The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] I should like to make an observation to-day at the beginning of this lecture in connection with the end of yesterday's lecture. I have seen that some of our respected listeners have given a certain importance to the fact — and one can very well understand it — that, in the sketch which I made each planet stood in a line with the Sun, that a sort of general relationship had been drawn, but I must expressly observe to you that this has no importance, and has nothing to do with that which concerns us here. It will be considered later on. We must not get wrong ideas.

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[ 2 ] First, we draw the Sun, in accordance with the Copernican system; then, that which is called Mercury to-day — but which is esoterically called Venus; then Venus — which is Mercury in the esoteric sense. Then (according to the Copernican system), comes the earth, with its moon. Then comes the orbit of Mars, of Jupiter, ending up with the orbit of Saturn.

[ 1 ] This then would be the world system of Copernicus. Now, as I have said, I should like to put the thing before you as it was taught in a school of Zarathustra. Zarathustra however was not always himself the teacher; these are elementary truths which were taught in the Zarathustra schools. [ 3 ] If we suppose that here is the constellation Gemini, we take these points which simply lie in this line (from x or Gemini, to the Sun), and join the Sun with the constellation of Gemini, whether there is such a conjunction or not does not matter. I have drawn this here only to show the orbits of the planets, not the points where they stand. These are the boundary marks for the different Hierarchies. [ 4 ] Now, if we want, for instance, to designate the realm of Saturn, we must think of the earth and not the Sun as the centre, and we must draw a sort of circle — which in reality is not circular but egg-shaped, so that the earth becomes the centre point. We must do the same with the other heavenly bodies. I beg you not to take the things of secondary importance in this drawing for the chief thing. The chief thing consists in getting into your minds the figures, which agree with the corresponding realms of power, of the Hierarchies.

[ 5 ] To-day we shall consider more in detail the nature of those members of the Hierarchies, standing immediately above man. It is good to study this and to begin for once with man. For only if we have quite clearly in our minds all that has been repeatedly said about the nature of man and of his developments, can we rise to the consideration of the nature of the members of the higher Hierarchies.

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[ 6 ] We know that man, as he first appeared upon earth, and as he has developed, consists essentially of four parts. These four members are the physical, the etheric, the astral body and the ‘I.’ We will draw these schematically to-day, as we have need. First we draw the human physical body as a circle, the same with the etheric body, the astral and lastly the ‘I’ or Ego as a small circle. You know how the development of man proceeds. During the course of his earthly evolution man begins to work on his astral body, with his Ego.

Generally speaking we may say: as much of his astral body as man has developed by the help of his ‘I’, so that this refashioned part of his astral body is completely ruled by the ‘I’, so much of it is called Manas or Spirit self, this — as has been often said — must not be looked upon as something new that has entered man, but simply as a transformed product of the astral body. It must be carefully noted that all that has just been said applies to man only. It is important that we should not generalise, but make it clear to ourselves that the Beings of the universe differ very much from each other. [ 7 ] Let us then draw the fifth part of man the transformed astral body, that is to say Manas, as a separate circle: in reality it ought to have been drawn inside the astral body. In the same way we must draw above it the transformed etheric body. The transformed part of the etheric body, we designate Budhi or life spirit: when the whole of it is transformed it becomes completely Budhi. In the same way the physical body is transformed into Atma, when we consider man in his perfected state, which he will attain in the course of his development through Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. Thus when man will have reached his highest perfection in the Vulcan condition, we might make a schematic drawing of him in the following way: we could say that we have here his Atma, Budhi, Manas, the ‘I’ or Ego, the astral body, the etheric and the physical body. And we would see in Diagram I that the most characteristic thing we have to observe in man is, that with his seven principles he is an entire being, that these seven principles are all within each other. This is the most important thing.

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[ 8 ] When we now turn to the members of the next Hierarchy, the Angels, the case is different. This scheme applies to man, but not to the angels.

Here, in Diagram II, we must say that the Angel has developed physical body (1) etheric (2) and astral body (3). But now the Ego (4) must be drawn as separated from these, then come Manas (5) Budhi (6) and Atma (7). If you want to be clear about the nature of an Angel you must think that his higher parts to which he seeks to develop himself float above that part of him which is in the physical world; at first he has really only Manas completely developed, the other two parts he will develop later. If one wanted therefore to study the nature of an Angel one would have to say that the Angel has not an Ego which dwells on earth as the man has. Nor is he developing his Manas present stage of evolution upon earth. Therefore, that which there is of him upon earth, does not look as if it belonged to a spiritual Being. When you meet a man and you look at him, you see he has his principles in him, therefore all his parts are organised within him. If you want to look for an Angel, you must keep in mind that his physical part is something like a mirrored reflection of his spiritual principles, which are to be found only in the spiritual world. In flowing and running water, in mists dissolving into water, also in the winds and the lightning flashing through the air, in all these, you have to look for the physical body of Angelic beings. The difficulty for man consists in his fixed idea that a physical body must necessarily have a definite outline. It is difficult for a man to say to himself: I see fog rising, I see a stream of water dissolving into spray, I stand in the blowing wind, I see lightning dart from the clouds, and I know that all these are revelations of Angels; behind this physical body, which is by no means so limited as the human one I have to recognise the spirit. [ 9 ] Man has to develop all his principles enclosed within him; because of this he cannot realise that a physical body can be so liquid and evanescent that it does not even have to be enclosed or outlined with precision. You must realise that eighty Angels may be associated with and have the most solid part of their physical body in some one sheet of water. The physical body of an Angel need not be understood as having any boundary; one piece of water may belong to it here, and far away another piece. In short, all that surrounds us as the water, fire, and air of the earth, we have to imagine as containing the bodies of the Hierarchy which stands next above man. One has to look clairvoyantly into the astral world in order to perceive the Angel's Ego and his Manas that gazes down on us from the higher world.

The realm of the solar system which we must investigate when we seek the Angels, is that whose limits are marked by the Moon. With the Angels, investigation is still comparatively easy, for their condition is such, that if for instance, we have an Angel's physical body in a piece of water or the like, and we consider that water or that wind clairvoyantly, we find within it an etheric or astral body. Hence, in the drawing these three are represented together. Of course, we must not only see the material image in the rushing wind, the flowing or broken water, which common perception sees; the etheric and astral parts of the Angels live in the most varied way in water, air, and fire. But if you want to look for the spiritual being, the soul of the Angel, you must seek it in the astral realm, you must seek it clairvoyantly.

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[ 10 ] The next stage, that of the Archangels, is again different. That which we have drawn here as the astral body is, in the case of the Archangels, not at all united with the etheric and physical bodies. The lowest part of them which we can find, we must draw like this: physical body, etheric body (Diagram III – 1,2); this they have separated off, and all the higher principles are above in the higher worlds, so that we can only have a complete image of the Archangel when we look for it in two places, and realise, that it is not the same as with man who unites all in one being. The spiritual part is above, and at the same time it mirrors itself below. A physical and etheric body can only unite when the physical consists of air or fire. For instance you could not perceive the physical bodies of these Archangels rushing along in the water; you could recognise them only in air and in fire, and you would have to find clairvoyantly, and only in the spiritual world, the spiritual counter-part of that rushing wind and that fire. This is joined neither to his physical, nor to his etheric body.

[ 11 ] And then we come to those Beings whom we designate as Archai, Primeval Beginnings or Spirits of Personality. Here below, we can draw only the physical body (Diagram IV); all the rest is above in the spiritual world. Such a physical Body can live only in fire; only in flames of fire can you recognise the physical body of the Archai. Whenever you see the flashing fire of the lightning you may say to yourselves: in it is contained something of the Archai; but in the spiritual world above I shall find the spiritual counter-part which, in this case is separated from its physical body.

It is specially in the Archai or Spirits or Personality that the clairvoyant can accomplish this with comparative ease.

These Spirits of Personality have a realm which reaches up to the astronomical Venus (Mercury in the occult sense of the Mysteries). Let us imagine that someone has progressed so far that he is able to observe what is evolving up there on Venus. (Occult Mercury). There he can recognise these highly evolved Beings, the Spirits of Personality. When he directs his clairvoyant vision to Venus so as there to observe the assembly of the spirits of Personality, and then sees the lightning flash through the clouds, he sees in that flash of lightning the reflection of the Spirits of Personality, for in it they have their physical body.

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[ 12 ] Now we come to yet higher spiritual Beings, to those who reach up to the Sun. These Powers, these Exusiai, or Spirits of Form interest us less at the present time; only it must be kept in view that the beings of Venus and of Mercury are their organs of execution, the beings of Venus who have their physical body in fire, and those of Mercury who have it in air. Translate this so that you say: the Beings who live in the Sun make use of the spirits of Venus (occult Mercury) in the fire flames, and the spirits of Mercury (occult Venus) in the rushing wind as their executive. ‘And God makes flames of fire into his servants and winds into his messengers.’ Sayings such as these found in ancient religious documents are taken absolutely from spiritual facts, and correspond with what the clairvoyant is able to observe.

[ 13 ] Thus we see that the three hierarchies who stand next above us are closely attached to our own existence. Man is the being he is, because he has partaken of solidity from the earth. This separates him from other Beings, it makes him into a self-contained being composed of separate organs. On the Moon, man was still a being like others; there he passed through transformations, just as the masses of water do which have a body that is ever in a state of transformation. On the earth man was for the first time imprisoned, as it were, within his skin; and became a self-contained being, so that it is possible to say, man is composed of a physical, etheric, astral body and an Ego. This isolation really originated not so very long ago. If we return to the first epoch of old Atlantean times, we find a man who did not yet feel his Ego completely within him, who was still waiting to receive his Ego. And if we go still further back in earthly evolution we find that what there is of man down on earth consists as yet only of a physical, etheric and astral body. And if we go back to Lemurian times, we find a man who in his way has no more of a physical, etheric and astral body down here upon earth than the Angels have. From this point of time, with the growth of the Ego the union begins, and continues through post-Atlantean times. In Lemurian times men walked the earth who had only a physical, and etheric and an astral body. But these were not men who could think, in the sense of to-day, or who could develop humanly — in the sense of to-day.

[ 14 ] And now something very remarkable happened upon earth. Those men of Lemuria who had only physical, etheric and astral bodies were helpless, they could not help themselves, they did not know what they had to do on earth. From heavenly regions the inhabitants of astronomical Venus first came down to the earth, to these helpless beings; because they had a certain relationship, to the physical body, they were enabled to send their light through, and ensoul the physical body of the first inhabitants of the earth. Thus, we find some among the Lemurians, who passed among the mass of humanity in quite a remarkable way; they had a different physical body to the others. A man, so particularly graced, had not an ordinary physical body, but a body ensouled by a spirit of Venus, a Spirit of Personality. Because that man of ancient Lemuria moved about with a spirit of Venus within his physical body, he had a powerful influence on all his surroundings. Such Lemurians did not appear different from their companions externally; but because a Spirit of Personality was translated into their bodies, these selected individuals acted suggestively, in the highest sense of the word, upon their surroundings. To-day, there is nothing to compare to the obedience, the reverence and awe that was felt for them. All the attempts at colonisation which were undertaken, to people the different regions of the earth, were led by such Beings, into whom a Spirit of Personality had descended. No speech was needed — for there was no speech then — no signs were needed, but the fact alone that such a Spirit of Personality was there, sufficed. And when it was held necessary that large masses of people should be led from one place to another, those masses simply followed without thinking about it. Thought did not exist, it only developed later.

[ 15 ] Thus the Spirits of Personality came down to earth, as Spirits of Venus, in ancient Lemurian times. And we can say, that the distinctive features of these messengers from Venus — such as the human countenances of that time could wear — signified something quite new with regard to the whole Universe. If we take their cosmic significance, it reaches as far as Venus, and their actions had a meaning, an influence on the whole concatinations of the Solar System. They could lead the people from one place to another, for they knew the connections that can only be known by those, who are acquainted with the surroundings of the earth, and not only with the Earth itself.

[ 16 ] The development of humanity progressed further. The necessity arose that Archangels, spirits of astronomical Mercury, should act upon the human development. These were now obliged to ensoul and give life to that which dwelt below upon earth. This was principally in Atlantean times. At that time the Archangels, or Spirits of Mercury descended upon earth, and inspired the physical and etheric bodies of the men of that period. So in Atlantis there were also men who were not outwardly very different from the others, but whose physical and etheric bodies were ensouled by an archangel. And if you remember what was said yesterday, that the Archangels have the task of directing whole nations, you will understand that a man who had an Archangel within him could actually give to the whole Atlantean race those laws which he received directly from heaven. [ 17 ] The great leaders of old Lemurian times, when it was still necessary to act much more generally, were ensouled by Spirits from Venus. Those who, in Atlantean times had to direct smaller masses of people, were ensouled by Archangels. Those who are called the priest-kings of Atlantis, were in truth — Maya. They were not at all what they outwardly appeared to be. An Archangel lived in their physical and etheric bodies, he was the real active agent..

If we go back to Atlantean times, we can seek out the secret stations of these leaders of mankind. From these hidden centres they worked, there they investigated the mysteries of Space One might ascribe the name of ‘Oracle’ to what was investigated, and commanded from those ancient Atlantean places of the Mysteries, even though this word originated in later times. The name ‘Place of the Oracles’ is quite suitable to these centres of instruction, and government. From them the great teachers worked, so that others might there be trained to become priests and servants of men.

[ 18 ] It is important that one should know that there were men in ancient Atlantis who in reality were Archangels, bearing an Archangel incarnated within their physical and etheric bodies. If such a man had been seen by someone endowed with clairvoyance, the latter would in fact have seen a physical man and behind him an enormous figure, rising high above him, and losing itself in indefinite regions — the figure of the inspiring Archangel. Such a personality was of a two-fold nature, as if behind the physical man, growing out of indefinite Space, was the inspiring Archangel. When such men died, the physical body was destroyed according to the laws of Atlantis. That physical body, which had been naturally ensouled by the Archangel, dissolved, but the etheric body did not dissolve. There is a spiritual economy which demands exceptions to the general truths expounded by Anthroposophy. We say — and in general it is correct — that when a man dies, he lays aside his physical body and after a certain time also his etheric body, which dissolves with the exception of an extract. But this is only generally the case. There is an enormous difference between an etheric body like that of the Initiates of the Atlantean Oracles, which was permeated by an Archangel, and an ordinary etheric body. Such a precious etheric body is not lost, but is preserved in the spiritual world. In the first place, the great leader of the Atlantean Oracles preserved the seven most important etheric bodies of the seven great initiators of these Oracles. These ether bodies were originally built up through being inhabited by Archangels, who, at their death, naturally returned to the higher worlds. Such things are certainly not preserved in boxes, but according to spiritual laws. The Atlantean Initiate of the Sun-Oracle is no other than Manu, who has been often mentioned, and who guided the remnant of the Atlantean nation over to Asia to establish the new post-Atlantean civilisation. He took his little handful of people with him and led them over to Asia. He trained the people through generations, and when the seven most adaptable ones had been bred and educated sufficiently, he wove into their individual etheric bodies the substance of the seven preserved etheric bodies, which had been woven by Archangels in ancient Atlantis. Those seven, who were sent down by the great Leader, to lay the foundation of the first Post-Atlantean civilisation, were the seven holy Rishis of ancient India; they bore within their etheric garment, the etheric bodies of the great Atlantean Leaders, who had themselves acquired these bodies through the Archangels. Thus the past, the present, and the future acted in harmony. Those seven men who are called the holy Rishis would have appeared to you as simple people, for with their astral body and their Ego, they had not reached the height of their etheric bodies.

All that they were capable of was interwoven with their etheric bodies. There were certain hours during which inspiration acted within their etheric bodies, and then they spoke of things which they themselves could never have known. Then from their lips flowed that which had been inspired into their etheric bodies. Thus they were simple, plain people when they were left to their own understanding; but in their hours of inspiration, when the etheric body was active, they spoke of the greatest mysteries of our solar system and of the whole universe.

[ 19 ] In the post-Atlantean times men had not yet advanced so far that they could do without help from above, inspiration was still necessary; and a sort of ensouling still took place from above. We have seen how such ensouling occurred in Lemurian times, because a spirit of Personality ensouled the physical. body; in the Atlantean times the physical and the etheric bodies were ensouled by Archangels, and now the great leaders of the post-Atlantean times were ensouled through an Angel descending into their physical, etheric and astral bodies. The great leaders of humanity in the post-Atlantean times did not possess merely a physical, etheric and astral body, but an Angel also lived within them. Therefore, these great leaders could look back into their former incarnations. The ordinary man cannot do so as yet, because he has not yet developed. his Manas; he must himself first become an Angel. These leaders, who were born out of the ordinary inhabitants, carried an Angelic Being within their physical, etheric and astral bodies, who ensouled and, interpenetrated them. This is again Maya, again we have Beings who are something different from what they appear to be on earth. The great leaders of humanity of grey antiquity were quite different from what they outwardly seemed to be. They were personalities in whom an Angel dwelt and gave what they needed, so that they might become Teachers and Leaders of men. The great founders of religions were men possessed by Angels. Angels spoke through them. [ 20 ] The affairs of the world have to be described indeed as entirely regular, but the processes of development always slide one within the other, they overlap. That which we describe as exhibiting complete regularity does not work itself out with such regularity. It is certainly true that, as a general principle, Spirits of Personality did speak through human entities in the Lemurian times, Archangels in the Atlantean, and Angels in the post-Atlantean times. But such beings arose, also even in the post Atlantean times, who were penetrated by a Spirit of Personality down to their physical body, who, therefore, were in the same position, although they lived in the post Atlantean times, as were those beings through whom in Lemuria the Spirits of Personality spoke. Thus it was possible to have men also in the post-Atlantean times, who bore externally all the characteristics of their nation, but who, because humanity still needed such great leaders, carried within them a Spirit of Personality — and who were the external incarnation of such a Spirit. Then there were also men in the post Atlantean times who had an Archangel, a Spirit of Mercury, within them, who ensouled their physical and etheric bodies. And lastly, a third category of men was ensouled, inspired in their physical, etheric and astral bodies by an Angel Being, one through whom an Angel spoke. [ 21 ] In the spirit of the Eastern Teaching such personalities received particular names. Thus a personality who outwardly resembles a man of our post-Atlantean times, but who really is the bearer of a Spirit of Personality, who is ensouled by that Spirit down to his physical body, is called Dhyani-Buddha in the Eastern Teaching. Dhyani-Buddha is a generic name for human individualities in whom the Spirits of Personality are active, even as far as their physical body.

Those personalities who are ensouled down to their etheric body, who were bearers of Archangels in the post-Atlantean times, are called Bodhi-Sattva And those who are the bearers of an Angel, who are, therefore, ensouled in their physical, etheric and astral bodies, are called human Buddhas

Thus we have three degrees: that of the Dhyani-Buddha, the Bodhi-Sattva and the human Buddha. This is the true teaching of the Buddhas, of the classes and categories of Buddhas, which we have to recognise in connexion with the whole manner and means by which the Hierarchies fulfil their ends. [ 22 ] This is the marvel which meets us, when we look back to earlier undeveloped men, that among these men we find those, through whom the Hierarchies speak The great Hierarchies speak out of the Cosmos downwards into the Planets, and only by degrees do these Spirits of the higher Hierarchies, who were active before the appearance of our earth, emancipate the planetary men who live down here, when they have reached the necessary degree of ripeness. Here we gaze into unfathomable depths of wisdom. And what is of extraordinary importance is, that we understand this wisdom exactly as it was taught in all the ages, when primeval wisdom was taught to men.

[ 23 ] Thus, when you hear of the Buddhas, for they do not speak of the one Buddha only in the Eastern teaching, but of many, among whom there are naturally different grades of perfection — give attention to the fact: a Buddha walks on earth, but behind the Buddha, was the Bodhi-Sattva and even the Dhyani-Buddha.

Matters, however, might be so, that the Dhyani-Buddha or the Bodhi-Sattva did not reach so far as to ensoul the physical body, but that the Bodhi-Sattva descended only as far as to be able to ensoul the etheric body, so that you can imagine a Being who does not reach so far as to ensoul and inspire the mans physical body, but only the etheric body. It can, however, happen when such a Bodhi-Sattva is not physically visible (for when he appears only in an etheric body he is not physically visible, and there were such Bodhi-Sattva who were physically invisible) that he can, as a higher Being, inspire quite exceptionally the human Buddha. So that we have the human Buddha, who is already inspired by an Angelic Being, being further inspired in his etheric body by an Archangel Being. [ 24 ] It is essential that we should look into this wonderful complexity of the human nature. Many Individualities to whom we look back into former times can only be understood, when we accept them as the meeting point of different higher Beings, who proclaim and express themselves through the man. For, in truth, many periods do not possess a sufficient number of great men to be inspired by the Spirits who have to be active. Thus sometimes one single personality has to be ensouled by different individualities of the higher Hierarchies. And sometimes it is not only the inhabitants of Mercury who speak with us, when we have a certain personality standing before us, but the inhabitants of Venus also.

Such ideas lead us to the understanding of human evolution, so that we may recognise the true nature of those personalities who, when met as physical men, represent merely Maya. [ 25 ] To-morrow we shall begin by trying to comprehend the origin of each individual planet, which up to now we have considered only as boundary marks, and then we shall gain an idea of them as the dwelling-places of the corresponding spiritual Beings.²

• 2. EDITORIAL NOTES —
  A Spirit of Personality enters the Physical and the entity is called a Dyani-Buddha in Post-Atlantis.
  An Archangel enters the Physical and Etheric and the entity is called a Bodhi-Sattva in Post-Atlantis.
  An Angel enters the Physical, Etheric and Astral and the entity is called a human Buddha in Post-Atlantis
  But there are different degrees of each, and it is possible for a being to be inspired by all three Spiritual Beings. The student should avoid making hard and fast rules. There is much overlapping and also some departure from diagrams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recitation by Marie von Sivers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With heartfelt veneration and gratitude!

Christian Morgenstern.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Christian Morgenstern!

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

Read Christian Morgenstern!

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

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

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

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

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

Recitation by Marie von Sivers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the study of Anthroposophy, a justifiable objection at first can be that the anthroposophical investigation of facts concerning the spiritual worlds depends upon calling up, through the training I have described, deep-lying forces in the human being, before these facts can be reached. Hence it might be said: All those who have not gone through such a development, and have therefore not yet reached the point of perceiving super-sensible facts for themselves, and actually experiencing super-sensible beings, have no means of proving the truth of what is said by the investigator of those worlds. Often, when the spiritual world is spoken of in public and information about it is given, the protest is heard: How should such ideas concern those who cannot yet see into this super-sensible world?

This objection rests on an entirely erroneous idea—the idea that anyone who speaks about the super-sensible worlds is talking of things quite unknown to his listeners. That is not so at all. But there is an important distinction, with regard to this kind of Initiation-knowledge, between what is right today and what was once right in the old days of which I was speaking yesterday.

You will remember how I described the path into the spiritual worlds. I spoke of how it leads us first to a great life-tableau, in which we see the experiences that have become part of our personality during this life on Earth. I went on to speak of how, having progressed from Imaginative-knowledge to that of Inspiration, a man is able, with empty consciousness and in absolute stillness and peace, to survey his pre-earthly life. He is thus led into that world of spiritual deeds which he has passed through between his last death and his recent descent to Earth.

Consider how, before making this descent, every human being has gone through such experiences; there is no-one who has not experienced in its full reality what the spiritual investigator has to tell. And when the investigator clothes in words facts at first unrecognised, he is not appealing to something quite unknown to his hearers but to what everyone has experienced before earthly life. The investigator of the spiritual world is simply evoking people's cosmic memories; and all that he says about the spiritual world is living in the souls of everyone, though in the transition from pre-earthly to earthly life it has been forgotten. In fact, as an investigator of the spiritual world, one is simply recalling to people's memories something they have forgotten.

Now imagine that during life on Earth a man comes across another human being with whom he remembers experiencing something, twenty years before, which the other man has completely forgotten. By talking with him, however, about the incident that he himself remembers clearly, he can bring the other man to recall it also. It is just the same process, though on a higher level, when I speak to you about spiritual worlds, the only difference being that pre-earthly experiences are more completely forgotten than those of earthly life. It is only because people are disinclined to ask themselves seriously whether they find anything in their souls in tune with what is said by the spiritual investigator—it is only because of this feeling of antipathy that they do not probe into their souls deeply enough when hearing or reading what the investigator relates. Hence this is thought to be something of which he alone has knowledge, something incapable of proof. But it can quite well be proved by those who throw off the prejudice arising from the antipathy referred to. For the spiritual investigator is only recalling what has been experienced by each one of us in pre-earthly existence.

Now someone might say: Why should anyone be asked, during his life on Earth, to take on this extra task of concerning himself with matters which, in accordance with cosmic ordering, or one might say with divine decree, he experiences during life beyond the Earth? There are those, too, who ask: Why should I go to this trouble before death to gain knowledge about the super-sensible worlds? I can very well wait till I am dead. Then, if all these things really exist, I shall come face to face with them.

All this, however, arises from a misunderstanding of earthly life. The facts of which the spiritual investigator speaks are experienced by human beings in pre-earthly existence, but they are not then the subject of thought, and only during life on Earth can thoughts about them be experienced. And only those thoughts about the super-sensible world that have been worked upon during earthly life can be carried with us through the gate of death, and only then can we understand the facts we experience between death and rebirth.

One might say—if one wished to give an uncompromising picture—that at this present stage of evolution a man's life after death is extraordinarily hard if, during life on Earth, he gives no thought to the spiritual world. For, having passed through the gate of death, he can no longer acquire any real knowledge of his surroundings. He is in the midst of what is incomprehensible for him. An understanding of what is experienced after death has to be striven for during life on Earth. You will learn from further descriptions that it was different for men of earlier ages. But, at the present moment of human evolution, men will be increasingly constrained to strive for an understanding of what they are to experience in the super-sensible world between death and rebirth. So one can say that speaking publicly of Spiritual Science is fully justified, for it can be proved by everyone. When it is established deeply enough in a man's soul, he will gradually come to say to himself: “What has been said through this spiritual investigator lights things up for me. It is just as if I had already experienced it all, and was now being given the thoughts in which to clothe the experience.” For this reason, when speaking of Spiritual Science, of spiritual knowledge, it is very necessary to choose terms of expression different from those used in ordinary life. The point is that a student of Spiritual Science, through the very words used, should have the impression: “I am learning something which does not hold good for the sense-world, something which in the sense-world is sheer nonsense.”

Then, you see, our opponents come and say: “What is said there about spiritual knowledge is all nonsense—pure fancy.” As long as these people know of nothing outside the world of the senses, and do not want to know of anything else, such a statement is justified, for the super-sensible world looks different from that of the senses. But if someone forgoes the one-sided witness of his senses and delves more deeply into his own soul, then he will say: “What the spiritual investigator says should simply give me the impulse to draw up from my own soul what is already there.”

Naturally there is much to hinder our making such a confession. Yet, where understanding of the super-sensible worlds is concerned, it is the most necessary confession of all. And it will be found that even the most difficult things become comprehensible when we are willing to penetrate in this way into our own depths.

There is no doubt that mathematical truths are among the most difficult things. They are held to be irrefutable. But the curious fact is that on entering the spiritual world we find that our mathematics and geometry are no longer correct. A very simple example will make this clear. From early youth we have learnt to look upon the old truths of Euclid as axiomatic, self-evident. For instance, it is stated as obvious that, given two points, A and B, the shortest distance between them is a straight line, and that any curved path between them is longer.

On a recognition of this fact—obvious for the physical world—rests the greater part of our geometry. But in the spiritual world it is the other way round. The straight line there from A to B is the longest way, and any other way is shorter because it can be taken in freedom. If at the point A one thinks of going to B, this very idea suggests an indirect way; and to hold to a straight course, and so at each single point to keep in the same direction, is hardest and causes most delay. Hence, in determining the most direct way in the two-dimensional or one-dimensional space of the spiritual world, we look for the longest way.

Now anyone who reflects about attentiveness, and delves deeply into his soul to discover what attentiveness really means, will find that in this connection, also, what is said by the spiritual investigator is true. For he will say to himself: “When I go around just as I choose, I get there easily, and I don't have to worry about traversing a particular stretch; I need do only what I do every day.” And most people are bustling around from morning to night. They are in such a hurry that they hardly notice how much of all they do is done from sheer habit—what they have done the day before, what other people say they should do, and so forth. Then it all goes smoothly. Just think what it would be like if you had to pay careful attention to every detail of what you do during the day. Try it! You will soon see how this slows you down.

Now in the spiritual world nothing is done without attentiveness, for there is no such thing as habit. Moreover, there is no such word as the impersonal pronoun “one”—at a certain hour one must have lunch, or one must have dinner at some other time. This “one”—for this occasion one ought to dress in a certain way, and so on—all that under the aegis of this little word plays such a great part in the physical world, particularly in our present civilisation, has no place in the spiritual world. There, we have to follow with individual attention every smallest step, and even less than a step. This is expressed in the words: In the spiritual world the straight way between two points is the longest way. So we have this contrast: In the physical world the direct way between two points is the shortest, whereas the direct way between two points is the longest in the spiritual world.

If we go down far enough into our soul, we find we can draw up from its depths a real understanding of this curious circumstance; and it becomes easier and easier to admit: “What the spiritual investigator says is actually wisdom I myself possess—I have only to be reminded of it.”

Then, side by side with this—since the steps to be taken for acquiring super-sensible cognition can to-day be found in books such as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—everyone, in so far as his destiny, his karma, make it possible, can, as we shall see, follow this path and thus acquire his own perception of the spiritual worlds. In this way he comes to knowledge of the facts. Understanding for the ideas of the spiritual world has to be won by his coming to know in his own being all that was forgotten on entering earthly life.

Now it may be said that anyone is capable of grasping knowledge of the spiritual world when it is communicated in ideas. Thus, for understanding what the spiritual investigator offers, all that a man needs is his own sound, unprejudiced reason, provided it searches deeply enough into the soul. The investigator of spiritual facts, entering into the spiritual world, and speaking of its facts from first-hand knowledge—all this naturally requires a person to have pursued the path of knowledge on his own account. Hence it is justifiable for anyone who has acquired knowledge of the spiritual worlds to speak of them quite publicly to-day; for what people now absorb in life, if only at school, is an intellectual capacity, a power of discrimination, which equips them to understand what Spiritual Science brings forward. Here, too, things were different in earlier times, and the teachers in the Mysteries, the teachers of art and religion, went about it in a different way. Anyone to-day who speaks about spiritual knowledge to his contemporaries must so order his ideas that memories are aroused of their pre-earthly life. What he says to his audience, what he writes for his readers, must be so arranged that memories of the life before birth are evoked.

Whenever one speaks about Spiritual Science it is as if this appeal were made to the audience: Listen to what is said, and if you look deeply enough into your souls you will find it all there. Moreover, it will dawn on you that you cannot have learnt it during your life on Earth; no flower, no cloud, no spring, nothing earthly can have told you, not even science—for that is founded on the senses and the intellect. Gradually you will realise that you have brought this knowledge with you into earthly life, and that before this life you took part in things which have lingered on in your soul as a cosmic memory. All this has ben stirred up in you by the spiritual investigator. What he says, therefore, is indeed a call to the very depths of the human soul, not a demand that you should accept anything unknown. It is simply an appeal to men to call up in memory the greatest treasures of their own souls.

It was not so for mankind in the distant past. The wise men of the Mysteries, the priests, had to proceed in another way, for people then had a spontaneous memory of their pre-earthly existence. A few thousand years ago, even the most primitive man would never have questioned the presence in his soul of something brought down with him from the super-sensible into the life of the senses; it was an everyday experience in his dreamlike imaginations. In his soul he had something of which he said: “I do not owe this to my eyes that see the trees; I do not hear it with my ears that listen to the nightingale's song; nor have I received it through any other sense. I cannot have absorbed it during life on Earth; it was there as I made my descent; and when as an embryo I was given my earthly, physical body by another human body, there was already within me that which lights up now in my dreamlike imaginations. I have clothed it in my physical human body.”

Hence in those olden days a man would not have been shown the way to further development by his attention being called to what must be emphasised to-day: that we have a memory, at first unconscious but capable of being made conscious, of pre-earthly existence. In the old Mysteries, attention had to be drawn to something quite different.

A man in those days had a feeling of intense sadness when looking at all that was most lovely in the sense-world. He looked at the flowers, springing out of the earth in their wonderful beauty, and watched the blossoms unfold. And he saw also how beneficent the flowers were for him. He saw the loveliness of the springs bubbling forth in shady places, and his senses spoke to him of their refreshing powers. But then, he said to himself: “It seems as though all this has fallen—fallen through sin from the world I bear within me and which I have brought down into physical existence out of spiritual worlds.” So the teachers in the Mysteries then had the task of explaining how in the flowers, in the rippling waters, in the woodland murmurings and the song of the nightingale—everywhere spirit is working and weaving, everywhere spiritual beings are to be found. They had to impart to men the great truth: What is living in you lives also outside in nature. For a man looked upon the external world with sorrow, with pain, at the very time when his senses were freshest and most responsive—a time when least of all the intellect spoke to him of natural laws, and he looked upon the outer world with primitive senses. The beauty of its sprouting and budding forced itself upon his sight, his hearing and other senses; but all he felt was sorrow; for he was unable to reconcile it with the content of his pre-natal existence, which still lived on in his soul. Thus it was incumbent upon the wise men of the Mysteries to point out how the divine-spiritual dwells in all things, even in those of the senses. It was the spirituality of nature that these teachers had to make clear.

This, however, could be done only by taking a different path from that of to-day. Just as now it is necessary above all to guide men to a remembrance of their life before birth, for teachers in the ancient Mysteries it was necessary to call up in those around them a different memory.

Now a man passes his life rhythmically between two states, or really three: waking, dreaming, sleeping. Sleep takes its course in unconsciousness. The human beings of older epochs had indeed this state of unconsciousness in sleep, although it differed in certain respects from that of people to-day. They did sleep, however; they did sink down into the state of experiencing nothing in their souls, in their consciousness. But during sleep we are of course still living; we do not die and are born again when we wake. As soul and spirit we have a life during sleep, but the experience of it is completely wiped out for ordinary, everyday consciousness. People remember their waking experiences and at the most those during their dreams, but in ordinary consciousness they have no memory of anything they experience during dreamless sleep. The Mystery teachers of old treated their pupils—and through the ideas these spread abroad, all who came to them—in such a way that they were awakened to what was experienced in sleep.

Modern Initiation-knowledge has to recall what has lived in men's souls before earthly existence, whereas the old Initiation-knowledge had to evoke a memory of experiences during sleep. Thus all the knowledge that the Mystery teachers clothed in ideas was so designed that their students, or anyone else who heard it, could say: “We are being told of something we always go through in sleep. We press it down out of mind. The priests of the Mysteries have simply been enabled by their Initiation to perceive in sleep many things that are hidden from ordinary consciousness, but are all the same experienced.”

Just as in the old Initiation-wisdom there was a recalling to memory of what a man had lived through in sleep, to-day there is a recalling to memory of pre-earthly life. One of the signs distinguishing the old Initiation from the new is that in the old Initiation a man was reminded of what he normally slept through, which means that he had no recollection of it in waking life. The wise men of those Mysteries drew the experiences of the night up into waking consciousness of day, and to the people they said: “During the night you dwell with your soul in the spiritual world, and the spiritual world lives in every spring, in every nightingale and every flower. Every night you enter into the midst of all that you merely perceive with your senses during the day.”

And then a man could be convinced that the Gods he experienced in his waking dreams were also there outside in nature. Thus, by showing his pupil what happened in sleep, the wise teacher of the Mysteries made clear to him that divine-spiritual Beings were active out there in the realms of nature all the time. In the same way the spiritual investigator now has the task of showing that a man, before descending to Earth, was living as a spiritual being among spiritual beings in a world of spirit; and that what he experienced there he can recall on Earth in terms of concepts, of ideas.

In the Initiation-science of to-day, the real facts that distinguish sleep from waking come to be known when we advance from Imagination to Inspiration. What a man himself is as soul, as spirit, from falling asleep until he wakes, becomes clear only to Inspired knowledge, whereas the advance to Imaginative knowledge gives a man the tableau of his life. When this life-tableau unfolds for him in his waking state and with empty consciousness he is wrapped in cosmic stillness—as I have described—there enters his soul from the Cosmos, as Inspiration, the life before birth. And then his own true being appears to him in the form he lives in as a being of soul and spirit between going to sleep and waking.

Through Inspiration we become conscious of that which remains unconscious during sleep. We learn to perceive what we do as soul and spirit while asleep, and we become aware that on falling asleep the soul and spirit leave the physical body and the etheric body. The physical body is left in bed and also the etheric body—or body of formative forces, as it is seen to be in Imagination, and as I have described it. The higher members of man's nature, the astral body and the Ego-organisation, leave the physical and etheric bodies, returning to them when the time of waking comes. This cleavage of our being, which comes about in the rhythmical alternation of sleeping waking, can be seen in its real nature only through Inspiration. We then perceive that everything absorbed in ordinary waking life through our thinking, through our world of thought, is left behind. The thoughts we work upon, the thoughts we struggle with at school, whatever we have done to sharpen our earthly intelligence—all this has to be left behind with our physical body and etheric body every time we sleep. Out of these two bodies we take into the spiritual world, where as Ego and astral body we pass the time of sleeping, something quite different from anything we experience in our waking state. When we pass from waking to sleeping we experience what is not normally brought into consciousness. Hence, in speaking to you of these experiences, I have to clothe them in pictorial concepts, so that they can be reflected on with healthy human understanding. These pictorial concepts, which are mere shadows of really living thoughts, we leave behind when we fall asleep; and we then come to live in a world where thinking is not as it is here on Earth, but where everything is inwardly experienced. During sleep, in fact, we experience light unconsciously. In waking life we think about the effects of light—how it makes shadows and colours appear in relation to objects. All these thoughts, as I have said, we leave behind. In sleep we enter into the weaving, living light; we pour ourselves out into the light. And as in day time here on Earth we carry our body with us, and also our soul and spirit, and go about on the surface of the Earth through the air, so there, as sleeping man, we enter the weaving, waving light, becoming ourself a being, a substance, of the living light. We become light within the light.

When a man comes to Inspired knowledge of what he actually is each night, when this rises up into his waking consciousness, he at once realises that during sleep he lives like a cloud of light in cosmic light. This does not mean, however, living simply as the substance of light, but living in the forces which in waking life become thoughts, are grasped as thoughts. The light then experienced is everywhere permeated by creative forces, the forces which work inwardly in the plants, in the animals, besides existing independently as spiritual worlds. Light is not experienced in the same way as in the physical world but—if we may express it figuratively—the weaving, living light is the body of spiritual weaving, as it is also the body of each spiritual being.

Here, as men of the physical world, we are enclosed in our skins, and we see our fellow-men so enclosed. But in our sleeping state we are light within the light, and other beings are also light within the light. We do not, however, perceive it as light in the way it is perceived in the physical world, but—again figuratively—the clouds of light that we ourselves are, perceive other clouds of light. These clouds of light are either another man, or some kind of being giving new life to the plant world, or a being who, never incarnating in a physical body, dwells always in the spiritual world.

Light, accordingly, is not experienced there as it is in earthly life, but as living, creative spirituality. Now you know how, as physical men here on Earth, we live in something besides light—in the warmth our senses perceive. We feel and experience heat and cold.

If, now, on going to sleep we pass out of our physical body and etheric body, we live as substance of the warmth in the cosmic substance of warmth, just as we live as light in the light. Thus we are not only what I have called a cloud of light, but a cloud of light permeated by weaving waves of warmth; and what we perceive also bears warmth within it. Just as when we are asleep, and as beings of soul and spirit, we experience light not as light but as living spirit, and when through Inspiration we realise ourselves and other beings also to be living spirit—so it is in the case of warmth. It is impossible to make any headway in the spiritual world, even with Inspiration, if we cling to ideas acquired here on Earth. We have already found it necessary to get used to a different conception concerning the distance between two points, and we must do likewise for everything else. And just as when experiencing ourselves as light within light we actually experience ourselves as spirit in the spiritual world, so when experiencing ourselves as warmth, within the cosmic warmth, we do not experience this as warmth in the usual way of the sense-world, but as weaving, strength-giving love. As the beings of love which we are in the super-sensible, we experience ourselves among beings who can do no other than draw love out of their own essence; who can have no other existence than that of beings of love in the midst of a cosmic existence of love. Thus do we experience ourselves, to begin with, between going to sleep and waking, in a spiritual existence imbued through and through with love.

Therefore, if we wish really to enter the world in which we are every time we go to sleep until we wake, we must enhance our capacity for loving; otherwise this world is bound to remain an unknown world. Here in our earthly world it is not spiritualised love that holds sway, but a love in which the impulse of the senses prevails. In the spiritual world, however, it is spiritualised love—as I have been picturing it. Hence, whoever aspires to enter consciously the world he experiences every night has to develop his capacity for loving in the way described yesterday.

Now a man cannot find his true self without this capacity for love; for all that he really is during sleep—during a third part of his life on Earth—remains a closed book for him unless he can find his way into it through the training and enhancement of love. All that is experienced during sleep would have to remain an unsolved riddle for earthly being if they had no wish to enhance their capacity for love, so as to be able to gain some degree of knowledge about their own existence, their own being, in the changed condition between going to sleep and waking. But the form of activity developed in our thinking when we have our physical body and etheric body within us—that is, in our waking state—we leave behind in bed, and during sleep this becomes united in movement with the whole Cosmos. Anyone who wishes to understand clearly what goes on in the physical and etheric bodies during the night would have to be able to perceive from outside, while living as a being of warmth and light, how the etheric body goes on thinking all through the night.

We still have the power to think even when with our souls we are not there at all, for what we leave behind in the bed carries the waves of thinking on and on. And when we wake in the morning, we sink down into what has thus continued to think while lying there in bed. We meet our own thoughts again. They were not without life between our going to sleep and waking, although we were not present. To-morrow I shall be describing how, when thus absent, we can be much cleverer, far more intelligent, than during the day, when with our soul we are actually within our thoughts.

To-day I wished to indicate how thinking is continuous in the etheric and physical bodies, and how on waking in the morning, when we are aware of having had a dream, the dream tells us, as it were: When your soul wakes, and dives down again into the etheric body and physical body, it loses something of its power. On the one hand you have the physical body and etheric body; and on the other hand you have the astral organisation and Ego-organisation which in the morning re-enter the physical and etheric bodies. When they re-enter, it is as if a dense wave were flowing into one less dense—there is a blockage, experienced as a morning dream. The Ego and the astral body, which have been weaving all night in light and warmth, dive back into the thoughts, but by not at once understanding them, get them confused, and this blockage is experienced as a morning dream.

What more there is to say about dreams, how they are a puzzling element in human life, and the further relation between sleeping and waking—all this we will consider tomorrow.

Yesterday I tried to show how the confusion in dreams arises from the fact that during sleep a man crosses the so-called Threshold unconsciously or half-consciously. Leaving the physical world of the senses, he enters the spiritual world and there encounters three worlds—a memory of the ordinary physical world, the soul world, and the real world of spirit. Events both inward and outward, experienced in our ordinary earthly life, are gathered together from what these three worlds reveal. But they are split apart when in sleep we enter the super-sensible world, and what we experience is not then related to the world where it belongs. That is why, for the usual memory-consciousness, deceptions and illusions arise in dreams. Imaginative consciousness does not see the dream merely in this way, but makes it an object of observation, just as we look towards a distant point in physical space—though now, with Imagination, we look towards something distant in time. We do not simply remember what is dreamt; we look at it, and so for the first time we arrive at a true conception of what a dream is. Thus we find how a dream is interpreted rightly only when we do not relate it to the physical, naturalistic world, but to the spiritual—above all, in most cases, to the moral world. The dream will never tell what it is expressing if its content is given a physical interpretation, but only when the interpretation is in accordance with the spiritually moral.

To illustrate this, let us turn to the confusion of the dream I told you about yesterday—the dream in which someone going for a walk is suddenly overcome with shame at finding himself without clothes in a crowded street. I remarked how the whole mood of soul in dream-consciousness is due to our confronting three different worlds. Looking at a dream of this kind in the right way, however, we see that although its content appears to belong to the realm of the senses, yet through this medium the spiritual-moral is seeking to reveal itself. Hence, anyone having such a dream ought not to look at the immediate, symbolical course it takes, but should ask himself: Haven't I sometimes had a tendency in daytime consciousness not to be completely truthful about myself with others? Haven't I perhaps been too fond of following the fashion in what I wear—altogether too apt to take refuge in convention? Is it not a characteristic of mine to give people a false impression of what I really am?

When anyone lets his thoughts take this course, he gradually arrives at the moral, spiritual interpretation of the dream. He says to himself: When during sleep I was in the super-sensible world, I met with spiritual beings there—they told me that I should not be present in a cloak of falsehood, but as I really am inwardly, in soul and spirit.

When we interpret dreams in this way, we come to their moral, spiritual truth. A whole host of dreams can be interpreted thus.

People of an older chapter in history, who even in the dreamy symbolism of sleep were conscious of the Guardian of the Threshold, took to heart his warning not to carry with them what belongs to the physical world of the senses when they enter the spiritual world. Had these men dreamt they had no clothes on in the street, it would never have occurred to them that they ought to have been ashamed; this is something that holds good for the physical world, for a man's physical body. They would have given heed to the warning that what holds good for the physical does not hold good in the spiritual world, and that what appears in the spiritual world is being said to human beings by the Gods. A dream, therefore, had to be interpreted as an utterance of the Gods. Only during the course of human evolution have dreams come to be interpreted in a naturalistic sense.

Or let us take another common dream. The dreamer is going along a path that leads him into a wood. After a while he realises that he has lost his way and cannot go any further. He tries to do so, but the path comes to an end and trees block the way. He begins to feel uneasy.

Now in ordinary consciousness this dream is easily taken at its face value. But if on thinking over it we forget all naturalistic associations, the spiritual world will say to us: This confusion you have met with is in your own thoughts. In waking consciousness, however, people are often loath to admit how confused their thinking is and how easily they reach a point where they can make no progress but only go round in a circle. This inclination is particularly characteristic of our present civilisation. People consider themselves enlightened thinkers, but in reality they dance around in a circle with their thoughts—either about conventional trivialities or about atoms, which are intellectual constructions of their own. In ordinary consciousness, naturally, they are not disposed to admit this.

In a series of symbolical pictures the dream brings out a man's true nature, and it is spiritual beings who are speaking through it. When anyone takes his dream experience in the right way, his self-knowledge will be greatly enhanced.

Another common human characteristic is that people allow themselves to be led by their instincts and impulses to do what is most congenial to them. For example, they find pleasure in doing something or other, but they are not ready to admit that they are doing it for their own satisfaction. They invent some way of interpreting it differently for their ordinary consciousness—they say perhaps that they are doing it for anthroposophical or occult or esoteric reasons, connected with a high mission or something of that sort. With this kind of self-justification they cover up—and this occurs with extraordinary frequency—an endless amount of all that rules and rages in the depths of our animal life. A dream—which wishes to reveal through symbolical pictures the forces which really hold sway even in the soul and spirit of the dreamer—may present a picture of the man pursued by wild beasts and trying vainly to escape. We shall interpret truly the moral significance of such a dream, not by looking at its outward events, but by accepting the self-knowledge it offers us. We have to recognise it as a warning to search for the inner truth about our own nature and to consider whether this does not resemble—if only slightly—animal instinct rather than what we ideally conjure up.

Hence it is possible for dreams to warn people in countless ways and to set them right. When a dream is related in the true way to the higher world, it can have a guiding influence on a man's life, and then, when the stage of conscious Imagination is reached, one can see how the dream, which at first naturally offers even to Imaginative knowledge pictures drawn from the sense-world, is metamorphosed entirely into moral-spiritual happenings.

Thus we see how the dream can be said to lead ordinary consciousness into the spiritual world, if only it is taken in the right way. But I have said also that on raising ourselves through Imagination to the spiritual world, we are not in the same state of soul as during our life here on Earth. In this life, I stand here, the table is there outside me; there is a physical gap between me and the table. The moment I enter the spiritual world, this separation ceases. I no longer stand here with the table over there; it is as if my whole being were spreading out over the table and the table were taking me into itself. In the spiritual world we sink right into whatever we perceive. Hence our experience, either in dreams or consciously in Imagination, should not be related merely to our inner life, but we can speak in a spiritual-scientific sense if we say with the poet that the whole world is woven out of dreams. It is certainly not woven out of the play of atoms, which is a dream of the scientists, but out of what I have described as the “chaos” of the Greeks, out of the weaving of our dreams and of our conscious Imagination. I have called it both subjective and objective, for the world is not woven purely subjectively; but we have to explain certain aspects of the world as being woven out of dreams.

For example, if we are looking at a seed, we should not be content to explain it by the laws of physics and chemistry. A scientist who sees nothing more than those laws in a seed, or in an embryo, cannot possibly explain them; for nature is dreaming in seed and embryo—their very essence is the weaving life of a dream. Take the seed of a plant—in it a dream is living and weaving. You can never enter into this with the intellect, for that is limited to nature's laws; you must approach it with the human faculty which lives otherwise in a dream or in conscious Imagination.

The same kind of dreaming that lives thus in the seed is active also in our whole organism throughout our life on Earth. Hence we should not look in our organism merely for the working of chemical and physical forces. When a man is there before us physically, we have to look upon him in his external physical form as a being who is living just for a time in the physical world of the senses. Behind him lives something else, invisible to the eye, inaudible to the ear, in so far as these are physical. But it can be perceived in Imagination, and also in what can be experienced in the unconscious Imagination of a dream. In the whole of a man's body nature is dreaming. Nature's way of thinking is not like man's intellectual thinking—it is a dreaming. Out of this dreaming the forces of our digestion and of our growth are guided, and everything is given form.

When we look back in earthly existence we generally start from this age—what shall we call this age of ours? We could take one of its symptoms and call it the age of the typewriter. Thus we go back from this age of the typewriter to the time when printing was first introduced; and going still further back we come perhaps to the time of the Romans, to the time of the Greeks, and then we arrive at the age in the East from which the Vedic records come. We are then left with no external documents. Many treasures have been excavated from the tombs of the Egyptian kings, but we still come at last to a time with no records, where we have to rely on Imaginative and Inspired spiritual knowledge. There we meet with a frontier beyond which, for ordinary consciousness, the past is vague, very much as sleep lies beyond the dream. By going back in this way through the temporal evolution of the world, we come in fact to that dream-veil we can experience every night.

If we reach that point with conscious Imagination, the further past lights up in a spiritual way. But it appears different from the world we learn about intellectually and from ancient records. This remote past in world-evolution, lying behind a veil of dreams, reveals man in direct connection with divine Spirits. He is himself still a divine soul-being; and the divine-spiritual Beings, whose destiny does not include entering an earthly body, meet together with him while he awaits his incarnation on earth.

When, therefore, we look back through history to this veil of chaos, to the dream-veil of which we have been speaking during the last few days, we see the divine Spirits foregathering with the still spiritual souls of men destined to dwell on Earth.

Moreover, we shall see how these things, connected as they are with human evolution, are at the same time connected with cosmic evolution. Where in a remote past this veil appears to Inspired Imagination, we see, too, how within cosmic evolution—of which we shall have to speak more precisely—the Moon, previously united with the Earth, detaches itself and goes out into cosmic space, there to circle the Earth. Thus we gaze back on a dream-veil, a veil of Imagination, and looking through it we find the Earth united with the Moon, and human beings in direct contact with divine-spiritual Beings. When this dream-veil appears to the retrospective gaze of Imagination, we perceive the momentous cosmic event of the Moon, in a quite different form, sliding out of the Earth and going forth into cosmic space as a separate body. So we look further back to the evolution of the Earth, of mankind, and of the world, when these were all united with the Moon. Man was already there, but as a being of soul and spirit only.

As we gaze further and further back, we find no epoch in cosmic evolution when man was not there, at least in some primal form. So that, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, we cannot say that for millions of years the Earth was evolving merely inorganically or with creatures of a lower order, with man emerging only after that. We find man in a different form connected at every stage with that cosmic evolution to which we look back when, behind the veil of chaos and the dream, we can rise through conscious Imagination to that which appears to us as the divine-spiritual essence of the world.

As I have said, when we look at a seed or anything in an embryonic state, Imaginative cognition reveals in it the weaving of a dream. We see how something real, though expressed in dream-pictures, holds sway over the material part of the seed. Anyone able to perceive the spiritual in the world will find it everywhere, though in a great variety of forms. It is precisely the spiritual that goes through the most varied metamorphoses. And when we have thoroughly grasped how in the seed of a plant, in the embryo of an animal, this real dream-weaving prevails, we are justified in asking: How is it, then, with the apparently dead world of the minerals? If here we look out of the window or go along the street, we see the bare hills, a world that seems entirely lifeless, and the question at once arises: If in any plant seed we pick up there is a dream-picture ruling, how is it with these rocky mountainous masses, and with all the lifeless substance that forms the ground we tread on in the physical world? If in the plants we see the ruling of spirit, which in the weaving of a dream seizes with comparative ease upon the material element, so in the same way through Imaginative cognition we find the spiritual in these rocky masses, but here the spiritual consists of individual spiritual beings.

These spiritual beings, however, are in a state not of dreaming but of deep sleep. When you look at these rocks and hills you must not think of them as permeated by a slumbering amorphous mist; you should think of individual spiritual beings sleeping there. Presently we shall see how these spiritual beings have come into existence through having been split off from higher beings with a higher consciousness. We shall see how they themselves, having in their present state only a sleep-consciousness, are the result of that separation, and how these elemental beings are asleep everywhere out there in the inanimate world. When we walk over this mountainous mass of rock, we should be aware that all around us there slumbers the creative weaving of the spirit in concrete form. And when we enter further into the sleeping of the spirit-weaving forms in the lifeless world, we become aware in these elemental beings of a certain mood. Imagination shows us these beings, but it is Inspiration that teaches us about their mood. In these elementals of the mountains, the rocks, and the soil, there lives what we can discover in ourselves when we are waiting for something with justified expectation. The weaving and creating of soul and spirit in the seemingly lifeless rocks is permeated by this same expectant mood.

In fact, these beings are waiting to awake from deep sleep into a state of dreaming. We learn this through Inspiration, and more particularly when we enter right into these beings through Intuition. All that confronts us out there, in those hills, is expecting that one day it will be able to dream, and so with dream-consciousness to take hold of earthly substance that is ground down into lifeless matter, and from these rocks and hills to conjure forth once more as embryos, as seeds, living plants. It is indeed these beings who bring before our souls a wonderful magic of nature, a creating from out of the spirit.

And so, as we go about here among these rocks and look at them in the physical light they reflect, they can reveal to us, not in any symbolical sense but as real knowledge, how they are now sleeping, how in the future they will be dreaming, and how, later still, they will come to the fully awake life of elemental nature-beings, who will one day become beings of pure spirit.

The physical material in a plant is still in a condition accessible to the dream-weaving of the spirit. In the rocks, matter is crumbling away. Looking back with Imagination and Inspiration, we realise how everything lifeless has arisen from the living. It is when the living becomes lifeless that the sleeping spirituality can sink into it. This sleeping spirit waits in the lifeless until it can wake into dreams and lead over the lifeless into cosmic embryonic life.

Now the various parts of the Earth show in different ways this sleep of spiritual beings in the mountains, in the firm crust of the Earth. It might be said: The sleep of beings awaiting their future is different in regions such as this from their sleep in other parts of the Earth. Here in Penmaenmawr we find that the particular configuration of the Earth, and the historical character of the rocks, enable these sleeping beings to rise to the aeriform, to interweave even with the light, while in other parts of the Earth this has long ceased to be so. Thus it is that here, if we look on the weaving as due not to the aerial atmosphere alone, but to the prevailing soul-atmosphere, which permeates the air just as the human soul permeates a man's body, then in Penmaenmawr we find that this soul-element in the atmosphere is different from elsewhere. I will give just one example to make this clear.

Suppose that in a certain region Imaginative cognition exerts itself to call up an Imagination of what is really going on there. This Imagination may be more or less easy or difficult to hold on to, for the possibility of retaining an Imagination in consciousness varies in different regions. Here we are in a region where Imaginations continue for a remarkably long time and so are able to become very vivid.

The wise men of the Druids, or others of that kind, sought out regions for their temples and sanctuaries where the conditions were such as to allow Imaginations to remain and not immediately to vanish away like clouds. Hence we can understand how it was that such centres for the holy places of the Druids were still sought for up to comparatively recent times. In this region it has always been felt that the difficulty of holding an Imagination is not so great as in other places. Everything, of course, has a light side and a shadow side. When an Imagination remains, Inspiration is made harder, though it gains in strength. Because of that, whatever the spiritual world has to say in this place streams down with—one might say—greater intensity, but in words which are weightier and more difficult.

Therefore, even where the spiritual is in question, differentiations are to be found throughout the Earth. A map might be drawn indicating the places where, for Imaginative consciousness, there is no difficulty in holding Imaginations. Those regions where they soon pass away could be given a different colour, and we should get an extraordinarily interesting map of the Earth. For the prevailing character of soul-atmosphere here, we should need a particularly strong colour—a sparkling, shining colour, full of life.

Hence I fully believe that those taking part in this lecture-course will be able to perceive here something of what I would call the esoteric mood of the elementals. It looks in at the windows, meets us on our walks, in fact is present everywhere in a quite special way. I am particularly grateful to the organisers of the course for having thus chosen a spot where the esoteric may be said to meet one at every turn. It does so indeed in other places, but not with the same ease and directness. So I am especially thankful for the choice of this place, out of many possible for the holding of a course such as this. From the point of view of the subjects discussed, this course may be said to take its place, in a wonderfully beautiful way, in the whole evolution of the Anthroposophical Movement.

It will be clear from the descriptions I have been giving you that between the physical world of the senses and the spiritual, super-sensible world, there is a barrier which with a certain rightness we call the Threshold of the spiritual world.

I have already pointed out in various ways how necessary it is that we should be able to cross this Threshold, and we have still to speak about it in greater detail. But you will have gathered already from my lectures that in older periods of human evolution this crossing of the Threshold was a rather different matter from what it is at the present day. In those ancient times people were able to cross in another way because even by day their consciousness was dreamlike, but for that very reason more alive to the super-sensible. Thus, in the way I have pictured, they passed the Guardian of the Threshold half-consciously, dreamily, both on going to sleep and on waking.

Here we can see a transition from men of an older type, with little freedom, to those who were becoming increasingly free. This former determinism was bound up with the fact that on going to sleep, and on awaking, men had some perception of the Guardian of the Threshold, who stood there giving warning. Now, in place of this unfree situation, we have the incapacity of present-day consciousness to see into the spiritual world, which signifies an increasing freedom: herein lies a principle of human progress.

Hence we can say that, looked at from the spiritual world, people have lost a great deal precisely because in the course of their evolution they have had to be led towards freedom. What has been lost, however, must be regained, in the way that Anthroposophy, for example, would show. And now is the historical point of time when a striving to regain what has been lost must begin.

But everywhere, among people of very various kinds, there still rises up something inherited from an earlier age, when man's relation to the spiritual world was different. So that to-day, in the consciousness of those given up to intellectualism, there is a strict frontier set up, as a rule, between what they experience in the world of the senses and what lies beyond in the spiritual world. The frontier is in fact so rigorously maintained that even enlightened spirits are unwilling to admit the possibility of crossing it.

In my brief sketch of the way into the super-sensible world, I have indicated that it is possible to cross the frontier and to enter that world in full consciousness. But as a relic from the time when a man entered the spiritual world in a more instinctive, unconscious way, and even in his day-consciousness had more in him of the spiritual world, there still rises up into his evolution to-day a certain heritage from the past. And this is something we must imperatively understand through conscious spiritual cognition. For, if not rightly understood, it manifests itself in many deceptive ways, and in these matters such errors can become very dangerous. Hence in the course of these lectures, intended to describe the evolution of man and of the world, I must speak about this question of a boundary, where what was natural and taken for granted among the people of former epochs re-appears to-day, and can lead to dangerous illusions in those who have not the requisite clear knowledge for dealing with it.

Among these phenomena, situated for ordinary consciousness at the frontier between the sense-world and the super-sensible, are visions. I mean the visions where, in a state of hallucination more or less controlled by the person concerned, pictures arise which have quite definite forms and colours—they may even seem to speak—but correspond to nothing external. For normal perception, the object is outside; the image, in a shadowy way within; and a person is perfectly conscious of how the shadowy, conceptual image is related to the external world. The vision arises of itself, claiming to be a reality on its own account. A person subject to such visions becomes incapable of estimating rightly what reality there is in the pictures which appear before him without his initiative.

How, then do visions come about? They come about because the human being still possesses the capacity for carrying over into his waking world what he experiences during sleep, and of bringing it into conceptual form just as he does with his sense-perceptions. Whether, after perceiving a clock that exists physically for the senses, I make an inner picture of it, or whether, after experiencing in a dream the form and inner reality of an external object, I wake up and make a picture of my experience, the only difference between the two processes is that I am in control of one of them—hence the image of it is more shadowy and flat—while the other process is outside my control. In the latter case I carry nothing of the real present into my conceptual life, but something experienced when the soul was outside in a past—perhaps long past—sleep, and out of this dream-experience I build up a vision.

In an earlier age of human evolution, when the relation of people both to the physical world and to the spiritual world was ruled by instinct, such visions were perfectly natural; it is human progress that has made them the uncontrolled, illusory things they are to-day. We must therefore be quite clear that modern man lacks something: when he has some experience in the spiritual world during sleep and is returning to the physical world, he no longer hears the warning of the Guardian of the Threshold: “All that you have experienced in the spiritual world you should note well and carry back to the physical world.” If he does carry it back, he will know what is contained in the vision. But if the vision appears to him only in the physical world, without his realising that he has brought it back from the spiritual world, so that he fails to understand what it really is, then he is without guidance, and at the mercy of illusion where his visionary experience is concerned. So we can say: Visions come about because a man carries over unawares his sleep-experience into his waking life, and in his waking life he then forms conceptions of the experiences—conceptions which are much richer in content than the ordinary shadowy ones, and these he builds up into vivid visions complete with colour and sound.

Another thing that comes about is this. A man carries over into his life of sleep the feelings and perceptions of the kind he has in physical life. Then, when he is in the act of carrying this over into the open sea of sleep-life, he is warned to be careful not to do anything foolish. If the sleep is very light—a far more common condition in ordinary life than is realised, for we are often just a little asleep when walking about quite normally, and we ought to be more aware of this—we may then, without noticing it, carry over the Threshold our everyday faculty of perception. Then arise those obscure feelings, as if one were inwardly watching something happening in the future, either to oneself or to someone else, and we have a premonition. Thus, whereas a vision comes about when experience during sleep is carried down into waking life and the threshold is crossed unconsciously, premonition comes about when we are in a light sleep without realising it and, thinking we are awake, carry over the Threshold, again ignoring the Guardian, our daytime experience. This, however, lies so deep down in the subconscious that it is not noticed. We are, of course, at all times connected with the whole world; and if we could draw this knowledge up out of the subconscious, we should be able to draw up much else also.

You will now see how, because these legacies from the evolutionary past can still be experienced, visions arise on one side of the Threshold, premonitions on the other. But a man may also halt at the Threshold and still not notice the Guardian. There may then be moments when inwardly, in his soul, he is as if he were enchanted. But the word “enchanted” does not quite meet the case, for he is not enchanted in the sense we generally associate with the term—it is rather that his attitude of soul undergoes a change. When he comes to the Threshold in such a way that he still perceives what is in the physical world while already perceiving what is in the super-sensible, he experiences something which is widespread in certain regions of the Earth—second sight, a half-conscious experience at the Threshold. Hence to sum up these legacies from the past, these phenomena in a man's life when his consciousness is dimmed, we have those appearing on this side of the Threshold as visions; those appearing beyond the Threshold as premonitions; those actually at the Threshold as second sight.

To-morrow I shall have to speak in greater detail of the characteristics of these three regions, going on from these to describe the worlds dimly indicated by vision, premonition and second sight—worlds which new knowledge will have to bring into the full clarity of enhanced consciousness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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