The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action,

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

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

Spirits of their souls, watchers ever-active,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In several lecture-courses given over the years in the different Groups and attended by many of the friends here to-day, we have endeavoured to study the Gospels of St. John, St. Luke and St. Matthew and the great event in Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha, from three different points of view.

One result of these studies should have been to establish in our souls a growing realisation of the greatness of this unique event. We have understood that the reason why there are four Gospels is that their authors, writing as inspired occultists, each wished to describe the great event from a special angle, just as a photograph of an object is taken from a particular side. By combining the pictures, each taken from a different angle, an idea of the reality can be obtained. Each of the Evangelists makes it possible for us to study one aspect in particular of the great event in Palestine.

The Gospel of St. John gives us insight into the great events in Palestine by opening out a vista of the highest human goals and at the same time of the sublime realities of the spiritual worlds.

The Gospel of St. Luke unveils the mysteries connected with the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, with the Solomon Jesus and the Nathan Jesus, until the moment when the Christ descends into him.

The Gospel of St. Matthew, as those of you who heard the lectures will know and others will be able to read, shows how the bodily nature in which the Christ was to incarnate for three years was prepared by mysterious processes connected with the racial stock of the ancient Hebrew people.

In a certain respect the Gospel of St. Mark can lead us to supreme heights in our study of Christianity and give us insight into many matters communicated by the other Gospels but in a less dramatic way. And so this evening I will take the opportunity of saying something in reference to the Gospel of St. Mark.

We must realise how necessary it is to study many subjects with which superficial modern thought has no inclination to concern itself. If we are to understand the Gospel of St. Mark in its depths we must acquaint ourselves to some extent with the very different character of the language in which men expressed themselves at the time when Christ Jesus was on the Earth. Let me try to convey to you what I mean by using contrasts as it were of light and shadow.

We make use of language to express what we want to say and to reveal what lives in our souls. It is in the way in which language is used as a means of expressing the inner life of soul that the several epochs in the evolution of humanity differ radically from one another. If we go back to the ancient Hebrew epoch and to the wonderful modes of expression used in the temple-language, we find that there was a quite different way of clothing the secrets of the soul in words—a way undreamed of nowadays. In the old Hebrew language only the consonants were written, the vowels being inserted afterwards; and when a word was uttered the echoes of a whole world reverberated in it—not, as is the case to-day, some more or less abstract concept. The reason why the vowels were not written was that they were an indication of the speaker's inmost being, whereas the consonants were intended to depict external objects or conditions. For example, whenever an ancient Hebrew wrote the letter B—or what corresponded to our present B—it always evoked in him a sense of warmth and a picture of some outer condition, in this case something in which one could be enclosed, as in a shelter or a house. The sound B could not be uttered without this feeling as an accompaniment. Again, the sound A (ah) could not be uttered without conveying the impression or image of something inwardly powerful, of a radiating force. The content of the soul thus projected into words streamed out into space and into other souls. Language was therefore much more alive, much more related to the secrets of existence than is the case nowadays.

This is one side—the light side I wanted to convey. But there is also the other side—the shadow side—constituted by the fact that in the use of our language we have to a great extent become utterly shallow. Our language expresses only abstractions, generalisations. People no longer have any feeling about this but it could not be otherwise in times when language is used, even for literary purposes, before writers have any spiritual content to convey, when enormous masses of printed matter circulate everywhere, when everyone feels that he must write something and nothing is considered unsuitable as subject-matter. When our Society was founded I discovered that certain authors were attaching themselves to it simply out of curiosity, in the hope of finding material for their novels. Why, they thought, should they not find characters among the Members who could be portrayed in their stories? So it behoves us to realise that our language nowadays has become abstract, commonplace and vacuous and there is neither a sense of its holiness nor, as was once the case, a feeling of responsibility towards its use. That is why it is so extraordinarily difficult to put into modern words the great facts proclaimed by the Gospels. People cannot understand that our modern language is empty when compared, for example, with the fulness of meaning implicit in a word of the ancient Greek language. When we read the Bible to-day we are reading something that in comparison with the original wording has been sifted not once but two or three times, and it is not the best but the worst that has remained. It does, of course, seem natural to quote from modern versions of the Bible, but we go astray most disastrously of all when we quote the Gospel of St. Mark in its modern rendering.

You know that at the very beginning of the Gospel of St. Mark, in Weizsacker's supposedly excellent translation—although as might be guessed from the high reputation it enjoys to-day, it is anything but excellent!—these words are found:

“As it is written in the prophet Isaiah: Behold I send my messenger before you who shall prepare the way before you. Listen how the voice is heard in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
[The words in the English Authorised Version are: ‘As it is written in the Prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’]

When we read a passage like this it would be self-deception to pretend that we understand it; if we are honest we shall admit that it is utterly incomprehensible to us. The passage is either of no significance or it says something we cannot understand. The first thing to do, then, is to assemble concepts enabling us to grasp the meaning of this saying of Isaiah. Isaiah was referring to the event which was to be of supreme significance for the evolution of humanity. What has already been said gives some indication of what Isaiah was foretelling in these words.

In ancient days man was endowed with a kind of clairvoyance and through the forces of his soul was able to rise into the divine-spiritual world. When this happened he was not using his Ego, his ‘I’, at the stage of development it had then reached; he was using his astral body which contained the powers of seership, whereas the forces rooted in the Ego were only gradually being awakened by perception of the physical world. The ‘I’ uses physical instruments, but in earlier times, if a man were seeking revelation, he used his astral body, seeing and perceiving through it. The process of evolution itself consisted in the transition from use of the astral body to use of the ‘I’. The Christ Impulse was to be the most powerful factor in the development of the ‘I’. If the words of St. Paul: ‘Not I but Christ in me’ are fulfilled in the ‘I’, then the ‘I’ is able to grow into the spiritual world through its own forces, whereas formerly this was possible only for the astral body.

This, then, is how evolution proceeded: Man once used his astral body as an organ of perception, but the astral body became less and less able to serve that purpose. When the time of Christ's coming was drawing near, it was losing its power to see into the spiritual world. Man could no longer be united with that world through his astral body and the ‘I’ was not yet strong enough to reveal it. That was the state of things when the time of Christ's coming was approaching.

In the course of human evolution the important steps which are eventually to take place have always to be prepared in advance. This was so in the case of the Christ Impulse too; but there was necessarily a period of transition. There could be no sudden change from the time when man felt his astral body becoming unreceptive to the spiritual world, becoming barren and desolate, to a time when the ‘I’ was kindled into activity through the Christ Impulse. What happened was that as the result of a certain influence from the spiritual world a few human beings were able to experience in the astral body something of what was later to be seen and known by the ‘I’. Egohood was prepared for, anticipated as it were in the astral body. It was through the ‘I’ and its development that man became Earth-Man in the real sense. The astral body properly belonged to the evolutionary period of the Old Moon, when the Angels were at the human stage. Man is at the human stage on the Earth. On the Old Moon it was appropriate for man to use his astral body. Everything else was merely preparation for the development of the ‘I’. The earliest stages of Earth-evolution proper were a recapitulation of the Old Moon-evolution, for man could never become fully man in the astral body; on the Old Moon it was only the Angels who could reach the human stage in the astral body. And just as the Christ lived in earthly man in order to inspire his ‘I’, so there were Angels who, having reached the human stage on the Old Moon, prophetically inspired man's astral body as a preparation for Egohood. A time was to come in human evolution on the Earth when man would be ready for the development of the ‘I’. On the Old Moon the Angels had developed to the highest stage, but as we have heard, only in the astral body. Now, in order that man might be prepared for Egohood, it was necessary that in exceptional conditions, and through grace, certain individuals should be inspired to work on the Earth as Angels; although they were men, the reality was that Angels were working in and through them.

This is a concept of great importance, without which there can be no understanding of human evolution in line with that of occultism. It is easy enough to say simply that everything is maya, but that is a mere abstraction. We must be able to say: Yes, a man is standing in front of me, but he is maya—indeed who knows if he is really a man? Perhaps what seems to be a human figure is only the outer sheath; perhaps some quite other being is using this sheath in order to accomplish a task that is beyond man's capacity.—I have given an indication of this in The Portal of Initiation.

Such an event in the history of humanity actually took place when the Individuality who had lived in Elijah was reborn as John the Baptist. An Angel entered into the soul of John the Baptist in that incarnation, using his bodily nature and also his soul to accomplish what no human being could have accomplished. In John the Baptist there lived an Angel whose mission was to herald in advance the Egohood that was to be present in its fulness in Jesus of Nazareth. It is of the greatest importance to realise that John the Baptist was maya and that an Angel, a Messenger, was living in him. This is indeed what the Greek says: Lo, I send my Messenger. The Messenger is an Angel. But nobody pays attention to what is actually said here. A deep mystery, enacted in the Baptist and foretold by Isaiah, is indicated. Isaiah foretold that the future John the Baptist would be maya—in reality he was to be the vehicle for the Angel, the Messenger who was to proclaim what man will become if he takes the Christ Impulse into himself. Angels announce in advance what man will later become. The passage in question might therefore be translated: Lo, the bestower of Egohood sends his Messenger (Angel) before you to whom Egohood is to be given.

Let us now see if we can discover the meaning of the third sentence. We must first try to picture the conditions prevailing in man's inner life when the astral body had gradually lost the power to send out its forces like feelers and to see clairvoyantly into the divine-spiritual world. Formerly, when the astral body was activated, man was able to look into that world, but this faculty was disappearing and darkness spreading within him. He had once been able to expand his astral body over all the beings of the spiritual world, but now he was inwardly desolate, inwardly isolated—the Greek word is ἔρημος. At that time the human soul lived in isolation, in desolation. This is what the Greek text tells us: Lo, a voice seems to speak in the desolation of the soul—call it ‘wilderness’ of the soul if you like—when the astral body can no longer expand into the divine-spiritual world. Hear the cry in the wilderness, in the desolation of the soul!

What is it that is being proclaimed in advance? First of all we must be clear about the meaning of the word Kyrios, when it was used in Hebrew but also still in Greek in reference to manifestations of the soul and spirit. To translate it simply as ‘the Lord’, with the usual connotation, is sheer nonsense. In ancient times everyone using the word Kyrios knew perfectly well that its meaning was connected with the development of man's soul-life and its mysteries. In the astral body, as we know, are the forces of thinking, feeling and willing; the soul thinks, feels and wills. These are the three forces working in the soul but they are actually its servants. In earlier times man was under their domination and he obeyed them, but as his evolution progressed these forces were to become the servants of the Kyrios, the Ruler, the Lord—in short, of the ‘I’. Used in relation to the soul, the word Kyrios actually meant the ‘I’. At this stage it would no longer be true to say: ‘The Divine-Spiritual thinks, feels and wills in me’, but rather: ‘I think, I feel, I will.’ The passage should be rendered more or less as follows.—Prepare yourselves, you human souls, to move along those paths that will awaken the Kyrios, the powerful ‘I’ within you; listen to the cry in the solitude of the soul. Make ready the path (or way) of the ‘I’, the Lord of the soul. Open the way for his forces so that he may no longer be the slave but the Ruler of thinking, feeling and willing. Lo, the power that is the ‘I’ sends his Angel before you, the Angel who is to give you the possibility of understanding the cry in the solitude of the astral soul. Prepare the paths of the ‘I’, open the way for the forces of the ‘I’.—Such is the meaning of these significant words of the prophet Isaiah; they point to the greatest of all events in the evolution of humanity. You will now understand the sense in which he speaks about the future John the Baptist, indicating how man's soul in its solitude longs for the coming of its Lord and Ruler, the ‘I’. Such is the real meaning of this passage and in this sense it is to be understood.

Why was John the Baptist able to be the bearer of the Angel? It was because he had received a particular form of Initiation. Initiations are not all identical in character and individuals who have a definite mission to fulfil must undergo a special form of Initiation. Now the writing of the stars in the heavens is so ordered as to reveal the nature and facts of happenings in the spiritual world. Thus a man may receive the Sun-Initiation, which means that he is initiated into the mysteries of the spiritual world of Ahura Mazdao—the spiritual world of which the Sun is the outer expression. But there are twelve forms of the Sun-Initiation, each of which differs from the other eleven. A man will receive a particular form of Initiation according to the mission he is to fulfil for humanity. His Initiation, though still a Sun-Initiation, may be of such a kind that the forces stream in as they do when the Sun is standing, for instance, in the constellation of Cancer; and these forces will be very different in the case of an Initiation connected with the Sun in Libra. These are the expressions used to indicate specialised Initiations. Individuals chosen for a mission as lofty as that of John the Baptist must receive Initiation in the form that can give the strength necessary for the fulfilment of their mission. And so in order that he might become the bearer of the Angel, John the Baptist received the Sun-Initiation originating from the constellation of Aquarius. The Sun in Aquarius is the symbol for the form of Initiation received by John the Baptist in order that he might become the bearer of the Angel. He received the Sun-forces which flow when the Sun is standing in Aquarius—the Waterman. The sign was the symbol indicating that John the Baptist had received this particular Initiation. In actual fact the name Aquarius, or Waterman, was given to the zodiacal sign because those who had received that Initiation acquired the faculty which enabled John the Baptist, for example, to achieve what he did. When men were plunged under water, their etheric bodies were momentarily loosened and in that condition it was possible for them to perceive what action was of the greatest importance at that particular time. Baptism in the Jordan revealed to those who underwent it the momentous significance of that period in history. It was to this end that John had received the baptismal Initiation and because this was connected with the rays of the Sun streaming from its position in a particular constellation, the constellation too was known symbolically as the Waterman. The name of the constellation was derived from the human faculty connected with it, and not vice versa.

Nowadays many learned ignoramuses try to explain spiritual happenings of this character by bringing Heaven down to Earth, saying that such things are simply indications of the movement of the Sun through the Zodiac. These learned gentlemen, who fundamentally know nothing, explain events in humanity by reference to the heavens. In the case of John the Baptist, actually the opposite was true: the zodiacal sign was used to express something that had occurred on Earth and was then transferred to the Heavens.

John the Baptist could therefore rightly say: ‘I baptise you with water.’ This was the same as saying to his intimate disciples, as he might well have done, that he had received the Aquarius Initiation. The movement of the Sun through the Zodiac as seen with physical eyes is in the direction from Leo to Virgo; the spiritual movement is from Aquarius to Pisces. Consequently John the Baptist was able to proclaim something that would work as the forces of the Sun in Pisces and not in Aquarius; also that the Being who was to come would give a higher kind of Baptism than he himself was able to give. The spiritual Sun progresses from Aquarius to Pisces and when this happens the Aquarius Baptism becomes a Baptism with spiritual water—Pisces, the Fishes. Hence the ancient symbol of fishes for the Being who was the bearer of the Christ. Just as John, through very special influences, had received the Aquarius Initiation, so all the mysteries enacted around and in Jesus of Nazareth belonged to a Pisces Initiation. The Sun had moved forward, spiritually, from one zodiacal constellation to another, indicating that Jesus of Nazareth had passed through a Pisces Initiation.

All this is hinted at in St. Mark's Gospel but such things have to be presented in pictures. Christ Jesus draws to Himself those who are seeking that of which Pisces is the symbol. Hence His first disciples are all of them fishermen. The indication of the Sun's progression into Pisces is clear when we read the words of John the Baptist: ‘I have baptised you with water, but He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.’ And as Christ passes along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, that is to say, when the Sun has moved so far that its counterpart could be seen rising in Pisces, the fishermen known as Simon and Simon's brother, James and James's brother, are inspired to follow Him.

How can we understand all this? We shall not understand it unless we go more deeply into the linguistic expressions used in those times. Our modern way of expressing ourselves is slovenly and banal. Thus when a human being is standing in front of us, we say: Here is a man—similarly when there are two or three. But what is there in front of us is only maya; if we see a being with two legs and a human face the only way of expressing what we see in our modern language is to say: That is a man. But what does occultism take this ‘man’ to be? In the form in which he stands before us he is nothing but maya—approximately as real as a rainbow in the sky. A rainbow is a reality only as long as the necessary conditions of rain and sunshine are present; as soon as the relation between sunshine and rain changes, the rainbow vanishes. It is exactly the same in the case of a man. He is only a confluence of forces of the Macrocosm; we must look for forces in the heavens, in the Macrocosm. For the occultist, what we assume on Earth to be a man is simply nothingness. The truth is that forces are streaming from above downwards and from below upwards, and they intersect. And just as a particular combination of rain and sun produces a rainbow, so do forces streaming together from above and from below out of the Macrocosm create a phenomenon, an illusory image, which we take to be a man. But the man we see before us is really nothing but maya. Where we think we see a man there are intersecting cosmic forces. You must take this quite seriously. The man as he stands before us is merely a shadow of many forces. But the being who manifests in the man may well be at a different place altogether from the point where the man with his two legs is standing.

Now think of three human beings. One is a peasant in ancient Persia, working his plough in the Persian countryside. He looks like a man, but in reality he is a soul whose forces are sustained by some world from above or from below, and if we are to have real knowledge of him we must ascend to the realm of these forces. The second man is possibly some kind of official in ancient Persia. He too is formed from another world through intersecting forces and again, if we are to know him in the real sense, we must ascend to the realm of those forces. Finally, think of a third Persian, or one of whom we should have to say even more emphatically: he is a veritable illusion, a phantom. To discover the truth about him we should have to ascend to the Sun to find the forces sustaining this phantom figure. There above, among the mysteries of the Sun, we should find what we might call the Golden Star—Zarathustra. Rays are sent down and on the Earth there lives the being we call Zarathustra, though his essential being is not there at all.

The important thing is to realise that in ancient times men were well aware of the significance of names. Names were not given as they are to-day but according to what was really living in a human being, apart altogether from the outer appearance. An old man at the time of Christ would have understood very well what was meant if someone had pointed to John the Baptist, saying: There is the Angel of God! The outer appearance would have been disregarded as a secondary consideration and attention paid only to the inner reality.—And now suppose the same mode of expression had been used in connection with Christ Jesus. What would have been said of Him in times when such things were understood? Nobody would have so much as dreamed of giving the appellation Christ Jesus to the body of flesh moving about the land; the body was regarded merely as the sign that what was streaming down spiritually from the Sun had gathered together at this particular point. And when this body—the body of Jesus—moved from one place to another it was simply that the Sun-force was being made visible. This Sun-force was able of itself to move from place to place, independently of a physical body. Occasionally, Christ Jesus was said to be ‘in the house’, that is to say, in the flesh; but the Being in the flesh also moved about without a body. In the Gospel of St. John, above all, the Evangelist often writes exactly as if the Sun-force were present in a body of flesh when in reality the Christ is moving from place to place purely in the spirit.

That is why it is so important for the deeds of Christ Jesus always to be brought into relationship with the physical Sun—which is the outward expression for the spiritual world when gathered together at the point where the physical body is present. For example, when Christ Jesus performs an act of healing, it is the Sun-force that heals, but the Sun must be in the right position in the heavens. Thus: ‘At even, when the sun did set they brought unto Him all that were diseased ...’ and so on. It was important to indicate that this healing force can flow down only when the physical Sun has set and is working in a purely spiritual way. Again when Christ Jesus needs special power in order to do His works, He must draw it from the spiritual Sun, not from the physically visible Sun. ‘And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, He went out ...’ The path of the Sun and the power of the Sun are expressly indicated, furthermore that it is the Sun-force that is working, that Jesus is simply the external sign and that this path taken by the Sun-force could also become visible to the naked eye. Wherever St. Mark's Gospel speaks of the Christ, what is meant is the Sun-force which, in that epoch of Earth-evolution, worked with special strength upon the land called Palestine. Moreover the Sun-force, gathered into a focus, was moving from place to place, and the body of Jesus was the outward sign making the movement of the Sun-force visible to physical sight. The paths of Jesus in Palestine were the paths of the Sun-force that had come down to the Earth. If you trace the paths of Jesus to form a kind of chart you will have before you the indication of a cosmic happening—the Sun-force had penetrated into the land of Palestine. It is a macrocosmic process—that is the essential point. This is made especially evident by the writer of St. Mark's Gospel, who was well aware that a body which was the bearer of a principle such as the Christ-Principle must be entirely subservient to it. The Gospel therefore directs attention to the world so gloriously proclaimed by Zarathustra—the world which lies behind the material world and influences the life of man. Through Christ Jesus it was again made clear how the forces of this spiritual world work into the Earth. Hence in the body—the body of the Nathan Jesus as we have heard [See Lecture-Course on the Gospel of St. Luke, lectures IV–VII.]—which was influenced in a particular way by the Zarathustra-Individuality, it was inevitable that a kind of repetition should take place of happenings connected with Zarathustra.

We know some of the beautiful legends about Zarathustra. Almost immediately after his birth occurred the first miracle, that known as the ‘Zarathustra smile’. The second miracle was when Duransurun, the King ruling the district where Zarathustra was born, determined to murder the child about whom retrograde Magi had made certain statements. But when the King was on the point of stabbing the child his arm was paralysed. Finding that he could not use his dagger to do away with the child, he ordered him to be taken out into the wilderness and left among the wild beasts. This is the expression used to indicate that already in earliest childhood Zarathustra was destined to see what everyone is bound to see if his gaze has not been cleansed of impurities. Instead of the majestic Group-Souls and the higher spiritual Beings, he sees the emanations of his untamed fantasies. This is what is meant when we are told that Zarathustra was left in the wilderness among the wild beasts, but remained unharmed. This was the third miracle; the fourth was again connected with wild beasts. And always it was the good spirits of Ahura Mazdao who ministered to him.

These miracles are to some extent repeated in St. Mark's Gospel. ‘And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness’ (the word really means solitude). ‘And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.’

It is made clear to us here that the body was being prepared to become a focus of macrocosmic processes. What had happened to Zarathustra had to be repeated in the encounter with the wild beasts. The body became the bearer of macrocosmic processes.

In its very first lines the Gospel of St. Mark presents us with a vista of majestic grandeur and my aim in this lecture has been to show you how this Gospel acquires new life and power if only the words are understood in their right sense—not in that of our commonplace modern speech but in the sense of ancient language, when whole worlds lay behind each word. Our modern language needs to be recast in many ways before it is possible to discover what the words of ancient languages contained. When we say that man lives on the Earth and develops his ‘I’, or that he was present on the Old Moon when it was the Angels who reached their human stage—all this must be borne in mind when we read: Behold, I send my Angel before men. These words cannot be understood without the preliminary knowledge communicated by Spiritual Science.

If people were really honest to-day they would admit that the words at the beginning of St. Mark's Gospel are unintelligible to them. But instead they adopt an arrogant attitude and maintain that Spiritual Science is so much fantasy and puts all kinds of complications into what would otherwise be quite simple. But the fact of the matter is that people to-day have no real knowledge; they no longer recognise the principle adopted, for instance, in ancient Persia, when the sacred records were re-written from epoch to epoch in order to be clothed in a new form suited to every period. In this way the divine Word was recast in the form of the Zend Avesta, then again recast, and what we have to-day is its latest form. The Persian scriptures were, in fact, re-written seven times. One of the tasks of Anthroposophy is to teach men how necessary it is that records in which sacred mysteries are clothed in words should be re-written from epoch to epoch. For if we want to preserve the sublime language of the ancient writings we should not attempt in our re-writing to adhere pedantically to the old words; we should rather try to translate them into words that are immediately intelligible in the present age. An attempt to do this was made in the summer in the lecture-course on Genesis, and you will have realised then how many of the words must be re-cast. The lecture today may have given you some idea of how the same principle applies to the Gospel of St. Mark.

The character of Spiritual Science is such that the truths and data of knowledge contained in it increase in difficulty the farther we descend from universal principles to concrete details. You may already have noticed this when attempts have been made in different groups to speak about historical details, for example about the reincarnations of the great leader of the ancient Persian religion, Zarathustra, or about his connection with Moses, with Hermes, and also with Jesus of Nazareth.¹ On other occasions too, concrete questions of history have been touched upon. As soon as we descend from the great truths concerning the universe as pervaded and woven through by Spirit, from the great cosmic laws to the spiritual nature of a particular individuality, a particular personality, we pass from matters where the human heart will still accept, comparatively easily, this or that questionable point, into realms teeming with improbabilities. And, as a rule, those who are insufficiently prepared become incredulous when they confront this abyss between universal and specific truths.

Our study is intended to be an introduction to lectures which belong to the domain of occult history and will present historical facts and personalities in the light of Spiritual Science. In these lectures I shall have many things to say to you that will seem strange. You will hear many things that will have to reckon upon the will-for-understanding promoted by all the spiritual-scientific knowledge brought before you in the course of the years. For, after all, the finest, most significant fruit of the spiritual-scientific conception of the world is that, complicated and detailed as the knowledge is, we finally have before us not a collection of dogmas, but within us, in our hearts and feelings, we possess something that carries us beyond the standpoint we can reach through any other world-view. We do not imbibe so many dogmas, tenets, or mere information, but through our knowledge we become different human beings. In a certain respect, the aspects of Spiritual Science we shall now be considering call for more than a purely intellectual understanding—for an understanding by the soul, which at many points must be willing to listen to and accept intimations that would become crass and crude if pressed into too sharp outlines.

The picture I want to call up in your minds is that behind the whole evolutionary and historical process, through the millennia up to our own times, spiritual Beings, spiritual Individualities, stand as guides and leaders behind all human evolution and human happenings, and that in the greatest, most significant events in history, this or that human being appears with his whole soul, his whole being, as an instrument of spiritual Individualities standing and working with set purpose behind him. But we must familiarise ourselves with many a concept unknown in ordinary life if we are to gain insight into the strange and mysterious connections between earlier and later happenings in the course of history

If you will remind yourselves of many things that have been said through the years, you will be able to picture that in ancient times—and in Post-Atlantean times, too, if we go back only a few thousand years before what is usually called the historic era—men fell into more or less abnormal states of clairvoyance. Between our matter-of-fact waking consciousness, limited as it is entirely to the physical world, and the unconscious sleeping state, there was once a realm of consciousness through which man penetrated into spiritual reality. And we know that what is nowadays explained as poetic folk-fantasy by scholars who are themselves the originators of so many scientific myths and legends, is to be traced back to ancient clairvoyance, to clairvoyant states of the human soul which in those times gazed behind physical existence and expressed what it saw in the pictures contained in myths, fairy-tales and legends. So that in old, genuinely old myths, fairy-tales and legends, more knowledge, more wisdom and truth are to be found than in the abstract erudition and science of the present day. Therefore when we look back to very ancient times, we-find men who were clairvoyant; we know too that this clairvoyance faded away more and more among the various peoples in the different epochs. In the Christmas lecture to-day² I told you how in Europe, at a comparatively very late time, abundant remains of this ancient clairvoyance still survived. The extinguishing of clairvoyance and the advent of consciousness limited to the physical plane occur at different times among the different peoples.

You can conceive that through the culture-epochs after the great Atlantean catastrophe—through the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin culture-epochs and an into our own—the effects produced in the plan of world-history by the activities of men have been very diverse—inevitably so, because the peoples all stood in different relationships to the spiritual world. In ancient Persian and also in ancient Egyptian times, what man inwardly felt and experienced extended upwards into the spiritual world, and spiritual Powers played into his very soul. Not until the Greco-Latin epoch did this living connection between the human soul and the spiritual world cease in essentials; nor did it disappear completely until our own times. As far as outer history is concerned, the connection exists in our time only when, with the means that are accessible to man to-day, the link between the human soul and the realities of the spiritual worlds is sought consciously. Thus in ancient times, when man looked into his own soul, this soul enshrined not only what it had learnt from the physical world, had pictured according to the pattern of the things of the physical world, but the spiritual Hierarchies ranging above man up into the spiritual worlds were experienced as immediate realities. All this worked down to the physical plane through the instrument of the human soul, and men knew themselves to be connected with these individual Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When we look back, let us say, into the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—but it must be the earlier periods of it—we find men who are, so to say, historical personalities; but we do not understand them if we think of them as historical personalities in the modern sense.

When as men of the materialistic age we speak of historical personalities, we are convinced that it is only the impulses, the intentions, of the actual personalities in question that take effect in the course of history. But with this conception we can in reality understand only the men of the last three thousand years: that is—approximately of course—the men of the millennium which ended with the birth of Christ Jesus, and those of the first and the second Christian millennia in which we ourselves are living. Plato, Socrates, possibly also Thales and Pericles, are men who can still be understood as having at any rate some resemblance to ourselves. But farther back than that it is not possible to understand human beings if we attempt to do so merely by analogy with those living to-day. This applies, shall we say, to Hermes, the great Teacher of the Egyptian epoch, also to Zarathustra, and even to Moses. When we go back before the thousand. years preceding the Christian era we must reckon with the fact that wherever we have to do with historical personalities, higher Individualities, higher Hierarchies stand behind and take possession of these personalities—in the best sense of the word, of course. And now a strange phenomenon comes to light, without knowledge of which the process of historical evolution cannot really be understood.

Five culture-epochs including our own, have been enumerated. Many, many thousands of years ago we come to the first Post-Atlantean culture-epoch, the ancient Indian; this was followed by the second, the ancient Persian; this by the third, the Egypto-Chaldean; this by the fourth, the Greco-Latin; and this by the fifth, our own epoch. When we go back from the Greco-Latin to the Egyptian epoch we must change our whole way of studying history: instead of looking at the purely human aspect—which it is still possible to do in connection with the figures of the Greek world as far back as the age of the Heroes—we must now apply a different criterion by looking behind the single personalities for the spiritual Powers which represent the super-personal and work through the personalities as their instruments. We must have These spiritual Individualities always in mind, so that working behind some human being an the physical plane we can discern discern a Being of the higher Hierarchies who, as it were, takes hold of him from behind and Sets him at the appropriate place in evolution.

From this point of view it is highly interesting to perceive the connections between the really significant happenings—those which were determinative factors in the course of history—in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch and in the Greco-Latin epoch. These two culture-epochs follow one another, and to begin with we go back, let us say to the years from 2800 to 3200–3500 B.C.—which comparatively speaking is not so very far. Nevertheless we shall not understand happenings then—of which ancient history is already able to tell something to-day—unless behind the historical personalities we discern the higher Individualities. But then it also becomes evident to us that in the fourth, the Greco-Latin epoch, there is a kind of repetition of the really important happenings of the third epoch. It is almost as if things that in the earlier epoch an be explained through higher laws, must be explained in the following age through laws of the physical world, as if everything had sunk down, had become a stage more material, more physical. There is a kind of reflection in the physical world of great events of the preceding period.

By way of introduction, I want to draw your attention to how one of the most important happenings of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch is presented to us in a significant myth, and how this event is reflected, but at a lower stage, in the Greco-Latin epoch. I shall therefore be speaking of two parallel happenings which in the occult sense belong together, the one taking place half a plane higher, as it were, and the other entirely on the physical earth but like a kind of shadow-image on the physical plane of a spiritual event of the earlier epoch. Outwardly, it is only in the form of myths that humanity has ever been able to tell of events behind which stand Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But we shall see what lies behind the myth which describes the most significant event of the Chaldean epoch.³ We will look only at the main features of this myth.

There was once a great king, by name Gilgamesh. From the name itself, one who understands such matters will recognise that here we have to do not merely with a physical king, but with a divinity standing behind him, a spiritual Individuality by whom the king of Erech is inspired, who works and acts through him. Thus we have to do with one who in the real sense must be called a god-man.⁴ The story narrates that he oppresses the city of Erech. The city turns to its deity, Aruru, and she causes a helper to arise out of the earth. These are pictures of the myth. We shall see what deeply significant historical events lie behind it. The Goddess of the City produces Eabani out of the earth. Eabani is a kind of human being who, in comparison with Gilgamesh, seems to be of an inferior nature, for we are told that he was clothed in the skins of animals, was covered with hair, was like a wild man. Nevertheless in his wild nature there was divine Inspiration, ancient clairvoyance, clairvoyant knowledge, clairvoyant perception.

Eabani comes to know a woman of Erech and is attracted by her into the City. He becomes the friend of Gilgamesh and this brings peace to the city. Gilgamesh and Eabani together are now the rulers. Then Ishtar, the Goddess of Erech, is stolen by a neighbouring city. There upon Eabani and Gilgamesh go to war with the marauding city, conquer the king and bring the Goddess back again to Erech. Gilgamesh lives near her, and here we come to the strange fact that he has no understanding of the essential nature of the Goddess. A scene takes place, directly reminiscent of a Biblical scene described in the Gospel of St. John. Gilgamesh confronts Ishtar, but his conduct is very different from that of Christ Jesus. He upbraids the Goddess for having loved many other men before she had encountered him, reproaching her particularly for her most recent attachment. Thereupon the Goddess carries her complaints to that deity, that Being of the higher Hierarchies, to whom she belongs. She goes to Anu. And now Anu sends a bull down to the earth; Gilgamesh has to engage in combat with it. Those who recall Mithras's fight with the bull will see a resemblance here. All these events—and when we come to explain the myth we shall see what depths it contains—have led meanwhile to the death of Eabani. Gilgamesh is now alone. A thought comes to him that gnaws at the very fibres of his soul. Under the impression of what he has experienced, he becomes conscious for the first time of the thought that man is mortal; a thought to which he had previously paid no heed comes before his soul in all its terror. And then he hears of the only man of earth who has remained immortal, whereas all other human beings in the Post-Atlantean epoch have become conscious of mortality: he hears of the immortal Xisuthros far away in the West. And because he is resolved to fathom the riddle of life and death, he sets out on the perilous journey to the West.⁵—I can tell you at once that this journey to the West is nothing else than the search for the secrets of ancient Atlantis, for happenings prior to the great Atlantean catastrophe.

Gilgamesh sets out on his journey. The details are interesting. He has to pass through an entrance guarded by giant scorpions; the spirit leads him into the realm of death; he enters the kingdom of Xisuthros and there learns that in the Post-Atlantean epoch all men will inevitably be more and more penetrated with the consciousness of death. Gilgamesh now asks Xisuthros whence he has knowledge of his eternal being; how comes it that he is conscious of immortality? Thereupon Xisuthros says to him: “You too can have this consciousness, but you must undergo all that I had to experience in overcoming the terror, anxiety and loneliness through which it was my lot to pass. When the god Ea had resolved to let perish” (in what we call the Atlantean catastrophe) “that part of humanity which was to live no longer, he bade me to withdraw into a kind of ship. I was to take with me the animals that were to remain, and those Individualities who are truly to be called the Masters. By means of this ship I outlived the great catastrophe.” Xisuthros then tells Gilgamesh: “What was there undergone, you can experience only in your innermost being; but you can attain the consciousness of immortality if for seven nights and six days you refrain from sleep.” Gilgamesh wishes to submit to the test but soon falls asleep. Then the wife of Xisuthros baked seven mystic loaves which by being eaten are to be a substitute for what would have been attained in the seven nights and six days without sleep. With this “life-elixir” Gilgamesh continues his journeying, bathes as it were in a fountain of youth, and again reaches the borders of his own country in the region of the Euphrates and the Tigris. A serpent deprives him of the power of the life-elixir and so he reaches his country without it, but all the same with the consciousness that there is indeed immortality, and filled with longing to see the spirit at least, of Eabani. The spirit of Eabani appears to him, and from the discourse which then takes place we can glean how, for the culture of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, a consciousness of the link with the spiritual world could arise.—This relationship between Gilgamesh and Eabani is very significant. I have now outlined pictures from the significant myth of Gilgamesh which, as we shall see, will lead us into the spiritual depths lying behind the Chaldean-Babylonian culture-epoch. These pictures show that two individualities stand there: the individuality of one—Gilgamesh—into whom a divine-spiritual being has penetrated; and an individuality who is more of a human being, but of such a nature that he may be called a young soul, who has had few incarnations and for that reason has carried over ancient clairvoyance into later times—Eabani.

Eabani is depicted as being clothed in skins of animals. This is an indication of his wild nature; but because of this very wildness he is still endowed with ancient clairvoyance an the one hand, and an the other hand he is a young soul who has lived through far, far fewer incarnations than other souls who have reached a high level of development. Thus Gilgamesh represents a being who was ready for initiation but was not able to attain it, for the journey to the West is the journey to an initiation that was not carried through to the end. On the one side we see in Gilgamesh the actual inaugurator of the Chaldean-Babylonian culture, and working behind him a divine-spiritual Being, a kind of Fire-Spirit.⁶ And beside Gilgamesh there is another individuality—Eabani—a young soul who descended late to earthly incarnation. If you read the book Occult Science, you will find that the individualities returned only gradually from the planets.—The exchange of the knowledge possessed by these two is the root of the Babylonian-Chaldean culture, and we shall see that the whole of this culture is an outcome of what proceeds from Gilgamesh and Eabani. Clairvoyance from the divine man, Gilgamesh, and clairvoyance from the young soul, Eabani, penetrate into the Chaldean-Babylonian culture. This process, enacted by two beings working side by side, each of whom is necessary to the other, is then reflected in the later, fourth culture-epoch, the Greco-Latin, and in fact reflected on the physical plane. We shall of course only very gradually reach complete understanding of such a process. A more spiritual process is thus reflected on the physical plane when humanity has descended very far, when men no longer feel the relation of human personality to the divine-spiritual world.

These secrets of the divine-spiritual world were preserved in the places of the Mysteries. So, for example, many of the ancient, holy secrets which proclaimed the connection of the human soul with the divine-spiritual worlds were preserved in the Mysteries of Diana of Ephesus and in the Ephesian temple. A great deal in these Mysteries was no longer comprehensible in an age when human personality had come into prominence. And like a token of how little the purely external personality understood what had remained spiritually, there stands the half-mystical figure of Herostratus, who has eyes only for the superficial aspect of personality—Herostratus who flings the burning torch into the temple of Ephesus. This deed is like a token of the clash between the personality and what had survived from ancient spirituality. And on the very same day when a man, merely in order that his name might go down to posterity, throws the burning brand into the sanctuary of Ephesus, there is born the man who has achieved more than all others for the culture of personality—and on the very soil where the culture of were personality was meant to be overcome. Herostratus flings the burning torch on the day when Alexander the Great is born—the man who is all personality! Alexander the Great stands there as the shadow-image of Gilgamesh.⁷ A profound truth lies behind this. In the Greco-Latin epoch, Alexander the Great stands there as the shadow image of Gilgamesh, as a projection of the spiritual on to the physical plane. And Eabani, projected on to the physical plane, is Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander the Great.

Here indeed is a strange circumstance: Alexander and Aristotle standing, like Gilgamesh and Eabani, side by side. And we see how in the first third of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch there is carried over, as it were, by Alexander the Great but transformed into the laws of the physical plane—that which had been imparted to the Babylonian-Chaldean culture by Gilgamesh. This comes to wonderful expression in the fact that, as a result of the deeds of Alexander, there was established an the scene of Egypto-Chaldean culture Alexandria itself, the city founded by Alexander in 332 B.C. in order that the great achievements of the Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean culture-epoch might be brought together in one centre. And gradually all the streams of Post-Atlantean culture that were intended to come together did indeed converge on Alexandria, the city established an the scene of the third culture-epoch but with the character of the fourth.

Alexandria outlasted the beginnings of Christianity. Indeed it was in Alexandria that the factors of greatest significance in the fourth culture-epoch developed, when Christianity was already in existence. There the great scholars were working; there the three most important streams of culture flowed together: the ancient Pagan-Grecian stream, the Christian stream and the Mosaic-Hebrew stream. They interpenetrated one another in Alexandria. And it is impossible to conceive that the culture of Alexandria which was built entirely on the foundation of personality—could have been inaugurated in any other way than through the being who was inspired by personality—Alexander the Great. For now, through the very existence of this centre of culture, everything that formerly was super-personal, extending from the human personality upwards into the spiritual world, assumed a personal character. The personalities we find in Alexandria have, as it were, everything within themselves; the Powers from higher Hierarchies who guide the personalities and set them in their allotted places, are very little in evidence. All the sages and philosophers working in Alexandria seem to be embodiments of ancient wisdom transformed into human personality; it is the personal element that speaks out of them. The singular fact is that everything in ancient Paganism that could be explained only by the teaching of how gods came down and united with daughters of men in order to bring forth heroes—all this is transformed into personal forcefulness in the men in Alexandria. And the forms which Judaism, the Mosaic culture, assumed in Alexandria can be described from what is in evidence precisely during the period when Christianity was already in existence. Nothing is to be found of those deep conceptions of a link between the world of men and the spiritual world which were present in the age of the prophets and are still to be found in the last two centuries before the beginning of our era. In Judaism too, everything has become personality. There are gifted, able men in Alexandria, men possessed of extraordinarily deep insight into the secrets of the ancient occult teachings ... but everything has become personal; personalities are working in Alexandria. And it is there that to begin with, Christianity appears, shall we say, in a distorted, debased state of infancy. Christianity, whose real function is to lead the personal element in man upwards into the impersonal, made its appearance in Alexandria in a very ruthless form. Christian personalities, in particular, acted in such a way that we often have the impression: their deeds are anticipations of later actions by bishops and archbishops working on a purely personal basis. This applies both to Archbishop Theophilus in the fourth century and to his kinsman and successor, St. Cyril.⁸ We can judge them only an the basis of their human failings. Christianity, which was to give to mankind the greatest of all gifts, reveals itself to begin with in its greatest failings and from its personal side. But in Alexandria a sign and token was to stand before the whole evolution of humanity.

There again we have a projection on the physical plane of earlier, more spiritual conditions. In the Orphic Mysteries of ancient Greece there was a wonderful personality, one who was initiated in the Mystery-secrets and was among the most loveable, most interesting pupils of these Mysteries, well prepared by a certain Celtic occult training undergone in earlier incarnations. This individuality sought with deepest fervour for the secrets of the Orphic Mysteries. The pupils of these Mysteries had to live through in their own soul what is described in the myth of Dionysos Zagreus, who was dismembered by the Titans but whose body was carried away by Zeus into a higher life. How, as the result of a certain path taken in the Mysteries, man's life is surrendered to the outer world, how his whole being is torn in pieces so that he can no longer find his bearings within himself—this was to become an actual, individual experience in the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries.

When in the ordinary way we study animals, plants and minerals, what we learn is merely abstract knowledge because we remain outside them; but anyone who wishes to obtain knowledge in the occult sense must train himself to feel as if he were actually within the animals, plants and minerals, in air and water, in springs and mountains, in stones and Stars, in other human beings—as if he were one with them. all. Nevertheless, a pupil of the Orphic Mysteries had to develop the inner strength of soul which would enable him, re-established as a self-based individuality, to triumph over the disintegration of his being in the external world. When all this had become an actual human experience, it represented in a certain sense one of the very highest secrets of Initiation. And many pupils of the Orphic Mysteries had undergone such experiences, had lived through this disintegration in the world and, as a kind of preparation for Christianity, had therewith attained the highest experience within reach in pre-Christian times.

Among the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries was the loveable personality of whom I am speaking, whose earthly name has not come down to posterity, but who stands out clearly as a pupil of these Mysteries. Already in youth and then for many years, this person was closely connected with all the Greek Orphics during the period preceding that of Greek philosophy—a period of which no account is given in books an the history of philosophy. For what is recorded of Thales and Heraclitus is an echo of what the Mystery-pupils had accomplished in their way at an earlier period. And one of the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries was the individual of whom I have just spoken, whose pupil in turn was Pherecydes of Syros, referred to in the lecture-course given at Munich last year: The East in the light of the West⁹

Investigation of the Akasha Chronicle reveals that the individuality of that pupil of the Orphic Mysteries was reincarnated in the 4th century A.D. We find this individuality amid the activity and life of those gathered together in Alexandria, the Orphic secrets now transformed into personal experiences of the loftiest kind. It is very remarkable how all the Orphic secrets were transformed into personal experiences in this new incarnation. At the end of the 4th century, A.D., we find this individuality reborn as the daughter of a great mathematician, Theon. We see how there flashes up in her soul all that could be experienced of the Orphic Mysteries through vision of the great mathematical, light-woven texture of the universe. All this was now personal talent, personal genius. These faculties had now to be of so personal a character that it was necessary even for this individuality to have a mathematician as father in order that something might be received from heredity.

Thus we look back to times when man was still in living connection with the spiritual worlds, as was this Orphic pupil; and we see the shadow-image of this pupil among those who taught in Alexandria at the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th century A.D. This individuality had as yet experienced nothing that enabled men at that time to see beyond the shadow-sides of Christianity at its beginning. For all that had remained in this soul as an echo of the Orphic Mysteries was still too powerful to enable any Illumination to be received from that other Light, the new Christ Event. What arose round about as Christianity, represented by men of the type of Theophilus and Cyril, was in truth of such a nature that this Orphic individuality, working now with personal faculties, had things far greater, far richer in wisdom to say and to give than those who represented Christianity in Alexandria at that time.

Theophilus and Cyril were both filled with the deepest hatred of everything that was not Christian in the narrow ecclesiastical sense in which these two bishops, in particular, understood it. Christianity had assumed in them such an entirely personal character that these two patriarchs levied hirelings in their service; men were collected from far and near to form bodyguards for them. Their aim was power in its most personal sense. They were utterly obsessed by hatred of what originated in ancient times and yet was so much greater than the new that was appearing in caricatured shape. The deepest hatred was directed by the dignitaries of Christianity in Alexandria against the individuality of the reborn Orphic pupil. The fact that she was branded as a black magician will not therefore surprise us. But that was enough to incite the whole mob of hirelings against the noble, unique figure of the reborn pupil of the Orphic Mysteries. She was still young, but in spite of her youth, in spite of the fact that she was obliged to undergo much that in those days, too, imposed great hardships an a woman during a long period of study, she found her way upwards to the light that outshone all the wisdom, all the knowledge existing in those days. And it was wonderful how in the lecture halls of Hypatia—for such was the name of this reincarnated Orphic pupil—the purest, most luminous wisdom in Alexandria was presented to the enraptured listeners. She drew to her feet not only the Pagans, bat also Christians of deep and penetrating insight, such as Synesius. She was an influence of outstanding significance, and the revival of the old Pagan wisdom of Orpheus transformed into personality could be experienced in Alexandria in the figure of Hypatia.

World-karma was working in the truest sense symbolically. What had constituted the secret of her Initiation was now projected, mirrored, on the physical plane. And here we come to an event that is symbolically significant in the case of many things that have taken place in historical times. We come to one of those events that is seemingly only a martyrdom, but is in reality a symbol in which spiritual forces, spiritual intimations are coming to expression.

On a day in March in the year 415 A.D., Hypatia fell victim to the fury of these who formed the entourage of the patriarch of Alexandria. They resolved to rid themselves of her power, of her spiritual power. The utterly uncivilised, wild hordes were rushed in from the environs of Alexandria as well, and the chaste young sage was fetched away under false pretences. She mounted the chariot, and at a given sign the enflamed rabble fell upon her, tore off her clothing, dragged her into a church, and literally tore the flesh from her bones. The fragments of her body were then scattered around the city by these hordes, completely dehumanised by their rapacious passions. Such was the fate of the great woman philosopher, Hypatia.

Symbolically, so to say, there is indicated here something that is deeply connected with the founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great—although it happened a long time after the actual founding of the city. In this event, important secrets of the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch are reflected. This epoch, destined as it was to represent the dissolution, the sweeping-away, of the old, contained so much that was great and significant, and with paradoxical grandeur placed before the world a most pregnant symbol in the slaughter—one can call it nothing else—of Hypatia, the outstanding woman at the turn of the 4th-5th centuries of our era.

• 1. See among other lectures by Rudolf Steiner: Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St. Matthew, lectures II and III; The Gospel of St. Matthew, notably lectures I, II, III; The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, lecture III; From Jesus to Christ, lecture VIII.
• 2. The lecture, not yet printed in English, was entitled: Yuletide and the Christmas Symbols. Stuttgart, 27.12.1910.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner, World-History in the light of Anthroposophy, notably lectures III, IV, V.
• 4. See also: Jastrow (Mords), Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, Chapter XXIII. (Boston, 1898.) Budge (E. A. Wallis), The Babylonian Story of the Deluge and the Epic of Gilgamesh. (London, 1920. Revised by C. J. Gadd, 1929.) Thompson (Reginald Campbell), The Epic of Gilgamesh (London, 1928.) Contains a fairly full text.
• 5. See Budge, op. cit., p. 50:
  
  "I myself shall die, and shall not I then be as Enkidi (Eabani)
  Sorrow hath entered into my soul,
  Because of the fear of death which hach got hold of me do I wander over the country ..."
  
  Xisuthros, said to mean "the exceedingly wise," is a Greek corruption of an earlier designation. He is the same being as Uta-Napishtim in the versions of the Epic mentioned abovc, and is the Babylonian Noah. He tells the story of the Deluge to Gilgamesh. Cp. Cory (Isaac Preston), Ancient Fragments, p. 49; also Enc. of Religion and Ethics, Vol. VI, pp. 642—3; and Budge, op. cit., PP. 25—40.
• 6. See Langdon, op. cit., pp. 207—8. The name Gilgamesh is said to mean: " The Fire-god is a commander."
• 7. Cp. Jastrow, op. cit., pp. 516–17
• 8. Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, 385–412. Persecuted the followers of Origen. Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria. Played a prominent patt at the Council of Ephesus in 431.
• 9. The passage on Pherecydes of Syros occurs in lecture 4 of the Course entitled The East in the Light of the West, pp. 67—71 in the English edition.

Since we spoke yesterday of the differentiation of the soul life of the human being into three parts—the realm of concepts, or of thought, the realm of emotions, and the realm of will impulses—it should be interesting to us now to raise the question: How can self-discipline, the nurture of the soul life, set to work in the appropriate way to develop and to cultivate these three parts of the soul life? Here we shall begin with our life of will, our will impulses, and shall ask ourselves: What characteristics must we specially cultivate if we wish to work in a beneficial way on our will life?

Most beneficial of all in our will nature is the influence of a life directed in its entire character towards a comprehension of karma. We might also say a soul life which strives to develop, as its primary characteristic, serenity and acceptance of our destiny. And what better way can one find of developing this acceptance, this calmness of soul in the presence of one's destiny, than by making karma an actual content in one's life?

What do we mean by this? It means that—not merely theoretically but in a living way—when our own sorrow or the sorrow of another comes upon us, when we experience joy or the heaviest blow of fate, we shall really be fully aware that, in a certain higher sense, we ourselves have given the occasion for this painful blow of fate: this means developing such a mood that we accept an experience of joy with gratitude, but are also clearly aware, especially in regard to joy, that we must not go to excess, since this is perilous. If we desire to progress in our development, we can conceive joy in the following way. For the most part, joy is something which points to a future destiny, not to one already past. In human life joy is usually something one has not deserved through previous actions. When we investigate karma by occult means, we always discover that in most cases joy has not been earned, and we should accept it gratefully as sent to us by the gods, as a gift of the gods, and to say to ourselves: The joy which comes to meet us today ought to kindle in us the will to work in such a way as to take into ourselves the forces streaming to us through this joy, and to apply these usefully. We must look upon joy as a sort of prepayment on account for the future.

In the case of pain, on the other hand, we have usually merited this, and we always find the cause in our present life or in earlier lives. And we must then realise with the utmost clarity that we have often failed to conduct ourselves in our external life in accordance with this karmic mood. We are not able to conduct ourselves always in external life in the presence of what causes us pain in such a way that our conduct shall seem to be an acceptance of our destiny. We do not generally have an insight into such a thing at once—into the law of destiny. But, even though we are not able to conduct ourselves outwardly in such a way, yet the principal thing is that we shall do this inwardly.

And even if we have conducted ourselves outwardly in accordance with this karmic mood, yet we should say to ourselves in the depths of our souls that we ourselves have been the cause of all such things. Suppose, for instance, that someone strikes us, that he beats us with a stick. In such a case it is generally characteristic for a person to ask: ‘Who is it that strikes me?’ No one says in such a case: ‘It is I that beat myself.’ Only in the rarest cases do people say that they punish themselves. And yet it is true that we ourselves lifted the stick against another person in days gone by. Yes, it is you yourself who then raised the stick. When we have to get rid of a hindrance, this is karma. It is karma when others hold something against us. It is we ourselves who cause something to happen to us as recompense for something we have done. And thus we come to a right attitude toward our life, to a broadening of our self, when we say: ‘Everything that befalls us comes from ourselves. Our own action is fulfilled outwardly even when it seems as if someone else performed it.’

If we develop such a way of viewing things, then our serenity, our acceptance of our karma in all occurrences, strengthens our will. We grow stronger in facing life with serenity, never weaker. Through anger and impatience we become weak. In the face of every occurrence we are strong when we are serene. On the contrary, we become continually weaker in will through moroseness and an unnatural rebellion against destiny.

Of course, we must view within a broad compass what we consider as destiny. We must conceive this destiny of ours in such a way that we say to ourselves, for instance, that the development of precisely one power or another at a certain period of one's life belongs also to a person's karma. And mistakes are often made just here in the education of children. Here karma comes into contact with the problem of education, for education is destiny, the karma of the human being in youth.

We weaken the will of someone when we expect him to learn something, to do something for which his capacities are not yet adequate. In educating one must come to see clearly in advance what is suitable for each stage of life in accordance with the universal karma of humanity, so that the right thing may be done. Doing the wrong thing is raising a rebellion against destiny, against its laws, and is associated with enormous weakening of the will. It is not possible to discuss here how a weakening of the will is associated with all premature awakening of the sensual appetites and passions. It is the prematurely awakened appetites, instincts and passions which are especially subject to this law. For making premature use of the bodily organs is contrary to destiny. All that is directly against the karma of humanity, all actions opposing the existing arrangements of nature, are associated with a weakening of the will.

Since people have been for a long time without any true fundamental principles of education, there are many persons in the world now who did not pass through their youth in the right way. If humanity does not determine to direct what is most important of all, the education of youth, according to Spiritual Science, a race will arise with ever weaker wills—and this not in a merely external sense. This takes a deep hold of the life of the human being. Ask a number of people how they came into their present occupations. You may be sure that most of them will answer: ‘Well, we don't know; we have in some way been pushed into this situation.’ This feeling that one has been pushed into something, has been driven into it, this feeling of discontent, is also a sign of weakness of will.

Now, when this weakness of will is brought about in the manner described, still other results follow from this for the human soul, especially when the weakness of will is evoked in such a way that states of anxiety, of fear, of despair are produced at a youthful age. It will be increasingly necessary for human beings to have a fundamental understanding of the higher laws in order to overcome states of despair, for it is precisely despair which is to be expected when we do not proceed in accordance with knowledge of the spirit.

By means of a monistic and materialistic world view it is possible to maintain only two generations of persons with strong wills. Materialism can satisfy just two generations: the one that founded the conception and the pupils who have received it from the founders. This is the peculiarity of the monistic and materialistic world view: the one who works in the laboratory or the workshop and who founded the view, whose powers are fully occupied and activated by what he is building up in his mind, experiences an inner satisfaction. But one who merely associates himself with these theories, who takes over a materialism ready-made, will not be able to achieve this inner satisfaction; and then despair will work back upon the culture of the will, and evoke weakness of will. Weakening of the will, human beings lacking energy, will be the results of this world view.

The second of the three aspects of the super-sensible life we mentioned yesterday is that of the emotions. What affects the emotions favourably?

If we take the utmost pains to acquire an attentive attitude of mind, a marked attentiveness to the events in our surroundings—and do not imagine that this attentiveness is very generally and strongly developed by people—this can be of great value to us. I must repeatedly mention a single illustration. In a certain country the order of the examinations for teachers was once altered, and for this reason all the school teachers had to sit the examinations again. The examiner had to test both old and young teachers. The young ones could be tested on the basis of what they had learned in the teachers' colleges. But how should he test the old teachers? He decided to ask them about nothing except the subjects which they had themselves been teaching year after year in their own classes, and the result showed that very many of them had no notion of the very subjects they themselves had been teaching!

This attentiveness, this habit of following with vital interest the things that occur in one's environment, is most beneficial especially in the cultivation of the emotions.

Now, the emotions, like everything else in the soul, are connected in a certain way with the will; and, when we influence our emotional life unfavourably, we may thus indirectly influence our will impulses. We nurture our emotions favourably when we place ourselves under the law of karma in connection with our anger and our passions, when we hold fast to karma. And this we find in what occurs in our environment. We find it, for example, when anyone does the opposite of what we had expected. We may then say to ourselves: ‘All right; that is simply what he is doing!’ But we may also become angry and violent, and this is a sign of weakness of will.

Outbursts of violent temper hinder the right development of the emotions and also the will, and also have a far more extensive influence, as we can see at once. Now, anger is something that a person does not by any means have under his control. Only gradually can he master the habit of becoming angry, and one must have patience with oneself. To anyone who believes he can achieve this with a turn of the hand I must repeat the story of a teacher who took very much to heart the task of ridding his pupils of anger. When he was faced by the fact, that after constant efforts, a boy still became angry, he himself became so angry that he threw the ink bottle at the child's head. A person who permits himself to do such a thing must think for many, many weeks about karma.

What this signifies will become clear to us if we take this occasion to look a little more deeply into the life of the human soul. There are two poles in the soul life, the life of will on the one hand and that of thoughts, of conceptions, on the other. The emotions, the feelings of the heart, are in the middle. Now, we know that the life of man alternates between sleeping and waking; and, while the human being is awake, his life of thoughts and conceptions is especially active. For the fact that the will is not very wide awake can become clear to anyone who observes closely, how a will impulse comes about. We must first have a thought, a concept; only then does the will thrust upward from the depths of the soul. The thought evokes the will impulse. When the human being is awake, he is awake in thought, not in will.

But occult science teaches us that when we sleep, everything is reversed. Then the will is awake and is very active, and thought is inactive. This cannot be known by the human being in a normal state of consciousness, for the simple reason that he knows things only by means of his thoughts and these are asleep. Thus he does not observe that his will is active. When he attains clairvoyance and arrives at the world of imaginative representations, he then observes that the will awakes the moment thinking falls asleep. And the will slips into the pictures he perceives and awakens these. The pictures are then woven out of will. Thus the thoughts are then asleep but the will is awake.

But this being awake in our will is connected with our total human nature in a manner entirely different from the way our thoughts are connected. Depending on whether the person works or does not work, is well or ill, is serene or hot-tempered, the will becomes healthy or unhealthy. And according as our will is healthy or unhealthy it works in the night on the condition of our life, even into the physical body. Very much depends upon whether one develops a mood of serenity during the day, acceptance of his destiny, and thus prepares his will so that this will may be said to develop a pleasant warmth, a feeling of well-being, or whether, on the other hand, he develops anger. This unhealthiness of the will streams into the body during the state of sleep at night and is the cause of numerous illnesses, whose causes are sought for but not found because the resulting physical illnesses appear only after the lapse of years or even decades. Only one who surveys great stretches of time can see in this way the connection between conditions of the soul and of the body. Even for the sake of bodily health, therefore, the will must be disciplined.

We can also influence our emotions through serenity and acceptance of our karma so that they work beneficially even upon our bodily Organisation. On the other hand, in no other way do we injure this Organisation more than through apathy, lack of interest in what is occurring around us. This apathy is spreading more and more; it is the reason why so few persons take an interest in—spiritual things. It may be supposed that objective reasons lead to the adoption of a materialistic view of life. There are really by no means such great objective reasons for a materialistic view of life. No, it is apathy; no one can be a materialist without being apathetic. It is a lack of attention to our surroundings. Anyone who observes his environment with alert interest is confronted on all sides with what can only be harmonised by spiritual knowledge. But apathy deadens the emotions and leads to weakness of will.

Furthermore, special significance attaches to the characteristic called obstinacy—the attitude of mind that insists inflexibly upon one thing or another. Unhealthy emotions can also bring about obstinacy. These things are often like the serpent that bites his own tail. All that we have mentioned may be caused by obstinacy. Even persons who go through life very inattentively may be very obstinate. Persons who are altogether weak-willed are often discovered to be obstinately persisting in something when we had not expected it, and the weakness of will becomes constantly more marked if we do not strive to overcome obstinacy. It is precisely in persons with weak wills that we find this quality of obstinacy. On the other hand, when we endeavour to avoid the development of obstinacy, we shall see that in every instance we have improved our emotions and strengthened our wills. Every time that we actually are goaded by an impulse to be obstinate but refuse to yield to it, we become stronger for the task of confronting life. We shall observe the fruits if we proceed systematically against this fault; through struggling to overcome obstinacy we attain to inner satisfaction. The nurturing of our emotions specially depends upon our struggling in every way to overcome obstinacy, apathy, lack of interest. In other words, interest and attentiveness in relation to the environment foster both the feelings and the will. Apathy and obstinacy have the opposite effect.

For a sound emotional life, we have the fine word ingenuity. * [Sinnigkeit, the gift or capacity of inventive or creative fantasy.] Being creatively fanciful means that something ingenious occurs to one. Children ought to play in such a way that the fantasy is stimulated, that the spontaneous activity of their souls is stimulated, so that they have to reflect about their play. They ought not to arrange building blocks according to patterns: this merely develops pedantry, not creative fantasy. We are developing creative fantasy when we let children do all sorts of things in sand, when we take them into the woods and let them form little baskets out of burs, and then stimulate them to make other things of burs stuck together. Things which cause a certain inventive talent to expand nourish creative fantasy. Strange as it may seem, such cultivation of creative fantasy brings serenity of soul, inner harmony, and contentment,

Moreover, when we go for a walk with a child, it is good to leave him free to do whatever he will, provided he does not behave too badly. And, when the child does anything, we should show our pleasure, our participation and interest; we should not be unresponsive or lacking in interest in what the child produces out of his own inner nature. Even when instructing a child, we should connect what we teach him with the forms and processes of nature. When children reach an older stage, we should not then occupy them with riddles or puzzles taken from newspapers; this leads only to pedantry. On the contrary, observation of nature offers us the opposite of what is afforded by the press for the cultivation of the emotional life. A serene heart, a harmonious life of feeling, determines not only mental health but also bodily health, even though long stretches of time may intervene between cause and effect.

We come now to the third aspect of the super-sensible life, to thinking. This, we nurture and sharpen, especially by the development of characteristics which seem to have nothing whatever to do with thinking, with concepts. The best method of developing good thinking is by complete absorption and insight, not so much through logical exercises but by observing one thing and another, using for this purpose processes in nature, in order to penetrate into hidden mysteries. Through absorption in problems of nature and of humanity, through the endeavour to understand complex personalities, through the intensifying of attentiveness, we grow wise. Absorption means striving to unravel something by thinking, by conceiving. In this connection, we shall be able to see that such mental absorption has a wonderfully good effect in later life.

The following example is taken from life. A little boy showed his mother remarkable aspects of his observation, which were associated with extraordinary absorption and capacity for insight. He said: ‘You know, when I walk on, the streets and see persons and animals, it seems as if I had to enter into the persons and the animals. It happened that a poor woman met me, and I entered into her, and this was terribly painful to me, very distressing.’ (The child had not seen any sort of destitution at home, but lived in altogether good circumstances.) ‘And then I entered into a horse and then into a pig.’ He described this in detail, and was stimulated to an extraordinary degree of compassion, to special deeds of pity, through feeling union with the life of others. Whence does this come, this expansion of one's understanding for other beings? If we think the matter over in this case, we are led back into the preceding incarnation, when the person in question had cultivated absorption in things, in the secrets of things, as we have described.

But we do not have to wait till the next incarnation for the results which follow the cultivation of absorption. These manifest themselves even in a single life. When we are induced in earliest youth to develop all of this, we shall develop in later life a clear, transparent thinking, whereas otherwise we develop a scrappy, illogical thinking. It is a fact that truly spiritual principles can advance us in our course of life.

During recent decades there have been few truly spiritual fundamental principles of education, almost none at all. And now we are experiencing the results. There is an extraordinary amount of wrong thinking in our day. One can suffer the pains of martyrdom from the terribly illogical life of the world. Anyone who has acquired a certain clairvoyance does not simply feel that one thing is correct and another incorrect, but he suffers actual pain when confronted by illogical thinking, and a sense of well-being in connection with clear, transparent thinking. This signifies that he has acquired a feeling for such things, and this enables him to make decisions. And this brings far truer differentiations when one has actually reached this stage. It gives a far truer discrimination between truth and untruth. This seems incredible, but it is true. When something erroneous is said in the presence of a clairvoyant person, the pain which rises in him shows him that this is illogical, erroneous. Illogical thinking is extraordinarily widespread; at no time has illogical thinking been so widespread as precisely in our time, in spite of the fact that people pride themselves so much on their logical thinking. Here is an example that may well seem somewhat crass, but it is typical of the habit of passing through experiences without interest or thought.

I was once traveling from Rostock to Berlin. Into my compartment entered two persons, a gentleman and a lady. I sat in one comer and wished only to observe. The gentleman was very soon behaving in a strange manner, though he was otherwise probably a well-educated person. He lay down, sprang up again in five minutes; then again he groaned pitiably. Since the lady thought he was ill, she was seized by pity, and very soon a conversation was in full course between them. She told him that she had clearly observed that he was ill, but she knew what it meant to be ill, for she was ill also. She said she had a basket with her in which she had everything that was curative for her. She said: ‘I can cure anything, for I have the remedy for everything. And just think what a misfortune has befallen me! I have come from the far interior of Russia all the way here to the Baltic Sea, in order to recuperate and to do something for my ailment, and, just as I arrive, I find that I have left at home one of my important remedies. Now I must turn back at once, and this hope also has been in vain.’

The gentleman then narrated his sufferings, and she gave him a remedy for each of his illnesses, and he promised to do everything, making notes about all. I think there were eleven different prescriptions. She then began to enumerate all of her illnesses one by one; and he began to show his knowledge of what would cure them: that for one ailment she could be helped in a certain sanatorium, and for another in another sanatorium. She, in turn, wrote down all the addresses and was only afraid that the pharmacies might be closed for Sunday when she arrived in Berlin. These two persons never for one moment noticed the strange contradiction that each knew only what might help the other one, but for himself and herself knew no means of help. This experience gave these two educated persons the possibility of bathing in a sea of nonsense that streamed forth from each of them.

Such things must be clearly seen when we demand that self-knowledge shall give insight. We must demand of self-knowledge that it shall develop coherence in thinking, but especially absorption in the matter in hand. All these things work together in the soul. Scrappy thinking has the inevitable result, even though only after a long time, of making the person morose, sullen, hypochondriacal about everything, and frequently we do not know where the causes of this are to be found. Insufficient cultivation of concentration and insight makes one sullen, morose, hypochondriacal. What is so absolutely essential to thinking seems to have nothing to do with it. All obstinacy, all self-seeking, have a destructive effect upon thinking. All characteristics connected with obstinacy and selfishness—such as ambition, vanity all these things that seem to tend in a very different direction make our thinking unsound, and act unfavourably upon our mood of soul. We must seek, therefore, to overcome obstinacy, self-seeking, egoism; and cultivate, on the contrary, a certain absorption in things and a certain self-sacrificing attitude toward other beings. Absorption, a self-sacrificing attitude, in regard to the most insignificant objects and occurrences have a favourable effect upon thinking and upon one's mood. In truth, self-seeking and egoism bring their own punishment because the self-seeking person becomes more and more discontented, complains more and more that he comes off badly. When anyone feels this way about himself, he ought to place himself under the law of karma and ask himself, when he is discontented: ‘What self-seeking has brought this discontent upon me?’

In just this way we can describe how we may develop and how injure the three parts of the soul life, and this is extraordinarily important. We see, therefore, that Spiritual Science lays deep hold upon our life, for true observation of spiritual principles may lead us to self-education, and this is of the most vital importance and will become of ever-increasing significance since the time in man's evolution has passed when human beings were led by the gods from above, from the higher worlds. In ever-increasing measure, men will have to do things for themselves, without being directed and led.

With regard to what the Masters have taught about our working our way upward to Christ, Who will appear even in this century on the astral plane, a greater understanding of this advance for humanity can be achieved only in this way: that the human being shall ever increasingly stimulate himself. Just as we explained to you yesterday that human beings gradually work their way upward to Christ, so must we gradually perfect in freedom our thinking, feeling, and will impulses. And this can be achieved only through self-mastery, self-observation. Just as in earlier times, in ancient clairvoyance, the impulses were given to men from above by the gods, so will man determine his own way in later times through the new clairvoyance. This is why Anthroposophy appears precisely in our time, so that mankind may learn to develop soul characteristics in the right way. In this way man learns to meet what the future will bring. Only in this way can we understand what must one day appear: that is, that those who are shrewd and immoral will be cast out and rendered harmless.

The characteristics mentioned are important for every human being. But they are of such a nature that they are especially important to those who are determined to strive to reach rapidly in rational ways those characteristics which are to become more and more necessary for humanity. For this reason it is the Leaders of human beings who strive to achieve this development in very special measure in themselves, because the highest attainments can be reached only by means of the highest attributes.

To the highest degree of all is this development carried through, for example, by that individuality who once ascended to the rank of a Bodhisattva, when the preceding Bodhisattva became a Buddha, and who has, since then, been incarnated once in nearly every century; who lived as Jeshu ben Pandira, herald of the Christ, a hundred years before Christ. Five thousand years are needed for his ascent to the rank of a Buddha, and this Buddha will then be the Maitreya Buddha. He will be a Bringer of the Good, because (as can be seen by those who are sufficiently clairvoyant) he succeeds, by most intense self-discipline, in developing to the utmost those powers which cause to emanate from him such magical moral forces as enable him to impart to souls through the word itself heart forces and moral impulses. We cannot as yet develop on the physical plane any words capable of doing this. Even the Maitreya Buddha could not do this at present—could not develop such magical words. Today only thoughts can be imparted by means of words.

How is he preparing himself? By developing to the highest possible degree those qualities which are called good. The Bodhisattva develops in the highest degree what we may describe as devotion, serenity in the presence of destiny, attentiveness to all occurrences in one's surroundings, devotion to all living beings, and insight. And, although many incarnations will be needed for the future Buddha, yet he devotes himself during his incarnations primarily to giving attention to what occurs even though what he now does is relatively little, since he is utterly devoted to the preparation for his future mission.

This will be achieved through the fact that a special law exists with regard to just this Bodhisattva. This law we shall understand if we take account of the possibility that a complete revolution in the soul's life may occur at a certain age.

The greatest of such transformations that ever occurred took place at the baptism by John. What occurred there was that the ego of Jesus, in the thirtieth year of His life, abandoned the flesh and another ego entered: the Ego of the Christ, the Leader of the Sun Beings.

A like transformation will be experienced by the future Maitreya Buddha. But he experiences such a revolution in his incarnations quite differently. The Bodhisattva patterns his life on that of Christ, and those who are initiated know that he manifests in every incarnation very special characteristics.

It will always be noted that, in the period between his thirtieth and thirty-third years, a mighty revolution occurs in his life. There will then be an interchange of souls, though not in so mighty a manner as in the case of Christ. The ‘ego’ which has until then given life to the body passes out at that time, and the Bodhisattva becomes, in a fundamental sense, altogether a different person from what he has been hitherto, even though the ego does not cease and is not replaced by another, as was true of the Christ.

This is what all occultists call attention to: that he cannot be recognised before this time, before this transformation. Up to this time—although he will be absorbed intensely in all things—his mission will not be especially conspicuous; and even though the revolution is certain to occur, no one can ever say what will then happen to him. The earlier period of youth is always utterly unlike that into which he is transformed between his thirtieth and thirty-third years.

Thus does he prepare for a great event. This will be as follows: The old ego passes out and another ego then enters. And this may be such an individuality as Moses, Abraham, Elijah. This ego will then be active for a certain time in this body; thus can that take place which must take place in order to prepare the Maitreya Buddha. For the rest of his life he lives with this ego which enters at that moment.

What then occurs is like a complete interchange. Indeed, what is needed for the recognition of the Bodhisattva can occur. And it is then known that, when he appears after 3,000 years, and has been elevated to the rank of Maitreya Buddha, his ‘ego’ will remain in him but will be permeated inwardly by still another individuality. And this will occur precisely in his thirty-third year, in the year in which, in the case of Christ, the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. And then will he come forth as the Teacher of the Good, as a great Teacher who will prepare the true teaching of Christ and the true wisdom of Christ in a manner entirely different from what is possible today.

Spiritual Science must prepare that which will one day take place upon our earth.

Now, it is possible for anyone in our time to cultivate those characteristics which are injurious to the emotional life, such as apathy, etc. But this results in a laxity in the emotions, a laxity in the inner soul life, and such a person will no longer be able to carry out his task in life, will no longer be able to fulfil it. For this reason everyone may consider it a special blessing if he can acquire for himself a knowledge of what is to occur in the future. Whoever has the opportunity today to devote himself to spirit knowledge, enjoys a gift of grace from karma.

For having a knowledge of these things gives a foundation for security, devotion, and peace in our souls, for serenity, confidence and hope in meeting what faces us in the coming millennia of the evolution of humanity. All who can know these things should consider this a special good fortune, something which evokes the highest powers of the human being, which can enkindle everything in his soul that seems at the point of being extinguished or is in a state of disharmony, or approaching destruction. Enthusiasm, fire, rapture become also health and happiness in outer life.

He who earnestly acquaints himself with these things, who can develop the necessary absorption in these things, will surely experience what they can bring to him in happiness and inner harmony. And, if anyone in our Society does not yet find this demonstrated in himself, he should for once accept such knowledge and say:

“If I have not yet felt this, the fault lies in me. It is my duty to steep myself in today's mysteries. It is my duty to feel that as a human being, I am one link in a chain which has to stretch from the beginning to the end of evolution, in which are linked together all human beings, individualities, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Christ. I must say to myself: ‘To feel that I am a link in it is to be conscious of my true worth as a human being.’ This I must sense; this I must feel.”

The Christmas festival which we are about to celebrate is given deep significance again and a new life in the spirit with the anthroposophical view of the world. Spiritually, the Christmas festival is a sun festival, and it is as a sun festival that we shall meet it today. To begin with, let us hear the most wonderful apostrophe⁸¹ addressed to the sun, words Goethe wrote for his Faust:

The throb of life returns, with pulses beating Soft to ethereal dawn. O steadfast earth,
True through the night, you waited for my greeting,
Breathing beneath my feet in glad new birth,
And, clothing me afresh in joy of living,
In high resolve that banishes misgiving,
You stir my soul to prove life’s utmost worth.—

In gold of dawn the quickened world lies gleaming,
The forest is alive with myriad voices,
Through dell and vale the misty shapes are teeming,
But nature’s deepest heart in light rejoices;
Now burgeon, freshly quivering, frond and bough,
Sprung from the fragrant depth where they lay dreaming;
On flower and blade hang trembling pearls, and now Each colour stands out clear, in glad device,
And all the region is my Paradise.

Look up on high!—The giant peaks that stand In joy of light above the mountain-brow,
Are heralds of the solemn hour at hand,
That brings the blessing down upon our land.
Already, down the soft eternal stair,
The shine has reached the lower Alpine sward,
Where clarity and brilliance are restored,
As downward, step by step, the light is poured—
The dazzling sun strides forth, and fills the air.
I turn, from greater power than eyes can bear.

And thus it is, when hope with earnest striving Has toiled in aims as high as man may dare,
Fulfilment’s open gates give promise fair,
But from those everlasting depths comes driving,
A fiery blast that takes us unaware:
We thought to light life’s torch, but now, depriving Our highest hope, a sea of fire surrounds us.
Such fire! Of love? Or the fierce glow of hate?
The blend of joy and sorrow that confounds us Sends us to earth: to veil our troubled state,
For benefice of Spring we supplicate.

And so I turn, the sun upon my shoulders,
To watch the waterfall, with heart elate,
The cataract pouring, crashing from the boulders,
Split and rejoined a thousand times in spate;
The thunderous water seethes in fleecy spume,
Lifted on high in many a flying plume,
Above the spray-drenched air. And then how splendid To see the rainbow rising from this rage,
Now clear, now dimmed, in cool sweet vapour blended.
So strive the figures on our mortal stage.
This ponder well, the mystery closer seeing;
In mirrored hues we have our life and being.⁸²

These are the tremendous words Goethe lets his representative of humanity utter as the sun rises in the morning. It is not this sun, however, awakening anew every morning, which we are considering in connection with the festival of which we want to speak today. We want to let the true nature of the sun influence us in a much deeper sense. And the reality of that sun shall be our lodestar today.

We shall now hear the words that reflect the most profound meaning of the Christmas mystery. These words sounded as the pupils listened in deep devotion in the mysteries of all ages, hearing them before they were permitted to enter into the mysteries themselves.

Behold the sun
At the midnight hour!
In the lifeless ground
Build thy rocky tower!

So, when in depths thou mourn,
Find thou in death’s dark night
Creation’s pulse new-born With living morning light.

The powers on high make known
The eternal word divine;
The deeps must guard their own—
Peace, in their sacred shrine.

In gloom thou livest—
Create anew a sun!
In matter weaves—
Know spirit-bliss begun!⁸³

Many people who today know only the Christmas tree with its candles believe it to be an institution that has a long tradition. This is not the case, however. The Christmas tree is in fact a fairly recent European institution. Even the earliest Christmas tree was only just over a hundred years ago. But young as the tree may be, the Christmas festival is old indeed.

The Christmas festival was known and celebrated in all the mysteries of earliest times everywhere. It is not a mere sun feast but one that takes humanity to true perception or at least an idea of the wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated annually by the highest initiates in the mysteries at the time when the sun sent the least energy to the earth, gave the least warmth. It was also celebrated by those who could not yet take part in the whole of it, but knew only an outer reflection of the most sublime mysteries, a reflection in the form of images. And these secrets from the mysteries have survived through the ages and assumed a different garb among different peoples, depending on their beliefs. Christmas is the name given to the solemn night, this holy night celebrated in the great mysteries. These were occasions when the initiator would let the higher human being be resurrected in those who had been adequately prepared, or, to put it in present-day terms, when the living Christ was born in the inner human being.

People who do not know that spiritual principles are at work as well as chemical and physical principles, and that like chemical and physical principles these have their particular seasons in the cosmos, people like this are the only ones able to believe that it does not matter when the higher self is awakened. The essence of the great mysteries was that human beings lived through an event in which they were allowed to see the creative powers in the glory of colour, in bright light; were permitted to see the world around them filled with spiritual qualities, with many spirits; were permitted to see the world of spirits around them, and had the greatest experience a human being can have. One day this moment will come for all and everyone. All will know it, though perhaps only after many incarnations—but the time will come for all and everyone when the Christ will rise within them and new seeing, new hearing will awaken in them.

Mystery pupils who were being prepared for the awakening would first be taught what this awakening meant in the great universe. After this the final acts would come to bring awakening, and these acts were performed at the time when the darkness was greatest, when the sun was at its lowest in the outside world—at Christmas, for those who knew the true facts in the spirit knew that powers moved through cosmic space at this time that were helpful for such an awakening. During the preparation the pupils would be told that those who truly wished to know must know not only what had been happening on this globe through millennia but must also learn to have an overview of the whole of human evolution. They also had to know that the great festivals had been made part of the year and its seasons by leading spirits and that they must devote themselves to looking up to the great eternal truths.

The eye was guided to roam over millions of years. Look to the time, the pupils would be told, when our earth was not yet the way it is now, when there was no sun as yet, no moon, but the two were still one with the earth; when the earth was still one body with the sun and the moon. Human beings were there at that time, but they did not yet have a body. They were spiritual entities, and no light of the sun fell on those human souls and spirits from outside. The light of the sun was in the earth itself. It was not like the sunlight of today, which falls on creatures and objects from the outside. It was a light that had power of spirit in it, and shone forth at the same time in the inner life of every human being. Then came the time when the sun moved away from the earth. It separated from the earth and its light then fell on the earth from outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth. Darkness had come to the inner human being.

This was where the human race began to evolve towards the future point in time when they would find the inner light shining again within them. Humanity had to gain knowledge of the things of this earth, using the outer senses. Human evolution tended towards the time when the higher human being, the spirit human being, would once again be aglow and alight within. From the light through the darkness to the light—that is the course of human evolution.

When the pupils had been prepared they would be guided towards awakening at the moment in time when as a chosen group they were to have an inner experience of something which the rest of humanity is only to experience in the distant future. Then they would see the light of the spirit with eyes that had been opened in the spirit. This solemn moment was to come when outer light was weakest, on the day when the sun shone least in the outside world. Then, on that day, the pupils of the mysteries would be brought together, and the inner light would open up for them.

Others who were not yet able to take part in this celebration were to have at least an outer image that would tell them: ‘You, too, shall one day know this great moment. Today you see an image. Later you shall experience the event you now see in the image.’

Those were the lesser mysteries. They would show a reflection of what the initiate would experience at a later time. Today we’ll share in the experience of what happened in the lesser mysteries around the midnight hour. It was the same everywhere—in the Egyptian mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, the mysteries of Asia Minor, in the Babylonian and Chaldean mysteries and also in those of Persian Mithra worship and the Indian Brahma mysteries. Everywhere the pupils of those mystery centres would have the same experience around the midnight hour of that solemn night.

They would gather in good time on the eve of the event. In quiet thought they had to gain insight into the significance of this, the most important event. They would sit in absolute silence, having gathered in the dark. When midnight approached they would have been sitting in the dark room for hours. Thoughts of eternity went through their inmost minds. Then, towards midnight, mysterious sounds would arise, flooding the room, growing louder and then softer again. Hearing these sounds the pupils would know it to be the music of the spheres. Profound, solemn devotion filled their hearts. Then a faint light would come from a dimly lit disk. Those who saw it would know that this disk represented the earth. The luminous disk would then grow darker and darker until finally it would be quite black. At the same time the room around them would grow progressively lighter. Those who saw it knew that the black disk was the earth. The sun, which otherwise shone through the earth had been obscured. The earth could no longer see the sun. Then halo upon halo would develop around the earth’s disk, in rainbow colours, going outwards. Those who saw this would know that it was the iris.⁸⁴ And around midnight, a luminous reddish violet halo would arise in place of the black earth disk; a word was written on this. The word would be a different one, depending on the nations whose members were allowed to experience the mystery. In our present-day language it would be Christos.⁸⁵ Those who saw it would know it to be the sun. It appeared to them in that midnight hour when the world all around was lying in profound darkness. The pupils would be told that they had now experienced something in images which in the mysteries was called ‘to see the sun around midnight’.

A true initiate truly learned to see the sun around the midnight hour, for the material principle in him had been extinguished. The sun of the spirit alone lived in him, its light shining out over all the darkness of matter.

This was the most blessed moment in human evolution when the human being found himself released from darkness and living in the light of eternity. It was shown as an image in the mysteries, year after year, around the midnight hour of that solemn night. The image showed that there is a sun of the spirit as well as the physical sun, and like the physical sun this must be born from deep darkness. To make it even clearer to them, the pupils were taken to a cave after their experience of the rising sun, the Christos. The cave appeared to contain nothing but rock—dead, lifeless matter. They would then see ears of corn arise from the stones, a sign of life, a symbolic picture of life arising from apparent death, life being born in dead mineral. They would then be told that just as the power of the sun will wax again from this day onward, the day when it appeared to have died, so new life was forever rising from life that was dying.

The same event is referred to in the words ‘He must wax but I must wane’ in the New Testament.⁸⁶ John, herald of the coming Christ, of the light of the spirit when it is at its greatest height in the course of the year at midsummer, this John must wane, and as he wanes the power of the light that is coming waxes, growing more and more powerful as John wanes. Thus the new, the coming life is preparing in the seed which must perish and die so that the new plant may arise.

The inner feeling pupils were meant to develop was that life lies dormant in death, that new, magnificent flowers and fruit arose from death and putrefaction, that the earth was filled with the power to give birth. They had to come to believe that something happens in the inner earth at this time—the overcoming of death through life. When they were shown the conquering light they were shown the life that was present in death. They experienced this inwardly, they lived through this when they saw light arise and shine out in the darkness. They now saw sprouting life in the rock cave, life arising in glorious abundance from something that was seemingly dead.

That is how the pupils were trained to develop this belief in life, and belief in what may be called the greatest human ideal was made to grow in their hearts and minds. They learned to look up to this, the greatest human ideal, to the time when earth will have completed its evolution, when light will be radiant in the whole of humanity. The earth itself will then fall to dust, but its spiritual essence will remain, with all the human beings who have grown inwardly luminous through the light of the spirit. And earth and humanity shall awaken to a higher form of existence, a new stage of existence.

When Christianity arose in the course of evolution, this was its ideal in the highest possible sense. It was inwardly felt that the Christos, being the immortal spirit of the earth, was to appear as the foundation not only of all material, sprouting life, but also of spiritual rebirth, the great ideal of all humanity; that he was born around Christmas time, the time of greatest darkness, as a sign that a higher human being can be born out of the darkness of matter in the human soul. Before people came to speak of a Christos, they would speak of a sun hero in the earlier mysteries; he was seen to be connected with the same ideal as the Christos of Christianity. The individual connected with the ideal was called the sun hero. Just as the sun completes its cycle in the course of the year, as its light increases and decreases, just as its heat seems to be withdrawn from the earth and then radiates again, just as its death holds life, letting it stream forth once again, so the sun hero has become lord over death and night and darkness because of the power of his life in the spirit.

Seven degrees of initiation were known in the Persian Mithras mysteries. The first was the ‘raven’, someone able only to go as far as the portal of the temple of initiation. The ravens became mediators between the material life of the outside world and the spiritual life of the inner world; no longer belonging to the material world they were not yet part of the spiritual world. We find these ravens come up again and again, always playing the same role as messengers going to and fro between the two worlds and conveying knowledge between them. We also have them in our Norse and German myths and legends—Odin’s ravens and the ravens flying around the Kyffhäuser mountain. The second degree, that of the ‘occult person’, took the disciple from the portal into the inner initiation temple. There he matured until he reached the third degree, the ‘protagonist’ who would go out and make known to the world the occult truths he had experienced in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the ‘lion’, was gained when his consciousness was no longer limited to the individual but to a whole tribe. Hence the Christ was known as the ‘lion of Judah’. Someone whose consciousness extended even further, embracing a whole nation, would have reached the fifth degree. He would no longer have a name of his own but would bear the name of the nation. Thus people spoke of a ‘Persian’, or an ‘Israelite’. We can see why Nathanael⁸⁷ was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of initiation. The sixth degree was the ‘sun hero’, and we need to understand what this means. We shall then come to see that pupils in the mysteries would feel a shudder of veneration if they knew something about a sun hero and were able to share in the festival to celebrate the birth of a sun hero at Christmas.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course. All the stars follow a great rhythm, as does the sun. If the sun were to abandon this rhythm for even a movement, if it were to leave its orbit for just a moment, this would cause a revolution of unheard-of importance in the whole of the universe. Rhythm governs the whole of nature, from lifeless nature all the way to the human being. We see it in the plant world—a violet, a lily flowering at the same season. Animals are on heat at given times in the year. This changes only in humans. Rhythm, active in powers of growth, reproduction and so on all the way up to the animal world, comes to a halt in human beings.

Humanity is meant to be embedded in freedom, and the more civilized people are the more is this rhythm on the decrease. Just as the light vanishes at Christmas time, so has rhythm apparently completely disappeared from human lives, and chaos prevails. But human beings are meant to bring this rhythm to birth from within and do so on their own initiative. They are meant to shape their lives of their own free will so that they run within rhythmic boundaries. Life’s events are meant to follow one another as firmly and securely as the sun’s orbit. And just as it is unthinkable that the sun’s orbit should ever change, so it should be unthinkable that the rhythm of such a life could be broken.

The sun hero was the embodiment of such a life rhythm. With the strength of the higher human being who had been born in him he gained the strength to govern the rhythm of his own biography. This sun hero was also the Christ Jesus for the first two centuries, and this is why the celebration of his birth was moved to the time when the birthday feast of the sun hero had been celebrated from time immemorial. Hence also everything connected with the life story of Christ Jesus, hence also the midnight mass, celebrated in caves by the early Christians in memory of the sun festival. At this mass, a sea of light shone out in the darkness of midnight in memory of the spirit sun that rose in the mysteries. Hence the story goes that Jesus was born in a stable, in memory of the rock cave out of which life was born in those ears of corn that were the symbol for life.

Just as life on earth was born out of dead rock, so was the highest—Christ Jesus—born out of the lowest. The legend of three priestly sages, the three kings from the east, was connected with his birth. They brought gold, the symbol of external power full of wisdom, myrrh, the symbol of life vanquishing death, and incense, symbol of the cosmic ether in which the spirit lives.

In the deeper meaning of the Christmas festival we can therefore sense echoes from man’s earliest times. And this has come down to us in the particular quality which Christianity has. Its symbols reflect the earliest symbols known to humanity. The tree with its candles is such a symbol. It is an image of the tree of paradise for us.⁸⁸ That tree represents the life-giving principle and the gaining of knowledge in paradise. Paradise itself is the whole, complete sphere of material nature. Spiritual nature is represented by the tree in the midst of it, the tree that encompasses knowledge and the tree of life. Knowledge can only be gained at the cost of life.

A story tells us the significance of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Seth stood before the gates of paradise and asked to come in. The cherub guarding the entrance let him enter. This is to indicate that Seth became an initiate. When Seth was in paradise he found that the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were firmly intertwined. The archangel Michael, he who stands before god, allowed him to take three seeds from the intertwined tree.

This tree prophesies the future of humanity. When the whole of humanity has gained insight and has been initiated, it will bear within it not only the tree of knowledge but also the other tree, that of life. Death will then be no more. For the time being, however, the initiate was only allowed to take three seeds, the three seeds that signify the higher principles of the human being.

When Adam died, Seth placed the three seeds in his mouth and a flaming tree grew on Adam’s grave. This had the property that new shoots and leaves would grow from any wood cut from it. In the bush’s circle of flame were written the words ehjeh asher ehjeh, meaning ‘I am the one who was, who is and who shall be’. This signifies the principle that goes through all incarnations, the power of man to renew himself, come into existence again and again, descending from the light into the darkness and ascending from the darkness into the light.

The rod Moses used to perform his miracles was cut from the wood of this bush. The gate of Solomon’s temple was made of it. Wood was taken from the bush and put into the pond at Bethesda and gave it the power of which the story tells. And the cross of Christ Jesus was made of this wood, the cross which shows life dying away, life perishing in death which nevertheless has the power in it to bring forth new life. Here we have before us the great symbol for the world—life that overcomes death. The wood of the cross had grown from the three seeds that came from paradise.

The same symbol—of the lower principle dying and the resurrection of the higher principle sprouting forth from it—is also shown in the Rose Cross, and the red roses. Goethe put it in these words:

For as long as you do not have
this word ‘die and become’,
you are but a troubled guest
in the darkness of this earth. ⁸⁹

This is a wonderful connection between the tree of paradise and the wood of the cross! The cross may be a symbol for Easter, but it also deepens the Christmas mood for us. We can feel the new life welling forth in the Christ idea as we contemplate it in the night when Christ Jesus was born. We see the idea reflected in the living roses decorating our tree here. They tell us that the tree of holy night has not yet become the wood of the cross but the power to be this wood is beginning to arise within it. The roses growing among the green are a symbol of the eternal conquering the temporal.

The square of Pythagoras (Fig. 12) is a symbol for the fourfold nature of man—physical body, ether body, astral body and I.

Above it is the tao (Fig. 16), the sign reminding us of the image our earliest ancestors had of God. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were cultivated land, those ancestors lived on Atlantis, which has gone down beneath the waves. Norse mythology still holds memories of Atlantis in the legends of Niflheim, home of mists. For Atlantis did not have clear air. Vast, mighty masses of mist rolled and boiled above the soil, similar to the experience we may have today walking in the clouds and mists at high altitudes. Sun and moon were not clearly visible in the sky. On Atlantis they appeared surrounded by rainbow haloes the sacred iris. People were then still much more able to understand the language of nature. The lapping waves, the sound of the wind in the trees, the whispering leaves, the rumble of thunder still speak to us today, but we no longer understand them. The ancient Atlanteans did. They felt that a divine element was speaking to them in all these things. In the midst of all those speaking clouds and water and leaves and winds a sound reached the ears of the Atlanteans: tao—it is I. The essence of the whole natural world lived in that sound. Atlantis heard it. The tao later became the letter T. The circle at the top is the sign for the all-encompassing nature of God the Father.

Finally the principle which is present in the whole of the universe and exists as the human being is shown in the symbol of the pentagram (Fig. 17) which we see at the top of the tree. It is not permissible to speak of the deepest sense of the pentagram here and now. It does show us the star of evolving humanity. It is the star, the symbol of the human being which is followed by all who have wisdom, as the priestly wise men did in the distant past. It is the meaning of the earth, the great sun hero who is born in holy night because the most sublime light shines out in the deepest darkness.

Humanity will live on into a future when the light will be born in them; when words pregnant with meaning will give way to others and it will no longer be said that the darkness cannot comprehend the light. Truth will sound out in cosmic space, and the darkness will comprehend the light that shines out for us in the star of humanity. Darkness shall yield and comprehend the light, that is, will be taken hold of by it. And this is meant to sound out for us from our inmost being in the Christmas festival. Only then will we be celebrating Christmas in the right way, for it will then tell us that one day the light of the spirit will shine out from the inmost human being into the whole world. And we’ll then be able to celebrate Christmas as the feast of the most sublime ideal for humanity. It will then have real meaning again, be alive again in our souls, and the Christmas tree, too, will once more have its true meaning as a symbol of the paradise tree, truer than the meanings it is given today, however thoughtful. In our hearts, celebration of holy night will lead to joyful hope and to understanding that yes, I too shall experience within me what we must call the birth of the higher human being; in me, too, the birth of the saviour, of the Christos, will come.

• 81. In rhetoric, a passage where the speaker specifically turns away from the main discourse and addresses a present or absent person or thing.
• 82. Goethe, J. W. Faust 2, Pleasing landscape. Faust speaking. Translated by Philip Wayne. London: Penguin Classics, Penguin Books Ltd 1959.
• 83. Version as found in a notebook entry Rudolf Steiner made in 1906. Different versions appeared in later years. English version given here taken from Steiner R. Verses and Meditations. Translated by F. Melland. London; Rudolf Steiner Press 1979.
• 84. In Greek mythology, Iris was the messenger of the gods. In another set of notes it says: 'an image of St Iris'.
• 85. The Greek ὁ Χριστός means ‘the anointed’, corresponding to the Hebrew ‘the Messias’. The ‘χρηστος’, Chrestos, used by Gnostics and Manicheans means 'the good one'; according to Marcion (early Christian Gnostic, c. 100–165 AD), the most sublime good god as distinct from the demiurgos, the creator god who was merely just. 'Chrestos' was introduced in the 3rd edition of the special German booklet Zeichen und Symbole des Weihnachtsfestes, for Rudolf Steiner used it in the lecture he gave on 14 December 1905 (in GA 54; English in Christmas). The context was a different one, however, and a further review of the original records shows that 'Chrestos' does not appear in any of the sets of notes available to us (Literary Estate Administration in Dornach).
• 86. John 3: 30.
• 87. John 1:47.
• 88. See 'Der Baum des Lebens und der Erkenntnis des Guten und des Bosen. Die Geheimnisse der Kunst' in GA 162.
• 89. In ‘Selige Sehnsucht’, Westöstlicher Diwan.
• 90. Lully (or Lull), Raymond (c. 1232–1315). See Steiner R. World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233), lectured dated 5 January 1924. Tr. G. & M. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

During the last few days, we have spoken about many things connected with the existence of hidden depths in our soul-life; and we should now do well to consider various other aspects of this subject, which may be useful for the Anthroposophist to know. On the whole, it must be said that a complete clarification of these things is possible only when we work them through in the light of what Anthroposophy is able to give.

Now, we have already considered, from the most varied aspects, all that might be termed the organisation of man. Hence, it should be quite easy for each one of us—if we direct our attention in some measure, to the hidden depths of the soul to connect in the right way what thereby appears from a new standpoint, with the organisation of man as it is known to us through the more or less elementary presentation of the Anthroposophical world-conception. It has been repeatedly stated, during the last few days, that everything comprising our conceptual thoughts, our perceptions, the impulses of our will, our feelings and sensations—in short, everything that takes place in our soul during its normal state, from the moment of waking to the moment of falling asleep—may simply be termed the activities, the peculiarities, or the forces, of ordinary consciousness.

Let us now summarise graphically—by enclosing it between these two parallel lines (a—b)—everything that is included in the ordinary human consciousness: that is, everything that a human being knows, feels, and wills, from the time he awakes, till he falls asleep.

We then find—do we not—that our thoughts, and also every one of our perceptions, belong within this sphere enclosed by these two parallel lines. Thus, when we enter into relationship with the external world through our senses, and thereby form an image of this external world through all sorts of sense impressions—an image which is still in connection, or in contact, with the external world—this also forms part of our ordinary consciousness. At the same time, our feeling-life and our impulses of will belong here also—in short, everything that constitutes our ordinary consciousness. We might say that this sphere represented by these parallel lines (a—b), includes everything which the normal, every-day life of the soul makes known to us.

Now, the important thing is that we should know, quire clearly, that this so-called soul-life is dependent upon the instruments of the physical body -- that is upon all those instruments comprised by the senses and the nervous system. If we now draw two other parallel lines beyond the first two, we may say that the sense-organs and the nervous system in our physical organism serve as the instruments of this ordinary consciousness—the sense-organs being the more important, although the nervous system may also be included, to a certain extent.

And, below the threshold of our ordinary consciousness, lies all that may be enclosed between these other two parallel lines (b—c)—and which may be termed the hidden side of the soul's life, or the sub-consciousness. We obtain a clear conception of what is imbedded, as it were, in this sub-consciousness, when we remember, on the one hand, that the human being acquires, as we have learned, through spiritual training, imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Thus we see that, just as we have to include our conceptual thoughts, our feelings, and our will-impulses, in the ordinary consciousness, so we have to include imagination, inspiration, and intuition, in the subconscious life. But we know, also that the sub-consciousness is active, not only when such a spiritual training is carried on, but that it may also become active in the form of an ancient inheritance—as an original primitive state of human consciousness, or a kind of atavism. In this case, something arises which we may call visions; and these visions, arising—let us say—in the naive consciousness, correspond, in this primitive state of consciousness, to the Imaginations acquired by means of the right training. Moreover, forebodings may arise; and these would be the primitive inspirations. A significant example will at once show us the difference between a foreboding and an inspiration.

We have often mentioned the fact that, in the course of the 20th century, an event will occur, in human evolution, which we may call a kind of spiritual return of the Christ; and that there will be a number of people who will experience the influence of the Christ upon our world—when He enters it in an etheric form, from out the astral plane. A knowledge of this fact can be attained if we learn to know, through the right sort of training, just how evolution takes its course, and we then come to see—as a result of this training—that such an event must indeed take place, during the 20th century. It is also quite possible, on the other hand—and indeed this often happens, in our days—that certain people will be gifted with a natural, primitive clairvoyance, a mysterious kind of inspiration, which we may describe as a foreboding of the approaching Christ. These people will not even know, perhaps, exactly what is taking place; yet, nevertheless, an important inspiration such as this may quite well appear as a foreboding, if something takes place within the primitive consciousness which is more than a vision, more than a foreboding. A vision is experienced when the image or counterpart of a spiritual occurrence arises before us. Let us suppose, for instance, that someone has lost a friend—so that the Ego has passed through the portal of death and is now dwelling in the spiritual world. A kind of connection may be established, in this case, between the one living in the spiritual world, and the one dwelling on the earth; and yet, the one who is living in this world may not know, at all rightly, just what the dead friend desires of him—indeed, he may have a false idea of what the departed friend, yonder, is experiencing in his soul. Nevertheless, the very fact of such a condition may be experienced in the form of a vision; and—even if it should be wrong, as far as the picture is concerned—the vision may be based upon the true fact: namely, that the departed friend wishes to establish a connection with the one who is still alive. And this assumes the form of a premonition. Thus, one who has premonitions knows certain things concerning either the past or the future, which are not accessible to ordinary consciousness. Let us suppose, on the other hand, something arises before the human soul in the form of a clear perception (not merely as a vision which may, under certain circumstances, be misleading, but as a clear perception); and let us suppose that it represents either some event which takes place in the physical world—although not in a sphere which renders it accessible to the ordinary senses—or an event taking place in the super-sensible world. Such an appearance is usually designated by occultism as “deuteroscopy,” or second sight. And with this I have described to you something, whether it be described through regular training or whether it appears in the form of natural clairvoyance, that takes place in human consciousness—in the sub-consciousness, to be sure; yet at the same time in the human soul itself.

Now, when we speak of sub-consciousness, in contrast to ordinary consciousness, we find that everything that takes place here in the human soul differs very greatly from all processes in the ordinary consciousness. These processes of ordinary consciousness—with respect to those things with which they are connected—are in reality such, that we must speak of the impotence of this ordinary consciousness. The eye sees the rose; but this eye, which acts, to be sure, in such a way that the image of the rose arises in us, is quite powerless to picture to the ordinary consciousness—even with all its perception and its capacity to imagine the rose—such a thing as the growth, the growing and fading of the rose. The rose grows and dies again through its inherent natural forces; and neither the eye, nor the ordinary consciousness, can go beyond the sphere which is accessible to their perception. This is not the case, however, with the facts belonging to the sphere of the sub-conscious. And this is what we must bear in mind first of all; for it is extremely important. If we perceive something with our eye, during the normal act of vision—whether it be coloured pictures, or anything else—we are not only unable, through our perception, to change anything in the objective facts, but something else indeed arises, if our sight is normal. If nothing else takes place, for the eye, than the mere act of vision, the eye in this case remains unchanged by this process. Only when we go beyond the natural limits, by sometimes passing from a normal light to a blinding light, do we injure the eye. So that we may say: facts and processes of ordinary consciousness do not enable us even to react upon ourselves, if we simply remain in this ordinary consciousness. Our organism is indeed constructed in such a way that facts accessible to ordinary consciousness do not even cause any particular changes within us.

It is quite different, however, with those things which arise in the sub-consciousness. Let us suppose that we form an imagination, or that we have a vision. And let us now suppose that this Imagination, or this vision, corresponds to some good Being. This good Being, in that case, is not in the physical, sense-world, but in the super-sensible world; and let us now suppose that the world, inhabited by these Beings which we perceive through imagination or vision, lies enclosed, here, between these two parallel lines. Let us try to find in this world everything which may become object, or perception, for our sub-consciousness (b—e)—we shall refrain from writing anything in this space, for the time being. On the other hand, if we have an imaginary picture, or a vision, of some sort of evil or demoniacal Being in this super-sensible world, we are not powerless, as far as this Being is concerned, in the way the eye is powerless with regard to the rose. If, during the imagination or vision of an evil Being, we call forth the feeling that it should retreat from us—if we do this while seeing perfectly clearly this visionary, or imaginative, picture, such a Being in this other world, must actually feel as if it were pushed and driven away by a force proceeding from us.

The same thing happens, if we have the corresponding imagination, or vision, of a good Being. In this case, also, if we develop a feeling of sympathy, this Being will feel within itself a force which compels it to approach us and to connect itself with us. All Beings—whatever may be their place in this world—sense the forces of attraction, or repulsion, coming from us, whenever we form visions of them. Our sub-consciousness is therefore in a situation similar to that of an eye that would not only see a rose, but would develop, through the mere sight of the rose, the desire that the rose should approach it—could attract it to itself. Or, if upon seeing something repulsive, the eye were not only to come to the opinion, “This is repulsive,” but could eliminate this repulsive thing through mere antipathy. Our sub-consciousness is therefore connected with a world in which the sympathy and antipathy arising in the human soul can be active. It is necessary to place this quite clearly before our minds.

But sympathy and antipathy—and, generally speaking, all the impulses in our sub-consciousness—are not only active in this sphere, in the way already described; they are also active in what is more especially within ourselves, and which we must now think of as a part of man's etheric body—not only as a part of the etheric body, however, but also as certain forces of the physical body—enclosed, here, within these two parallel lines (b—c). We must imagine here, that is to say, first of all what lives in man as a force pulsating through his blood, or: the force of warmth in the blood. And then, we must imagine within this space still another force: namely, that force which is present in our healthy or unhealthy breathing depending, as it does, upon our entire organism in short, the more or less healthy force of breathing. We may also call it the constitution of the force of breathing. Furthermore, a great part of what we must term man's etheric body belongs to all that upon which the sub-consciousness is actively at work within us. Hence, sub-consciousness, or the hidden forces of the soul-life, work within us in such a way that they influence, in the first place, the temperature of our blood. Since the entire pulsation, the vitality, or lack of vitality of our circulation is dependent upon the temperature of our blood, we can realise that this whole circulation must be connected in some way with our sub-consciousness, Whether or not a human being has a more rapid, or a less rapid, circulation is essentially dependent upon the forces of his sub-consciousness.

Now, if the influence man has on all that exists in that other world, in the form of demoniacal of good Beings, takes place only when there arise out of his sub-consciousness with a certain clearness visions, imaginations, or other sorts of perceptions—that is if, things really stand clearly before him; and if, then, certain forces become as it were magically active in this world, through sympathy and antipathy, this clear way of facing himself, subconsciously, in his own soul, will not be necessary for the influencing of that inner organism which consists of what we have indicated here (b—c). Whether man knows, or fails to know, exactly what imaginations correspond to this or that sympathy within him—in either case, this sympathy works upon the circulation of his blood, upon his breathing-system, upon his etheric body. Let us now suppose that, for a certain period of time, someone is inclined to have only feelings of repulsion. If he were able to see visions, or if he were endowed with imaginative knowledge, he would have the kind of vision, or imagination, described day before yesterday, in the form of perceptions of his own being. These would be projected out into space, to be sure, but they would nevertheless belong only to his own world; these visions and imaginations would reveal what lives within him in the way of forces active in feelings of repulsion. Yet, even if he simply has these feelings of repulsion, so that they live within him—they nevertheless work upon him all the same. And they work in such a way, indeed, that they actually influence the force which warms his blood, and also the force in his breathing. Hence, if we now pass on to the other aspect, we find that the human being has a more or less healthy breathing—depending upon the feelings which he experiences in his sub-consciousness; and that he has a more or less healthy circulation, depending upon his sub-conscious experiences. It is especially the activity of the etheric body, and all its processes, that are dependent on the world of feeling that lives in man.

When the facts of sub-consciousness are really experienced by the soul, we can see, not only that there exists this connection (of the world of feeling—with the breathing, the circulation, and the activity of the etheric body), but that owing to it, there is a continual influence upon the entire constitution of man, with the result that there are certain feelings and sensations which reach down into the sub-consciousness. And because these call forth certain forms in the force of warmth in the blood, and a certain disposition in the force of breathing and of the etheric body, their influence upon the organism is either a furthering one, during the whole of a man's life; or it is one that retards and hinders it. Thus there is always something arising or passing away in man, through these forces which play into his sub-consciousness. He either diminishes his vital forces, or he increases them, through what he sends down into his sub-consciousness out of his ordinary conscious state. If a man takes pleasure in the thought of lies which he has told; if it does not fill him with repulsion—for this would be the natural feeling toward a lie—or if he is lazy and indifferent toward lies, and even takes pleasure in telling them, this feeling which accompanies the lie, is in that case sent down into his sub-consciousness. Whatever enters the sub-consciousness, in this way injures the circulation of the blood, the constitution of breathing, and the forces of the etheric body; and the consequence of this will be that the human being, when he passes through the portal of death with what then remains to him, will be stunted—will become impoverished in his forces—because something has died in him, which would have come to life had he felt abhorrence and repulsion toward lying—in accordance with the normal human feeling. If the feelings of aversion toward lying had dived down into his sub-consciousness they would then have been transferred to those forces indicated here, in our drawing, and the human being would have sent down into his organism something beneficial—something in the nature of forces of birth.

Thus we see how, in the first place, the human being works from out of his sub-consciousness upon his own growth and decay, because of the fact that forces are continually passing from his upper consciousness—from his ordinary consciousness—down into his sub-consciousness. Man, as he is constituted today, however, is not yet strong enough to cause injury through his soul-nature, as it were, to other parts of his organism also—besides his circulation, his breathing, and his etheric body. He cannot harm the coarser and firmer parts of his physical organism, as well. Thus, we may say that man is in a position to harm only a part of his entire constitution. What has thus been injured appears with especial clearness, when that part of the etheric body which has remained (for the etheric body is continually connected with the force of warmth in the blood, and with the constitution of breathing) has been influenced in the way we have mentioned; for in this case it deteriorates through wrong feelings. On the other hand it acquires fruitful, strengthening and beneficent forces through good, normal, true feelings. We may therefore say that what takes place in his sub-consciousness enables man to work directly upon the growth and decay, that is, upon the true processes, the reality, of his organism. He plunges down from the sphere of impotence of his ordinary consciousness, into the sphere where there is constant growth and decay, in his own soul, and consequently in his whole human constitution.

Now we have seen that, through the fact that our soul has more or less experience of our sub-consciousness—knows something concerning it: through this fact, the sub-consciousness also acquires an influence over that world which may be termed (according to an expression which was used for it throughout the Middle-Ages)—the elementary world. Nevertheless, man cannot enter into direct relationship with this elementary world, but only by the circuitous road, of experiencing, first of all in himself, the effects of his sub-consciousness upon his organism. If, after a period of time, the human being has learned sufficient self-knowledge to say to himself: “When you have this feeling within you, and when you send the one or the other result of your conduct down into your sub-consciousness, you destroy certain things in yourself, thereby, and cause them to be stunted; and when you experience other things, and send down certain accompanying experiences, you further your development,” if, for a certain period of time, he experiences within himself this fluctuation between destruction and furthering forces, he will then become more and more mature in self-knowledge. This is, in reality, the true self-knowledge; and it can be likened only to a “picture” with may be obtained as follows:—

Self-knowledge, attained in this way, may actually bring it about—through a lie, and through a wrong feeling toward the lie, which arises in our instincts—that we feel as if a scorpion were biting off one of our toes. We may be sure that, if human beings were to perceive some real effect of this sort, they would never lie as they do. Thus, if we were to experience at once, in the physical world, a crippling of our physical organism this would correspond to what actually happens in connection with things that usually remain invisible—through what we send down into sub-consciousness, out of our daily experiences. Any sort of lazy indifference toward a lie, which is sent down into the sub-consciousness, has the effect of biting off something within us, as it were—taking away something which we then no longer possess, so that we are stunted and must acquire it again, in the later course of our karma. And if we send down a right feeling into our sub-consciousness (of course, we must imagine an infinite scale of feelings which may plunge down in this way) we grow in ourselves thereby, and form new life-forces in our organism. The first thing which appears in a man who attains true self-knowledge is this ability to become a spectator of his own growing and fading.

I have been told that my listeners did not understand quite clearly, day before yesterday, how we may distinguish between a true vision or imagination which forms an objective experience, and one which is merely projected into space and belongs to our subjective life. Now, we cannot say—“Write down this or that rule, and then you will be able to distinguish the one from the other.” Such rules do not exist; on the contrary, we learn only gradually, in the course of our development. And we are able to distinguish between what belongs only to ourselves, and what arises as exterior vision and belongs to a true Being, only when we have passed through the experience of being continually devoured, inwardly, by sub-conscious processes that kill. This will equip us with a kind of certainty, and will be followed also by a state in which we shall always be able to face a vision or an imagination and say to ourselves: “If we can see into the vision through the force of our spiritual sight, the vision will remain; for, if we develop the active force of spiritual sight, this corresponds to an objective fact. If, on the other hand, the active force of spiritual sight obliterates the vision, this proves that it was merely a part of our own self.”

Thus, a human being who is not careful with regard to this may even see thousands and thousands of pictures from the Akasha Chronicle; yet, even so, if he does not apply the test as to whether or not these pictures are obliterated through an absolutely active sight, these Akasha pictures, in that case—no matter how many facts they may reveal—can be looked upon only as pictures of man's own inner life. It might happen, for instance—I repeat, it might happen—that someone who sees nothing more than his own interior, projected in very dramatic pictures, imagines these to be events, let us say, which extend over the entire Atlantean world, through whole generations of humanity. ... And, all the while—no matter how seemingly objective—this might, under certain circumstances, be merely a projection of his own inward being. Now, when a human being passes through the portal of death, it always comes to pass that whatever might hinder his subjective life from being transformed into visions or Imaginations now disappears. In the ordinary human life of our day, as we know, what man experiences within himself sub-consciously, what he sends down into his sub-consciousness, does not always become vision or Imagination. It becomes an Imagination if he undergoes the regular and necessary training; and it becomes a vision if he still possesses an atavistic clairvoyance. When the human being has passed through the portal of death, his entire inner life becomes immediately an objective world, and is there before him. Kamaloka is in its essence nothing else than a world erected around us out of all that we have experienced within our own souls. Only in Devachan does the reverse of this take place. Thus we can easily realise that what I have said regarding the activity of man's sympathy and antipathy, as contained in visions, Imaginations, Inspirations, and also premonitions, etc.—that this activity always, under all circumstances, influences the objective elementary world. And I said, in connection with this activity, that, in the human being who is incarnated in the physical body, only that which he brings as far as vision or Imagination can influence this elementary world. In the case of the dead, those forces also which existed in the sub-consciousness and which always accompany the human being when he crosses the portal of death, are active in the elementary world; so that everything which he experiences after death is in reality exceedingly active in the elementary world.

Just as certainly as we create waves in the river, when we lash its waters—with the same certainty do the experiences of the dead continue to influence the elementary world. Just as certainly, I repeat, as waves arise and ripple out from whatever point we happen to strike, in the water; and just as surely as a current of air continues to create itself, just so surely do these forces continue their influence in the elementary world. Hence, this elementary world is continually filled with forces which have been called into being through what human beings take with them, out of their sub-consciousness, when they cross the portal of death. The important thing, therefore, is always to be in position to create such circumstances as will enable us to see—to perceive—the things in the elementary world. It need not surprise us, when the clairvoyant rightly recognises the things that occur in the elementary world as Beings brought about through the activity of the dead. At the same time—and under certain specific conditions to be sure—we can pursue these activities, resulting from the experiences of the dead (and influencing, first, the elementary world) even as far as the physical world. For, when a clairvoyant has himself passed through all those experiences which I have described, and has attained the ability to perceive the elementary world, he will arrive at the point, after a certain length of time, when he has the most extraordinary experiences.

Let us suppose that a clairvoyant passes through the following process:—To begin with, he looks at a rose, let us say. He looks at it with his physical eye. Now, when he looks at it in this way, he will receive a sense-impression. And let us suppose, further, that this clairvoyant has trained himself to experience quite a definite feeling, with a certain definite nuance, when he sees the colour red. This is necessary; otherwise the process would not go any further. Unless we experience quite definite nuances of feeling, when we see colours, or hear sounds, we cannot progress in a clairvoyance that is directed at exterior objects. Now, let us suppose that the clairvoyant gives away the rose. If he were not clairvoyant, his perception would sink down into his sub-consciousness and would carry on its work, there—making him ill or healthy, as the case might be. If on the other hand, he is clairvoyant, he will now perceive just how his Imagination of the rose works upon his sub-consciousness. That is, he will have a visionary picture—an Imagination of the rose. At the same time, he will perceive how the feelings which the rose called forth in him have either a furthering or a destructive effect upon his etheric body—as well as upon what we have here described as the physical body. He will perceive in everything, the effect upon his own organism. And if he has now formed an Imigination of the rose, he will be able through this to exercise a force of attraction upon that Being which we may call the Group-Soul of the rose, and which is always at work in the rose. Thus, he will be able to look into the elementary world, to see the Group-Soul of the rose, in so far as it lives in that world. Now, on the other hand, if the clairvoyant goes still further—that is, if he has started by looking at the rose; has then given it away; and, finally, has pursued the inner process of his surrender to the rose, and of the effect resulting therefrom; and if he thus reaches the point of seeing something of the rose in the elementary world, he will then see, in the place where the rose appeared to him, a wonderfully luminous sort of picture, belonging to the elementary world. And then, if he has followed the process as far as this point, something new will take place. He may now ignore what is there, before him, and may command himself not to look with the inner eye at what appears before him as a living etheric Being, extending out into the world—he must not see this! An extraordinary thing then takes place: namely, the clairvoyant sees something which goes through his eye and which shows him the activity of the forces that construct his eye—those forces, that is, which build up the human eye out of the etheric body. He sees which are the constructive forces of his own physical body. He actually sees his physical eye as if it were an exterior object.

This is actually what may take place. He may follow the path leading from an exterior object to that point—otherwise a space containing absolute darkness—where, without allowing any other sense-perception to enter, he now perceives what his own eye looks like, in a spiritual picture. Thus he can see the interior organ itself; and he has now reached this region, here)—the region of what is truly creative in the physical world, or the creative physical world. Man perceives it first, by perceiving his own physical organisation. Thus he retraces the path and returns to himself. What is it that has sent into our eye forces which, in reality, cause us to see this eye, as if rays of light went out from it, corresponding completely with the nature of vision? As a next step, we then see the eye surrounded by a sort of yellow luminosity, we see it enclosed within ourselves. All this has been effected by the process of those forces which have brought man up to this stage.

The same course is followed by those forces which may proceed from a dead person. The dead man takes with him, into the world in which he lives after passing through the portal of death, the content of his sub-consciousness. As soon as we reach the interior of our own physical eye, we experience there the forces sent out by the dead, and coming from the elementary world back into the physical world. The one who has died may perhaps experience a special longing for someone he has left behind. This special longing was contained, at first, in his sub-consciousness; but it now immediately becomes a living vision; and through this he influences the elementary world. In the elementary world, what at first was only living vision becomes, now at once, a force. This force takes the path indicated by the longing for the one living on earth; and if it is in any way possible, there will be knocking and other noises in the physical world, in the neighbourhood of the living. One may hear these sounds of rapping, etc., or perceive them, just as one perceives any other physical thing. These very things, which are due to connections and circumstances of this sort, would be noticed far more often in the world than is generally the case, if people would only pay attention to the times most favourable for such influences. And the most favourable times are the moments of falling asleep, and of waking in the morning. People simply do not pay sufficient attention to such things—for, indeed, there cannot really be any human beings, anywhere, who have not, at some time or other, received messages from the super-sensible world, in the transition state between falling asleep and awaking again—messages that come in the form of rapping noises, or even of spoken words.

I wished to allude to this today, my dear friends, because I wished to point out the true reality of the connection between Man and the Universe. What man obtains from the objective sense-world, in his ordinary consciousness, is powerless, and devoid of any real connection with this sense-world. But, as soon as his experiences pass into his sub-consciousness a connection with Reality is established. The impotence of his preceding state of consciousness is transformed into a fine, imperceptible, magic force. And when man has passed through the portal of death, and is unhampered by his physical body, his experiences are such as to play into an elementary world; and, under favourable circumstances they may work down as far as the physical world—where they may be perceived even by the ordinary consciousness.

I have indicated the simplest sort of thing which can take place; because, after all, we must always begin with the simplest things. Naturally, in the course of time—for we have always allowed ourselves time to work out gradually whatever we need to know—we shall pass on to the more complicated things, which may lead us, in turn, into the more intimate connections, so to speak, existing between the Universe and Man.

The changes which take place in the pupil through his occult or theosophical development as regards his muscular system, and especially as regards his senses, his sense organs, lead over, as it were, from man's physical system of sheaths to the etheric-system, the etheric body. With respect to the muscular system, the pupil not only feels this muscular system gradually becoming more mobile—as may also be said with respect to the other physical organs—but, besides becoming more alive, he feels this muscular system permeated by a delicate inner consciousness. It is as though consciousness actually extended to the muscular system. And without inaccuracy, speaking as it were in paradox about this experience, we might say that in the course of his esoteric or theosophical development the student gradually becomes conscious of his several muscles and his muscular system in an inner dreamy way; he always carries his muscular system about with him in such a way that he entertains vague thoughts, dreams of its activity in the midst of his ordinary waking consciousness.

It is always very interesting to grasp the reason of this changing of the physical sheath because in this perception the student has something which informs him that in a certain direction he has made progress. When he begins to feel his several muscles, so that when for example, contracting and extending them he is faintly conscious of what is going on, he has a dim feeling of sympathy which means: something is going on in the muscles. When the movements of his muscles become ideas to him it is a proof that he is beginning gradually to feel the etheric body impregnating the physical body; for what he then actually feels are the forces of the etheric body which are active in the muscles. So that when a man begins to have a shadowy feeling of his several muscles, a dreamy consciousness of himself, as it were, just as in text-books on anatomy one may see the picture of a man whose skin has been removed so that only the muscles appear, that is the beginning of the perception of the etheric body. Indeed, when one begins to perceive the etheric entity, it is in a certain sense like this ‘drawing off one's skin’ and having a shadowy consciousness of one's several members as of a jointed doll.

Less comfortable, but nevertheless present, is the sensitiveness when the bone-system begins to draw upon the consciousness. This is a more uncomfortable feeling, because to become aware of this bone-system is to be forcibly struck by the fact of increasing age. It is not precisely pleasant to notice the faculty for sensation with respect to the bone-system—not usually felt at all in ordinary life; but a man begins to feel his bone-system as something like a shadow within him, when he is developing etherically. And he then realises that the symbolical representation of death as a skeleton was in accordance with a certain clairvoyant faculty of mankind in primeval times, for they knew that in his skeleton a man gradually learns to feel the approach of death.

But much more significant than all this is the experience which the student has during his esoteric or theosophical development with respect to his sense organs. Now we know that these sense organs must really be stripped off when the pupil undergoes an esoteric development; they must be silent, as it were. The physical sense organs thereby feel that during esoteric development they are condemned, as it were, to inactivity; they are disconnected. Now when they are disconnected as physical sense-organs, something else comes in their place. The student first becomes gradually conscious of the sense-organs as distinct worlds which penetrate him. He learns to feel the eye, the ears, even the sense of warmth, as if they had been bored into him. But what he thus learns to feel are not the physical sense organs, but the etheric forces, the forces of the etheric body, which act constructively upon the sense organs. So that when he shuts off the activity of the senses, he sees the nature of these sense-organs appearing as so many etheric organisations penetrating him. It is extremely interesting.

To the extent that during his esoteric development the student shuts off his eyes, for example, and no longer thinks of physical sight, to that extent does he learn to recognise something that penetrates his own organisation like organisms of light, he then really learns to recognise that the eyes have gradually come into being through the working of the inner forces of light upon our organism. For during the time that he withdraws from all the activity of the physical eyes, he feels the field of vision to be permeated by the etheric light-forces which organise the eyes. This is a peculiar phenomenon: when one shuts off the eyes themselves, one learns through them to know the forces of light. All physical theories are nothing as compared to the knowledge of the inner nature of light and its activity which the student experiences when he has accustomed himself to eliminate the physical seeing-power of the eyes, and gradually becomes able, in place of the physical use of the eyes, to perceive the inner nature of the etheric forces of light.

The sense of warmth is at a lower stage, as it were, and it is extremely difficult really to shut off sensitivity to heat and cold; this end is best attained during esoteric development, by trying not to be disturbed during the time of meditation, by any feeling of heat. It is therefore good to perform meditation while surrounded by a temperature which is neither hot nor cold, so that no irritation is produced by either feeling. If this can be done, the inner nature of the heat-ether which radiates through space can gradually be recognised, only then does a student feel himself in his own body as though permeated by the true activity of the warmth-ether. Having no longer the external perception of heat, he can learn the nature of the warmth-ether through himself.

By shutting off the sense of taste—of course, it is shut off during the esoteric exercises—but when he attains the faculty of calling up the sensation of taste as a memory, that becomes the means of recognising the so-called chemical ether, still finer than the light-ether. This also is not very easy, but it can be experienced.

In the same way, by shutting off the sense of smell, one may recognise the life-ether.

The shutting off of the hearing yields an unique experience. For this, however, such a power of abstraction must be attained, that even if something audible is going on around, it is not heard. Everything audible must be shut out. Then come towards one, as if piercing one's organism, the forces in the etheric body which organised our organ of hearing. Thereby a remarkable discovery is made. These matters really belong to the secrets of still higher and higher regions. Therefore, there is no difficulty in stating that it is not possible to understand all at once all that is said regarding experiences with such a sense as that of hearing. We make the discovery that this ear, as man bears it in its wonderful organisation, could not possibly have been formed through the etheric forces which play around the earth as such. The light-forces, the etheric forces of light which play around the earth are inwardly connected with the formation of our eyes; even though the foundations for the eyes were already in existence, yet by the formation of the eye, by its position in the organism, it is inwardly connected with the forces of the light-ether of the earth. In the same way, our sense of taste is connected with the forces of the chemical-ether of the earth, out of which for the most part it is developed. Our sense of smell is connected with the life-ether of the earth; it is organised almost exclusively from the life-ether which plays round the earth. But when our organ of hearing is met with in occultism during esoteric development, it shows us that it owes an infinitesimal part of its being to the etheric forces playing round the earth. It might be said that the etheric forces which play round the earth have given the finishing touch to our organ of hearing; but the latter has been so influenced by these etheric forces that they have really made it—not more perfect, but more imperfect; for they can only work upon the ear by their activities in the air, which continually offers resistance to them. Hence we may say—although a paradox—that our organ of hearing is the degenerate manifestation on earth of a much more delicate organisation previously existing; and at this stage, through his own experience, the developing student will know that he brought the ear, the complete organ of hearing, with him to the earth when he made his way from the ancient Moon to the Earth; indeed, he will find that this organ of hearing was much more perfect on the ancient Moon than it is upon the earth. With respect to the ear, we gradually learn to feel—we are often obliged to make use of paradoxical expressions—that we might be saddened by this thought, because the ear belongs to those organs which, in their entire arrangement, in their entire structure, bear witness to past perfections. And one who is gradually approaching the experience we have thus briefly indicated will understand the occultist who really gains his knowledge from still deeper powers, the occultist who tells him: on the ancient Moon, the ear had much greater significance for man than it has now. At that time the ear enabled him to live entirely, as it were, in the music of the spheres which still rang out, in a certain sense, on the ancient Moon. The ear was so related to the sounds of the sphere-music, which, although weak as compared to what it had been before, still rang out on the Moon; it was so related to these sounds that it received them. On account of its perfection on the ancient Moon, the ear was, so to say, always immersed in music. This music on the ancient Moon was still imparted to the whole of the human organisation; these waves of music still permeated the human organisation on the ancient Moon, and the inner life of man was in sympathy with all the music around him, adapted to the whole musical environment; the ear was the organ of communication, so that the outer sphere-music might be imitated in corresponding inner movements. On the ancient Moon, man still felt himself to be a sort of instrument on which the cosmos with its forces played, and the ears in their perfection were at that time on the ancient Moon intermediary between the players of the cosmos and the instrument of the human organism. Thus the present arrangement of the organ of hearing serves to awaken a remembrance, connected with the idea that by a sort of deterioration of the organ of hearing man has become incapable of hearing the music of the spheres; he has emancipated himself from it, and can only catch the reflection of the sphere-music in the music of the present day, which, however, can, in reality, only play in the air surrounding the earth.

Experiences also emerge with respect to other senses, but they become more and more indistinct, and it would be of little avail to follow the experiences connected with other sense-organs, for the simple reason that it is difficult to explain by means of ordinary human ideas these changes which take place in one through esoteric development. For example, of what use would it be as regards what man can now experience on earth if we were to speak of the sense for language—I do not mean the sense for speaking? Those who heard the lecture on Anthroposophy in Berlin already know that there is a special sense for language. Just as there is a sense for sound, so there is a special sense, which only has an organ inwardly but none externally, for the perception of the spoken word itself. This sense has deteriorated still further, so that to-day there remains but a last echo of what it was, for instance, on the ancient Moon. That which to-day has become the sense for language, the understanding of the words of our fellow-men, served on the ancient Moon to enable a man to feel himself consciously in the whole environment, with imaginative consciousness, to move round the ancient Moon, as it were. There the sense for language dictated the movements to be made, showed how to find the way. A gradual acquaintance with this experiencing the sense for language is made when the student acquires a perception of the inner value of the vowels and consonants, as exemplified in mantric sentences. But what the earthly man generally attains in this respect is but a faint echo of what the sense for language was at one time.

Thus you see how the pupil gradually gains the perception of his etheric body; you see how that from which he turns away in his occult development, namely, the activity of his physical senses, compensates him on the other side, for it leads him to the perception of his etheric body. But it is peculiar that when we experience the perceptions of the etheric body of which we have just spoken, we feel as if they did not really belong to us, but as we have already said—as though they penetrated us from outside. We feel the body of light as though it were drilled into us, we feel something like a musical movement inaudible on the earth penetrating us through our ear; the warmth-ether, however, we do not feel as penetrating but as permeating us; and we learn to feel in place of the eliminated taste the activity of the chemical ether working in us, etc. Thus as compared with what is known as the normal condition, the pupil feels his etheric body transformed, as though other conditions were grafted on to it from outside, as it were.

The pupil now, however, begins to perceive his etheric body more directly. The most striking change that takes place in the etheric body, which many do not appreciate at all, and which is not recognised as a change in the etheric body, although it is such, is that as a result of esoteric or theosophical development it becomes very distinctly evident that the power of memory begins somewhat to diminish. Through esoteric development, the ordinary memory almost invariably suffers diminution. At first one's memory becomes poorer. If the student does not wish to have a less efficient memory, he cannot undergo an esoteric development. Especially does that memory cease to be strongly active which may be described as the mechanical memory, best developed in human beings in childhood and youth, and generally meant when memory is alluded to. Many esotericists have to complain of the diminution of their memory, for it soon becomes perceptible. In any case, this depreciation of the memory can be observed long before one perceives the more delicate things which have just been explained. But as the student, by pursuing correct theosophical training, can never suffer injury in his physical body—in spite of its becoming more mobile—neither will his memory be injured for long. But care must be taken to do the correct thing. As regards the physical organisation, while the external body is growing more flexible, while inwardly its organs are becoming more independent, so that it is more difficult to bring them into harmony than before, inner strength must be sought. This is done by means of the six exercises described in the second part of my book, An Outline Of Occult Science (

Now, as regards the memory, we must also do the correct thing. We lose the memory belonging to the external life: but we need suffer no injury if we take care to develop more interest, a deeper interest in all that affects us in life, more concern than hitherto. We must especially acquire a sympathetic interest for the things which to us are important. Previously we developed a more mechanical memory, and the working of this mechanical memory was fully reliable for a time, even without any particular liking for the things observed; but this ceases. It will be noticed that when undergoing a theosophical or esoteric development it is easy to forget things. But only those things fly away for which one has not a sympathetic interest, which one does not particularly care for, which do not become part of one's soul, as it were. On the other hand, that which appeals to one's soul fixes itself in the memory all the more. Therefore, the student must try systematically to bring this about. The following may be experienced. Let us imagine a man in his youth, before he came to Theosophy when he read a novel he was quite unable to forget it; he could relate it again and again. Later, when he has come into Theosophy, if he reads a novel, it very often vanishes from his mind; he cannot recount it. But if a student takes a book, of which he has been told—or tells himself—that it might be valuable, and reads it through once and then tries directly afterwards to repeat it mentally, and not only to repeat it, but repeat it backwards, the last matters first and the first last; if he takes the trouble to go through certain details a second time, if he becomes so absorbed in it that he even takes a piece of paper and writes brief thoughts on it, and tries to put the question:—what aspect of this subject specially interests me—then he will find that in this way he develops a different kind of memory. It will not be the same memory. By using it, the difference can be accurately observed. When we use the human memory, things come into our soul as remembrances; but if, in the manner just described, we systematically acquire a memory as an esotericist or theosophist, then it is as though the things thus experienced had remained stationary in time. We learn to look back into time, as it were, and it really seems as though we were looking at what we were remembering; indeed, we shall notice that the things become more and more picture-like and the memory more and more imaginative. If we have acted in the manner just described—for instance, with a book—then, when it is necessary to bring the matter to mind again, we need only meet with something in some way connected with it, and we shall look back, as it were, at the occasion when we were studying the book, and see ourselves reading it. The remembrance does not arise, but the whole picture appears. Then we are able to notice that, while previously we only read the book, now the contents actually appear. We see them as at a distance in time; the memory becomes a seeing of pictures at a distance in time. This is the very first beginning, elementary to be sure, of gradually learning to read the Akashic Record. The memory is replaced by learning to read in the past. And very often a man who has gone through a certain esoteric development may have almost entirely lost his memory, yet he is none the worse for it, because he sees things in retrospect. He sees those with which he himself was connected, with special clearness. I am now saying something which, if it were said to anyone not connected with Theosophy, would only make him laugh. He could not help laughing, because he could not form any idea of what it means when an esotericist tells him that he no longer has any memory, and yet that he knows quite well what has happened, because he can see it in the past. The first man would say: ‘What you have is in reality a very excellent memory,’ for he cannot conceive of the change that has taken place. It is a change in the etheric body that has brought it about.

Then, as a rule, this changing of the memory is connected with something else, viz., we form, we might say, a new opinion about our inner man. For we cannot acquire this retrospective vision without at the same time adopting a certain standpoint as regards our experience. Thus when at a later date a man looks back at something he has done, as in the case described above about the book, for instance, when he sees himself in that position, he will, of course, have to judge for himself whether he was wise or foolish so to occupy himself. With this retrospect there is closely united another experience, viz., a sort of self-criticism. The pupil at this stage cannot do otherwise than define his attitude towards his past. He will reproach himself about some things; he will be glad he has attained others. In short, he cannot do otherwise than judge the past he thus surveys, so that, in fact, he becomes a sterner judge of himself, of his past life. He feels within him the etheric body becoming active, the etheric body which—as may be seen by the retrospect after death—has the whole of his past within it; he feels this etheric body as included in himself, as something that lives in him and defines his value. Indeed, such a change takes place in the etheric body that very often he feels the impulse to make this self-retrospect and observe one thing or another, so as to learn in quite a natural manner to judge of his own worth as a man. While in ordinary life one lives without being aware of the etheric body, in the retrospective view of one's own life it can be perceived, and this gradually rouses in the student an impulse to make greater efforts when he undergoes an esoteric development. The esoteric life makes it necessary for one to pay more attention to one's merits and demerits, errors and imperfections.

But something deeper becomes perceptible, connected with the etheric body, something that could also be perceived formerly, though not so strongly: that is one's temperament. Upon the changing of the etheric body depends the greater sensitivity of the earnest Theosophist or esotericist towards his own temperament. Let us note a special case in which this can be particularly observed, namely, in a person of a melancholic temperament, inclined to melancholy, a person of such a melancholic temperament who has not become an esotericist, nor studied Theosophy, and goes through the world in such a way, that many things make him surly and morose, many things draw forth his all too disapproving criticism, and he approaches things as a rule in such a manner that they arouse his sympathy and antipathy more strongly than they would perhaps in the case of a phlegmatic person. When a melancholy person of such a disposition, whether of the intense kind inclining to moroseness, turning away from, despising, hating the whole world, or the milder degree of mere sensitiveness to the world's opinion—for there are many grades and shades between these two—when such a person enters upon an esoteric or theosophical development, his temperament becomes essentially the basis from which to perceive his etheric body. He becomes susceptible to the system of forces producing his melancholy and perceives it clearly within him, and, while formerly he merely turned his discontent against the external impressions received from the world, he now begins to turn this discontent against himself. It is very necessary that in an esoteric development self-knowledge should be carefully exercised, and that the student inclined to melancholy should exercise this introspection, which enables him to take this change quietly and calmly. For while formerly the world was very often odious to him, he now becomes odious to himself; he begins to criticise himself, so that obviously he is dissatisfied with himself. We can only judge these things rightly, my dear friends, when we look at what is called temperament in the right way. A melancholy person is such simply because in him the melancholy temperament is accentuated; for fundamentally every human being has all four temperaments in his soul. In certain things a melancholy person is also phlegmatic, in others he is sanguine, in others again choleric; the melancholy temperament only stands out more prominently in him than the phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric. And a phlegmatic person is not one possessing no other temperament but the phlegmatic, but in him the phlegmatic temperament is more prominent, and the other temperaments remain more in the background of his soul. It is the same with the other temperaments.

Now, just as the change in the etheric body of the decidedly melancholy person takes the form of turning his melancholy against himself, as it were, so do changes and new sensations appear with respect to the other temperamental qualities. But, through wise self-knowledge, esoteric development can bring about a distinct feeling that the mischief occasioned by the predominating temperament can be repaired by bringing about changes in the other temperaments also, changes which will, as it were, balance the principal change in the predominating temperament. It is only necessary to recognise how the changes in the other temperaments appear.

Let us suppose that a phlegmatic person becomes an esotericist—it will be difficult for him, but let us suppose that he can be brought to be a really good esotericist. The phlegmatic person who receives strong impressions is sometimes powerless against them; so that often the phlegmatic temperament, if not yet too much corroded by materialism, is in no sense a wholly bad preliminary condition for an esoteric development; only it must appear in a nobler form than its usual distorted manifestation. When such a phlegmatic person becomes an esotericist, the phlegmatic temperament then changes in a peculiar manner. The phlegmatic person then has a very strong inclination to observe himself very carefully, and for this reason the phlegmatic temperament to which this process gives the least pain is not a bad preliminary condition for an esoteric development when such can be entered upon, because it is practically adapted to a certain calm self-observation. What the phlegmatic person perceives within him does not disturb him as it does the melancholic person, and, therefore, when he makes self-observations, they as a rule go even deeper than those of the melancholic person, who is positively kept back by his wrath against himself. Therefore, a phlegmatic person is, as it were, the best pupil for serious theosophical development.

Now, as already stated, every man has within him all the temperaments, and in the case of a melancholy person the melancholic temperament predominates. He has also within him, for example, the phlegmatic temperament. In the melancholy person we can always find aspects which prove him to be a phlegmatic individual towards certain things. Now, if the melancholy person becomes an esotericist, while, on the one hand, he will certainly set to work severely on himself, so that self-reproaches are bound to come, if one is able to guide him in any way, his attention should be turned to the things with respect to which he was previously phlegmatic. His interest must be aroused in things for which he previously had none. If this can be accomplished, then the evils produced through his melancholy are to a certain extent paralysed.

The characteristic of the sanguine person in external life is that he likes to hurry from one impression to another, unwilling to keep to one impression. Such a one becomes a peculiar esotericist. He changes in a very peculiar way through the alteration of his etheric body: the moment he tries to acquire esotericism, or another tries to impart it to him, he becomes phlegmatic towards his own inner being, so that under certain circumstances the sanguine person is at first the least promising—as regards his temperament—for an esoteric development. When the sanguine person comes to esotericism or theosophical life—as he very frequently does, for he is interested in all sorts of things, and so, among other things, in Theosophy or esotericism, though his interest may not be serious or permanent—he must acquire a sort of self-observation; but he does this with great indifference, he does not care to look into himself. He is interested in this or that in himself, but his interest is not very deep. He discovers all sorts of interesting qualities within himself; but he is at once satisfied with that, and he speaks enthusiastically of this or that interesting quality, but he has soon forgotten the whole matter again—even what he had observed in himself. And those who approach esotericism from a momentary interest and soon leave it again are chiefly the sanguine natures. In the next lecture we shall try to illustrate what I am now explaining in words by a drawing of the etheric body on the blackboard; we shall then sketch, in addition, the changes in the etheric body through theosophical or esoteric development.

It is different, again, in the case of the choleric temperament. It is almost impossible, or, at any rate, very seldom possible, to make a choleric an esotericist; if the choleric temperament is especially prominent in him as personality, it is characteristic that he rejects all esotericism, he does not wish to have anything to do with it. Still, it may happen through the karmic conditions of his life that a choleric person may be brought to esotericism; but it will be difficult for him to make changes in his etheric body, for the etheric body of the choleric proves to be particularly dense, and can only be influenced with difficulty. In the melancholy individual the etheric body is like an india-rubber ball (this is a trivial comparison, but it will convey what I wish to say) from which the air has escaped: when one presses a dent made in it, it remains for some time; in the choleric, the etheric body is like an india-rubber ball well inflated, filled with air. An attempt to make a dent in it not only produces no permanent effect, but is perceptibly resisted. The etheric body of the choleric is not at all yielding, but knotty and hard. Hence the choleric himself has a difficult task to change his etheric body. He can do nothing with himself. Therefore, from the outset he rejects esoteric development, which is to change him; he cannot lay hold of himself, as it were. But when the choleric realises the seriousness of life, or similar things, or when there is a little melancholic ring in his temperament, then by means of this melancholy he can be led so to develop the choleric note in his human organism that he now works with all the intensity of his force on his resisting etheric body. And if he then succeeds in producing changes in his etheric body he rouses within him a very special quality; through his esoteric development he becomes more capable than other people of presenting external facts in an orderly and profound manner in their causative or historical connection. And one who is capable of judging a well-written history—which is not, as a rule, written by esotericists—a history which really depicts the facts, will always find the beginning, the unconscious, instinctive beginning of that which the choleric esotericist could do as an historian, as a narrator or describer. Men like Tacitus, for instance, were at the beginning of such an instinctive, esoteric development; hence the wonderful, incomparable descriptions given by Tacitus. As an esotericist, who reads Tacitus, one knows that this unique kind of history-writing depends upon the very special working of a choleric temperament into the etheric body. This appears especially in writers who have undergone an esoteric development. Even though the outer world may not accept it, this is the case with Homer. Homer owed his vivid glorious power of delineation to the choleric temperament working into his etheric body. And many other things could be pointed out in this realm which in external life would prove, or at least verify the fact, that when he undergoes an esoteric development the choleric renders himself specially capable of clearly representing the world in its reality, in its causative connections. When the choleric undergoes an esoteric development, his works, even in their external structure, one might say, bear the character of truth and reality. Thus we see that in the changes of the etheric body the life of man is very clearly expressed; the form it has hitherto taken is more perceptible than is otherwise the case in the present incarnation. In esoteric development temperaments become more strongly perceptible, and it is specially important in true self-knowledge to take this observation of temperaments into account. We shall speak further on these matters in the next lecture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

for the inauguration of the Vidar branch.

A number of friends from out of town have come to visit our friends in Bochum to see the branch of our spiritual endeavor that has been established here under the Christmas tree. And there is no doubt that all those who have come from out of town to celebrate the opening of this branch with our Bochum friends feel the beauty and spiritual significance of our Bochum friends' decision to found this place of spiritual endeavor and feeling here in this city, in the middle of a field of material activity, in the middle of a field that, so to speak, mainly belongs to the outer life. And in many ways, each of our dear branches, here in this area more than anywhere else, can be a symbol for us of the significance of our kind of anthroposophical spiritual life in the present day and for the future development of human souls.

We are truly not in a situation where we can look critically or disparagingly at what is going on around us when we are in the midst of a field of the most modern material activity, because we are rather in a field that shows us how it must become more and more in later outer life on earth. We would only show ourselves to be foolish if we wanted to say: ancient times, when one was more surrounded by forests and meadows and the original life of nature than by the chimneys of the present, should come back again. One would only show oneself to be unintelligent, for one would prove that one has no insight into what the sages of all times have called “the eternal necessities in which man must find himself.” In the face of the material life that covers the earth, as the 19th century in particular has brought about and which later times will bring to mankind in an even more comprehensive way, in the face of this life there is no justified criticism based on sympathy with the old, but there is only and alone the insight that this is the fate of our earth planet. From a certain point of view, one may call the old times beautiful, one may look upon them as a spring or summer time for the earth, but to rage against the fact that other times are coming would be just as foolish as it would be foolish to be dissatisfied with the fact that autumn and winter follow spring and summer. Therefore, we must appreciate and love it when, out of an inwardly courageous decision, our friends create a place for our spiritual life in the midst of the most modern life and activity. And it will be right if all those who have only come to visit our branch for the sake of today leave with a grateful heart for the beautiful activity of our Bochum friends, which is carried out in a truly spiritual scientific way.

What is so endearing about what we have been calling our “branch initiations” for years is that on such occasions, friends from outside the circle that has come together in a particular place often come from far and wide. As a result, these friends from afar can ignite the inner fire of gratitude that we must have for all those who found such branches, and that, on the other hand, these friends from afar can take with them a vivid impression of what they have experienced, which keeps the thoughts alive, which we then turn to the work of such a branch from everywhere, so that this work can be fruitful from all sides through the creative thoughts. We know that the spiritual life is a reality, we know that thoughts are not just what materialism believes, but that thoughts are living forces that, when we unite them in love, for example over any place of our work, there they unfold, there they are help.

And I would like to be convinced that those who have brought their visit here will also take with them the impulse from today's get-together to think often and often of the place of our work, so that our friends here can feel when they sit together in silence, into that which, by the grace of the hierarchies, becomes spiritual knowledge for us, so that our friends, when they sit together in silence again, may cherish the feeling that creative thoughts are coming from all sides into their working space, their spiritual working space.

Looking at what is, and not practicing an unjustified criticism of existence, is something we are gradually learning through our anthroposophical worldview. There is no doubt that the earth is undergoing a development. And when we, equipped with our anthroposophical knowledge, yes, when we look back with understanding, with what we can know outside of anthroposophical knowledge, to earlier times in the development of the earth, then earlier times appear to us in relation to the earth, which is is riddled with telegraph wires and swept by those electric currents, these times of the earth appear to us like spring and summer time, and the times we are entering appear to us like the autumn and winter time of the earth. But it is not for us to complain about this, but for us to call this a necessity. Nor is it for us to complain, just as it is not for a person to complain when summer comes to an end and autumn and winter arrive.

But when autumn and winter come, the human soul has been preparing for centuries to erect the sign for the living word to enter into the evolution of the earth in the depths of the winter night. And in this way the human heart, the human soul, showed that what is created from the outside by summer without human intervention must be created by human intervention from within.

When we rejoice in the sprouting, sprouting forces of spring, which are replaced by gentle summer forces from the outside, without our intervention, winter, with its blanket of snow, covers what would otherwise, without our intervention, please us during the summer and always brings new proof that divine-spiritual forces prevail throughout the world, so we receive during the cold, dark winter time, we receive what is placed in winter as the summer hope for the future, which tells us that just as spring and summer come after every winter, so too, once the earth has reached its goal in the cosmos, a new spiritual spring and summer will come, which our creative powers help shape. Thus the human heart erects the sign of eternal life.

In this very sign of eternal spiritual life, we feel united today with our friends in Bochum, who some time ago founded their branch here. It is wonderful that we can inaugurate it just before Christmas.

Perhaps to some who at first glance look at it superficially, all that has been discovered about Christ Jesus through our spiritual science, and all that has been revealed to it about Christ Jesus, will look at it superficially, it may seem as if we are replacing the former simplicity and childlikeness of the Christmas festival, with its memories of the beautiful scenes from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, with something tremendously complicated. We must draw people's attention to the fact that at the beginning of our era two Jesus-children entered into earthly evolution; we must speak of how the ego of one Jesus-child moved into the bodies of the other Jesus-child; we must speak of how, in the thirtieth year of Jesus' life, the Christ-being descended and lived for three years in the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. It might easily appear as though all the love and devotion which men through the centuries have been able to summon up for their own salvation, when they were shown the Christ Child in the manger, surrounded by the shepherds, when the wonderfully moving Christmas carol sounded to their ears, when the Christmas plays were celebrated here and there, when the lights appeared on the Christmas tree, delighting the most childlike hearts, it might appear that in the face of all what so immediately kindles the human heart to intimacy, to devotion, to love, when the warm feeling, the warm sensation, should fade away when one has yet to take in the complicated ideas of the two Jesus children, of the passing over of the one ego into the body of the other, of the descent of a divine spiritual being into the bodily shell of Jesus of Nazareth. But we must not indulge in such thoughts, for it would be a bad thing if we did not want to submit to the law of necessity in this area.

Yes, my dear friends, in the places that lay outside the forest or in the middle of the fields and meadows, the snow-capped mountains and distances or the wide plains and lakes spoke down and into them. In those places that were not traversed by railroad tracks and telegraph wires, hearts could dwell there that were immediately ignited when the manger was built and when one was reminded of what the Gospels of Matthew and Luke told of the birth of the wonderful child. What is contained in these narratives, what has happened on earth in such a way that these narratives bear witness to it, lives and will continue to live. It just takes time, which occurs, we may say, in the “earthly winter”, a time of railways and telegraph wires and meals, stronger forces in the soul, to ignite warmth and intimacy in the heart in the face of the external mechanism, in the face of the external materiality. The soul must grow strong in order to be so inwardly convinced of the truth of what has happened in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha that it lives firmly in the heart, however outwardly the mechanical natural order may intervene in earthly existence. The knowledge of the child in Bethlehem must penetrate differently into the souls of those who are allowed to live on the edge of the forest, on mountain slopes, by the lakes and in the midst of fields and meadows; the knowledge of the same being must penetrate differently to those who must have grown to the newer conditions of existence.

For this reason, for our own time, those whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings tell us of those higher contexts that we must consider when speaking of the Child of Bethlehem. With our newer insights, we stand no less soul-filled before the Christmas tree because we must know something different from what earlier times knew. On the contrary, we come to a better understanding of those earlier times, we come to understand why the hope and joy of the future spoke from the eyes of young and old at the Christmas tree and at the manger. We learn to understand how they lived in a way that went beyond what could be seen immediately, when we explain to ourselves, in our own terms, the reasons why we feel such deep, heartfelt love for the Child of Bethlehem. We may call the Jesus child, the one from the Nathanic line of the House of David, in the most beautiful sense, in the most beautiful sense, “the child of humanity, the child of man”. For what do we feel when we look at this child, whose essential nature shines through even in the descriptions of Luke's Gospel?

Humanity took its origin with the origin of the earth. But much has passed humanity in the course of the Lemurian, Atlantean and post-Atlantean times. And we know that this was a descent, that in primeval times there was an original knowledge and original looking, an original connection with the divine-spiritual powers, an old inheritance of a knowledge of the connection with the gods. What lived in the souls of human beings from divine beings has increasingly become less and less. Over time, people have come to feel their connection with the divine spiritual source less and less through their direct knowledge. They were increasingly thrown out into the field of mere material observation, of sensuality. Only in the early years of life, in childhood, did people know how to revere and love innocence, the innocence of the human being who has not yet taken up the descending forces of the earth.

But how, now that we know that with the Jesus child an entity came to earth that had not previously been on earth as such, that was a soul that had not gone through the rest of the evolution of mankind on earth — which I have indeed presented in my “Occult Science Outline», was held back, as it were, in the innocent state before the Luciferic temptation, that such a soul, a childlike human soul in a much, much higher sense than is usually meant, came to earth, how can one not recognize this human soul as the «child of humanity»? What we human beings, even in the most tender childhood, may no longer have in us, because we carry within us the results of our previous incarnations, which we cannot recognize in any of us, even in the moment when we first open our eyes on the field of the earth, is presented in the child who entered the earth as the St. Luke's Boy Jesus. For in this child there was a soul that had not previously been born on earth out of a human body, that had remained behind when the evolution of humanity began anew on earth, and that appeared on earth at the very beginning of our era, in the infancy of humanity. Hence the marvelous event that the Akasha Chronicle reveals to us: that this child, the Nathanic Jesus-child, immediately after his birth, uttered intelligible sounds to his mother only, sounds that were not similar to any of the spoken languages of that time or of any time, but from which sounded for the mother something like a message from worlds that are not the earthly worlds, a message from higher worlds. That this child Jesus could speak, could speak immediately at his birth, that is the miracle!

Then it grew up as if it were to contain, concentrated in its own being, all the love and loving ability that all human souls together could muster. And the great genius of love, that was what lived in the child. He could not learn much of what human culture has achieved in earthly life. The Nathanian Jesus Child was able to experience little of what had been achieved by people over the course of thousands of years until he was twelve years old. Because he could not, the other ego passed into him in his twelfth year. But everything he touched from the earliest, most tender childhood was touched by perfected love. All the qualities of the mind, all the qualities of feeling, they worked as if heaven had sent love to earth, so that a light could be brought into the winter time of the earth, a light that shines into the darkness of the human soul when the sun does not unfold its full external power during this winter time. When later the Christ moved into this human shell, we must bear in mind that this Christ-being could only make itself understood on earth by working through these shells.

The Christ-Being is not a human being. The Christ-Being is an Entity of the higher Hierarchies. On earth It had to live for three years as a human being among human beings. For this purpose, a human being had to be born to It in the way I have often described for the Nathanian Jesus child. And because this human child could not have received — since it had not previously set foot on earth, had no previous education from earlier incarnations — because it could not have received what external culture had worked for on earth, so a soul entered this child that had, in the highest sense, worked for what external culture can bring: the Zarathustra soul.

And so we see the most wonderful connection when Jesus Christ stands before us. We see the interaction of this human child, who had saved the best human aspiration, love, from the times when man had not yet fallen into Luciferic temptation, until the beginning of our era, when it appeared on earth for the first time, embodied, with the most developed human prophet Zarathustra, and with that spiritual essence which, until the Mystery of Golgotha, had its actual home within the realms of the higher hierarchies, and which then had to take its scene on earth by entering through the gate of the body of Jesus of Nazareth into its earthly existence. That which is the highest on earth, and which we can only glimpse in its purity in the still innocent gaze of the human being, in the eye of the child, that is what the human child brought with him to the highest degree. That which can be achieved on earth as the highest, that is what Zarathustra contributed to this human child. And that which the heavens could give to the earth, so that the earth might receive spiritually, which it receives anew each summer through the intensified power of the sun, that the earth received through the Christ-being.

We will just have to learn to understand what has happened to the earth. And in the times to come, the soul will be able to swell with intimacy, the soul will be able to strengthen itself through a power that will be stronger than all the powers that have so far been connected to the Mystery of Golgotha, in a time that can offer little outward support to the strengthening of those forces that tend towards man's true source of power, towards man's innermost being, towards an understanding of how this being flows from the spiritual-cosmic. But in order to fully understand such, we must first understand ourselves as one once understood the Christ Child on Christmas Day; we must first rise to the knowledge of the spirit. Times will come when, as it were, one will look at earthly events with the eye of the soul. Then one will be able to say many a thing to oneself that one cannot yet say to oneself in the broadest circles today, for which only spiritual science enables us today, so that we can already say many a thing to ourselves that one cannot yet say to oneself in the broadest circles today.

We see spring approaching. During the approaching spring, we see the plants sprouting and sprouting from the earth. We feel our joy igniting in what comes out of the earth. We feel the power of the sun growing stronger and stronger to the point where it makes our bodies rejoice, to the point of the Midsummer sun, which was celebrated in the Nordic mysteries. The initiates of these mysteries knew that the Midsummer Sun pours itself over the earth with its warmth and light to reveal the workings of the cosmos in the earth's orbit. We see and feel all this.

We also see and feel other things during this time. Sometimes lightning and thunder crash into the rays of the spring sun when clouds cover these rays. Irregular downpours pour over the surface of the earth. And then we feel the infinite, uninfluenced, harmonious regularity of the sun's course, and the — well, we need the word — changeable effectiveness of the entities that work on earth as rain and sunshine, as thunderstorms, and other phenomena that depend on all kinds of irregular activity, in contrast to the regular, harmonious activity of the sun's path through space and its consequences for the development of plants and everything that lives on earth, which cannot be influenced by anything. We feel the infinite regular harmony of the sun's activity and the changeable and fickle nature of what is going on in our atmosphere like a duality.

But then, when autumn approaches, we feel the dying of the living, the withering of that which delights us. And if we have compassion for nature, our souls may become sad at the dying of nature. The awakening, loving power of the sun, that which regularly and harmoniously permeates the universe, becomes invisible, as it were, and that which we have described as the changeable weather then prevails. It is true what earlier times knew, but what has faded from our consciousness due to our materiality: that in winter, the egoism of the earth triumphs over the forces that permeate our atmosphere, flowing down from the vast cosmic being to our earth and awakening life on our earth.

And so the whole of nature appears to us as a duality. The activity of spring and summer is quite different from that of autumn and winter. It is as if the earth becomes selfless and gives itself up to the embrace of the universe, from which the sun sends light and warmth and awakens life. The earth in spring and summer appears to us as showing its selflessness. The earth in autumn and winter appears to us as showing its selfishness, conjuring forth from itself all that it can contain and produce in its own atmosphere. Defeating the working of the sun, the working of the universe through the selfishness of earthly activity, the winter earth appears to us.

And when we look away from the earth and at ourselves with the eye that spiritual research can open for us, when we look beyond the material and see the spiritual, then we see something else. We know that, yes, in the elemental forces of the earth's atmosphere, which appear to be at work only in the unfolding of the sun's forces, in the spring and summer struggles that take place around us, the elemental spirits live, innumerable spiritual entities live in the elemental realm that swirl around the earth, lower spirits, higher spirits. Lower spirits, which are earthbound in the elemental realm, have to endure during the spring and summer season that the higher spirits, which stream down from the cosmos, exercise greater dominion, making them servants of the spirit that streams down from the sun, making them servants of the demonic forces that rule the earth in selfishness. During the spring and summer season of the earth, we see how the spirits of earth, air, water and fire become servants of the cosmic spirits that send their forces down to earth. And when we understand the whole spiritual context of the earth and the cosmos, then during spring and summer these relationships open up to our souls and we say to ourselves: You, earth, show yourself to us by making the spirits, which are servants of egoism, servants of the cosmos, of the cosmic spirits, who conjure up life out of your womb, which you yourself could not conjure up!

Then we move towards autumn and winter time. And then we feel the egoism of the earth, feel how powerful those spirits of the earth become, which are bound to this earth itself, which have detached themselves from the universe since Saturn, Sun and Moon time, feel how they close themselves off from the working that flows in from the cosmos. We feel ourselves in the egoistically experiencing earth. And then we may look within ourselves. We examine our soul with its thinking, feeling and willing, examine it seriously and ask ourselves: How do thoughts emerge from the depths of our soul? How do our feelings, affects and sensations emerge first? Do they have the same regularity with which the sun moves through the universe and lends the earth the life forces that emerge from its womb? They do not. The forces that reveal themselves in our thinking, feeling and willing in everyday life are similar to the changeable activity in our atmosphere. Just as lightning and thunder break in, so human passions break into the soul. Just as no law governs rain and sunshine, so human thoughts break out of the depths of the soul. We must compare our soul life with the changing wind and weather, not with the regularity with which the sun rules our earth. Out there it is the spirits of air and water, fire and earth, that work in the elemental realm and that actually represent the egoism of the earth. Within ourselves, these are the elemental forces. But these changing forces within us, which regulate our everyday life, are embryos, germinal beings, which, only as germs, but as germs, resemble the elemental beings that are found outside in all the vicissitudes of the weather. We carry the forces of the same world within us as we think, feel and will, which live as demonic beings in the elemental realm in the wind and weather outside.

When the times approached in which people, who were at the turning point of the old and the new times, felt: there will come a time reminiscent of the wintertime on Earth. Indeed, there were teachers and sages among these people who understood how to interpret the signs of the times and who pointed out: Even if our inner life resembles the changeable activity of the outer world, and just as man knows that behind the activity of the outer world, especially in autumn and winter, the sun still shines, the sun lives and moves in the universe, it will come again - so man may also hold fast to the thought that, in the face of his own fickleness, which lives in his soul, there is a sun, deep, deep in those depths where the source of our soul gushes forth from the source of the world itself. At the turn of the ages, the sages pointed out that just as the sun must reappear and regain its strength in the face of the earth's selfishness, so too must understanding develop from those depths of our soul for that which can reach this soul from the sources, where this soul is connected in its life itself with the spiritual sun of the world, just as earthly life is connected with the physical sun of the world.

At first this was expressed as a hope, pointing to the great symbol that nature itself offered. It was expressed in such a way that the winter solstice was set as the celebration for the days when the sun regains its strength, the time when it was said: however the selfishness of the earth may unfold, the sun is victorious over the selfishness of the earth. As if through the darkness of a Christmas in the world of elemental spirits, which represent the egoism of the earth, the spirits that come from the sun and show us how they make the egoistic spirits of the earth their servants.

At first it felt like a glimmer of hope. And when the great turning point had come, when nothing but desolation and despair should have been felt in human souls, the Mystery of Golgotha was preparing itself. It showed in the spiritual realm that, yes, there are forces at work within the human being that can only be compared to the changeable forces of the earth's atmosphere, to earthly egoism. They manifested themselves in ancient times, when people still carried within them the legacy of the ancient powers of the gods, like the forces that show themselves in spring and summer: they were servants of the old hierarchies of the gods. But in the time when it was heading towards the Mystery of Golgotha, the inner forces of human souls became more and more like the outer demonic elemental spirits in autumn and winter. These forces within us were to break away from the old currents and workings of the gods, just as the changeable forces of our earth withdraw from the activity of the sun in winter. And then, for man in his evolution on earth, what had always been symbolically depicted in the hope that it would come about in the victory of the sun over the winter forces, the winter solstice of the world began, in which the spiritual sun underwent for the whole evolution of the earth what the physical sun always undergoes at the winter solstice. These are the times in which the Mystery of Golgotha occurred.

We must really distinguish between two periods on earth. A time before the Mystery of Golgotha, when the earth is heading towards autumn through its summer, when the inner forces of human beings become more and more similar to the changeable forces of the earth, and the great Christmas festival of the earth, the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when breaks over the earth, which is indeed winter time for the earth, but where out of the darkness the victorious spirit of the sun, the Christ, approaches the earth, bringing the souls within what the sun brings to the earth externally in the way of growth forces.

So we feel our whole human earthly destiny, our innermost human being, when we stand at the Christmas tree. So we feel intimately connected with the human child, who brought message from that time, where humanity had not yet fallen into temptation and thus the disposition to decline, brought the message that an ascent will begin again, as in the winter solstice the rise begins. On this day in particular, we feel the intimate relationship of the spiritual within the soul with the spirit that permeates and flows through everything, that expresses itself externally in wind and weather, but also in the regular, harmonious course of the sun, and inwardly in the course of humanity across the earth, in the great festival of Golgotha.

Should humanity not develop a new piety out of these thoughts, a piety that is not meant to remain a mere thought but can become a feeling and an intuition, a piety that cannot become dulled even by the most extreme mechanism, as it must unfold more and more on earth? Should not Christmas prayers and Christmas songs be possible again, even in the abstract, telegraph-wired and smoke-filled earth's atmosphere, when humanity will learn to feel how it is connected with the divine spiritual powers in its depths, by intuiting in its depths the great Christmas festival of the earth with the birth of the boy Jesus?

It is true, on the one hand, what resounds through all human history on earth: that the great Christmas festival of the earth, which prepared the Easter festival of Golgotha, had to come one day. It is true that this unique event had to occur as the victory of the spirit of the sun over the fickle earth spirits. On the other hand, it is true what Angelus Silesius said: “A thousand times Christ may be born at Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art still lost forever.” It is true that we must find within us, in the depths of our soul, that through which we understand the Christ Jesus.

But it is also true that in the places at the edge of the forest, on the lakeshore, surrounded by mountains, people, after a summer spent in the fields and pastures, were able to look forward to the symbol of the Christ Child , that they felt something else in their souls than we do, who must also feel the power to sense the Christmas message in the face of our smoky, dry, abstract and mechanical times. If these strong thoughts, which spiritual science can give us, can take root in our hearts, then a solar power will emerge from our hearts that will be able to shine into the bleakest external surroundings, to shine with the power that will be like when in 'our inner being itself light kindled light on the tree of our soul life, which we, because its roots are the roots of our soul itself, are to transform more and more into a Christmas tree in this winter time. We can do it if we absorb, not just as theory, but as direct life, what the message of the spirit, what true anthroposophy can be for us. So I wanted to bring the thoughts of Christmas from our spiritual science into the space that we want to consecrate today for the work that our dear friends here have been doing for a long time.

In the name of that deity who is regarded in the north as the deity who is supposed to bring back rejuvenating powers, spiritual childhood powers of aging humanity, to which Nordic souls in particular tend when they want to speak of what, flowing from the Christ Jesus being, can bring our humanity a new message of rejuvenation, to this name our friends here want to consecrate their work and their branch. They want to call it the “Vidar Branch”. May this name be as auspicious as it is auspicious for us, who want to understand the work that is being done here, what has already been achieved and is intended by loving, spirit-loving souls here. Let us truly appreciate what our Bochum friends are attempting here, and let us give their branch and their work the consecration that is also intended to be a consecration for Christ today, by unfolding our most beautiful and loving thoughts here for the blessing, for the strength and for the genuine, true, spiritual love for this work. If we can feel this way, then we will celebrate today's festival of the naming of the “Vidar” branch in the right spirit with our friends in Bochum.

And let us let our feelings reach up to those whom we are naming as the leaders and guides of our spiritual life, to the Masters of the Wisdom and the Harmony of Feelings, and let us implore their blessing for the work that is to unfold here in this city through our friends:

You who guide the spiritual life, give people
what they need according to the times,
you work with us when our friends devotedly serve the spiritual life
here in this city.

We would like to send this up as a prayer to the spiritual leaders, the higher hierarchies, at this moment, which is solemn in two respects. And we may hope that what has been promised will prevail over this branch, despite all the resistance that is piling up more and more, despite all the obstacles and opposition, what has been promised for our work: that through it the mystery of Christ will be incorporated anew into humanity in the way it must happen.

That this may prevail, that may be our Christmas gift today: that this branch too may become a living witness to what flows as strength into the evolution of humanity from higher worlds and can ever more and more give human souls the consciousness of the truth of the words:

The senses speak
The things in the vastness of space,
They change in the stream of time;
Recognizing, the human soul,
From the vastness of space,
And unreachable by the stream of time,
Into the realm of eternity.

Our dear friends in Bochum will return to their work here imbued with this feeling. Those who, through their meeting with them, are now aware of their work will think of it often and with great intensity. These thoughts can unfold their special power all the more because we were able to consecrate the work immediately before Christmas this year, before the festival that can always be a symbol for us of all that the spirit has achieved in victory over the material, over all the obstacles that it can and must face in the world.

Those of you who have been attending these group lectures for years will perhaps have noticed that the themes have not been haphazardly chosen but have a certain continuity. In the course of each winter, too, the lectures have always had a certain inner connection, even if, on the surface, this has not been immediately apparent. Therefore it will obviously be of the utmost importance to follow up the various courses that are being held here alongside the actual group evenings, and which are intended for the purpose of bringing newer members up to the level, as it were, of these group lectures; for various things said here cannot be immediately understood by every newcomer. But there is something else we should note as well, which will gradually have to be taken into consideration in the various groups of our German section. As there is a certain inner thread in the lectures, it is incumbent upon men to form each lecture so that it is part of a whole. Therefore it is not possible to say the things that can be presented to advanced participants in that kind of single lecture in such a way that they are equally suitable for newcomers. We could speak about the same theme in a very elementary way, of course, but that would not do in face of the progressive path we are planning to take in the anthroposophical life of this particular group. This again is connected with the fact that the further we progress the more we can anticipate in the way of wide-spread lecture publications and reporting of lectures from one group to another. For with regard to these lectures I give in the groups it is becoming less and less immaterial whether you hear the one on one Monday and the next the following Monday. It may not be immediately apparent to the audience why the one lecture succeeds the other, yet it is important nevertheless; and when you lend lectures to one another you cannot take this into account at all. One lecture might get read before the other, and then it unavoidably gets misunderstood and causes confusion. I want to make a special point of this, as it is an essential part of our anthroposophical life. Even the inserting of a phrase here or there, or the over or under emphasising of a word depends on the whole development of the life of the group. Only when the publication of the lectures can be strictly supervised so that nothing is published unless it has been submitted to me, can any good come of this duplicating and publishing of lectures.

This is also a kind of introduction to the lectures about to be held in this group. There will be a certain inner connection in the course of this winter's lectures and all the preparatory material will eventually be directed towards a definite culmination with which the course will then close. Last week's lecture was a small beginning, and today's lecture will be a kind of continuation. But it will not continue like a newspaper serial, where the thirty-eighth installment follows on after the thirty-seventh. There will be an inner connection, even though the subject matter will appear to differ, and the connection will consist in the fact that the whole series will culminate in the final lectures. So, with these concluding lectures in view, we will start today by sketching the nature of illnesses, and next Monday we will talk about the origin, historic importance and meaning of the “Ten Commandments”. These could well appear to have nothing in common; however, you will eventually see that it all has an inner connection, and that these lectures should not be taken as separate ones, as is often the case with those given for a wider public.

We would like to speak today about the nature of illness from the point of view of spiritual science. As a rule people are not concerned about illness, or one or another type of illness at least, until they themselves fall sick with it, and even then their interest does not go much beyond the cure. That is, they are only concerned about their recovery. How this cure is effected is sometimes a matter of complete indifference, and the pleasantest thing is not to have any further responsibility for the “how”. Most of our contemporaries content themselves with the thought that the people who carry out the job have been appointed to do so by the authorities. In our time there exists in this sphere a much more rabid belief in authority than has ever existed in the religious sphere. The papacy of medicine, irrespective of its various forms, still makes itself felt with great intensity and will do so to an even greater extent in the future. Laymen are in no way to blame for the fact that this can and will be like this. For they do not think about these matters or care in the least about them unless it affects them personally and they suffer from an acute case that requires treatment. Thus a large section of the population calmly looks on whilst the papacy of medicine assumes greater and greater dimensions and insinuates itself into things in all manner of ways, like the way it is now speaking out and interfering so horribly in the education of children and the life of the schools, and claiming its right to a particular therapy. People do not care about the deeper significance that is actually behind all this. They look on whilst one or another law is instituted. People do not want to have any insight into these matters. On the other hand there will always be people who are personally affected and cannot manage with ordinary materialistic medicine, the basis of which does not concern them, but only the fact of whether they can be cured or not, and then they will apply to the people who work out of occultism—and there again they only care about whether they can be cured or not. But they do not care whether public life as a whole, with its methods and its way of understanding things, completely undermines a deeper method arising out of the spirit. Who cares whether the public prevents any cures being effected in the method based on occultism, or cares whether the one who applies the method is put in prison? These things are not taken seriously enough except when people are personally affected. However it is just the task of a really spiritual movement to awaken a consciousness of the fact that there has to be more than an egoistic desire for recovery; in fact there has to be knowledge of the deeper foundations in these matters, and this knowledge has to be made known.

In our age of materialism it appears to anyone who can see to the bottom of these matters as only too obvious why just the theory of illness in particular comes under the strongest influence of materialistic thinking. However, if we follow this or that slogan, or give special credit to this or that method, merely criticising what is trimmed with materialistic theories, despite the fact that it arises out of a scientific basis and is useful in many respects, we shall be making just as much of a mistake as if we were to go to the other extreme and put everything under the heading of psychological cures and suchlike, and fall victim in this way to all manner of one-sidedness. Present-day mankind must, above all, realise more and more that man is a complicated being and that everything to do with man is connected with this complexity of his being. If there is a kind of science holding the opinion that man consists merely of a physical body, it cannot possibly work beneficially with the healthy or the sick human being. For health and sickness, have a relationship to man as a whole and not to one part of him only, namely the physical body.

Nor must the matter be taken superficially. You can find plenty of doctors nowadays, properly recognised members of the medical profession, who would never admit to being sworn materialists; they profess to one or another religious faith, and they would staunchly deny the accusation of being materialistic. But this is not the point. Life does not depend on what a man says or believes. That is his personal concern. To be effective it is necessary to know how to apply and make valuable use in life of those facts that are not limited to the sense world but have an existence in the spiritual world. So that however pious a doctor is and however many ideas he has regarding this or the other spiritual world, if he nevertheless works according to the rules that arise entirely out of our materialistic world conception, that is, he treats people as though they only had a body, then however spiritually minded he believes himself to be, he is nevertheless a materialist. For it does not depend on what a person says or believes but on his ability to set in living motion the forces behind the external world of the senses. Nor is it sufficient for anthroposophy to spread the knowledge of man's fourfold nature and for everybody to go repeating that man consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, even if people can define and describe them in a certain way. The essential thing is not just to know this, but to understand more and more clearly the living interplay of these members of man's being and the part the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego play in the healthy and in the sick human being and what their interrelationship implies. Unless you make it your business to know what spiritual science can tell you about the nature of the fourth member of man's being, the ego, then however much you study anatomy and physiology you would not know anything about the nature of blood. That would be quite impossible. And you would never be able to say anything of any value about the illnesses connected with the nature of the blood. For the blood is the expression of the ego nature of man. And if Goethe's words in Faust: “Blood is a very special fluid” [see the lecture: Occult Significance of the Blood, e.Ed] are still quoted today, they do in fact say a very great deal. Present-day science has no inkling of the fact that scientists ought to treat blood, even physical blood, in an entirely different manner from any other organ of man's physical body, because these other organs are the expression of entirely different things. If the glands are the expression, the physical counterpart, of the etheric body, then even physically we have to look for something quite different in the composition of a gland, be it liver or spleen, than we have to look for in the blood that is the expression of a much higher member of man's being, namely the ego. And scientific methods must be guided by this if they are to show us how to work with these things. Now I want to say something which will really only be understood by advanced anthroposophists, yet it is important that it is said.

A materialistically-minded scholar of today takes it as a matter of course that when he makes a prick in the body blood will flow out that can be examined in all the known ways. And blood is described according to the method of investigating its chemical composition in exactly the same way as is done with any other substance, such as an acid. One thing, however, is left out of account, although, needless to say, it is not only bound to be unknown to materialistic science, but it is sure to be considered sheer folly and madness, and yet it is true: the blood flowing in the arteries, and sustaining the living body, is not what flows out when I make the prick and take out a drop. For the moment blood comes out of the body it changes to such an extent that we have to admit it is something quite different; and what flows out as coagulating blood, however fresh it is, is no proof of the living essence within the organism. Blood is the expression of the ego, a member of the human being that is at a high level. Even as physical substance blood is something that you cannot examine physically in its totality at all, because when you are able to see it, it is no longer the blood it was when it flowed in the body. It cannot be looked at physically, for the moment it is exposed to view and can be examined by some method similar to X-ray, you are no longer examining blood but something that is the external image of blood on the physical plane. These things will only gradually be understood. There have always been scientists in the world working out of occultism who have said this, but they have been called things like madmen or philosophers.

Everything to do with man's health or sickness really is bound up with man's manifold nature, with the complicity of his being; hence it is only through a knowledge of man arising out of spiritual science that we can arrive at a conception of man in health and in sickness. There are certain ailments in man's organism which can only be understood when we realise their connection with the nature of the ego, and these ailments also appear in a way—but in a limited way—in the expression of the ego, the blood. Then there are certain ailments in man's organism that point to an illness of the astral body and which therefore affect the external expression of the astral body, the nervous system. Now whilst mentioning this second case I shall have to ask you to be somewhat aware of the subtlety of thought necessary here. When man's astral body has an irregularity that comes to expression in the nervous system, the external image of the astral body, the first thing we notice physically is a certain disability in the functioning of the nervous system. Now when the nervous system cannot do its job in a certain area all kind of symptoms can result, affecting the stomach, head or heart. However, an illness that shows symptoms in the stomach does not necessarily point to a disability of the nervous system in a certain area and originate therefore in the astral body, it can come from something entirely different.

Those types of illnesses connected with the ego itself and therefore also connected with its external expression, the blood, appear as a rule—but only as a rule, for things are not so clear cut in the world, even though you can draw clear lines when you want to make observations—these illnesses appear as chronic illnesses. Various other disturbances appearing to begin with are usually symptoms. One or another symptom may appear, which nevertheless originates in a disturbance in the blood, and that has its origin in an irregularity of that part of the human being that we call the bearer of the ego. I could speak to you for hours about the types of illness that are chronic and which originate from the physical point of view in the blood and from the spiritual point of view in the ego. Those are chiefly the illnesses that are in the proper sense hereditary, and these are the illnesses that can only be understood by those people who look at the being of man from a spiritual point of view. Here and there are people who are chronically ill, who are, in other words, never really fit; they always have one or another thing the matter with them. To get to the bottom of this, we must ask ourselves what the actual basic character of the ego is like. What kind of a person is he? If you understand what life really is, then you will know that definite forms of chronic illnesses are connected with one or another basic soul character of the ego. Certain chronic illnesses will never occur in people who have a serious and dignified attitude to life but only in those of a frivolous nature. This can merely be an indication, to show the way these lectures are leading.

As you see, the first thing you have to ask yourself when somebody comes and says he has been suffering from this or that for years, is what kind of person is he fundamentally? You have to know what basic character type his ego is, otherwise you are bound to go wrong with ordinary medicine, unless you are lucky. The important thing in curing people of these, illnesses which are mainly the really hereditary ones, is to consider their whole surroundings, in so far as they can have a direct or indirect influence on the ego. When you have really got to know this aspect of a person, you may have to advise that he is sent to another natural surrounding, perhaps for the winter, if possible; or, if he has a certain job, to change it and encounter a different aspect of life. The essential thing will be to try to find the setting that will have just the right effect on the character of the ego. To find the right cure, you need, in particular, a wide experience of life, so that you can enter into the person's character and can say: For this person to recover, he must change his job. It is a matter of pinpointing what is necessary from the point of view of his soul nature. Sometimes, perhaps, just in this sphere, no recovery can be achieved at all, because it is impossible to effect a change; in many instances it can be effected, however, if people only know of it. A lot can be done for some people, for example, if they simply live in the mountains instead of the lowlands. These are the things that apply to the kind of illnesses that appear externally as chronic illnesses, and that are connected physically with the blood and spiritually with the ego.

Now we come to those illnesses that have their spiritual origin mainly in irregularities of the astral body and that appear in certain disabilities of the nervous system in one or another direction. Now a large part of the common acute illnesses are connected with what we have just mentioned, in fact most of them. For it is sheer superstition to believe that when someone has a stomach or heart complaint or even a clearly perceptible irregularity somewhere, the right treatment is to deal directly with the symptom. The essential thing could be that the symptom is there because the nervous system is incapable of functioning. Thus the heart can be affected simply because the nervous system has become incapable of functioning in the area where it ought to support the movement of the heart. It is quite unnecessary to maltreat the heart or, as the case may be, the stomach, for they may, in principle, have nothing directly the matter with them, for it is only the nerves that provide for them which are incapable of carrying out their job. If in a case like this the stomach complaint is treated with hydrochloric acid, it would be a mistake comparable to tinkering with an engine that is always running late because you think something is the matter with it—yet it still runs late. For you would find, on closer examination, that the engine-driver always gets drunk before driving; so you would do better to deal with the engine-driver, for the train would be punctual otherwise. So it could well be that with stomach complaints we have to treat the nerves that provide for the stomach instead of the stomach itself. In the domain of materialistic medicine, too, you may perhaps hear various remarks to this effect. But it is not just a matter of saying that with stomach symptoms you have to deal with the nerves first. This achieves nothing. You only achieve something when you know that the nerve is the expression of the astral body and seek for the causes in the irregularities to be found there. The question is, what is the main thing?

The first thing to consider in the treatment of this sort of complaint is diet and finding the right balance between what a person enjoys and what is good for him. What matters is his way of life, not with regard to externalities but regarding what has to be digested and worked through by him, and in this respect nobody can possibly know anything on the basis of purely materialistic science. We need to realise that everything around us in the wide world of the macrocosm has a relationship with our complicated inner world of the microcosm, and every kind of food there is has a definite connection with what is within our organism. We have heard often enough that man has passed through a long evolution, and how the whole of outside nature has been built up out of what has been thrust forth from man. Time and again in our studies we have gone back to the ancient Saturn period, where we found that there was nothing in existence apart from man, who, as it were, thrust forth the other kingdoms of nature: the plants, the animals, and so on. In that evolution man built up his organs in accordance with what they thrust forth. Even when the mineral kingdom was pushed out, certain specific inner organs arose. The heart could not have arisen if certain plants, minerals and mineral possibilities had not arisen externally in the course of time. Now what arose externally has a certain connection with what arose within. And only the person who knows of this connection can prescribe in individual cases how the macrocosmic element outside can be used in the microcosm, otherwise man will experience in a certain way that he is taking in something that is not right for him. So we have to turn to spiritual science for the actual basis of our judgment. It is always superficial to follow purely external laws taken from statistics or chemistry when prescribing dietary treatment. We need quite a different basis, for spiritual knowledge has to be active when we deal with man in health or sickness.

Then there are those types of illness, partly chronic and partly acute, which are connected with the human etheric body, and which therefore come to expression in man's glands. As a rule these illnesses have nothing to do with heredity, but a great deal to do with nationality and race. So that in the case of the illnesses originating in the etheric body and appearing as glandular complaints, we must always ask whether the illness is occurring in a Russian, an Italian, a Norwegian or a Frenchman. For these illnesses are connected with the national character and therefore take quite different forms. Thus for example a great mistake is being made in the field of medicine, for over the whole of Western Europe they have a completely wrong view of spinal consumption. Although they have the right judgment of it for the West [Europeans, they are quite wrong about it where the East European population is concerned, because it has quite a different origin there, as even these things still vary considerably nowadays. Now you will realise that the mixture of peoples affords us a certain survey. Only the person who can distinguish differences in human nature can make any judgment at all. These illnesses are simply treated externally today and lumped together with acute illnesses, whilst they really belong to quite a different field. Above all we must know that the human organs that come under the influence of the etheric body, and which can fall sick as a result of irregularities of the etheric body, have quite definite relationships with one another. There is for instance a certain relationship between a man's heart and his brain which can be described in a somewhat pictorial way by saying that this mutual relationship of the heart and the brain corresponds to the relationship of the sun and the moon—the heart being the sun and the brain the moon. So we have to know, if a disturbance occurs in the heart for instance, that in so far as this is rooted in the etheric body it is bound to have an effect on the brain. Just as when something happens on the sun, an eclipse for instance, the moon is bound to be affected. It is no different, for these things have a direct connection.

In occult medicine these things are also described by applying the images of the planets to the constellation of man's organs. Thus the heart is the sun, the brain the moon, the spleen saturn, the liver jupiter, the gall mars, the kidneys venus and the lungs mercury. If you study the mutual relationships of the planets you have an image of the mutual relationships of man's organs in so far as they are in the etheric body. The gall could not possibly ail—and this would show spiritually in the etheric body—without the illness having its effect on the other organs mentioned, in fact if the gall is described as mars, its effect would be similar to the effect of mars in our planetary system. You have to know the interconnections of the organs when there is an etheric illness, and yet these are principally those illnesses—and from this you will see that any form of one-sidedness must be avoided in the field of occultism—for which specific remedies are to be used. This is the place to use the remedies you find in the plants and minerals. For everything belonging to the plants and minerals has a profound importance for everything to do with the human etheric body. So when we know an illness has arisen in the etheric body, and it appears in a certain way in the glandular system, we must find the remedy that can correctly repair the complex of interconnections. Particularly with those illnesses where the first thing you have to look for is obviously whether they originate in the etheric body, and secondly whether they are connected with the national character, and all the organs are interconnected in a regular way, these illnesses are the first ones for which specific remedies can be used.

Now perhaps what you are imagining is that if it is necessary to send a person to another place, you will not be able to help him as a rule if he is tied to a job and cannot move. The psychological method is indeed always effective. What is called the psychological method works best of all when the Illness is actually in a person's ego being. Thus when a chronic illness of this type occurs, one that is in the blood, psychological remedies are justified. And if they are carried out in the right way, their effect on the ego will entirely compensate for what impinges on him from outside. Wherever you look you will be able to see the subtle connection between what a man experiences in his soul when he is habitually working behind a work bench and when he gets the chance to enjoy country air for a short while. The joy that lends wings to his soul can be called a psychological method in the widest sense. Then, if the therapist is carrying out his method properly, he can gradually exercise his own influence in place of this, and psychological methods have their strongest justification for this form of illness and should not be overlooked, because most of the illnesses came from an irregularity of the ego being of man.

Then we come to the illnesses arising out of irregularities of the astral body. Although purely psychological methods can be used, they certainly lose their greatest value, therefore they are seldom used for these. Dietary remedies apply here. The type of illness we described in third place are actually the first in which we are justified in using external medicines to assist the course of recovery. If we see man as the complicated being he is, the treatment of illnesses will also be a broad-minded one, and one-sidedness will be avoided.

The only illnesses left now are those that actually originate in the physical body itself, having to do with the physical body, and these are the actual infectious diseases. This is an important chapter and will be considered in greater detail in one of the coming lectures, after we have first of all dealt with the real origin of “Ten Commandments”. For you will see that this really has a connection. Today, therefore, I can only just mention that there is this fourth type of illness, and that a deeper understanding of these involves knowing the nature of everything connected with the human physical body. The basis of these illnesses is not physical but very much of a spiritual nature. When we have looked at the fourth type we shall still not have finished with all the important illnesses, for we shall see that human karma also plays in. That is a fifth category to be considered.

Let us say, then, that we shall gradually attain an understanding of the five different forms of human illness, that stem from the ego, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, and also from karmic causes. The sphere of medicine will not improve until this whole sphere includes a knowledge of the higher members of man's being. Up to now we have not had a medical practice that has really come to grips with what is at stake. Although, as with many another occult insight, these things have to be brought up to date and put in a modern form, you must realise that this wisdom is, in some respects, not new.

Medicine arose from spiritual knowledge and has become more and more materialistic. And perhaps in no other science can we see so clearly how materialism has overtaken mankind. In earlier times people were at least conscious of the fact that they had to have a knowledge of man's fourfold being in order to understand it. There have been instances of materialism before, of course, and even earlier than four hundred years ago clairvoyants observed materialistic thinking arising all around them in this sphere. Paracelsus, for instance, who is taken for a madman or dreamer and not understood at all today, drew full attention to the increasing materialism of medical science centred in Salerno, Montpellier, Paris and also certain parts of Germany. And just because of his responsible position in the world, Paracelsus felt compelled—as we do today—to draw attention to the difference between medicine based on spiritual knowledge or on materialism. Perhaps it is even more difficult nowadays to achieve anything with paracelsian thinking. For in those days the materialistic approach to medicine was not so rigidly opposed to the paracelsian approach as materialistic science is today to any insight into the real, spiritual nature of man. What Paracelsus said about this, therefore, still applies today, though its significance would be less readily recognised. If we look at the opinions held today by the people working at the dissecting benches and in laboratories, and at the way research is applied to the understanding of man in health and in sickness, we could, to a certain extent, react similarly to the way Paracelsus did. It might not be appropriate, though, to add a plea for understanding and forgiveness, too, perhaps, as Paracelsus did to his local contemporaries in the medical sphere—that is, with any real hope of forgiveness. For Paracelsus himself said he was not a man of good breeding, nor had he moved in high circles; he lacked grace and refinement, therefore he would be forgiven if what he said was not always couched in the best language. Whilst discoursing on the nature of the different illnesses Paracelsus said the following about the foreign and also the German medical doctors: “It is a bad business, all those foreign doctors, to name those in Montpellier, Salerno and Paris, who want to have all the credit and pour scorn on everybody else, yet they themselves know nothing and can do nothing, and it is common knowledge that it is nothing but talk and show. They are not ashamed of their enemas and purgatives, and rely on them even if the patient is dying. They boast about all the anatomy they know, and they cannot even see the tartar on people's teeth, let alone anything else. Fine doctors they are, even without spectacles on their noses. What kind of eyesight and anatomy have you got? You can do no earthly good with them, and see no further than your own noses. They work so hard, too, those German swindlers and thieves of doctors and newly-hatched fools, that when they have seen everything, they know less than they did before. So they choke in filth and corpses and afterwards put on holy airs—they ought to be thrown to the rabble!”