the spiritual world they are strictly separated from one another, and they can be distinguished from one another. In antiquity, those who belonged to the kingdom of the world, worshiped superstition, that is, they fashioned for themselves false images of the deity; since the beginning of the fifteenth century, they cling to unbelief. That is what de Maistre and his followers say. They know very well what the majority of the European population has slept through, namely, the new age that has in fact dawned since the beginning of the fifteenth century. They indicate this point in time; they indicate it as that moment in time when humanity forgot the source, the actual source of divine truth. The put it like this: Through sole use of the shadowy intellect, human beings found themselves in a position where the connecting link between them and the source of eternal truth was severed. Since that time, Providence no longer extends mercy to mankind, only justice, and this justice will hold sway on the day of Judgment.

If one relates something like this, it is like telling people a fairy tale; nevertheless, there are those in Europe who cling to this view that since the beginning of the fifteenth century divine world rule has assumed a quite different position in regard to earth humanity. They cling to this tenet just as modern scientists adhere to the law of gravity or something like that. Despite the fact that the existence of this view of life is of fundamental significance particularly for the present, people today do not wish to pay any heed to something like this. De Maistre sees the most pronounced defection from ancient truth in the French Revolution. He does not view it in the way we considered it, namely, as the arising in abstract form of what is supposed to direct human beings to the consciousness soul. Instead, he views this Revolution as the fall into unbelief, the worst thing that could have happened to modern humanity. The French Revolution in particular signifies to him that the seal has now been set on the fact that the divine world power no longer has any obligation to extend mercy in any form on the human being but merely justice, which will be sure to prevail on the Day of Judgment. It is assumed in these circles that those who will fall prey to the powers of doom are already predestined, and also already preordained are those who are the children of the Kingdom of God, who are destined to save themselves because they still cling to ancient wisdom that enjoyed its special bloom in the fourth century A.D.

Such an impulse pervades the text Observations About France de Maistre wrote in 1796 when he still lived in Piermont. Already then he reproached France, the France of the Revolution, for its long list of sins. Already then, he referred to the foundations of Romanism that still retain what has come down from ancient times. This sentiment is expressed even more strongly in de Maistre's later writings, and the latter are connected with the whole mission in world history de Maistre ascribed to himself.³

After all, he chose Petersburg as the setting for his activity; his later writings proceeded from there. De Maistre had the grandiose idea to tie in with Russianism, particularly with the element that had found its way since ancient times from Asia into the Orthodox Catholic, Russian religion. From there, he wished to create a connection to Romanism. He tried to bring about the great fusion between the element living in the Oriental manner of thinking in Russian culture, and the element coming from Rome. The article he wrote in Petersburg in 1810, ”Essay Concerning the Creative Principle of Political Constitutions,” is already imbued with this view. We can discern from this text how de Maistre refers back to what Christianity was in regard to its metaphysical view prior to the scholastic age, what it was in the first centuries and what was acceptable to Rome. De Maistre aimed for Roman, for Catholic, Christianity as a real power, but in a certain sense he even rejected what the Middle Ages had already produced as an innovation on the basis of Aristotle's philosophy. In a certain sense, de Maistre tried to exclude Aristotle, for the latter was to him already the preparation for what has appeared since the fifteenth century in the form of the modern faculty of reason. Through human faculties other than logic, de Maistre wanted to attain to a relationship with spirituality.

The essay he wrote in the second decade of the nineteenth century, “Concerning the Pope,” moves particularly strongly in the direction of this concept of life. We might say that it is a text that exudes a classic spirit in its composition, a spirit that belongs, in a manner of speaking, to the finest times of French culture under Louis XIV. At the same time, it had as penetrating an effect as any inspired writing. The Pope is presented as the rightful ruler of modern civilization, and it is significant that this is being stated in Petersburg. The manner of presentation is such that one is supposed to distinguish between the temporal, namely, the corruption that has come into the world through a number of Popes, the objectionable elements in regard to some of the Popes, and the eternal principle of Roman Papacy. In a sense, the Pope is represented as incarnation of the spirit of the earth that is to rule over this earth. One is moved to say: All the warmth that lives in this essay about the Pope is the shining forth of Ormuzd's spirit that very nearly sees Ahura-Mazdao himself incarnated in the Roman Pope and therefore makes the demand that the Roman Catholic Church in its fusion with all that found its way from the Orient into Russia—for this is implied in the background—will rule supreme, that it will sweep away all that the intellectual culture has produced since the beginning of the fifteenth century.

De Maistre was really brilliantly effective in this direction. In 1816, his translation of Plutarch was published.⁴ In it he tried to demonstrate the sort of power that Christianity possessed; a power, so he thought, that had insinuated itself as thought form into Plutarch's dissertations although the latter was still a pagan. Finally, the last work from de Maistre's pen, again proceeding from Petersburg, Twilight Hours in St. Petersburg, was published in two volumes.⁵ First of all, everything I have already characterized appears in them in an especially pronounced form; in particular he depicts the radical struggle of Roman Catholicism against what appears on the British Isles as its counterpart.

If, on the one hand, we see how Roman Catholicism crystallizes in all this in a certain direction, if we note what is connected in the form of Roman Catholicism with personalities like Ignatius of Loyola,⁶ Alfonso di Liguori,⁷ Francis Xaverius,⁸ and others and relate this to the brilliant figure of de Maistre; if we observe everything that is present here, then, in a manner of speaking, we see the obsolete, archaic light of Ormuzd. On the other hand, we note what de Maistre sees arising on the British Isles and what he then assails cuttingly with the pungent acid of his penetrating mind. This struggle by de Maistre against the true essence of the Anglo-Saxon spirit is one of the most grandiose spiritual battles that has ever taken place. In particular, he aims at the personality of the philosopher Locke⁹ and sees in him the very incarnation of the spirit that leads mankind into decline. He opposes Locke's philosophy brilliantly to excess.

We need only recall the significance of this philosophy. In the background, on the one hand, we must note the Roman principles of initiation that express themselves like a continuing Ormuzd worship. We must be aware of everything that flowed into this from somebody like Ignatius of Loyola,¹⁰ and in such grand manner from de Maistre himself. On the other hand, in contrast to everything that has its center in Roman Catholicism in Rome itself, yet is based on initiation and, I might say, is certainly the newest phase of the Ormuzd initiation, we have to observe all the secret societies that spread from Scotland down through England and of which English philosophy and politics are an expression. From a certain, different viewpoint, I have described that on another occasion. De Maistre is just as well informed about what makes itself felt out of an ahrimanic initiation principle as he is knowledgeable about what he is trying to bring to bear as the Ormuzd initiation in the new form for European civilization. De Maistre knows how to evaluate all these things; he is intelligent enough to recognize them esoterically, inasmuch as he attacks the philosopher Locke who in a sense is an offspring, an outward, exoteric offspring, of this other, ahrimanic initiation. He is attacking an important personality, the one who made his appearance with the epochal book Concerning Human Reason, which then greatly influenced French thinking. Subsequently, Locke was indeed revered by Voltaire.¹¹ His influence was such that Madam de Sevigne¹² remarked concerning an Italian writer who made Locke palatable in a literary sense for Italy, that the latter would have liked to consume Locke's rhetorical embellishments in every bowl of boullion.

Now de Maistre took a close look at Locke and said: It is impossible that Voltaire, for example, and other Frenchmen could have even read this Locke! In his book Twilight Hours in St. Petersburg de Maistre discusses in detail how writers actually gain world fame. He demonstrates that it is quite possible that Voltaire had never read Locke; he really could not have read him, otherwise he would have been smart enough not to defend Locke as he did.

Even though de Maistre sees a veritable devil in Voltaire, he still does him justice by saying this of him. And in order to substantiate this, he offers long essays on how individuals like Locke are written and spoken about in the world, individuals who are viewed as great men. This is notwithstanding the fact that in reality people are not concerned with gaining firsthand knowledge about them, but instead familiarize themselves with such individuals by means of secondary sources. It is as if humanity were imprisoned in error—this is how Locke affects these people. The whole modern way of thinking that, according to de Maistre's view, then led to the catastrophe of the French Revolution actually proceeds from Locke; in other words Locke is the exponent, the symptom, the historical symptom for this. From the point from which Locke proceeded, this way of thinking dominates the world. De Maistre scrutinizes Locke, and he says that there were few writers who had such an absolute lack of a sense of style as did Locke, and he demonstrates this in detail. He tries to prove in every instance that Locke's statements are so trivial, so matter of fact, that one need not reckon with them at all, that it is quite unnecessary to trouble one's thoughts with them. He states that Voltaire said Locke always clearly defined everything, but, asks de Maistre, what are these definitions by Locke? Nothing but truisms, “nonsensical tautologies,” to use a modern term, and ridiculous. According to him, all of Locke's pen pushing is supposedly a joke without style, without brilliance, full of tautologies and platitudes.

This is how de Maistre characterized something that became most valuable for modern mankind, namely, that people today see greatness in platitude, in popular style, in the lack of genius and style, in what can be found in the streets but passes itself off as philosophy.

Yet, de Maistre is actually a person who in all instances pays attention to the deeper spiritual principles, to the spiritually essential. It is most difficult for matters such as these encountered here to be made comprehensible to a person today. For the way a personality like de Maistre thinks is really quite foreign to present day human beings who are accustomed to the shadowy intellect. De Maistre not only observes the individual person; he sees the spiritual element working through that individual. What Locke wrote must be characterized in de Maistre's sense in the way I have just described it. However, de Maistre expresses this with extraordinary brilliance and geniality. At the same time, he says: If, in turn, I consider Locke as a person he was indeed a quite decent fellow; one can have nothing against him as a person. He is the corrupter of Western European humanity, but he is a decent person. If he would be born again today and would have to watch how human beings make use of this triviality that he himself recognized as such after death, he would cry bitter tears over the fact that people have fallen for his platitudes in this manner.

All this is expressed by de Maistre with tremendous forced and plausible emphasis. He is imbued with the impulse thus to annihilate what appears to him as the actual adversary of Roman Catholicism and what, according to his view, thrives especially on the other side of the Channel. I would like to read to you one passage verbatim from the “Petersburg Twilight Conversations,” where he speaks of the—to his view wretched—effect of Locke on politics: “These dreadful seeds”—so he says—“perhaps would not have come to fruition under the ice of his style; animated in the hot mud of Paris, they have produced the monster of the Revolution that has engulfed Europe.”

After having uttered such words against the spirit working through Locke, he again turns to Locke as a person. This is something that is so difficult to impress on people of our age who constantly confuse the external personality with the spiritual principle that expresses itself through that human being and see it as a unit. De Maistre always distinguishes what reveals itself as actual spirituality from the external human being. Now he turns again to the outward personality and says: He is actually a man who had any number of virtues, but he was gifted with them about as well as was that master of dance who, according to Swift,¹³ was so accomplished in all the skills of dance and had only one fault—he limped. Thus, says de Maistre, Locke was gifted with all virtues. Yet, de Maistre truly sees him as an incarnation of the evil principle—this is not my figure of speech, de Maistre himself uses this expression—that speaks through Locke and holds sway supersensibly since the beginning of the fifteenth century. One really gains some respect for the penetrating spirituality that imbued de Maistre. One must also be aware, however, that there really exist people who are gaining influence today and are on the verge now of winning back their influence over European civilization, who are definitely inspired by that spirituality that de Maistre represented on the highest level.

De Maistre still retained something of the more ancient, instinctive insights into the relationship between world and man. This is particularly evident from his discourse about the Sacrifice Offering and the ritual of the Sacrifice. He had somewhat of an awareness of the fact that what is linked to the physical body in regard to the consciousness soul must make itself felt independently in the human being and that it is embodied in the blood. Basically, it was de Maistre's view that the divine element had only been present in human evolution up to the fourth Christian century. He did not wish to acknowledge the Christ Who works on continuously. Above all, he tried to extinguish everything existing since the fifteenth century. He longed to return to ancient times. Thus, he acquired his particular view of the Christ, a view that possessed something of the ancient Yahweh, indeed of the old pagan gods, for he really went back to the cult of Ormuzd. And he gathered from this viewpoint that the divine element can only be sought far beyond the human consciousness soul, hence, beyond the blood. Based on such profound depths of his world view de Maistre expressed the thought that the gods—namely the gods of whom he spoke—have a certain distaste for the blood, and in the first place have to be appeased by the blood sacrifice. The blood has to offer itself up in sacrifice.¹⁴

It goes without saying that this is something the supremely enlightened modern human being laughs at. Yet it is something that has passed on from de Maistre to those who are his followers and who represent a segment of humanity that must be taken seriously, but who are also intimately connected with everything proceeding today from Roman ecclesiasticism. We must not forget that in de Maistre we confront the finest and most brilliant representative of what infused France from Romanism and what indeed has come to expression in French culture, I would say, in an ingenious but folk-oriented form. It is this that lives in French culture and has constantly brought it about that clericalism played a significant role in everything motivating French politics throughout the whole nineteenth century.

In France, the abstract impulses of freedom, equality, and brotherhood clashed with what existed there as Roman Catholicism. Actually, we must vividly feel what imbued a person such as Gambetta¹⁵ when, at a decisive moment, the deep sigh escaped from him: “Le clericalisme, voila l'ennemi!” (“Clericalism, that is the enemy!”). He sensed this clericalism that pulsed up from everything in the art of social experimentation during the first half of the nineteenth century. It lived in Napoleon III; it was something even the Commune¹⁶ had to struggle against. It was an element that survived into¹⁷ of the 1880's and the conflicts around the personality of Dreyfus;¹⁸ it is something that is alive even today.

An element is present in France that stands in an inner, spiritual, and absolutely radical difference to all that exists on the other side of the Channel in Great Britain and is basically embodied in the elements that remained behind from something else, from the various Masonic orders and lodges. Whereas, on the one hand, we are dealing with initiated Roman Catholicism, on the other hand we encounter the movements of secret societies, which I have already characterized here from another viewpoint and which represent the ahrimanic stream. There is a tremendous difference in the way the modern question of one person's individual status is expressed, say, in the elections to Parliament in France, or over in Great Britain. In France, everything proceeds from a certain theory, from certain ideologies. In England, everything emerges directly from the practical relationships of commercial and industrial life and collides, as I pointed out yesterday, with the ancient patriarchal conditions that prevailed particularly in the landowners' lifestyle. Just look at the way things take place in France. You find everywhere what you might call spiritual battles. There are struggles for freedom, for equality and brotherhood; people fight for the separation of school and church. People struggle to push the church back. But it is not possible to do so, for the church dwells in the depths of the soul's existence. Everything runs its course, in a manner of speaking, in the domain of certain dialectics, of certain arguments.

Over in England, these matters run their course as questions of power. There, we find a certain spiritual movement that is typical of the Anglo-Saxon people. I have often pointed out that as the middle of the nineteenth century approached, certain people came to the conclusion that things could not be allowed to go on in the same way any longer; human beings had to be made aware of the fact that a spiritual world does exist. The merely shadowlike intellect did not suffice. Yet people could not make up their minds to bring this inclination towards the spirit to the attention of the world in a manner other than through something that is “super-materialistic,” namely, through spiritism. This spiritism, which in turn has a greater impact than one would think, has its origins there. Spiritism, out to grasp the spirit externally, so to speak, just as one grasps matter, is therefore super-materialistic, is more materialistic than materialism itself. Locke lives on, so to say, in this super-materialism. And this element that in a sense, dwells in the inner sphere of the modern cultural development, expresses itself outwardly. It is certainly again and again the same phenomenon.

We encounter a tendency toward that spiritual stream de Maistre opposes so radically in the 1840's across the Channel: The tendency to comprehend everything by means of material entities. Locke basically referred to the intellect in such a manner that he deprived the intellect of its spiritual nature. He made use of the most spiritual element in the human being in order to deny the spirituality in the human being, indeed, in order to direct human beings only to matter. Similarly people in the nineteenth century referred to the spirit and tried to demonstrate it through all sorts of material manifestations. The intention was to make the spirit comprehensible to human beings through materialism. The element, however, that imbued the initiates of the various fraternities then passed over into the external social and political conditions.

One is inclined to say: By fighting for the abolition of the grain tariff in 1846 and succeeding in that endeavor, the cotton merchant Cobden and the Quaker Bright¹⁹ were the outward agents of the inner spiritual stream in the political life in the same way as the two most inept individuals who ever existed in politics, Asquith and Grey in the year 1914.²⁰ Certainly, Cobden and Bright were not as blind as Asquith and Grey, but basically it is the same symptom, presented to the world in outward phenomena such as the abolition of the grain tariff in 1846 when industry was victorious over the ancient patriarchal system, only on a new stage. Yesterday, I listed the other stages preceding this one. Then we can observe, so to speak, stage following upon stage. We see the workers organizing themselves. We note that the Whigs increasingly become the party concerned with industry, that the Tories turn into the party of the landowners, of the old patriarchal system. But we also see that this ancient patriarchal element could no longer resist the abrupt clash with modern technology—I characterized the manner of that yesterday—and that, all at once, modern industrialism pushed its way in. Thus, centuries, indeed millennia, were skipped, and England's mental condition that dated back to pre-Christian eras and existed well into the nineteenth century simply merged with what has developed in recent times.

Then we see the right to vote increasingly extended, the Tories calling for the support of a man, who only a short while ago certainly would not have been counted among them, Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, who was of Jewish extraction, an “outsider.”²¹ We watch the Upper House finally becoming a shadow and the year 1914 approaching in which a quite new England emerges. Only future historiography will be able to evaluate this emergence of the new England correctly.

You see, this is the course of the major events in the development of the nineteenth century. We see the various moments flashing up, indicating how significant a point in humanity's evolution has actually appeared. Only the most enlightened minds, however, can discern the light flashes that are the most important. I have frequently called attention to a phenomenon that is highly significant for the comprehension of the development in the nineteenth century. I have called attention to the moment in Goethe's house in Weimar when, having heard of the July revolution in France, Eckermann appeared before Goethe and Goethe said to him: “In Paris, unheard-of things have occurred, everything is in flames!” Naturally, Eckermann believed that Goethe was referring to the July revolution. That was of no interest at all to Goethe; instead, he said: “I don't mean that; that is not what interests me. Rather, in the academy in Paris, great controversy between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire has broken out concerning whether the individual types of animals are independent or whether the one type passes over into the next.” Cuvier claimed the first, namely, that one is dealing with firm, rigid types that cannot evolve into other types. Geoffroy held that one has to view a type as being changeable, that one type passes over into the next.²² For Goethe, this was the major world event of modern times!

In fact, this was true. Goethe, therefore, had a profound, tremendously alive sensitivity. For what did Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire argue against Cuvier? The former sensed that when human beings look into their inner being, they can animate this shadowy intellect, that it is not merely logic, which is passively concerned with the external world, but that this logic can discover something like living truth about the things in this world within itself. In what imbued Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, Goethe sensed the assertion of the living intellect, something that arose, I might say, in the occult development of modern humanity and reached its culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. Goethe really sensed something of great significance.

Cuvier, the great scholarly scientist, claimed that one had to be able to differentiate between the individual species and had to place them side by side. He stated that it was impossible to transform one type into the next, least of all, for example, the bird species into that of the mammals, and so on. Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, on the other hand, claimed that it was possible to do so.

What sort of confrontation was that? Ordinary truth and sublime error? Oh no, that is not the case. With ordinary, abstract logic, with the shadow-intellect, one can just as easily prove the correctness of what Cuvier claims as of what Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire has stated. On the basis of ordinary reason, which still prevails in our science today, this question cannot be resolved. This is why it has come up again and again; this is why we see Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire confront Cuvier in Paris in 1830 and in a different manner Weissmann²³ and others confront Haeckel.²⁴ These questions cannot be determined by way of this external science. For here, the element that has turned into the shadowlike intellect since the beginning of the fifteenth century, something that de Maistre detests so much, is really aiming at abolishing spirituality itself.

De Maistre pointed to Rome, even to the fact that the Pope—except for the temporal, passing papal personalities—sits in Rome as the incarnation of what is destined to rule over modern civilization. The culmination point of these discourses by de Maistre was reached in the year 1870, when the dogma of the Pope's infallibility was proclaimed. By way of the outmoded Ormuzd worship, the element that should be sought in spiritual heights was brought down into the person of the Roman Pope. What ought to be viewed as spirituality became temporalized matter; the church was turned into the secular state. This was subsequent to the fact that the church had already for a long time been successful in fitting the secular states into the form it had assumed itself when it had turned into the state religion under Constantine.

Therefore, in Romanism, we have on the one hand something that turns into the modern state inasmuch as the legal principle itself rebels and brings about its own polarity, so to speak, in the French Revolution; on the other hand, we have the outdated Ormuzd worship. Then we confront the element arising from the economic sphere, for all the measures that are taken on the other side of the English Channel originate from that sphere. In de Maistre we encounter the last great personality who tries to imprint spirituality into the judicial form of the state, who tries to carry the spirit into earthly materiality. This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to oppose. It wishes to establish super-sensible spirituality. It tries to add to the prolonged Ormuzd worship, to the ahrimanic worship, something that will bring about a balance, it wishes to make the spirit itself the ruler of the earth.

This cannot be accomplished other than in the following manner. If, on the one hand, the earthly element is imprinted into the structure of political laws and, on the other hand, into the economic form, this spiritual life, in turn, is established in such a way that it does not institute the belief in a god who has become secular but rather inaugurates the reign of the spirit itself that flows in with each new human being incarnating on earth. This is the free spiritual life that wishes to take hold of the spirit that stands above all that is earthly. Once again, the intention is t bring to bear what one might call the effusion of the Spirit.

In A.D. 869, during the general ecumenical council, the view of the spirit was toned down in order to prevent human beings from arriving at the acknowledgment of the spirit that rules the earth from heaven, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, in order to make possible the appearance of a man such as de Maistre as late as the nineteenth century.

This is what is important: Rather than appealing to the spirit believed to be incarnated in an earthly sense, a Christ-being believed to be living on in an earthly church, we must appeal to the spiritual entity that is indeed connected with the earth, yet must be recognized and viewed in the spirit. But since everything human beings must attain in the earthly domain has to be acquired within the social order, this cannot come about in any other way but by acknowledging the free right of the spirit descending with each new human life in order to acquire the physical body, the spirit that can never become sovereign in an earthly personality and dwells in a super-sensible being.

The establishment of the dogma of infallibility is a defection from spirituality; the last point of what had been intended with that council of 869 had been reached. We must return to the acknowledgment, belief in, and recognition of the spirit. This, however, can only come about if our social order is permeated with the structure that makes possible the free spiritual life alongside other things—the earth-bound political and economic life.

This is how the insight human beings must acquire today places itself into the course of civilization. This is how it has to be experienced within the latter. If we fail to do that, we cannot arrive at the essence of what is actually trying to come to expression in the “Threefold Social Organism,” of what tries to work for the salvation of a civilization that otherwise must fall victim to decline in the manner described by Spengler.

• 1. Joseph-Marie Comte de Maistre, 1753–1821, French diplomat and political theoretician.
• 2. Augustine, 354–430, neo-Platonist, Church Father. Converted to Christianity in 387, Bishop of North Africa. Wrote City of God, Confessions, among other books.
• 3. “Considerations sur la France,” London, 1796; “Essai sur le principe generateur des constitutions politiques,” Petersburg, 1810; "Du pape," Lyon, 1819.
• 4. Plutarch, around A.D. 125, from Chaironea. Greek philosopher and historian of the Roman-Hellenistic age.
• 5. Joseph de Maistre, Les soirees de St. Petersbourg, 1821, or “Twilight Conversations in St. Petersburg, Discourses About the Reign of Divine Providence in Temporal Matters,” with an appendix: “Explanations Concerning the Sacrifices.”
• 6. Ignatius of Loyola, 1491–1556, founder of the Jesuit Order, canonized in 1622.
• 7. Alfonso Maria di Liguori, 1696–1787, founder of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, canonized in 1839.
• 8. Francis Xaverius, 1506–1552, Jesuit; missionary to India and Japan.
• 9. John Locke, 1632–1704, English philosopher of the Enlightenment.
• 10. Jaques Benigne Bossuet, 1627–1704, French theologian and Church politician.
• 11. Voltaire, actually Francois-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778, French theologian and philosopher of the Enlightenment.
• 12. Madame De Sevigne's remark concerning an Italian writer: See de Maistre's Les soirees de St. Petersbourg, vol. 1, p. 413. Concerning his discourse about Locke, see the whole sixth conversation in Les Soirees, vol. 1, p. 337–430.
• 13. Jonathan Swift, 1667–1745, Dublin, English writer and satirist.
• 14. See note 5.
• 15. Leon Gambetta, 1838–1882, French statesman and republican. Remark from a speech on May 4, 1877.
• 16. Commune: Socialistic-Communistic community council that ruled over Paris for several months following the armistice of 1871 with Germany. The movement was bloodily defeated in May of 1871.
• 17. Boulangism: George Boulanger, 1837–1891, French general and monarchist.
• 18. Alfred Dreyfuss, 1859–1935, French officer, banished in 1894 for alleged high treason, pardoned in 1899. The Dreyfuss affair gave rise to consolidation of the political Left in France.
• 19. Richard Cobden, 1804–1865, and John Bright, 1811–1889, adherents of free trade, brought about abolition of the grain tariff, which, along with other factors, brought about England's industrial advancement.
• 20. Herbert, Earl of Oxford and Asquith, 1852–1928, liberal British Prime Minister in 1914; Edward Grey, 1862–1923, British Foreign Minister in 1914, belonging to the imperialistic faction of the Liberals.
• 21. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 1804–1881, British Prime Minister from 1868 until 1880.
• 22. Baron George Cuvier, 1769–1832, and Geoffroy de St.-Hilaire, 1772–1844, French natural scientists. See Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, part 3, conversation of August 2, 1830 (the quote is not verbatim).
• 23. August Weissmann, 1834–1914, zoologist.
• 24.

The fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of the development of humanity's intellect, was guided by the Greek mystery centers. Initially, the mysteries provided the basis of this intellectual or mind culture for the general population of Asia Minor and southern Europe. The secret of human life and its connection with the sun played a major role in these mysteries. We know from the descriptions given in my book Theosophy how the ego lights up within man's intellectual or mind soul, after which it is meant to attain to its full inner power through the consciousness soul. Now, insofar as man's ego was destined to be developed during the age of the intellectual culture, the mysteries of that age had to be occupied with the secrets of the sun's life and particularly the sun's links with the human ego. You also know from my description in Riddles of Philosophy that the Greeks still perceived their ideas and concepts in the outer world, just as we today perceive colors, sounds, and so on. For the ancient Greeks, the element that dwells in concepts was not something merely created within the mind. It was something they beheld with the objects. In this respect, Goethe definitely possessed something of a Greek nature. He made this evident in the famous conversation with Schiller. When he heard Schiller say that his mental images—something conceptual and ideal—were not perceptions but ideas, Goethe replied that in this case he saw his ideas just as he saw external perceptions around him.

The Greeks' relationship to concepts was associated with a quite definite sensation the Greeks experienced when they directed their glance upon the outer world. In fact, they regarded the conceptual content that shone forth to them everywhere as the offspring of the sun's life. When the sun rose in the morning, they sensed the rising of conceptual life in space. With the setting sun they experienced the disappearance of the life of thought. We cannot understand the evolution of nations if we do not take into consideration this change in the soul life.

That faculty, my dear friends, has actually been lost from the soul life of human beings, namely, the faculty to sense and experience the spirituality of the whole environment. Today, a person sees the rise of the sun's round globe and only has an awareness of what is encountered there in the way of colored and shining atmospheric phenomena; it is the same when the sun is viewed as it disappears in the red glow of a sunset. The Greeks had the feeling that in the morning the world arose and bestowed on them their world of ideas. It vanished in the evening and a world then appeared that withdrew from them their world of ideas. In the darkness of night, they felt bereft of their ideas. When they looked up at the sky, which appears blue to us, but for which they used the same term as for “darkness,” they actually felt that the boundaries of space consisted of what was beyond conceptual life.

Where the Greeks saw the universe reaching a boundary, there ended for them the world of ideas with which the human being is endowed. Beyond this universe, the Greeks divined the existence of other worlds, the thought worlds of the gods. Those worlds seemed to them closely linked to what they designated as light.

They were revealed to them concentrated, as it were, in the sun's life, whereas, otherwise, they withdrew into the expanse of the dark cosmic firmament. We have to have insight into this quite different world of sensations if we are to understand the way in which this manner of perception in all its inner vitality affected the evolution of the human being for some time. We have to realize what the most advanced representatives of mankind felt when they could no longer experience the spiritual reflection of the sun's life in the cosmos upon them. And especially the most advanced representatives of humanity who had received their education in the Greek mysteries then experienced the Mystery of Golgotha as a salvation inasmuch as it once again brought about the possibility of enkindling this light within their being. The light such individuals had actually experienced earlier as a divine element they now wished to experience by means of participating with their soul and spirit in the events of the Mystery of Golgotha.

We do not acquire an actual knowledge of what has come to pass in mankind in the course of millennia when we merely study these things with the intellect. We have to focus on the transformation of the whole human mind and soul life. Living since the beginning of the fifteenth century in the age of the consciousness soul development, we have retained only the shadowy nature of our inner intellectual activity, of the spirituality of reason that existed in the fourth post-Atlantean period. I have outlined this here during the past few weeks. Now, once again, we have to struggle to attain an awareness of what can permeate our form of shadowy intellect with a living perception of the universe. It was precisely because of the modern culture of the shadowy intellect that the human being, in a manner of speaking, has been fettered to the earth. Today we actually consider only what the earth offers to us, particularly when we allow ourselves to be infected by the constantly expanding, purely scientific culture. People have no idea that they belong not only to the earth with their whole being but to the whole extraterrestrial universe as well. This knowledge of their connection with the cosmos beyond earth is something mankind must acquire once again.

We simply take earthly life today as the basis of our ideas and concepts and construe a view of the whole universe in accordance with conditions on earth. The resulting picture of the universe is then not much else than the transference of earthly conditions to extraterrestrial ones. Thus, by means of the tremendous achievements of modern science, through spectral analysis and other methods, a view of the sun was developed that is really modeled entirely upon earthly conditions. A conception is formed of what a luminous body of gas might look like. This conception is then transferred to what meets our eye as the sun in the cosmos. We must once again learn to use the materials of spiritual science to arrive at a conception of the sun. The physicist believes that the sun would present itself to him as a luminous sphere of gas if he were able to travel out into space. Yet, despite the fact that it reflects the cosmic light to us in its own way in the manner it receives it, the sun is a spiritual entity through and through. We are not dealing with a physical entity that moves about somewhere out there in the universe but with a completely spiritual being.

The Greeks still had the right feeling when they experienced the light, shining down upon them from the sun, as something that must be brought into a connec tion with their ego development insofar as this ego development is tied to the conceptual nature of the intellect. The sun's rays were to the Greeks something that enkindled their ego within them. It is therefore obvious that the Greeks still had a feeling for the spirituality of the cosmos. To them, the sun being was substantially a being related to the ego. The element the human being becomes aware of when he says "I" to himself, the force that works in him and enables him to say “I” to himself, this is what the Greeks looked at. They felt called upon to address the sun in the same way they addressed their ego, to regard the sun with the same feelings they had for their ego.

Ego and sun are the inner and the outer aspects of the same being. What orbits out there through space as the sun is the cosmic I. What lives within me is the human I.

One is inclined to say that this sensation is still faintly perceptible to those who have a somewhat deeper feeling of affinity for nature. The basis of such an experience has already vanished to a large degree. Yet, something is still alive in the human being today that is attuned to the rise of the sun in springtime, that can still experience the spirituality of the sunbeam and can feel how the ego is imbued with new life when the rays of the sun illuminate the earth with greater intensity. Yet, it is but a last, faint sensation that, even in this external manner, is dying out in mankind. It is about to disappear in the abstract, shadowy culture of the intellect that has gradually become prevalent in the whole of civilized life today. However, we must once again reach the point where some recognition can be gained of humanity's relationship with super-sensible existence. In this respect I want to point out a number of things today.

By bringing together all the references found here and there in anthroposophical literature, we shall be able, first of all, to comprehend once more the sun's connection with the ego. We shall be able to perceive the significant contrast between the forces radiating from the sun to the earth and those forces that are active in what we term the moon. Sun and moon are in a certain respect total opposites. Complete polarity exists between them. When we study the sun by means of spiritual science, we find that the sun sends down to us everything that fashions us into bearers of our ego. We owe to the rays of the sun what in fact bestows on us the human form and, in the latter, molds us into an image of the ego. What works in the human being from outside and determines his form from without even as early as the embryonic stage are influences from the sun. When the human embryo is developing in the womb, a great deal more is taking place than what present-day science is dreaming about, namely, that forces originate from the impregnated mother that then develop the human being. No, the human embryo merely rests in the mother's body; it is given form by the sun's forces. It is true, however, that we must bring these sun forces into connection with the moon's forces that have opposite effects. The moon forces become evident, above all, as the inner influence in the lower, metabolic nature of man. In drawing an outline, we may therefore say: The sun's forces are the element molding the human being from outside. What develops in the metabolic processes from within are the moon's forces, positioning themselves within the human organism and radiating outward from the center.

This does not contradict the fact that these moon forces also play a part, for instance, in forming the human countenance, They shape the face because the effects that proceed from the center, from the lower, metabolic system, exert an attracting power, as it were, from outside on the development of the human face. The moon forces have a differentiating effect on this development due to adding their influence to that of the sun's forces while counteracting the latter from within the human being. For this reason, the organism connected with human reproduction depends on the moon forces, which bestow the form. On the other hand, the result of procreation depends on the sun forces. With their whole being human beings are placed into the polarity between sun forces and moon forces.

In seeking the moon forces within the inner human organism, we have to distinguish them in the metabolic process from the forces originating within this process itself. The moon forces play into the metabolism but the latter possesses its own forces. These are the earth forces. The forces contained in food substances, in vegetables and other foods, work in the human being by virtue of their own nature. Here, they are active as earth forces. Metabolism is primarily a result of the earth's forces, but elements of the moon's forces work into them. If the human being possessed only the metabolic process with its forces, if only the substances of his foods would unfold their forces in his body after having been consumed, then he would have nothing but a chaotic play of all kinds of forces. The fact that these forces continuously work to renew the human being from within does not depend at all on the earth; it is due to the moon that is added to earth. The human being is shaped from within outwards by the moon, from without inwards by the sun. Inasmuch as the sun's rays are received through the eye into the human head organization, they also have an inward effect; nevertheless, they still work from outside in.

Thus, on the one hand, in regard to his whole ego development the human being depends on the influence of the sun; without the sun he could not be an ego dwelling solidly on the earth. On the other hand, there would be no human race, no propagation, if the moon were not the earth's companion. It is possible to say that it is the sun that firmly places the human being as a personality, as an individual, on the earth. It is the moon that conjured human beings in their multitude, in their whole evolution, upon the earth. The human race in its physical succession of generations is the result of the moon forces, which stimulate human beings. Man as a single being, an individuality, is the product of the sun forces. Therefore, if we wish to study the human being as well as the human race, we cannot study merely the conditions of earth. Geologists seek in vain to investigate the earth's conditions in order to comprehend the human being; they study in vain the other forces of earth so as to arrive at this understanding. Human beings are not primarily a creation of the earth. They are formed out of the cosmos; they are the offspring of the world of the stars, above all, of sun and moon. From the earth, only those forces are derived that are contained in matter itself. They are effective outside man and then continue their effects when, through eating and drinking, they have entered into the human being, but there they are received by something that is of an unearthly nature.

The processes that take place within the human being are by no means merely earthly ones; they are definitely something provided for out of starry worlds. It is this insight that human beings have to struggle to attain once again.

When we observe the human being further, we can take into consideration, first of all, that he is a physical body. This body absorbs the external foods. They in turn extend their forces into this physical body. But the latter is also taken hold of by the astral body, and in it the moon's influence is active in the manner I have just described. The sun's effect also plays into this astral body. Imbuing it with their forces, sun and moon permeate the astral body, and the latter works in the manner I have outlined above. The etheric body stands in the middle between physical and astral body.

When we study the forces coming from foodstuffs, we find, to begin with, that they are active in the physical body, and, in the manner I described earlier, are then taken hold of by the astral body containing the sun and moon influences. But in between the physical and astral bodies we find something else that is active in the etheric body. It, too, is not derived from the earth but from the whole surrounding cosmos. When we study the earth with its products in relation to the human being, the substances composed of solid, liquid, or aeriform ingredients, we see that they are consumed by the human being and then worked upon by the forces of sun and moon. In addition, there are also active in man forces that stream in from all directions of the universe. The forces active in the foodstuffs come from the earth. Those streaming into the human being from all corners of the universe are the etheric forces. They also take hold of the foodstuffs, but in a much more uniform manner, and transform them in such a way that they become inwardly capable of life. In addition, the etheric forces turn these foodstuffs into something that can inwardly experience the etheric element as such, namely, light and warmth. Thus, we can say that because of his physical body the human being is part of the earth, because of his etheric body he is related to the whole surrounding sphere, and because of his astral body man in connected above all with the effects of moon and sun.

Now, these effects of moon and sun contained in the astral body are in turn modified. They are modified to the extent that a powerful difference exists between the effects upon the upper human organization and those on the lower human organism.

Let us refer today to the part of the human being that is permeated by the bloodstream flowing upwards toward the head as “upper human organization”; let us refer to what lies below the heart as “lower human organism.” In viewing the human being thus, we have, first of all, the upper part including his head and whatever is organically connected with it. Its formation is dependent mainly on the sun's effects and also develops first during embryonic life. Already in the embryo, the sun's effects work on this organization in a quite special way, but these effects then continue after birth when the human being is present physically in the life between birth and death. Roughly speaking, what lies in this part of the human organism above the heart—a more detailed description would have to trace the blood circulation above the heart—is then modified in regard to the astral influences by Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars (see outline p. 248).

According to the Copernican world view, Saturn has forces it develops in its orbit around the sun and then sends down to the earth. It possesses those forces that are effective in the whole human astral body, particularly in the part belonging to the above mentioned upper organism of man. Saturn possesses the forces that stream into this astral body. As these forces penetrate and enliven the latter, they essentially determine the extent to which the astral body places itself in a proper relationship to the physical body. When a person cannot sleep well, for example, when his astral body does not properly emerge from the etheric and physical bodies, when it does not correctly reenter them upon awakening, or in some other way does not fit itself properly into the physical body, then this is an effect, but an irregular one, of the Saturn forces. Saturn is chiefly that celestial body that, by way of the human head, brings about a correct relationship of the astral body to the human physical and etheric bodies. By means of this, on the other hand, it is the Saturn forces that produce the connection between astral body and ego because of Saturn's relation to the sun. This relationship of Saturn to the sun's effect is expressed in regard to space and time in the fact that Saturn completes its orbit around the sun in a period of thirty years.

In the human being this relationship of Saturn to the sun comes to expression in the ego achieving an appropriate relationship to the astral body, and above all, in the proper incorporation of the astral body into the whole human organization. Thus, we can say Saturn possesses a relationship to the upper part of the whole human astral body. This relationship was definitely an important factor for people in ancient times. Even in Egypto-Chaldean times, going back to the third and fourth millennium prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, we would find that among the teachers, the sages in the mysteries, every individual was judged according to how he had determined his relationship to Saturn by the date of his birth. For these wise men knew quite well that depending on whether a person was born during one or another of Saturn's celestial positions, he was one who could use his astral body in the physical body in a more efficient or less efficient manner. Insight into such things played an important role in ancient times. The progress of mankind's evolution, however, is denoted precisely by the fact that in our age, which, as you know, began in the fifteenth century, we are freeing ourselves of the influences affecting us there.

My dear friends, do not misunderstand this. It does not mean that Saturn is not active in us today. It works in us just as it did in antiquity; the point is that we have to free ourselves from it. And do you know in what this freeing ourselves in the proper way from the Saturn influences consists? You free yourself most poorly from the Saturn influences if you follow the shadowy intellect of the present time. In doing so you actually permit the Saturn effects to run riot within yourself, to shoot hither and thither, and actually to turn you into what is nowadays called a nervous person. A nervous condition in a person is caused mainly by the fact that the astral body does not fit properly into the whole physical configuration. The nervousness of our age is due to this. Human beings must be induced to strive for real perception, for Imagination. If they remain with abstract conception, they will become more and more nervous, for they are actually growing out of the Saturn activity, which is nevertheless within them, shooting back and forth, pulling the astral body out of the nerves, thus making people nervous. In a cosmic sense, the nervousness of our age has to be recognized as an effect of Saturn.

Just as Saturn is chiefly involved with the upper part of the whole astral body inasmuch as the latter is connected with the whole organism through the nervous system, so Jupiter is active in thinking (see outline p. 248).

Human thinking, after all, is also based in a certain way on a partial activity of the astral body. I should say, a smaller part of the astral body is active in thinking than in sustaining the whole human being. It is Jupiter's effect that works in our astral body and, above all, strengthens our thinking. The effect of Jupiter deals mainly with the astral permeation and organization of the human brain.

Now, Saturn's effects actually extend over the whole of adult human life after the first three decades of our life. For our whole life and health depend on how we develop in our astral body during the periods of growth, and in fact, they only cease after age thirty. That is why Saturn requires thirty years to circle around the sun. This completely fits the human being. The thinking that develops in us has to do with the first twelve years of life. After all, what orbits out there in space is not without a connection to the human being.

Just as Jupiter has to do with thinking, so Mars has to do with speech.

Saturn—upper part of the whole astral body

Jupiter—thinking

Mars—speech

Mars separates a still smaller part of the astral body from its incorporation into the remaining human organization than the one that comes into play in regard to thinking. And it depends on the Mars effects within us that the forces can unfold that then pour into speech. The small revolution of Mars also has a bearing on this. A human being acquires the first sounds of speech within a time span that corresponds roughly to half the Martian orbit around the sun.

Ascending and descending development! We see how this whole development is linked with the forces of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars insofar as it is tied to the region of the human head.

We have thus considered the outer planets' activity in the human astral body. Whereas the sun is connected more with the ego, these three cosmic bodies, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, have to do with the development of what is tied to the astral body, namely, speech, thinking, and the whole conduct of the human soul in the human organism.

Besides the sun, which has to do with the actual ego, we also have in addition those planets called the inner planets. They are the ones that are closer to earth than to the sun, having their place between earth and sun, whereas, seen from the earth, the other planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, are on the other side of the sun. When we focus on these inner planets, we likewise arrive at a consideration of the connections between their forces and the human being. To begin with, we shall consider Mercury.

Similar to the moon, Mercury has its target points more in the inner being of man, working from outside only on the human countenance. In the part lying below the region of the heart, its forces are effective by taking hold inwardly of the human organization and, in turn, streaming forth from there. Mercury's chief task is to bring the astral body's activity into all breathing and circulation processes of the human being. Mercury is the intercessor between the astral body and the rhythmic processes in man. Thus, we are able to say that its forces intercede between the astral element and the rhythmic activity (see outline on p. 250). Due to this, similar to the moon forces, the Mercury forces also intervene in the whole human metabolism, but only insofar as the metabolism is subject to rhythm, reacting upon rhythmic activity.

Then there is Venus. Venus is active especially in the human etheric body, in what works out of the cosmos in the human etheric body and its activities.

Finally we have the moon, which we have already mentioned. It is the element in the human being that is the polar opposite of the sun forces. From within, it leads substances into the realm of life and therefore is also connected with reproduction. In the fullest sense, the moon stimulates inner reproduction as well as the procreative process of reproduction.

You realize now that what actually takes place in the human being is becoming evident to you in its dependence on the surrounding cosmos. On the one hand, with the physical body, the human being is tied to the earthly forces. On the other hand, he is linked to the whole cosmic environment with his etheric body. In that body, differentiations occur in the manner I have just outlined, and inasmuch as the differentiation proceeds primarily from man's astral body, the forces of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus and moon integrate themselves into this body. By way of the ego, the sun is also active in man. Now take into consideration that due to the fact that the human being is integrated into the cosmos in this manner, it makes a difference whether a person stands at a given spot on the earth, and Jupiter, for instance, shines down on him from the sky, or whether he is in a location where Jupiter is covered by the earth. In the first case, Jupiter's effects on the person are direct ones; in the second case, the earth is placed in between. This results in a significant difference.

We have said that Jupiter is connected with thinking. Let us assume a person receives the direct Jupiter influence during the period when his physical organ of thinking is in the stage of major development after birth. His brain will be formed into a quite special organ of thinking; the person receives a certain predisposition to thinking. Assume that a person spends these years in a place where Jupiter is on the opposite side of the earth, the latter thus hindering Jupiter's influences. Such a person's brain is less developed into an organ for thinking. If, on the other hand, the earth with its substances and forces is active in a person and everything proceeding from them is transformed, say, by the moon influences, which, in a certain sense, are always present, such a person turns into a dull dreamer, one who is barely aware. Between these two possibilities we find any number of variations.

Let us take the case of an individual possessing forces from his former incarnation that predestine his thinking to develop in a pronounced way in the earth life on which he is about to embark. He is on the verge of descending to earth. Since Jupiter has its set time for completing its orbit, he chooses the moment when he is to appear on earth, when he is to be born, so that Jupiter sends down its rays directly.

In this manner, the starry constellation provides the setting into which the human being allows himself to be born, depending on the conditions of his former incarnations.

Today, in the age of the consciousness soul, the human being must free himself increasingly from what is becoming evident to you here. It is a matter, however, of freeing oneself from these forces in the proper manner, of actually doing something I have indicated in regard to the Saturn effects, namely of trying to turn once again from the mere shadowy, intellectual developing of thoughts to a pictorial, concrete one. What is developed out of spiritual science in the way I described it in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds is also a guideline for human beings to become independent in the right way from the cosmic forces that are nevertheless active in them.

It depends on the starry constellations how a human being finds his way into earth life as he allows himself to be born. Yet, he has to equip himself with forces that make him independent in the right way from this starry constellation.

It is to such insights that our civilization must attain once again, insights concerning the relationship of the human being with the cosmos beyond the earth. Human beings must acquire an attitude that makes them realize that it is not only the ordinary forces of heredity acknowledged by today's science that are active in the human organization. In regard to the actual facts it is sheer nonsense, for example, to believe that the forces transmitted through heredity are contained in the structure of the female organism. Nowadays, heredity is an unclear, mystical concept; it is thought that the above forces then develop a heart, a liver, and so on. There would be no heart in the human organism if the sun did not incorporate it into the latter, and proceeding from the head at that. There would be no liver if Venus would not incorporate it into the human organism. And so it is with each single organ. They are certainly connected with extraterrestrial effects. The Jupiter forces are active in the human brain. The Saturn forces influence the healthy or pathological way in which the astral body is fitted into the physical organization. Human beings learn to speak because the Mars forces work in them; they become evident through speech.

These are matters humanity must once again learn to understand. We must realize that human beings cannot be explained by a science that merely considers earthly phenomena. Then, the connection between the human being and the earth will also become better known. After all, the other beings dwelling in our surroundings are also not merely creatures of the earth. To begin with, only the minerals are earth beings. Yet, in the minerals, too, changes have taken place that in turn were dependent upon forces in the earth's cosmic environment. Insofar as they are crystallized, all our metals owe their shape to extraterrestrial forces. They were formed when the earth had not yet evolved its own forces intensely but when forces from outside the earth were still active in it. Healing properties contained in minerals and particularly in metals are connected with the way the metals developed within the earth through cosmic forces.

When we go back in the post-Atlantean age to the first epoch, when the ancient Indian culture was at its prime, we see that the human being definitely experienced himself in the whole universe, as a citizen of the cosmos. Although he had not yet developed the faculties mankind is so proud of today, he was Man in the true sense of the word.

Subsequently, the human being was more or less diverted from the cosmic forces. Still, in the whole Chaldean epoch and early Greek time, we see that human beings looked up at least to the sun. In a certain sense, they were still like a kind of amphibian, a being that was happy when the rays of the sun poured down upon it and it no longer had to burrow in the earth's dankness. The human being had turned into an amphibian. Now, inasmuch as he believes he is related only to the earth's forces, one cannot even say any longer that man is like a mole. At most, he is really an earthworm that is aware of the return of something that rose in the first place from earth into space, namely, of rain water. This is the only thing the human being still perceives of extraterrestrial forces. But even earthworms perceive that—you could have seen it this morning if you had set foot in the streets! In his materialism, the human being today has basically turned into an earthworm. Once again, we must overcome this earthworm nature. We can do that only when we develop to the point of recognizing our connection with the cosmos outside the earth.

Therefore, my dear friends, the point is that we must bring it about in our age to lift ourselves out of our civilization and this earthworm-state to a new spirituality.

The lectures I have just given on the nature of color and the lecture last Thursday preceding the ones on color¹ may have served to show that we can approach the true nature of man only if we consider the human being in connection with the whole universe. Yet, when asking about the nature of the human being, we must at length learn to look up from the earth to what is extraterrestrial. Our age in particular stands in need of this. For, as we have seen, the human intellect has grown more and more shadowlike. Particularly since the developments of the nineteenth century it is no longer rooted in reality.

All this indicates to us that human beings absolutely have to think of receiving new impulses into their soul life. All this will become even clearer to us as we turn our minds today again to certain incisive cosmic events; having studied them already from outer points of view, we shall bring these cosmic events once more before our souls.

You will no doubt remember and probably also know from your reading of my Occult Science that one of those mighty events that intervened in the earth's evolution was the moon's withdrawal from the earth being. The moon we see shining down upon us from the cosmos was once united with the earth. It separated from the earth and has been circling it ever since as its satellite.

We know of the profound changes in human evolution that are connected with this separation of the moon from the earth. You know that we have to go far back—far beyond the Atlantean flood—to reach that time when the moon departed from earth existence.

Today, we will only consider what became manifest on earth with respect to the human being and the surrounding kingdoms of nature through the moon's separation from the earth. We have already seen that the variously colored minerals basically derive their colors from this relationship of the moon to the earth. This insight has enabled us to bring these cosmic events together with an artistic conception of existence. Very important other things are also connected with this. The human being, as we know, has brought his nature with him from the preceding metamorphoses of earth existence, from the Saturn, Sun, and Moon nature. Now, while he evolved as a Saturn, Sun, and Moon being, no mineral kingdom existed as yet in his environment. The mineral kingdom and everything of a mineral nature appeared only during earth evolution. Hence, what is now considered mineral matter permeated the human being only during the earth age. During the ancient Saturn, Sun, and Moon age, the human being contained nothing of a mineral element. Nor was he as yet a being who depended on spending his existence on earth. On the contrary, he was a being who, through his very constitution, belonged to the whole cosmos.

Prior to the moon leaving the earth, before the mineral kingdom in its multicolored nature developed within the earth, the human being was as yet not adapted at all to the earth. And, if we may so express ourselves, the question of what to do with man was indeed a very real one for the spiritual beings guiding this earth evolution. Should he be placed upon the earth or should he spend his existence outside and beyond it? We can actually call it a decision on the part of the beings who guide the evolution of mankind that the moon was separated and that the whole earth and man along with it were changed. For through the fact that the crude moon substance was separated from the earth the human being acquired the organization that enabled him to become an earth being. Hence, through this event—through the moon separation and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into earth—the human being became an earthly being. Basically, it was this that gave man his earthly weight. On the other hand, he would never have become a being capable of inner freedom if he had not received this earthly weight. Earlier, he was not a personality in the proper sense. He became a personality due to the fact that the forces intended to form his body drew together. This densification took place because of the moon separation and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom. The human being became a personality and thus accessible to freedom.

This evolution of man on earth since the departure of the moon has gone through the most diverse stages. One can say that as long as nothing else had occurred except that the moon had left the earth, it was always possible for the human being to receive images of ancient clairvoyance due to his whole organization and nature of body and soul.

The human being was not deprived of this faculty of having clairvoyant images by the moon's separation. He beheld the world in images, something we have often described. If nothing else had taken place, human beings would be living in that world of images to this day. But as we know, evolution went still further. The human being did not remain in a condition that merely fetters him to the earth. He was in turn induced to a regressive development, as it were, and the nineteenth century was the culmination point of this development. I have characterized this repeatedly in my recent lectures. Already in ancient times it had come about that although in a sense man was earth-bound, weighted down in his metabolic system, in his head system he was enabled to cosmic existence. Human beings developed their intellect. The images of ancient clairvoyance condensed into this intellect, something that continued up until the fourth century A.D. It was only then, and particularly after the fifteenth century, that the human intellect became more and more shadowy. Though it is something entirely spiritual, this human intellect has no real existence at all; basically, it possesses only what would have to be described as a picturelike existence. When a person thinks today merely by means of his intellect, his thoughts are not rooted in reality. Human thoughts only move about in a shadowy existence and this is becoming more and more the case. This development reached an extreme in the nineteenth century and today human beings altogether lack a sense of reality. They live in a spiritual element but are materialists. With their spiritual thoughts that are, however, only shadow thoughts, they think only in terms of material existence.

Thus this second event came to pass. The human being has again become more spiritual, but the spiritual contents bestowed on him by matter in earlier times no longer ensoul him. He has become more spiritual; yet, with what is spiritual he merely thinks of things material.

Now you know that one day the moon will reunite with the earth. The point in time when this reunion of moon and earth will occur is placed by astronomers and geologists who live in abstractions, many, many thousands of years in the future; that, however, is an illusion. In reality, we are not so very far away from that point in time. As you know, humanity as such is becoming younger and younger. It is becoming more and more the case that the development of body and soul only continues up to a certain point in life. At the time of the death of the Christ when the event of Golgotha took place, mankind in general was capable of physical and soul development until age thirty-three. Today, people are able to develop only until age twenty-seven. In the fourth millennium A.D., a time will come when human beings will be capable of development only until age twenty-one. Again, in the seventh millennium, a time will come when their bodily nature will be capable of development only until the fourteenth year of life. Then, women will cease to be fertile; an entirely different form of living on earth will come about. That will be the time when the moon will again approach the earth and will be incorporated into it.

You see, my dear friends, human beings must now begin to pay attention to such extraterrestrial events. They must not go on dreaming, vaguely and abstractly, of something divine. They must begin to focus on the events connected with their evolution. They must know: The moon once separated from the earth; the moon will reunite with the earth again. And just as this moon separation had a tremendous impact, so will the moon's reentry. It is true that we will still be inhabiting the earth then as human beings, but we shall no longer be born in the ordinary way. We shall be connected with the earth in a way other than through birth. We shall have evolved in a certain manner by the time this point is reached. We must now learn to connect what is happening today—the increasing shadowiness of the intellect—with what will occur one day in earth evolution as an incisive event, namely, the moon's whirling back into earth's matter.

Our intellect is becoming more and more shadowy. If this were to go on, if men were never to make up their minds to receive what can come to them from spiritual worlds, the human being would gradually become completely absorbed in the shadowy cast of his intellect.

Try to realize what this shadowlike intellect actually contains. It cannot really understand the human being himself; it comprehends the minerals. That, after all, is the only thing the shadowy intellect can understand to a certain degree. Already the life of the plant remains a riddle for it; this is true even more so of the life of the animals, and its own life becomes completely obscure for it. Thus people go on evolving views of the world that, in reality, are but questions, because all they contain is unable to approach the nature of plant and animal, least of all that of the human being. Yet, this forming of pictures will increase more and more unless we make up our minds to receive what is being given us by way of new Imaginations in which the existence of the world is described. Into our shadowy intellectual concepts the living wisdom that spiritual science is able to give must be received. The shadow images of the intellect must in this way be called to life.

This calling to life of the shadow images of the intellect is not only a human event, it is a cosmic event. Remember what I described in my Occult Science—how once upon a time human souls migrated up to the planets and afterward returned to earth existence. I outlined in my Occult Science how the human beings of Mars, Jupiter, and so on came down again to earth. Now, a most important event took place—it can only be described from the facts that are confirmed as truths in the spiritual world—a very important event occurred at the end of the seventies of the nineteenth century. Whereas in ancient Atlantean times these human beings descended to earth from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and the other planets—and it was therefore a matter of human soul beings entering the earth existence then—now a time is beginning when beings who are not human are coming down to earth from cosmic regions beyond. These beings are not human but depend for the further development of their existence on coming to earth and on entering here into relationships with men.

Thus, since the eighties of the nineteenth century, heavenly beings are seeking to enter this earth existence. Just as the Vulcan men were the last to come down to earth,^T1 so Vulcan beings are now actually entering this earth existence. Heavenly beings are already here in our earth existence. And it is thanks to the fact that beings from beyond the earth are bringing messages down into this earthly existence that it is possible at all to have a comprehensive spiritual science today.

Taken as a whole, however, how does the human race behave? If I may say so, the human race behaves in a cosmically rude way toward the beings who are appearing from the cosmos on earth, albeit, to begin with, only slowly. Humanity takes no notice of them, ignores them. It is this that will lead the earth into increasingly tragic conditions. For in the course of the next few centuries, more and more spirit beings will move among us whose language we ought to understand. We shall understand it only if we seek to comprehend what comes from them, namely, the contents of spiritual science. This is what they wish to bestow on us. They want us to act according to spiritual science; they want this spiritual science to be translated into social action and the conduct of earthly life.

Since the last third of the nineteenth century, we are actually dealing with the influx of spirit beings from the universe. Initially, these were beings dwelling in the sphere between moon and Mercury, but they are closing in upon earth, so to say, seeking to gain a foothold in earthly life through human beings imbuing themselves with thoughts of spiritual beings in the cosmos. This is another way of describing what I outlined earlier when I said that we must call our shadowy intellect to life with the pictures of spiritual science. That is the abstract way of describing it. The description is concrete when we say: Spirit beings are seeking to come down into earth existence and must be received. Upheaval upon upheaval will ensue, and earth existence will at length arrive at social chaos if these beings descended and human existence were to consist only of opposition against them. For these beings wish to be nothing less than the advance guard of what will happen to earth existence when the moon reunites once again with earth.

Nowadays it may appear comparatively harmless to people when they think only those automatic, lifeless thoughts that arise through comprehension of the mineral world itself and the mineral element's effects in plant, animal, and man. Yes, indeed, people revel in these thoughts; as materialists, they feel good about them, for only such thoughts are conceived today. But imagine that people were to continue thinking in this way, unfolding nothing but such thoughts until the eighth millennium when moon existence will once more unite with the life of the earth. What would come about then? The beings I have spoken about will descend gradually to the earth. Vulcan beings, Vulcan supermen, Venus supermen, Mercury supermen, sun supermen, and so on will unite themselves with earth existence. Yet, if human beings persist in their opposition to them, this earth existence will pass over into chaos in the course of the next few thousand years. People will indeed be capable of developing their intellect in an automatic way; it can develop even in the midst of barbaric conditions. The fullness of human potential, however, will not be included in this intellect and people will have no relationship to the beings who wish graciously to come down to them into earthly life.

All the beings presently conceived so incorrectly in people's thoughts—incorrectly because the mere shadowy intellect can only conceive of the mineral, the crudely material element, be it in the mineral, plant, animal or even human kingdom—these thoughts of human beings that have no reality all of a sudden will become realities when the moon and the earth will unite again. From the earth, there will spring forth a horrible brood of beings. In character they will be in between the mineral and plant kingdoms. They will be beings resembling automatons, with an over-abundant intellect of great intensity. Along with this development, which will spread over the earth, the latter will be covered as if by a network or web of ghastly spiders possessing tremendous wisdom. Yet their organization will not even reach up to the level of the plants. They will be horrible spiders who will be entangled with one another. In their outward movements they will imitate everything human beings have thought up with their shadowy intellect, which did not allow itself to be stimulated by what is to come through new Imagination and through spiritual science in general.

All these unreal thoughts people are thinking will be endowed with being. As it is covered with layers of air today, or occasionally with swarms of locusts, the earth will be covered with hideous mineral-plant-like spiders that intertwine with one another most cleverly but in a frighteningly evil manner. To the extent that human beings have not enlivened their shadowy, intellectual concepts, they will have to unite their being, not with the entities who are seeking to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but instead with these ghastly mineral-plant-like spidery creatures. They will have to dwell together with these spiders; they will have to seek their further progress in cosmic evolution in the evolutionary stream that this spider brood will then assume.

You see, this is something that is very much a reality of earth humanity's evolution. It is known today by a large number of those human beings who hold mankind back from receiving spiritual scientific knowledge. For there are those who are actually conscious allies of this spidery entangling of human earth existence. Today, we must no longer recoil from descriptions such as these. For descriptions of this kind are behind what is said to this day by many people who, based on ancient traditions, still have some awareness of things like these, and who would like to surround these ancient traditions with a certain veil of secrecy. The evolution of earthly humanity is not such that it can be veiled in secrecy any longer. However great the resistance in hostile quarters, these things must be said; for, as I have stated again and again, the acceptance or rejection of spiritual scientific knowledge is a serious matter facing mankind. It is not something that can be decided on the basis of more or less indifferent sympathies or antipathies; we are dealing with something that definitely affects the whole configuration of the cosmos.

We are dealing with the question of whether humanity at the present time will resolve to grow gradually into what benevolent spirits, wishing to ally themselves with human beings, bring down from the universe, or whether mankind will seek its continued cosmic existence in the gradual entanglement, in the spider-brood of its own, merely shadowy thoughts. It does not suffice today to set down in abstract formulas the need for spiritual scientific knowledge. It is necessary to show how thoughts become realities. This is what is so dreadful about all abstract theosophists who appear on the scene and place abstractions before people, for example: Thoughts will become realities in the future. But it does not occur to them to present the full and actual implications of these matters. For the concrete implication is that the intellectual, shadow-like thoughts, spun inwardly by human beings today, will one day cover the earth like a spider's web. Human beings will become entangled in it if they are not willing to rise above these shadowy thoughts.

The path of the ascent, my dear friends, is indeed outlined. We must take profoundly serious thoughts such as the one with which I concluded my lectures on color last Sunday where I said: The point is to lift the comprehension of color out of the abstractions of physics into a region where the creative fancy, the feeling of the artist who understands the being of color, will harmonize effectively with a spiritual scientific insight into the world. We have seen how the beings and nature of color can be taken hold of, how the artistic element, which physics with its dreadful diagrams lets slide down into the ahrimanic sphere, can be lifted up. Thus, a theory of color can be founded; it would be remote from the established thought habits of modern science, yet can provide a basis for artistic creativity, if we will only imbue ourselves with its insight. Such thoughts must certainly be taken seriously.

Another thought must be earnestly considered. What do we witness today throughout the civilized world? Our young people are sent into the hospitals and to the scientific faculties of the universities; there the human being is explained to them. They become acquainted with the human skeleton and with the human organism by studying the corpse. They learn to put together the human being logically in abstract thoughts.

Yet, my dear friends, this is no way to comprehend the human being; in this way, one only gets to know the mineral aspect of man. What we learn about the human being through such a science is something that simply and solely has significance from the moon's separation until its return, something that out of the spider thoughts of today will then turn into spider beings. A knowledge must be prepared that takes hold of the human being quite differently, and this can be done only if science is lifted into artistic vision. We must admit that science in the present-day sense of the word can reach only to a certain level. It reaches only as far as the mineral element in the mineral, plant, and human kingdoms. Already in the plant kingdom science must change into art; still more so in the animal. It is sheer nonsense to try to understand the animal form in the way the anatomists and physiologists do. And as long as we do not admit that it is nonsense, the shadowy intellect cannot really be transformed into a living, spiritual grasp of the world.

What our young people are taught in so wretchedly abstract a form in the universities must everywhere turn into an artistic comprehension of the world. For nature around us creates artistically. Unless it is understood that nature around us is an artistic creation and can be grasped only with artistic concepts, no good will come of our world conceptions. The idea should take hold that the torture chambers in medieval castles, where people were locked into the “Iron Maiden,” for instance, and them pierced through with spears, remind us of a procedure that, though more physical and concrete, is the same as the one that occurs when young people today are introduced to anatomy and physiology and told that this will make them understand something of human nature. No, they comprehend nothing but what has been produced by a soul-spiritual element of torture: The human being torn limb from limb, the mineralized human being—that part of man that one day will be woven into the spider-cover of the earth.

Is it not sad that the power of civilization belongs now to those who consider the thoughts of truth itself, which most inwardly and intimately relate to the salvation and whole mission of mankind's development in the world, nonsense! It is tragic and we must be mindful of this tragedy. For only if we place this clearly and objectively before our soul's eye, shall we perhaps bestir ourselves to resolve to do what we can so that the intellect, shadowy as it has become, may find the way to admit the spiritual world that is approaching from the heavenly realms. Then, this shadowy intellect will be made fit for the potential it is to achieve. After all, this shadowy intellect should not be cast back into the realm beneath the plant kingdom, into a spider brood that will spread over the earth. No, it is intended that the human being shall be lifted up, in that time when women will no longer be fertile, when the eighth millennium will have arrived and the moon will unite again with the earth. The earthly shall then remain behind, and the human being only direct it from outside—like a foot stool. It will be something he is not supposed to take along with him into his cosmic existence. Human beings should prepare themselves so that they need not become one with what will someday have to develop on the surface of this earth in the manner described above.

Mankind entered from a pre-earthly existence into this physical existence. At the time of the departure of the moon, physical birth commenced. The human being began to be born of woman. Just as this came to pass, so in the future the human being will no longer be born of woman. For that is only a passing episode in the whole of cosmic evolution. It is the episode that is to bring to man the feeling of freedom, the consciousness of freedom, the integrated wholeness of individuality and personality. It is an episode that must not be disdained, an episode that was necessary in the whole cosmic process, but it must not be retained. Human beings must not give themselves up to the indolence of merely looking up to an abstract divine principle; they must concretely behold everything connected with their evolution. For they can attain a true inner revitalization of the whole soul-spirit being only if they comprehend that great period of time—but in its concrete evolutionary configuration—through which they will live in successive earth incarnations.

This is what a true spiritual science tells us today. Yet, such a spiritual science encounters opposition. We are threatened by a conscious will that would exclude us from spirituality and unite us with the spider web of the earth. This conscious will dwells in some people, for they believe that it will be to their advantage if they train only themselves spiritually and leave the others to live in ignorance. In most cases, however, this is done in ignorance; basically, people do not have the remotest idea of the appalling earthly destiny they are approaching by uniting themselves with what an ancient spiritual knowledge called the sixteen paths of human perdition. For, my dear friends, just as there are many ways in which we can turn with the shadowy intellect toward what can come to us as a message from the spiritual worlds, so there are variations of the shadowy intellect itself, various ways of uniting ourselves through this intellectual activity with the elements of spidery incrustation that will be spun over the whole earth in the future. In that time, the intellect will hold sway objectively in the manifold limbs these spider creatures will possess. They will entwine and wind themselves around one another; in doing so, in these convolutions reminiscent of the caduceus, they will produce the most marvelous, clever, the most ingenious formations—ingenious in todays's sense of the word. However, by again acquiring an understanding of the artistic from within, human beings will be able to show understanding for what goes beyond the mineral and is expressed in the formation of the plant.

It is symptomatic that in the course of mankind's evolution it was Goethe who discovered the teaching of metamorphosis—Goethe, who was artistically inclined. All the pedants around him considered it to be dilettantism, and they think so even today. In Goethe, however, the artistic conception of the world and his clarity of mind in general combined with the power of vision that recognizes, even in nature herself, nature as the artist. He was not yet capable of seeing the animal kingdom in the same way, except for the formation of the vertebra and the skull. That wondrous transmutation of a previous existence of man, where the present shape of the head develops from the form of the earlier remainder of the body, that marvelously artistic transformation of the long bones of the limbs into the spherical bones of the skull—only when this will truly be perceived will a real inner comprehension of the difference between the head and the whole remaining human form result. Such is the insight we must attain if we would plastically connect the head with the remainder of the human organism.

Yet, as art, this is at the same time true science, for all science that does not rise to the level of art is a deceptive science, a science casting humanity into cosmic misfortune. Thus, we see, on the one hand, that a true spiritual science shows us the way to an artistic grasp of things. Like a great hymn, I might say, this dwelled in Goethe's soul, when, as early as 1780, he wrote “Nature” his hymn in prose: “Nature, we are surrounded and encompassed by her ...” The whole hymn weaves a tapestry of thoughts such that one would like to say: It is like the unfolding of a mighty longing to receive spirit beings from the whole universe. Indeed, to pursue and develop further the thoughts living in Goethe's hymn "Nature" would be to provide a dwelling place for those beings who are seeking to descend from the cosmos to the earth. On the other hand, the torturous concepts developed in the nineteenth century concerning human physiology, biology, the system of plants, and so on, actually have nothing to do with the true being of the plants, something we had occasion to point out during our reflections on color. These inartistic concepts neither provide real insight nor do they penetrate to the human level. Therefore, what is held to be science today is essentially a product of Ahriman; it leads mankind to earthly doom and does not allow the human being to reach the sphere that, if I may say so, is brought toward him since the last third of the nineteenth century by beings from the cosmos.

The cultivation of spiritual science, my dear friends, is no abstract pursuit. It implies opening doors to cosmic influences that have been trying to enter upon the earth since the last third of the nineteenth century. It is a real, cosmic event to cultivate spiritual science. We need to become conscious of this fact.

Thus we may say, we overlook the whole span of time from the moon's departure until its return. This moon, which reflects the sunlight to us, has indeed a profound connection to our existence. It separated from the earth in order that the human being might become free. Humanity, however, must make use of this period so as not to provide for the moon, when the latter will have returned again, the material that can be bound up with the moon existence in the earth in that new kingdom of nature, of which I have now told you a little in a more or less graphic form.

We can say that now and then there arises in human beings some kind of forboding of what is to come. I do not know what meaning has been attached by readers to what Nietzsche describes in the chapter on the ugliest man in the valley of death in his Zarathustra. It is a touching, tragic description. Of course, Nietzsche had no vision of the valley of death into which earth existence will be transformed when the above-mentioned spider brood will cover the earth. Nevertheless, at the time when this fantasy of the valley of death arose in Nietzsche, there lived in him subconsciously something of this picture of the future. Therefore, he placed the ugliest of human beings into this vale of death. It was indeed some sort of foreboding of the time to come when human beings will be carried along in the most hideous shapes by the moon existence as it sinks down upon the earth, if they continue to cultivate only their shadowy thoughts. As the ugliest of men, they will fall into this swarm of spiders and be united with it.

What would be the use of keeping these things secret today, as many people would have us do? It would mean pulling the wool over people's eyes. After all, a large part of what is disseminated as spirituality today is nothing else but throwing dust in people's eyes. Occasionally one encounters people who realize what this means, namely, not to comprehend a single historical event as it is in reality. How many people are there today who know that events of fundamental importance are taking place in our days? I have already drawn attention to these things. How few are prepared really to enter into them? People would like to close their eyes to them. They would like to say: Well, these things are really not of so much importance. Yet, the signs of the times are there, and should be understood by human beings.

This is what I wished to add to my considerations on the world of color and man's relationship with the cosmos beyond the earth. We shall continue with these studies in the future.

• 1. Lectures of May 6, 7, and 8, 1921 in Colour, RSE 623, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1977.
• T1. This occurred during the Atlantean age.

Dornach, June 2, 1921

In the past few weeks, I have repeatedly spoken of the great change that took place in Western civilization during the fourth century A.D. When such a matter is discussed, one is obliged to point out one thing again and again, that has already been the subject of discussion here many times. Yet it is necessary to focus on it time and again. I am referring to the metamorphoses of human development, markedly differing from each other on the soul level. When speaking of such a major point in human evolution as the one in the fourth century, one has to pay heed to the fact that the soul life of humanity changed in a sense with one great leap.

This view is not prevalent today. The prevailing opinion holds that the human race has undergone a certain history. This history is traced back to about the third or fourth millennium along the lines of the most recent documented records. Then, going back further, there is nothing for a long time; finally, one arrives at animalistic-human conditions. But in regard to the duration of the historical development, it is assumed that human beings have in the main always thought and felt the way they do today; at most, they formerly adhered to a somewhat more childish stage of scientific pursuit. Finally, however, human beings have struggled upward to the level of which we say today that it is splendid how far we have come in the comprehension of the world. To be sure, a reasonably unbiased consideration of human life arrives at the opposite view. I have had to indicate to you the presence of a mighty transition in the fourth Christian century; I outlined the other change in the whole human soul life at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Finally, I described how a turning point in human soul life occurred also during the nineteenth century.

Today, we shall consider one detail in this whole development. I would like to place before you a personality who illustrates particularly well that human beings in the relatively recent past thought completely differently from the way we think today. The personality, who has been mentioned also in earlier lectures, is John Scotus Erigena,¹ who lived in the ninth century A.D. at the court of Charles the Bald in France.² Erigena, whose home was across the Channel, who was born approximately in the year 815 and lived well into the second half of the ninth century, is truly a representative of the more intimate Christian mode of thinking of the ninth century A.D. It is, however, a manner of thinking that is still completely under the influence of the first Christian centuries. John Scotus Erigena apparently was intent on immersing himself in the prevalent scholarly and theological culture of his time. In his age, scholarly and theological knowledge were one and the same. And such learning was most readily acquired across the British Channel, particularly in the Irish institutions where Christianity was cultivated in a certain esoteric manner. The Franconian kings then had ways of attracting such personalities to their courts. The Christian knowledge permeating the Franconian kingdom, even spreading from there further east into western Germany, was mainly influenced by those who had been attracted from across the Channel by these Franconian kings.

John Scotus Erigena also immersed himself into the contents of the writings by the Greek Church Fathers, studying also the texts of a certain problematic nature within Western civilization, namely, the texts by Dionysius the Areopagite.³ As you know, the latter is considered by some to be a direct pupil of Paul. Yet, these texts only surfaced in the sixth century, and many scholars therefore refer to them as pseudo-Dionysian writings composed in the sixth century by an unknown person, which were then accredited to Paul's disciple.

People who say that are ignorant of the way spiritual knowledge was passed on in those early centuries. A school like the one in which Paul himself taught in Athens possessed insights that initially were taught only orally. Handed down from generation to generation, they were finally written down much, much later on. What was thus recorded at a later time, was not necessarily anything less than genuine for that reason; it could preserve to some extent the identity of something that was centuries old. Furthermore, the great value that we place on personality today was certainly not attached to personality in those earlier ages. Perhaps we will be able to touch upon a circumstance in this lecture that must be discussed in connection with Erigena, namely, why people did not place much value on personality in that age.

There is no doubt about one thing: The teachings recorded in the name of Dionysius the Areopagite were considered especially worthy of being written down in the sixth century. They were considered the substance of what had been left from the early Christian times, which were now in particular need of being recorded. We should consider this fact as such to be significant. In the times prior to the fourth century, people simply had more confidence in memory working from generation to generation than they had in later periods. In earlier ages, people were not so eager to write everything down. They were aware, however, that the time was approaching when it would become increasingly necessary to write down things that earlier had been passed on by word of mouth with great ease; for the things that were then recorded in the writings of Dionysius were of a subtle nature.

Now, what John Scotus Erigena was able to study in these writings was certainly apt to make an extraordinarily profound impression on him. For the mode of thinking found in this Dionysius was approximately as follows. With the concepts we from and the perceptions we acquire, we human beings can comprehend the physical sensory world. We can then draw our conclusions from the facts and beings of this sensory world by means of reasoning. We work our way upward, as it were, to a rational content that is then no longer visually perceptible but is experienced in ideas and concepts. Once we have developed our concepts and thoughts from the sensory facts and beings, we have the urge to move upward with them to the supersensory, to the spiritual and divine.

Now, Dionysius does not proceed by saying that we learn this or that from the sensory things; he does not say that our intellect acquires its concepts and then goes on to deduce a deity, a spiritual world. No, Dionysius says, the concepts we acquire from the things of the senses are all unsuitable to express the deity. No matter how subtle the concepts we form of sensory things, we simply cannot express what constitutes divinity with the aid of these concepts. We must therefore resort to negative concepts rather than positive ones. When we encounter our fellowmen, for example, we speak of personality. According to this Dionysian view, when we speak of God, we should not speak of personality, for the concept of personality is much too small and too lowly to designate the deity. Rather we should speak of super-personality. When referring to God, we should not even speak of being, of existence. We say, a man is, an animal, a plant is. We should not ascribe existence to God in the same sense as we attribute existence to us, the animals, and the plants; to Him, we ought to ascribe a super-existence. Thus, according to Dionysius, we should try to rise from the sensory world to certain concepts but then we should turn them upside down, as it were, allowing them to pass over into the negative. We should rise from the sense world to positive theology but then turn upside down and establish negative theology. This negative theology would actually be so sublime, so permeated by God and divine thinking that it can only be expressed in negative predicates, in negations of what human beings can picture of the sensory world.

Dionysius the Areopagite believed he could penetrate into the divine spiritual world by leaving behind, so to speak, all that can be encompassed by the intellect and thus finding the way into a world transcending reason.

If we consider Dionysius a disciple of Paul, then he lived from the end of the first Christian century into the second one. This means that he lived a few centuries prior to the decisive fourth century A.D. He sensed what was approaching: The culmination point of the development of human reason. With a part of his being, Dionysius looked back into the days of antiquity. As you know, prior to the eighth century B.C., human beings did not speak of the intellect in the way they did after the eighth century. Reason, or the rational soul was not born until the eigth century B.C., and from the birth of the rational soul originated the Greek and Roman cultures. These then reached their highest point of development in the fourth century A.D. Prior to this eighth century B.C. people did not perceive the world through the intellect at all; they perceived it directly, through contemplation. The early Egyptian and Chaldean insights were attained through contemplation; they were attained in the same manner in which we acquire our external sensory insights, despite the fact that these pre-Christian insights were spiritual insights. The spirit was perceived just as we today perceive the sensory world and as the Greeks already perceived the sensory world. Therefore, in Dionysius the Areopagite, something like a yearning held sway for a kind of perception lying beyond human reason.

Now, in his mind, Dionysius confronted the mighty Mystery of Golgotha. He dwelled in the intellectual culture of his time. Anybody studying the writings of Dionysius sees—regardless of who Dionysius was—how immersed this man was in all that the intellectual culture of his time had produced. He was a well educated Greek but at the same time a man whose whole personality was imbued with the magnitude of the Mystery of Golgotha. He was a man who realized that regardless of how much we strain our intellect, we cannot comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha and what stands behind it. We must transcend the intellect. We have to evolve from positive theology to negative theology.

When John Scotus Erigena read the writings of this Dionysius the Areopagite, they made a profound impression on him even in the ninth century. For what followed upon the fourth Christian century had more of an Augustine character and developed only slowly in the way I described in the earlier lectures. The mind of such a person, particularly of one of those who had trained themselves in the schools of wisdom over in Ireland, still dwelled in the first Christian centuries; he clung with all the fibers of his soul to what is written in the texts of Dionysius the Areopagite. Yet, at the same time, John Scotus Erigena also had the powerful urge to establish by means of reason, by what the human being can attain through his intellect, a kind of positive theology, which, to him, was philosophy. He therefore diligently studied the Greek Church Fathers in particular. We discover in him a thorough knowledge, for example of Origen,⁴ who lived from the second to the third century A.D.

When we study Origen, we actually discover a world view completely different from the Christian view, that is from what appeared later as the Christian view. Origen definitely still holds the opinion that one has to penetrate theology with philosophy. He believes that it is only possible to examine the human being and his nature only if he is considered as an emanation of the deity, as having had his origin in God. Then, however, man lowered himself increasingly; yet through the Mystery of Golgotha, he has gained the possibility of ascending once again to the deity in order once more to unite with God. From God into the world and back to God—this is how one could describe the path that Origen perceived as his own. Basically, something like this also underlies the Dionysian writings, and then was passed on to such personalities as John Scotus Erigena. But there were many others like him.

One could say that it is a sort of historical miracle that posterity came to know the writings of John Scotus Erigena at all. In contrast to other texts of a similar nature from the first centuries that have been completely lost, Erigena's writings were preserved until the eleventh, twelfth, a few even until the thirteenth century. At that time, they were declared heretical by the Pope; the order was given to find and burn all copies. Only much later, manuscripts from the eleventh and thirteenth century were rediscovered in some obscure monastery. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, people knew nothing of John Scotus Erigena. His writings had been burned like so many other manuscripts⁵ of a similar content from that period. From Rome's point of view the search was more successful in the case of other manuscripts: all copies were fed to the flames. Yet, of Erigena's works, a few copies remained.

Now, considering the ninth century and also taking into account that in John Scotus Erigena we have an expert in the wisdom and insights of the first Christian centuries, we must conclude the following. He is a characteristic representative of what extended form an earlier age, from the time preceding the fourth century, into later periods. One could say that in these later times, all knowledge had ossified in the dead Latin language. All the wisdom of the spiritual world that had been alive earlier became ossified, dogmatized, rigid, and intellectualized. Yet, in people like Erigena lived something of the ancient aliveness of direct spiritual knowledge that had existed in the first Christian centuries and was utilized by the most enlightened minds to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha.

For a time, this wisdom had to die out in order for the intellect of man to be cultivated from the first third of the fifteenth century until our era. While the intellect as such is a spiritual achievement of the human being, initially it turned only to the material realm. The ancient wealth of wisdom had to die so that the intellect in its shadowy nature could be born. If, instead of immersing ourselves in a scholarly, pedantic manner into his writings, we do so with our whole being, we will notice that through Scotus Erigena something had spoken out of soul depths other than those from which people spoke later on. There, the human being had still spoken out of mental depths that subsequently could no longer be reached by human soul life. Everything was more spiritual, and if human beings spoke intellectually at all, they spoke of matters in the spiritual realm.

It is extremely important for one to scrutinize carefully what the structure of Erigena's knowledge was like. In his mighty work on the divisions of nature that has come down to posterity in the manner I described, he divided what he had to say concerning the world in four chapters. In the first, he initially speaks of the uncreated and the created world (see outline below). In the way Erigena believed himself able to do it, the first chapter describes God and the way He was prior to His approaching something like the creation of the world.

Ancient Legacy

The Human Being

John Scotus Erigena clearly describes this in the way he learned through the writings of Dionysius. He describes by means of developing the most refined intellectual concepts. At the same time, he is aware that with them he only reaches up to a certain limit beyond which lies negative theology. He therefore merely approaches the actual true being of the spirit, of the divine. Among other topics, we find in this chapter the beautiful discourse about the Trinity, instructive even for our age. He states that when we view the things around us, we initially discover existence as an overall spiritual quality (see above). Existence embraces everything. Now, we should not attribute existence as possessed by things to God. Yet, looking upward to existence transcending existence, we cannot but speak summarily of the deity's existence.

Likewise, we find that things in the world are illuminated and permeated by wisdom. To God, we should not merely ascribe wisdom but wisdom beyond wisdom. But when we proceed from things, we arrive at the limit of wisdom-filled things. Now, there is not only wisdom in all things. They live; there is life in all things. Therefore, when Erigena calls to mind the world, he says: I see existence, wisdom, life in the world. The world appears to me in these aspects as an existing, wisdom-filled, living world. To him, these are three veils, so to speak, that the intellect fashions when it surveys all things. One would have to see through these veils, then, to see into the divine-spiritual realm. To begin with, Erigena describes these veils: When I look upon existence, this represents the Father to me; when I look upon wisdom, it represents the Son to me; when I look upon life, it represents the Holy Spirit in the universe.

As you can see, John Scotus Erigena certainly proceeds from philosophical concepts and then makes his way up to the Christian Trinity. Inwardly, proceeding from the comprehensible, he still experiences the path from there to the so-called incomprehensible. Indeed, of this he is convinced. Yet, from the way he speaks and presents his insights we can see that he has learned from Dionysius. Precisely when he arrives at existence, wisdom, and life, which to him represent the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, he would really like to have these concepts dissolve in a general spiritual element into which the human being would then have to rise by transcending concepts. However, he does not credit the human being with the faculty of arriving at a state of mind that goes beyond the conceptual.

In this, John Scotus Erigena was a product of the age that developed the intellect. Indeed, if this age had understood itself correctly, it would have had to admit that it could not enter into the realm transcending the conceptual level.

The second chapter then describes something like a second sphere of world existence, the created and the creating world (see above). It is the world of the spiritual beings where we find the angels, the archangels, the Archai, and so on. This world of spiritual beings, mentioned already in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. is creative everywhere in the world. Yet this hierarchical world is itself created; it is begun, hence created, by the highest being and in turn is active creatively in all details of existence surrounding us.

In the third chapter, Erigena then describes as a third world the created world that is noncreating. This is the world we perceive around us with our senses. It is the world of animals, plants, and minerals, the stars, and so on. In this chapter, Erigena deals with almost everything we would designate as cosmology, anthropology, and so forth, all that we would call the realm of science.

In the fourth chapter, Erigena deals with the world that has not been created and does not create. This is again the deity, but the way it will be when all creatures, particularly all human beings, will have returned to it. It is the Godhead when it will no longer be creating, when, in blissful tranquility—this is how John Scotus Erigena imagines it—it will have reabsorbed all the beings that have emerged from it.

Now, in surveying these four chapters, we find contained in them something like a compendium of all traditional knowledge of the schools of wisdom from which Scotus Erigena had come. When we consider what he describes in the first chapter, we deal with something that can be called theology in his sense, the actual doctrine of the divine.

Considering the second chapter, we find in it what he calls in terms of our present-day language the ideal world. The ideal is pictured, however, as existing. For he does not describe abstract ideas but angels, archangels, and so forth. He pictures the whole intelligible world, as it was called. Yet it was unlike our modern intelligible world; instead it was a world filled with living beings, with living, intelligible entities.

As I said, in the third chapter Erigena describes what we would term science today, but he does so in a different way. Since the days of Galileo and Copernicus, who, after all, lived later, we no longer possess what was called cosmology or anthropology in Scotus Erigena's age. Cosmology was still described from the spiritual standpoint. It depicted how spiritual beings direct and also inhabit the stars, how the elements, fire, water, air, and earth are permeated by spiritual beings. What was described as cosmology, was indeed something different. The materialistic way of viewing things that has arisen since the middle of the fifteenth century did not yet exist in Erigena's time, and his form of anthropology also differed completely from what we call anthropology in our materialistic age.

Here, I can point out something extraordinarily characteristic for what anthropology is to John Scotus Erigena. He looks at the human being and says: First, man bears existence within himself. Hence, he is a mineral being, for he contains within himself a mineral nature (see outline above). Secondly, man lives and thrives like a plant. Third, man feels as does the animal. Fourth, man judges and draws conclusions as man. Fifth, man perceives as an angel.

It goes without saying that in our age this would be an unheard-of statement! When John Scotus Erigena speaks of judgment and conclusions, something that is done, for instance, in a legal court where one pronounces judgment over somebody—then, so he says, human beings do this as human beings. But when they perceive, when they penetrate the world in perception then human beings do not behave as human beings but as angels! The reason for pointing this out is that I am trying to show you that for that period anthropology was something different from what it is for our present age. For it is true that you could hardly hear anywhere, not even in a theological seminar, that human beings perceive as angels. Therefore, one is forced to conclude that our science no longer resembles what Erigena describes in the third chapter. It has turned into something different. If we wanted to call Erigena's science by a word that is no longer applicable to anything existing today, we would have to say that it was a spiritual doctrine of the universe and man, pneumatology.

Now to the fourth chapter: This contains, first of all, Erigena's teaching of the Mystery of Golgotha and the doctrine concerning what the human being has to expect in the future, namely, entrance into the divine-spiritual world, hence, what in modern usage would be called soteriology. “Soter,” after all, means savior; the teaching of the future is eschatology. We find that Erigena here deals with the concepts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the emanation of Divine Grace, man's path into the divine-spiritual, world, and so on.

There is one thing that truly holds our attention, if we study attentively a work such as the De divisione naturae by John Scotus Erigena about the divisions of nature. The world is definitely discussed as something that is perceived in spiritual qualities. He speaks of something spiritual as he observes the world. But what is not contained in this work? We have to pay attention, after all, to what is not included in a universal science such as Erigena is trying to establish there.

In John Scotus Erigena's work, you discover as good as nothing of what we call sociology today, social science, and things of that kind. One is almost inclined to say it appears from the way Erigena pictures human beings that he did not wish to give mankind social sciences, no more so than any animal species, say the lion, the tiger, or any bird species, would come out with a sociology if it produced some sort of science. For a lion would not talk about the way it ought to live together with the other lions or how it ought to acquire its food and so on; this is something that comes instinctively. Just as little could we imagine a sociology of sparrows. Surely sparrows could reveal any number of the most interesting cosmic secrets from their viewpoint, but they would never produce any teaching about economics, for sparrows would consider this a subject that goes without saying, something they do because their instinct tells them to do it.

This is what is remarkable: Because we discover as yet nothing like this in Erigena's writings, we realize that he still viewed human society as if it produced the social elements out of its instincts. With his special kind of insight, he points to what still lived in the human being in the form of instincts and drives, namely, the impulses of social living. What he describes transcends this social aspect. He describes how the human being had emerged from the divine, and what sort of beings exist beyond the sense world. Then, in a form of pneumatology, he shows how the spirit pervades the sensory world, and he presents the spiritual element that penetrated into the world of the senses in his fourth chapter on soteriology and eschatology. Nowhere is there a description, however, of how human beings ought to live together. I should say, everything is elevated above the sensory world. It was generally a characteristic of this ancient science that everything was elevated beyond the sense world.

Now, if we contemplate writings such as John Scotus Erigena's teaching in a spiritual scientific sense, we discover that he did not think at all with the same organs humanity thinks with today. We simply do not understand him if we try to understand him with the thinking employed by mankind today. We understand him only when, through spiritual science, we have acquired an idea of how to think with the etheric body, the body that, as a more refined body, underlies the coarse sensory corporeality.

Thus Erigena did not think with the brain but with the etheric body. In him, we simply have a mind which did not yet think with the brain. Everything he wrote down came into being as a result of thinking with the etheric body. Fundamentally speaking, it was only subsequent to his age that human beings began to think with the physical body, and only since the beginning of the fifteenth century did people think totally with the physical body. It is normally not recognized that during this period the human soul life has truly changed, and that if we go back into the thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh centuries, we encounter a form of thinking that was not yet carried out with the physical but with the etheric body. This thinking with the etheric body was not supposed to extend into later ages when, dialectically and scholastically, people discussed rigid concepts. This former thinking with the etheric body, which certainly was the form of thinking employed during the first Christian centuries, was declared to be heretical. This was the reason for burning Erigena's writings. Now, the actual soul condition of a thinker in that age becomes comprehensible.

Going back to earlier times, we find a certain form of clairvoyance in all people. Human beings did not think at all with their physical body. In past ages, they thought with their etheric body and carried on their soul life even with the astral body. There, we should not speak of thinking at all, since the intellect only originated in the eighth century B.C., as I have pointed out. However, certain remnants of this ancient clairvoyance were retained, and it is particularly true of the most outstanding minds that with the intellect, which had already come into being, they tried to penetrate into the knowledge that had been handed down through tradition from former ages. People tried to comprehend what had been viewed in a completely different manner in past times. They tried to understand, but now had to have the support of abstract concepts such as existence, wisdom, life. I would say that these individuals still knew something of an earlier spirit-permeated insight and at the same time felt quite at home within the purely intellectual perception.

Later on, when the intellectual perception had turned into a shadow, this was not felt anymore. Earlier, however, people felt that in past ages insights had existed that permeated human beings in a living way out of spiritual worlds, it was not something merely thought up. Erigena lived in such a divided state. He was only capable of thinking, but when this thinking arrived at perception, he sensed that there was something of the ancient powers that had permeated the human being in the ancient manner of perception. Erigena felt the angel, the angelos, within himself. This is why he said that human beings perceive as angels. It was a legacy from ancient times, extending into his age of intellectual knowledge, that made it possible for a mind like Scotus Erigena's to say that man perceives like an angel. In the days of the Egyptian, Chaldean, and the early ages of the Hebrew civilization, nobody would have said anything else but: The angel perceives within me; as a human being, I share in the knowledge of the angel. The angel dwells within me, he cognizes, and I take part in what he perceives.

This was true of the era when reason did not yet exist. When the intellect had appeared, it became necessary to penetrate this older knowledge with reason. In Scotus Erigena, however, there still existed an awareness of this state of permeation with the angel nature.

Now, it is a strange experience to become involved in this work of Erigena's and to try and understand it completely. You finally arrive at a feeling of having read something most significant, something that still dwells very much in spiritual regions and speaks of the world as something spiritual. But then, in turn, the feeling arises that everything is basically mixed up. You realize that with this text you find yourself in the ninth century when the intellect had already brought much confusion. And this is truly the case. For if you read the first chapter, you are dealing with theology. But it is a theology that is certainly secondary even for John Scotus Erigena, a theology which evidently points back to something greater and more direct. I shall now speak as if all these matters were hypotheses, but what I now develop as a hypothesis can be established by spiritual science as a fact. A condition must once have existed, and we look back on it, when as yet theology was not addressed in such an intellectual manner but was considered to be something one delved into in a living way. Without doubt, it was that kind of theology the Egyptians spoke of, those Egyptians of whom the Greeks—I mentioned it above—report that Egyptian sages told them: You Greeks are like children;⁶ you have no knowledge of the world's origin, we do possess this sacred knowledge of the world's beginnings.

Obviously, the Greeks were being referred to an ancient, living theology. Thus, we have to say: During the time of the third post-Atlantean period, which begins in the fourth millennium and ends in the first millennium B.C. in the eighth pre-Christian century, approximately in the year 747 B.C., there existed a living theology. It now needed to be penetrated by Erigena's intellect. It was obviously present in a much more vital form to the personality who must be recognized as Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius had a much more intense feeling for this ancient theology. He felt that it was something that existed but could no longer be approached, that becomes negative as one tries to approach it. Based on the intellect, so he thought, one can only arrive at positive theology. Yet, with the term, negative theology, he was really referring to an ancient theology that had disappeared.

Again, when we consider what appears in the second chapter as the ideal world, we could believe that it is something modern. That, however, is not the case, That ideal world actually is identical with a true idea of what appears in the ancient Persian epoch, just as I described it in my Occult Science, hence in the second post-Atlantean period. Among Plato and the Platonists, this ancient Persian living world of angels, the world of the Amshaspands, and so on, had already paled into the world of ideals and ideas due to a later development. Yet, what is actually contained in this ideal world and is clearly discernible in Scotus Erigena goes back to this second ancient Persian age.

What appears in Erigena's book as pneumatology, as a kind of pantheism is not vague and nebulous such as is frequently the case today, but a pantheism that is alive and spiritual, though dimmed in Erigena's writing. This pneumatology is the last remnant, the very last vestige filtered out of the first post-Atlantean, ancient Indian period.

And what about the fourth chapter? Well, it contains Erigena's living perception of the Mystery of Golgotha and the future of humanity. We hardly speak of this anymore today. As an ancient tradition, it is still mentioned by theologians, but they know of it only in rigidified dogmas. They even deny that man could attain such insight through living knowledge. But it did originate from what was thus cultivated as soteriology and eschatology. You see, the theology of former times was handed over, as it were, to the councils; there, it was frozen into dogmas and incorporated into Christology. It was not to be touched anymore. It was viewed as impenetrable to perception. It was removed, so to speak, from what was carried out in schools by means of knowledge. As it was, exoteric matters were already being preserved like nebulous formations from ancient times. But at least the activities in schools were to be linked with thoughts that emerged in the age of thinking. They were to be connected, after all, with the Mystery of Golgotha and the future of mankind. There, one spoke of the Christ being's rule among human beings; one spoke of a future day of judgment. The concepts that people could come up with were used for that.

Thus, we see that Scotus Erigena actually records the first three chapters as though they had been handed down to him. Finally, he applies his own intellect to the fourth chapter but in such a manner that he speaks of things that far surpass the physical, sensory world, yet have something to do with this world. We realize that he took pains to apply the intellect to eschatology and soteriology. After all, we know the kind of scholarly disputes and discussions Scotus Erigena was involved in. For example, he was involved in discussions of the question whether in Communion, that is, in something that was related to the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings confront the actual blood and the actual body of Christ. He took part in all the discussions of human will, its freedom and lack of freedom in connection with divine grace. Hence, he honed and schooled his intellect in regard to everything that was the subject of his fourth chapter. This is what people discussed then.

We could say that the content of the first three chapters was an ancient tradition. One did not change it much but simply communicated it. The fourth chapter, on the other hand, was a living striving; there, the intellect was applied and schooled.

What became of this intellect that was schooled there? What happened to the concepts of soteriology and eschatology arrived at by people like Scotus Erigena in the ninth century? You see, my dear friends, since the middle of the fifteenth century this has become our science, the basis of the perception of nature. Once, people employed the intellect in order to consider whether bread and wine in the Sacrament are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. They pondered whether grace is bestowed on man in one way or another. This same intellect was later used to consider whether the molecule consists of atoms and whether the sun's body consists of one form of substance or another, and so on. It is the continuation of the theological intellect that inhabits natural science today. Precisely the same intellect that stimulated Scotus and the others who were involved with him in the dispute over Communion—and the discussions were indeed very lively in those days—survived in the teachings of Galileo and Copernicus. It survived in Darwinism, even, say, in Strauss's materialism. It has lived on in a straight line. You know that the old is always preserved alongside the new. Therefore, the same intellect that in David Friedrich Strauss hatched the book The Old and the New Faith, which preaches total atheism, occupied itself in those days, with soteriology and eschatology; it continues in a straight line.

We could therefore say that if this book had to be written today based as much on modern conditions as Scotus Erigena based what he wrote on the conditions of his age, then, here (referring to outline above), total atheism would not appear, but rather our natural science. For, naturally, complete atheism would contradict the first chapter. In the ninth century soteriology and eschatology still appeared there, for then the intellect was applied to other things. But here, (see p. 281), materialistic science would emerge today. History reveals to us nothing else but this. Now, we can perhaps see what becomes evident from the whole conception of this work.

Basically, what is listed here (outline above) would have to appear in a different sequence. The third chapter would have to read: world view of the first post-Atlantean age. The second chapter, would have to read: world view of the second post-Atlantean age, and the first chapter: world view of the third post-Atlantean age. In the sense of Scotus Erigena—who lived in the fourth post-Atlantean age that only came to an end in the fifteenth century—the last chapter applies to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The sequence (in the outline) would therefore have to be: III, II, I, IV. This is what I meant when I said earlier that one receives the impression that things are actually mixed up. Scotus Erigena simply possessed bits of the ancient legacy but he did not list them in accordance with their sequence in time. They were part of the knowledge of his age, and he mentioned them in the order in which they were most familiar to him. He listed the nearest at hand as the highest; the others appeared so nebulous to him that he considered them to be inferior.

Yet, the fourth chapter is nevertheless most remarkable. Let us try to understand from a certain viewpoint what it should actually be. Let us go back into pre-Christian times. If we were to seek among the Egyptians a representative mind such as Scotus Erigena was for the ninth century, such a person would still have known something concerning theology in a most lively way. He would have had even more alive concepts of the ideal or angelic world, of the sphere that illuminates and permeates the whole world with spirit. He would still have known all that and would have said: In the very first age, there once existed a human world view that beheld the spirit in all things. But then, the spirit was abstractly lifted up into the heights. It became the ideal world, finally the divine world. Then, the fourth epoch arrived. It was supposed to be even more spiritualized than the theological epoch. This Greco-Latin period was really supposed to be more spiritualized than the third epoch. And above all, the fifth which then followed, namely our time, would have to be an even more spiritualized era, for with materialistic science in place of soteriology or eschatology it would have to be listed in fourth place, or we would have to add a fifth listing with our natural science, and the latter would have to be the most spiritual view.

Yet, in fact, my dear friends, matters are buried. We hear Scotus Erigena saying that man exists as a mineral being, lives and thrives as a plant, feels as an animal, judges and draws conclusions as a human being, perceives as an angel—something Erigena still knew from ancient traditions. Now, we who aspire to spirit knowledge would have to go even further. We would have to say: Right, human beings exist as mineral beings, live and thrive as plants, feel as animals, judge and draw conclusions as human beings, perceive as angels and, sixth, human beings behold—namely, imaginatively, the spiritual world—as archangels. When we speak of the human being since the first third of the fifteenth century, we would have to ascribe to ourselves the following. We perceive as angels and develop the consciousness soul by means of soul faculties of vision—to begin with, unconsciously, but yet as consciousness soul—as archangels.

Thus, we face the paradox that in the materialistic age human beings actually live in the spiritual world, dwelling on a higher spiritual level than they did in earlier times. We can actually say: Yes, Scotus Erigena is right, the angel experience is awakening in man, but the archangel experience is also awakening since the first third of the fifteenth century. We should rightfully be in a spiritual world.

In realizing this, we could really look back also to a passage in the Gospels that is always interpreted in a most trivial way, namely, the one saying: The end of the world is near and the kingdoms of heaven are at hand. Yes, my dear friends, when we have to say of ourselves that in us the archangel is developing vision so that we can receive the consciousness soul, then there results a strange view of this approach of the heavens. It appears that it is necessary to revise such conceptions of the New Testament once more from the standpoint of spiritual science. These views are very much in need of revision, and we really have two tasks: First, to understand whether our age is not actually meant to to be different than the age when Christ walked on earth and whether the end of the world of which Christ spoke might not be something we have behind us already? This is the one task we confront. And if it is true that we have the so-called end of the world behind us and we therefore already face the spiritual world, then we would have to explain why it has such an unspiritual appearance, why it has become so material, arriving finally at that terrible, astounding life that characterizes the first third of the twentieth century? Two mighty and overwhelming questions place themselves before our soul. We shall continue speaking about that tomorrow.

• 1. Johannes Scotus Erigena, 810–877, Irish philosopher of scholasticism in Paris.
• 2. Charles the Bald, 828–877, king of the Franconians, emperor from 875–877.
• 3. Dionysius the Areopagite: connected Christianity with neo-Platonic philosophy. Had strong influence on medieval mysticism.
• 4. Origen, around 185–254, Greek Church Father in Alexandria, later presbyter in Caesarea; basis of his philosophical theology: De principiis (“Peri archon”). Under Justinian I, during the fifth ecumenical council in Constantinople in 553, his teachings were condemned as heretical.
• 5. After the Church had forbidden the reading of Scotus Erigena's texts, all editions were ordered burned in 1225.
• 6. These words are reported by Plato in Timaios, 22 B.C.

Yesterday, we concluded with two significant questions resulting from considering the position of a personality such as John Scotus Erigena. In him, we discover a world view, dating from the first centuries of Christianity that throws its light into the ninth century. Based on everything we have learned recently, we can say that the manner of perception, the whole way of thinking, differed in the first centuries A.D. from what it was later on. As we already know, a great change occurred in the fourth Christian century. From the middle of that century onward, people simply thought much more rationally than they had done earlier. One could say that until that time all perception, all forming of concepts had sprung far more from a form of inspiration than later on when human beings became increasingly conscious of the fact that they themselves were working with thoughts. What we have found to be the consciousness of human beings prior to the fourth century A.D. is still echoed in statements such as that by Scotus Erigena that man makes judgments and draws conclusions as a human being but perceives as an angel. This idea Scotus Erigena brings up as an ancient legacy, as a kind of reminiscence, was acknowledged by anyone who thought at all prior to the fourth century A.D. It never occurred to people in those days to attribute to the human being thoughts that transmit knowledge or perception. They ascribed those to the angel working within man. An angel inhabited the body of human beings; the angel perceived, and human beings shared in this knowledge.

Such a direct consciousness had faded away altogether after the fourth century. In men like Scotus Erigena it emerged once again, drawn forth from the soul with effort, as it were. This proves that the whole way of looking at the world had changed in the course of these centuries. That is why it is so difficult for people today to turn their minds back to the mode of thinking and conceiving prevalent in the first centuries after Christ. Only with the help of spiritual science can this be done again. We have to arrive once more at views that will truly correspond to what was thought in the first centuries A.D.

Already in the days of John Scotus Erigena controversies such as the one over Communion and man's predestination began. These were unmistakable indications of the fact that what was earlier more like an inspiration people did not argue about had now moved to the level of human debate. This came about because, as time went on, many things were simply no longer understood at all.

Among the things that were no longer understood, for example, is the beginning of the Gospel of St. John in the form generally known. If we take this beginning of the Gospel of John seriously, it actually states something that is no longer present in subsequent centuries in the general consciousness of those who profess Christianity. Consider that this Gospel starts with the words: “In the beginning was the Word”—and then it says further that through the Logos all things were made, that is, everything came into being that belongs among created things, and nothing was created except through the Logos.

If we take these words seriously, we have to admit: They signify that all visible things, all the things of the world, came into being through the Logos and that the Logos is therefore the actual creator of all things. In the Christian thinking after the fourth century A.D. the Logos, rightly identified with Christ in the sense of the Gospel of John, was certainly not regarded as the creator of all visible things. Instead, Christ is contrasted with the Creator as the Father, as God the Father. The Logos is designated as the Son, but the Son is not considered the Creator; it is the Father Who is made into the Creator. This doctrine has persisted through the centuries and completely contradicts the Gospel of St. John. You cannot take this Gospel seriously and not regard Christ as the Creator of all things visible, and instead view the Father God as the Creator. You can see, my dear friends, how little this Gospel was taken seriously in later Christian times.

In our mind, we have to place ourselves in the whole mode of thinking of the first Christian centuries, which, as I have said, experienced a change at the point in time indicated above. This way of thinking was in turn structured on the basis of insights into the spiritual world left behind from ancient pagan times. In particular, we have to understand clearly how people viewed the Last Supper, which then continued in the Christian Sacrifice of the Mass. We have to understand the view concerning Communion, the main content of which is contained in the words: “This is my body”—pointing to the bread—and “This is my blood”—pointing to the wine. This content of Communion was truly comprehended during the first Christian centuries; it was even understood by people who were by no means educated but simply gathered together in remembrance of Christ in the Sacrament of Communion. But what did people actually mean by that? They referred to the following.

Throughout antiquity, people were in possession of a religious doctrine of wisdom. Fundamentally speaking, the further back we go in time, the more we find this religious teaching of wisdom based on the being of the Father God. When we consider the religions of very ancient times, preserved in decadent form in later religious faiths, they exhibit in all instances a certain worship of what had remained behind from the ancestor of a tribe or a people. In a sense, human beings worshiped the ancestral father of a tribe. You know from Tacitus' Germania¹ how even those tribes who then invaded the Roman empire and made possible the new civilization, definitely retained such memories of tribal deities although in many cases they had already changed to a different form of worship, namely, to that of local gods—something I have mentioned in the public lectures of the last course.² They believed that while generation after generation had passed since a certain ancient ancestor had lived who had established the tribe or nation, the soul, the soul-spiritual element of this tribal father, still held sway in the most recent generations.

This presence was believed to be connected with the physical community of the bodies in the tribe. After all, these bodies were all related to each other. They all had the same ancestry. The common blood flowed through their veins. The body and the blood were one. As people looked up in religious devotion to the soul-spiritual element of the tribal father, they also experienced the presence of the deity to whom the tribal father had returned, the god through whom this ancestral father now affected the whole tribe or nation by means of his soul-spiritual nature. The rule of this deity was seen in the bodies, in the blood that ran down through the generations. A profound mystery was sensed in the mysterious forces of the body and the blood.

In those ancient pagan times, people actually beheld the forces of the deity in what held sway in the body and circulated in the blood. Therefore, it is possible to say that when a follower of such an ancient world view saw an animal's blood or, what was more, human blood run out, he beheld in this blood the corporeality of the deity. In the bodies of his race or tribe, which were built up by the blood, he beheld the forms, the image, of the deity. People today no longer have any idea of how the divine-spiritual was worshiped then at the same time as the material substance.

Truly, through the blood of the generations flowed the power of the deity; through the bodies of the generations the deity formed its image. The soul and spirit of the ancestor rose up to this deity and hence worked upon the descendants with divine power and was worshiped as the ancestral god. Not only in regard to these ancient beliefs, but above all in regard to actual truth, the elements working in the human body depend on the forces of the earth. As you know, the body's origins lie in much more ancient times but the forces of the earth are active in the human body as it is today—containing the mineral kingdom—and in the blood.

In the human blood, for example, not only those forces are active that enter the human being through foods but also those that are effective in the whole planet earth. For instance, due to the fact that a person lives in a region rich in red soil, hence a region possessing certain geological characteristics and certain metallic inclusions in the soil, an effect proceeds from the earth to the blood. In turn, the formation, the body, of man is dependent on the earth. The body develops one way in warmer, another way in colder regions of the earth. The corporeality and the elements active in the blood depend on the forces working in the earth. This truth, which we are approaching once again today through spiritual scientific research, was immediately clear to people in antiquity due to their instinctive perception. They know that the earth forces pulsate in the blood.

Today we say that when we connect a telegraph machine in station A by wire to one in station B, we connect the machines one-sidedly. We transmit the electrical current through the wire but the circuit must be closed. It is closed when we make the so-called ground connection. You probably know that if we have a telegraph machine at one station, we guide the wire over the telegraph poles. Yet the circuit is then not closed and it must be closed. We transmit the current into the plate sunk into the ground at one station and do the same at the other station but do nothing more. We could run a different wire there, but we do not do that; we mount an earth-wire plate on both ends of the wire, and the earth takes care of the rest. We know this today as a result of science. We have to presume that electricity, the electric current, works within the earth.

Now people in antiquity knew nothing of electricity and electric currents. Instead, they know something about their blood. They stood on the earth and knew that something was in the earth that also lived in the blood. They looked at the matter differently; they did not speak of electricity but of an earthly element that dwelled in their blood. We no longer know that the earth's electricity lives in the blood. We only speak out of attempts to grasp the matter outwardly through mathematical and mechanistic conceptions. This is why human beings linked their conception of God to the earth's body as such. They realized that the divine element worked in the blood and in the body through the earth. This was what appeared in the concept of the Father God because people considered the primal ancestor, the father, of the tribe or their folk as the point of departure for the influence of the divine element. The primal ancestor was believed to be working through the earth as his means, and the effects of the earth in the blood and the whole human body were seen to be the effects of the divine.

Now these people of old had still another conception. They said, The human being is not only affected by the earthly element. It would be fine if only the earth influenced mankind, but that is not the case. The neighbor of the earth, the moon, works together with the earth's forces. Therefore, they said, it really is not the earth alone but earth and moon together that are effective. With this combination of earth and moon forces, they now linked conceptions of not only one uniform deity of the earth, but many subordinate deities who were then present in the pagan world. All the conceptions that existed of the deity, the elements that affected the human being through the body and blood, all these were the primal source that fed any view of God in this ancient period.

It is not surprising that all search for insight turned in antiquity to the earth, the moon, and the earth's influences and therefore people had to figure out what affected the earth. Thus, a most sophisticated form of science was developed. An echo of this science of the Father God still influenced the first three books by John Scotus Erigena I spoke about yesterday. Basically though, he was not really familiar any more with this primal wisdom, for he lived as late as the ninth century, but bits of this science had been handed down and been preserved. They referred to the insight that the Father God, Who was not created but creates, dwells in everything surrounding the human being on earth, that the other deities, who have been created but also create, live in it as well. They are then the various entities of the hierarchies. Furthermore, the visible world is spread out around man, the created as well as the noncreating. Finally, human beings are to await the world in which the deity as a noncreating and not created, hence, as a resting divinity, holds sway and receives all else into its bosom. This is what is contained in Scotus Erigena's fourth book.

As I have told you, this fourth book deals mainly with soteriology and eschatology. It presents the history of Christ Jesus, the Resurrection and the gifts of grace, but also the end of the world and the entering into the resting Godhead. The first three chapters of the great book by Scotus Erigena clearly show us a reflection of ancient world views, for basically only the fourth chapter is really Christian. The first three chapters are permeated with a number of Christian concepts but what predominates in them really dates from ancient pagan times. We also find this unchanged pagan wisdom in the Church Fathers of the first Christian centuries. We can say that through nature, through what the human being saw in the creatures surrounding him, he beheld the region of the Father God. He saw a world of ideals behind nature; he saw certain forces in nature. He also saw the rule of the Father God in the sequence of generation, in the development of mankind in individual tribes and nations.

In the first Christian centuries, another insight had joined this knowledge, which has been almost completely lost. The first Christian Church Fathers referred to something their later critics thoroughly eradicated. They said it was true that the Father God worked in the element flowing in the blood through the generations and expressed in the bodies, but He did so in constant conflict and together with His opponent powers, the nature spirits. This was a particularly vivid conception in the first Christian centuries, namely, that the Father God had never been quite successful in exerting His influence exclusively. Rather, He was waging a constant battle with the nature spirits who rule in any number of things in the outer world. Therefore, these first Christian Church Fathers said, The ancients of pre-Christian times believed in the Father God, but they really could not distinguish Him from the nature spirits, they actually believed in a kingdom of the Father God that included the domain of nature. They believed that the whole visible world has its source in it. This, however, is not true, so they said. All these spiritual beings, these various nature deities, do work together in nature, but first of all they crept into the things of the earth. Now, these earthly things we see around us with our senses, the things that have come about on earth, neither originate from these nature spirits nor from the Father God Who actually expressed His creative being only in the metamorphoses preceding the earth. What we see as earth does not originate from the Father God nor from the nature spirits. It comes from the Son, from the Logos, whom the Father God let spring forth from Himself so that the earth might be created by the Logos. And the Gospel of St. John, a mighty, significant monument was written in order to indicate: No, it is not as the people of old believed; the earth was not created by the Father God. The Father God made the Son come forth from Him; and the Son is the creator of the earth.

This is what the Gospel of John was supposed to state. This was basically what the Church Fathers of the first Christian centuries struggled for. This then became so hard to grasp for the developing human intellect that Dionysius the Areopagite preferred to say: Everything the intellect creates is positive theology and does not penetrate into the regions containing the actual mysteries of the universe. We can enter into them only if we negate all predicates, if we do not speak of the existence of God but of God's existence transcending existence, if we do not refer to the personality but the personality transcending personality. Hence, human beings only enter into them if they transpose everything into its negative. Then, through negative theology, he takes hold of the actual secret of existence. So Dionysius and his successors, such as John Scotus Erigena, who was already completely imbued with the intellect, did not believe that the human being was at all capable of explaining these mysteries of the universe with human intellect.

Now, what is implied by saying that the Logos is the creator of everything? We need to recall what was present in all the ancient pre-Christian times and endured in diminished form until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. People believed that the deity works through the blood and through the body. This led them to believe that when the blood flows through the veins of the human being or the animals, it is really taken away from the gods. It is the rightful possession of the gods. Therefore, human beings can approach the gods if they return blood to them. The gods really wish to keep the blood for themselves; humans have taken possession of it. In turn, human beings must give the blood back to the gods, hence the blood sacrifice of ancient times.

Then came Christ and said: This is not what counts; this is not the way to approach earthly things. They do not originate from those gods who desire the blood. Look upon what works in the human being prior to the earth's influence on him; take bread, something that nourishes human beings, and look at how they initially partake of it. They partake of it by means of the sense of taste. The food in human beings goes to a certain point before it is transformed into blood. For it is only changed into blood after having passed through the walls of the intestines into the organism. Only there does the earth's influence begin; as long as the food has not been taken hold of by the blood, the earth's influence has not yet begun. Therefore, do not view blood as something corresponding to the god; behold that in the bread before it turns into blood and in the wine before it enters the blood. There is the divine element; there is the incarnation of the Logos. Do not look upon the element that flows in the blood, for that is an ancient legacy from the Moon age, the pre-earthly time. Before it turns into blood, food has to do with what is earthly in the human being. Therefore, do away with the conceptions of blood, body, and flesh. Instead, turn your thinking to what has not yet become blood nor flesh; direct your minds to what is prepared out there on earth, to what is of the earth without the moon having had an influence on it, to what comes from the sun's influence. For we behold the things through the light of the sun; we eat bread and drink wine, and in them we eat and drink the force of the sun. The visible things have not come about through the Father God, they have come into being through the Logos.

With this, the whole realm of human thought was directed to something that could not be attained from the whole of nature in the way people in the past had done. It could be attained only by looking upon what the sun lets shine forth upon the earth. Human thinking had been turned to something purely spiritual. Human beings were not supposed to extract the divine element from the physical things of the earth; they were supposed to behold this divine element in the purely spiritual, the Logos. The Logos was contrasted to the ancient conceptions of God the Father. That is, people's minds were directed toward a purely spiritual element. In pre-Christian times, people beheld the deity only through what was in a manner of speaking, organically brewed up in them and then arose within them somewhat like a vision. They did indeed behold the divine arising out of the blood. Now they sought to grasp it in the purely spiritual element. They were to view the visible things around them as a result of the Logos and not of what had only slipped into them, as the result of a god who had been creative in pre-earthly times.

Only by thinking in this manner do we actually approach the concepts of the first Christian centuries. Human beings had been told not to use any force other than that of their consciousness to attain the concepts with which to arrive at the comprehension of the deity. Human beings were being directed toward the spirit. Therefore, what could be said to them? They could be told: Formerly, the earth was so powerful that it bestowed upon you the concepts of the divine. That has ceased. The earth no longer gives you anything. Through your own efforts you must come to the Logos and to the creative principle. Up to now, you have basically worshipped something that was creative in pre-earthly conditions; now you must revere the creative principle in the earthly realm. But you can grasp this only through the power of your I, your spirit.

The first Christians expressed this by saying: The end of the world is near. They meant the end of the earth condition that bestows insights on man without his working on these insights with his consciousness. In fact, a profound truth is expressed in these words concerning the end of the world, for human beings had formerly been children of the earth. They had given themselves up to the forces of the earth. They had relied on their blood to give them their knowledge. This, however, was no longer possible, The kingdoms of the heavens drew near, the kingdoms of the earth ceased to be. Henceforth, man can no longer be a son of the earth. He has to turn into the companion of a spiritual being, a being that has come down to earth from the spiritual world, the Logos, the Christ.

The end of the world was prophesied for the fourth century A.D.: the end of the earth, the beginning of a new kingdom, the dawn of that age when man is to experience himself living as spirit among spirits. This is probably the most difficult to picture for people of our present age, namely, that our present manner of dwelling as human beings would not have been considered by people of the early Christian centuries as living in an earthly manner. It would have been seen as life in the spirit realm, after the destruction of the earth as it was when it still bestowed faculties upon the human being. If we properly understood the first Christians' way of thinking, we would not say that they superstitiously believed in the end of the world, which did not take place. As the first Christians saw it, this end did occur in the fourth century A.D.

The way we live today would have been considered by the first Christians as the New Jerusalem, the kingdom where the human being lives as spirit among spirits. However, they would have said: According to our view, the human being has actually entered heaven, but he is so worthless that he does not realize it. He believes that in heaven everything overflows with milk and honey, that there are no evil spirits against whom he has to defend himself. The first Christians would have said: Formerly, these evil spirits were contained in the things of nature; now they have been let loose, flit about invisibly, and human beings must withstand them.

Hence, in the sense of the first Christian centuries, the end of the world definitely did occur, but people simply did not comprehend this. It was not understood that instead of the god dwelling in the earth, a god whose presence is announced through events on the earth, now the supersensory Logos was present who must be recognized in the supersensory realm and to whom human beings must adhere by means of super-sensory faculties. Now, assuming this, we can comprehend why in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, a feeling of the end of the world was present again in civilized Europe. Again, people awaited the world's end. They did not know what the first Christians had meant by it. Out of this frame of mind of anticipating the end of the world, which spread over all of civilized Europe during these centuries, something developed that caused people to seek Christ in a more physical manner than they ought to have looked for him. People should realize that we are to find the Logos in the spirit, not based on nature's phenomena. This search for the Logos in the spirit is something that these people, who once again were in a mood of expecting the end of the world, did not understand. Instead, they set about this search in a more materialistic way. Thus, this mood gave rise to the Crusades, the material quest for Christ in his tomb in the Orient. People adhered to Christ in this mood of the world's end, in the misunderstood mood of the end of the world.

However, Christ was not found in the Orient. People received approximately the same answer his disciples had received when they sought him tangibly in his tomb—He whom you seek is no longer here—for He must be sought in the spirit.

Now, in the twentieth century, once again a mood of the world's end prevails—and these phenomena will increase—although people have become so lethargic and indifferent that they do not even notice this anticipation of the end of the world. But the man who did speak of this mood of the world's end in his Decline of the West³ made a significant and noticeable impression, and this frame of mind will become increasingly prevalent.

Actually, we do not need to speak of the end of the world. It has already ended in the sense that humanity can no longer find the spirit based on nature; it is a matter of realizing that we live in a spiritual world. Humanity's error of not knowing that we live in a spiritual world has brought misfortune over us. It causes wars to be bloodier and bloodier. It is becoming increasingly evident that human beings act as if possessed. Indeed, they are possessed by the evil forces who confuse them, for their speech no longer expressed the inherent content of their I. They are as though possessed by a psychosis. This psychosis is much talked about but little understood.

What the first Christians meant by the end of the world, and what they understood by it, did take place. The new age is here, but it must be recognized. People must realize that when the human being perceives, he does perceive as an angel, and when he becomes conscious of his own self, he becomes self-aware as an archangel. The significant point is that the spiritual world has already descended and human beings must become conscious of it. Many have thought that they take the Gospel seriously. Yet, although the Gospels clearly say that all things that were made, hence, all things under consideration should not be explained based on their earthly forces but originated through the Logos, people professed the Father God. He should be acknowledged as one with the Christ but as that aspect of the Trinity that was active until the earth was formed, whereas the actual ruler of the earth is the Christ, the Logos.

These matters could hardly be comprehended anymore in the ninth century when Scotus Erigena was active. This is why, on the one hand, his book about the divisions of nature is so great and significant. On the other hand, as I told you yesterday, this is why it is chaotic as well. This is why you only begin to find your way in it when you view it from the spiritual scientific viewpoint as we have done yesterday and today.

Well, as I said, in the fourth chapter, Erigena speaks of the uncreated entity that is not creating. If we understand the true meaning of what Scotus Erigena describes here, namely, the resting deity in which everything unites, then the necessary step has been taken. The world that is described in the preceding three chapters has come to an end. The world of the resting Godhead, the noncreated and noncreating being, is here.

Insofar as it is nature, the earth is declining. I have often called attention to the fact that this is the case by indicating that even geologists say nowadays that by and large, nothing new originates anymore on the earth. Certainly, as an aftereffect, plants develop, and so forth, plants, animals, and human propagate. But the earth as a whole has turned into something other than what it was. It is becoming fragmentized; it is splitting. The earth as a whole is already in a state of disintegration as far as its mineral kingdom is concerned.

The great geologist, Suess,⁴ expressed this in his work The Countenance of the Earth (Das Antlitz der Erde) by saying that we walk around on the corroding crust of the earth. He points to certain regions on earth where this corrosion is evident. He stresses that in the past this was different. This is what the world view and conception of life in the first Christian centuries referred to, though not based on facts of nature but on the moral facts of humanity's evolution.

Indeed, it is true that since the beginning of the fifteenth century we live even more in the resting Godhead than did Scotus Erigena. This Godhead awaits our attainment of Imagination and Inspiration through our own efforts. Then we will be able to recognize the world around us as a spiritual world. We will perceive that we are indeed in a spiritual world that has thrown off the earthly one. This deity awaits our realization that we are living after the end of the world and that we have arrived in the New Jerusalem.

It is indeed a strange spiritual destiny for human beings that they dwell in the spiritual world and neither know it nor wish to know it. There is no substance in any of the interpretations aiming at representing true Christianity as mixed up with some half-baked conceptions of an end of the world, which, after all, did not occur and was only meant symbolically, and so on. What we find in the writings of Christianity must be comprehended in its true meaning. It must be grasped in the right way. There must be clarity concerning the fact that the early Christian views referred to a world that had already changed after the fourth century A.D.

The teachings in the first Christian centuries stood in awe of the abundant wisdom of paganism, and the Christian Church Fathers attempted to connect it with the secret of Golgotha. Matters were actually viewed the way I described it today. Yet, it was not believed that mankind could understand them offhand. This is why the secrets of ancient time were preserved in dogmas meant only to be believed, not to be understood. The dogmas are by no means superstition or untruth. The dogmas are true, but they must be comprehended in the right way. They can only be understood, however, if this comprehension is sought for with the faculty that has developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century.

When Scotus Erigena lived, human reason was still a force. Scotus Erigena still sensed that the angel within him comprehended. After all, this human intellect was still a force in the best minds of that period. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, we have only the shadow of this reason, this intellect. Since that time, we have developed the consciousness soul. Yet we still retain the shadow of the intellect. When a person develops his concepts today, he is indeed far from having any idea that an angel is comprehending something within him. He simply thinks: I am figuring something out concerning the things I have experienced. He certainly does not talk about the presence of a spiritual being that is perceiving, much less of a still higher spiritual being, which he is by virtue of his self-awareness. The faculty with which we try to know things is only the shadow of the intellect that had developed for the Greeks, for example for Plato and Aristotle, and even for the Romans and that had still been alive for Scotus Erigena in the ninth century A.D.

But this is the point, my dear friends. We no longer need to be misled by the intellect; this insight can help us to progress. Today, people follow a shadow, the reasoning or intellect within them. They allow themselves to be misled by it instead of striving for Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, which in turn would lead once again into the spiritual world that actually surrounds us. It is really beneficial that the intellect has become like a shadow. Initially, we established external natural science with this shadowlike intellect. On the basis of this intellect we have to work further, and God rests so as to allow us to work. The fourth stage is completely here today. We just have to become conscious of it. If we do not become aware of this fact, nothing can develop further on earth. For what the earth has received as a legacy is gone; it is no more. New things must be inaugurated.

An individual such as Spengler beholds the fragments of the old civilizations. After all, they were prepared in sufficient numbers. In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the mood of the imminent end of the world prevailed. Then came the Crusades. They really accomplished nothing new, for people sought in the material realm something that should have been sought in the spirit. Now, because the Crusades had brought no results, the Renaissance came, so to speak, to the rescue of mankind. Greek culture was again disseminated in what prevails today as education. Greek culture was present again but not as something new. The mathematical and mechanistic concepts of external nature developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century were the only new elements. But the ruins of antiquity were there, too, and they are crammed into our young people in the secondary schools. They then form the basis of civilization. Oswald Spengler encountered these fragments of the Renaissance. Like erratic blocks, they float on the sea that is intent on producing something more. Yet if you merely look upon these floating ice blocks, you behold the decline. For what has been retained from the past is characterized by a mood of decline, and nobody can galvanize our modern education. It is perishing. Out of the spirit, through primal creation, a different civilization must be created for the fourth stage is here.

This is how Scotus Erigena must be understood, who brought along his wisdom—already difficult to understand for him, I would say—from the Irish isle, from the mysteries that had been cultivated in Ireland. This is how we must interpret Scotus Erigena's work. Thus, not only the primal knowledge that can be attained through spiritual science, but also the documents of former times express this meaning if we are willing really to understand them, if we are willing finally to free ourselves from the Alexandrianism of the modern philosophic science that calls itself philology. For we must admit that the way things are handled today, we do not see much of either philology or philosophy. If we observe the methods of cramming and the way examinations are conducted in our educational institutions, very little is present of philo, of love. That has to emerge from a different direction, but we are in need of it once again.

It was my intention, first of all, to present the figure of Scotus Erigena to you. Secondly, I wanted to point out that the ways to properly grasp the buried primordial wisdom have yet to be sought. Nowadays people pay no attention to the fact that the Gospel of St. John clearly states that the Logos is the creative principle, not the Father God.

• 1. Publius Cornelius Tacitus, around A.D. 55 until 120, Roman historian and consul. His work, De origine et situ germanorum, is the oldest surviving source concerning the geography and ethnography of the Germanic peoples.
• 2. Contained in Die Naturwissenschaft und die weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung der Menschheit seit dem Altertum, six lectures, 1921. GA 325, 1969.
• 3. Oswald Spengler, 1880–1936, philosopher of history and culture.
• 4. Eduard Suess, 1831–1914, geologist. Das Antlitz der Erde, 3 vol., 1885–1909.

In the course of the last few days we had occasion to refer once again to the turning point in Western civilization in the fourth century A.D. with the example of John Scotus Erigena. In the present, when so many things are supposed to change, it is particularly important to understand clearly what really happened then to the human soul constitution. For it is a fact that we too are living in an extraordinarily significant moment in humanity's evolution; it is necessary for us to pay heed to the signs of the times and to listen to the voices of the spiritual world, so that out of the chaos of the present we may find a path into the future.

In the fourth century A.D., changes took place in the souls of those belonging to the leading nations and tribes, just as in our century changes in part have begun to develop, in part will still occur. And in John Scotus Erigena we have observed a personality who in a certain way was influenced by the aftereffects of humanity's world view prior to the fourth century A.D.

We shall now call to mind other things that also make evident this change of character. As far as can be done in a more outward manner, we will consider from this standpoint how the study of nature developed, in particular people's views of health and illness. We shall confine ourselves, first of all, to historical times. When we ask what the views concerning nature, particularly human nature in connection with health and illness were, and look back into the early Egyptian period, we can for the first time speak of any similarity between these ancient views and ours now. Yet, in regard to health, illness, and their natural causes, these ancient Egyptians held opinions still differing significantly from ours. The reason was that they thought of their relationship with nature quite differently from the way we think of it today. The ancient Egyptians certainly were not fully aware that they were gradually separating from the earth. They pictured their own bodies—and they naturally started by considering what we call “body” in an intimate connection with the forces of the earth. We have already mentioned in the last lecture how such a concept arises, how it is that the human being pictures himself in a certain sense closely bound inwardly to the earth through his body. I referred to the ancient soul forces in order to illustrate this. It was altogether clear to the ancient Egyptians that they had to see themselves as part of the earth, similarly to how the plants must be seen as belonging to the earth. Just as it is possible to trace the course of the sap or at least the earth's forces in plants more or less visibly, so people in ancient Egypt experienced the working of certain forces that, at the same time, held sway in the earth. Therefore, the human body was seen as belonging to the earth.

This could only be done because a view of the earth prevailed that was quite different from the view prevalent nowadays. The ancient Egyptians would never have thought of representing the earth as a mineral body the way we do it today. In a sense, they pictured the earth as a mighty organic being, a being not organized in quite the same way as an animal or man, but still, in a certain respect, an organism; and they considered the earth's masses of rock as a skeleton of sorts. They imagined that processes took place in the earth that simply extended into the human body.

The ancient Egyptians experienced a certain sensation when they mummified the human corpse after it had been discarded by the soul, when they tried to preserve the shape of the human body by mummification. In the formative forces proceeding from the earth and forming the human body, they beheld something like the will of the earth. They were trying to give permanent expression to this will of the earth. These Egyptians held views concerning the soul that seem somewhat alien to a person of today. We shall now try to characterize them.

It must be emphasized that when we go back to early Egyptian times, and even more so to the ancient Persian and Indian epochs, we find that, based on instinctive old wisdom, the doctrine of reincarnation—the return of the essential human entity in successive earth lives—was widespread. We are mistaken, however, in assuming that these ancient people were of the opinion that what we know as soul today is what always returns. Especially the Egyptian concept demonstrates that such a view did not exist. Instead, it must be pictured like this: The soul-spiritual being of man lives in spiritual worlds between death and a new birth. When the time approaches for this being to descend to the physical earth, it works formatively in the human body, in what comes through heredity from the successive generations. On the other hand, these ancient people did not think that what they bore in their consciousness during life between birth and death was the actual psycho-spiritual being that lives between death and a new birth and then shapes the human corporeality between birth and death. No, these people of antiquity pictured things differently. They said: When I find myself in the waking state from morning until evening, I know absolutely nothing of the soul-spiritual matters that are also my own affairs as a human being. I must wait until my own true being, which worked on me when I entered into earthly existence through birth, appears to me in half-sleep or in image-filled sleep, as was the case in these ancient times.

Thus, the ancient human being was aware that in his waking state he was not meant to experience his actual soul being; instead, he was to look upon his true soul entity as upon an external picture, something that came over him when he passed into the frequently described dreamlike, clairvoyant conditions. In a certain sense, the human being in former times experienced his own being as something that appeared to him like an archangel or angel. Only beginning in ancient Egypt, people started to think of this inner human essence as belonging directly to the soul.

If we try to characterize how the ancient Egyptians pictured this, we have to say the following. They thought: In a dream image, my soul-spiritual being appears to me in its condition between death and a new birth. It shapes the body for its use. When I look at the form of the body, I see how this soul-spirit being has worked like an artist on this body. I see much more of an expression of my soul-spiritual being in my body than if I look within. For that reason I shall preserve this body. As a mummy, its form shall be retained, for in it is contained the work the soul has done on the body between the last death and this birth. That is what I retain when I embalm the body and in the mummy preserve the image on which the soul-spiritual being has worked for centuries.

By contrast, the ancient Egyptians considered the experiences of the human being in the waking state between birth and death differently: This is really like a flame kindled within me, but it has very little to do with my true I. My I remains more or less outside my soul experiences in the waking state between birth and death. These soul experiences are actually a temporal, passing flame, enkindled in my body through my higher soul being. In death, they are extinguished once again. Only then does my true soul-spirit being shine forth, and I dwell in it until the new birth.

It is true that the ancient Egyptians imagined that in the life between birth and death they did not properly attain to an experience of the soul element. They viewed it as something that stood above them, enkindled their temporal soul element and extinguished it again; they saw it as something that took from the earth the earth's dust to form the body. In the mummy, they then tried to preserve this bodily form.

The ancient Egyptians really placed no special value on the soul element that experiences itself in the waking state between birth and death, for they looked beyond this soul nature to a quite different soul-spirit essence, which ever and again forms new bodies and passes through the period between death and a new birth. Thus, they beheld the interplay of forces between the higher human element and the earth. They really directed their attention to the earth, for to them, the earth was also the house of Osiris. Inner consciousness was something they overlooked.

The development of Greek culture, which began in the eighth century B.C., consisted precisely in man's placing an ever increasing value on this soul element that lights up between birth and death, something the ancient Egyptian still viewed as enkindled and subsequently dying flame. To the Greeks, this soul element became valuable. But they still had the feeling that in death something like an extinction of this soul element took place. This gave rise to the famous Greek saying I have characterized often from this viewpoint: "Better a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shades." This saying was coined by the Greeks as they looked upon the soul element. To them, the latter became important, whereas it had been less significant for the ancient Egyptians. This development is connected with the view of health and illness held by the ancient Egyptians.

They thought that this soul-spiritual element, which does not really enter properly into human consciousness between birth and death, builds up the human body out of the earth elements, out of the water, the air, the solid substances of the earth, and the warmth. And since the ancient Egyptians believed that this human body was formed out of the earth, they set great store by keeping it pure. During the golden age of Egyptian culture, maintaining the body in a pure state was therefore something that was especially cultivated. The Egyptians thought very highly of this body. Hence, they felt that when the body became ill, its connection with the earth was in some way disturbed, in particular its relationship to the earth's water, and this relationship had to be restored. Therefore, there were hosts of physicians in Egypt who studied the relationship of the earthly elements to the human body. Their concern was to maintain people's health and, when it was disturbed, to restore it by means of water cures and climatic treatments. Already in the heyday of Egyptian civilization, specialized physicians were at work, and their activity was principally directed at the task of bringing the human body into the proper relation with the earth's elements.

Beginning with the eighth century B.C., particularly in Greek civilization, this changed. Now, the consciously experienced soul element became really important. People did not see it anymore in as close a connection with the earth as people in ancient Egypt had done. For the ancient Egyptians, the human body was in a sense something plantlike that grew out of the earth. For the Greeks, the psycho-spiritual element was the factor that held together the earth elements; they were more concerned with the way these elements in the body were held together by man's soul and spirit. On this basis developed the scientific views of Greece. We find them especially well expressed by Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician and contemporary of Phidias, Socrates, and Plato.¹ This view of the importance of the human soul element, which becomes conscious of itself between birth and death, is already clearly developed in Hippocrates, who lived in the fourth century B.C.

We would be very much mistaken, however, if we believed that this soul-spiritual element lived in Greek consciousness in the same way we experience it in our consciousness today. Just reflect on how poor, how abstractly poor this thing is that modern man calls his soul! When people speak of thinking, feeling, and willing, they picture them as quite nebulous formations. It is something that no longer affects the human being substantially. It had a substantial effect on the Greeks, for they had an awareness that this psycho-spiritual being actually holds together the elements of the body and causes their interplay. They did not have in mind an abstract soul element as people do today. They had in mind a full, rich system of forces that gives shape above all to the fluid element, bestowing on it the human form. The Egyptians felt: The soul-spirit being that finds its way from death to a new birth gives form to this fluid element. The Greeks felt: What I experience consciously as my soul element, this is what shapes the water; it has a need for air and then develops the circulatory organs in that form. It causes the conditions of warmth in the body and also deposits salt and other earthly substances in the body.

The Greeks actually did not picture the soul separately from the body. They imagined it molding the fluid body, bringing about the presence of air through inhaling and exhaling. They pictured the soul causing the conditions of warmth in the body, the body's warming and cooling processes, the breathing and movement of the fluids, the permeation of the fluids with the solid ingredients—actually representing only about 8% of the human body. The Greeks pictured all this in full vitality. They attached special importance to the shaping of the fluids. They imagined that in turn a fourfold influence was at work in these fluids due to the forces active in the four elements, earth, water, air, and warmth. This is how the Greeks pictured it.

In winter, human beings must shut themselves off from the outer world to a certain extent, they cannot live in intimate contact with it. They must rely on themselves. In winter, above all the head and its fluids make themselves felt. There the part of the fluids that is most waterlike works inwardly in the human being. In other words, for the Greeks this was phlegm or mucus. They believed all that is mucous in the human organism to be soul-permeated and particularly active in winter. Then came spring, and the Greeks found that the blood made itself felt through greater activity; the blood received greater stimulation than in winter. This is a predominantly sanguine time for human beings, emphasis is placed on what is centralized in the arteries leading to the heart and is active in the movement of fluids. In winter, it is the movement of the phlegm in the head, hence, this is the reason why the human being is then particularly inclined to any number of diseases of the mucous fluids. In spring, the blood circulation is especially stimulated.

The Greeks pictured all this in such a way that matter was not separated from the soul aspects. In a sense, blood and phlegm were half soullike, and the soul itself with its forces was something half physical in moving the fluids.

When summer approached, the Greeks imagined that the activity of bile (they called it yellow gall), which has its center in the liver, is particularly aroused. The Greeks still had a special view of what this is like in the human being. For the most part, people have lost this view. They no longer see how, in spring, the skin is colored by the blood's stimulation. They no longer notice the peculiar yellow tinge coming from the liver where this so-called yellow bile has its center. In the rosy flush of spring and the yellowish tinge of summer, the Greeks saw activities of the soul.

When autumn came, they said: Now, the fluids having their center in the spleen, the fluids of black bile, are particularly active. In this way, the Greeks pictured in the human being movements and effects of fluids that were directly under the influence of the soul. Unlike the Egyptians, the Greeks considered the human body by itself, apart from the whole of the earth. Thus, they came closer to the inner soul configuration of the human being as it is expressed between birth and death.

As this civilization progressed further, however, particularly as the Western element, the Latin-Roman element, gained ground, this view, which we find especially in Hippocrates who based his medical science on it, was to a certain extent lost. Hippocrates held that the soul-spiritual nature of man manifesting between birth and death causes these mixtures and separations of the fluids. When these do not proceed as the soul-spiritual influence intends them to go, the human being encounters illness. The soul-spiritual element actually always strives to make the activities of the fluids run their normal course. This is why the physician has the special task of studying the soul-spirit nature and the effect of its forces on the activities of the fluids in addition to observing the illness. If the activity of the physical body somehow tends to cause an abnormal mixture of fluids, then the soul element intervenes. It intervenes to the point of a crisis, when the outcome in the struggle between corporeal and soul-spiritual elements hangs in the balance. The physician must guide matters in such a way that this crisis occurs. Then, at some point in the body it will be evident that the bad fluid combination is trying to come out, to escape. Then it is the physician's task to intervene in a proper way in this crisis, which he has introduced in the first place, by removing the fluids that have accumulated in the way described above and that are resisting the influence of the soul-spiritual element. The physician accomplishes this either by means of purging or by bloodletting at the right moment.

Hippocrates' manner of healing was of a quite special kind and connected with this view of the human being. It is interesting that such a view existed that pictured an intimate relationship between the soul-spirit element as expressed between birth and death and the system of body fluids. Things changed, however, when the Latin-Roman influence continued this development.

This Roman element had less inclination for a full comprehension of the form and the system of fluids. This can be clearly seen in the case of the physician Galen² who lived in the second century A.D. The system of fluids that Hippocrates saw was no longer so transparent to Galen. You really have to picture it like this: Today, you watch how a retort in a chemistry laboratory is heated by a flame underneath, and you see the product of the substances inside. For Hippocrates, the effect of the soul-spiritual element in the fluids of the body was just as transparent. What took place in the human being was to him visible in a sensory-supersensory way. The Romans, on the other hand, no longer had a sense for this vivid view. They no longer considered the soul-spiritual element that dwells in man in its connection to the body. They turned their glance in a more abstract, spiritual direction. They only understood how the soul-spiritual being can experience this spirit within itself between birth and death.

The Greeks looked at the body, saw the soul-spiritual in the mixing and separating of the fluids and, to them, the sensory view in its clarity and vividness was the main thing. To the Romans, the essential thing was what a man felt himself to be, the feeling of self within the soul. To the Greeks, the view of how phlegm, blood, yellow, and black bile intermingle, how they are, in a manner of speaking, an expression of the earthly elements of air, fire, water, earth in the human being became something they saw as a work of art. Whereas the Egyptians contemplated the mummy, the Greeks looked upon the living work of art. The Romans had no sense for this, but they had an awareness for taking a stand in life, for developing inner consciousness, for allowing the spirit to speak, not for looking at the body but for making the spirit speak out of the soul between birth and death.

This is connected with the fact that at the height of Egyptian civilization, four branches of knowledge were especially cultivated in their ancient form: geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. In contemplating the heavenly element that formed the human body out of the earth, the Egyptians imagined that this body is molded in its spatial form according to the law of geometry; it is subject to the influences of the stars according to the laws of astrology. It is involved in activity from within according to the laws of arithmetic and is inwardly built up harmoniously according to the laws of music—music here conceived not merely as musical tone elements but as something that lives in harmonies in general. In the human being. as a product of the earth, in this mummified man, the Egyptians saw the result of geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. The Greeks lost sight of this. The Greeks replaced the lifeless, mummified element, which can be comprehended by means of geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music, with the living soul element, the inner forming, the artistic self-development of the human body.

This is why we note in Greek culture a certain decline of geometry as it had existed among the Egyptians. It now became a mere science, no longer a revelation. The same happened with astrology and arithmetic. At most, the inner harmony that forms the basis of all living things remains in the Greek concept of music.

Then, when the Latin element came to the fore, the Romans, as I said, pictured this soul-spiritual being as it is between birth and death together with the inner spirit now expressing itself not as something that could inwardly be seen but inwardly experienced, taking its stand in the world through grammar, through dialectics, and through rhetoric. Therefore, during the time when Greek culture was passing over into Latin culture, these three disciplines flourished. In grammar, man was represented as spirit through the word; in rhetoric, the human being was represented through the beauty and forming of the word; in dialectics, the soul was represented through the forming of thought. Arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music continued to exist, but only as ancient legacies turned science. These disciplines, which in ancient Egypt had been very much alive, became abstract sciences. By contrast, the arts attached to man—grammar, rhetoric, dialectics—took on new life.

There is a great difference between the way a person thought of a triangle in ancient Egypt prior to Euclid and the way people thought of it after Euclid's time. The abstract triangle was not experienced in earlier times the way it was conceived later on. Euclid signified the decadence of Egyptian arithmetic and geometry. In Egypt, people felt universal forces when they envisaged a triangle. The triangle was a being. Now, all this became science, while dialectics, grammar and rhetoric became alive.

Schools were now established in accordance with the following thinking: Those people who want to be educated have to develop the spiritual potential in their already existent soul-spiritual human nature. As the first stage of instruction, they must master grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. Then, they have to go through what remains only as a traditional legacy but forms the subjects of higher education: geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. These then were the seven liberal arts, even throughout the Middle Ages: grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. The arts that came more to the fore were grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics; the arts that were more in the background, conceived by the ancient Egyptians in a living manner as they stood on a relationship to the earth, were the subjects of higher learning.

This was the essential development between the eighth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. Look at Greece in the fourth century or in the third or fifth centuries. Look at modern Italy. You find everywhere in full bloom this knowledge of the human being as a work of art, as a product of the soul-spiritual element, of life of the spirit through dialectics, rhetoric, and grammar. Julian Apostate³ was educated in approximately this way in the Athenian school of philosophers. This is how he saw the human being.

Into this age burst the beginning of Christianity. But by then all this knowledge was in a certain sense already fading. In the fourth century it had been in its prime, and we have heard that by John Scotus Erigena's time only a mere tradition of it existed. What lived in the Greeks based on the view I have just characterized, then was transmitted to Plato and Aristotle who expressed it philosophically. When the fourth century B.C. drew near, however, people understood Plato and Aristotle less and less. At most people could accept the logical, abstract parts of their teachings. People were engrossed in grammar, rhetoric, dialectics. Arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music had turned into sciences. People increasingly found their way into a sort of abstract element, into an element where something that had formerly been alive was now to exist only as tradition. As the centuries passed, it became still more a tradition. Those who were educated in the Latin tongue retained in a more or less ossified state grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. Formerly a person would have laughed if he had been asked whether his thinking referred to something real. He would have laughed, for he would have said: I engage in dialectics; I do not cultivate the art of concepts in order to engage in anything unreal. For there, the spiritual reality lives in me. As I engage in grammar, the Logos speaks in me. As I engage in rhetoric, it is the cosmic sun that sends its influences into me.

This consciousness of being connected with the world was lost more and more. Everything became abstract soul experiences, a development that was completed by Scotus Erigena's time. The ideas that had been retained from earlier times—from Plato and Aristotle—were only comprehended more or less logically. People ceased to find any living element in them.

When the Emperor Constantine⁴ made Rome the ruling power under the pretext that he wished to establish the dominion of Christianity, everything became entirely abstract. It became so abstract that a person like Julian Apostate, who had been educated in the Athenian school of philosophy, was silenced. With an aching heart, he looked at what Constantine had done in the way of ossifying concepts and ancient living ideas, and Julian Apostate resolved to preserve this life that had still been evident to him in the Athenian schools of philosophers.

Later on, Justinian ruled from Byzantium, from Constantinople, which had been founded by Constantine.⁵ He abolished the last vestiges of these Athenian philosophers' schools that still possessed an echo of living human knowledge. Therefore, the seven wise Athenians—Athenians they were not, they were a quite international group, men from Damascus, Syrians, and others gathered from all over the world—had to flee on order of Justinian. These seven wise men fled to Asia, to the king of the Persians,⁶ where philosophers had had to escape to already earlier when Zeno, the Isaurian,⁷ had dispersed a similar academy. Thus we see how this knowledge, the best of which could no longer be comprehended in Europe, the living experience that had existed in Greece, had to seek refuge in Asia.

What was later propagated in Europe as Greek culture was really only its shadow. Goethe allowed it to influence him and as a thoroughly lively human being, he was seized with such longing that he wished he could escape from what had been offered to him as the shadow of Greek culture. He traveled to the south in order to experience at least the aftereffects.

In Asia, people who were capable of doing so received of Plato and Aristotle what had been brought across to them. This is why during the sixth century Aristotle's work was translated based on the Asian-Arabic spirit. This gave Aristotle's philosophy a different form.

What had in fact been attempted here? The attempt had been made to take what the Greeks had experienced as the relationship between the soul-spiritual element and the body's system of fluids, what they had seen in full physical and soul-spiritual clarity and formative force, and to raise it up into the region where the ego could be fully comprehended. From this originated the form of science tinged with Arabism, which was especially cultivated in the academy of Gondishapur⁸ throughout the whole declining age of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This form of science was brought in later centuries by Avicenna⁹ and Averroes¹⁰ by way of Spain into Europe and eventually exerted a great influence on people such as Roger Bacon¹¹ and others. It was, however, a completely new element that the academy of Gondishapur meant to bestow on mankind in a manner that could not endure by way of the translation of Aristotle and certain mystery wisdom teachings, which then continued in directions of which we shall talk another time.

Through Avicenna and Averroes, something was introduced that was to enter human civilization with the beginning of the fifteenth century, namely, the struggle for the consciousness soul. After all, the Greeks had only attained to the intellectual or rational soul. What Avicenna and Averroes brought across, what Aristotelianism had turned into in Asia, so to speak, struggles with the comprehension of the human I, which, in a completely different way, has to struggle upward through the Germanic tribes from below to above—I have described this in the public lectures here during the course.¹² In Asia, on the other hand, the I was received like a revelation from above as a mystery wisdom. This gave rise to the view that for so long provoked such weighty disputes in Europe, namely, that man's ego is not actually an independent entity but is basically one with the divine universal being. The aim was to take hold of the ego. The I was supposed to be contained in what the Greek beheld as the being of body, soul, and spirit.

Yet, people could not harmonize the above with the I. This is the reason for Avicenna's conception that what constitutes the individual soul originates with birth and ends with death. As we have seen, the Greeks struggled with this idea. The Egyptians viewed it only in this way—the individual soul is enkindled at birth, extinguished at death. People were still wrestling with this conception when they considered the actual soul element between birth and death, the true soul element. The I, on the other hand, could not be transitory in this manner. Therefore, Avicenna said: Actually, the ego is the same in all human beings. It is basically a ray from the Godhead which returns again into the Godhead when the human being dies. It is real, but not individually real. A pneumatic pantheism came about, as if the ego had no independent existence but was only a ray of the deity streaming between birth and death into what the Greeks viewed as the soul-spiritual nature. In a manner of speaking, the transitory soul element of man is ensouled with the eternal element through the ray of the Godhead between birth and death. This is how people imagined it.

This shows to some extent how people of that age struggled with the approach of the I, the consciousness of the ego, the consciousness soul. This is what occurred in the span of time between the eighth century B.C. and the fifteenth century A.D., the middle of which is the fourth century A.D. People were placed in a condition where the concrete experience, which still dwelled in the mixing and the separating fluids and beheld the soul element in the corporeal being, was replaced. A purely abstract state of mind, directed more toward man's inner being, replaced this vivid element of perception.

It is indeed possible to say that until the fourth century A.D., Greek culture predominated in Romanism. Romanism only became dominant when it had already declined. In a sense, Rome was predestined to exert its activity only in its dead element, in its dead Latin language, in which it then prepared the way for what entered human evolution in the fifteenth century. This is how the course of civilization must be observed. For, once again, we are now faced with having to seek the way toward knowing of the approach of spiritual revelations from the higher worlds. Once again, we must learn to struggle, just as people struggled then.

We must be clear about the fact that what we possess as natural science came to us by way of the Arabs. The knowledge we have acquired through our sciences must be lifted up to Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. In a certain sense, however, we must also steel our faculties by means of observing the things of the past, so that we acquire the strength to attain what we need for the future. This is the mission of anthroposophical spiritual science. We must recall this again and again, my dear friends. We should acquire quite vivid perceptions of how differently the Greeks thought about soul and corporeal aspects. It would have sounded ridiculous to them if one had listed seventy-two or seventy-six chemical elements. They perceived the living effect of the elements outside and of the fluids within.

We live within the elements. Insofar as the body is permeated by the soul, the human being with his body lives within the four elements the Greeks spoke about. We have arrived at the point where we have lost sight of the human being, because we can no longer view him in the above manner and focus only on what chemistry teaches today in the way of abstract elements.

• 1. Hippocrates, 460–377 B.C., known already in antiquity as the greatest physician.
  
  Phidias, 500–435 B.C., Greek sculptor in Athens, master of classical style.
  
  Plato, 427–347 B.C., Greek philosopher, pupil of Socrates.
  
  Socrates, 470–399 B.C., moral philosopher in Athens, developed Socratic dialog to teach his students to think for themselves.
• 2. Galen, A.D. 129–199, outstanding physician in the days of the Roman emperors; personal physician to Marc Aurel. In his writings, he tried to compile all medical knowledge of antiquity.
• 3. Julian Apostate, A.D. 332–363, nephew of Constantine the Great, Roman emperor from A.D. 361–363.
• 4. Constantine I., the Great, A.D. 288–337, Roman Emperor from A.D. 306–337. Made Christianity the state religion in 324.
• 5. Justinian I, see note 8, Lecture IV.
• 6. “... to the king of the Persians ...”: Chosrau Nurshivan (king from A.D. 531–580) invited the sages from all over the world, particularly those versed in medicine, to Persia. He is frequently considered the founder of the academy of Gondishapur.
• 7. Zeno the Isaurian, A.D. 426–491, Byzantine emperor from A.D. 474–491, closed the school of philosophers in Edessa in 487.
• 8. Gondishapur (Djundaisabur), city founded by the king of the Sassanides, Shapur I (242–272). It was the cultural center of the kingdom for a long period.
• 9. Ibn Sina Avicenna, 980–1037, Persian philosopher and physician, author of over 100 books.
• 10. Ibn Roshd Averroes, 1126–1198, Arabian philosopher and universal scientist. Physician from Cordova. Following Aristotelianism, he attempted to combine philosophy and faith. His rational faith led to his banishment.
• 11. Roger Bacon, around 1216–1294, English Franciscan, called doctor mirabilis on account of his comprehensive knowledge. He included natural scientific perceptions in his theological manner of thought.
• 12. See note 2 to Lecture XVI.

Today and the day after tomorrow I propose to discuss a few of the more important facts relating to consciousness and to karmic connections.

If you cast even a superficial glance at that which exists in your soul from awaking in the morning to falling asleep at night—in the form of ideas, moods, impulses of will, adding of course all the impressions that approach the soul from without—then you have everything that may be called the objects of ordinary consciousness.

It must be clear to us that all these details of our conscious activity are dependent, under ordinary conditions, upon the instrumentality of the physical body. The immediate, irrefutable proof of this is that one must awake in order to live within these facts of the usual consciousness. For us this means that the human being must submerge himself in the physical body with what is outside it during sleep, and his physical body must be at his disposal with its instruments. He must be able to make use of them if the activities of the ordinary consciousness are to go on.

The following question then arises: In what way does the human being, as a soul and spiritual entity, make use of his physical instruments, his organs of sense, his nervous system? In what way does he use his bodily organs in order to exist in his ordinary consciousness? In the outer, materialistic world there is, first of all, the belief that the human being possesses in his physical instruments that which produces the facts present to consciousness. It has been frequently pointed out that this is not the case; that it is no more sensible for us to imagine that our inner corporeality, our sense organs or brain, bring forth the details of consciousness than to imagine that a candle creates the flame. The relation of what we call consciousness to the bodily mechanism is quite otherwise. We might compare it with the relation of a man to the mirror in which he sees himself. When we sleep our state of consciousness is comparable, let us say, to walking straight ahead in a certain space. If we do this we do not see ourselves, how our nose or forehead looks, and so forth. Only when someone steps forward with a mirror and holds it before us do we behold ourselves. But then we are confronted by what has always belonged to us. It is then there for us. It is the same with the facts of our ordinary consciousness. They exist continually within us, and have, as they exist there, nothing whatsoever to do with the physical body—as little as we ourselves have to do with the mirror mentioned above. The materialistic theory in this field is simply nonsense; it is not even a possible hypothesis. For the materialist in this field affirms nothing less than would be asserted were someone to declare that because he sees himself in a mirror the mirror created him.

If you wish to give yourself up to the illusion that the mirror creates you because you see yourself only when it is held before you, then you may also believe that parts of the brain or the sense organs produce the content of your soul-life. Both statements are equally intelligent and true. That the mirror creates the human being is just as true as that the brain produces thoughts. The facts of our consciousness persist. It is necessary for our ordinary organization that we be able to perceive these existing details of consciousness. To this end we must encounter that which reflects them—our physical body. We have thus in our physical body what we may call the reflecting apparatus for the facts of our ordinary consciousness. These facts exist in our soul and spiritual entity. We cannot perceive them psychically any more than we can perceive ourselves without a mirror. We become aware of that which lives within us and is a part of us by having held before us the mirror of our bodily nature. That is the actual state of things, except that one has not to do with a passive reflector in the case of the body, but with something that contains processes of its own. Thus it may be imagined that instead of the mirror which is silvered to produce reflection, the physical body has behind it all sorts of processes. The comparison suffices to show the relation of our spirit and soul being to the body. We will hold before our minds the fact that for all we experience in normal, everyday consciousness, the physical body is an adequate reflector. Behind or, let us say, below all the details of this usual consciousness lie the things that rise up into our ordinary soul-life, and which we must designate as facts within the hidden depths of the soul.

Some of that which exists in the hidden depths of the soul is experienced by the poet or the artist who knows—if he is a genuine poet or artist—that he does not conceive his works by means of logic or outer observation. He knows instead that they emerge from unknown depths, and are there, really there without having been gathered together by the forces of ordinary consciousness. But from these hidden depths of soul-life other things also emerge which, although in everyday life we are unaware of their origin, play a part in our everyday consciousness.

We saw yesterday that we can go down deeper, into the realm of half-consciousness, the realm of dreams, and we know that dreams lift something up out of the depths of soul-life which we cannot lift up by straining the memory in the simple usual way. When something long buried in memory stands before a human soul in a dream picture—which happens again and again—the individual in most cases could never, through recollection alone, lift these things up from the hidden depths of soul-life because the ordinary consciousness does not extend so far down. But that which is inaccessible to this surface consciousness is quite within reach of the subconsciousness, and in the half conscious dream state much that has remained or been preserved, so to say, is brought up or rises up.

Only those things strike upwards that have failed to produce their effects in the way usual to that emanation of human experience which sinks into the hidden depths of the soul. We become healthy or ill, moody or gay, not due directly to our ordinary course of life, but because a bodily condition results from that which has sunk down from our life experience. It is no longer remembered, but there below in our soul this sunken something works, and makes us what we become in the course of our lives. Many a life would be quite comprehensible to us, if we but knew what hidden elements had descended throughout its course into these subconscious depths. We should be able to understand many a man in his thirties, forties, or fifties, should know why he has this or that tendency, why he feels so deeply dissatisfied in certain connections without being able to say what causes this discomfort. We should understand a great deal if we were to follow the life of such a man back into childhood. We should be able then to see how in his early years his parents and environment had affected him, what was called forth of sorrow and joy, of pleasure or pain, perhaps entirely forgotten, but acting upon his general condition. For that which rolls down, and surges out of our consciousness into the hidden depths of soul life continues its operation there. It is a curious fact that the force, acting in this way, works primarily upon ourselves, does not leave, so to speak, the sphere of our personality. Therefore when the clairvoyant consciousness descends, (and this happens through what is called imaginative cognition), when the clairvoyant consciousness descends to the realm where, in the subconsciousness, things rule which have just been described, the seeker always finds himself. He finds that which exists and surges within him. And that is good; for in true self-knowledge the human being must learn to know himself in order that he may observe and become acquainted with all the driving forces that work within him.

If he gives no heed to these facts; if when he gains clairvoyant consciousness through exercises in imaginative cognition, and forces his way down into the subconscious—if he does not recognize that in everything working within him he finds only himself—then he is exposed to manifold errors. For he cannot become aware of this in any way comparable to the ordinary activities of consciousness. There arises for the human searcher the possibility, at one step or another, of having visions, of seeing shapes which are quite new and do not resemble those with which he has become acquainted in average experience. This may happen, but to believe that such things are part of the outer world would be a serious mistake. These phenomena of the inner life do not present themselves as in the ordinary consciousness. If one has a headache it is a fact of the ordinary consciousness. One knows it to be located in one's own head. If anyone has a stomachache he is aware of it within himself. If we descend into what we call the hidden depths of the soul, we remain absolutely within ourselves, and yet what we encounter may present itself objectively, as if it were in the outside world.

Let us consider a striking example: Let us assume that someone has a longing to be the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. (I have already stated that I have counted during my lifetime twenty-four such Magdalenes!) Let us assume also that this wish is not as yet admitted: we do not need to admit to ourselves our own wishes, that is not necessary. But a woman reads the story of Mary Magdalene, and it pleases her exceedingly. The desire to be Mary Magdalene may arise at once in her subconscious mind while in the surface consciousness nothing is present but the attraction of this character. It pleases the person in question. In the subconsciousness, unknown to its possessor, there is a growing desire to be this Mary Magdalene. This individual goes through the world, and as long as nothing intervenes in her upper consciousness, that is to say, as far as she knows, she is simply pleased with Mary Magdalene. The ardent desire to be Mary Magdalene is in her subconscious mind, but she knows nothing about that, so it does not trouble her. She is guided by the details of the ordinary consciousness, and may go through the world as though she had no such injurious subconscious desire. But let us assume that, as a result of employing this or that occult method of reaching the subconscious, this woman succeeds in descending into herself. She might not become aware of a desire to be Mary Magdalene as she would of a headache. If she did her attitude towards her desire would be the same as towards a pain: she would just try to get rid of it. But in the case of an irregular penetration this desire presents itself as something outside the personality. The vision pretends to say: Thou art Mary Magdalene! It stands before her, projecting itself as a fact, and a human being, as evolution is today, is unable to control such a condition with the ego. With good, correct, and careful schooling this cannot happen, for then the ego goes along into every sphere; but as soon as something enters the consciousness without the accompanying presence of the ego it is produced as an objective fact. This observer believes that she recalls events surrounding Mary Magdalene, and identifies herself with her.

This is a real possibility. I emphasize this today in order that you may gather from it the fact that only careful schooling, and caution in regard to your entrance into the domain of occultism can save you from falling into error. It is to be understood that you must first see a whole world before you, must note objects around you, excluding however that which you relate to yourself, or which is within you, even though it appears as a world tableau—if you know that it is well to regard what you first see only as the projection of your own inner life, then you have a good corrective for the errors along the way. This is the best of all: regard, as a general rule, everything as phenomena emanating from yourself. Most of them arise out of our wishes, vanities, from our ambitions, in short, from characteristics relating to the egotism of humanity. These things project themselves, for the most part, outward, and you may now raise the question: How can we avoid these errors? How can we save ourselves from them?

We cannot save ourselves from these errors by the ordinary facts of consciousness. The deception arises from the fact that, although the human being is confronted in reality by a world-tableau, he cannot escape from himself, is all entangled in himself. From this you may see that it depends upon our coming, in one way or another, out of ourselves that we learn to differentiate: here you have a vision and there another. The visions are both outside ourselves; one is perhaps only the projection of a desire, the other is a fact, but they do not differ as radically as in ordinary life when someone else says he has a headache, and you have it yourself. Our own inner life is projected into space, just as the inner life of another person. How shall we learn to distinguish the one from the other?

We must undertake research within the occult field, and learn to distinguish true from false impressions, although they appear confused and all make the same claim to authenticity, as though we looked into the physical world and saw besides ordinary trees, imaginary ones. The real objective facts and those which arise from our own inner life are mixed together. How are we to learn to separate two realms which are so intermingled?

We do not learn this primarily through our consciousness. If we remain entirely within the confines of our mental life there is then no possibility of differentiation. This possibility lies only in the slow occult training of the soul. As we go on further and further we acquire real discrimination. This means that we learn to do in the occult realm what we would have to do in the physical world if trees born of phantasy and genuine trees stood side by side. If we run against phantasy-trees they let us pass through without resistance, but if we encounter real trees we bruise ourselves against them. Something similar, although of course only as a spiritual fact, must confront us in the occult field.

We can, if we go about it properly, learn in a comparatively simple way to distinguish between the true and false within this field, not however through ideas, but by resolution of will. This resolution may be brought about in the following way: If we look over our life we find in it two distinctly different groups of occurrences. We often find that this or that in which we succeed or fail is related to our abilities. That is to say, we find it comprehensible that in a certain field we do not succeed very well because in it we are not particularly bright. Where we assume on the contrary that we have ability, we find success quite natural.

Perhaps we need not always discern so distinctly the connection between what we carry out and our abilities. There is also a less definite way to realize this connection. If, for example, anyone in his later years is pursued by this or that blow of fate and, thinking back says to himself: “As a man I did little to make myself energetic”—or must say to himself: “I was always a careless fellow”—he may also say: “Well, the connection between my lack of success and my other omissions is not immediately apparent, but I do see that things cannot really succeed for a careless, lazy person to the same degree they are possible for one who is conscientious and industrious.” In short, there are successes and failures which we can comprehend and find natural, but there are others which happen in such a way that we cannot discover any connection, so that we say to ourselves: “Although in accordance with certain abilities this or that should have succeeded, it nevertheless did not succeed.” Thus there is distinctly a type of success or failure whose connection with our capacities we cannot see.

That is one thing. The other is that in regard to some things in the outside world which strike us as blows of fate, we can sometimes say: “Well yes, that appears to be just, for we furnished all the predisposing conditions;” but some other things that happen we cannot discover that we are in any position to explain. We have thus two types of experience; those whose relation to ourselves and our capacities we realize, and the other type just characterized, for which we cannot see that we are responsible. Our external experiences fall likewise into two classes: those of which we cannot say that we have produced the determining conditions, in contrast to others which we know we have brought about.

Now we may look around a little in our lives. That is a useful experiment for everyone. We could gather together all the things whose causes we cannot see, whose success led us to say “a blind chicken has found a kernel of corn”—things whose success we cannot attribute to ourselves. But we can remember and collect also failures in the same way, and those seemingly accidental outer events for which we know of no modifying influence. And now we make the following soul experiment: We imagine that we constructed for ourselves an artificial human being who, through his own abilities, brought about all our successes whose cause we do not understand. If something succeeded for us requiring wisdom just where we ourselves are stupid, then we conceive a person who is particularly clever in this field, and for whom the enterprise simply had to succeed. Or for an outer event we proceed in this way: let us say a brick falls on our head. We can see no reason, but we conceive someone who brought it about by running up to the roof and loosening the brick, so that he needed only to wait a little for it to fall. He runs down quickly, and the brick strikes him. We do this with certain events which we know have not been brought about by us in any ordinary way, and which happen very much against our will. Let us assume that at some time in our life we were struck by someone. In order that we may not find this too difficult we may place this event back in our childhood; we can pretend that then we contrived to be beaten by someone, that is, we had done everything to bring it about. In short, we construct for ourselves a human being who brings down upon himself everything for which we cannot account. You see, if progress in occultism is desired many things must be done which run contrary to ordinary events. If you do only what generally seems reasonable you get no further in occultism, for that which relates to higher worlds may seem to ordinary people quite foolish. It does no harm if the method does seem foolish to the prosaic outer man.

Well, we construct for ourselves this human being. At first it seems to us a merely grotesque performance, something the object of which we perhaps do not understand; but we shall make a discovery about ourselves, in fact everyone will who tries it, namely the astonishing discovery that he no longer wishes to detach himself from this being which he has himself built up, that it is beginning to interest him. If you try it you will see for yourself: you cannot get away from this artificial human being; it lives within you. And in a peculiar way: it not only lives within you but it transforms itself and radically. It changes so that at last it becomes something quite different from what it was originally. It becomes something of which we are forced to say “it really does exist within us.”

This is an experience which is possible to everyone. We admit that what has just been described—which is not the original self-created being of phantasy, but that which this has become—is a part of what is within us. Now this is just what has, so to speak, brought about the apparently causeless things during our lives. We find within ourselves the real cause of what is otherwise incomprehensible. That which I have described to you is, in other words, the way not only to peer into your own soul-life and find something, but it is the way out from the soul-life into the environment. For what we fail to bring off does not remain with us, but belongs to our environment. So we have taken something out of our environment which does not harmonize with the facts of our consciousness, but presents itself as if it were within us. Then we gain the feeling that we really have something to do with what seems so causeless in real life. A person acquires in this way a feeling of his connection with his destiny, with what is called Karma. Through this soul experiment a real way is opened to experience within himself, in a certain manner, his own Karma.

You may say: “Yes, but I do not understand exactly what you have said.” If you say that you do not fail to understand what you imagine, but you lack understanding for something which even a child can grasp, but about which you simply have not thought. It is impossible for anyone who has not carried out the experiment to understand these things. Only he who has done this can understand. These things are to be taken only as the description of an experiment that can be made and experienced by anyone. Each one comes to the realization that something lives within him which is connected with his Karma. If anyone knew this beforehand no rule would need be given him for the attainment of this knowledge.

It is quite in order that no one grasps this who has not yet made the experiment; it is not however a question of understanding in the ordinary sense, but an acceptance of information regarding something that our soul may undertake. If our soul follows such paths it accustoms itself not to live within itself only, in its own wishes and desires, but to relate itself to outer happenings, to consider them. Exactly the things which we ourselves have not desired, we have built into that which is here considered. And when we have come to face our Destiny so that we can calmly take it upon us, and think in regard to what we usually murmur and rebel against: “We accept it willingly, for we ourselves have decreed it,” then there arises a state of mind and heart in which, when we force our way down into the hidden depths of soul, we can distinguish with absolute certainty the true from the false. For then is shown with a wonderful clarity and assurance what is true and what false.

If you behold any sort of vision with the mental eye, and can as it were by a mere look, banish it, drive it away, simply by the use of all the inner forces with which you have become acquainted—then it is just a phantasm. But if you cannot get rid of it in this fashion, if you can banish at most that which reminds you of the outer world; if the really visionary quality, the spiritual thing remains like a solid fact—then it is true. But you cannot make this distinction until you have done what has been described. Therefore without the above-mentioned training there can be no certainty in the differentiation between the true and false upon the super-sensible plane. The essential thing in this soul experiment is that we always remain in full possession of our ordinary consciousness in regard to what we desire, and that by means of this experiment we accustom ourselves to look upon what we in our ordinary consciousness do not at all want, and is repugnant to us, as something willed into existence by us. One may in a certain sense have reached a definite degree of inner development; but unless, through such a soul experiment, we have learned to contrast all the wishes, desires, sympathy and antipathy which live in the soul with our relation to what we have not wished, then we shall make mistake after mistake.

The greatest mistake in the Theosophical Society was first made by H. P. Blavatsky; for although she fixed her spiritual attention upon the realm where Christ may be found, in the contents of her upper consciousness, in her wishes and desires, there was a constant antipathy, even a passion against everything Christian or Hebrew, and a preference for all other spiritual cultures on earth, and because she had never gone through what has been described today she conceived of the Christ in an entirely false way. That was quite natural. It passed over to her nearest students, and has been dragged along, although grotesquely coarsened, to the present day. These things extend to the highest spheres. One may see many things upon the occult plane, but the power of discrimination is something different from mere sight, mere perception. This must be sharply stressed.

Now the problem is this: When we sink down into our hidden soul-depths (and every clairvoyant must do this,) we first come into what is fundamentally ourselves. And we must learn to know ourselves by really making the transition, by having a world before us, of which Lucifer and Ahriman always promise to give us the kingdoms. This means that our own inner self appears before us, and the devil says: “This is the objective world.” That is the temptation that even Christ did not escape. The inner illusions of the inner world were presented, only He, through His inherent power, recognized from the very beginning that it is not a real world, but a world that is within. It is through this inner world alone, which we must separate into two parts in order to get rid of one—our own personal part—and have the other remain, that we pass through the hidden depths of our soul-life out into the objective super-sensible world. And just as our spiritual-soul kernel must make use of our physical body as a mirror for outer perception, for the facts of ordinary consciousness, so must the human being make use of his etheric body as a reflecting apparatus for the super-sensible facts which next confront him. The higher sense organs, if we may so describe them, open within the astral body, but what lives in them must be reflected by the etheric body, just as the spiritual and soul activity of which we are aware in ordinary life is reflected by the physical body. We must now learn to manage our ether body, and it is entirely natural since our etheric body is usually unknown to us, although it represents what vitalizes us, that we must become acquainted with it before we can learn to recognize that which enters us from the super-sensible objective world and may be reflected by this ether body.

You now see what we experience when we descend into the hidden depths of our soul life. It is primarily ourselves, and the projection of our wishes is very similar to what we usually call the life in Kamaloca [Region of Burning Desire, or of Cleansing Fire; also Purgatory.] It differs from it only in that when anyone in ordinary life thus pushes forward into imprisonment within himself (which is what it may be called,) he has still his physical body to which he can return. But in Kamaloca the physical body is gone, even part of the etheric body—the part which most immediately reflects for us—but the universal life-ether surrounding us serves as an instrument of reflection, and mirrors everything that is within us. Thus in the Kamaloca period our own inner world is built up about us as an objective world, all our wishes, desires, all that we feel, and to which we are inwardly attuned.

It is important to understand that the primary characteristic of the life in Kamaloca is our imprisonment within ourselves, and this prison is the more securely fastened by the fact that we cannot return to any sort of physical life to which our whole inner activity has been related. Only when we live through this Kamaloca period in such a way as to realize gradually (we do come to this gradually,) that it all may be got rid of by experiencing our-self otherwise than through mere desires and so forth, only then is our Kamaloca prison opened.

How is this meant? In the following way: Let us suppose that someone dies with a definite wish; this wish belongs to that which projects itself outward and is built up around him in some kind of imagery. Now as long as this desire lives within him it is impossible, in regard to it, to open Kamaloca with any sort of key. Only when he realizes that this wish cannot be satisfied except by discarding it, when his attitude towards it becomes the opposite to what it has been, then gradually with the wish everything that imprisons us in Kamaloca will be torn from the soul. Only then do we come into the realm between death and rebirth which has been called the devachanic [Devachan = Heaven.], and which may be entered also through clairvoyance when we have recognized that which belongs to the self alone. In clairvoyance it is reached through a definite degree of development; in Kamaloca through the passage of time, simply because time so torments us through our own desires that at last they are overcome. By this means that which has been dangled before us as if it were the world and its splendor is destroyed.

The world of super-sensible realities is what is usually called Devachan. How does this world of super-sensible facts appear before us? Here upon this earthly globe we can speak of Devachan only because in clairvoyance, when the self has been really conquered, we enter at once into the world of super-sensible facts, which are objectively present, and these facts coincide with those of Devachan.

The most important characteristic of this devachanic world is that in it moral actualities are no longer separable from the physical, that moral and physical laws are one and the same. What does that mean? Well, is it not true that in the ordinary physical world the sun shines upon the just and the unjust? Whoever commits a crime may be put in prison, but the physical sun is not darkened. That is to say: in the physical world there is a realm of moral and physical laws, leading in two very different directions. It is not so in Devachan, not at all; instead of this, everything proceeding from morality, from intelligent wisdom, from the aesthetically beautiful, and so on, leads to growth (is creative,) and that which arises from immorality, intellectual falsity, and aesthetic ugliness leads to withering and destruction. And there the laws of nature are such that the sun does not shine upon the just and the unjust alike but, if we may speak figuratively, it darkens upon the unjust; so that the just, passing through Devachan, have there the spiritual sunshine, that is to say, the influence of the fertilizing forces that bring about their forward progress in life. The spiritual forces draw back from the dishonest or ugly human being. The following is possible there which is impossible here on earth. When two people—just and unjust—walk here side by side, the sun cannot shine upon one and not upon the other; but in the spiritual world the effect of the spiritual forces depends absolutely upon the quality of the individual concerned. That is to say: the laws of nature and the spiritual laws do not follow two separate roads, but one and the same. That is the fundamental, essential truth. In the devachanic world the natural, moral, and intellectual laws act together as one.

As a result the following occurs: If a human being has entered and lives through the devachanic world he has within him what is left over from his last life of justice and injustice, good and evil, aesthetic beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood. All this residue acts however in such a way that it takes immediate possession of the natural laws. We may compare the law there with the following in the physical world: If anyone in the physical world had stolen or lied and, seeking the sunlight, found that the sun did not shine upon him, could not find it anywhere, and thus through lack of sunshine developed a disease ... or let us rather assume as an example that someone in the physical world who was a liar had difficulty in breathing; that would be an exact parallel with what would be the case in the devachanic world. To the person who has burdened himself with this or that, something happens in his spiritual and soul nature so that the natural law at once and absolutely expresses the spiritual law. Hence, if the further development of this personality is brought about in this way, as he progresses gradually and is more fully permeated by these laws, such characteristics develop in him that he becomes an expression of the qualities which he brought over from his past life. Just let us suppose that someone has been two hundred years in Devachan, and has gone through it, having been in his last life a liar: the spirits of Truth withdraw from him. There dies in him that which in a truthful soul would be invigorated.

Or let us assume that someone with a pronounced quality of vanity which he has not given up goes through Devachan. This vanity in Devachan is an extraordinarily evil-smelling emanation, and certain spiritual beings avoid a personality who gives out the offensive evaporation of ambition or vanity. This is not a figurative statement. In Devachan vanity and ambition are extremely evil exhalations, and lead to the withdrawal of the beneficent influence of certain beings who retreat before this atmosphere. This could be compared to the placing in the cellar of a plant which thrives only in sunlight. A vain person cannot thrive. He will grow up with this characteristic. When he reincarnates he lacks the strength to build in the good influences. Instead of developing certain organs in a healthy way, he forms an unhealthy part in his organism. Thus not only our physical limitations, but our moral and intellectual ones as well show us the kind of human beings we become in life. Only when we emerge from the physical plane do natural and spiritual law go side by side. Between death and a new birth they are a single whole. And in our soul are implanted the natural forces which destroy if they are the result of the immoral deeds of past lives, but which fructify if they are the result of noble ones. This is true not only for our inner constitution, but also for that which falls upon us from without as our Karma.

In Devachan the essential fact is that no difference exists there between natural and spiritual law, and it is the same for the clairvoyant who really penetrates to the super-sensible worlds. These laws of the super-sensible worlds are radically different from those which rule upon the physical plane. It is simply impossible for the clairvoyant to differentiate in the manner of the materialistic mind when someone says: “That is only a law of objective nature.” Behind this objective natural law there exists always in reality a spiritual law. A clairvoyant cannot cross a scorched meadow, for example, or a flooded district, cannot perceive a volcanic eruption without thinking that behind the facts of nature are spiritual forces, hidden spiritual beings. For him a volcanic eruption is at the same time a moral deed, even though its morality may lie in an entirely different, undreamed-of realm. Those who always confuse the physical with the higher worlds will say: “Well, when innocent human beings are destroyed by a volcanic outbreak, how can one assume that it is a moral deed?” We do not need to worry about that. Such a judgment would be as cruelly philistine as the opposite idea: namely, to regard it as a punishment from God upon the people who are settled around the volcano. Both judgments are possible only to the narrow-minded standpoint of the physical world. Such is not the question, which may have to do with much more universal things. Those who live on the slope of a volcano, and whose property is destroyed by it, may be for this life entirely innocent. It will be made up to them later. This does not make us hardhearted and unwilling to help them (that again would be a narrow-minded interpretation of the matter). But in the case of volcanic eruptions the fact is that in the course of the earth evolution certain things happen through human deeds which retard human evolution, and just the good gods must work in a certain way for a balance which is sometimes achieved through such natural phenomena.

This application of the law is to be seen only in occult depths: that compensation is created for what is done by men themselves against the genuine development of humanity. Every event, whether a mere activity of nature or not, is at bottom something moral, and spiritual beings in the higher worlds are the bearers of the moral law behind the physical fact. If you simply conceive a world in which no separation of natural and spiritual laws can be considered, a world in which, with other words, justice rules as a natural law, you have then the devachanic world. Therefore one need not think that in this devachanic world through any sort of arbitrary decision an unworthy action has to be punished, because in that realm the immoral destroys itself as inevitably as fire consumes inflammable material, and morality is self-stimulated, and advances itself.

We thus see that the essential characteristic, the innermost nerve of existence, so to speak, is quite different for the different worlds. We gain no idea of the several worlds if we do not consider these peculiarities which differ so radically upon different levels. We may thus correctly characterize physical world, Kamaloca, and Devachan: in the physical world natural and spiritual law run side by side as two series of facts; in Kamaloca the human being is confined within himself, as if in a prison of his own being; the devachanic world is the complete opposite of the physical; there natural and spiritual law are one and the same. These are the three characteristics, and if you consider them carefully, striving sensitively to realize how very different from our own a world must be in which the moral, intellectual, even the law of beauty are at the same time natural law, then you will gain an acute impression of conditions in the devachanic world.

In our physical world when we meet an ugly or a beautiful face we have no right to treat the ugly person as if he must be psychically revolting, or the beautiful one as if he must necessarily be worthy of high esteem. In Devachan it is quite otherwise. There we meet no ugliness that is not deserved, and it will be impossible for anyone who, because of his preceding incarnation, is obliged in this one to wear an ugly face, but who strives throughout this life to be true and honorable, to meet us in Devachan with any sort of unpleasant appearance. He will have transformed his ugliness into beauty. But it is equally true that he who is untruthful, vain, or ambitious in this life will wander about in Devachan with some hideous form. And something else is also true: In ordinary physical life we do not see that an ugly face continually robs itself, nor that a beautiful one contributes something to itself, but in Devachan it is like that; ugliness is an element of progressive destruction, and we cannot perceive beauty without assuming that it is the result of an equally continuous furtherance and help.

We must feel quite otherwise towards the devachanic or mental world than towards the physical world. And this is necessary: to differentiate in these sensations, to see the essential which matters, in order that you may appropriate not only the description of these things, but that you may take away feelings, sensitivity towards that which is described in spiritual science. If you try to soar upwards to an appreciation of a world in which morality, beauty, and intellectual truth appear with the inevitability of natural law then you have the feeling of the devachanic world; and this is why we must, so to say, collect so much material and work so much, in order that the things which we work out for ourselves may at last be merged into one feeling.

It is impossible for anyone to come easily or lightly to a real knowledge of what must gradually be made clear and comprehensible to the world through spiritual science. There are many different movements that say, “Oh why must so many things be learned in spiritual science? Are we to become pupils again? Feeling is all that matters.” It does matter, but it must be the right feeling, which must first be developed! This is true of everything. It would be pleasanter, would it not, for the painter if he did not have to learn the technique of his art, if he did not have to bring out upon the canvas, at first slowly, the final result, if he needed only to exhale in order to have his finished work before him! In our world today it is a curious fact that the more the realm of the soul is in question, the harder it is for people to realize that nothing is accomplished by mere exhaling! In music it would not be admitted that one could become a composer without learning anything of composition; there it is quite obvious. This is so also with painting, though people admit it less easily, and in poetry they admit it even less, otherwise there would be in our own time fewer poets. For actually no time is as unpoetic as our own though there are so many poets. If it is not necessary to have studied poetry, but only to be able to write (which naturally has nothing to do with poetic art) and of course to spell correctly—we need only to be able to express our thoughts! And for philosophy still less is required. For today, that anyone may judge straight away anything concerning the conceptions of life and the world is regarded as a matter of course, since everyone has his own point of view. One finds again and again that no value is set by such people upon the carefully worked out personal possession of the means and methods of cognition and of research in the world, gained through every resource of inner work. Instead, it seems to them obvious that the standpoint of one who has labored long before venturing to give out even a little about world secrets has no greater value than that of the one who simply takes it upon himself to have a standpoint. Anyone can count nowadays as a man with a world conception.

This, on the contrary, is what really matters, upon which everything depends; that we labor with all our energy in order that what we work out for ourselves we may at last gather together and carry over into feelings, which through their coloring give the highest, the truest knowledge. Struggle through, by working towards a feeling, an impression of a world in which natural and spiritual law coincide. Then if you work seriously—no matter though people believe you to have learned only theoretically, although you have striven hard in working through this or that theory—you will realize that it makes an impression upon the devachanic world. If you have not simply imagined a feeling, but evolved it by years of careful work, then this feeling, these nuances of sensibility, have a strength which will bring you further than they could reach of themselves; for through earnest, eager study, they have become true. Then you are not far from the point where these nuances burst asunder, and there lies before you the reality of Devachan. For if the nuances of feeling are truly worked out they become a power of perception.

Therefore, if work along these lines is undertaken by student groups upon a basis of truth, honesty, and patient practice, outside of all sensation, their meeting places become what they should be: schools to lead men into spheres of clairvoyance. And only those who cannot wait for this, or who will not co-operate, can have an erroneous view of these matters.