The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have now studied your questions, which are all connected with the matters of which we spoke yesterday. A first category of questions has arisen out of a certain uneasiness. Single questions will find their answer in the course of the lectures: in the case of others which are fundamentally similar, it will not be possible to give theoretical answers—the answers will only emerge as a result of the whole course of lectures. Fundamentally, the trend of all these questions is: How can those who are attending this course develop their medical work in association with Dornach? The true development of the impulse of which I spoke in the esoteric sense yesterday and shall speak of again tomorrow—this true and real development of our work is the foundation of everything, although, naturally, such matters can only be inadequately dealt with in so few lectures. To begin with, I will make certain general remarks in connection with what was said yesterday.

Little is accomplished, my dear friends, if we simply direct a person's general attention, or if he does this himself, from the material world to the spiritual world. In every sphere of life—and most strongly of all in the medical sphere and for the physician—this general indication towards the spiritual does correspond with an innermost need of the soul. But in many respects this need requires much greater definition and clarity and also possibly most important of all—a greater inner strength than that with which it usually arises. It is a striving in you, my dear friends, but a definite path must be taken. The impulse towards this path can, in the first place, be given by me, but having received this impulse you yourselves must continue to work in association with Dornach—definitely those of you who have set yourselves this task.

It is not enough to strive, in a general way, towards the spiritual; this striving towards the spiritual must be concrete and real in every domain of life. We must enter into a real communion with the being of the world, with the being and reality of the external cosmos. Man has no experience of the cosmos today and because he does not experience the cosmos, he does not experience spirituality, for spirituality can only be acquired by way of the cosmos. In its external form, medical science yields no spiritual knowledge concerning existence. It is only by being able to place things in their whole cosmic connection that we learn to see through the veil of nature to the spiritual forces behind her.

For more than twenty years now within the Anthroposophical movement, it has been possible to study and to get a very exact knowledge of the difficulties that may arise in the pursuit of the spiritual life. And it may sound rather trivial when one describes, in a few brief words, in what these difficulties have consisted. They have consisted simply in the fact that those who were striving for esotericism in some domain or other wished to make things too easy, too comfortable for themselves. The esoteric path is either difficult or it is no path at all! Esoteric development is not to be obtained along an easy or comfortable path. We must take in complete and solemn earnestness the general and often repeated statement that it is a matter of overcoming difficulties, of man growing out of and beyond himself. From now onwards, from the time that began with our Dornach Christmas Foundation Meeting, a kind of change must take place in our whole conception of the anthroposophical movement. This change must also take place in the individual sections of the work. And you who are seeking to find your path in the medical sphere, must, from the very beginning, share in this essential change. There can be no question of regarding the esoteric path as a mere adjunct to life; one's path of life must be completely filled with esoteric impulses. The help that can be given will be given in the lectures. But, as I shall say at the end of this lecture, something else must be added as well.

Let us first consider one particular detail. For if you have not the will to enter into details in spiritual studies, you will not be able to find the way to the spiritual. Let it not be imagined that one can really find the spiritual as a dreamer, or as a person who gives himself up to all kinds of vague inspirations and the like. The spiritual must be attained today by the most intensely earnest, inner striving. And it can only be attained through the knowledge that comes from the spiritual world.

I have already said that much can be learned from the world of the plants. And now let us think of a plant. People study plants today by looking at the root, stem, leaves, flowers, pistil, stamens, seed. The seed develops in the ovary, and then people describe what they thus see in the plant more or less as they would describe an armchair, adding that they often sit in one! This, more or less, is the way in which a plant is described. We are told how the roots are set in the soil, how they draw in physical and chemical forces and substances, how the saps rise up through capillary action, or the like. To speak of a spiral arrangement of the leaves is considered an error, an aberration. At any rate, it is not known that this spiral arrangement is connected with the cosmos. So far as the blossoms and flowers are concerned, the most that can be said is that botanists picture some kind of force in connection with the colors and substances of the flowers, or with fertilization. The whole thing is described entirely from the external point of view, just as one describes how a person sits in an armchair. Yes, but the reality that must be grasped simply cannot be grasped by these methods. In studying a plant we must realize that a wonderful mystery is indicated as it stands there with its root sunk in the soil. The stem with the leaves points to another mystery and the processes in the blossom to yet another mystery.

Think of it, my dear friends—the root, sinking into the soil, represents the end of the plant existence in the direction of the solid earth. But this root could receive nothing from the soil if the soil of the earth had not first come under the influence of the cosmic environment. The cosmic environment, not only the warmth and light of the sun but also those forces which proceed from the rest of the planetary system belonging to the earth, influence the earth from the surface a little way inwards. And the forces that are quickened in this way in the earth's substances make it possible for the root to be within the earth.

Now in the human head we find the same forces that play around the roots of plants, but in the human head we find them in quite a different form from that in which they exist around the roots of plants in the soil. Inner perception of these things will never unfold if we go no further than what can be learned today from natural science. Many of your questions speak of this as the chaotic knowledge given you by contemporary natural science. What is necessary is to understand, out of real experience, the nature of what was once called the earthy, the watery, the airy, the fiery. For if you simply go on speaking about hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, in the way modern chemistry speaks, these things will always remain something quite external. You will never be able to think in any other way than that you stand there as a human being and somewhere outside there is oxygen or nitrogen. What modern physiology or chemistry tells you about oxygen or nitrogen is something quite direct. Physiology tells you that nitrogen exists in the organism, but you do not experience nitrogen in the organism. What is necessary is to take one's start from what can be experienced. And things that can be experienced must be deeply united with our whole being, if it is our aim to place ourselves in the service of the shaping of the world. And that is what we are doing when we heal.

Now so far as one of the elements of antiquity is concerned, everyone can know that he experiences it. This element is warmth, warmth as a quality of nature. We experience warmth, for we feel warm, or we feel cold. We are not as external to warmth as we are to oxygen and nitrogen.

It was characteristic of ancient study of nature that it took as its fundamental element something that could actually be experienced, something in which a man can be, not something that he must remain outside of. Let us first take this element of warmth, of fire, because here it is easiest to grasp the factor of actual experience. We know that as human beings we experience warmth. Now what is, for the plant, the earth—the earthy element is, for the human head, warmth.

Suppose you have here the earth, and 'think away' from it what appears to you as the earthy element; also think away the fluid and the airy, but let the warmth remain, so that you have a kind of ‘soil’ of warmth. You can picture this quite easily. Now take the whole thing (See Illustration I on the next page) and turn it round, so that what was formerly below is now above (See Illustration I on the next page)—it is a polar opposite.

You can now say: I behold the root of the plant, it is within the earthy soil; I behold the human head, it is in the 'warmth' soil, but the soil is in the reverse position. That is because what happens here (See Illustration I on the next page) lies four stages further back than this. (See Illustration I on the next page) If you speak of what goes on in the plant root as an earth happening, you must speak of what goes on in the human head, out of the warmth, as a Saturn happening. Between them are Sun and Moon happenings. And now 'think away' from the human head everything that came into it at later stages. Think away the earthy, the watery, the airy, and picture merely the warmth working in the human head, the warmth that provides the rest of the organism with differentiated warmth—and then you have the human head as it is today, a miniature Saturn. In the human head today you have the old Saturn organization. And if you understand the connection, then you say to yourselves: In the cosmos, untold millennia ago, there was a structure that anticipated everything that exists today as warmth in the human head. And the plant root in the earthy element today creates an image of the condition that thus preceded it.

There you have a connection. You behold ancient Saturn in the warmth organization of the human head. But if this act of beholding is to be true, it must be connected not merely with theoretical ideas but with inner, moral impulses. Looking at the human head must be an experience that moves us inwardly; we feel that the human head is the living, embodied remembrance of a very ancient evolutionary period of the cosmos, of the old Saturn period. Try, for once, to let this feeling permeate you. I am a human being who has reached a certain age. My childhood stands before me; the remembrance of childhood rises up. As one who has grown older, I sink myself into the remembrances of my childhood. This in itself gives rise to a certain inner experience which we can confront with moral power. And now expand this feeling to the point where you say to yourselves: “As a human being I was present during the old Saturn period. If, in this present time I understand my head truly, it is like a living remembrance of a primeval evolutionary period of the cosmos.” All that takes shape through the remembrances of childhood is infinitely multiplied when contemplation of the living head leads us back to the time of Old Saturn.

Such knowledge is only of value when it is steeped in moral feeling, when one can really be filled with awe by the fact that our own activity leads us into a real experience of the cosmos. Meditation, above all for the physician, does not consist in merely brooding over thoughts; meditation consists in actually bringing such interrelationships before the soul and having, in regard to them, manifold feelings through which one may experience all kinds of inner shocks and emotions. Suppose I meet a human being whom I have not seen for, say, forty years. As he comes before me in his present form, the picture of his childhood stands before my soul. I see him before me as a child. This gives rise to certain inner emotion or shock. I look at the root nature of the plant, I acquire the capacity to relate this root nature to the human head, and the human head leads me back to the time of Old Saturn. Meditation must penetrate to the very soul; it must quicken a deep inward life.

This is an indication of how, after the foundation has been laid by a course of exoteric study, everything in the esoteric domain must aim at promoting intuitive experience of the cosmos in connection with the whole being of man. For just as the Old Saturn existence can arise within you when you study the connection between the human head and the root of a plant, so too can the Old Sun existence arise within you when you study the connection between the human heart and the development of the stem and leaves of a plant. The stem and leaf development in the plant is, again, a remembrance that has now become living, of the Old Sun existence.

The flower in which the seed is produced is connected with the human metabolic system, the limb-metabolic system. And when we study what goes on in the flower in connection with the metabolic or limb system in man, a remembrance of the Old Moon period arises. And if you have this inner experience, if in deepest meditation you feel these connections inwardly, then you experience still more.

Something of great significance is experienced. If with this deepened feeling you turn your soul to the root of the plant, you will begin to feel as if no plant root were really still, but as if it were moving. You learn to recognize this movement. I can only give an outline of these things. I can only point to an impulse, to the way in which inner experience must be built up and how knowledge of nature becomes a real wisdom. You will experience this movement in the root of the plant. And contemplating it, you will feel as if, together with the root, you were moving through cosmic space. Through this very experience, in which you seem to be in the chariot which travels with you through the cosmos with the swiftness of the plant root, you will discover that what you are really experiencing is the movement of the planetary system through cosmic space. In the root of the plant you experience the movement of the whole planetary system through cosmic space. And if then, in the same way, you experience the growth of the leaves, again you experience a movement in which you yourselves participate. And this is the true movement, the inwardly experienced movement of the earth.

What the Copernican system has to say about the revolution of the earth around the sun is nothing but a series of constructions. The true movement of the earth becomes an

inner experience when we deepen ourselves in the connection which exists between stem and leaves. In your contemplation of stem and leaves you move, together with the earth, in the wake of the sun, so that the earth really seems to be doing what the Copernican system describes. But the movement is, in reality, a much more complicated one.

If you contemplate the processes in the blossom around the stamens and the pistil deeply enough, you will experience the movement which the moon carries out around the earth. In experiencing the flower you experience the movement of the moon—a movement that is already separate from the earth. The planetary system as a whole is experienced in the root of the plant, the earth's movement in the stem and leaves; the moon's movement which has been separated off, is experienced in the generation of the seed in the plant.

I say this to you, my dear friends, in the first place, in order that you may learn to have insight into things of which ordinary science takes no account at all, because it considers that such matters are neither knowable nor worth knowing. But they must be known—otherwise nothing of reality can be known. And I tell you all this for yet another reason. I do not think that, in the ordinary way, anybody gets a shock or feels emotion from what he learns about the plants. It causes him no inner concern—he simply assimilates it. And he experiences nothing at all, in reality. But in a second medical course such as that of which we spoke, if you begin to know the planets' movements, the earth's movement, the moon's movement from your contemplation of the plants, the minerals, (though here things are rather different) and also of the human being—then these things will not leave you indifferent.

It is essential for us today, my dear friends, to bring activity of knowledge into these things. The heart feels that these are the ways which knowledge should take. But what is offered to the heart is something that is merely didactic, containing nothing of the realities. People think they have the realities in what is nothing more than a tiny fragment.

What is the attitude of science today? It always seems to me to be rather like this—suppose someone were to go to Dresden and were looking at the Sistine Madonna. A scientist might come up to him and say: This Sistine Madonna is, after all, nothing but an external impression which comes to you from outside. Then he might proceed to take the Madonna out of the frame and break it up into fragments getting smaller and smaller until they were mere atoms. And then he might say: Now you have real knowledge of this Madonna. But this is all wrong. If we want to have a real understanding of the Sistine Madonna we must first be able to enter into the aims of religion, then into all that poured into this Madonna figure from Raphael's spirituality, then into many other things too, but this is the first: we must try to enter into the intentions of the Gods, of the Divine Spiritual Beings behind the physical world. This would have to form part of the second medical course of which I have spoken. Only in such ways is it possible to bring people near to reality.

If you will take what I have just said as a stimulus, you will understand the two meditations which will awaken the power of medical understanding within you. In this meditation you may proceed as follows: First of all you can deepen yourselves in contemplation of the external phenomenon of fire, of fire that gives warmth, realizing in this contemplation that this external manifestation of fire is Maya, semblance, illusion. Behind the fire there is something quite different. Behind the fire there is working, active will.

You may ask: Yes, but how do I get to know that there is active, working will behind the fire? All true esoteric instruction addresses itself to the powers in the pupils themselves. If you will allow what I have said today really to enter into your hearts, there will arise within you the realization that wherever there is fire, there, too, is active working will—just as when you see the form of a human countenance, a human figure, you realize that here there is spirit and soul. Wherever you have fire, even in the tiniest match, there is active, working will. In order that you may also be able to penetrate the other substances of nature, you must reach the point where a burning match is no longer merely the external phenomenon that would be described today, but where you actually see it as active, working will. When you are able in this way to transform your minds and hearts, you will find that your soul learns to experience quite differently, to have quite a different attitude to the environment in which you find yourselves. You will find that your own working, active will is akin to fire. You will live out into the world from your own inner being and you will have a much more subtle and delicate perception of fire than before, because you realize its kinship with your own will. You will find this kinship wherever there is fire. You must learn to realize: I am really within this fire, for it is active, working will; it belongs to me, just as my own finger belongs to me.

Air must be encouraged in you as courage. Wherever wind blows, you will experience it in your own soul as courage. What you see in outer nature as air—this is courage. Courage is air. This must be an experience in your soul.

Water is the outer manifestation of feeling. In feeling there is the same inner activity as is present in the external world, in water. Water is feeling.

Earth, solid earth, is the same as thought. In thought, life freezes.

If you can grasp these four points in meditation; if you can learn to think of fire as active, working will—if you can take the external appearance of fire as manifestations of this active will—if you see in the fire this active will just as you see spirit and soul in the form of a human being—if you can feel that the external form of the fire is maya—if you can feel that the blowing wind and the clouds are phenomena which are a revelation of courage—if you can see water as an expression of feeling, and the earth as something that resembles your own thoughts—then you will discover that this organic process, which arises in your own being as an earthly going out from the head and stretching downwards, is a continuation of the earth formation, the uniting of a substance of earth formation which has weight, and this is the nature of thought.

If you then pass to the breathing and feel how, in the breathing the aeriform nature of the human being is circulating, then you will recognize, in the activity of man's aeriform nature, everything that may be called activity in the human being, that takes him into the outer world, in order that he may assert himself within this outer world. And you will try to learn from the study of many phenomena in outer nature, what it is that happens to the air in the human being.

And you will know that the watery organism of man, the fluid organism with its inner mobility, is the seat of feeling, the feeling that flows in the centrifugal and centripetal directions. You will know that the movement of air is a semicircular movement, from above downwards. You will know that what lives in the fluid nature has a centrifugal and centripetal movement in man and strives everywhere to hold the balance.

Thus, from observation of what exists outside in nature, you will find the transition to what happens with these elements in the human being. The essential point is that we shall not rest content with observation of the ordinary kind, for this makes us earthy ourselves, dried up and rigid, and we lose our mobility.

Much has been given in what I have sketched today. Intermediary stages have been left out because it would take too long to give you every detail. I can only give suggestions. You will have realized from what I have said that the whole method, the whole way of medical study must become different. And now see to it that what I have told you here really bears fruit within you. Many of the questions which you have put with heavy hearts and which I have read with a heavy heart because they point so tellingly to what is needed in our times, will be answered if you always remain in connection with the Goetheanum. If you do this, your medical studies, wherever they may be, will constantly be enriched.

It is, of course, essential that you should realize the necessity of earnest striving, earnest learning. You must work seriously and earnestly. And you must have a second feeling which arises in you in all sincerity—you must decide whether you will follow this feeling, or whether you will not. This feeling must be that the enrichment of medical study is to proceed, in future, from Dornach; in Dornach we shall try to give the enrichment that is so needed today. You must choose the path you are going to take in medicine. For one thing, there will be the problem of karma. In the nature of things, those who want to heal must have an intimate understanding of karma in the world. I shall speak of this again. In healing, one cannot run counter to karma; one can only heal in accordance with karma. But where karma is concerned one cannot say superficially: When someone is ill, it is his karma to remain ill; and when he is well again, his karma has given him health. It is not right to speak thus. The question of how karma works in human life needs a real, fundamental deepening, a cosmic deepening. These things will be taken care of in Dornach for those who seek them.

I have already said that in the future, impulses will be given from esoteric sources, for account must be taken of the realities which exist and which were reckoned with in the foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Meeting. As I said yesterday, the question of others copying the remedies causes me no anxiety, if in Dornach, it is really understood that esoteric medical study must be carried on in a much deeper connection with Dornach. To this end it will be necessary to carry out this medical work in the same way as other branches of the spiritual life in Dornach.

In the life of the Anthroposophical Society it was always the case that those who wanted to become esotericists did not pay enough heed to the inner conditions of the esoteric life. And so the years went by. It has only been in two spheres that we have been able to achieve what is necessary, namely, in the sphere of General Anthroposophy and in the sphere of Eurythmy and the Art of Speech. But the independent, inner activity that has developed in these spheres must be developed in all the Sections now to be formed. And to this end you must really submit to the conditions that will be made; you must submit to them in full confidence and trust.

One of these conditions is that I shall carry out everything connected with the medical sphere in association with Dr. Wegman, who in the course of years within the anthroposophical movement has prepared herself for medicine and whose place in this medical movement is such that it will be led by her in association with me. And so those who join Dr. Wegman with confidence will get help from Dornach as they go along. An arrangement will have to be made that those who want to remain permanently connected with the Section for the renewal of medicine shall address themselves, with their requests, to Dr. Wegman, in complete confidence.

Periodically—perhaps about every month—we will answer, in a circular letter, the questions of those who, at the end of this lecture course, want to become pupils at the Goetheanum. It will be the same in all the sections. This circular letter will answer the questions put by individuals and all those who are members of the corresponding section will receive the answers. But unless there is inner confidence, there will be no success. A real link will be created by these means, and all your human and medical needs will be satisfied.

This is how things will be arranged to begin with, until we can take further steps. The great failing that has existed in the esoteric life hitherto is that people have been arrogant enough to think that they should always receive their esoteric exercises from me. They all wanted to come to me, not to others. That is where the esotericism has foundered hitherto. For inner, occult reasons, the only possible way is for what lives in the well-spring of esotericism to be led and guided by the personalities who are suited for this work. This leadership by persons who are destined for it by fate—this is part of esotericism. It is a principle that has been rejected because people were immodest. If this principle is not adopted we shall not make progress, even in the newly founded Anthroposophical Society.

Thus I have sketched, and I will still further develop, how the true esotericism must work on into the future. Tomorrow I will try to answer the greater part of the questions which have been put and will all amount to this: How can I find my way into a training that has its center in Dornach? You will be able to find the way, but you must have confidence. It is not a matter of belief in authority but of an intelligent building upon an inner foundation, and an acceptance of conditions that are created by destiny.

I should still like to add something to what we have been studying, and afterwards to consider the more general theme to which certain of your questions relate.

I want to speak now of something that it is well to consider only after we have listened to what has been given here in the last few days. It is not well to give the general truths first but only to pass on to them when certain things have already been learned. Only so can general truths receive their proper coloring.

We will now picture to ourselves that each of the four members of man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego has its own special structure. The structure of physical body and etheric body is one of space and time. The structure of astral body and ego is purely spiritual. A purely spiritual structure is not governed by space and time. It is possible, nonetheless, to make a picture of the spiritual structure so that we can have a conception of it. This can be done in imaginative consciousness. Hold it firmly in your minds, my dear friends, that on the one side we have to do with a physical etheric structure which in the sleeping human being is separated from the structure of spirit and soul, and, on the other side, with the structure of spirit and soul.

In the sleeping human being we have a physical etheric structure which has sent out the ego and astral body, and again we have the structure of spirit and soul that is separated from physical body and etheric body. These two structures are very different from each other. The physical-etheric structure is differentiated into the single organs, as an organism that has, so to speak, driven out the single organs from the center of life. The astral body and ego structure have, however, been driven inwards from outside—it is as though space and time had been left free by this process. The essential thing is that the physical-etheric structure and the structure of spirit and soul are fundamentally different from one another. In the human being as he stands in the physical world in waking consciousness, the spirit and soul (astral body and ego) are inserted into the physical-etheric organization—to use a form of expression that is not absolutely accurate but enables us to visualize the state of things. To a certain degree they permeate each other. So that every physical organ that is warmed through and irradiated by the etheric body is also filled with life, inasmuch as the cosmos works through the etheric body, and in every physical organ ego organization and astral organization are working, when the human being is in waking consciousness.

And now think of the following: Suppose that astral organization and ego organization impress their own structure upon some organ or system of organs. In other words, something that ought to maintain its physical and etheric structure receives a spiritual structure, becomes an image of the astral and ego organization. This, speaking quite generally, is the cause of physical illnesses. Speaking generally, the cause of physical illnesses is that the body of the human being is becoming too spiritual, in some parts or as a whole. Hence, as was well-known in olden times, real and devoted study of the sick human being throws tremendous light upon knowledge of man as a being of spirit.

In ancient times quite a different idea prevailed of man's nature. Therefore I do not say the following in any sense for the purpose of suggesting that this conception should be re-adopted or made the basis for modern methods. In olden times, when conceptions of the human being were more robust, a man who held heretical views was burned, if such a fate was deemed necessary for the salvation of his soul. These heretics were burned for the salvation of their souls—so at least it was alleged. They were burned in order that they might be freed from what, after their death, would cause them the most terrible sufferings. This procedure was, in earlier times, the outcome of a form of vision; later on, of course, it assumed a really brutal form. Views about the human being were more robust and so it might happen that a certain preparation of melissa (balm mint) would be given to someone who might be regarded as healthy. When he took melissa that had been prepared in a certain way, his consciousness would become slightly dreamy. He became more dreamy than he was before taking the melissa preparation. In this condition, faint imaginations entered into his consciousness. If, for instance, a man was treated in a certain way with henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) he became very susceptible to inspirations. Such investigations revealed that if the solar plexus was stimulated by means of henbane, it was permeated with spirit; in such a case, astral body and ego organization take firm hold of the solar plexus. Or it was noticed that the whole blood supply of the cerebrum became stronger—to a slight extent, but the effect was very significant—by the administration of melissa juice, because the ego organization takes a firm hold by way of the cerebrum. And so the whole human being was tested for the purpose of finding out how he could become spiritual and of perceiving how the single organs could become more spiritual.

It is a preconceived notion to imagine that we think with the head. This is simply not true. We think with legs and with arms and the head beholds what is going on in the arms and legs and receives it into the pictures of thought. I said at Christmas that man would never have learned the law of angles if he had never walked. He would never have learned the mechanical laws of equilibrium if he had had no experience of them through his own center of gravity which lies in his subconsciousness. When we come to the astral body which unfolds these things in the subconsciousness, the human being appears to us to be extraordinarily wise, even if he is often a fool in the physical world, because the geometry that comes to expression in walking, for instance, is all known—if I may put it so—in the subconsciousness, and then perceived by the brain.

Now when the organization of spirit and soul takes too strong a hold of the physical-etheric organization, physical illness ensues. In former times, therefore, the spirit in the physical organs was investigated because everything that can be spoken of as a gift from above is spiritual, of the nature of spirit and soul. But a distinction has to be made here. What the human being received, in a purely spiritual way, as a gift from above, was called a gift and retained this name. But now take a substance like belladonna for example.

Whereas in ordinary plants the physical and etheric principles are at work, there are others where the cosmic astrality works very strongly from outside, where the spiritual element—either the astral or what corresponds in the cosmos to the ego organization—works upon plants or animals. Poisons are then produced instead of the gifts bestowed by the spirit. But the poisons are a true correlate of the spiritual because, in plants and animals, they are the element of cosmic astrality which transcends the plant nature proper. By administering henbane we lead over the astral contained in the warmth mantle of the earth (which marks the boundary of the atmosphere) into the solar plexus and thereby into the diaphragm of the human being. Melissa, which is not a poison in the real sense, produces a gentle working of the spiritual which shows itself only in a form of slight stupor. In melissa, the poisoning process is in statu nascendi. This leads to the principle: physical illness arises when the physical organism or its parts are becoming too strongly spiritual.

But a different condition may set in. It may happen that when a human being is in waking consciousness, the soul-spiritual structure of his astral body or ego organization is transferred with too much strength into some physical organ. But instead of impressing itself upon the physical organism the physical organism forces physical structure upon the structure of spirit and soul, so that when he is asleep the human being becomes, in his astral body and ego, an image of his physical and etheric body. He takes the physical structure into his astral body and ego.

Here we have the difference in the two forms of irregularities which may appear. Even to observation they differ quite essentially. When a human being is ill, the sick organ is, strange to say, spiritualized. It becomes clearer. As though from outside, from its surface inwards, it is laid hold of by spirituality. Long before any definite traces are noticeable in the color of the skin and the like, a sick man appears transparent—shall I say—to occult sight and the spirit and soul is pressing into the transparency.

We notice the opposite condition, where the organization of spirit and soul is taking on the structure of the physical and etheric, when a man in his life of soul and spirit is really asleep. Then he becomes a ghost, a fleeting, wavering ghost of his physical body. He remains like his physical body. He truly becomes a specter of his physical body, and all the crude experiments that are made by spiritualists in connection with manifestations, as they are called, are due to the fact that the spirit and soul in the medium is weakened. That is indeed obvious. In some hidden way, this is what happens. In a dark room the weakened astral body and ego can take on the forms of the organs to the point of visibility. The manifestations are real, but illicit.

Now all so-called mental diseases are due to the spirit and soul—astral body and ego organization—assuming the physical and etheric structure. All so-called mental illnesses are due to this. We may therefore say: Physical illnesses are due to the physical organism or its parts becoming spiritual. Mental illnesses are due to the astral body or ego organization, or one of their parts, taking form in the physical or etheric sense. This universal truth is a very good guiding principle.

These things have a bearing, too, upon questions put by individuals about the connection between medicine and pedagogy, for in the child's organism we have before us every grade between these two extremes. The astral and ego organization in one child will tend to make the physical and etheric body spiritual. In another child the tendency of the astral and ego organization will be to allow the physical and etheric to give them form. Between these two extremes there are all kinds of intermediate stages. This fundamental principle also comes to expression in the temperament. When the astral body and ego organization have a vehement tendency (not as in insanity but of a kind that is controllable) to assume forms belonging to the physical and etheric body, we have the melancholic temperament. When the astral body and ego organization have the tendency to impress their structure on the physical and etheric body, we have to do with the choleric temperament. The phlegmatic and sanguine temperaments lie in between. In the phlegmatic temperament the astral body and ego organization have a tendency, but only in a certain sense, to assume the structure of the physical and especially of the etheric body In the sanguine temperament, the vital principle in the etheric body is strongly influenced by the astral body. So this principle also comes to expression in the temperaments.

What, in radical cases, is the guiding principle for the physician, namely, knowledge of how the spirit and soul and physical-etheric are interlinked in the waking consciousness of a human being, is also a guiding principle for educators, although they have to deal with latent conditions. Pedagogy and medicine are mutual continuations, the one of the other.

Now what you have to do, my dear friends, is to strive with might and main to attain imagination in your conception of man's being. I should therefore like, in this connection, to give you a few fundamental indications.

The form of the human being in the embryonic state is familiar to you as a picture—or at any rate can become so. We know today what the embryo looks like in its earliest stages and the form it takes later on, and from this you can make a connected picture of the human being in the embryonic state. You can also form a connected picture of the human being during childhood. You must try to make both the first and second pictures as intense as possible, as though your thinking were actually touching them, so that it seems as if the embryo were tangible to your thinking and you were inwardly following its forms. Then, in your thoughts, expand the embryo to the size of the child in an equally intense mental picture which you can look at and observe. Then, inwardly metamorphosing the mental picture of the embryo, let it pass into the picture of the child. If you really carry this out, you will be aware of certain difficulties. You will feel: If I enlarge the head of the embryo to the size of a child's head, it becomes very big. I must compress it. I must also inwardly crystallize, as it were, all that in the embryo is still watery and fluid, being part of the fluid man so that it becomes the embryonic brain. Then you will have to stretch and give shape to the limbs in the embryonic state. Inwardly you will have to carry out an act of plastic activity by letting the unplastic limbs of the embryo pass over to become the limbs of the child. It is an extraordinarily interesting inner occupation to let the embryo pass over into childhood in inner contemplation.

Then, going further, you can make the same experiment with the child and the grown-up person. Here there will be greater difficulty. The differences between embryo and child are very considerable and you will have to be extremely active inwardly if you are to succeed. But when you compare childhood with the prime of life, the differences will not be so great. The difficulty will be to fit the one into the other. But if you succeed in this, the imagination of the human etheric body will actually come to birth within you, and comparatively soon.

Shove man's earliest time
[- the embryonic life -]
On into childhood,
And carry childhood on
Into the days of youth.
There will appear to you, condensed, Human ether being
Behind the body's structure.
[- physical body in its structure -]

Schiebe die Frühzeit
[ - Embryonalzeit -]
In des Kindes Alter,
Und des Kindes Alter In die Jugend Zeit.
Dir erscheint verdichtet Menschenäthersein
Hinter Körperwesen.
[ -physischer Leib in seiner Struktur-]

Here you have a guiding principle which you can use just as well as the others I have given during these lectures. But you must fully realize that the acquisition of imaginative consciousness demands effort. It is not to be attained by mere beckoning but only by strenuous work.

Now you can go still further. You can try to picture an old, sclerotic man—old men are, to a certain extent, sclerotic—feeling that you are touching him and in this act of spiritual touching you get the impression that he is really hollow. The impression you get when you touch an old, sclerotic man spiritually is not as if he were more solid, harder, but, on the contrary, as if he were sucking at you. In this spiritual touching the feeling is as if, in the physical world, you were to run a moistened finger along the foam of a breaking wave or along the surface of clay. This, as you know, gives the impression of suction. So it is, spiritually, with a sclerotic old man. You must develop this experience of touch in your visual picture of the old man. This applies not only to the visual act but to any one of the twelve senses, also to the sense of life (Lebenssinn). So you have a picture of age, with its density, which seems to exercise suction. And now just as in the first instance you let the picture of the embryonic period pass on into the picture of childhood and then into that of the prime of life, maturity—now let the picture of old age pass backwards. Picture the mature human being and let your touch experience of the aged man pass back into the picture of man in the prime of life, who does not seem to suck but stands in the world full of vigor. When you let the picture of the embryonic structure pass over into the structure of childhood, you carried out a spatial metamorphosis—what happens now is that with old age you have the impression of a being who has been hollowed out, who sucks all the time, and this hollow being seems to be filled with force and energy when you let the picture pass back into the age of maturity. Whereas the first picture of abounding strength is connected with an experience of being very slightly paralyzed, when the picture of the old man is let pass backwards, vigor seems again to come into his bones and into the whole structure of his solid organism. More care must be taken when this inner process is being carried out. And then the picture of the prime of life must be carried back to that of youth. This is an easier thing to do. We picture a man who already has one or two wrinkles and then let him be merged into the picture of a young, chubby-faced person. When we succeed in doing this, we get the impression of the etheric body being animated, beginning to ring and sound. This gives us an impression of the astral nature of the human being. And so you have a guiding principle for the ascent to inspiration.

Shove old age's density
Back into the prime of life,
And the prime of life
Back into the life of youth.
There will ring forth in cosmic tones The working of man's soul
[—astral body—]
Out of the Ether life.

Schiebe die Altersdichte In die Menschenreifezeit,
Und das reife Alter
In das Jugendleben.
Dir ertönt in Weltenklängen Menschenseelenwirken
[ - der Astralleib also -]
Aus dem Ätherleben.

You will realize from what I have told you that guiding lines for meditation are not given out as a commandment but are based upon things that can be understood. When a human being is guided to meditation in the proper way, conditions are not as they once were in the ancient East, when both the upbringing of children and the development of old age rested upon quite different foundations. When somebody is given meditations today, they are of such a form that he realizes and understands what he is doing with himself. In the East the child was under the guidance of his Dada. This meant that the child was taught and brought up according to the Dada's mode of life. The child learned no more than he was able to learn by watching the Dada. When a grown-up man wished to make progress, he had his Guru. And the Guru taught in no other way than: thus it is and thus it shall be done. The difference in our Western civilization is that an appeal is always made to the free spiritual activity of the human being, so that he is fully aware of what he is doing. He also has insight into how inspiration arises.

If with the powers of healthy human intelligence we have grasped how physical illness and spiritual illness work—and the things I have told you today can be understood by healthy human intelligence—if we go on to realize what we should achieve in meditation, we have reached, with the powers of healthy human intelligence, the boundary of what can be attained. Healthy human intelligence can acquire everything that proceeds from Anthroposophy. When things begin that are not to be understood by healthy human intelligence, then it is right for this intelligence to work only so far as that boundary, and no farther. It is like standing by an lake—a boundary is there, too. We look towards it from the shore. Truly, the healthy human intelligence leads right up to this boundary. No criticism ought to be leveled at you for spreading an obscure, mystical view of the world, for it should be one that is attainable by all healthy human intelligence. When I once said the same thing in Berlin, an article that was written about the lecture, said: Healthy human intelligence can comprehend nothing whatever about the spiritual world and a form of intelligence which does grasp something about the spiritual world is ill; it is not healthy. This was what was held up against me.

I want still to say something else. Your medical studies oblige you to look very intimately into the whole nature and being of man and as young men and women you are in a special position. In all seriousness we must take the fact that the Kali Yuga has passed, that we have entered a new Age of Light although for the reason that the old continues through inertia, humanity is still living in the darkness. From the spiritual universe, light is shining in; as human beings, we are entering an Age of Light; only we must make ourselves fit to realize the intentions of this Age of Light. Young people are especially predestined for this and if with the necessary earnestness they unfold a definite consciousness of why they have been born precisely at the beginning of the Age of Light, it will be possible for them to adjust themselves to what is really demanded in the sense of the true evolution of humanity. And what is demanded now is that we shall look into the human being if we want to explain the world, just as formerly men looked at nature in order to see how the human being is built up out of the forces and processes of nature. Man and his being will have to be understood and the single nature processes as specializations, one-sided processes of what is going on within the human being. When this point is reached a certain inward quality in all the activities of human feeling and the human mind will arise—a quality that has been sought for, although in a rather tumultuous fashion.

Think only of how youth began to deify nature when the Youth Movement of the Age of Light began. It was all abstract, however vitally the impulse may have been felt. The true path of spiritual development for the young man or woman today must lead to the unfolding of intimate feelings for his connection, as a human being, with the world—there must be intimate, tender feelings and what the young absorb spiritually must no longer be a science for the intellect. In that he remains cold—it has always been so. Science must take a form in which every stage that is reached means that one becomes a different human being in feeling and in mind, and acquainted with something that has been forgotten. We also learned to know nature before we came down into the physical world. But then, nature had a different appearance. When a young human being today is led to a coarse, robust, external way of looking at things, the deathblow is struck at what he experienced in pre-earthly existence. If we could succeed in feeling that an old acquaintance of pre-earthly life had entered into our external, material way of looking at things, then feeling would flow into knowledge and understanding. And like a bloodstream, a spiritual bloodstream, this must go through the whole of scientific life, above all through the whole education and teaching of the human being. It is this intimacy with reality that must be acquired in science. Truly the modern age was lacking in understanding in this respect.

Comparatively early in my life I tried to show how the human being, when he confronts the outer world of sense, really has only the half reality, and how he only reaches the whole reality when he unites what arises within him with the outer, material reality. And to begin with, because the times were quite different then—things have always to be prepared—I had to present it in terms of a theory of knowledge. When you read my little book Truth and Science (Mercury Press, 1993), try to let the spiritual rise up into the mind and heart, the spiritual that wells forth from within. Thereby the first step is taken towards this “making inward” of science, especially towards a heart-filled receptivity to world reality. The physician has particular opportunities for this intimate experiencing of reality and therefore the physician, just because he is a physician, can be the person who can make the abstractness prevalent in the other Youth Movement composed of those who are not destined to be physicians, more concrete, more full of heart. A young person today who has some real knowledge of medicine has the advantage when he comes together with someone else who knows nothing but jurisprudence and is, consequently, to be pitied. Medicine can be deepened as we are deepening it here, but with law this is quite impossible. Even up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, something of the spirit still remained in medicine; in jurisprudence spirituality ceased far away in the Middle Ages, when men no longer even dreamed of the spirit and had nothing but recorded statutes. The physician who from the very beginning comes to grips with the most concrete facts of life can have an extraordinarily good effect upon the rest of the youth.

It would be good if you, as physicians, would interest yourselves, too, when opportunity arises, in the educational work that is being done in the Anthroposophical movement. There would be nothing to prevent this if you are in real earnest. The information contained in the Waldorf School Seminary courses cannot be given to everyone, but when somebody shows genuine interest there is nothing against your getting these courses if you really study them from the medical point of view, remembering the close relationship that existed in ancient times between healing and education.

In these days we have quite got away from the conception of man as a being who comes into earthly life burdened with sin, because the modern mind simply does not know what sin really is. What is it that took form as the notion of sin? It is what I have spoken of here as the law of heredity—this is the inherited sin. Individual sin, too, is something that the human being has to overcome in the second half of his life. He has to overcome the sinful model, which comes from heredity. We can also say the sick model, according to ancient conceptions. If the human being were to retain, as his body, what works in his model up to the change of teeth, he would carry it within him his whole life long and at nine years of age he would be a man—how shall I put it?—the whole of his skin would be covered with a kind of moist eczema and if the condition continued he would get little cavities all over his body, would look like a leper, and if he lived on at all the flesh would fall away from his bones. Man is born as a sick being into the world and to educate him, that is to say, to understand and guide what is working according to the model, is the same thing as a mild healing process. Within the Youth Movement and when speaking of education, you should consider yourselves as healers. You can indicate the remedies—which in the first place, of course, remain a spiritual matter—but can certainly be applied physically when a child's condition becomes pathological. In pedagogy, too, there is an art of healing, only it is on another level, another plane. On the other hand, when a patient gives no help at all by working with any guiding principle we may give him for his own subjective consciousness, for the understanding of his illness, for pessimism or optimism in his conception of life—when we simply cannot work educationally—it is exceedingly difficult to help him medically. If the patient—I do not say that he must have blind faith in the remedy for that would be an exaggeration—but if the patient, simply through the individuality of the physician, is brought to a point where he feels the physician's will-to-heal, the reflex action in him is that he will be filled with the will to become healthy. This interplay of the will-to-heal and the will to be healthy plays a tremendous part in the therapeutic process. We can therefore say that there is a reflection of education in healing, and in education a reflection of healing.

Very much depends today upon human beings in the world coming together in the right consciousness. If, therefore, medical youth comes together with the other youth in the right consciousness, the result will certainly be that the medical youth can work very fruitfully on the others. But what is so necessary is to sharpen the consciousness in both directions.

These are the things that I would fain have laid into your souls and hearts, now that you have come here again. I hope they have helped to strengthen still more the bonds between your souls and the Goetheanum and that even in such a concrete domain as that of medicine, the Goetheanum will find human beings who carry out into the world those things that can be found here. You will think rightly about this if you will also feel yourselves as part of the Goetheanum and will often turn your thoughts to what the Goetheanum desires for the world and the growth of civilization. And so the ties of heart that you can form with the Goetheanum may be a very great help to you in the tasks before you. This is what I have had in mind in giving these more intimate addresses and I believe that we shall be able to achieve much if, after what must be the last lecture now, you will carry this feeling out into the world. Thereby we shall also remain together and the Goetheanum will feel itself a center with a definite task. Then the Goetheanum will be a real Goetheanum and you, true Goetheanists. And at the same time, out yonder in the world you will be the supporting pillars which the Goetheanum needs. If things go on in this way, everything will be well.

Let us once again recall the deeply significant fact that the knowledge and truths contained in the Mysteries of Hibernia gradually lost force and influence as they moved from the West towards Central Europe and the East; and in place of a knowledge of the Spiritual—even in matters pertaining to religion—physical perception, or at any rate a tradition based upon physical perception, made its appearance.

You will remember the picture to which we came at the end of the last lecture. We spoke of the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Over in Hibernia were the Initiates with their pupils; and there, without any means for physical perception of the Mystery of Golgotha and without any possibility of receiving information of the Event, the Mystery was none the less celebrated with all solemnity, because the Initiates knew from their own insight that the Mystery of Golgotha was happening—externally—at that very time.

These Initiates and their pupils in the Mysteries of Hibernia were thus under the necessity of experiencing an actual physical reality, an event in the world of the senses, in a spiritual way. But for their peculiar disposition of soul and for the orientation of knowledge then customary in Hibernia, there was no need to have anything more in the physical world than the Spiritual alone. In Hibernia the Spiritual was always predominant.

By all manner of secret streams in the spiritual life, what had been begun in Hibernia was carried over to the British Isles and to Brittany, to the lands that are now Holland and Belgium, and finally by way of the present Alsace to Central Europe. Though not recognisable in the general civilisation of the first centuries of Christian evolution it can nevertheless be discovered in all these regions; here and there we find single individuals who are able to understand what had come over from the Mysteries of Hibernia. In order to find these individuals we must set out with a deep and intimate longing for knowledge. In the first Christian centuries they are still fairly numerous, but later on, from the eighth and ninth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they become very rare. Yet in these centuries too, individuals are still to be found who gather around them, in silent places far removed from the great world and its civilisation, little groups of pupils through whom what had been begun in Hibernia in the West of Europe could be fostered and continued.

In general, we find instead all over Europe that for which spiritual perception is not required; people receive readily the historical tradition of the physical events which took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era. From this stream proceeded that element in human history which takes account only of what happens in physical life. Humanity in general was less and less able to perceive the contradiction which lies in the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha, an Event that is comprehensible only by means of the deepest spiritual activity, should be referred to an external phenomenon, perceptible to the physical senses. This line of development became necessary for a time. Fundamentally speaking, it had been gradually prepared over a long period, but it could be realised only because a very great deal of the old Mystery knowledge, even such as still existed in Greece, had been forgotten.

Now these Mysteries of Greece were divided into two kinds. One kind was engaged in directing man’s senses towards the spiritual world, towards the actual guidance and ordering of the world in the spirit; while the other investigated the secrets of Nature, all that rules in Nature, and especially the forces and beings connected with the powers of the Earth. Many of the candidates for the Mysteries were initiated into both kinds. Of these candidates it was said that they had knowledge on the one hand of the Mysteries of the Father, the Mysteries of Zeus, and had been initiated into them, and that on the other hand they had also been admitted into the Mysteries of the Mother, the Mysteries of Demeter. When we look back into those times we find a spiritual perception which though somewhat abstract can extend into the highest regions, and side by side with this, a conception of Nature capable of descending into the depths. And as has been said, we also find what is of special significance—the union of the two.

Now in this union of the heights and the depths a fact was perceived that today is but little noticed. It is the fact that man has certain external substances of Nature within him, but not certain others. This fact was observed and studied in its deepest meaning in the Chthonic Mysteries in ancient Greece. You know that iron is part of man’s make-up. There are also other metals in him, calcium, sodium, magnesium, and so on; but there are many more metals which are not in him. If we were to try to find these other metals in man by the use of ordinary scientific methods, that is to say, by analysing the substances in him, then by means of this external investigation we should find in him no lead, no quicksilver, no tin, no silver and no gold.

That was the great riddle which occupied the Initiates in the Greek Mysteries, eventually finding expression in the question: How does it come about that man carries iron in him, that he carries sodium, magnesium and other substances which can also be found in outer Nature, but does not, for instance, carry lead or tin in him? They were deeply convinced that man is a ‘little world’, a microcosm, and yet it would appear that man does not carry in his make-up these other metals—lead, tin, copper and so on.

Now we may truly say that the older students and Initiates in Greece were of the opinion that this was only apparently the case; for they were steeped in the knowledge that man is a real microcosm, which means that everything which reveals itself in the Cosmos, man must also carry in himself.

Let us consider for a moment the mood of a man about to be initiated in Greece. He would be instructed somewhat as follows—and here I must, of course, gather together into a few sentences an instruction that extended over long periods. He would be told the following.—Observe how the Earth today carries everywhere in it the iron which is also in man. Once upon a time, when the Earth had not yet become Earth, when it existed in a previous planetary condition, when it was Moon, or perhaps even Sun, and also contained in itself lead, tin, and so on, all the Beings who partook in this earlier form of the Earth shared in these metals and their forces, even as man today shares in the forces of iron. But after the various changes which the ancient form of the Earth underwent, the iron alone persisted in such strength and density that man could permeate his being with it. The other metals named are also still contained in the Earth, but they are no longer of such a nature that man can directly permeate himself with them. They are however also to be found, in an infinitely rarefied condition, in the whole cosmic space which surrounds man.—

If I examine a small piece of lead, I see before me the well-known greyish-white metal, which has a definite density. I can take hold of it. But this same lead which appears in the lead ores of the Earth exists in infinitely fine rarity in the whole cosmic space surrounding man, and it has significance there. For it radiates its forces everywhere, even where there is apparently no lead, and man comes into contact with these forces of the lead, not through his physical body, but through his ether body; because outside the lead ores of the Earth lead exists in a rarefied, fine condition such as can work on the ether body of man. And so in this condition of rarity, and spread out over the whole of cosmic space, lead works upon man’s ether body.

The pupil of those ancient Chthonic Mysteries in Greece learned that, just as today the Earth is rich in iron—for it is a planet concerning which the inhabitants of another planet could say: that planet is rich in iron, the only other planet rich in iron being Mars—just as the Earth is rich in iron, so Saturn is rich in lead. What iron is for the Earth, lead is for Saturn; and we have to imagine that once upon a time, when Saturn separated from the common planetary body of the Earth (as described in my book, Occult Science), this fine division of lead took place. One can say that Saturn took the lead out with him, as it were, and through his own planetary life-force, through his own planetary warmth, retained it in such a condition that he is able to permeate the whole planetary system to which our Earth also belongs, with this finely divided lead.

You must therefore imagine the Earth and in the distance Saturn filling the whole planetary system with finely distributed lead; and then imagine this fine lead substance working in upon man. You can still find evidence that this was taught to those who were to be initiated in ancient Greece, and that they learned to understand how this lead worked. They knew that without it the sense organs, especially the eye, would claim the whole of man’s being, and not allow him to come to self-dependence. Man would be able only to see, and not to think about what he had seen. He would be unable to detach himself from what he saw and say: ‘I see’. He would, as it were, be overpowered with seeing, unless this lead influence were present in the Cosmos. It is this working of lead which makes it possible for man to be independent in himself, placing him as Ego over against that sensitiveness to the outer world which is in him. It is these lead forces which, entering first the ether body of man, and then from the ether body impregnating also, in a sense, the physical body, bestow upon him the faculty and power of memory.

It was a great moment for a pupil of the Chthonic Mysteries in Greece, when after having learned all this, he was led on to know what follows. With deep solemnity and ceremony he was shewn the substance of lead, and then his senses were directed towards Saturn. The relationship of Saturn with the lead of the Earth was brought before his soul, and he was told: ‘The lead which you see is concealed in the Earth, for in its present state the Earth is not in a condition to give the lead a form in which it can work in man; but Saturn, with his very different condition of warmth, with his inner life-forces, is able to scatter this lead out into the planetary spaces, and make you an independent human being, possessing the power of memory. For you are a human being only through the fact that today you can recollect what you knew ten or twenty years ago. Think how the human part of you would suffer if you did not carry within you what you experienced ten or twenty years ago. Your Ego-force would be shattered unless this power of memory were present in full measure. The power of memory is due to what streams to you from distant Saturn. It is the force which has come to rest in the Earth in lead, and in this state of rest cannot now work upon you. The Saturn lead-forces enable you to fix your thoughts, so that after a time these thoughts can arise again out of the depths of the soul and you can have continuity in your life in the external world, and not merely live in a transitory way. You owe it to the Saturn lead-forces that you do not merely look around you today and then forget the objects you behold, but retain the memory of them in your soul. You can retain in your soul what you experienced twenty years ago, and can cause this so to live again that your inner life is transformed and becomes again as it was at that time.’

It was a deep and powerful impression that the pupil received. With great and solemn ceremony this knowledge was brought before him. And now he learned also to understand that if these Saturn forces alone were active— giving him the power of the Ego, the power of memory—he would be completely estranged from the Cosmos. Inspired by Saturn with the power of memory, he would become, as it were, a hermit. And then he was told that over against the Saturn force another force must be placed—the force of the Moon. Let us suppose that these two forces act in such a way that the force of Saturn and the force of the Moon approach from opposite sides, and flowing into each other, descend to the Earth and to man upon the Earth. Then what Saturn takes from man, the Moon gives to him. And what Saturn gives to man, the Moon takes from him. And just as in iron the Earth has a force which man can inwardly transmute, and just as Saturn has a corresponding force in lead, so the same force is possessed by the Moon in silver.

Now silver, as it exists in the Earth, has arrived at a condition in which it cannot enter directly into man, but the whole sphere that is embraced by the Moon is actually permeated by finely divided silver; and the Moon, especially when its light comes from the direction of the constellation of Leo, works in such a way that man receives through these silver-forces of the Moon the opposite influence to the lead-forces from Saturn, and he is therefore not estranged from the Cosmos, in spite of the fact that he is endowed by the Cosmos with forces of memory. It was a deeply solemn moment when the Greek pupil was led to see this opposition of Saturn and the Moon. In the holy solemnity of night he was told: ‘Look up to Saturn surrounded by his rings. To him you owe the fact that you are an independent being. Look to the other side, to the Moon streaming out her rays of silver. To her you owe it that you are able to bear the Saturn forces without being cut off from the rest of the Cosmos.’

In this way, with direct reference to the connection between man and the Cosmos, teaching was given in Greece which we find caricatured later on in Astrology. In those days it was a true wisdom, for men saw in the stars not merely the points of specks of light above them in the sky; in the stars they beheld living spiritual Beings. And the human being of the Earth they saw to be in union with these living spiritual Beings. Thus they had a natural science which reached up into the heavens and extended right out into cosmic space. Then, when the pupil had received such an insight, when this vision of light had been deeply inscribed into Iris soul, he was led into the real Mysteries of Eleusinia. (You have heard how these things took place in my description of other Mysteries— for instance, the Mysteries of Hibernia.) The pupil was led before two statues. The first of these two statues represented to him a Father Godhead—the Father God surrounded by the signs of the planets and the Sun. It showed Saturn, for example, raying out in such a way that the pupil remembered: Yes, that is the lead radiation of the Cosmos; and the Moon so that he was reminded: Yes, that is the silver radiation of the Moon. And so on with each single planet. Thus in the statue which represented the Father nature, there appeared all the secrets which stream down to Earth from the planetary environment and are connected with the several metals of the Earth, of which man is now no longer able to make use in his inner make-up.

Then the pupil was told the following.—‘The Father of the whole World stands there before you. In Saturn He carries lead, in Jupiter tin, in Mars iron—iron which is closely connected also with the Earth, but in a quite different condition; in the Sun He carries radiant gold, in Venus the radiantly streaming copper, in Mercury the radiant quicksilver, and in the Moon the radiant silver. You yourself bear within you only so much of the metals as you were able to assimilate from the planetary conditions through which the the Earth passed in earlier times. In its present condition you can assimilate only the iron. But as an earthly human being you are not complete. The Father who stands before you shows you in the metals that which today cannot exist within you as coming from the Earth but which you have to receive from the Cosmos; and in this you have another part of your being. For only when you look upon yourself as a human being who has lived through the planetary transformations of the Earth—only then are you really a complete human being. You stand here on Earth as a part only of man. The other part of you the Father carries around His head and in His arms; he bears it for you. That which stands here on Earth together with that which He carries forms the real ‘you’. You stand on the Earth, but the Earth was not always as it is today. If the Earth had always been as it is today, you could not be on it as a human being. For the Earth today carries within it, even though in a dead condition, the lead of Saturn, the tin of Jupiter, the iron of Mars (in that other state), the gold of Sun, the silver of Moon, the copper of Venus, and the quicksilver of Mercury. It carries all these things within it. But the condition in which the Earth carries these metals within it today is no more than a memory of the condition in which, once upon a time, silver lived during the Old Moon-existence of the Earth, or gold during the Sun-existence of the Earth, or lead during the Saturn-existence of the Earth. That which you see today in the dense metallic ores of lead, tin, iron, copper, silver, quicksilver— with the exception of the iron as you know it, which is not essentially earthly but belongs to Mars—all these metals, which you now see in dense, concentrated form, once poured from the Cosmos into the Earth in quite different conditions. The metals, as you know them today on the Earth, are the corpses of what they once were; they have remained as the corpse of the metal substance and metal nature which played a part on the Earth in her ancient form—during the Old Saturn period, and later on in a different stage during the Old Moon period. Tin played a part, together with gold, during the Old Sun period of the Earth, in an altogether different condition. And when you behold this condition in the spirit, then this statue becomes for you, in what meets you today, a true “Father statue”.’

And in the spirit—as it were in a real vision—the Father statue of the true Mysteries of Eleusis became alive, and handed to the female figure standing beside it the metals in the state they then were. In the vision seen by the pupil, the female figure received this ancient form of the metals and surrounded it with what the Earth could give out of her own being, when she became Earth. This wonderful process the pupil now beheld. Once upon a time, what the pupil now saw in a symbolic way had actually happened. The mass of metal streamed or rayed forth from the hand of the Father statue; and the Earth, with its chalk and other stones, came to meet that which streamed in, and surrounded these instreaming metals with earthly substance. A hand outstretched in love from the Mother statue came to meet the metal forces coming from the Father statue. This made a deep and powerful impression upon the pupil, for he saw how the Cosmos worked together with the Earth in the course of the aeons; and what the Earth has to offer—that he learned to perceive and understand in the right way.

Look at the metal substance in the Earth today in all its variety! You find it crystallised and surrounded with a kind of crust which is from the Earth. The metal is from the Cosmos; and that which is of the Earth receives with love what comes from the Cosmos. You may see this all around you if you walk about in those parts of the Earth where metals are found, and interest yourself in them. That which came to meet the metal was called ‘Mother’.¹ The most important of these Earthly substances which, as it were, placed themselves there before the Heavenly metals in order to receive them, were called the Mothers. And this is also one aspect of the ‘Mothers’ to whom Faust descends. He descends at the same time into those pre-earthly periods of the Earth, in order to see there how the mother-like Earth takes into herself what is given, father-like, by the Cosmos.

Through all this a deep inner feeling was aroused in the pupil of the Eleusinian Mysteries. He felt that he was indeed sharing in the life of the Cosmos; he began to know, with a knowledge that is of the heart, the products and processes of Nature upon the Earth.

When a man of today observes the products and processes of Nature, it is all dead for him, it is nothing but a corpse. And when we occupy ourselves with physics or chemistry, are we really doing any tiling else with Nature than what the anatomist does when he dissects the dead body? The anatomist has before him the dead remains of what is made and intended for life. In the same way we with our chemistry and physics dissect a living Nature! A very different natural science was given to the pupil in Greece—a science of what is living, which enabled him to see, for example, our present lead as the corpse of lead. He had to go back into the times when lead was alive. And he learned to understand the mysterious relation of man to the Cosmos, the mysterious relation of man to all that is around him on the Earth. And now, after the pupil had experienced all this and it had been deepened in his soul by contemplation of the Father-like statue and the Mother-like statue, which made present for him in his soul the two opposing forces, the forces of the Cosmos and the forces coming from the Earth—after this experience he was led into the very holiest place of all. There he had before him the picture of the female figure suckling at her breast the Child. And he was introduced to the meaning of the words: ‘That is the God Jacchos who will one day come.’

Thus did the Greek disciple learn to understand beforehand the Mystery of Christ. Those who sought Initiation in Eleusis also had the Christ placed before them; and it was again in a spiritual way. At that time however, men could only learn of the Christ as of One Who was to come in the future, as of One who was still a child, a Cosmic Child, who must first grow up in the Cosmos. Those who were to be initiated were called Tellists—that is to say, those who have to look towards the end and goal of Earth evolution.

And now came the great turning-point. Now came the great change which finds such clear and even historic expression in the transition from Plato to Aristotle. It was indeed a remarkable happening. As the fourth century approached in the evolution of Greek culture and civilisation, human thought underwent the first ‘turn’ in the direction of becoming abstract. And then, at a time when Plato was already an old man and near the end of his life’s course, the following scene took place between him and Aristotle.

Plato spoke to Aristotle somewhat as follows. (I have to clothe it in words, but of course the whole event took place in a much more complicated way.) ‘Many things that I have said in my lectures have not seemed to you quite correct. All that I have taught to you and the other pupils is however nothing else than an extract from the ancient and holy Mystery wisdom. But a time will come in the course of evolution when human beings will acquire a nature and an inner organisation which will gradually lead them to a stage that is in truth higher than what is now represented in man; at the same time it will become impossible for them to accept natural science as it is current among the Greeks.’ (I have explained to you what this means. ... All this Plato made clear to Aristotle.) He continued: ‘Therefore I intend to withdraw for a time and leave you to yourself. In the world of thought for which you are specially endowed, and which is destined to be the world of thought for humanity for many centuries—in this world of thought try to build up and develop in thoughts what you have received here in my School.’

Plato and Aristotle then remained apart, and in this way Plato fulfilled, through Aristotle, a high spiritual mission.

I am obliged, my dear friends, to describe the scene as I have done. If you look in the history books, you will find the same scene described, and I will tell you how it is given there. Aristotle, so runs the story, was in reality always a headstrong pupil of Plato. Plato once said that Aristotle was indeed a gifted pupil, but was like a horse that has been trained and then turns and kicks its trainer. As time went on, the trouble between them led at last to this result, that Plato withdrew from Aristotle, was annoyed, and never again went into the Academy to teach. That is the account given in history books.

The one story is in the history books; the other, which I have related to you, is the truth. And it bears within it an impulse of great significance. For the writings of Aristotle were of two kinds. One set of writings contained an important natural science, which was the natural science of Eleusis, and which came to Aristotle indirectly through Plato. The other writings contained the abstract thoughts which it was Aristotle’s task to develop in pursuance of Plato’s instructions—in fulfilment, that is, of the mission that Plato had in his turn received from the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Now what Aristotle had to give to mankind, besides being of two kinds, followed also a twofold path. There were his so-called logical writings, which owe their most productive thoughts to the ancient Eleusinian wisdom. These writings, which contained only little natural science, Aristotle entrusted to his pupil, Theophrastus, through whom, as well as through many other channels, they came over to Greece and Rome, and formed throughout the Middle Ages the whole wisdom and learning of the teachers of philosophy in Central Europe, who in those days also participated actively in the civilisation of their time.

The development which I described in the last lecture came about because men were destined to reject and turn away from the Mystery wisdom of Hibernia and there was left for them only the tradition of the Event that had taken place in the physical world of the senses at the beginning of our era. With this was now united what had become separated out from the wisdom of Plato, that wisdom which existed still in Aristotle, and which was in reality the wisdom of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The true natural science, bearing within it still the spirit of the Chthonic Mysteries which flowed over into the Eleusinian Mysteries, this natural science which, in order to find an explanation for the Earth, reached out to the Heavens and soared aloft into the wide spaces of the Cosmos—for this the time was past in Greece. Only so much of it was saved as could be saved by Aristotle becoming the teacher of Alexander, who made his campaigns into Asia and did everything possible to introduce Aristotelian natural science to the East. In this way it passed over into Jewish and Arabian schools, whence it came back and across through Africa to Spain, and there, in a diluted form, had a certain influence upon those isolated individuals in Central Europe who, as I explained to you in the last lecture, still carried—within a newer civilisation—something of the impulse of the Hibernian Mysteries. Theophrastus had given his Aristotle to the teachers and fathers of the Church in the Middle Ages. Alexander the Great had carried the other Aristotle over to Asia. The Eleusinian wisdom which in a very much weakened and diluted form had made its way through Africa into Spain, lights up here and there in the Middle Ages; notwithstanding the utterly different general character of the civilisation, it was studied and cultivated in certain monasteries—for example, by Basil Valentine, who is looked upon in our time almost as a mythical personality. It lived on—hidden as it were within the general civilisation, under the surface; while on the surface prevailed that culture of which I spoke in the last lecture, a culture that had no place for such truth as could still be taught in the time of Aristotle. For even then it was taught that the Christ must be known and recognised. The third picture, the female form who carried at her breast the Child, the Jacchos Child, had also to be understood; but it was said that what would bring the understanding of this third figure was still to come in the evolution of humanity. This truth Aristotle made clear again and again to Alexander the Great, although he was not able to write it down.

So we see how there lies in the bosom of time the demand to understand in its pristine reality what has been so beautifully put before the world by the Christian painters—the Mother with the Child at her breast. It has not yet been fully understood, neither in the Madonnas of Raphael, nor in the Eastern Ikons. It still awaits understanding.

Something of what is necessary to acquire such understanding will be spoken of in the lectures to be given here in the near future. In the next lecture I will describe the path along which many occult secrets travelled, on their way from Arabia into Europe. This will help to place before your souls a certain great historical event; and in the course of lectures ² which will be given to the delegates at Christmas and are intended to show the occult foundation of the historical evolution of humanity, I shall have occasion to explain to you the full significance of the journeys of Alexander the Great, in their connection with the teachings of Aristotle.

• 1. In English still called the ‘Matrix’. (Note by Translator.)
• 2. The title of these eight lectures is, World History in the light of Anthroposophy. (English translation by George and Mary Adams, 1950) Rudolf Steiner Press.

My dear friends! We turn first again to the protecting spirits of those who are standing outside as a result of current events:

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action,

may your wings bring
the love of our souls
to the earthly people who trust in your protection;
so that, united with your power,
our request may shine helpfully
on the souls that it seeks with love.

And turning to the protecting spirits of those who have already passed through the portals of death:

Spirits of their souls, watchers ever-active,

Your wings may bear
Our souls' imploring love
To the Sphere-men you guard.
That, united with your power,
our request may shine forth helpingly
to the souls it seeks in love.

And the Spirit whom we seek to approach through our spiritual science, the Spirit who has gone to earth's salvation and to human freedom and progress through the Mystery of Golgotha, be with you and your difficult duties.

My dear friends, it would not be in the spirit of the spiritual science movement if the thoughts of the spiritual scientist in our difficult times did not turn again and again to that which goes through the world in our time as a test for humanity, as a difficult fate for humanity. And in the sense of our spiritual science, it must be so, above all, to turn our thoughts inquiringly to many a riddle that already exists in the broader context of what we call the present. For as soon as we ask about the causes that could bring such a difficult fate upon humanity, we are confronted, so to speak, with one mystery after another. And we may now try, from our point of view and with our impulses, to penetrate a little deeper into that which is at work in the present in the wider world. Since I am here so rarely, my task today may be not to speak in the external sense of current events. But it can certainly be my task to point out some things that, deepened by your own reflection, by your own recurring reflection, can solve many a question that today every feeling human heart, every feeling human soul, will want to solve. Things are indeed deeper than those who are unable to sharpen their vision through spiritual-scientific contemplation are often able to recognize. One can see, as one might say, in the most individual events what is actually happening in our time, something that is deeply, deeply incisive. It is just that this deeply incisive is not always seen, not always felt in the appropriate way. One would be a poor spiritual scientist if one believed that one could deepen one's own thinking and feeling and knowing by turning one's gaze away from that which so deeply affects people today and preferring to focus on all manner of more remote matters, at least in thought. As for the most isolated events, I said, today one can feel at every turn what time we actually live in within our immediate present.

Many of you will remember that I have often mentioned the name Herman Grimm among other contemporary figures in the broader sense in the course of the lectures, which have been given for over fifteen years now. Herman Grimm certainly did not stand on the standpoint of spiritual science; but he stood within a world-conception that he had won for himself and that was truly from the source of the spiritual development of the nineteenth century. And it was always interesting to hear, in particular, but also to read when Herman Grimm expressed himself on this or that question, which he then always considered in the sense of a person from the end of the nineteenth century.

I must say that when I mentioned the name Herman Grimm in this or that context within our spiritual-scientific considerations during the course of the twentieth century up to 1914, it was as if he were standing beside me. One always had the need, when considering such personalities who seemed particularly valuable for the development of the spiritual life of the present, to quietly ask oneself the question: How would such a personality have reacted to this or that event that has occurred since his death? Herman Grimm died at the beginning of the twentieth century. Of course, such a question is hypothetical. If we turn our gaze up to the souls of such people who have passed through the portal of death, something different comes out than if we ask ourselves the hypothetical question: How would a person, if still embodied in the body, express themselves about this or that that is going on in the world? Anyone who is interested in world events will, I believe, naturally want to feel the same way about their contemporaries; and if they have been personally close to these contemporaries, they will try to feel with them even beyond death. I said: It seemed to me as if Herman Grimm were standing beside me when I spoke of him up until 1914. That has changed since the difficult events befell us. Since then, it has seemed almost absurd to me to ask the question the way I used to. One would be tempted to say that such a personality, with whom one has still lived and who basically lived with one, even after he had departed from the physical plane, such a personality seems to one today, despite the fact that only three years have passed since 1914, like a mythical personality; like a personality who belongs to a distant history. Almost as if one were studying a personality from the Middle Ages, whom one could not ask, in the sense that I just indicated, how he would speak about the events of the present if he were still embodied in the body. It is really as if we had experienced a relatively short period of time being stretched out long.

It is almost as if one can hardly grasp it when one says: In this short time, we have lived through something like centuries, really like centuries. And what came before that has stormily entered the realm of history, even if we have also experienced it. And we can talk about the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as if we were talking about events from centuries ago. Much of what we have lived with has become mythical, so deeply incisive were the events of the last three years. And now, however, we find that in many respects what I have said is true, that we can fully accept the complete truth of what has just been said; but on the other hand, we find that not many people, really not many people today, have fully realized what has certainly taken place in their subconscious, what they have experienced in their subconscious. And there is hardly anything better suited than our immediate present to make clear – excuse the harsh expression, but it has to be used – to make clear how much people actually oversleep, really oversleep, what is going on around them, happening. Just as we, when we sleep in some room, have no capacity to absorb what is otherwise going on in the room while we sleep, so many people show a certain drowsiness towards what is going on around them. And this is particularly evident when something so powerful, so great, so incisive is taking place.

The words have been spoken: there has never been such an event in the course of human development. But there is another thing, to feel this in all its depth and strength, not to oversleep it. On such an occasion, we must feel, my dear friends, what I have often said before you and what I would always like to emphasize again: the living nature of spiritual science. This spiritual science would be worth nothing if it were limited to making it quite clear to us, let us say, that the human being consists of four limbs, that there is karma, that there are incarnations, and so on, and we were to absorb these things into our minds as we absorb other things into our minds. Of course we need these things, they are fundamentals. But anyone who grasps them in the same way as other insights into the external world has not grasped the living source of spiritual science, which wants to become a living source of direct life at the same time; which should give us the opportunity to understand and grasp life around us in a fully alert state, to snatch us from sleepiness.

If you want to grasp spiritual science in a way that is full of life, my dear friends, the first thing you need to do is to realize the problematic, the doubtful nature of what is often called self-knowledge. For many people, self-knowledge is often nothing more than a kind of self-incubation, a kind of looking into their inner selves, through which they feel a certain mental voluptuousness, and also serve a certain mental voluptuousness when, in this so-called self-knowledge, they reproach themselves for this or that.

Self-knowledge in the sense in which spiritual science imparts it and in which it is already necessary today and will become ever more necessary in a rapidly maturing future: above all, self-knowledge must be clear to itself that the human being is organized in such a way that, precisely when it comes to recognizing himself, he is almost always inclined to confuse cause and effect. However simple it may appear, what I am about to say is something of immense importance and of far-reaching significance for life.

Let us take a simple case. We begin to treat a person whom we have perhaps been indifferent to, or who may even have been a friend, in a hostile and unfriendly manner, and do all kinds of things against him. What do we usually do when we are dealing with something that involves us to some extent? Well, what we usually do – just ask yourself – is say: Yes, I have to do this or that against this person because he is like this or that. He has done this or that, and it is simply the right thing to do this or that. Of course, such talk may be right in many cases, but in most cases it is not right at all for someone who knows life in its roots. Rather, in most cases it is the case that the person who begins to hate another has has gone through a certain development; not an esoteric development, but he has lived, has lived something out; and what he has lived through has brought it to the point that at a certain moment he felt an inner, subconscious necessity that discharges itself into an impulse of hatred. He must hate, it is as necessary for him as it is to eat when he is hungry. In the course of the development of the soul, it comes about that this soul only feels well when it hates; that it would become ill if it did not hate, and so on. This hatred is the real reason why we are hostile towards others. Of course it is not always so, but in a great many cases it is so; and one does not know life if one does not consider such cases. One wants to be self-sufficient when acting out this hatred, and one seeks out the object of hatred. The object will be found, because after all, something can be found in every person that makes it possible to hate them, to be hostile towards them.

But then we mask this hatred by surrounding it with the veil of justification. We deceive ourselves because we cannot admit to ourselves: You are lying now, you just have to hate. Isn't it, it's not easy to admit that. Because brooding over everything does not want to go so far as to say to oneself: I now have to hate for a while to not burst; so I live out this hatred.

Of course, it can be the same with love. Because love can also occur at a certain moment in life, and then, of course, one finds a lovable object to which one attributes all good qualities – perhaps it also has these qualities. But one must realize that especially in these matters, cause and effect are often confused in an outstanding way, and that what a person consciously says to himself actually consists only of him taking a kind of emotional opiate to numb himself to what actually lives in his soul.

It is remarkable what people can achieve in this area. I met a gentleman who wanted to do a certain job, but always explained that he did not want to do the job at all, that he only felt it was his mission to do the job. He would much rather do the opposite job. That is what he talked himself into believing. In reality, it was quite different. He felt totally incapable of doing the opposite work. He only believed that he could achieve something in this field. But, no, that was not a noble motivation. Especially when you want to talk to people about a mission, you will find them much more willing to make sacrifices if you say: I hate the work, but I feel that it is my mission. These are all soul opiates to disguise the impulses present in the soul – not only from others, but also from oneself.

Yes, the human soul is complicated, and above all, deep. And you can descend into deep, deep shafts, and you will still only partially understand it. From this you will understand, my dear friends, that so-called self-poreering can only be a very one-sided path to what can be called self-knowledge. In reality, self-knowledge can only be gained if one is able to measure one's own self against the great development of humanity, to enter into a relationship with the great development of humanity.

Now let us take such a building block for self-knowledge for a person of the present day, taken from a somewhat larger context. We have often spoken from the most diverse points of view about the post-Atlantic period, in the fifth epoch of which we are placed. Today we want to supplement what has been discussed from a different point of view, because it is precisely through such an addition, through such a consideration, that some foundations can be provided on which to build those thoughts that at least to some extent convey an understanding of the present, the present that is immediately around us. However, when one looks at the development of humanity, one makes a serious mistake almost without exception today. Today, people have certain ideas about what goes on in the human soul when the human soul thinks, feels and wills and so on. Man has the tacit assumption that what takes place in this human soul in thinking, feeling and willing has always taken place in the times that can be remembered and established through spiritual science, beyond the historical. But it is not so. Even in the soul of the Middle Ages, it looks quite different than in the soul of the Greek age. Our time is particularly suited to pointing out such things, because a waking soul today looks quite different than it did in 1913. But a soul of the Middle Ages was not created like a present-day soul, or even a Roman or Greek soul, or going back even further. Well, today we go no further back than the time of the first period after the Atlantic catastrophe.

You know, the first period, which begins after the catastrophe is over, is the time of the primeval Indian period; that time, of which no historical documents report. Everything that is reported belongs to a much later time. But we have often characterized this primeval Indian time. If we direct our research-oriented, spiritual scientific gaze to this time, we find that the whole of life, and in particular the life in which the human being lives with his soul in the social environment, was quite different during this primeval Indian time than what we can actually imagine today. Today, when we think about human development, we think the way we have to think when we look at a person around us. We see that a person develops in a particular way during childhood, that development stops at a certain age, and then a certain stationary state occurs. We all know that in childhood, the human being is very dependent on the physical in terms of soul and spirit. The various stages of physical development are also expressed in the soul and spirit. And vice versa: the soul and spirit are connected to the physical, to structural changes in the nervous system, to changes in the muscular system, in the metabolic system, and so on. But then there comes a certain age when we say to ourselves, in today's world: now we are adult human beings; so adult human beings, in fact, that no one can dispute our right to have a say in parliaments, to have as much say as the elderly. This is also evident in other areas, that in our time people have truly come to realize: they have become adults. It is not the case for everyone, the present are always excluded; but for many people today, if you expect them to read this or that at a certain age, they say: Oh, that belongs to school age; you read that at school; you have it inside you now.

All this is based on the fact that from a certain point in time, the spiritual-soul becomes independent of the physical-bodily. At this point, the physical-bodily comes to a certain conclusion. The soul-spiritual continues, and for most people it continues in such a way that they remain stationary, that they most decidedly reject further development.

This was different in the period we have to call the primeval Indian. In terms of their soul and spiritual life, people remained dependent on the physical and bodily well into their fifties. Just think what such a person went through. He went through the whole ascending life of childhood and youth, where one grows, thrives and blossoms and experiences the spiritual and soul life in this sense. Then he went through the middle of life in his thirties until the age of 35. Then one begins to develop in reverse. One begins to mineralize, to sclerotize. But today we no longer go along with this in our soul and spirit. Everything that today the child only feels as instinctive dependence of the soul-spiritual on the physical-bodily, thus only feels as a human being in the ascending, blossoming, thriving, growing , but also at the point of culmination; and then he felt again how the body sinks into itself, how the physical body recedes. He felt that the physical body recedes, something we do not sense today: the physical body no longer provides the foundation for the soul and spirit, it collapses into itself. But as the physical body declined, he perceived the spiritual life, especially in a dreamy or sleeping state. Just as the ascending and flourishing life connects one to matter, so the declining life frees one from matter. The soul feels more and more akin to the spiritual life. And that reached its peak between the ages of 48 and 56. In the first period after the Atlantic catastrophe, human beings were thus capable of development up to the age of 56. Then up to the ages of 55, 54, 53, and so on. And when the first cultural epoch, the primeval Indian one, had passed, human beings were still capable of development up to the age of 48. Therefore, the whole social life was different. It was the case that people in those days looked up to those who had reached their fifties; they knew that they had a special connection with the spiritual world.

The fact that the elderly were in contact with the spiritual world was simply a result of evolution. And the whole of social feeling, the whole of social life, was influenced by this. However, this was also connected with the fact that, in those days, the environment of the human being, the earthly environment of the human being, was different, so to speak. This earthly environment of man was such in those days that the spirits of the three nearest hierarchies - the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai - worked through the immediate elements. And the best, the noblest spirits of these three higher hierarchies worked through the elements, water, air, warmth, which man absorbed. It is particularly important to note that what we call the spirit of the age, that is, the essence of the hierarchy of the archai, worked directly through the elements in those days. One can say: in air and warmth, with the climate, man inhaled spirituality. And he inhaled this spirituality purely as spirituality in the most perfect way between the 48th and 56th year of life in the epoch referred to.

And then came the time that we call the proto-Persian period. During this time, people only remained capable of development in the manner indicated initially until the 48th year, then until the 47th, until the 46th and so on until the 42nd year, when the proto-Persian period had expired. So by that time, people had already come so far in their development that by the 48th year they no longer got anything for their development from the 48th year. If someone wanted to remain capable of development, he had to shape the soul in a way that was capable of development, independently of what the environment had to offer. But at least during this original Persian period, one remained capable of development until the 42nd year. And this was connected with the fact that although the archai, the spirits of time, had withdrawn more from the immediate elemental forces of the earth, the spirits of the people, the archangeloi, as they are called, still worked strongly through the elements, and these were the best spiritual beings of the spiritual hierarchies. Therefore, in a certain sense, what was the national context over the earth in the ancient Persian period was regulated according to spiritual laws. For that which regulated the relationships between the individual nations depended on spiritual laws. It may be more or less comprehensible to us, but that is not the point; in a certain sense, they were divine spiritual laws.

The spirits of the higher hierarchies withdrew even further during the third post-Atlantic period. And we find in this time that actually the human being, who at the beginning remained capable of development until the age of 42, now at the end of the third post-Atlantic period remains capable of development only until the age of 35. We find that during this time people still had a living relationship with the being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi that belonged to them. The individual people still knew very well: they have a spirit being with them, they are in contact with the spirit being. To speak of the fact that there is no spiritual world would have been nonsense for the time, because every single person knew that he was related to a being from the hierarchy of the angeloi. This is therefore the epoch in which people are capable of development until the end of the thirties.

Now the fourth post-Atlantean period began. During this time, the general age of humanity declined again. We know that the third period begins with the year 747 BC, before the Mystery of Golgotha, and ends with the year 1413 AD, after the Mystery of Golgotha. It was the time when the spirits of the higher hierarchies, who had worked directly through the elements and their forces in the earth, had withdrawn from direct human observation and human experience. The Greeks and Romans remained capable of development only into their thirties, into the middle of life. This is certainly connected with the whole view of life of the Greeks and Romans, which I have already touched on. On the one hand, we are entering an age in which every human being is still so close to those ancient times when people had a connection to the spiritual world because they were able to develop into old age. This is why the Greeks — and this must be know today if you want to judge the Greeks - the Greeks felt that when they moved their hands, when they grew, when they thought, when they ate and drank, they were glowing with a soul; that there is soul in everything that is in them. To doubt that there is something spiritual in everything that is physically lived out would have been inconceivable to the Greeks. But if a Greek or a Roman wanted to know more about the spiritual world, they had to seek this knowledge through the mysteries. There, indeed, one could still acquire the ability to see into the spiritual world, but it is quite interesting to consider those Greeks who rose to the heights of spiritual development but were not initiated into the mysteries, such as Aristotle. He was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. He was a thinker of this Greek period. He was able to think what only a Greek could think, but he did so in the sharpest way. That is to say, it was clear to him that the human being as a physical being had to be connected to a soul and spirit. But now Aristotle said to himself: If I take away one arm of a human being, he is no longer a whole human being. If I take away two arms, even less. But if I take away the whole body, as happens at death, then he is certainly no longer a whole human being. Therefore, for Aristotle, the human soul, when it has passed through the gate of death, is no longer “a whole human being”. For Aristotle, a whole human being is, of course, made up of body and soul. In a sense, the soul is only an incomplete human being when it has passed through the gate of death. Aristotle defended the immortality of the soul philosophically, but for him it is only what it was for Homer, who said: “Better a beggar in the underworld than a king in the realm of shadows.” A king in the realm of shadows is a soul among incomplete human souls.

So it had come about, on the one hand, that human ideas, powers of perception, unfertilized powers of perception, as a result of humanity having regressed in its age to the 28th year, could no longer comprehend or could only comprehend that everything physical is filled with soul, but that the soul is not complete when it is separated from the body. But anyone who makes an effort to understand Aristotle will find that this is the correct interpretation, which could easily be proved philosophically. On the other hand, however, we see that in those days, real full humanity, what man actually is in his deepest being, can only be known through initiation into the mysteries.

While the Greeks underwent a development – which is very interesting, as Aristotle showed up to the Stoics – in which they sought to know what human knowledge can know, Roman development went other ways. With the establishment of the Imperium Romanum, after the Roman Republic, the Roman emperors wanted to be full human beings. Through the power of the physical plan, they were able to force themselves to undergo initiation. And so we have the peculiar phenomenon that on the one hand we have Aristotle, who only made it to such a concept of immortality as I have described, and on the other hand we have the peculiar phenomenon that, without sufficient preparation, purely because they had the power, the Roman emperors were able to force the initiation upon themselves. Thus not only was Augustus an initiate who knew from the mysteries what a secret there is about man; but we also have to count Caligula among the initiates. For it is a truth and not a fairy tale that Caligula, through his initiation into the mysteries, was able to realize that which is expressed figuratively, but is correctly and truly expressed by what history relates – that he was able to commune with the spirits of the moon at night and from there draw inspiration. It is true that Caligula did not merely engage in dramatic posturing, but because he knew the significance of things, he sometimes had himself worshiped as Jupiter, as Bacchus, as Apollo, or as some other god, because he believed in the identity of man with the god.

Commodus, who was not only an initiate, but also an initiator, killed [gap in the transcript]

We finally have the initiate Nero. And, as incredible as it may sound, it must be said today what actually prevailed in the Imperium romanum – in this Imperium romanum, which has transmitted its developmental impulses through a thousand and one channels through the Middle Ages and into our time. Even today, when we think legally, we are still thinking in the sense of this Imperium Romanum, and we think in many other areas in the sense of this Imperium Romanum. On the one hand, these Caesars had certainly come to a view from which they could say how man is connected to the spiritual world. On the other hand, however, they had come to despise what was the world of the physical plane. What Nero did was largely based on misanthropy. Caligula already had this misanthropy. When, for example, an innocent man had been condemned at a court hearing, he said: What does it matter; he will be as guilty as the guilty man; and the judge will be no less guilty than the condemned man. And Nero was convinced – and this is important to know – that there can be nothing good about man, about the physical man here on earth; that everything that lives in the physical man is unchaste; that everything is permeated by physical drives.

If you want to fully understand the soul configuration of Nero, then you have to say: Nero is actually the first psychoanalyst, but - a psychoanalyst of greatness; compared to him, the “Freuderl” is actually just a - well, a “Neroerl”. But there is a relationship. Such relationships run through history without people seeing them, they are very much asleep. And this relationship can have an effect.

Now, 747 BC marks the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantic age. At that time, humanity lived to be 35 years old. A little later, it only lived to be 34 years old, and even later, 33 years old. This means that humanity reached this level of development at the moment when our era begins.

We can therefore say that in the post-Atlantean period, people began with an age of 56 years; up to the 56th year, the human being remained capable of development. Then, in the course of the second, third and fourth periods, the age of human development went down to 33 years. And what happened when the age of human development had gone down to 33 years? What happened? In the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ developed up to the age of 33. That is to say, He grew contrary to the age of humanity.

Consider, my dear friends, what this means! We can follow how people in ancient times had their development up to old age. And when the decline had occurred by the age of 33, the Christ Jesus being developed among them, so to speak, ran counter to the development of humanity, up to the age of 33. When one comes to this matter in a spiritually scientific way, something happens to the human soul. Then the moment arrives when one is confronted with the miracle, the mystery of humanity, in the greatest emotion: the sacrifice of Christ Jesus in the Mystery of Golgotha coincides with the descent of the age of humanity. This is as powerful as anything that can confront you today among the mysteries of humanity. It is something great and powerful that is revealed here from the history of humanity. And truly, spiritual science is, as you can see from this, not intended to somehow suppress those feelings and perceptions that a person can have in the face of the greatness and violence and miraculous effectiveness of the world. Because the further we progress in spiritual science, the better we understand the divine-spiritual forces that prevail in human development. We feel that we are only at the beginning of our understanding of Christ; that times will come when this understanding of Christ will reveal itself quite differently than it can be the case today. But it must develop quite differently. After all, we now live in the fifth post-Atlantic period, and the human being remains capable of development only up to the age of 27. After 1413, when the fifth post-Atlantic period began, people were capable of development until the 28th year. Today, until the 27th year. This means that, through what nature itself provides, we no longer remain capable of development even into the middle of our lives.

From this, however, you can see, my dear friends, how spiritual science truly does not arise from an arbitrary idea, from an arbitrary impulse for agitation. If natural science does not provide what makes human beings capable of development, then human beings must seek in their souls the development that is no longer given to them by nature. He must seek ways into the spiritual world by the soul turning to itself. And however strange and grotesque it may sound, it is true: if you do not seek to stimulate the innermost soul impulse that nature no longer gives us, then you will not live longer than 27 years, even if you live to be a hundred. We are now at that stage in human development where we cannot grow older than 27 years. This winter, in which I have come to a preliminary conclusion on many of the research questions that have occupied me for more than thirty years, has really kept me very much alive to what is actually connected with this realization, which comes from a completely different angle. Many phenomena of the present have made me wonder: yes, where does it all come from? Why is it that in our time we are experiencing precisely what could be called such a terrible unreality of thought and ideals?

This is what should be particularly noticeable to those people who are not asleep, that people are unable to immerse themselves in reality with their ideas and ideals. Of course, they have beautiful ideas, have beautiful ideals, but these ideas and ideals cannot be immersed in reality. They are not strong enough to grasp reality. Therefore they remain beautiful ideas and ideals, which people lick their lips over when they express them, but which have no driving force because they do not submerge into reality. We can see this most in everyday life. What is it when it is said today: “The most capable man must stand in the right place in the future.” We hear that today from all rooftops. It is a beautiful idea; certainly. But what is this beautiful idea worth when it is precisely the “nephew” who is the “most capable.” It is truly not a matter of having beautiful ideas, but of applying these beautiful ideas in reality; of developing a state of mind that is capable of immersing itself in life.

However, if everything that is unable to be realized in life were to be eliminated, then the whole science of states and nations could be eliminated. For all these things are abstract ideas, are unreal ideas. That is why some personalities are so enigmatic.

My dear friends, I am not saying what I am about to say out of chauvinistic sentiment. It has been hard enough for me to arrive at such realizations. I say it because I believe I possess the knowledge. If I look for a typical person – in order to avoid being offended by close personalities, let us take a somewhat more distant one – there is a personality in whom one can clearly see from everything it says world, that, however old he is, he is in reality no older than 27 years, and therefore expresses ideas that go beyond the whole earth today, but which are unrealistic. And this personality, who is so truly a type of our time that she cannot get older than 27 years because she rejects the idea of developing forces from within that nature itself provides, is the President of the United States of North America, Woodrow Wilson. I need only point out that I characterized Woodrow Wilson in the Helsingfors cycle before the war, so that one need not have the impression that I am doing so now under the impression of the present circumstances. But only because of this do the outbursts of Woodrow Wilson's ideas appear so unreal, so mere words, to those who know reality, because it is as I have discussed it. That is why it could happen that this man, who holds one of the most powerful positions of the present day, could publish a peace manifesto and thereby not achieve peace, but only war in his own country; because his ideas are not only unrealistic, but in many respects even opposed to reality.

But he is the representative of our time. That is what our time is like. And our time is fundamentally incapable of understanding reality. Anyone who expresses realistic ideas is understood in the same way as those who express abstract, unrealistic ideas. A spiritual-scientific education must first be created to create an understanding of reality.

As you can see, there is a way to get to know our time. But you have to start from a broad point of view. For someone who has a sense of reality, it is the most incredible thing that people today achieve in terms of ideas and ideals. These ideas are beautiful, wonderful, and Eucken's ideas are even more beautiful. They satisfy people very much. But Eucken is a philosopher who, although he is an old man, is no older than 27 years old, hence this peculiar jumble of beautiful ideas that seem beautiful to people. You see, you have to see through the periods that follow one another in history, in their true form, in their immediate reality. The Greeks still knew: the soul pervades the body. In the fifth epoch, this is known less and less, unless it is acquired through the soul, through a spiritual impulse that one seeks within oneself from within, because the body no longer gives this impulse to the soul by itself.

Now there is a beautiful search, my dear friends, a beautiful search for the human being who has become, as it were, dispirited, but now consciously, not unconsciously, as it was with the Persian, with the Egyptian - there was beautiful endeavor to lead the dead man in his soul back up into the spiritual world; now consciously, because the body no longer connects to the spiritual, now to connect with the soul to the spiritual. The path has been started and it leads directly into spiritual science. But it must be walked. This path is still little understood today. It is a sign, a deeply significant sign, how it was begun through Lessing, Herder, through Schiller and Goethe and those who were with them, to reconnect the dispirited human being to the spiritual world. And Schiller is greater as the writer of the Aesthetic Letters than as a poet. For in these Aesthetic Letters, Schiller seeks the way back for the human soul to the spiritual. He seeks it in a modern way, as modern man must seek it. Thus, through his “Letters on Aesthetic Education,” Schiller is one of the greatest educators of modern times, but he is also the least appreciated in this field of all – and so is Herder; [and also] Lessing, who is the first to point out the “education of the human race” in broad lines. Then Goethe, in his Imaginationen, linking all this in his “Fairytale” of the green snake and the beautiful lily. It is therefore not a coincidence but an inner necessity that our Mystery Plays should take up the first Mystery Drama from this fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. This is where what is in store for humanity in the near future begins: that it will have to seek to re-establish contact with the spiritual world through inner impulses, but now consciously through the free, independent soul. But these things are difficult to understand today. It is difficult to create an understanding for them.

Oh, if you could go back to how our Anthroposophical Society and the Anthroposophical movement developed, you would see in several places: it should be pointed out. You will find a small booklet that contains lectures of mine from that time about Schiller's philosophical significance. And, as I said, you will find the link to Goethe's fairy tales in the Mystery Dramas. These things are more in touch with the times in which we live than the rehashing of intellectual achievements of earlier times that are no longer suitable for our time. And it was not a process of progress but of degeneration when, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Theosophical Society emerged and wanted to transplant oriental-Indian essence into Europe without realizing that with what arose in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and what must develop on their soil, something much more significant and greater has been created for modern humanity than can ever come from any earlier source.

I myself have to think back to some personally strange things. When the president of the Theosophical Society in Germany, about whom she now writes so “kindly”, made her first appearance in Hamburg, I asked her whether it was not actually the task of the newer times to tie in with the spiritual life that had been achieved by Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Herder and so on. At the time, she replied, based on the process of degeneration of the Theosophical Society: “These are all people whose ideas were more distant from actual spiritual life. You have to penetrate much more deeply.” And so, through that reality, that materialistic construct, which the Theosophical Society as a theosophical doctrine contains, was placed in the place of the truly spiritual, which, basically, as from the very beginning, we wanted and needed. Because, whether you imagine the etheric body as a more or less dense or thin haze, you imagine it as a certain haze and so on. And even with the astral body, and with everything else, one still speaks of atoms and the like.

So the first steps, but only the first steps, had to be linked to the world view that finds expression in the “Letters on Aesthetic Education” and in the “Fairytale”. Just feel the necessities of a spiritual movement.

We will come to the sixth cultural period. We can then expect that humanity will remain capable of development into the 21st, 20th, 19th, and so on down to the 14th year. So humanity will remain infantile if it does not undergo an inner development, which can only come through spiritual knowledge.

But there are still quite different phenomena connected with what has been said. The estrangement from reality to which I have drawn attention is connected with this twenty-seven year-old age. Men must consciously find their way back into reality, for full reality also contains spiritual reality. He who does not recognize the spiritual world thereby becomes a man hostile to reality. That is why our political economy, our political science, is an insubstantial abstraction that can never create anything, because it treats reality like someone who sees nothing in a horseshoe magnet except a thing with which to shoe a horse's hoof. He does not know that the iron contains magnetic forces. Today, humanity must consciously regain what it once had instinctively, what has been lost to it. And here we are at a very important point. Much that people once had instinctively must now be consciously acquired, and this includes a sense of truth.

The world is taking giant strides towards people losing their instinctive sense of truth and having to acquire a new, conscious sense of truth. Therefore, we encounter things at every turn that we can only understand if we are able to see the world through the prism of the preconditions we have described today. Sometimes people are well-meaning, not ill-intentioned. But then they cannot help but harbor unrealistic ideas; they are incapable of responding to ideas that are rooted in reality. I can give you a good example of this that appeared recently in an article in the magazine 'Die Furche'. There you can read a relatively benevolent article about the relationship between spiritual science and religion. All sorts of strange things are said. And at the end, something is said about which one would have to scratch one's head to find any way of justifying that such a thing could be said about a person who is not malevolent:

[Rudolf Steiner has deeply recognized the power of self-love, with which one also loves what one should feel as ugly; but he says nothing against the most anti-divine power of this self-love, with which it only wants to ascribe the redemption of its own self to itself again and again, instead of only out of Christ Jesus, who wants to bring about his redemption in us.

So think about that. Think about this sentence in the light of what I have been saying for years about the Christ impulse in relation to human development. It is possible for something like this to be put forward by a source that is not malevolent.

[Rudolf Steiner deeply understood the power of self-love, with which one also loves what one should perceive as ugly; but he says nothing against the most anti-divine force of this self-love, with which it only wants to ascribe the redemption of one's own self to itself again and again, instead of solely from Christ Jesus, who wants to bring about his redemption in us.

While [but precisely] spiritual science is the only thing today that, in the face of the materialistic world view and also in the face of Christianity, which has become anti-Christian, restores the Mystery of Golgotha in its full depth. But people today do not read such things, and they do not think to test these things for their truth content. Today, people do not have enthusiasm for the truth. Therefore, they do not admit that such things are completely equivalent to lies, because it is a lie. People do not want to call things by their right name. There is an estrangement from reality. And it is necessary, because it is a very widespread evil, that someone who does not want to face the world while asleep but rather wide-awake should confront such a phenomenon with the impulses of spiritual science and in full consciousness.

A magazine called “The Invisible Temple” appears. In it, under the direction of a certain Horneffer, it is preached that a higher moralization of humanity should take place. Now, I am convinced that many people turn to such things with emotion - but emotion is rarely true today - in good faith. Now, there is a sentence in the magazine that

[However different the monists and the theosophists are, and however eagerly they fight and despise each other, they are strangely similar in one respect: they monopolize the word “science” for themselves. What they themselves do is true, pure science; what other people do is sham and pseudo-science. This can be read in Haeckel and Rudolf Steiner.

Now I ask you if I have ever written anything like this: what I write and say is science; what others write is pseudo-science.

What is this if not a lie! The people who put something like this together, even those who know that it is a lie, do not approach things with the feeling that they are dealing with dishonesty.

But today we need a new sense of truth. We must call a spade a spade. Such a magazine lies, and it is not ashamed to lie. And it writes about human ennoblement and human moralization by people who can be shown to be lying.

Keen observation, a real attention to the actual truth, that is what belongs above all to the duties of those who want to understand the anthroposophical world view, as a world view, as a view of life; not an easy acceptance of the facts of the world, whether on the spiritual or physical plane. Today, a tremendous magnitude and strength of earnest must permeate the world where a true world view is concerned; an earnestness that cannot be compared to any earnestness of earlier times. But for this to happen, people must become aware of how lightly humanity treats the truth today.

I will give you only a few examples that may be close to us. Under such circumstances, it is truly no wonder that this spiritual science, just at the time when it seems to be opening up from one side, is having some impressions and influences on the currents of our time – that this spiritual science, on the other hand, is experiencing attack after attack, and indeed such attacks that really arise from the nature of our time.

I truly did not consider it worthwhile to go into the matter for as long as the Freimarke and others were scolding the things. But the time has come when opponents are being recruited from within the Anthroposophical Society itself, and not opponents who fight honestly, but opponents who spread untruth after untruth in order to drive spiritual science into a scandal. The slander and vilification that have come our way during this time cannot be described. Allow me, however, to draw attention to some of them here as well.

I know that there are members among us, members of the Anthroposophical Society, who say with a haughty air: one does not get involved in these things, one only gets into personal squabbling. But one should turn to those who are the cause of this personal squabbling, not to those who have to defend themselves. We have gone through bitter enough times in which we had to defend ourselves.

I do not want to be misunderstood, my dear friends. Opposition to spiritual science may occur as much in the world as is always possible. It only depends on how this opposition occurs. I still count some of the opposition as justified, even if this opposition is often strange in expression. I would just like to remind you that a man who has done an enormous amount for our cause in recent years, Ludwig Deinhard, only slowly came around and became a sincere friend, and that at the beginning, when I had to appear in Germany, he could not approve of it and was quite in agreement with those who publicly attacked me at the time. I did not respond to such attacks, although at the time, when I gave a lecture in Munich, the sentence was said: “The Berlin traveler for Theosophy has appeared again.” I still consider such things to be justified. One can have opinions, no matter how trivially they are expressed. Therefore, I do not want to be misunderstood. If an opponent appears honestly, or even dishonestly, but in a literary form, that is not what I mean today. What I want to talk about today is opposition, not out of the matter itself, but out of objective untruth. And in this respect, there have been some terrible developments in recent times. It must be said that it has never happened before that such things have been thrown at a matter as the one I have to represent.

Anyone who speaks to esoteric impulses knows that he must naturally create opponents for himself. Because that which must be spoken by the real spiritual science, that just causes opposition. And it is perhaps not too much to say that if you speak to 120 people, in all seriousness about the deepest things, among these 120 there are probably 70 possible opponents; 70 possible enemies. That is the case. You must not be under any illusions about that.

And it is not a question of whether such opponents arise or not, but of whether they are decent or not. And certainly much in this area emerges from what I have characterized today. But we are experiencing the strangest things. And so please allow me to make a few brief remarks about this, because I simply have to take action against these attacks that are coming from within society, from members of society – who have now left, admittedly. I have to say a few words to you about this.

All in all, it has to be said: today is the time to raise the question: Can the Anthroposophical Society continue in this way if I am to give lectures in it – or not? The Anthroposophical Society is truly something other than anthroposophy or spiritual science. Spiritual science would not have the opposition that it currently has, which is currently coming from the fact that, firstly, people are relying on dishonesty and because other people, who are outside, are using this dishonesty. It is too inconvenient for these latter people to study spiritual science in order to attack it. It is much easier to drive spiritual science into a scandal. To attack it, one would first have to study it. It is easier this way, but what do we experience?

Above all, a positive, active judgment must develop in the Anthroposophical Society if it is to continue to exist as such. After all, spiritual science could very well continue without the Society. You could have three or four friends in every city who could arrange everything needed for lectures; you don't need an Anthroposophical Society for that. So we must not confuse anthroposophy with the Anthroposophical Society. I said that a more active judgment is needed. We have to recognize that things are possible in our Society that are actually only possible within it. We first had to found the Society for these things to become possible. I want to recall an older matter. But a new one is not out of place in telling this story.

A certain Mr. Grasshoff joined our society. He attended lectures in all cities for a while, was present everywhere. You may, of course, ask why the man was accepted. Yes, you see, there is no way to reject people under certain conditions when they are brought in; you would have to anticipate the future. Do you think that a Grasshoff would come in and I would say: We cannot accept you. – Yes, why not? – Well, because in the future you will be a swine against society!

You can't say that if something is only going to happen in the future but has not yet happened. So you have to let such people into society, that goes without saying.

This Mr. Grasshoff listened to all the lectures he could possibly hear; he borrowed all the notes taken by the members. He copied everything down. After a while he went back to America, where he had come from, and wrote a nice book. In this book, he put together everything he had heard in the various lectures, what he had found in the books, and what he had written from the unpublished lectures. But he did not say that. He wrote a preface to the book. There he says: I heard this and that from Dr. Steiner, but then I was not finished. But I was then given the task of going to a master, of course a master in the Transylvanian Alps, and there this master told me the deeper things that I still lacked. So this “deeper” and this “higher” all comes from this “master”. As I said, everything in this book is copied from my lectures and from books and notes of other members.

Now, the book was published in America. But what happened? The book, titled “Rosicrucian World Conception,” was published in America.

One could still say: Well, that's American, you couldn't expect much different over there. But then a book publisher was found here in Germany, run by a certain Dr. Hugo Vollrath. He was inclined to translate this book into German and to publish it in individual lesson letters. And a preface was written to the effect that some of the content had already come to light in Germany, but that it first had to be cleansed in the pure air of California, in America. Such a disgraceful piece is actually not possible in literary life outside. I even told this story in public lectures. It is a disgrace that should have become known everywhere if it had been understood with the necessary power of judgment. I would like to go and collect how many people know about it. But that is why things can always repeat themselves.

That is why it could happen that a member, a long-standing member, who of course could not be expelled for the same reason that Mr. Grasshoff - who appeared under the name A. M. Heindel - could not be expelled, could write a book called “Who Was Christ?” In this book, he did not go to the same lengths as Mr. Grasshoff, but he did compile all kinds of cycles under the motto that knowledge should not be kept secret but belongs to the times. The person from whom he copied this motto took it very badly because the person who wrote it meant it quite differently. But then he hinted: Dr. Steiner did indeed point out some of these things, but it is necessary to elaborate on all of them. — You can imagine, my dear friends, that this book had to be rejected by the Anthroposophical-Philosophical Publishing House in Berlin. Thereupon the man became an opponent.

So, a long-standing member, a member who has even done a lot for the Anthroposophical Society, a member who for a long time has appeared to be a quiet member, becomes an opponent because a brochure is rejected by the publisher. That is the real reason for the antagonism. That is the reason. Of course, one sometimes says, it is not quite true, post hoc, but one does not go far wrong with such things if one uses the expression. In any case, Seiling has not only become an opponent, but an enemy, after his brochure had to be rejected by the publisher. He did, however, admit to someone that he had suffered a great deal from me in recent years and therefore had to write some things from his soul. Yes, but I also had some strange experiences with this gentleman. You know that the gentleman speaks a very Berlin dialect and had no idea about recitation. He took a few lessons and was also very useful because he could use the dialect as a Berliner. But then the story got into his head. Then he appeared in Dornach: Now I, an old fellow, want to show you what reciting is. I even showed my nephew, I want to show you what I achieve before the world as a reciter. It is understandable that someone like this, who has a great deal of vanity, suffers when one cannot say 'yes' to such things as a matter of course. But with all the ridiculous contradictions that he has put together, this man could not have lured a dog out of the oven, because anyone can check them. That is not the point, but the point is that these contradictions had to be covered up with a lot of untrue stuff. And this untrue stuff, he concocts it out of “conversations”. He is one of those people who have been coming for years with requests for private conversations, for interviews. He now distorts what happened in these conversations, and what he cites is all objectively untrue. Objectively untrue! For example, that I had told someone – which he cites – that I had not agreed to the publishing house accepting another brochure that had appeared before. But Dr. Steiner had wanted this brochure from him in her publishing house, so I had given in. Now he talks about private conversations like that. If these private conversations can be misused like that, then it is a fatal thing.

The gentleman presents himself in a very strange light. He knows very well how things are in Dornach. He knows that the others caused a scandal there, but now he writes in the “Psychical Studies” that our marriage has led to scandals. — [But:] We were quite innocent of the scandal, the others caused it. This is a clever way of deliberately dragging things into scandal if that is what you want. You just have to look at things in the right way. And what do we experience next?

A man in a city in central Germany wrote to the present Dr. Steiner years ago, saying that he had reached a turning point in his soul and did not know what to do. Should he get involved in a business or should he help his soul in some other way? Dr. Steiner wrote to him that we could not deal with such things. Then he reappeared as a member of the Theosophical Society in Berlin. There he had initially surprised the members, despite having no idea of recitation, by pouring out Schiller's “Kassandra” over the eardrums [of those present] in a – well, let's say in a “surprising” way. The man did not aspire to become an artist, as he claimed, but: to be an artist. I was later told by a reliable source that he was now pursuing the strategy of marrying his way into our society, but he did not succeed. Then he turned to Munich. There, everything that could be done for him was done. He imagined that he had to paint. He couldn't paint, nor did he have any talent for it. But, you know, some talent, at least the small talents, only show up after some time. They got him a teacher, but you can't turn him into a genius in the blink of an eye. If he had wanted to become something, they would have accommodated that. But he wanted to be a painter, to be a genius, not just become one. That's a terrible crime, isn't it? In short, the man also became an enemy one day, and for some time now he has been engaged in some strange writing. His name is Erich Bamler.

Yes, it is extremely difficult to take this writing seriously. For example, one of the points mentioned is that I advised the man to do a deep occult exercise. The exercise: He should see everything in his environment as good and necessary. You only have to look it up in Schopenhauer's works to find this sentence. There you will find that Schopenhauer considers this behavior to be very beneficial for mental and spiritual health. Yes, as a result of this sentence, the man now claims to have developed blue bumps on his legs and other things that have given him a bad occult development. Things are so stupid, so terribly stupid, that you can only make something of them if you use defamatory things to smear the other person and use them as clothing. And today, of course, there are enough people who do this. It is even possible that university professors do not content themselves with a factual reply, but also dress it up in real madness. But today there are editors who do not go into spiritual science. They have no idea about it. But they do go into the things that are reported to them. And what is reported?

A few days ago I received a letter. A gentleman wrote to me saying that he had been to one of my lectures in a town in North Germany and that at this lecture he had, as he assured me, heard with his own ears that I had pointed out that the Christ would repeatedly appear on Earth and that I had made it clear that I myself was laying claim to this incarnation. Imagine that, my dear friends! And the man not only says that he himself has heard this, but he can also produce witnesses who have also heard it. Such things are happening today. Can it be incomprehensible that there are editors like those who come into question here in this case, who let themselves be told these things, especially when they are brought by members who have surrendered to the cultivated lack of judgment in society. But this is only the beginning, it will continue. Spiritual science truly has no fear of refutations, so I never think that there should be no opposition.

It has been said that a commission should be set up to examine the matter and put it right. I see this as foolishness. Hundreds and thousands of opposing writings may appear; there can be no opposition, if it is honest, that spiritual science has to fear. Spiritual science can stand up to scientific scrutiny. But that is not what this is about. Instead, it is about driving people into meanness, about defamation, about throwing dirt at them, as has never been seen before. It could reach such heights that a long-standing member writes fabricated things, fabricated follies from beginning to end, things that are completely untrue. These are accepted by the editorial team. This can happen today.

So a member writes to the editorial team: I have had to deal with anthroposophical matters, and I have come to the view that something similar should happen to me as the Lazarus miracle that Christ performed and that Dr. Steiner described. Dr. Steiner sent me chocolate, and I have to assume that this chocolate was sent to me to perform the Lazarus miracle on me.

Now, this madness can be said and also printed today, and the editor writes as a note under these follies: “Where such occult exercises are done, even healthy people can go insane.” Yes, such things happen. I do not care about the real side issues. Whether such people are to be regarded as mentally ill is not an issue here. That is important, of course, but here it is a matter of dealing with pure inventions, with inventions of the most disgraceful kind. These are the things with which one is supposed to present spiritual science today. And do not think that it is based on a superficial judgment when I say: It is necessary that the judgment in the Anthroposophical Society be strengthened. The silliness that is now appearing again, with this article about chocolate and the miracle of Lazarus, that the reincarnation of Christ has been spoken of and that I myself am being pointed to – do not believe that it is without connection to these follies, that I actually had to emphasize very early on, again and again: There is only one incarnation of Christ. Such things have already been done in abundance in society.

So it has become necessary, my dear friends, for me to take two measures. They certainly hurt me as much as they may hurt some of you. But they are absolutely necessary. As things stand now, there is no other way.

From now on, all private conversations that have been held so far must stop, because the worst objective distortions arise from a number of these private conversations. I have indeed been quietly pointing this out for years. So perhaps a fact will come to light. It is not so much about this measure itself, but rather that by taking this measure, our members are being made aware that it is necessary to take these things seriously. You see, these things are all carried out. What members carry out of the Society is the most outrageous. And outside, everyone tells you: Yes, this is a society in which everything is based on authority. In blind faith, everyone follows this Dr. Steiner! And in reality it is like this: there is perhaps no other society in which a person like me, who is active in it, finds that everything happens differently than they think it should. Because in this society, in reality, everything that happens is always against my will; in the details, and also in some big questions. How countless things develop under the type: someone wants to go to a lecture cycle; it is necessary to excuse it to someone; what does he say? Dr. Steiner sent me. - What is the point of all this sending? Well, the person in question comes and says: Should I travel to the cycle? - That is of course none of my business, because it can only be voluntary. So I say: That's none of my business, it's up to you. - Then the person asks: Do you have any objections? — Of course I have no objections, because such things are done of one's own free will. - But if my answer is passed on to a second or third person, then it is: I should travel, Dr. Steiner said so.

I am far from any kind of mischief of sectarianism. But there is a lot of sectarianism in the Anthroposophical Society. Of course, this is less prominent here, but the Society must be treated as a unit. Therefore, these things must also be said here.

I made a trip to [Stettin]. As I arrived, a strange group marched in through one of the station doors. They were all ladies, but they looked like cardinals. Of course, they were all wearing stoles, as we call them. Then they had these strange caps on. Well, in Munich something like that might be acceptable; there you just say: they are crazy; you are used to it there. In Berlin it is less so. But when the ladies arrived in [Helsingfors], all hell broke loose. The [Helsingfors] ladies had to sit separately so that it would not be noticed that they belonged together. You see, such outward appearances are only a symbol of inward sectarianism.

In short, it is therefore necessary that the first measure to be taken is to stop all private conversations from now on. Those who have an esoteric matter to bring forward must pass on a little time; I will try to create a substitute for these conversations. Everyone will find satisfaction in what they can receive esoterically, but the private conversations will have to be stopped. For it is precisely from these discussions that most of what is now coming to the world in such an enormous way originates. Therefore, the innocent must now suffer with the guilty. For this reason, let us turn to those who are to blame. For years I have been pointing out that this will come.

But one will not say the complete thing if one does not say a second measure. That is that I give everyone, as far as I am concerned, an absolute permission to tell the truth about everything that has ever been said or done in a private conversation, insofar as he himself wants it. Only in this way will it be possible to silence the incredible distortions and untruths, denigrations, and slanders that have now been spread throughout the world, if this second measure is taken. The one who will tell the one measure without the other will tell an untruth. The two belong together. They must be thought together and said together.

Therefore, firstly: All private conversations must be recorded. Secondly: I authorize everyone to pass on everything that has ever been said or done in private conversations, provided that they themselves want it.

My dear friends, spiritual science will simply have to be brought into the full light of the public, because our time cannot tolerate what is very often confused with esotericism, but which does not need to be confused at all. Esotericism can also be practiced when anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is brought into the full light of the public. It can do so because this spiritual science has nothing to fear. But it is not always to everyone's taste to be besmirched and to have to take a public stand against it, especially when the mud is being slung from places and by personalities one would prefer not to take a stand.

Please forgive me, my dear friends, for having to attach these remarks to our deliberations; I had to attach them to what I wanted to give you today as a striking characteristic of our time, which I believe will be of use to you if you want to observe with an alert eye of the soul what is going on around us and has been going on around us in the last three years.

What has happened in the last three years is truly so that what happened before seems to us to lie in a mythical past. But it is precisely when one observes the times and takes spiritual science in the fullest sense seriously that one does not consider 'personal bickering' and 'personal matters' to be what I have been forced to link to these arguments before.

(Questions were asked about Colours and Primeval Rock.)

DR. STEINER: I will first deal with the question about rock, as that can very well be brought into connection with the things we have been considering lately.

Now you know that when a building is put up on the earth, great attention has to be paid to the laws of weight, gravity and many others—the laws of elasticity, for instance, of which we shall speak presently.

Imagine that one builds a tower, a tower, let us say, like the one on Cologne Cathedral, or that one builds something like the Eiffel Tower. It is clear, of course, that it must be built in such a way that it does not fall. If one has accurate knowledge of the laws of gravity there is no need for the whole thing to fall down. Still, the highest towers on earth can only be built on a base, and if you carry upwards to a height about ten times the base—that is, one to ten, you can get the highest towers.

So with the ratio of one to ten the highest towers can be built—otherwise the motion of the earth, wind storms, etc., would make them fall.

But in addition one must take care that the towers are in themselves somewhat elastic. The top always rocks to and fro slightly. Attention must be paid to what is called the force of gravity. The tower will always rock, but as soon as it rocks too violently it collapses. The Eiffel Tower rocks quite considerably at the summit. But care must be taken that it does not get thrown out of its base.

Now if you look at—let us say—a blade of wheat, you find at once that these laws are not observed at all. A blade of wheat is really nothing but a tower, yet it has a tiny base. A wheat blade with its tiny base goes up high aloft, and if we reckon out the ratio it is certainly not one to ten, which must always be used in mechanical building. The ratio is much more like one to four hundred, and in many cases one to five hundred.

By the mechanistic laws we use on earth, such a tower would quite definitely have to fall down. For when it is shaken by the wind its elasticity forces cannot be understood at all by the laws that a mechanist must obey.

If you tried to set up something else quite heavy on the Eiffel Tower, you would find that it simply could not be done! But at the top of this tower, this blade or stalk, there is still the ear, and it moves to and fro in the wind. That, you see, contradicts all the laws of the builders.

Now when one investigates the substances of which this blade consists, one first finds wood, that is to say, one gets a woody substance which you all know as bast. You see it in trees. And next you find in it a real building material: silica, quartz, real silicic acid. But it is harder quartz than is found in the Alps, in granite, for instance, or gneiss. This quartz, then, forms a scaffolding.

Besides these it contains a fourth substance—water. Thus this mortar made from wood, bast, water and quartz enables the stalk to contradict all terrestrial laws. A blade of grass is also a tower built entirely of substances. It can be tossed in the wind, does not break, rights itself when the wind ceases or the weather is favourable and calmly stands upright again, as of course you know.

But forces such as these, forces which can build something like this out from the ground, are not to be found on earth, assuredly not. And if you ask: Well, where do they come from?—this answer must be given: The Eiffel Tower is dead, the blade of wheat is alive. But it does not get life from the earth, its life comes from the whole surrounding universe. [See Fundamentals of Therapy, by Rudolf Steiner and Dr. Ita Wegman. Chapter III, “The Phenomena of Life.”] On the Eiffel Tower, gravity works purely downwards, drawing it down. The blade, however, does not grow by supporting itself on what is below. If we build the Eiffel Tower we must lay one material upon another and what is beneath will always be the support of what is above. With the blade this is not the case; the blade is in fact drawn out towards universal space.

So if you picture the earth (a sketch was made on the blackboard) and there the blades of wheat, then because the universe is filled by a very fine substance called ether which lives in the plant, [See Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man, by Dr. G. Wachsmuth.] the wheat blades are all drawn out towards the universe. But life does not come from the earth, it comes from cosmic spaces, and we can say: life simply comes out of the universe.

In the same way, when the egg is formed in the body of the mother (I have spoken of this before) this body only provides the substance. It is the whole cosmos that works upon the egg and gives it life. In all that lives, you see, the whole of universal space is working.

Now if you consider the plant, it grows, to begin with, under the earth. (A sketch is made.) If that is the earth, the plant is growing within it. But the earth is not some sort of neutral lump, it is really miraculous. It contains all sorts of substances, but three were of quite special importance in ancient times.

One of the three is a substance which we call mica. Only a small amount is to be found in plants to-day, but even so it is extraordinarily important. If you have already seen mica, you can perhaps remember that it is formed of thin plates, so thin that they sometimes look transparent. And once upon a time the earth was interwoven by such little mica plates. They went in this direction (sketch). As long as the earth was soft, such forces were still in it. Opposing them were other forces: they went so (sketch) and thus there was a real grating of lattice-work in the earth. These other forces are to-day contained in quartz.

And in between is yet another substance—clay. This clay unites the two, it fills in the lattice-work, so to speak. As a rock it is called feldspar.

Thus at one time the earth was composed in the main of these three kinds of primeval rock. But it was all soft, like pulp. There was the mica, which was really at pains to have the earth formed of thin plates in a horizontal direction. Then there was the quartz, radiating in this direction, and then the feldspar cementing the two together.

We find these most essential constituents to-day when we take the clay soil that is everywhere in the fields. At one time they were all intermingled inside the earth, now they are to be found outside in the mountains. If we take a piece of granite, it is quite granular, simply composed of little scales. These scales are the thin places of mica broken into splinters. Then there are very hard grains in it—that is the quartz; and then combining grains—the feldspar. These three bodies are broken down, made granular and are to be found outside in the mountains. They form the base of the hardest mountain ranges.

Thus since the earth was soft they have been pounded and broken to bits by all manner of forces which work in the earth. But remains of these old substances, particularly remains of their forces, are still to be found everywhere in the earth and the plants are built up from them by the universe.

We can say therefore that when they are working to-day out there in the mountains, they can create nothing more. These rocks are broken up, crumbled away, crushed into grains and are too hard to become plant. But since the plant always gives its essential substances and forces to the seed, what is within the earth can still be used for building up the plant out of the universe.

Such a view as this, where one takes into account how the whole of cosmic space works together to produce life, is not found at all in modern science. You may have read of the lecture recently delivered in Basle where an explanation was given of how life must actually have arisen on earth. The lecturer said: Yes, it is difficult to imagine that through mere intermixing or chemical combinations of substances, life comes about on earth. Then it must have come out of the universe—but how?

Now it is interesting to see how a modern scientist pictures to himself the way in which life can have come out of the universe. He says to himself: Well now, if it is not on the earth it must have come from other stars. The nearest star which perhaps once threw off substances that then flew towards the earth is so far away that what was split off would take forty thousand years to reach the earth. One has to imagine that the earth was once a fiery-fluid body. There could be no life on it or else of course it would have been burnt up. But it cooled down and then it was able to absorb life if it had flown to it from the nearest star. Now one cannot imagine—said the lecturer—that a life germ, a little germ of life wandered for forty thousand years through cosmic space, especially as this has a coldness—not warmth—of minus 220 deg. C. This germ then would arrive at the earth and then life on earth would originate. Earlier, no matter how many germs had flown into it, they would have been burnt up. And when the earth had sufficiently cooled down they would have thriven. But this simply could not have come about, said the lecturer. Therefore we don't know where life comes from!

But one can see quite clearly that life comes out of the universe. One sees in reality that in everything living, not only earth-forces are at work. We use only the forces of the earth for the Eiffel Tower and so on. But in such a tower as this (blade of wheat) there work indeed not only the earth's forces but the forces of the whole universe. And when the earth was still soft, when mica, feldspar and quartz or silica, swam through each other in the fluid condition, then the whole earth was under cosmic influences; it was a giant plant. When you go out to the mountains to-day and find granite there, or gneiss—which differs from granite in being more rich in mica—they are the remains of this ancient giant plant. And just as when to-day the plant decays and gives over its mineral constituents to the earth, so, later on, the whole earth body as plant gave over its mineral constituents. And thus to-day you have the mountain ranges. For our hardest mountains originated from the plant nature, when the whole earth was a kind of plant.

I have already told you how the earth looked when this primeval rock had ceased to be in a plant condition, but all was still soft. Our present animals and men were not then in existence, but the Megatherion and all the creatures I described to you. But before all this came about, the earth was a giant plant in cosmic space. And if you observe a plant to-day and enlarge it, you find even now that it resembles the mountain formations outside. For the universe only acts on the plant as a whole; its minutest parts are already stone. Thus, briefly, the earth has once been alive and what we find to-day in the hardest mountain rocks is the remains of a living earth.

But the earth's solid, mineral matter has originated in yet another way. If you go out on the ocean you find island formations. Here is the sea (sketch) and at a certain depth under the sea there live tiny creatures in real colonies—the coral-insects or polyps. These coral polyps have the characteristic of continuously secreting chalk. The chalk remains there and the island is finally covered by their deposited chalk secretions. And then sometimes the ground sinks in here, is submerged and a lake is formed. There is a ring of chalk which the coral insects have left behind. Now the earth as a whole is continually sinking in the very regions where these polyps are depositing their chalk. They can only live in the sea itself, so they go down deeper and deeper, while the chalk is left behind up above.

Thus one can still find in the sea chalk deposits which are derived from living creatures, namely, the coral polyps. Formerly there was animal life where now in the Juras we find limestone or chalk. The limestone is the deposit of former animal life.

If you go into the central Alpine region where the hardest rocks are, there you have the deposited plants. If you go into the Juras, there you have what is deposited by animals. The whole earth has once been living; originally it was a plant, then an animal. What we have to-day as rock is the remains of life.

It is simply nonsense to imagine that life is built up from dead substances through chemical combination. Life comes out of the ether-filled universe. It is nonsense to say that dead substances could unite and come to life—what is called “original creation.” No, it is precisely the dead substances that are derived from the living, are deposited by the living. As our bones are separated out—in the mother's body they are not there at first—so is everything, our bony structure, etc., formed out of the living. The living exists first and only afterwards comes the dead. The ether surrounds us and it draws everything upwards just as the earth's gravity draws everything down. It draws upwards but it does not bring death, as gravity does. The more you inhale gravity, the more you become gouty or diabetic or something of the sort. To that extent we become dead. And the more the upward forces prevail in us, the more living we become.

HEALING FORCES IN HUMAN NATURE

I now come to a part of the question which Herr B. has asked. Let us imagine then that I have someone before me who is ill, and I can say to myself: What is wrong with him is that he has not enough of the forces that work outside in the universe. He has too much of the forces of gravity—everything imaginable is deposited in him. Now I remember! Yes, I say to myself, it was quartz, silica, that at one time let forces stream out into the universe. If I prepare silica in such a way that the original forces become active again, that is, if I make a preparation from silica, mix it with other substances by which the silica element gets etheric force again and give this as a remedy, then I may be able to make a cure. Very good results can come from a silica preparation. And so in medicine one can make use again of forces which at one time existed in silica in living form. Great achievements in medicine can be secured if one reflects upon the condition of the earth when it was fully alive, when the silica was still under the influence of the universe.

Therefore when too little is living in a patient and he needs a connection with the universe, i.e. gives him substances which lie hardened outside and which one can very well employ as medicaments.

The head projects most of all into the cosmos, therefore it is most easily healed with silica; the abdomen tends most towards the earth, hence it is most easily healed with mica. And that which lies more in the centre—lungs, etc.—that one heals very well with feldspar when one prepares it in the right way.

So now you see that when one understands nature, one also really understands what are healing forces in human nature. But one must have a real feeling for the fact that the universe acts upon our earth.

Now it is always only possible to explain certain things at certain times. And so I can explain to you the flight of birds from another aspect than the one I took before, when we were not so advanced. Our modern science thinks very abstractly about the flight of birds in autumn and spring. In spring the birds leave their warmer haunts and in autumn, when it gets colder, they desert the more northerly regions. But there are birds which fly over the ocean in a south-easterly direction and they fly very fast and make no halt in between. One can prove this because it can be shown that there are no islands at all on the routes such birds sometimes take. Moreover they fly very high and it is not possible, on the lines of ordinary science, to answer the question: what do they breathe up there! For one could only think that so high up they would be stifled.

Nor can people make out how these birds find their direction. It is sometimes said: Oh, well, that is an inherited faculty; the young ones have always inherited it from the older ones, and the old birds instruct the young and then it works very well—the young ones can also do it. So when autumn comes, the older swallows organise a school, the young ones are instructed, the old ones fly in front, the young ones behind and copy them. This is what people have imagined.

But not all birds of passage do this. In the case of migratory birds in South Africa, for instance, when spring comes here with us, the older birds fly away first and come back here. The young ones can hold out longer there because they are still strong. The old birds get away earlier from the dust and leave the young ones behind. They don't instruct them at all, don't act as guides; the young have to find their way quite alone.

Some people have said: Oh, well, birds see to a great distance. In fact if it is a case of Africa they would even have to see through the earth! One doesn't get very far with these things. But I will give you an example by which you can see how the matter really lies. There is something else about which one can wonder how it makes its way—namely, a ship. How does a ship find its direction if it is to sail from Europe to America? It takes its direction from the compass. When as yet there were no compasses it went rather badly with the ships; they had to find their direction from the stars. So they steer their course by the compass, that is to say, by forces which are invisible, which are present in the ether. These are the very forces by which the birds find their direction! Only we men have no longer a sense for these invisible forces. The birds, however, have a sense for them, they have an inner compass. What we only learn laboriously, by observing the etheric forces with compass, magnet, etc., a bird has within itself. It flies by the ether, by what is working in universal space.

And so we can say: the earth is everywhere surrounded by ether and the ether contains life-forces. They come from the universe, take hold of earthly substances and from them bring about the living.

But something always remains within as remains of life. When, for instance, you take coral chalk, there is always something left that a little recalls life, something that has branched off from the living. So it is possible to find all sorts of things within it still, which can be administered as quite a good remedy.

And if, as I said, you take silica, which has already become terribly hard, and make use of it as a medicament, you can heal head ailments very effectively.

Thus life is still within it. The whole of it has once been alive. We cannot say that minerals are still living to-day, but they have lived once. They were once constituents of life. There is a remnant left in them which we can extract by all sorts of means and through which they can serve very well as remedies.

So this question as to whether there is also life in stone has been answered. If people only calculate with the forces acting on earth, then they proclaim that the earth looked different millions of years ago. They take no account in this of heavenly space. I said to you lately that if one takes into account what comes from the heavens one does not arrive at anything like such vast numbers of years.

One discovers, however, that here in our regions everything was still frozen and covered with ice, while over in Asia there was already quite a high degree of civilisation with much wisdom spread among the inhabitants.

But one comes to see that in a certain way our earthly life depends on the life outside, the life in the universe. When one goes back six, seven, eight thousand years, the earth with its mineral rocks was quite different from what it is to-day; not so much externally, but internally quite different. And then one goes back farther and farther to the soft condition of the earth. If we want to direct ourselves by the cosmos, we must observe it in the right way.

Now one can observe the cosmos by observing the position of the sun's rising. At the present day the sun in spring rises on the morning of 21st March with the constellation of Pisces behind it. But if one goes farther back—for instance, into the times before the Birth of Christ, the sun rose, not in Pisces, but in the constellation of Aries. That means the vernal point has moved along. If the sun rises in spring on 21st March in Pisces, then about 2,160 years ago it rose in Aries, still earlier in Taurus, still earlier in Gemini. There are twelve such constellations.

Thus the rising position of the sun is always moving in a backward direction; it moves round a whole circle, so that the vernal point goes quite round the earth. Is that understandable? It is always moving farther round from west to east.

One therefore arrives at the fact that formerly the sun rose in Aries, earlier in Taurus, still earlier in Gemini, then in Cancer, Leo, Virgo, then in Libra, in Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and then, as to-day, in Pisces. So when we go back 2,160 years it rose in Aries, another 2,160 years in Taurus, another 2,160 in Gemini, still another in Cancer, another in Leo. Then we come round again until at one time it was rising in Pisces. We come right round. (Sketch.) In 25,920 years the sun makes a revolution round the whole universe.

That is very interesting, and by such a course of the stars one can see how everything on earth changes. With the conditions brought by our present vernal point, we have our high mountains with the dead granite masses, containing feldspar, quartz and mica. It is all dried up, devastated. So it was, too, 25,920 years ago: similar conditions then prevailed on earth. But in between it was all different. For instance, the sun rose at one time in spring in Libra, between Virgo and Scorpio. Then the whole earth was alive, soft, was in fact a kind of plant. We need not go back more than 15,000 years at most, then through the quite different position of the sun the earth had a plant nature, and later an animal nature. We should be able to follow from the sun's course how the influences coming in from cosmic space have altered conditions on the earth.

You must think to yourselves, as you go back in time: the rock in the primeval Alps which is quite hard and solid to-day begins to flow, somewhat as iron flows in an iron foundry. It is naturally not quite the same, for when we go back the flow is reversed, as it were, it is in process of becoming solid. And if we go forward into the future, we shall again have the sun in Libra—for now it rises in Pisces, after 2,160 years in Aquarius, then in Capricorn, Sagittarius and once more in Libra, the Scales. At this future time when the sun rises once more in the Scales, the whole primeval Alpine range will have dissolved. The dense quartzes will have become fluid again, the earth will once more be plant-like and men and animals return to the condition in which they formerly were. In the meanwhile, however, they have absorbed all that they could take in on the earth.

So everything really goes in a circle. We look back to an earlier time when the earth and its hardest formations were fluid. Then the cosmos above brought forth such creatures as I once described to you; they arose through the in-working of heavenly forces and died out. Then all cooled down, solid formations arose and gradually there came the life of to-day. But it all goes back again. The granular quartz and granite, etc., are dissolved and former conditions return, but at a higher stage of evolution.

If you take in your hand a piece of granite containing quartz, you can say: This piece of granite with its quartz will at a future time be alive again. It has lived in former ages and to-day it is dead. It has formed solid ground upon which we can walk about. When we did not need to walk, the solid ground was not there. But one day it will come to life again.

In fact we can say that the earth sleeps as regards cosmic space—only the sleep is long, 15,000 years at least. When the earth was alive it was awake, it was in connection with the whole universe and the life forces of the universe brought forth upon it the great beasts. Later, as solidity was reached, these forces brought forth the human beings. Human beings nowadays have a pleasant time of it on earth—of course in regard to the universe too—they can go about on solid ground. But this solid ground will wake up again—it is really only asleep—it will wake up again and become active life.

If we take a piece of chalk, limestone, just an ordinary bit from the Juras, it is the remains of a portion of life. It is deposited from life, but someday it will be alive again, it is between life and life and is really only asleep.

Now we can use chalk, or calcium, very well as a medical preparation when, for instance, we find that children cannot absorb proper nourishment. This is particularly the case in Germany to-day—it is dreadful there now. When I recently went to Stuttgart to inspect the Waldorf School again, I visited the first Class. We have twenty-eight children in this Class, of whom only nineteen were present, the others were all ill. In another Class, fifteen were ill. And when one goes into it one finds terrible conditions. They brought a little boy into my consulting room and asked: What is to be done with him? He can no longer eat and the doctor has given him up.

Through persistent undernourishment, the digestive organs gradually form the habit of not being able to digest and they refuse everything. People can no longer eat, no matter how much one gives them. You can give them Quaker meals (The Society of Friends supplied the Waldorf School with food gifts) and everything possible, but nothing can help the child because his organs have ceased to act. He looks rather fat and greyish-yellow. What is to be done? The organs must first be made fit again to take in nourishment. Here one is well served by the little bit of life that is in calcium. When calcium is rightly used as a remedy, one can reawaken these sleeping digestive forces so that the child can live. One must give a mixture of calcium with other substances as it does not work by itself alone; it must be made to pass over into the organism. The calcium is absorbed if it is given in 5 per cent dilution.

But what is one using in giving calcium in this dilution? One is using the forces which once, in earlier times, were life forces in the chalk. They are still in it and can be used to reawaken life. But if one uses calcium in high dilution, in homeopathic doses, as one says, not 5 per cent but 5/10,000—not even 5 per 1,000 but 5/10,000—this, mixed with the other substances, acts on the head. It immediately becomes a remedy for the head.

If one gives the calcium allopathically it acts on the digestive organs, but in a quite high dilution it acts on the head and one can vary one's treatment in this way. It is also possible to ask: what is one using in the high dilutions of calcium? Here one is using the forces of the future which are still in it and will come into existence again in future ages.

You see, we must know nature in this way and then it can give us remedies. For there was once life everywhere and will be so again; death only stands between two lives. From primeval rock it is possible to use both past and future life forces in the right way.

This makes us realise something else. We find in our modern world both allopaths and homeopaths. The allopaths cure allopathically and the homeopaths, homeopathically. Well, but as a matter of fact many illnesses cannot be cured homeopathically, many must be cured allopathically. Remedies must be prepared differently. One cannot be a fanatic who swears by words, one must administer the remedies out of a full knowledge—sometimes so, sometimes so. Anthroposophy does not go in for catchwords—allopathic—homeopathic—but it studies the matter and says: the allopath works principally on the stomach, intestines, kidneys; there he is successful. Homeopathy is successful when the source of the illness is in the head, as in influenza. Many illnesses have their origin in the head. One must know how things really take their course in nature. People invent catchwords to-day as they no longer have real knowledge. Catchwords are always invented when things have ceased to be understood.

It is naturally not easy to arrive at the truth, for the allopath says: I have often cured such and such ... and the homeopath says: I have often cured such and such. ... Of course they always leave out the diseases they have not cured!

But take a man like Professor Virchow of Berlin, a doctor and professor who certainly could not be accused of not standing completely in modern medicine, who has even been called a genuine Liberal by the Free Thought Party. Yet with regard to cures he has been obliged to admit the following: “When a doctor in our modern medical world can show that he has cured one hundred people, the truth really is that fifty of these would have got well without him, and 20 per cent would have recovered even if he had used quite different remedies. So 70 per cent of cures are not to be attributed to modern medicine—30 per cent at most.” This is what Virchow calculated and he stood fully within the world of modern medicine.

It can definitely be stated that the right remedy, rightly employed, is effective; everyone can convince himself of that. Quicksilver, for instance, although it has after-effects, is nevertheless efficacious. And so one must just find the right thing. Sometimes it is terribly complicated, sometimes the organism has even become too brittle to stand the cure. But in a certain sense, through a real knowledge of what exists in nature, we can see how the various substances work. As dead substances they are really only in the middle between two periods of life and we can see their effect on man. But it is essential to have a real knowledge concerning their life.

Now the peculiar thing is that if one wants to understand anything, one must always start from life. Even in regard to colours we must take our start from life.

Sometimes when one sees modern pictures one has the feeling that there is no flesh behind, but that wood has simply been smeared with colour. Modern painters are quite unable to reproduce the tint of flesh-colour, because they have no living feeling that flesh colour is created out of the human being. Nowhere does it appear on any other material. One has to understand flesh colour and then the other colours can be understood. I will speak more about this on another occasion.

The child that they brought to me in the Waldorf School and who had been treated with calcium by the school doctor had completely lost the flesh colour and had become yellow from within outwards ... let us hope that people don't say that a proper remedy was not used! Living activity is inherent in colour and we are therefore experimenting in using the less dead for colours. So when we painted the Goetheanum we used plant colours as they come more from the living. In colour too you must go to life.

You see, the question as to whether rocks also have life was not so foolish, in fact it is quite intelligent. It has given us the opportunity of considering how the rocks are alive in the course of the earth's evolution, become dead again, and so on, and how human life is related to this.

Let us try to think once about the fact how many people are still able to evoke a clear, somewhat more in-depth idea in their souls walking through the streets and looking at the preparations of Christmas everywhere. There are slightly clear ideas about this festival today and they correspond less to the intentions of those—we are allowed to speak as theosophists this way—who once used these great festivals as symbols of the infinite and imperishable in the world. You can convince yourselves of it adequately if you have a look at the so-called Christmas considerations of our newspapers. There probably cannot be anything bleaker and stranger at the same time to that which it concerns than what is disseminated by the printed paper into the world at this time. Let a kind of summary of that pass before our souls that these various autumn talks on the spiritual-scientific horizon have brought us. It should not be a pedantic, schoolmasterly summary, but a summary of the kind as it can arise in our hearts if we link on Christmas from the spiritual-scientific point of view. The spiritual-scientific view of life should not be a grey theory, not an external confession, not a philosophy, but it should pulsate in our life directly. The modern human being is estranged to the immediate nature, much more than he thinks, much more than still at the time of Goethe.

On the other hand, does anyone still feel the whole depth of that saying by Goethe, which the great poet spoke when he entered the circles of Weimar and began a life epoch extremely important for him at the same time? At that time, he addressed a hymn, a kind of prayer to Nature with her mysterious forces:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—unable to come out of her, and unable to go deeper into her. Uninvited and not warned she takes us up in the circulation of her dance and drifts away with us, until we are tired and drop out of her arm.

She creates forever new figures; what is there was never, what was does not come again—everything is new and, nevertheless, always the old.

We live in the middle of her and are strange to her. She speaks continually with us and does not betray her mystery to us. We continuously work on her and, nevertheless, do not exercise power over her.

She seems to be out for individuality of everything and makes nothing of the individuals. She is always building and always destroying, and her workshop is inaccessible.

She lives in nothing but children; where is the mother? She is the only artist: from the simplest material to the biggest contrasts; by all appearance without effort to the biggest completion—to the most precise assertiveness, always covered with something soft. Any of her works has own being, any of her phenomena the most isolated concept, and, nevertheless, everything constitutes one.

She plays a game: whether she sees it herself, we do not know, and, nevertheless, she plays it for us who stand in the corner.

It is an everlasting life, becoming and moving in her, and, nevertheless, it does not move further along. It changes forever and no moment of standstill is in her. She has no concept of remaining and curses the standstill. She is firm. Her step is measured, her exceptions are seldom, and her principles are unalterable...

We all are her children. If we believe to act according to her principles least of all, maybe, we act most of all according to this big principle that floods through Nature and streams into us. Who does feel the other significant saying by Goethe so deeply even today with which Goethe tried not less to express the empathy with the concealed forces common to Nature and the human being, where Goethe approaches Nature not as a lifeless being like the modern materialistic thinking where he speaks to her like a living spirit:

Spirit sublime, all that for which I prayed,
all that you now have granted me. In fire
you showed your face to me, but not in vain.
You gave me for my realm all Nature's splendour,
with power to feel and to enjoy it. You grant
not only awed, aloof acquaintanceship,
you let me look deep down into her heart
as if it were the bosom of a friend.
You lead the ranks of living beings past me,
and teach me thus to know my fellow creatures
in air and water and in silent wood.
And when the storm-swept forest creaks and groans,
when, as it falls, the giant fir strips down
and crushes neighbouring boughs and trunks, and when
the hill echoes its fall as muffled thunder,
you guide me to the safety of a cave,
reveal my self to me, and then my heart's
profound and secret wonders are unveiled.

(Faust I, Forest and Cave, v. 3217-3234)

Goethe tried out of his feeling of nature to refresh something of that, which flowed out of emotion and knowledge at the same time by this mood. This is the mood of the times in which wisdom still was in league with nature, when those symbols of empathy with nature and the universe were created, which we recognise as the great festivals from the spiritual-scientific point of view. Such a festival has become something abstract, almost uninteresting to the soul and to the heart. Today often the word about which we can argue to which we can swear weighs much more than that which should apply to this word originally. This external word should be the representative, the announcement, the symbol of the big creative word that lives in the outside nature and in the whole universe. It revives again in us if we recognise ourselves correctly, and all human beings have to become aware of it with those opportunities that are in particular suited to it according to the course of nature. This was the intention when the great festivals were established. Let us attempt to apply our knowledge we have got in the course of the spiritual-scientific talks to understand something that the old sages expressed in the Christmas.

Christmas is not only a Christian festival. It existed where religious feeling expressed itself. If you look around in old Egypt, thousands and thousands years before our calendar, if you walk across to Asia, even if you go up into our areas, again many years before our calendar, everywhere you find this same festival during the days in which also the birth of Christ is celebrated by the Christians.

What a festival was celebrated everywhere on earth since ancient times during these days?—We want to refer to nothing but to those marvellous fire festivals, which were celebrated in the areas of Northern and Central Europe in old times. During these days, that festival was mainly celebrated in our areas, in Scandinavia, Scotland, England, within the circles of the old Celts by their priests, the so-called druids. What did one celebrate there?

One celebrated the ending wintertime and the springtime announcing itself again bit by bit. Of course, we still approach wintertime advancing to Christmas. But in nature a victory has already announced itself there which can just be the symbol of a festival of hope for the human being, or better said—if we use the word that exists for this festival almost in all languages—the symbol of a festival of confidence, of trust and faith.

The victory of the sun over the opposing powers of nature: this is the symbol. We have felt the shorter and shorter growing days. This decreasing in length of the days is an expression of a decease, better said of the natural forces falling asleep up to the day at which we celebrate Christmas and at which our ancestors celebrated the same festival. During this day, the days start becoming longer. The light of the sun celebrates its victory over darkness. Today, this appears to us, thinking materialistically, even more than we believe it, as an event about which we do no longer think in particular. It appeared to those who had a lively feeling and wisdom connected with this feeling as a living expression of a spiritual experience, of an experience of the divinity, which leads our life. As if in the single human life an important event takes place that decides something, one felt such a solstice in that time as something important in the life of a higher being. Yes, even more: one did not feel this decreasing and increasing of the days immediately as an expression of such an event in the life of a higher being, but still more like a reminiscent sign of something much bigger, something unique. Thus, we conceive of the great basic idea of Christmas as a universal festival, a festival of humanity of the highest rank.

In the times in which a real secret doctrine one saw something occurring in nature at Christmas that was considered as a commemoration of a great event which had taken place once on earth. The priests, who were the teachers of the peoples, gathered the faithful around themselves during these days at midnight and tried to reveal a great mystery to them and spoke about the following. I do not tell anything sophisticated to you here, anything found by the abstract science, but I say something that lived in the mysteries, in secret cult sites, because the priests gathered their faithful around themselves by that which they said to them to give them strength for their teachings.

Today, they said, we see the victory of the sun over the darkness announcing itself. Thus, it also was once on this earth. There the sun celebrated the great victory over the darkness. This happened in such a way: until then all physical, all bodily life on our earth had almost only reached the stage of animals. What lived on our earth as the highest realm was only on the level to be prepared to receive the immortal human soul. Then a moment came in this prehistoric time, a great moment of human development, when the immortal imperishable human soul descended from divine heights. The wave of life had developed up to that time in such a way that the human body had become able to take up the imperishable soul in itself. Indeed, this human ancestor ranked higher than the materialist naturalists believe. However, the spiritual part, the immortal part was not yet in him. It descended only from another, higher planet to our earth, which should now become the scene of its work, the place of residence of that which is now undetachable to us, of our soul.

We call these human ancestors the Lemurian race. The Atlantean race and then ours, which we call the Aryan race, followed it. Within this Lemurian race, the human bodies were fertilised by the higher human soul. Spiritual science calls this great moment of human development the descent of the divine sons of the spirit.

Since that time, this human soul forms and works in the human body for its higher development. Unlike the materialist natural sciences imagine, the human body was fertilised by the imperishable soul at this time. At that time contrary to the view of the materialist naturalists, something happened in the big universe that belongs to the most important events of our human development.

At that time, that constellation, that mutual position of earth, moon, and sun gradually appeared, which made the descent of the souls possible. The sun became significant for growth and thriving of the human being and of the plants and animals belonging to him. Only somebody who realises spiritually the whole becoming of humanity and earth correctly sees this connection of sun, moon, and earth with the human beings living on earth.

There was a time—one taught this at these old times—, when the earth was one with the sun and moon. They were one body. The beings still possessed figures and appearances different from those living on earth today, because they were adapted to that world body which consisted of sun, moon and earth together. Everything that lives on this earth received its being because first the sun and then the moon separated, and that these heavenly bodies interrelated now externally with our earth. The mystery of the togetherness of the human spirit with the entire universal spirit is based on this relationship. Spiritual science calls the universal spirit logos, which encloses sun, moon, and earth at the same time. We live, we work and we are in it.

As well as the earth was born out of the body which enclosed sun and moon at the same time, the human being was born out of a spirit, of a soul to which sun and earth and moon belong at the same time. If the human being looks at the sun, at the moon, he should see not only these external physical bodies, but he should regard them as external bodies of spiritual beings. Modern materialism has admittedly forgotten this. However, who can no longer regard sun and moon as the bodies of spirits can also not recognise the human body as the body of a spirit. As true as the human body is the bearer of a spirit, as true the heavenly bodies are the bearers of spiritual beings.

The human being also belongs to these spiritual beings. As well as his body is separated from the forces which prevail in the sun and moon, and, nevertheless, as his external physical accommodates forces which are active in the sun and moon, the same spirituality, which rules on the sun and the moon is also active in his soul. While the human being became this being on earth, he became dependent on that effect of the sun, which it causes as a special body shining on the earth.

Our ancestors felt as spiritual children of the whole universe that way, and they said to themselves, we have become human beings because the spirit of the sun caused our spiritual form. The victory of the sun over the darkness signifies to us a memory of the victory, which our soul gained in those days, in the times in which the sun appeared for the first time in such a way as it shines now onto the earth. It was a victory of the sun, when the immortal soul entered the physical body in the sign of the sun, when it descended into the darkness of desires and passions.

Let us imagine the life of the spirit. The darkness precedes the solar victory. It followed a former solar time only. Thus, it was also with the human soul. This human soul originates from the original divinity. However, it had to disappear for a while in unconsciousness to build up the lower human nature within this unconsciousness; since this human soul itself built up the lower human nature gradually to inhabit this house built by itself. If you imagine that a master builder builds a house, according to his best forces, and enters it later, you have a right simile of the entry of the immortal human soul into the human body. The human soul could work only unconsciously in that time on its house. This unaware work is expressed in the simile by the darkness. The emergence of consciousness, the lighting up of the conscious human soul is expressed in the simile by the solar victory.

Thus, this solar victory signified to those who still had a lively feeling of the connection of the human being with the universe the moment in which they had received the most important of their earthly existence. This great moment was maintained in that celebration.

At all times one imagined the way of the human being on earth in such a way that this human being becomes more and more similar to the regular rhythmical way of nature. If we look from the human soul at that which encloses its life now, at the way of the sun in the universe and at all with which this way of the sun is connected, something becomes clear to us that is infinitely important to feel. It is the big rhythmical, the big harmonious in contrast to the chaotic, to the unharmonious in the own human nature. Look at the sun, pursue it on its way, and you see how rhythmically, how regularly its phenomena return in the course of the day and of the year. You see how regularly and rhythmically everything is connected in nature under the influence of the sun.

On occasion, I have already emphasised that everything is rhythmical with the beings ranking below the human being. Imagine the sun deviating for a moment, for a fraction of a second only, and imagine the unbelievable, indescribable mess, which would be caused in our universe.

The rhythmical life processes of all beings that are dependent on the sun are connected with this harmony. Imagine the sun in the course of the year how it evokes the beings of nature in the spring, imagine how little you are able to think that the violet blossoms at a time different from that when you are used. Imagine that the seeds are sown at another time and the harvest may take place at another time than it takes place. Up to the animal life, everything appears to you depending on the rhythmical way of the sun. Even with the human being, everything is rhythmical, regular, and harmonious, as far as it is not subjected to the human passions, instincts or even to the human mind. Observe the pulse, the way of digestion, and admire the big rhythm and feel the great, infinite wisdom that floods through the whole nature, and then compare the irregular, the chaotic to it which prevails in the human passions and desires and in particular in the human mind and thinking. Try once to let the regular of your pulse and your breath pass yourselves by, and compare it to the irregularity of your thinking, feeling and willing. They wander around aimlessly.

On the other hand, imagine how wisely the life powers are arranged how the rhythmical has to overcome the chaos. Which crimes do not all human passions and hedonism commit against the rhythm of the human body! On occasion I have already mentioned here how marvellous it is for him who gets to know the heart by anatomy, this wonderfully arranged organ of the human body, and must say to himself what has it to bear because the human being enjoys tea, coffee and so on that has an effect on the rhythmical, harmonious heartbeat. Thus, it is with the entire rhythmical, divine nature that our ancestors admired and the soul of which is the sun with its regular way.

While the sages and their followers looked at the sun, they said to themselves, you are the picture of that which is not yet this soul, which is born with you, but which it should become.—The divine world order presented itself to these sages in its whole glory. The Christian worldview also says that the glory is in the divine heights (Latin gloria in excelsis deo). The word “glory” means revelation, not honour, or splendour.

One should not say, glory to God in highest heaven—but God is revealed in the heavens today.—This is the true meaning of the sentence. In this sentence, one can fully feel the glory flowing through the world. In former times, one felt in such a way that one established this world harmony as a great ideal for that who should be the leader of the remaining humanity. Therefore, one spoke at all times and everywhere where one was aware of these matters of the “sun hero.”

In the temple sites where the initiation was carried out one distinguished seven degrees. I use the Persian terms of these degrees. The first degree is that where the human being went beyond the everyday feeling, where he came to a higher mental feeling and to the knowledge of the spirit. One called such a human being “raven.” Hence, the ravens are those, which announce to the initiates in the temples what takes place outdoors in the world. When the medieval poetry of wisdom wanted to portray an initiate in the person of a medieval ruler, for example, Barbarossa who should wait inside of the earth with the treasures of wisdom of the earth for that big moment when Christianity should rejuvenate humanity, it let the ravens be again the messengers. Even the Old Testament speaks of the ravens of Elias (Elia, Elijah).

The initiates of the second degree are the “occult.” The third degree is that of the “fighters,” the fourth degree is that of the “lions.” The initiates of the fifth degree are called with the name of their own people: Persian or Indian and so on, because only the initiate of the fifth degree is the true representative of his people. One called the sixth degree “sun hero” or “sun runner.” The seventh degree had the name “Father.”

Why did one call the initiate of the sixth degree a sun hero? Who had climbed up so high on the ladder of spiritual knowledge had to have developed such an inner life at least that it ran after the pattern of the divine rhythm in the whole universe. He had to feel, to think in such a way that anything chaotic, anything arrhythmic, anything inharmonious no longer existed with him. This was the demand, which one made on him in the sixth degree of initiation. One considered them as holy human beings, as a pattern, as ideals, and said about them, as big as the misfortune would be to the universe if it were possible that the sun deviated from its way for a quarter of a minute. It would also be a big misfortune if it were possible for a sun hero to deviate from the way of the big morality, from the road of the soul rhythm.—One called somebody a sun hero who had found such a sure way in his mind like the sun outdoors in the universe. All nations had such sun heroes.

Our scholars know so little about these matters. Indeed, it strikes them that sun myths about the lives of all great religious founders formed. However, they do not know that one was in the habit of creating the leading heroes sun heroes with the ceremonies of initiation. It is not miraculous at all, if that which the ancient peoples had attempted to put into them is found out again by the materialist research. With Buddha and even with Christ, one looked for such sun myths and found them. Here you have the reason why one could find this with them. They were put into them first, so that they showed an immediate imprint of the solar rhythm. Then these sun heroes were the big pattern that one should try to equal.

What did one imagine what happened in the soul of such a hero who had found such an inner harmony?—One imagined that in such a way that now no longer only a single human soul lived in him, but that in him something of the universal soul had emerged which flows through the whole universe. In Greece, one called this universal soul, which flows through the whole universe, Chrestós, and the most elated sages of the East know it as buddhi. If the human being has stopped only feeling as the bearer of his individual soul and if he experiences anything of the universal, then he has created an image of that in himself, which combined at that time as a solar soul with the human body; then he has reached something tremendously important on the road of humanity.

If we look at this human being with such an ennobled soul, we are able to put the future of the human race and the whole relationship of this human future with the idea, the image of humanity generally, before ourselves. As humanity faces us today, one can imagine only that certain matters are decided by the fact that people bring about a decision in quarrel and discord by a kind of majority, by a majority decision. Because where one still looks at such majority decisions as something ideal, there one has not yet understood what truth is. Where does truth live in us? Truth lives in us where we pledge ourselves to think logically. On the other hand, would it not be nonsense to decide by majority decision whether two times two are four or three times four are twelve? If the human being has recognised once what is true, then millions may come and say, it is different, nevertheless, he has his assurance in himself.

So far, we are in relation to the scientific thinking, to that thinking, which is no longer affected by human passions, desires, and instincts. Where passions, desires and instincts play a part, the human beings are still in quarrel, in confused mess as the instincts form a wild chaos generally. However, if once the desires, instincts, and passions are purified, have become what one calls buddhi or the Chrestós, if they are developed up to that height on which today the logical thinking is without passion, then that the human ideal is attained which shines to us in the old religions of wisdom, in Christianity, in the anthroposophic spiritual science. If our thinking and feeling is so purified that that which one feels harmonises with that which our fellow men feel, if on this earth the same epoch has arrived for the feeling and the sensation, as it has come for the equalising intellect, if buddhi is on this earth, if the Chrestós is embodied in the human race, then the ideal of the old teachers of wisdom, of Christianity, of anthroposophy is fulfilled. Then one needs to vote just as little about that which one regards as good, noble and right as one needs to vote about what one has recognised as logically wrong or right. Everybody can put this ideal before his soul, and doing this, he has the ideal of the sun hero before him, the same that all esoteric teachers also have who are initiated in the sixth degree.

Even our German mystics of the Middle Ages felt this, while they pronounced a word of deep meaning, the word deification or apotheosis. This word existed in all religions of wisdom. What does it signify? It signifies the following: once also those at whom we look today as the spirits of the universe passed a chaotic stage which humanity experiences today. These leading spirits of the universe brought themselves up to their divine stage where their manifestations of life sound harmoniously through the universe. What appears to us today as the harmonious way of the sun in the course of the year, with the growth of the plants, in the life of the animals, was once chaotic and brought it to this great harmony. Where these spirits stood once, the human being stands today. He develops from his chaos to a future harmony that is modelled after the present sun, the present universal harmony.

The anthroposophic mood of Christmas results from this, not as a theory, not as a doctrine, but as a living feeling lowered into our souls. If we feel it so sure that the splendour, the revelation of the divine harmony, appears in the heights of the heavens, and if we know that the revelation of this harmony sounds once from our own soul, then we feel the other that will happen within humanity due to this harmony. Then we feel the peace of those who are of good will (Latin: et pax hominibus bonae volutatis). Thus, two feelings are connected as Christmas feelings. If we look into the divine world order, into the revelation, at its splendour in the heights of the heavens, and look at the human future, we can already feel that harmony in advance which takes place on earth in the human beings in the future who have the feeling and the sensation of it. The more that lowers itself into us what we feel outdoors in the world as harmony, the more peace and harmony will be on this earth.

Thus, the great ideal of peace places itself as the highest feeling of nature before our souls if we feel the way of the sun in nature in the right way during Christmastide. If we understand the victory of the sunlight over the darkness during these days, we take the big confidence, the big trust from it that connects our own developing souls with this world harmony, and then we let that be known not for nothing, which lives in this world harmony in our souls. Then something lives in us that is harmonious, then the seed falls into the soul that brings peace on this earth, in the sense of the peace between the religions. Those human beings are of good will who feel such peace, such a peace, as it spreads over the earth if that higher stage of the unity of feeling is attained which is attained only in the equalising intellect today. Then love flowing through everything replaces quarrel and discord. Goethe said in the same hymn I have quoted that a few swallows from this cup of love compensate a life full of trouble.

That is why Christmas was a festival of confidence, of trust and hope in all religions of wisdom because we feel during these days that the light must be victorious. Out of this big universal feeling, the Christian church determined in the fourth century to reschedule the birthday celebration of the Saviour on the same day in which with all great religions of wisdom the victory of the light over the darkness was celebrated. Until the fourth century Christmas, Christ's birthday celebration was completely variable. Only in the fourth century, one decided to let the Saviour be born on that day when this victory of the light over the darkness has always been celebrated.

Today we cannot deal with the Christian teachings of wisdom, which will be an object of a talk next year. But one thing should and must be said already today that nothing was more justified than to reschedule the birthday celebration of that divine individuality in this time, which offers the guarantee, the confidence to the Christian that his soul, his divinity will carry off the victory over everything that is darkness in his only outward world. Thus, Christianity is in harmony with all great world religions. When the Christmas bells sound, the human being may probably remember that during these days this festival was celebrated all over the world. Everywhere it was celebrated where one had understood the true big progress of the human soul in this world, where one knew something of the significance of spirit and spiritual life, where one tried to practice self-knowledge in the practical sense.

We have today not spoken of an uncertain, an abstract feeling of nature, but we have spoken about a feeling of nature in any lively spirituality. If we go back to the word of Goethe: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by her” and so on, we may be clear in our mind that we interpret nature, not in the materialistic sense, but that we see the external expression and the physiognomy of the universal divine spirit in her. As the physical is born from the physical, the mental and spiritual from the divine-mental and divine-spiritual, and as the physical, the body combines with merely material forces, the soul combines with the spirit.

The great annual festivals are there as symbols for humanity to feel this in connection with the whole universe and to use our knowledge, our thinking to feel one with the whole universe not uncertain but most certain. If one feels anything about it again, these festivals will be different from today, then they will plant themselves again vividly in soul and heart, then they will be to us that which they should be really to us: nodal points of the year, which connect us with the universal spirit.

If we have fulfilled our duties, our tasks of everyday life all the year round, at these points of the year, we look at that which connects us with the everlasting. Even if we know that we had to grind out quite a few in the course of the year, during these days we get a feeling of the fact that there is peace and harmony beyond all fight and chaos. Therefore, these festivals are annual festivals of the great ideals; and Christmas is the birthday celebration of the greatest ideal of humanity, the ideal that humanity must gain if it wants to reach its destination generally. The birthday celebration of that which the human being can feel and want is Christmas if one understands it properly.

The anthroposophic spiritual science wants to go making understandable this festival again. We want to announce not a dogma, no mere doctrine, or philosophy to the world but life. This is our ideal that everything that we say and teach, and is included in our writings, in our science passes into life. It passes into life if the human being practices spiritual science also in the everyday life everywhere, so that we do no longer need to speak of spiritual science, if from all pulpits spiritual-scientific life sounds through the words, which are spoken to the believers, without saying the word theosophy or spiritual science. If at all courts the human actions are considered with spiritual-scientific feeling, if at the sickbed the doctor feels spiritual-scientifically and heals spiritual-scientifically, if at school the teacher develops spiritual science for the adolescent child, if in all streets one thinks, feels, and acts spiritual-scientifically, so that the spiritual-scientific doctrine becomes superfluous—then our ideal is attained, then spiritual science will be mundane. Then, however, spiritual science will also be in the great festive turning points of the year. The human being connects his everyday tasks with the spiritual using the spiritual-scientific thinking, feeling, and willing. On the other hand, he lets the everlasting and imperishable, the spiritual sun shine in his soul at the great annual festivals. They remind him that in him a true, higher self is, a divine, a sun-like, a light that will forever win over all darkness, over all chaos, that gives a soul peace, that will always compensate all fight, all war and strife in the world.

First appeared in the Golden Blade 1977.¹

Translated by Dorothy Lenn

In the course of these winter lectures I have repeatedly said that there is such a thing as knowledge of supersensible worlds. We have discussed bow the human being can attain to such knowledge, and we have many times spoken of its fruits. I want now to give two lectures which will serve to illustrate what we mean by knowledge of the higher worlds.

With the help of two examples, out of many that might have been selected, I propose to show how clairvoyant knowledge developed in a certain region—the kind of clairvoyant knowledge that has been, or ought to have been, left behind by present-day humanity. Clairvoyant knowledge given by natural forces, by natural capacities, will be my subject to-day. Next time I will discuss, again by means of examples, how clairvoyant knowledge can be acquired through strict training, by specific methods. To-day we will speak of the knowledge that led our ancestors to a form of spiritual perception which has now been superseded; next time I will deal with the kind of clairvoyance which has existed in all ages, but which has to undergo a different training from epoch to epoch.

I have already pointed out that Spiritual Science speaks of an evolution of human consciousness. What we call our consciousness to-day, the consciousness whereby we recreate the outer world within us in thoughts, in mental images, in ideas, is only one stage of evolution. Another stage preceded it, and yet another stage will follow it. When anyone speaks to-day of the theory of evolution, he usually means the evolution of outer form, of the forms of material existence. Spiritual Science speaks of an evolution of the soul, of the spirit, and therefore of consciousness. We can look back to an earlier form of consciousness which has been superseded by the present form, and we can look forward to a future form of consciousness which will develop only gradually. The earlier state of consciousness we may call subconsciousness, and the consciousness to which our present consciousness can be developed, by spiritual-scientific methods, we may call superconsciousness. Thus we can differentiate three consecutive stages—subconsciousness, consciousness, superconsciousness.

In a certain sense all consciousness to-day is a stage of development of consciousness in general, just as the forms of the higher animals are developments of the universal animal form. Present-day consciousness has evolved from a lower stage. It is surrounded by external objects, which it perceives through the senses—hearing, sight, taste and so on. From what was first perception it makes concepts, mental images, ideas. Thus an external world of objects which work upon us is mirrored in our consciousness.

Subconsciousness was not like that. It was of a far more direct nature. We may call it a lower clairvoyant consciousness, because whoever possessed it did not approach objects with sense-organs and straightway seek to make concepts of them, but the concepts were there directly. Pictures arose and faded away. Let us suppose that the clairvoyant consciousness encountered an external object which was dangerous to it. To-day we see the object, and the mental image called forth by the sight of it brings about the consciousness of danger. It was not like that in the earlier clairvoyant consciousness. The external object was not perceived in clear outline, especially in the earliest times. Something like a dream-picture arose and revealed whether the object was sympathetic or unsympathetic. The fluctuating pictures in dreams to-day will serve to illustrate this for us. The dreams of a normal person to-day have no real connection with any outer world. But suppose something quite definite were to correspond to every picture which arose in us like a dream-picture, one picture occurring in case of dangers another in the presence of a useful object, then we could say that it was immaterial whether we were awake or dreaming, for we could direct our lives according to these pictures!

Our present consciousness has developed out of such a dream-life, which allowed the inner nature of things, their inner soul-quality, to rise up before us. And this dream-consciousness has passed through manifold forms before reaching its present form. If we look back in history as it is revealed to us by Spiritual Science, we reach at last, in the far-distant past, a state of soul in which the external was not perceptible, but in which the surrounding world, possessed inwardly by the soul, was perceived by an old clairvoyant consciousness. But this consciousness had in consequence one attribute which, contrasted with the fundamental attribute of the soul to-day, must be designated as imperfect. It was not self-conscious; the soul could not say “I” to itself, could not distinguish itself properly from its environment. Only because external objects with sharp contours confront the soul can it distinguish itself from them. Thus man has had to purchase his self-consciousness by the surrender of his old clairvoyance. All evolution is an advance which at the same time involves the renunciation of certain advantages of the earlier stage. Now at each stage something from the earlier stage lingers on into later times, and in certain circumstances we can, from such legacies of the past, see the earlier conditions projected into the present where they rank as abnormalities.

We find traces of such atavisms even in the human body, as for example in the muscles round the ear, which in an earlier stage moved the ear. In animals these muscles still have a purpose; in human beings they still exist, but few men are able to move their ears voluntarily. At one time human beings had a form of body in which such muscles were needed. To-day they are just relics of the past—vestiges of an earlier stage of evolution.

Just as we find certain organic survivals in these outer structures, so, too, we find remains of other early evolutionary conditions. Thus we see traces of the old clairvoyance projected right into our own time, but clouded and changed by our present stage of development, and hence abnormal. This throws light upon the old European clairvoyance, which differs in a certain way from the clairvoyance of the East. To-day I want to go into these differences.

What are these survivals of the old clairvoyant state of mankind? We can distinguish two kinds. One of them speaks for itself and is a true legacy of the past. I am referring to the dream and to dream experiences. The other vestiges of the past are in quite a different category. They are very much coloured and altered by present-day development, whereas the dream has not been changed by man, but by advancing evolution. The other remnants of the past are vision, premonition, and deuteroscopy, or second sight.

Let us first take the dream. It is something left behind from the old picture-consciousness But into that ancient consciousness the nature of the object really penetrated, whereas the dream to-day, although it still shows certain characteristics of the old picture-consciousness, has lost its real value, its reality. Let us take an example. Someone dreams that he sees a tree-frog, snatches at it and catches it Then he wakes up and finds a corner of the bedcover in his band. The dream symbolised the external event. Had the man met the dream with objective consciousness, he would have seen that he had the bedcover in his hand. But this is how the dream symbolises. It can become very dramatic. For example, a student dreams that on leaving the lecture-room he is jostled by another student. It comes to a duel. The seconds are chosen, they go to the agreed place, the distance is measured, the pistols are loaded, the first shot is fired. But in that moment the student wakes up, and knocks over the chair by his bedside. There we have the same thing. If the student concerned had seen the event with his objective consciousness, had he been awake, he would have seen that the chair had been knocked over, or possibly it would not have been knocked over. Now, however, the dream gives a more or less symbolic expression to what happened.

There are all kinds of such dreams; they may even have some element of reality. But in typical cases we have to do with an arbitrary connection between what is pictured and the outer event. The dream itself shows that one is dealing with a picture; but it does not show any direct connection between the picture and the inner qualities of the outer world. In direct consciousness a man would not have been obliged to touch salt with his tongue in order to recognise it, but a quite definite dream-picture would have arisen before him, and there would have been one for vinegar, another for sugar, and yet another for a dangerous being, and so on. With every being in nature there went a specific picture.

Something of this survives in dream-consciousness. But because present-day man has contracted his whole being into self-consciousness, because he has cut himself off from the outer world, differentiated himself from it, his dream-pictures no longer have any connection with it. Through having made the normal transition from dream-consciousness to self-consciousness, he has lost connection with the outer world.

It is different as regards the other three survivals—vision, premonition, and deuteroscopy, or second sight. We have often described the course of human evolution somewhat as follows. The human being, as he is to-day, consists of four members: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. The ego is the last member to develop, and it is through the attainment of the ego that man has become a self-conscious being; he has thereby wrested his being from the life in his lower members. When the ego was not so far developed as it is to-day, when man still lived in his astral body, when the astral body was the bearer of his consciousness, this consciousness was pre-eminently a dream-consciousness. It was the astral body which caused these pictures to come and go. Hence it is easy to understand that man was then more closely united with his lower members. Thus it is as if man had become free in his astral body, as if he had disengaged himself from it and had thereby acquired his present objective consciousness.

As man was once submerged in his astral body, so in still earlier times he was submerged in his etheric and physical bodies. Then he had still lower forms of consciousness. Thus we have three states of subconsciousness below the present objective consciousness.

Imagine that a man is swimming below the surface of the sea. It is then possible for him to see what is in the sea. He sees what happens at the bottom of the sea, what swims and moves there, and so on. What he encounters there is quite different from what confronts him if he rises to the surface and looks up at the star-strewn heavens. Similarly, man has been lifted out of that stage of consciousness in which he was aware of what was conveyed to him by astral, etheric and physical bodies; he has risen to self-consciousness. In certain abnormal cases, however, he can revert to the sea of subconsciousness. In dreams this happens involuntarily. What he has won by rising out of this sea he can take back again into it.

Imagine a man plunging back into this sea and able to compare all that he perceives below with what he has learnt above. That is what it is like to-day. The man takes with him what he has experienced here above. It is not as it is with a diver who takes nothing but his memory with him, who can make comparisons only with the help of his memory. Whoever plunges into the sea of subconsciousness after having become a modern man colours everything below with his experiences above. What has been experienced above is carried as a sheath into the subconscious, and man receives no clear picture of that world, but a picture clouded by the world above.

When a man plunges into his astral body, he transplants himself artificially into the sphere occupied by his consciousness when he himself still lived in his astral body. This is how what to-day we call visions come about. Were man to descend into his astral body without knowing anything of the modern world, he would really experience the inwardness of objects; they would appear to him in their true guise. To-day, however, they appear to him as a distorted reflection of what can be experienced only in the upper world of consciousness. Therein lies both the truth and the deceptiveness of visions. Anyone who descends into the world of vision may always be sure that the cause of what he sees lies in the soul-environment; but it is also certain that the vision confronting him will be distorted, that it will not show him things in their true guise, but will imitate what occurs in the world above. Hence a man’s visions usually indicate what the men of his own day are experiencing. This can be checked in full detail, from decade to decade.

Let us suppose that a man plunged into that world at a time when there were no telegrams and no telephone. Then he would have seen no telegrams and no telephone in the world below, whereas in our own day the incidence of telegrams and telephones in visions becomes more and more frequent. That, too, is why the pious Catholic, who in his objective consciousness has so often seen the figure of the Madonna, takes this figure with him, and she appears to him down there too. It is not an expression of the reality, but something which the person has taken down with him, and in which he clothes the reality. In such a case he has carried down into the world below what he has experienced in the world above. Thus when a man returns in vision into the world from which he has emerged, he gives an abnormal colouring to what he experiences.

If he plunges back again into the etheric body, he experiences what we may call premonition. But this is even more dangerous, because his state of consciousness has gone still further back. There man becomes involved in all the tangled threads of existence out of which he had raised himself into ego-consciousness; but in that case, too, he carries below all that he has acquired above. He is unable to see the threads in their true form.

Just think how little of what is all around man comes within his range. The thoughts which he makes (about cause and effect for example) are limited to a small section of the world. But the whole world in its entire circumference hangs together, and there are other relationships involved. Man is, as it were, standing upon an island of existence, and the island is all he sees. But this island is related to the whole cosmos. In his etheric body man is much more closely connected with the cosmos than he is in his present consciousness. If he were able to receive in its purity what his ether body tells him, he would see future events, because down in his etheric body things converge. He would see that an event, which might not emerge into reality for perhaps ten years, was already there in germ. But man takes down with him his little intellect, his narrow little mind soul. Hence what emerges as premonition is falsified; that is why so little reliance can usually be placed upon premonitions, just as generally there is no objective truth in visions which occur by way of nature.

When man plunges into his physical body, premonition can pass over into penetration of space. Whereas in premonition he sees other times, in deuteroscopy he can see what happens in the far distance, beyond the range of the physical eye. These pictures are like a Fata Morgana. Abnormal phenomena such as those reported by Swedenborg come into this category.² But here the deceptions are even greater, and nothing ought to be accepted which has not been tested by a trained, disciplined seer. Such conditions, which to-day are morbid, are survivals of an ancient clairvoyance which was once thoroughly healthy, was once something which placed the man in a relationship of complete understanding with his environment.

In the evolution of European peoples, in particular, we find everywhere a picture-consciousness of varying antiquity which saw the world in its inner, soul-spiritual nature. But the ego-consciousness of these peoples was still quite undeveloped. Have we anything left of what was seen and related by these people of olden times, who had not yet got the mature ego-consciousness, who had a transitional consciousness between the old picture-consciousness and the objective consciousness? We have indeed a beautiful and precious survival of it in myths and sagas, in the whole range of mythology. The content of mythology is so often described to-day as folk-poetry. Clouds will be described as flocks of sheep, and thunder and lightning as something else. There is nothing more arbitrary than such interpretations. Sagas, myths and fairy tales, too, tell us about what we experienced in the subconscious. All sagas and myths were experienced, not composed—experienced not in our present-day consciousness, but in the ancient, clairvoyant state.

We can penetrate deeply into this consciousness and into the origin of myths and sagas if we turn to an important passage of the Scriptures. You will remember the significant verse in the Old Testament which reads. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. II, 7). A certain formation of the breathing process is here associated with human evolution. We shall see later that this is a reference to the fact that man owes his present-day ego-consciousness, his capacity for living with and in his blood, to the peculiar structure of the breathing process which he has acquired in course of time and still has to-day. Only through having learnt to breathe as an upright being did man raise himself above the picture-consciousness. Animals still have picture-consciousness to-day, either directly or indirectly, because their lungs have not the upright position. It has quite rightly been observed that the dog is much more intelligent than the parrot, and yet it is only the parrot which has learnt to speak. Much depends on the direction in which an organ is placed. The parrot has a larynx in the vertical position, and that is why it learns to speak. It is because of the special configuration of his organs that man has been able to advance to his present objective consciousness.

If we have understood the words of the Bible just quoted we shall say: “Man has been so formed in conformity with the laws of the cosmos that his present breathing process has developed.” Those who understood this process from its spiritual aspect, who knew that a spiritual element lives in all things, said to themselves: “The spiritual element of the air has to penetrate us in the way that this process makes possible; then the free ego-consciousness will evolve.” When this process takes place in us in an irregular way, when the spirits of the air are unable to work into our blood in a way which corresponds to our present state of consciousness, then consciousness is forced back into an earlier stage. That is why the ancient European experienced every irregularity of the breathing process as a suppression of consciousness and an inner experience.

The physical expression of irregular breathing is the nightmare (Alpdruck). The word comes from Alb or Elf, so that it signifies the spiritual which enters into the human being even though it cannot unfold itself fully. When the breathing process becomes irregular, when the ego has to descend into a lower kingdom, the host of lower spirits, which can make an appearance in the astral realm, have access to man. And though you may say this is a kind of illness, that is not the point; the important thing is what the conditions bring about. From our higher standpoint to-day, the condition must of course be called unhealthy.

Although to-day it is a reversion to an earlier condition, it was once a transitional state between the normal and the abnormal. Our present-day breathing has arisen from a breathing process which is found as a survival in the nightmare; the nightmare is the last vestige of it. At one time man needed less oxygen and more carbon dioxide. When that was the normal condition, when man was nearer the state of the plant, he had a different form of consciousness, he was plunged into the ancient clairvoyant consciousness. Then he emerged from this condition, and what was formerly healthy became unhealthy, and during the transition period, when he oscillated between the one form of consciousness and the other, the ancient European experienced all that we find in the elves and sprites, which came to his consciousness before he had acquired consciousness of the self. Thus we look back by way of nature into conditions which were once normal; the nightmare represents a survival of the picture-consciousness which created myths and sagas.

But the change in the breathing has involved many other changes. The seeing of external objects has come about. Picture-consciousness did not involve seeing external contours, seeing the outer surface of things. Then came the time when pictures gradually vanished and were replaced by the world of external objects. And once again there was an intermediate stage when man had already developed sight, but when his external sight might in abnormal circumstances withdraw and he might revert to a state of clairvoyance.

There is a popular expression in German, an expression of ancient origin, for looking at something without seeing it. It is Spannung, Staunen, Spahnen, and the last word has the same derivation as the German word Gespenst (ghost), so that here you have the ghost before you, so to say; you have before you something which is seen by means of inner, astral forces. To-day that is abnormal. In the transitional period, whenever it occurred, the man was admonished to say to himself, “But I will see, I do not wish to be stared at, I wish to see.” Thus what he saw in this way seemed to him to be something which he had to overcome. All the stories about blinding whatever stares at one, so that it can no longer stare, derive from this. In all these stories, from the story of the blinding of the giant Polyphemus right down to the wonderful story in which Dietrich of Berne overcomes the giant Grim, we have this stage of consciousness. The very strangeness of the phenomenon, however, could have an attraction for the soul. Hence there were beings, beings who belonged to the inwardness of things, who could have a seductive influence on men, who could lead them astray.

The key word in German for this enticement is Lur or Lore. And wherever you meet this word, you have the ghost in its “alluring” form. If men were specially liable to meet it at a special place, they said that this place was its home. The word Lei is connected with this, hence the Lorelei rocks. It is there that the alluring form is to be found which withdraws into the Lei, as into its native country. We can find this word Lei in various associations with the word Lure. Thus we have the subconscious experience of seeing, with its Lore or Lure, which emerges as the specific seeing of external objects develops. The Alpe, or elves, have to do with the fact that man retains his ego-consciousness within him.

We have yet another survival, still to be found in certain Slav regions. It is the saga of the Midday Woman.³ When men go out into the fields, and, instead of returning home at mid-day, remain there, the Midday Woman appears to them, clothed in white. She questions them until the clock strikes. If they are able to answer all the time, she says, “Good, you have redeemed me.”

Here once again an ancient clairvoyant experience is expressed. Just as we breathe in with the air the spirit of the ego, so we have gathered together our entire being, our entire microcosm, out of the macrocosm. Everything within us has come from without. Our inner intelligence is a product of the outer intelligence. There is a transitional period between the time when men saw the spiritual beings who directed the structure of the world, the beings who directed the formation of the flowers and of the crystals, and the time when the outer intelligence was formed. This intelligence has taken possession of man; he has become conscious of it. The midday sun, the midday demon, obliterates the ego-consciousness through a partial, undeveloped sunstroke. Then what has entered into man to make him intelligent, the external cause of his intelligence, appears before the man, and in such a way that he has to exercise his intelligence. It is through his having to make a mental effort that the phenomenon occurs. The man is, so to say, confronted objectively by what the cosmos has made of him. He must overcome it. If he can exercise his intelligence so as to be able to answer the Midday Woman until the clock strikes, he can unite himself again with his ego.

We meet the best expression of this in ancient Greece and sculpturally in ancient Egypt, in the great questioner, the Sphinx. The Sphinx is nothing but the highest expression of the Midday Woman. It asks the ultimate question, the question to which the answer is “man.” Whoever is able to solve the riddle redeems the Sphinx. It falls into the abyss—that is, it unites with human nature.

Man has acquired his present clear day-consciousness, which has brought with it self-consciousness, as a victory over the ancient picture-consciousness. In earlier times, although he was unable to see into himself, did not find a self within him, yet when he looked outside himself he saw spiritual beings everywhere—in the waves, in the air, in the trees—all was indwelt by spiritual beings. How could he himself not be so indwelt also? When he felt, “With the air I breathe in. I receive the actual imprint of the ego,” how could he do otherwise than see in the air the embodiment of the god to whom he owed his objective consciousness? When he breathed in the air, he knew, “The air moves my ego.” When the wind blustered without in the stormy winter nights he knew that Wotan was roaming about, the same Wotan who was breathed in by him. We could go through all the myths and sagas in this way. We should doubtless find that literary composition has brought about modifications, but they can all be traced back to the old clairvoyant consciousness.

European clairvoyance, however, differs essentially from that of the East; for every people has a special mission, a special task to fulfil in the course of evolution. Whereas in the time when the Oriental was going through the transition from the old clairvoyance to the formation of the ego, he possessed only a mere rudiment of the ego, so that it very easily surrendered itself to the higher beings, the consciousness of personality developed early in European life. It was a particular characteristic of the European peoples that during the transition period the ego made tremendous inroads. The human being was able to see into the inwardness of things, but he asserted his ego very strongly, felt himself from the outset as a strong opponent of the beings who were trying to entangle him in the threads of the spiritual world around him. Therefore the beings who are man’s helpers are those who work towards the acquisition of self-consciousness, towards the liberation of the ego.

The victory over the astral Spirits, which is the aim of those Spirits who bestow personal self-consciousness, plays a great part in Germanic literature, in European literature. The Alp-spirit, who ensnares man, is present everywhere for European consciousness in the Midgard Snake, or in the forms of the giants. Everywhere we see how the gods ally themselves with men in the formation of personal self-consciousness. We see how the god Wotan, who lives in the breathing, becomes man’s ally in his fight against all the lower spirits; he stands beside man in his struggle to overcome the lower consciousness. It is Donar or Thor, with his hammer, who conquers the giants and the Midgard Snake; he it is who expresses man’s emergence into reality.

This conquest over the astral powers, who prevent men from becoming free, played a great part in preparing the way for Christianity. There was something more impersonal in the Oriental, whereas the warm-hearted European had to experience something unknown to less advanced Eastern peoples. In Europe the urge to emerge from subconsciousness was the dominant motive. Therefore the European felt intensely: “I with my ego have emerged from the spiritual world into the physical-sensible world, in primeval times my soul was in the spiritual world, the world of light. What I have acquired here has made me blind to the old astral world.” This found its strongest expression where the victory over the astral world was most strongly felt. The ancient European consciousness felt Baldur to be the leader of souls in so far as they belong to the land of their birth, to the astral world of light. The leader of the sense-world is Hodur, who slays Baldur.⁴

Thus tragically the ancient Europeans experienced the fading out of the clairvoyant soul, the provisional death of the soul. But they experienced it as a transition; they felt that something new had to follow. Hence the “Twilight of the Gods,” the downfall of the spiritual world. And because in ancient times personal consciousness was strongly marked in the European peoples, the appearance of the personal God, Christ Jesus, could be most deeply understood by the Europeans. The germ for the reception of the personal God was laid down long beforehand.

We have seen how in Europe the present-day consciousness has developed out of the earlier one. It was only a small section of the spiritual world that people could see in this way. But the initiates had their consciousness in still higher worlds. We shall show how the knowledge of the initiates was raised above the clairvoyant consciousness of the masses, what impression the appearance of the Christ made on the Mysteries, and how the Mysteries have evolved right up to the present day. What men saw at lower levels in the past they will see in the future at a higher level; for they will see into the spiritual world in full consciousness.

Man has indeed passed through this process. While still leading a subconscious form of existence, he descended in order to acquire self-consciousness. And with his self-consciousness he will rise again. His earlier clairvoyance was not his own, but a clairvoyance which other beings had instilled into him. What he will acquire for himself will be a free self-conscious possession, best described by a saying of Christ-Jesus. On the occasion (John VIII, 32) when the Christ was emphasising the relationship between truth and freedom, he spoke of the far-distant future in these terms: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

• 1. This lecture is the second of three public lectures (Berlin, April-May, 1906), which in 1955 were published in book form, in German, by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, under the title of Isis und Madonna: Alteuropäisches Hellsehen, die Europäischen Mysterien und Ihre Eingeweihten. A typescript translation of the first lecture is in the Library at Rudolf Steiner house, London; a translation of the third appeared in the quarterly, Anthroposophy, vol. iv, no. 3, 1929.
• 2. See also the following lectures by Dr. Steiner: Swedenborg's Power of Vision (Dornach, 12/9/15), printed in the Goetheanum English News-Sheet 1939; Die Geschichte des Spiritismus (Berlin. 30/5/04), published in English as the first of two lectures in the booklet, The History of Spiritism, Hypnotism and Somnambulism (Anthroposophic Press, 1943); and Menschlich und Menschheitliche Entwicklungwahrheiten (Cycle 46, Berlin, 1917: not translated).
• 3. See the fourth, lecture in the cycle, The inner Nature of Man between Death and Rebirth (Vienna, 1914), published by Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1928; out of print.
• 4. See the lectures, The Balder Myth and the Good Friday Mystery (Dornach, 2-3/4/15); published in Festivals and the Seasons (Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1928: out of print).

From ANTHROPOSOPHY: A Quarterly Review—Michaelmas 1929 No 3 Vol. 4. From GA# 57.

In ancient times a kind of natural clairvoyance was a common heritage of the European peoples. Indeed man's consciousness as it is to-day has evolved from that earlier state of clairvoyant consciousness. With these ancient clairvoyant faculties, man was able to perceive certain connections of his life, and what he so perceived was then expressed in the legends and myths which speak of goblins, elfin-beings, dwarfs and the like. Now these legends and myths are very different in character. They were based on what man was able to see with his clairvoyant faculties, but when we study them we find on the one hand certain resemblances and on the other outstanding differences, simply because the clairvoyant powers of men were by no means the same. There is a much greater similarity in the more important mythological figures—the figures of Gods and Heroes in the sagas. These sagas, too, were the outcome of clairvoyance, but in a different sense. The great mythological figures lead us back to the experiences of those who were Initiates in the ancient Mysteries. It is not easy for our present consciousness to form a true conception of these ancient Mysteries and their Initiates, for the nature of our education and the knowledge resulting therefrom does not conduce to an understanding of the nature of Initiation—far from it! If we were to speak of the nature of the Mysteries and their Initiates in the language of current thought, we should say that the Mysteries are schools for the training of those faculties which enable the soul of man to have actual vision of the spiritual worlds. They are schools, where in a methodical and systematic way, man's soul is so guided and trained that he can finally perceive the higher worlds with spiritual eyes and ears. Although modern scholarship knows little of the Mysteries, they are nevertheless still in existence to-day and are the means whereby man can be led consciously to the spiritual worlds.—And the whole content of Spiritual Science, everything that is communicated in Spiritual Science, is, in its essence, Mystery-wisdom.

The man who so trains his soul that he can perceive in higher worlds, is an Initiate. Through all the ages there have been centres for developing the faculty of fully conscious clairvoyance and the aim of the present lecture is to give a cursory survey of the European Mysteries.

For this purpose we must go back to ancient pre-Christian times and try to visualise what went on in the occult schools of Initiation and how they influenced civilisation and culture in general. You have often heard how man to-day can be led to the Initiates, how his thinking, feeling and willing can be so trained that he can set out on the path leading to the “Mothers.” This is the path which the pupils of all the Mysteries have had to tread in quest of fully conscious clairvoyance.

There were Mysteries of great significance, deeply influencing ancient European civilisation, in various regions of France, Germany and Britain. In all these regions the Mysteries were of a definite and unique kind, and were instituted on the basis of knowledge such as I indicated in my lecture “Isis and Madonna,” namely, that man has a spiritual origin, that his home was once in spiritual worlds whence his spirit and soul have come forth. When a man penetrates more deeply into his soul and rises to a level higher than that of ordinary sense-perception, he still feels, even to-day, that there is within him something that is a last remnant of his being as it was in the spiritual world. To-day, this last remnant—the human soul—is enclosed within the physical body, which in its turn is a densification of the primordial spiritual being. When he has conscious realisation of the spirit and soul within him, man says: ‘Now I know what I once was in my whole being; now I know that I was born out of the womb of worlds, out of the great universe.’ To-day the universe is revealed to human intelligence in everything that is spread out before the senses. But behind all that can be perceived by the senses and grasped by the intellect there is the spiritual universe—the Primordial Father and Mother from whom the soul is born. The body too is born from them but at first in spiritual form. This true form of man is now hidden.

It was known in the ancient European Mysteries that the true being of man is hidden and must be sought in its concealment. The saying went: “Isis is seeking for the Being from whom she proceeded.” To be initiated was to live through all those processes which enable the soul of man once again to behold its true origin and to unfold the faculty which will unite it again with its spiritual origin. Whether in the depths of the sacred oak-groves, or in places adapted for the Mysteries, it was always the same.—The candidate was subjected to certain processes whereby he might be united with his spiritual origin.

All that lies hidden behind the sense-world, as the sun behind the clouds, the hidden spirit, was known in these Mysteries by the name of “Hu.” “Ceridwen” was the seeking soul. And all the rites of Initiation were a means of revealing to the pupil that death is only one of the many processes in life. Death changes nothing at all in the innermost kernel of man's being.—In the Druidic Mysteries (Druid denotes an Initiate of the third degree), the neophyte was put into a condition resembling death; his senses could not function as organs of perception. A man whose only instrument of perception is the physical body or the physical brain has no consciousness in a condition where his senses cease to function. But in Initiation, the senses—feeling, hearing and so on—cease to function, and yet the neophyte is able to experience and observe. The principle which observes was called “Ceridwen”—the soul. And that which comes to meet the soul, as light and sound come to our outer eyes and ears, was called “Hu”—the spiritual world. The Initiate experienced the union between Ceridwen and Hu. Such experiences are described in the myths. When we are told to-day that the ancients paid homage to a God Hu and a Goddess Ceridwen, this is simply another way of describing Initiation. The true myths are always concerned with Initiation. It is empty chatter to say that these myths have an astronomical meaning, that Ceridwen is the moon and Hu the sun, and so on. These myths originated because their creators were conscious of an inner union between the aspiring soul and the spirit of the sun, not the physical sun. The Mysteries of Hu and Ceridwen, then, were those into which men were initiated in the regions of which we are speaking.

More to the North, in Scandinavia and Northern Russia, we find the Trottic Mysteries, founded by the Initiate who is known as Sieg, or Siegfried: Sikke. All the Siegfried myths are to be traced back to this being. These Northern Mysteries are characterised by a principle that is really common to all the Mysteries, but which here for the first time is clearly emphasised. Let me explain this principle by means of a comparison.—Think of the human being as he stands before us in life, with his head, hands, feet and other members. And now, if we imagine him without one of these members, he is no longer a whole man. Think of the most important organs, the heart, the stomach and others. Each one of these organs contributes to human life and serves its needs. The fact that these organs work together makes it possible for a soul to live and develop in the body of man. The soul lives in a physical body which is a unit composed of many members. This suggests that wherever a dwelling place has to be found for a human soul, or for a higher being, single members must be working together, each one of them carrying out their particular functions. And so even in the ancient Northern Mysteries it was realised that something can be accomplished if a number of men are gathered together and each individual is allotted a special and definite task. One man, for instance, may resolve to develop principally the thinking faculty, another the power of feeling, a third the power of will. Sub-divisions are of course also possible.

The Northern Mysteries were based upon the idea that when a number of men, each of whom has his particular task, are gathered together into a whole, an invisible influence will work in them, just as the soul works in a human body. When men come together in this way, each playing his own part, they form a kind of higher organism or body, and thus make it possible for a higher spiritual being to dwell among them. Thus Sieg gathered together a circle of twelve men, each of whom set out to develop the powers of his soul in a particular direction. And then, when they gathered together in their holy sanctuaries, they knew that a higher spiritual being was living among them as the soul lives in a human body, that their souls were members of a higher body. This was the sense in which the “Thirteenth” lived and moved among the Twelve who knew: We are twelve and the Thirteenth lives among us. Or else they chose out a Thirteenth whose function was then, within the circle of the Twelve, to be the connecting link enabling the higher influence to descend. And so the Thirteenth was recognised to be the representative of the Godhead in the sanctuaries of Initiation.

Everything was related to the sacred number three, and for this reason the one who united in himself all the knowledge was known as the representative of the ‘holy Three’ and around him were the twelve, each one with his definite functions, like members of an organism.

And so it was realised that when twelve men united together to develop a power which enabled a higher being to dwell among them, they were rising out of the physical into the spiritual world, rising to their God. They regarded themselves as the twelve attributes, the twelve qualities of the God. This was all reflected in the figures of the twelve Germanic Gods in the Northern sagas. He who desired to become a member of this noble circle was told that he must seek Baldur—in other words, he must seek Initiation. And who is Baldur? Baldur is the Spiritual in man, the principle for which the soul is seeking and which is found in Initiation. Who slew Baldur? Those who killed out the clairvoyant faculties in man, who organised his physical nature, who endowed him with material sight and who could prematurely misuse the forces of physical matter—Loki, the power of Fire, and Hodur the Blind, representing the principle in man's being that is incapable of beholding the spiritual world. This is only a way of describing processes of Initiation. Material existence has made man blind; through Initiation he again finds the path leading to the higher worlds. The trained clairvoyance of the old Initiates was a higher faculty than the innate, natural clairvoyance possessed by all human beings in those days.

The Druidic and Trottic Mysteries were the inspiring source of European civilisation and culture in pre-Christian times. Now the essential feature of European culture, namely, the development of a consciousness of personality, is likewise a danger—a danger likely to be far greater here than in other regions of the earth. Consciousness of personality is a keynote of all European culture. It was present in all Germanic lands, in a much stronger form than in the East where men loved to surrender themselves to Brahman. But this consciousness of personality brought with it the danger that those who were initiated could readily misuse what they learnt in Initiation and turn it into caricature. Initiation gives man control of spiritual forces and those who have learnt to use them can also misuse them. So it came about that the Mysteries of ancient Europe began to degenerate, the unripeness of the Initiates began to give rise to all kinds of atrocities and in many regions they were dreaded by the people. Much that we hear of the Mysteries to-day, although not everything, refers to the period of their decline. In this age we need not, after all, be so very astonished that the Mysteries are so often misunderstood. For if Spiritual Science does not help a man to realise what went on in the Mysteries and he has to rely merely on the tittle-tattle of history written down much later on, his ideas on the subject will be utterly barren. Just think what happens when people are content to draw their information about Spiritual Science from what the outside world has to say about it. They get a fine picture! And if what is being said about Spiritual Science to-day were to live on, it would do far more harm than the fragmentary knowledge of the Mysteries has done.

It would be an attractive study to trace back many things in the sagas and legends of Europe to the Mysteries. We should find a great deal in the Niebelung and Siegfried legends that points back to the ancient Mysteries. But it is difficult to discriminate in such study. The only thing that can reveal whether a certain feature in the legends is simply an improvisation of fancy or leads back to the Mysteries, is actual knowledge and the capacity to trace it back to its real source.

In all these Mysteries, no matter where we look, we find an element of tragedy. Let me put it thus: The Initiate in the ancient Druidic or Trottic Mysteries might indeed be united with Hu or Baldur, but there was something lacking in the spiritual world into which he entered. In more popular parlance, the Initiates would have said: ‘Our Gods are mortal, are doomed to downfall.’—Hence the myth which tells of the Twilight of the Gods. But then came the news of the great Christ Impulse which could work more strongly in Europe than anywhere else—the news that a sublime Spirit, the Christ, had lived in an earthly body among men. And the Initiates realised that all that had hitherto been experienced in the depths of the Mysteries had become historic fact in the Christ Event. In the ancient Mysteries the Initiate had not fully vanquished death.—But now he learnt of the Mystery of Golgotha. This historic Mystery was received with understanding in the European Mysteries—a much deeper understanding than elsewhere. The attitude of the Initiates may be described somewhat as follows: In our Initiation we rose to a divine-spiritual world, yet it was a world pervaded with the forces of mortality. But he who steeps himself with all that is bound up with the mighty impulse brought by the Christ-Being, he who can link himself with Christ, will realise that just as the sun irradiates and quickens the life of the plants, so the Christ Impulse can flow into the human soul and endow the soul with knowledge of eternity and immortality, with knowledge of victory over death. The soul is quickened by a true understanding of Christ.—And it was also known to the Initiates that besides such outer teaching as can be given, there is an inner knowledge, a quest of the soul (Ceridwen) not only for a Hu or a Baldur but for another ‘Baldur,’ for One Who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha. The Initiates knew that the soul who experienced this acquired a bigger kind of clairvoyance than was attained through Initiation into the ancient Mysteries.

Here in Europe there was a deep understanding of these things. I have often told you of the great stimulus given to the evolution of man by the Christ Impulse. To understand this, let us think once more of ancient Hebrew consciousness. The ancient Hebrew felt himself one with his “Fathers.” He said to himself: ‘My Ego is enclosed between birth and death, but my blood streams into me from my Father Abraham. The blood in my veins is the expression of my Ego, of my individuality; it is the blood-stream which flows through the generations and is the expression of my God.’—And so the ancient Hebrew felt himself part of one great whole, secure in the blood-stream which passes down through the generations. Christ says: “Before Abraham was, I AM;” and “I and the Father are One.” The Ego of man is linked to a spiritual world by threads which everyone may discover in his own individuality. The Mystery of Golgotha brought to man a realisation of the Ego that is grounded upon itself, albeit the ties of blood are not ignored—the Ego that understands the physical world. Therefore, in the blood which flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer, men saw the expression of the human Ego-principle, and the saying went: “He who quickens this blood within himself will become a true seer.” But the world was not ripe enough to understand the true essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. It was not ripe in the centuries immediately following the Coming of Christ, nor is it to-day. Paul had a vision of the Living Christ in the spiritual world, but, after all, who understands those profound Epistles of one who was an Initiate or speaks with any truth of Paul's disciple, Dionysos the Areopagite?

In the Mysteries of Wales and Britain the teachings of Dionysos were received and the influence of the Christ Mystery so permeated the Druidic and Trottic Mysteries that the Initiates realised in full clarity of consciousness that He whom they had sought as Hu and Baldur, had come to earth as Christ. But they said among themselves that mankind in general was not ripe to understand the mystery of the blood flowing from the Redeemer's wounds, that men were not fit to receive into themselves the blood that runs through all creation.

It was only in small circles of Initiates that this sacred Christ Mystery was preserved. A man who was initiated into this Mystery experienced the overcoming of the Ego that functions in the world of sense. This is how he experienced it.—He asked himself: ‘What has been the manner of my life hitherto? In my quest for truth, I have turned to the things of the outer world. The Initiates of the Christ-Mystery, however, demand that I shall not wait until outer things tell me what is true but that in my soul, without being stimulated by the outer world, I shall seek the invisible.’—This quest of the soul for the highest was called by the outer world in later times: The secret of the Holy Grail. And the Parsifal or Grail legend is simply a form of the Christ Mystery. The Grail is the holy Cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood as it flowed on Golgotha. The Cup was then taken to a holy place and guarded. So long as a man does not ask about the invisible, his lot is that of Parsifal. Only when he asks, does he become an Initiate of the Christ Mystery.

Wolfram von Eschenbach speaks in his poem of the three stages through which the soul of man passes. The first of these is the stage of outer, material perception. The soul is caught up in matter and allows matter to say what is truth. This is the “stupor” (Dumpfheit) of the soul, as Wolfram van Eschenbach expresses it. And then the soul begins to recognise that the outer world offers only illusion. When the soul perceives that the results of science are not answers but only questions, there comes the stage of “doubt” (Zwifel), according to Wolfram von Eschenbach. But then the soul rises to “blessedness” (Saelde, Seligkeit)—to life in the spiritual worlds.—These are the three stages.

The Mysteries which were illuminated by the Christ Impulse have one quite definite feature in common whereby they are raised to a higher level than that of the more ancient Mysteries. Initiation always means that a man attains to a higher kind of sight and that his soul undergoes a higher development. Before he sets out on this path, three faculties live within his soul: thinking, feeling and willing. He has these three soul-powers within him. In ordinary life in the modern world, these three soul-powers are intimately bound together. The Ego of man is interwoven with thinking feeling and willing because before he attains Initiation he has not worked with the powers of the Ego at the development of his higher members. The first step is to purify the feelings, impulses and instincts in the astral body. Out of the purified astral body there rises the “Spirit-Self” or “Manas.” Then man begins to permeate every thought with a definite element of feeling so that each thought may be said to have something ‘cold’ or ‘warm’ about it.—He is transforming his “ether-body” or “life-body.” Out of the transformed ether-body (it is a transformation of feeling), arises “Budhi” or “Life-Spirit.” And finally, he transforms his willing and therewith the physical body itself, into “Atma” or “Spirit-Man.” Thus by transforming his thinking, feeling and willing, man changes his astral body into Spirit-Self or Manas, his ether-body into Life-Spirit or Budhi and finally his physical body into Spirit-Man or Atma. This transformation is the result of the Initiates systematic work upon his soul, whereby he rises to the spiritual worlds. But something very definite happens when the path to Initiation is trodden in full earnest and not light-heartedly. In true Initiation it is as if a man's organisation were divided into three parts, and the Ego reigns as king over the three. Whereas in ordinary circumstances the spheres of thinking, feeling and willing are not clearly separated, when a man sets out on the path of higher development thoughts begin to arise in him which are not immediately tinged with feeling but are permeated with the element of sympathy or antipathy according to the free choice of the Ego. Feeling does not immediately attach itself to a thought, but the man divides, as it were, into three: he is a man of feeling, a man of thinking, a man of will, and the Ego, as king, rules over the three. At a definite stage of Initiation he becomes, in this sense, three men. He feels that by way of his astral body he experiences all those thoughts which are related to the spiritual world; through his ether-body he experiences everything that pervades the spiritual world as the element of feeling; through his physical body he experiences all the will-impulses which flow through the spiritual world. And he realises himself as king within the sacred Three. A man who is not able or ripe enough to bear this separation of his being, will not attain the fruits of Initiation. The sufferings that crowd upon him in his immature state will keep him back. A man who approaches the Holy Grail but is not worthy, will suffer as Amfortas suffered. He can only be redeemed by one who brings the forces of good.—He is freed from his sufferings by Parsifal.

And now let us return once more to what Initiation brings in its train. The seeking soul finds the spiritual world; the soul finds the Holy Grail which has now become the symbol of the spiritual world. Individual Initiates have experienced what is here described. They have gone the way of Parsifal, have become as kings looking down on the three bodies. The Initiate says to himself: ‘I am king over my purified astral body which can only be purified when I strive to emulate Christ.’ He must not hold to any outer link, to anything in the external world, but unite himself in the innermost depths of his soul with the Christ Principle. Everything that binds him with the world of sense must fall away in that supreme moment. Lohengrin is the representative of an Initiate. It is not permitted to ask his name or rank, in other words, what connects him with the world of sense. He who has neither name nor rank, is called a “homeless” man. Such a man is permeated through and through with the Christ Principle. He too looks down on the ether-body which has become Life-Spirit, as upon something that is now separate from the astral body. By this ether-body he is borne upwards to the higher worlds, where the laws of space and time do not hold sway. The symbol of this ether-body and its organs, is the Swan who bears Lohengrin over the sea in a boat (the physical body), over the material world. The physical body is felt to be an instrument.

The soul on earth who experiences a new impulse through Initiation is symbolised in the figure of Elsa von Brabant. This shows us the sense in which the Lohengrin legend—which has many other meanings as well—is a portrayal of Initiation in the Mysteries associated with the Holy Grail. Thus in the eleventh to the thirteenth century, these secrets of the Holy Grail were taught in connection with the Christ Mystery. The Knights of the Grail were the later Initiates. They were confronted in the world with an exoteric Christianity, whereas esoteric Christianity was cultivated in the Mysteries. And in the Mysteries, men sought to find that relation to Christianity whereby, through the outer Christ in the soul, the inner Christ, Who is symbolised by the Dove, was awakened to life.

The whole development of the European Mysteries is expressed in yet another cycle of legends and sagas, but it is difficult to speak of them now. We must wait for another occasion. To-day we will consider how this knowledge found its way into the outer world and made its appearance in a remarkable body of legends. Comparatively little notice has been taken of a legend which was given poetic form by Conrad Fleck in 1230. It is one of the legends of Provence and deals with the Initiation of the Knights of the Grail or the Templars. It speaks of an ancient pair, “Flor” and “Blancheflor.” In modern parlance: the flower with red petals (the rose) and the flower with white petals (the lily). In earlier times it was known that a great many mysteries were contained in this legend, of which it is only possible to-day to speak briefly. It was said: Flor and Blancheflor are souls incarnated in human beings who have lived on earth. According to the legend, these two were the grandparents of Charles the Great. But those who studied the legend more deeply, saw in Charles the Great the figure who, in a certain sense, united esoteric and exoteric Christianity. This is expressed in the coronation of the Emperor. But in the grandparents of Charles the Great, Flor and Blancheflor, lived the rose and the lily—typifying souls who were to preserve in its purity the esoteric Christianity which had been taught by Dionysos the Areopagite and others. The rose—Flor or Flos—symbolised the human soul who has received the impulse of the Ego, of personality, who lets the Spiritual work out of his individuality, who has brought the Ego-force down into the red blood. But the lily was the symbol of the soul who can only remain spiritual when the Ego remains outside. Thus there is a contrast between the rose and the lily. The principle of self-consciousness has entered wholly into the rose, whereas it remains outside the lily. But there was a union between the soul that is within and the soul that as the World-Spirit pervades the universe outside. Flor and Blancheflor symbolise the finding of the World-Soul, the World-Ego, by the human soul or the human Ego. The event recorded in the legend of the Holy Grail is also described in the legend of Flor and Blancheflor. Flor and Blancheflor must not be thought of as outer figures—the lily symbolises the soul which finds its higher Egohood. The union of the lily-soul with the rose-soul was taken to express that principle in man which can link him with the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore it was said: Over against the forces of European Initiation inaugurated by Charles the Great which were to fuse exoteric and esoteric Christianity, pure esoteric Christianity must be kept alive and continued. But among the Initiates it was said: The same soul who lived in Flos or Flor and of whom the legend tells, was reincarnated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the founder of Rosicrucianism, a Mystery-School having as its aim the cultivation of an understanding of the Christ Mystery in a way suited to the new era. Thus esoteric Christianity found refuge in Rosicrucianism. Since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Rosicrucian Schools have trained the Initiates who are the successors of the ancient European Mysteries and of the School of the Holy Grail. Many things have trickled through into outer life in regard to the Rosicrucian Mysteries, but much that is told is a caricature of the truth. Profound achievements of spiritual life were influenced by the mysterious threads of Rosicrucianism which found their way into civilisation.—So, for instance, there is a connection between Bacon of Verulam's New Atlantis and Rosicrucianism. This work is more than a Utopia. Bacon there tries to lead those who would revive the dim clairvoyant faculties of the old Atlanteans, to higher levels. But associated with the outer Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians is all the charlatanism, quackery and caricature that is unavoidable in our age since the discovery in the art of printing. Since printing was discovered it has been no longer possible, as it was in olden times, to let secrets remain secret. Everything comes out, caricatured and distorted! And the same terrible thing happens to the teachings given in the Anthroposophical Movement. If the Anthroposophical Movement were what it is said to be in entirely ignorant circles, it would be something to be avoided at all costs. But in reality, anthroposophical teachings are nourished to a greater extent than has yet ever been the case, from the wellsprings of the Mysteries. Goethe's greatest poetic achievements were nourished from Rosicrucian sources. It is not without significance that in his poem Die Geheimnisse he speaks of a man who was led to a house and found on its door the sign of the Rose Cross. “Who brought the roses to the Cross?”—Who were these Initiates of the European Mysteries who linked the mysteries of the rose to the mystery of the Cross? How deeply Goethe had penetrated these things is apparent, for instance when he speaks of the twelve gathered around the table—twelve as in the ancient Trottic Mysteries. Oh! Goethe knew all these things. But those who study him to-day, study only the Goethe they are capable of understanding. But although he was only able to speak a mysterious language, the time has now come to speak openly about Initiation. More and more it will become apparent that Spiritual Science does not produce dreamers who are remote from the affairs of the world, but men who are practical and active in life. It brings a new hope and confidence. To modern thinking we shall more and more be able to apply the words spoken by Faust of Wagner, the representative of materialistic thinking: “How ardently be grubs for treasures, and is happy when he finds rain-worms!” Truly, materialism is happy when it finds rain-worms and can prove that in a certain sense they are necessary to the re-organisation of everything that lives and moves upon the earth. But the spirit that flows from the Mysteries makes human thinking so supple and flexible that it can really cope with life. It could not be otherwise, for the meaning of world-evolution itself is contained in the mystery-teachings of Spiritual Science.

The world and “all that therein is” is born out of the spirit; man is born and called to rise to the spirit. Spiritual Science shows us more and more that the spirit lies exhausted in matter, that physical substance is the magic robe of the Spiritual. It is for man living in the material world, to charm the spirit out of this magic robe. The Spiritual finds its resurrection in man, in the human soul that rises above itself.—To enable the soul to find this path is the task of Spiritual Science. Thus does spirit find spirit. And man will realise and understand the spirit more and more as he fashions himself in its image.

These lectures are so arranged that separate themes will be introduced, and then I shall bring in considerations which will lead towards the themes and throw light upon them. One theme, accordingly, resides in what was said about the difficulty of understanding the Being of Christ Jesus. Then we came to the significance of the prophecies of the Sibyls as illustrating one side of human soul life during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Finally, at the close of yesterday's lecture, I introduced the theme of Paul and the olive tree.

I will return to these leading themes, but we must approach them as it were in circles, with our themes inscribed at the centre. What is really meant by the themes will then gradually emerge. Today I would like to say something about the Christ Being as such. We shall then see how in Paul the Christ Being is reflected in a certain definite way.

From earlier lectures we know that the Christ Being can be understood if we follow the evolution of our system back to the Old Sun existence.¹ And on various occasions, in lectures already published, attention has been drawn to the fact that in the Christ Being we have to do with a high spiritual Being—that is the term we will use for the present—for whose own evolution the Old Sun period was especially important. I will not go further into that just now. We will simply look up to the Christ Being as a high spiritual Being. But for understanding human evolution something else is necessary, and we have seen how necessary it is, for in relation to a certain fact the concepts and ideas which in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch aspired to understand the Being of Christ were powerless to do so.

Again and again, especially during the early centuries among the Gnostics, among the Apostolic Fathers and among the persons who contributed in one way or another to the founding of Christianity, this question came up—How was the nature of Christ related to the nature of Jesus? Now we already know that we have to distinguish two Jesus-boys.² Of one of these we need not speak further here, for he can be readily understood from previous anthroposophical explanations. I mean the Jesus in whom lived the Ego of Zarathustra. Here we have a human being who in the second post-Atlantean epoch had already reached a high degree of evolution; who at that time founded the Zarathustrian spiritual stream and then had subsequent lives; who later reincarnated in the Solomon Jesus-child and in him, up to his twelfth year, underwent the development appropriate for so lofty an Ego in that period. We know also that the Zarathustra Ego passed over into the body of the other Jesus-child, on whose nature the Luke Gospel throws some gleams of light.

We must now consider a little this Nathan Jesus child. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that in this child we have not to do with a human being, like other human beings, in the strict sense of the term. We cannot say of this Being that he had previously been incarnated on Earth in this or that individual. We have always emphasised that of the soul-element which has come forth from spiritual worlds in order to live in single individuals on Earth, something as it were remained behind; and that what had thus remained behind appeared in the Nathan Jesus-child. Hence of this child we cannot say that in him there lived an ordinary human ego which had developed in a certain way through earlier incarnations. We have to recognise (this follows from what is said in my book, Occult Science—an Outline) that he had not previously walked the Earth as man. The only question is: Did this Being, whom we will now call simply Jesus of Nazareth, have any previous connection with Earth-evolution?³ We must remember that the Beings and Powers connected with human evolution are not confined to those who incarnate on the Earth itself; there are also spiritual Beings and Powers who belong to the higher Hierarchies. If therefore we say that something of the substance which divided itself among single human souls remained behind, and was then in a certain sense born in the Nathan Jesus-child, we are not saying that this .Being had no previous relation with Earth evolution. We are saying only that he was not related to the evolution of the Earth and of humanity in such a way as to have walked the Earth as man. We must look for him not in the history of the physical Earth, but in pre-earthly spiritual realms. And then, for the kind of observation I have often spoken about—clairvoyant observation—the following is revealed.

Let us recall what is described in Occult Science—how from the Lemurian Age onwards souls gradually came down from the other planets (with the exception of one principal human pair who had stayed on earth) and were incarnated in human bodies throughout Atlantean times. We must accordingly think of Earth-evolution as being such that the souls withdrew from the Earth's cosmic surroundings and at various points of time took up again their evolution on Earth. We know that before the Lemurian Age they had gone away to other planets. But we know also that the evolution of the Earth had been exposed to the attacks of Lucifer, and later to those of Ahriman. Thus the souls of men had to enter into bodies wherein they were exposed in the course of human evolution to the attacks of both these spiritual Beings. If nothing further had come about—if, that is, the human souls had come down from planetary existence into evolution on Earth, there to encounter the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences—then something else would have happened to them as they went through subsequent incarnations; something I did not intimate in Occult Science, for at the present day one cannot say everything in public.

First of all, when the human beings came down from the planets into physical bodies, the development of their senses would have been exposed to a certain danger. We must not think it was a quite simple matter for these human souls to come down from their planetary abodes and assume bodies on Earth, and that after that everything went on normally. Because the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles held sway in these bodies, they were not so organised as to enable human beings to pursue the course of evolution which in fact they did pursue. If these souls had simply gone on using the forces which governed the sense-organs of these bodies, they would have had to use their senses in a peculiar way—a way not really human.

For example, the eye would have been so impressed and affected by a colour that it would have felt itself permeated with intense feeling. At the sight of one colour it would have positively glowed with pleasure; for another colour it would have felt intense, painful antipathy. And so, because of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, the souls descending from the planets would have found no bodies equipped with senses of the right kind. They would have been tormented by sympathy and antipathy; on seeing one colour or another they would have been seized with bliss or repulsed with acute pain, all through their lives. That was how evolution was going; cosmic forces, especially those from the Sun, would have worked on the Earth in such a way as to give the senses this character. Any contemplation of the world, in a spirit of quiet wisdom, would have been ruled out. So a change had to be brought about in the forces which flowed from the cosmic environment into the Earth and had built up the senses of man. In the spiritual world something had to happen so that these forces would not turn the senses into mere organs of sympathy and antipathy, for they would then have been under the sway of Lucifer and Ahriman. Hence the following took place.

The Being of whom we have said that he had not chosen the path down from the planets to the Earth, but had remained behind, the Being who later appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child and who had dwelt from primal ages in the spiritual worlds—this Being resolved (if we may use this expression, for of course all these expressions are taken from human speech and cannot fully convey what one wants to say) while still in the world of the higher Hierarchies to go through a development which would enable him to be permeated for a time by the Christ Being. Thus we have to do not with a man but with a superhuman Being who (if we may speak in this way) lived in the spiritual world and as it were heard the distress of the human sense system crying out to the spiritual world for help, and in response to this cry made himself fitted to be permeated by the Christ.

So it was that in the spiritual worlds the Being who later became the Nathan Jesus-child was permeated by the Christ Being, and then brought about a change in the cosmic forces which were streaming in to build up the human senses. These senses were changed in such a way that instead of being mere organs of sympathy and antipathy, they became organs that human beings could use, and so could look with wisdom at all the nuances of sense-perception. Very differently would the cosmic forces have flowed into mankind if this event, far back in the Lemurian Age, had not taken place in the spiritual worlds. This Being who appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child was then still living (if I may use the phrase) in the Sun-sphere, and because he listened to the human cry of distress, he experienced something which made it possible for him to be permeated by the very Spirit of the Sun, so that the activity of the Sun was modified in such a way that the human sense organs, which derive essentially from solar activity, did not become organs of mere sympathy and antipathy.

Here we touch upon a significant cosmic secret, and one which will enable us to understand much that happened later on. A certain order and harmony, imbued with wisdom, could now flow into the realm of the human senses, and evolution could go on normally for a while. The worst activity of Lucifer and Ahriman had been turned away from the human senses by a deed in the higher worlds.

Later on came a time, in the Atlantean Age, when it once more became apparent that the human bodily constitution could not be a suitable instrument for the further course of evolution. The human vital organs, and their underlying forces in the etheric body, which for a time had developed in a suitably useful way, had fallen into disorder. For the cosmic forces which had worked on them from the surroundings of the Earth, and whose task it was to bring order into these organs—the organs of breathing, blood circulation and so on—these forces would have developed under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in such a way that the vital organs would have ceased to be usable by human beings on Earth. They would have acquired a quite peculiar character. The forces which provide for these vital organs do not flow in directly from the Sun, but from the seven planets, as they used to be called. The planetary forces worked from the cosmos into man. And it was necessary that these forces, also, should be modified. If they had remained under the sway of Lucifer and Ahriman, the vital organs would have become merely organs of greed or organs of loathing. For example, a man would not have been able to restrain himself from hurling himself greedily upon a given dish, while a terrible loathing would have driven him from another. These are things which unveil themselves as world secrets, as cosmic secrets, when we try to penetrate into them clairvoyantly.

So again something had to happen in the spiritual worlds in order that this destructive activity should not enter into human life. And this same Being, who later appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child and who (as we have explained) dwelt in earlier times on the Sun and was there permeated by the Christ Being, the sublime Sun-Spirit—this Being went from planet to planet, touched in his innermost nature by the fact that human evolution could go no further, as things were. And this experience affected him so strongly, while he was assuming a form of body on the different planets, that at a certain time during the Atlantean evolution the Spirit of Christ permeated him again. And through what was now brought about by the permeation of this Being by the Christ Spirit, it became possible for moderation to be implanted in the vital organs of man. In the same way that wisdom had been given to the sense-organs, so moderation was now bestowed on the vital organs. Thus it came about that when a man breathed in a particular place, he was not impelled to suck in the air greedily, or to recoil with loathing from the air in another place. That was the deed accomplished in the spiritual worlds through a further permeation of the Nathan Jesus-child by the Christ Being, the high Sun-Spirit.

Then in the further course of human evolution a third thing happened. A third confusion would have arisen if the souls had been obliged to continue using the bodies then available for them on Earth. We can put it in the following way.

At this time the physical nature of man was in order. Through the two Christ deeds in the super-sensible world, the human sense organs were in a condition serviceable for man on Earth, and so were the vital organs. But it was not so with the soul-organs, thinking, feeling and willing. If nothing further had happened, these soul-organs would have become disordered. I mean that willing would have been continually disturbed by thinking, feeling would have interfered with willing, and so on. Men would have been condemned as it were to a perpetually chaotic use of these soul-organs. They would have been maddened by an excess of will, or confused by repressed feeling, or there would have been people plagued with fleeting ideas through a hypertrophy of thinking, and so forth. This was the third great danger to which humanity was exposed on Earth.

Now these three soul-powers, thinking, feeling and willing, are coordinated from the surroundings of the Earth, for the Earth itself is essentially the scene of action for the Ego. The working together of thinking, feeling and willing has to be kept in order; not, however, from all the planets, but only from Sun, Moon and Earth, so that through the inter-working of Sun, Moon and Earth, if this is harmonious, man is made fit for the harmonious cooperation of his three soul-powers.

Help for these soul-forces had to be provided from the spiritual world. And now the soul of that Being who later became the Nathan Jesus-child assumed a cosmic form such that his life was in a sense neither on the Moon nor on the Sun, but as though it encircled the Earth and felt a dependence on the influences of Sun, Moon and Earth at the same time. The Earth influences came to him from below; the Sun and Moon influences from above. Clairvoyant observation really sees this Being, in the spring time of his evolution—if I may use that phrase—in the same sphere as that in which the Moon goes round the Earth. Hence I cannot say exactly that the Moon influence came to him from above, but rather that it came to him from the place where he was, this pre-earthly Jesus-Being. Again there rose to him a cry of distress, a cry that told of what human thinking, feeling and willing were on the way to becoming; and he sought to experience completely in his own inner being this tragedy of human evolution. Thereby he called to himself the high Sun-spirit, who now for the third time descended upon him, permeating him. So in the cosmic height, beyond the Earth, there was a third permeation of this Nathan Jesus-child by the high Sun Spirit whom we call the Christ.

Now I would wish to depict for you this third ensouling rather differently from the way in which I described the other two. That which took place through these successive stages of spiritual evolution—or heavenly evolution, I would say—was reflected in the various world outlooks of the post-Atlantean peoples. For it had effects which worked on into later times; the Sun's activity continued to be influenced by the fact that in ancient Lemurian times the Being who afterwards became the Nathan Jesus-child had been permeated by the Christ Being. And the essential thing about the initiation of Zarathustra was that he perceived the activity of the Sun impregnated with this influence. In this way his teaching arose; his initiation had revealed to him—had projected into his soul—what had happened in primeval times.

The third post-Atlantean epoch, which we call the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, came about partly through the reflection in human souls, as a continuing human experience, of the activities that had originated from the permeation by the Sun-Spirit of the Nathan Jesus-Being while that Being was journeying round the planets. From this arose that science of planetary activities which comes before us in Chaldean astrology; people today have a very meagre conception of what it really was. Among the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples of the epoch there developed also that star worship which is indeed known exoterically; it arose because the moderating of planetary influence was still making itself felt at that later time.

Later still, in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, we can see in Hellenism a reflection of planetary spirits who had as it were come into existence because the Being who had been permeated by the Christ journeyed from planet to planet and on each planet became one or other of these spirits. On Jupiter he became the one whom the Greeks later called Zeus; on Mars, the one later called Ares; on Mercury, the one later called Hermes. In the Greek planetary gods there was this later reflection of what Christ Jesus in the super-sensible worlds had made of the planetary beings who were imbued with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles. When a Greek looked up to his heaven of the gods, he came into touch with the adumbrations, the reflections, of the activity of Christ Jesus on the individual planets, together with much else that I have described.

To this was added as a third event the reflection or adumbration of that which the Jesus-Being, in the later post-Atlantean times, had experienced as a celestial Being in relation to Sun, Moon and Earth. If we are to characterise this we can say: The Christ “ensouled” himself in an angelic Being. We say of Christ that he embodied himself in Jesus of Nazareth, but we are speaking now of an event that took place in spiritual worlds: the Christ “ensouled” himself in an angelic Being. And the effect was that human thinking, feeling and willing took an orderly course. This was an important event, coming early in the evolution of humanity: the development of the human soul-powers was brought into good order. The two earlier Christ events had brought order rather into the bodily constitution of man on Earth: what then had had to happen in the celestial worlds for this third event to come about?

It will be easier to recognise this third event if we look for the reflection of it in Greek mythology. For just as the planetary spirits projected themselves into the figures of Zeus, Ares, Hermes, Venus or Aphrodite, Kronos and so on, so was this third cosmic event reflected not only in Greek mythology but in the mythologies of the most diverse peoples. We can understand how it was reflected if we allow ourselves to compare the reflected images with their sources; if, that is, we compare what happened in Greece with what first happened in the Cosmos.

What was it that happened up there in the Cosmos? The need was to drive out something which would have raged chaotically in human souls; this had to be overcome. The angelic Being who was permeated with the Christ had to accomplish the deed of vanquishing and driving out from the human soul that which had to be driven out if thinking, feeling and willing were to be harmonised. And so there arises the picture—let us bring it vividly before our souls—of an angelic Being, dwelling still in the spiritual worlds, who later became the Nathan Jesus-child: he appears to us ensouled by the Christ and thereby rendered capable of special deeds—able to drive out from thinking, feeling and willing the element which would have raged within them as a dragon and brought them into chaos.

A reminiscence of this is preserved in all the pictures of St. George vanquishing the Dragon which are found in the records of human culture. St. George and the Dragon reflect that celestial event when the Christ ensouled the Jesus-Being and enabled him to drive the Dragon out of the soul-nature of man. This was a significant deed, made possible only with the help of Christ in the Being of Jesus, at that time an angelic Being. For this angelic Being had actually to connect himself with the Dragon-nature; to take on as it were the form of the Dragon in order to hold off the Dragon from the soul of man. He had to work from within the Dragon, so that the Dragon was ennobled and brought out of chaos into a kind of harmony. The training, the taming of the Dragon—that is the further task of this Being. And so it came about that the Dragon indeed remained active, but because there was poured into him the influence and power of the Being I have described, he became the bearer of many revelations which proved their worth to human civilisations throughout the course of post-Atlantean evolution. Instead of the chaos of the Dragon manifesting in maddened or bewildered men, the primal wisdom of the post-Atlantean time came forth. Christ Jesus used the Dragon's blood, as it were, so that with His help it could transfuse human blood and thereby make human beings the vehicles of divine wisdom. A significant reflection of this is apparent—even quite exoterically—in Greek mythology from the ninth century B.C. onwards.

It is remarkable how for the Greek mind one particular divine figure emerged from the others. The Greeks, we know, reverenced a variety of gods. These gods were the reflections or projections of the Beings who originated from the journey round the planets of the Being, permeated by the Christ, who later became the Nathan Jesus-child. The Greeks saw them in such a way that when they looked out into cosmic spaces, when they looked up through the light-aether, they rightly ascribed to the planet Jupiter—in an inward spiritual, not an external, sense—the origin of the Being they spoke of as Zeus. So they spoke of Pallas Athene, of Artemis, of the various planetary gods who were the reflections of what we have spoken about. But from these pictures of the various figures of the gods there emerged one figure—the figure of Apollo. The figure of Apollo emerged in a distinctive way: what did these Greeks see in him?

We come to know Apollo if we look at Parnassus and the Castalian spring. To the west of it there was a cleft in the earth, and over this the Greeks built a temple—why? Vapours used to rise up out of the cleft, and when the air-currents were right the vapours crept up the Mountainside like the coils of a snake, like a dragon. And the Greeks imagined Apollo as shooting his arrows at the dragon, as it rose from the cleft in the form of turbulent vapours. Here, in the Greek Apollo, we see an earthly reflection of St. George, shooting his arrows at the dragon. And when Apollo had overcome the dragon, the Python, a temple was built, and instead of the dragon we see how the vapours entered into the soul of the Pythia, and how the Greeks imagined that Apollo lived in these swirling dragon-vapours and prophesied to them through the oracle, through the lips of the Pythia. And the Greeks, that self-conscious people, rose through the stages for which their souls had been prepared; they accepted what Apollo had to say to them through the Pythia, who was imbued with the dragon-vapours. It meant that Apollo lived in the dragon's blood and filled men with wisdom from the Castalian spring. And the place became a meeting-place for the most sacred plays and festivals.

Why was Apollo able to do this—who was he? It was only from spring to autumn that he caused wisdom to flow up from the dragon's blood. Towards autumn he went away to his ancient home in the north, in the Hyperborean land. Farewell festivals were held at the time of his departure, and his return was welcomed in the spring. A deep wisdom resides in this idea of Apollo going north. The physical sun withdraws towards the south; in a spiritual sense it is always the opposite. The story shows that Apollo has to do with the sun. Apollo is the angelic Being of whom we have spoken; he was a reflection, projected into the Greek mind, of the angelic Being who had in fact worked at the end of the Atlantean time and who had been permeated by the Christ. This reflection was the Apollo who spoke wisdom to the Greeks through the mouth of the Pythia. And what was the content for the Greeks of this Apollo wisdom? We might say it was everything that led them, on the most important occasions, to take this or that decision. Again and again people went to Apollo at difficult moments in their lives, with their souls well prepared, and received prophetic guidance from the Pythia, who was stimulated by the vapours in which Apollo lived. And Asklepios, the Healer, is for the Greeks the son of Apollo, the healing god. The weakened form of the Angel in whom Christ once dwelt is a healer on Earth, or for the Earth. For Apollo was never physically embodied, but he worked through the Earth-elements.

And the god of the Muses, above all the god of song and the art of music, is Apollo. Why is this? Because through the power of song and string-music he brings thinking, feeling and willing into harmony. We have only to keep firmly in mind that in Apollo there was a projection of what had happened at the end of the Atlantean time. Something had then worked from spiritual heights into the human soul, and a weak echo of it could be heard in the musical art cultivated by the Greeks under the protection of Apollo. They knew it as an earthly reflection of the ancient art which the Angel-Being, permeated by the Christ, had cultivated in the heavenly heights in order to bring thinking, feeling and willing into harmony. They did not say so openly; only in the Mysteries was the meaning of it understood.

In the Apollonian Mysteries it was said: A high Divine Being once sank Himself into a Being of the Hierarchy of Angels and thereby brought harmony into thinking, feeling and willing. The art of music was a reflection of that happening, especially the Apollonian art which flowed from the sound of strings. The music which demands less of the elements than wind instruments do; which depends in the main only on the skill of human hands; in short, the music that sounds from the strings of Apollo—to this music the Greeks ascribed the musical effects which bring harmony into the soul. And persons who have no inclination for Apollo's music, or do not value it highly enough, were said by the Greeks to carry a bodily mark of their obtuseness in this respect; a sign that they had stayed behind, atavistically, at an earlier stage.

It is remarkable that when a certain man—King Midas—was born with exceptionally long ears, the Greeks said he had come into the world with ass's ears because in his life before birth he had not rightly devoted himself to the influence of the Being whom the Christ had enfilled. Therefore, said the Greeks, he had asses ears, and that was why he preferred wind instruments to string instruments. And when once a child was born who so to speak had no skin—he is known in mythology as the Flayed Marsyas—the Greeks said it was because before his birth he had not paid heed to all that flowed from the angelic Being. For that is how it looks to occult observation: Marsyas was not flayed in his lifetime, but before his birth, and it was then that his misdeed occurred.

Many towns founded by the Greeks as colonies were named Apollonia, because the sites for them had been chosen after consulting the Pythia. The Greeks cherished their freedom and so were not politically united, but they had an ideal unity through the god Apollo, for whom a kind of confederation was founded later on.

We see how the Greeks revered in the god they called, Apollo the Being of whom we have spoken; and we might say that in the Being who truly corresponded to Apollo at the end of the Atlantean time, the Christ was ensouled. Who then was Apollo—not the reflection revered by the Greeks, but Apollo himself? A celestial Being who from the higher worlds poured out healing forces for the soul, paralysing the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers. These forces brought about in the human body a harmonious co-operation of brain, breath and lungs with the larynx and the heart, and it was this that came to expression in song. For the right co-operation of brain and breathing with the speech organ and the heart is the bodily expression of harmony in thinking, feeling and willing. The Healer, the celestial Healer, is Apollo. We have seen this Being pass through three stages of evolution, and then the Healer, whom Apollo reflected, was born on Earth and men called him Jesus, which in our language means “He who heals through God”. He is the Nathan Jesus-child, the one who heals through God, Jehoschua-Jesus.

Now, at this fourth stage, this Being made himself ripe to be enfilled with the Christ Being, with the ‘I’. This came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha. For if this Mystery had not been enacted—if the Being whom we have followed through cosmic ages had not given embodiment to the Christ—then in the course of later time human souls would not have found bodies in which the Ego-force could come to necessary expression on Earth. The Ego had been brought to its highest stage in Zarathustra. The souls who had taken part in the evolution of the Ego would never have found earthly bodies suitable for its further development if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come to pass.

We have now seen the four stages of harmonisation: the harmonising of sense perception, of the life-organs, of thinking, feeling and willing, and the harmonisation in the Ego, this last through the Mystery of Golgotha. You have the connections between the Being who was born as the Nathan Jesus-child and the Christ Being, and the way in which this was prepared. It is now possible, through that which it is permissible to reveal in true Anthroposophy, to understand this kind of growing together, belonging together, of the Christ Being and the human nature of Jesus. This is possible for us. And a healthy development of spiritual life in the future will depend on this—on it becoming possible for more and more people to grasp that which could not be grasped by the thoughts and ideas of the epoch in which the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled.

• 1. See Occult Science—an Outline, Chapter IV. Chapter IV. (Rudolf Steiner Press, London.)
• 2. See, among others, the following references in lecture courses by Dr. Steiner: The Gospel of St. Luke, notably lectures 4 to 7; The Gospel of St. Matthew, notably lecture 6; The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind; Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of St. Matthew's Gospel.
• 3. See lecture given by Dr. Steiner at Pforzheim (7–3, 1914): Pre-Earthly Deeds of Christ.

[ 1 ] We will continue our study of the Mystery of Golgotha. At the very outset it must be realised that happenings on the Earth are not determined by earthly conditions alone but by the whole Universe. It is difficult for the modern mind to grasp what this means, but without the knowledge that influences pour down unceasingly upon the Earth from cosmic space, no event of human life, however simple, can be understood. I have spoken about this on many occasions and I shall speak of it to-day in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 2 ] I told you that the Jews—I mentioned them as the fourth people in the evolutionary process ¹—experienced the reality of the fourth member of man's being, namely the “I,” the Ego. This fourth member, which the Jews conceived to be the divine, innermost core of the human being, they called Jahve. And they saw a connection between Jahve and the universe of stars.

[ 3 ] You know, of course, that Palestine was the birth place of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth lived in Palestine, in a Jewish environment. The Jewish religion prevailed in Palestine and although the Romans were the political rulers, in those far-off lands they were not in a position to abolish the established religion. Jesus of Nazareth, therefore, grew up in the environment of the Jewish religion.

[ 4 ] It will be easier for you to understand the character of the Jewish religion if I say something about the peoples who were living in Mesopotamia, that is to say, further to the East, namely, the Babylonians, the Assyrians. These peoples were neighbours of the Jews and their religion was connected essentially with the stars—it was a Star Religion. One often ears it said that the Assyrians “worshipped” the stars. They did not worship the stars but the instinctive wisdom of those times enabled them to know much more about the stars than is known nowadays, despite the claims of modern scholarship.

[ 5 ] You may have read in the newspapers recently that this hitherto undisputed knowledge of the stars threatens to collapse as a result of the discovery that the Earth is not surrounded by empty, celestial space but that at a height of 400 kilometres there are solid crystals of nitrogen! It would seem, therefore, that science is finding confirmation of the “crystal heavens” spoken of in Greek antiquity. I mention this merely in parenthesis. Such things may bring home to scholars how little is really known about the world of stars.

[ 6 ] And now imagine a being inhabiting the planet Mars. If such a being were to look downwards without a powerful telescope, he would not see any human beings on the Earth: he would simply see the Earth radiating a greenish light into cosmic space. Yet the Earth swarms with human beings who are in turn connected with Spiritual Beings. And just as the physical forces of the stars have an influence upon the Earth, so too the spiritual forces of the stars have an influence upon the Earth, above all upon man. The ancient, instinctive wisdom of the East revealed the existence of Spiritual Beings in the stars and it was to these Spiritual Beings, not to the physical stars, that men looked with veneration. In this sense the religion in Western Asia in those early times was a Star Religion. It was accepted as a matter of course that Spiritual Beings belonging to Saturn, Jupiter and the other heavenly bodies have a certain influence upon men and upon their earthly life. [ 7 ] Now what the Jews had adopted from ancient religions was the teaching concerning the influence of the Moon; they paid little attention to the other heavenly bodies. Jahve or Jehovah was connected with the spirituality of the Moon. The Jewish religion in its earliest, original form taught that Jahve, or Jehovah, as a living reality within the human “I,” was connected with the spiritual forces of the Moon. [ 8 ] This is not a mere legend, neither is it an idea born of religious superstition; it relates to something of which there is scientific evidence. During the pregnancy of the mother—a period of great importance for earthly existence—when the human being is still an embryo, he is essentially dependent on the Moon. This dependency of the human embryo on the Moon has long been known and the period of pregnancy computed as ten lunar months. It is only comparatively recently that the ten lunar months have been changed to nine solar months. But these ten lunar months, which have rightly been connected with the period of pregnancy, are in themselves an indication that the embryonic human being in the body of the mother is dependent on the Moon. What does this mean? [ 9 ] In its earliest condition after fertilisation, the ovum really contains earthly substance that has been broken down, pulverised, and nothing whatever would arise from it if it were exposed to the influence of earthly forces alone! The development into a human embryo is only able to take place because influences from the Moon play down upon the Earth. It can truly be said that the forces of the Moon lead the human being into earthly life. And so in its veneration of Jahve as a Moon God, the Jewish religion was really pointing to this dependency of the human being upon the forces of the Moon when he is entering earthly existence.

[ 10 ] Now the peoples living further to the East, in Asia—the Babylonians, the Assyrians—recognised other planetary influences as well as those of the Moon. They said, for example: Whether a human being subsequently becomes wise or remains a dullard, depends to a certain extent upon the influence of Jupiter. But the Jews did not concern themselves with these other influences. They venerated the one God—a Moon God. The fact that the Jews turned from many Gods to one God is generally regarded as a great step forward in religious life.

[ 11 ] Jesus of Nazareth heard much of the one God, the God Jahve, for the Jewish religion was all around him and He was instructed in its teachings.

[ 12 ] You can understand why a people who venerated only the Moon God, the God whose influence upon the human being works above all during the period while he is in the mother's body, believed that a man brings the whole of his being with him when he comes to the Earth. And this found expression in the ancient Jahve religion. If an ancient Jew who had fallen sick were asked: Why has this befallen you?—he answered: It is the will of Jahve. If his house had been set on fire and he were asked: Why has your house been burnt?—again his answer would have been: It is the will of Jahve ... He attributed everything to the one God, Jahve, through whose power man is led into the earthly world, and he saw the will of Jahve in everything that happened. Hence there was a kind of frozen rigidity about the Jewish religion. Through the whole of his life a man felt that his existence was determined by what he had brought with him to the Earth.

[ 13 ] Other religious teachings, as well as those of the Jews, came to the knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth. These other religions taught that many heavenly bodies—not only the Moon—have an influence upon the human being. There is an indication in the Gospels of a connection between the Star Religions of the East and the country inhabited by the Jews where Jesus of Nazareth was born. For the Gospels tell of the Wise Men from the East who had seen a star and were led by this star to the birthplace of Jesus.

[ 14 ] The story as it stands in modern versions of the Gospels gives rise to misunderstanding. The truth of the matter is that with their knowledge of the heavenly constellations the Wise Men recognised from the position of the stars that a momentous event was about to take place. And so at the very birth of Jesus of Nazareth we have the indication of a link with the Star Wisdom of Asia, of the East. And this link remained.

[ 15 ] The aim of Jesus of Nazareth was to enable man—while he is actually living on the Earth—to become aware of an inner reality of being, an inner selfhood. The Jews said: Everything comes from Jahve.—But in reality it is only until birth that the influence of Jahve holds sway, and once the human being is born, his life on the Earth is not simply a continuation of the Jahve impulse. The great truth brought by Christ Jesus was that during earthly life man is not like a rolling ball, impelled only by the impetus given by Jahve before his birth, but that he possesses an inner power of will by means of which he can ennoble or debase his own nature, his own personality. This was a truly epoch-making teaching. For the Star Wisdom had been kept very secret; nothing was known of it in Palestine, let alone in Rome. The Star Wisdom had been kept strictly secret and it was therefore profoundly significant that Jesus of Nazareth should have taught: It is not only from the Moon that influences pour down upon man; influences also pour down upon him from the Sun.

[ 16 ] This was a momentous teaching. But such things must not be regarded merely as theories; they must be studied in the light of reality. What is it that the influence of the Moon really brings about while the human embryo still rests within the body of the mother? The being of soul, the being of soul-and-spirit comes from the Moon-sphere and passes into the physical body. Man descends as a soul from the heavens by way of the Moon. When the Jews said: Jahve has an influence upon the human being in the womb of the mother—what did this really indicate? It indicated the view: The soul-and-spirit of man comes from the Moon; there, in the Moon, is the Creator of the soul. The physical, material constitution of man comes from the Earth; but the soul-and-spirit comes from the great universe, entering into man by way of the Moon.—The Jews, therefore, maintained that the soul entered into man by way of the Moon and received its endowments and gifts from the Moon God.

[ 17 ] Jesus of Nazareth taught that in truth man has the soul within him but that the soul can change, can be transformed in the course of his life because he has freedom of will.

[ 18 ] What underlay this teaching of Jesus of Nazareth? This question is profoundly significant and in order to find the answer we must consider the following:

[ 19 ] The Jews are always distinguished in a certain way from other peoples of the Earth. The difference is due to the fact that throughout the centuries the Jews have been brought up in the Moon religion and have refused to recognise any other influence. Real understanding of these things requires a knowledge of certain characteristics of Judaism. There is abundant evidence that the Jews have a great talent for music; but on the other hand they have no outstanding gift for sculpture, painting and arts of this nature. The Jews have a flair for materialism but little aptitude for acknowledging the reality of the spiritual world. And this is because their veneration has always been paid to the Moon and the Moon only; the rest of the super-earthly universe has hardly entered their ken. The Jewish character and the Greek character are in complete contrast. The talent and inclination of the Greeks lay above all in the direction of sculpture, pictorial art, architecture—architecture which embodied the art of sculpture. The Jews have always been, and are by nature, a musical people, a sacerdotal people; they unfold more particularly the inner activity which has its source in the talents bestowed during embryonic life. [ 20 ] At the time when Jesus of Nazareth lived, this tendency was very strongly marked. The Jews one meets in Europe to-day have of course been living among other peoples for a long time, and they have assimilated many traits from them. But anyone of discernment can readily distinguish the fundamental character of the Jews from that of other peoples. As I said, the hearts and minds of the ancient Jews were directed entirely to the Moon God. Therefore they developed the traits which are connected with the Moon, not those which are connected with the Sun. The Sun was completely forgotten. If Jesus of Nazareth had remained a Jew, even He could only have taught a Moon Religion. But a different impulse, a spiritual influence proceeding directly from the Sun entered into him in the course of His life.

[ 21 ] As a result of this, He was “born a second time.” Eastern religions all knew what it meant to be born a second time, but to-day it is nothing more than a tradition and is no longer understood. At a certain moment in His life, Jesus of Nazareth knew that he had been born again, that the soul with which he had been endowed by the forces of the Moon while still within the mother's body had been quickened and filled with new life by the Sun ... And from that moment, He who had been Jesus of Nazareth was known among the initiated as Christ Jesus. It was said: Like all other Jews, Jesus of Nazareth became a man through the forces of the Moon; but because at a certain moment in his life the Sun influence poured into him, He has been born a second time—as CHRIST.

[ 22 ] Obviously, an average man of to-day who cannot take these things in their spiritual sense, will never be able to make anything of them. Having no idea that the human being is united with his soul in the mother's body before birth, he thinks that the soul must come in some way from the external world. And he certainly can make nothing of the teaching that a Sun Being, a second “personality” as it were, entered into Jesus of Nazareth. Just as the first personality enters into the mother's body, so did the Sun Being enter into Jesus of Nazareth as a second personality.

[ 23 ] The words used in the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church make no reference to what I have just told you. But at any celebration of High Mass you will see on the altar the Sanctissimum, the Monstrance containing the Sacred Host, and here (sketch on blackboard) rays are depicted. It is a representation of the Sun and the Moon. The very form of the Monstrance tells us that Christianity originates from a religious conception which, unlike that held by the Jews, recognises not only the influence of the Moon but also that of the Sun. Just as the influence working in the process of the birth of a human being is that of the Moon, so the influence working in Christ Jesus is that of the Sun.

[ 24 ] Having heard this, you may imagine that it is possible for every human being to be born a second time and to receive the influence from the Sun during the course of his life. But the truth is rather different. What happened in the case of Christ Jesus was that the influence streamed directly to the “I,” the Ego. Upon which member of man's being does the Moon influence work during embryonic life? As you know, man is composed of physical body, ether-body, astral body, and the “I.” The Moon influence works upon the astral body: the astral body, of which a man is not normally conscious, is influenced by the Moon. But in Christ, the Sun influence poured into the “I”—the free and independent “I”!

[ 25 ] If the Sun influence had ever worked upon man in exactly the same way as the Moon influence, what would have been the result? Think of the following:—As individuals we have no very decisive influence upon our own birth; our birth dispatches us as it were into the world. If the Sun influence were of exactly the same character as the Moon influence, we should simply receive the Sun influence at, say, the age of 30, and we should have no more say in this than we have in our birth. At the age of 30 we should suddenly become different persons, we should actually forget what we had been doing before that time. Just imagine what it would be like if you were to be going about until your 29th year and then, at 30, were to be born again! After this second “birth” you might come across someone not yet 30, who greeted you as an acquaintance. You would say: I know nothing about you ... I have only been here since to-day and I do not know you. That is what would happen if every human being at the age, say, of 30, were actually to receive the Sun influence. All this may seem very questionable but it is true nevertheless. It has simply been forgotten because history has been so greatly falsified. An exactly similar process was at work in very ancient times, although not in quite as drastic a form as I have described to you now ... In the very distant past, about seven or eight thousand years ago in India, men were like new beings when they reached the age of 30, and they knew nothing about their earlier life. Then the people around took charge of them and sent them to some “official” (I am using a modern term) who told them their names and who they were. This transformation was less and less marked as time went on, but in those olden times it did indeed take place. Even the ancient Egyptians who had reached, say, the age of 50, did not remember back to their childhood but only to their thirtieth year; they were told by the people around them about their earlier life, just as we are told to-day what we used to do when we were babies of one or two years old. History says nothing about this change that has come about in the life of man, but it is a fact.

The last human being destined to receive the direct influence of the Sun was Jesus of Nazareth; for others this was no longer possible. There is a hint about this Sun influence in the Gospels but it is always misinterpreted. The Gospels tell us that when Jesus of Nazareth went to the Jordan to be baptised by John, a Dove descended upon Him from heaven. The Dove is the symbol of the Sun influence, of the Sun Being who entered into Jesus. But He was the last, the very last. The bodily constitution of other men in His day was such that they were not able to receive the Sun influence. Jesus was the last.

[ 26 ] In the ancient East, men could say with truth: The Sun influence comes to everyone in the course of his life, and when this happens he becomes a new being. This could no longer be said in the epoch when Christ Jesus lived, and the priests knew of it merely through tradition, not through their own vision.

[ 27 ] In the ancient past, before the days of the Jews, veneration was paid to the Sun, because the Sun was known to be the source of this all-powerful influence during life. When no such influence was received, men ceased to venerate the Sun. By whom, then, was the Sun replaced? By Christ Jesus Himself! Before the founding of Christianity there had been a Sun Religion in which the Sun itself was the object of veneration. Christ Jesus was the last to receive this Sun influence, and thereafter men could do no other than point to Christ, saying: There, within Him, is the Sun Spirit!

[ 28 ] Herein lies the great and fundamental change. It denoted a sheer revolution in thought to be able to say: Christ Jesus brought down upon the Earth that which was formerly in the Sun. In the first Christian centuries, Christ was always called the Sun and in the Gospels we still find the words: “the Sun, the Christ.” Later on, the meaning was entirely forgotten. At every High Mass the truth is visibly portrayed in the Monstrance; but if anyone says in so many words that what is represented there is a fact, he is denounced as a heretic. For the Christian Church has always considered it dangerous to proclaim truths which have to do with the Stars, and therefore also with the Sun.

[ 29 ] Why is this so? Here again we must go back to the ancient Mysteries and compare them with Christianity. You know that the Mysteries were not open to everyone. I told you about the different stages. The Initiates were known as Ravens, Occultists, Defenders, Sphinxes, Spirits of the People, Sun Men, Fathers.³ These men knew that influences come from the stars and the initiated priests were careful to ensure that the knowledge was in the possession only of those who had actually been received into the Mysteries. For knowledge is a power! True, it is often suppressed ... but when the authority of the priesthood is strong, knowledge is certainly a power.

[ 30 ] The Star Wisdom had, however, been lost. And now came Christ Jesus who brought it to life again—but in a new form—teaching that the Sun God must now have his place upon the Earth. If Christ's teaching had gained the victory, knowledge of the Sun influence and indeed of the ancient Star Religion in its entirety would again have been present in the world. Moreover in the early Christian centuries this was in many ways the case. There was a certain revival of the ancient Mystery teachings. But Christ Jesus had brought about the great and fundamental change in that He placed as a reality before all the world what had previously been guarded as a close secret in the Mysteries. Thereafter it would have been within the reach of all human beings, but no effort succeeded in spreading the knowledge.

[ 31 ] A certain Roman Emperor, Julian, called the “Apostate” tried to introduce the ancient Star Religion once again but he was murdered while on a journey to Persia

[ 32 ] What happened in Rome was this. The Star Wisdom that had in truth been brought again to the world by Christ Jesus was denounced as superstition—and not only as superstition but as a creed of the devil. The very means, therefore, of leading men to a real knowledge of the Spiritual was denounced and practically exterminated. People were expected to believe only in the external, historical event of the presence of Christ Jesus in Palestine—in the form in which the Church proclaimed it.

Consequently the Church became the supreme authority for all believers in the matter of how and what they should think. It was not by way of Rome that real Christianity came to Europe; what Rome brought to Europe was a changed Christianity—a Christianity which accepted only the outer event in Palestine and ignored the whole cosmic setting of that event.

Why did it happen so? [ 33 ] As I told you, Rome originated from a band of brigands who had once gathered together,² and echoes of their mode of life persisted for a very long time. Rome has always striven for power in worldly affairs and in the religious life at the same time. And in the course of the Middle Ages, the Pope took the place ... well, not of the ancient High Priest, the “Pontifex Maximus,” for it was only the name that continued ... the Pope assumed the position that had once been held by the Roman Emperors.

At one period—it was at the beginning of the eleventh century—an attempt was made by a certain German Emperor to achieve something in the same direction as Julian who had been called the Apostate. It is a very interesting story. Henry II was a good and faithful advocate of Christianity and was looked upon as a kind of saint. He reigned as Emperor from 1002–24. In history, too, he is known as Henry “the Saint” and he still figures among the saints named in the breviary of Catholic priests. Henry II was one who wished to point to the ancient wisdom, to preserve for Christianity the conception that in Christ Jesus there had lived the Sun Spirit. He wanted to establish an Ecclesia catholica non Romana, that is to say, a Catholic Church that is not Roman. This attempt was made at the beginning of the eleventh century. Lutherism came considerably later. If Henry II's attempt to establish a “Catholic Church that is not Roman” had succeeded at that time, the whole cosmic setting of Christianity would have come to the knowledge of Europe and through the religious life men would have been led to a truly spiritual science. But Rome conquered—that is to say, semi-religious, semi-imperial Rome. No Ecclesia catholica non Romana came into being and the Ecclesia catholica Romana lived on. The aim of Emperor Henry II had been to separate the Catholic Church entirely from the sphere of worldly dominion.

[ 34 ] It would have been a momentous deed, for if it had succeeded, the subsequent, very widespread persecution of heretics and heresies would never have taken place. Such persecutions are simply the outcome of authority exercised over men's thoughts. But in reality, nobody can have permanent authority over thoughts. Authority over thoughts can only be exercised when a human being is subject to the sway of worldly power, when he is obliged to attend particular schools where certain doctrines are inculcated into him, when he is put into a certain class which influences his point of view, and the like. Thoughts, in reality, cannot be made to submit to authority. No Church could ever have worked harmfully without the help of the worldly dominion to which man is subject as a physical being. For the Church can only teach; the response must come from human beings themselves. That is the principle which Henry II tried to establish. But as I said, the victory was won by Rome—by the ancient, imperial power working in the person of the Pope. The power of worldly dominion was very great in the days of Henry II. And if the attempt to establish a “Catholic Church that is not Roman” had succeeded at that time, the teachings of the Church would have remained apart from the sphere of worldly dominion.

[ 35 ] Fundamentally, the Crusades were pursuing the same aim. It is commonly said that the Crusades were undertaken in the service of Rome, that because the wicked Turks had conquered Jerusalem the pilgrims there could no longer perform their devotions in safety. Then Rome intervened and sent Peter of Amiens out into Europe to preach. Numbers of men were urged to come together in a Crusade to the East, to Jerusalem, and a great band of Crusaders gathered as the result of this preaching under the leadership of Peter of Amiens and Walter the “Penniless.” (Perhaps you can guess why he was called the “Penniless.” He was like all of us here, for we could not raise enough money between us to pay the cost of a crusade to Asia!) But this whole band of Crusaders perished on the way and nothing was achieved.

[ 36 ] Then came others, under the leadership of Godfrey of Bouillon. These men were not in the service of Rome but their aim had certain points in common with that of Henry II. They wanted to do away with the element of worldly dominion. (Dr. Steiner makes a sketch on the blackboard.) Here is Italy, here Greece, here the Black Sea, here Asia, here Palestine, here Jerusalem. The aim of the first real Crusade was that Jerusalem, not Rome, should stand as the centre and citadel of the Christian religion. This was again an attempt to make the Ecclesia, the Church, independent of worldly dominion.

[ 37 ] None of these attempts succeeded. Roman princes and nobles again found their way into the later Crusades. The story can be read in any history book.

[ 38 ] And so this basic principle of Christianity, enshrining the great thought that in Christ Jesus the Sun Force itself was brought down to the Earth and that realisation of this makes every human being free ... “Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free ...”—this whole conception has remained in oblivion through the centuries and true Christianity must be discovered again to-day through Spiritual Science. It is not surprising that the representatives of Christianity in the form it has now assumed, oppose the Christianity which genuinely adheres to Christ Jesus and teaches the same realities as He Himself taught. This is what Anthroposophy does. Again it is not surprising that those who only know Christianity in its present form often have an aversion to it. This aversion, however, it not to be laid at the door of Christianity itself. Christianity has brought about tremendous progress in the social life. Slavery was gradually abolished, for one thing. And without Christianity there would have been no science as we know it to-day. Most of the really epoch-making discoveries were made by monks (the air-pump produced by the worthy Burgomaster Guericke von Magdeburg is one of the exceptions). Copernicus was a dignitary of the Catholic Church; and the schools and academies of learning were all dependent upon the monks.

[ 39 ] But something else must also be remembered.—The monasteries were not, at first, welcome in the Church, because the monks had preserved a good deal of the ancient knowledge. Among the monks (only they were not allowed to speak) there did indeed exist knowledge of the ancient Star Wisdom. Ample evidence of this can be found by anyone who looks for it. It was through monasticism, not through any external regime that knowledge of the kind of which I gave you an example in the last lecture, had been preserved and it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it was completely swept away. The Middle Ages were by no means as “dark” an epoch as people generally believe. It is only what comes within the range of ordinary observation that is “dark.” In secret there was a great deal of wisdom, only it is not understood to-day.

[ 40 ] We can truly say: The greatest thought enshrined in Christianity is that the Sun Force in all reality came down upon the Earth.

[ 41 ] Not until then did history, as we know it to-day, really come to birth. For whereas in olden times men in the East possessed a glorious Star Wisdom, they attached no value to “history.” Those who were knowers and sages in the East always declared: It is there, in the Heavens, that the act of Creation takes place. They did not concern themselves to any great extent with the life and doings of human beings on the Earth.—True, something in the nature of history appears when the Jews come upon the scene, but it is history that begins with Star Wisdom—for the story of the “seven days of Creation” is pure Star Wisdom. Later on, events become chaotic, a medley. True history—and true history divides the whole process of evolution on the Earth into the pre-Christian and the post-Christian—really begins when Christianity is born.

• 1. See the lectures in the first volume of this series: The Birth of Christianity, and Christianity and the Mysteries of Antiquity.
• 3. See Christianity and the Mysteries of Antiquity.
• 2. See Christianity and the Mysteries of Antiquity; also Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History.