The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When some time ago the first volume of Spengler's Decline of the West appeared, there could be discerned in this literary production something like the will to tackle more intensively the elemental phenomena of decay and decline in our time. Here is a man who felt in much that is now active in the whole western world an impulse toward decline that must necessarily lead to a condition of utter chaos in western civilization, including America; and it could be seen that the man who had developed such a feeling—a very well-informed person, indeed, with mastery of many scientific ideas—was making the effort to present a sort of analysis of these phenomena.

It is clear, of course, that Spengler recognized this decline; and it is evident also that he had a feeling for everything of a declining nature exactly because all his thinking was itself involved in this decline; and because he felt this decadence in his very soul, I might say, he anticipated nothing but decadence as the outcome of all mass civilization. That is comprehensible. He believed that the West will become the prey of a kind of Caesarism, a sort of development of individual power, which will replace the differentiated, highly-organized cultures and civilizations with simple brute-force.

It is evident that Spengler, for one, had not the slightest perception of the fact that salvation for this western culture and civilization can come out of the will of mankind, if this will, in opposition to all that is moving headlong toward destruction, is directed toward the realization of something that can yet be brought forth out of the soul of man as a new force, if the human being of today wills it so. Of such a new force—naturally a spiritual force, based on spiritual activity—Oswald Spengler had not the slightest understanding.

Thus we can see that a very well-informed, brilliant man, with a certain penetrating insight, and able to coin such telling phrases, can actually arrive at nothing beyond a certain hope for the unfolding of a brute-power, which is remote from everything spiritual, from all inner human striving, and which depends entirely upon the development of external brutish force.

However, when the first volume appeared, it was possible to have at least a certain respect for the penetrating spirituality (I must use the expression again)—an abstract, intellectualistic spirituality—as opposed to the obtuseness of thinking which by no means is equal to the driving forces of history, but which so often gives the keynote to the literature of today.

Oswald Spengler's second volume has now appeared, and this indeed points out much more forcefully all that lives in a man of the present which can become his world-conception and philosophy, while he himself rejects, with a sort of brutality, everything genuinely spiritual. This second volume is likewise brilliant; yet in spite of his clever observations, Spengler shows nothing more than the dreadful sterility of an excessively abstract and intellectualistic mode of thought. The matter is extraordinarily noteworthy because it shows what a peculiar configuration of spirit can be attained by an undeniably notable personality of today.

In this second volume of Spengler's Decline of the West, it is primarily the beginning and the end that are of exceptional interest. But it is a melancholy interest which this beginning and end arouse; they really characterize the whole state of this man's soul. You need to read only a sentence or two at the beginning in order to estimate at once the soul-situation of Oswald Spengler, and likewise of many other people of the present time. What is to be said of it has not merely a German-literary significance, but an altogether international one.

Spengler begins with the following sentence: [The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler; Volume II: Perspectives of World History. Translated by Atkinson (Knopf). The above citation, however, and all others used herein are translated from the original of Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, by the translator of this lecture. Ed.] “Observe the flowers in the evening, when in the setting sun they close one after the other; something sinister oppresses you then, a feeling of puzzling anxiety in the presence of this blind, dreamlike existence bound to the earth. The mute forest, the silent meadows, yonder bush, and these tendrils, do not stir. It is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free. It still dances in the evening light; it moves whither it will,” and so on.

Notice the starting-point from the flowers, from the plants. Now when I have wished to point to what gives its significance to the thinking of the present, I have again and again found it necessary to begin with the kind of comprehension applied today to lifeless, inorganic, mineral nature. Perhaps some of you will remember that in order to characterize the striving of present-day thinking for clarity of view, I have often used the example of the impact of two resilient balls, where from the given condition of one ball you can deduce the condition of the other by pure calculation.

Of course, anyone of the Spenglerian soul-caliber can say that ordinary thinking does not discover how resilience works in these balls, nor what the relations are in a deeper sense. Anyone who thinks thus does not understand upon what clarity of thought depends at the present time. For such an objection would have neither greater validity nor less than would an assertion by someone that it is impossible for me to understand a sentence written down on paper without first having investigated the composition of the ink with which it is written. The important thing is always to discover the point at issue. In surveying inorganic nature, the matter of concern is not what may eventually be discovered behind it as force-impulse, just as the composition of the ink is not the important thing for the understanding of a sentence written with it; but the matter of importance is whether clear thinking is employed.

This definite kind of thinking is what humanity has achieved since the time of Galileo and Copernicus. It shows first that man can grasp by means of it only lifeless, inorganic nature; but that, on the other hand, only by yielding himself to it, as to the simplest and most primitive kind of pure thinking, can he develop freedom of the human soul, or any kind of freedom for man. Only one who understands the character of clear, objective thinking, as it holds sway in lifeless nature, can later rise to the other processes of thinking and of seeing—to that which permeates thought with vision, with inspiration, with imagination, with intuition.

Therefore, the first task confronting one who wishes to speak today with any authority on the ultimate configuration of our cultural life is to observe what it is that the power of present-day thinking rests upon. And those who have become aware of this power in the thinking of our time know that this thinking is active in the machine, that it has brought us modern technical sciences, in which by means of this thinking we construct external, lifeless, inorganic sequences, all of whose pseudo-intelligence is intended to contribute to the outer activities of man.

Only one who understands this begins to realize that the moment we start to deal with plant-life, this kind of thinking, grasped at first in its abstractness, leads to utter nonsense. Anyone who uses this kind of crystal-clear thinking—appropriate in its abstractness to the mineral world alone—not as a mere starting point for the development of human freedom, but instead employs it in thinking about the plant-world, will have before him in the plant-world something nebulous, obscure, mystical, which he cannot comprehend. For as soon as we look up to the plant-world we must understand that here—at least to the degree intended by Goethe with his primordial-plant (Urpflanze), and with the principle by means of which he traced the metamorphosis of this primordial-plant through all plant-forms—here at least in this Goethean sense, everyone who approaches the plant-world with a recognition of the real force of the thought holding sway in the inorganic world must perceive that the plant-world remains obscure and mystical in the worst sense of our time, unless it is approached with imagination—at least in the sense in which Goethe established his botanical views.

When anyone like Oswald Spengler rejects imaginative cognition and yet starts describing the plant-world in this way, he reaches nothing that will give clarity and force, but only a kind of confused thinking, a mysticism in the very worst sense of the word, namely materialistic mysticism. And if this has to be said about the beginning of the book, the end of it is in turn characterized by the beginning. The end of this book deals with the machine, with that which has given the very signature to modern civilization—the machine, which on the one hand is foreign to man's nature, yet is on the other precisely the means by which he has developed his clear thinking.

Some time ago—directly after the appearance of Oswald Spengler's book, and under the impression of the effect it was having—I gave a lecture at the College of Technical Sciences in Stuttgart on Anthroposophy and, the Technical Sciences, in order to show that precisely by submersion in technical science the human being develops that configuration of his soul-life which makes him free. I showed that, because in the mechanical world he experiences the obliteration of all spirituality, he receives in this same mechanical world the impulse to bring forth spirituality out of his own being through inner effort. Anyone, therefore, who comprehends the significance of the machine for our whole present civilization can only say to himself: This machine, with its impertinent pseudo-intelligence, with its dreadful, brutal, demonic spiritlessness, compels the human being, when he rightly understands himself, to bring forth from within those germs of spirituality that are in him. By means of the contrast the machine compels the human being to develop spiritual life.

But as a matter of fact, what I wished to bring out in that lecture was understood by no one, as I was able to learn from the after-effects.

Oswald Spengler places at the conclusion of his work some observations about the machine. Well, what you read there about the machine finally leads to a sort of glorification of the fear of it. We feel that what is said is positively the apex of modern superstition regarding the machine, which people feel as something demonic, as certain superstitious people sense the presence of demons. Spengler describes the inventor of the machine, tells how it has gradually gained ground, and little by little has laid hold of civilization. He describes the people in whose age the machine appeared.

“But for all of them there also existed the really Faustian danger that the devil might have a hand in the game, in order to lead them in spirit to that mountain where he promised them all earthly power. That is what is meant by the dream of those strange Dominicans, like Peter Peregrinus, about the perpetual motion device, through which God would have been robbed of His omnipotence. They succumbed to this ambition again and again; they extorted his secret from the Divinity in order to be God themselves.”

So Oswald Spengler understands the matter thus: that because man can now control machines, he can through this very act of controlling, imagine himself to be a God, can learn to be a God, because, according to his opinion, the God of the cosmic machine controls the machine. How could a man help feeling exalted to godhood when he controls a microcosm!

“They hearkened to the laws of the cosmic time-beat in order to do them violence, and then they created the idea of the machine as a little cosmos which yields obedience only to the will of man. But in doing so they overstepped that subtle boundary where, according to the adoring piety of others, sin began; and that was their undoing, from Bacon to Giordano Bruno. True faith has always held that the machine is of the devil.” Now he evidently intends at this point to be merely ironic; but that he intends to be not only ironic becomes apparent when in his brilliant way he uses words which sound somewhat antiquated. The following passage shows this:

“Then follows, however, contemporaneously with Rationalism, the invention of the steam-engine, which overturns everything and transforms the economic picture from the ground up. Till then nature had given service; now it is harnessed in the yoke as a slave, and its work measured, as in derision, in terms of horse-power. We passed over from the muscular strength of the negro, employed in organized enterprise, to the organic forces of the earth's crust, where the life-force of thousands of years lies stored as coal, and we now direct our attention to inorganic nature, whose waterpower has already been harnessed in support of the coal. Along with the millions and billions of horse-power the population increases as no other civilization would have considered possible. This growth is a product of the machine, which demands service and control, in return for which it increases the power of each individual a hundredfold. Human life becomes precious for the sake of the machine. Work becomes the great word in ethical thinking. During the eighteenth century it lost its derogatory significance in all languages. The machine works and compels man to work with it. All civilization has come into a degree of activity under which the earth quivers.

“What has been developed in the course of scarcely a century is a spectacle of such magnitude that to human beings of a future culture, with different souls and different emotions, it must seem that at that time nature reeled. In previous ages, politics has passed over cities and peoples; human economy has interfered greatly with the destinies of the animal and plant world—but that merely touches life and is effaced again. This technical science, however, will leave behind it the mark of its age when everything else shall have been submerged and forgotten. This Faustian passion has altered the picture of the earth's surface.

“And these machines are ever more dehumanized in their formation; they become ever more ascetic, more mystical and esoteric. They wrap the earth about with an endless web of delicate forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever more immaterial, even more silent. These wheels, cylinders and levers no longer speak. All the crucial parts have withdrawn to the inside. Man senses the machine as something devilish, and rightly so. For a believer it indicates the deposition of God. It hands over sacred causality to man, and becomes silent, irresistible, with a sort of prophetic omniscience set in motion by him.

“Never has the microcosm felt more superior toward the macrocosm. Here are little living beings who, through their spiritual force, have made the unliving dependent upon them. There seems to be nothing to equal this triumph, achieved by only one culture, and, perhaps, for only a few centuries. But precisely because of it the Faustian man has become the slave of his own creation.”

We see here the thinker's complete helplessness with regard to the machine. It never dawns on him that there is nothing in the machine that could possibly be mystical for anyone who conceives the very nature of the unliving as lacking any mystical element.

And thus we see Oswald Spengler beginning with a hazy recital about plants, because he really has no conception at all of the nature and character of present-day cognition—which is closely related to the evolution of the mechanical life—because to him thinking remains only an abstraction, and on this account he is also unable to perceive the function of thinking in anything mechanical. In reality, thinking here becomes an entirely unsubstantial image, so that the human being in the mechanical age may become all the more real, may call forth his soul, his spirit, out of himself by resisting the mechanical. That is the significance of the machine-age for the human being, as well as for world-evolution.

When anyone intending to begin with metaphysical clarity starts out instead with a hazy recital about plants, he does so because in this mood he is in opposition to the machine. That is to say, Oswald Spengler has grasped the function of modern thinking only in its abstractness, and he sets to work on something that remains dark to him, namely, the plant-world.

Now taking the mineral, the plant, the animal, and the human kingdoms, the last-named may be characterized for the present time by saying that since the middle of the fifteenth century we have advanced to the thinking that makes the mineral kingdom transparent to us. So that when we look at the human being of our time, as he is inwardly, as observer of the outer world, we must say that as human being he has at this precise time developed the conception of the mineral kingdom. But then we must characterize the significance of this mineral-thinking in the way I have just now characterized it.

But when someone who knows nothing of the real nature of the mineral kingdom takes his start from the plant kingdom, he gets no farther than the animal kingdom. For the animal bears in itself the plant-nature in the same form we today bear the mineral nature. It is characteristic of Oswald Spengler, first, that he begins with the plant, and in his concepts in no way gets beyond the animal (he deals with man only in so far as man is an animal) ; and second, that thinking really seems to him to be extraordinarily comprehensible, whereas, in reality, as I have just explained, it has been understood in its true significance only since the fourteenth century. He thus lets his thinking slide down just as far as possible into the animal world. We see him discovering, for example, that he has sense-perception, just as has the animal, and that this sense-perception, even in the animal, becomes a sort of judgment. In this way he tries to represent thinking merely as something like an intensification of the perceptive life of the animal.

Actually no one has proved in such a radical way as this same Oswald Spengler that the man of today with his abstract thinking reaches only the extra-human world, and no longer comprehends the human. And the essential characteristic of the human being, namely, that he can think, Oswald Spengler regards only as a sort of adjunct, which is inexplicable and really superfluous. For, according to Spengler, this thinking is really something highly superfluous in man.

“Understanding emancipated from feeling is called thinking. Thinking has forever brought disunion into the human waking state. It has always regarded the intellect and the perceptive faculty as the high and the low soul-forces. It has created the fatal contrast between the light-world of the eye, which is designated as a world of semblance and sense-delusion, and a literally-imagined world, in which concepts with slight but ever-present accent of light pursue their existence.”

Now in setting forth these things Spengler develops an extraordinarily curious idea; namely, that in reality the whole spiritual civilization of man depends upon the eye, that it is really only distilled from the light-world, and concepts are only somewhat refined, somewhat distilled, visions in the light, which are transmitted through the eye. Oswald Spengler simply has no idea that thinking, when it is pure thought, not only receives the light-world of the eye, but unites this light-world with the whole man. It is an entirely different matter whether we think of an entity which is connected with the perception of the eye, or speak of conceptions or mental pictures. Spengler has something to say also about conceptions, or mental pictures (Vorstellen); but at this very point he tries to prove that thinking is only a sort of brain-dream and rarified light-world in man.

Now I should like to know whether with any kind of thinking that is not abstract, but is sound common sense, the word “stellen” (to put or place), when it is experienced correctly, can ever be associated with anything belonging to the light-world. A man “places” himself with his legs; the whole man is included. When we say “vorstellen” (to place before, to represent), we dynamically unite the light-entity with what we experience within as something dynamic, as a force-effect, as something that plunges down into reality. With realistic thinking, we absolutely dive down into reality. Consider the most important thoughts. Aside from mathematical ones, thoughts always lead to the realization that in them we have not merely a light-air-organism, but also something which man has as soul-experience when he causes a thought to be illuminated at the same time that he places both feet on the earth.

Therefore, all that Oswald Spengler has developed here about this light-world transformed into thinking is really nothing but exceedingly clever talk. It is absolutely necessary that this should be stated: the introduction to this second volume is brilliant twaddle, which then rises to such assertions as the following:

“This impoverishment of the sense-faculties involves at the same time an immeasurable deepening. The human waking existence is no longer mere tension between the body and the surrounding world. It is now life in a closed, surrounding light-world. The body moves in observable space. The experience of depth is a mighty penetration into visible distances from a light-center. This is the point which we call ‘I’, ‘I’ is a light-concept.”

Anyone who asserts that “I” is a light-concept has no idea, for example, how intimately connected is the experience of the I with the experience of gravity in the human organism; he has no notion at all of the experience of the mechanical that can arise in the human organism. But when it does arise consciously, then the leap is made from abstract thinking to the realistic, concrete thinking that leads to reality.

It might be said that Oswald Spengler is a perfect example of the fact that abstract thinking has become airy, and also light, and has carried the whole human being away from reality, so that he reels about somewhere in the light and has no suspicion that there is also gravity; for example—that there is also something that can be experienced, not merely looked at. The onlooker standpoint of John Stuart Mill, for instance, is here carried to the extreme. Therefore, the book is exceedingly characteristic of our time.

One sentence on page 13 [Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Vol. II.] appears terribly clever, but it is really only light and airy: “One fashions conception upon conception and finally achieves a thought-architecture in great style, whose edifices stand there in an inner light, as it were, in complete distinctness.”

So Oswald Spengler starts out with mere phraseology. He finds the plant-world “sleeping”; that represents first of all the world around us, which is thoroughly asleep. He finds that the world “wakes up” in the animal kingdom, and that the animal develops in itself a kind of microcosm. He gets no farther than the animal, but develops only the relation between the plant-world and the animal-world, and finds the former in the sleeping state and the latter in the waking state.

But everything that happens in the world really comes about under the influence of what is sleeping. The animal—therefore, for Oswald Spengler, man also—has sleep in himself. That is true. But all that has significance for the world proceeds from sleep, for sleep contains movement. The waking state contains only tensions—tensions which beget all sorts of discrepancies within, but still only tensions which are, as it were, just one more external item in the universe. Actually, an independent reality is one which arises from sleep.

And in this broth float all sorts of more or less superfluous, or savory and unsavory blobs of grease—which is the animal element; but there could be broth without these blobs of grease, except that these bring something into reality. In sleep the Where and the How are not to be found, but only the When and the Why. So that we find the following in the human being, who contains the plantlike as well—of the role played by the mineral element in the human being Oswald Spengler has no notion—so that in man we find the following: in as far as he is plantlike, he lives in time; he takes his stand in the “When” and the “Why,” the earlier being the Why of the later. That is the causal factor. And by living on thus through history man really expresses the plantlike in history. The animal-element—and therefore the human as well—which inquires as to the “Where” and the “How,” these (the animal and human elements) are just the blobs of grease that are added to it. (This is quite interesting as far as the inner tensions are concerned, but these really have nothing to do with what takes place in the world.) So we can say: Through cosmic relationships the “When” and the “Why” are implanted in the world for succeeding ages.

And in this on-flowing broth the grease-blobs float with their “Where” and “How.” And when a man—just one such drop of grease—floats in this broth, the “Where” and the “How” really concern only him and his inner tensions, his waking existence. What he does as a historical being proceeds from sleep.

Long ago it was said as a sort of religious imagination: The Lord giveth to his beloved in sleep. To the Spenglerian man it is nature that gives in sleep. Such is the thinking of one of the most prominent personalities of the present time, who, however—in order to avoid coming to terms with himself—plunges into the plant kingdom, thence to emerge no farther than the animal kingdom, into which the human also is stirred.

Now one would suppose that this concoction with its cleverness would avoid the worst blunders that thinking has made in the past; that is, that it would somehow be consistent. If the plant-existence is to be poured out over the history of humanity, then let the concoction be confined to the plant kingdom. It would be difficult, however, to enter upon a historical discussion concerning the man of the plant kingdom. Yet Oswald Spengler does discuss historically, even very cleverly, the plantlike activity of humanity during sleep. But in order that he may have something to say about this sleep of humanity, he makes use of the worst possible kind of thinking, namely, that of anthropomorphism, artificially distorting everything, imagining human qualities into everything. Hence, he speaks—as early as on page 9—of the plant, which has no waking-existence, because he wants to learn from it how he is to write history, and also give a description of the activity of man that arises from sleep.

But let us read the first sentences on page 9: “A plant leads an existence with no waking state”—Good. He means: “In sleep all beings become plants,” that is, man as well as animal—All right.—“the tension with the surrounding world is released, the measure of life moves on.” And now comes a great sentence: “A plant knows only the relation to When and Why.” Now the plant begins not only to dream, but to “know” in its blessed sleep. Thus one faces the conjecture that this sleep, destined to spread perpetually as history in human evolution, might now begin to wake up. For then Oswald Spengler could just as well write a history as to attribute to the plants a knowledge of When and Why. Indeed this sleep-nature of the plant has even some highly interesting qualities:

“The thrusting of the first green spears out of the winter-earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole force of blossoming, of fragrance, of glowing, of ripening—this is all desire for the fulfilment of a destiny and a constantly yearning query as to the Why.”

Of course history can very easily be described as plantlike, if the writer first prepares himself to that end through anthropomorphisms. And because all this is so, Oswald Spengler says further:

“The Where can have no meaning for the plantlike existence. That is the question with which the awakening human being daily recalls his world. For only the pulse-beat of existence persists through all the generations. The waking existence begins anew with each microcosm. That is the distinction between procreation and birth. The one is guarantee for permanence, the other is a beginning. And therefore, a plant is procreated but not born. It exists, but no awakening, no first day, spreads a sense-world around it ...”

If anyone wishes to follow Spenglerian thoughts, he must really, like a tumbler, first stand on his head and then turn over, in order mentally to reverse what is thought of in the human sense as right side up. But you see by concocting such

metaphysics, such a philosophy, Spengler arrives at the following: This sleeping state in man, that which is plantlike in him, this makes history. What is this in man? The blood—the blood which flows through the generations.

Well, in this way Spengler prepares a method for himself, so that he can say: The most important events developed in human history occur through the blood. To do this he must of course cut some more thought-capers:

“The waking existence is synonymous with ‘ascertaining’ (Feststellen), no matter whether the point in question is the sense of touch in one of the infusoria or human thinking of the highest order.”

Certainly when anyone thinks in such an abstract way, he simply fails to discover the difference between the sense of touch in one of the infusoria and human thinking of the highest order. He comes then to all sorts of extraordinarily strange assertions, such as: that this thinking is really a mere adjunct to the whole human life, that deeds originate in the blood, and that out of the blood history is made. And if there are still a few people who ponder about this, they do so with purely abstract thinking that has nothing whatever to do with actuality.

“That we not only live, but know about life, is the result of that observation of our corporeal being in the light. But the animal knows only life, not death.”

And so he explains that the thing of importance must come forth out of obscurity, darkness, out of the plantlike, out of the blood; and he claims that those people who have achieved anything in history have done so not at all as the result of an idea, of thinking—but that thoughts, even those of thinkers, are merely a by-product. About what thinking accomplishes, Oswald Spengler has no words disparaging enough.

And then he contrasts with thinkers all those who really act, because they let thinking be thinking; that is, let it be the business of others.

“Some people are born as men of destiny and others as men of causality. The man who is really alive, the peasant and warrior, the statesman, general, man of the world, merchant, everyone who wishes to become rich, to command, to rule, to fight, to take risks, the organizer, the contractor, the adventurer, the fencer, the gambler, is a world apart from the ‘spiritual’ man” (Spengler puts ‘spiritual’ in quotation marks), “from the saint, the priest, the scholar, idealist, ideologist, regardless of whether he is destined thereto by the power of his thinking or through lack of blood. Existence and being awake, measure and tension, instincts and concepts, the organs of circulation and those of touch—there will seldom be a man of eminence in whom the one side does not unquestionably surpass the other in significance.

“... the active person is a complete human being. In the contemplative person a single organ would like to act without the body or against it. For only the active man, the man of destiny” (that is, one whom thoughts do not concern)—“for only the active man, the man of destiny, lives, in the last analysis, in the real world, the world of political, military, and economic crises, in which concepts and theories count for nothing. Here a good blow is worth more than a good conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which the soldiers and statesmen of all times have looked down on the scribbler and the book-worm, who has the idea that world-history exists for the sake of the spirit, of science, or even of art.”

That is a plain statement; in fact, plain enough for anyone to recognize who said it: that it is definitely written by none other than a “scribbler and book-worm,” who merely puts on airs at the expense of others. Only a “scribbler and bookworm” could write:

“Some people are born as men of destiny and some as men of causality. The man who is really alive, the peasant and warrior, the statesman, general, man of the world, merchant, everyone who wishes to become rich, to command, to rule, to fight, to take risks, the organizer, the contractor, the adventurer, the fencer, the gambler, is a world apart from the ‘spiritual’ man, from the saint, the priest, the scholar, idealist, ideologist” ... As if there had never been confessionals and father confessors! Indeed, there are still other beings from whom all those classes of men glean their thoughts. In the society of all such people as have been mentioned—statesmen, generals, men of the world, merchants, fencers, gamblers, and so on—there have even been found soothsayers and fortune-tellers. So that actually the “world” that is supposed to separate the statesman, politician, etc., from the “spiritual” man is in reality not such an enormous distance. Anyone who can observe life will find that this sort of thing is written with utter disregard of all life-observation. And Oswald Spengler, who is a brilliant man and an eminent personality, makes a thorough job of it. After saying that in the realm of real events a blow is worth more than a logical conclusion, he continues thus:

“Here a good blow is worth more than a good conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which the soldiers and statesmen of all times have looked down on the scribbler and the book-worm, who has the idea that world-history exists for the sake of the spirit, of science, or even of art. Let us speak unequivocally: Understanding liberated from feeling is only one side of life, and not the decisive side. In the history of western thought, the name of Napoleon may be omitted, but in actual history Archimedes, with all his scientific discoveries, has perhaps been less influential than that soldier who slew him at the storming of Syracuse.”

Now if a brick had fallen on the head of Archimedes, then, according to this theory, this brick would be more important, in the sense of real logical history, than all that originated with Archimedes. And mind you, this was not written by an ordinary journalist, but by one of the most clever people of the present time. That is exactly the significant point, that one of the cleverest men of the present writes in this way.

And now exactly what is effective? Thinking? That just floats on top. What is effective is the blood. Anyone who speaks about the blood from the spiritual viewpoint, that is, speaks scientifically, will ask first of all how the blood originates, how the blood is related to man's nourishment. In the bowels blood does not yet exist; it is first created inside the human being himself. The flow of the blood down through the generations—well, if any kind of poor mystical idea can be formed, this is it. Nothing that nebulous mystics have ever said more or less distinctly about the inner soul-life was such poor mysticism as this Spenglerian mysticism of the blood. It refers to something that precludes all possibility, not only of thinking about it—of course that would make no difference to Oswald Spengler, because no one really needs to think, it is just one of the luxuries of life—but one should cease to speak about anything so difficult to approach as the blood, if one pretends to be an intelligent person, or even an intelligent higher animal.

From this point of view, it is perfectly possible, then, to inaugurate a consideration of history with the following sentence:

“All great historical events are sustained by such beings of a cosmic nature, as dwell in peoples, parties, armies, classes; while the history of the spirit runs its course in loose associations and circles, schools, educational classes, tendencies—in ‘isms.’ And here it is again a matter of destiny whether such a group finds a leader at the decisive moment of its greatest efficiency, or is blindly driven forward, whether the chance leaders are men of high caliber or totally insignificant personalities raised to the summit by the surge of events, like Pompey or Robespierre. It is the mark of the statesman that he comprehends with complete clarity the strength and permanence, direction and purpose of all these soul-masses which form and dissolve in the stream of time; nevertheless, here also it is a question of chance as to whether he will be able to rule them, or is dragged along by them.” In this way a consideration of history is inaugurated which lets the blood be the conqueror of everything that enters historical evolution through the spirit! Now:

“One power may be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and against money, there is no other” (but blood, he means). “Money is vanquished and deposed only by blood. Life is the first and last, the illimitable cosmic flux in microcosmic form. It is the fact in the world as history. Before the irresistible rhythm of successive generations, everything that the waking life has built up in its worlds of spirit finally disappears. The fact of importance in history is life, always only life, the race, the triumph of the will to power, and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money. World-history is world-judgment. It has always decided in favor of life that was more vigorous, fuller, more sure of itself, in favor, that is, of the right to live, whether it was just or not in the waking life; and it has always sacrificed truth and righteousness to power, to race, and has condemned to death men and whole peoples to whom truth was more precious than deeds, and justice more essential than power. Thus another drama of lofty culture, this whole wonderful world of divinities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities, closes with the primeval facts of the eternal blood, which is one and the same with the eternally circling, cosmic, undulating flood. The clear, form-filled waking existence plunges again into the silent service of life, as demonstrated by the Chinese epoch and by the Roman Empire. Time conquers space, and time it is whose inexorable passage imbeds on this planet the fleeting incident—culture, in the incident—man, a form in which the incident—life, flows along for a time, while behind it in the light-world of our eyes appear the flowing horizons of earth-history and star-history.

“For us, however, whom destiny has placed in this culture at this moment of its evolution when money celebrates its last victories, and its successor, Caesarism, stealthily and irresistibly approaches, the direction is given within narrow limits which willing and compulsion must follow, if life is to be worth living.”

Thus does Oswald Spengler point to the coming Caesarism, to that which is to come before the complete collapse of the cultures of the West, and into which the present culture will be transformed.

I have put this before you today because truly the man who is awake—he matters little to Oswald Spengler—the man who is awake, even though he be an Anthroposophist, should take some account of what is happening. And so I wished from this point of view to draw your attention to a particular problem of the time. But it would be a poor conclusion if I were to say only this to you concerning this problem of our time. Therefore, before we must have a longer interval for my trip to Oxford, I will give another lecture next week Wednesday.

Certain dread concerning the destiny of humanity in the future may come over one who enters with feelings into the thoughts which occupied us at the close of our last lecture. A picture of this future of humanity was brought before us which on the one hand was great and powerful, filling one with bliss, showing the future condition of the man who has understood the mission of our present age upon the earth, who has received the Christ-spirit and is thereby able to keep pace with the necessary spiritualization of our earth, a glorious blessed picture of those men who are called in exoteric Christianity the “Redeemed,” and, not quite appropriately, the “Elect.” But the opposite picture had also to be put before you, the picture of the abyss in which is found a humanity which was not in a position to receive the Christ-spirit, which remained in matter, which excluded itself, so to speak, from the spiritualizing process leading into the future; and this portion of humanity which has fallen away from the spiritualized earth, and, in a certain sense apart from it, advances towards a frightful fate. When the beast with the seven heads and ten horns glowers at us from the abyss, the beast led astray by the other frightful being, the two-horned beast, this picture gives rise to fear and horror, and many aright ask: “Is it not hard and unwise on the part of Providence to lead a number of men to such a frightful fate, and in a way, to condemn them to the abyss of evil?” And the question might arise, “Would it not have been more fitting for a wise Providence to have averted this frightful fate from the very beginning?”

In answer to these questions, we might, to begin with, say something abstract, theoretical—and it already signifies a great deal for one who can grasp this theoretical statement is his feeling: It is extremely wise that Providence has taken care that this terrible fate is possible for a number of men. For if it were impossible for man to sink into the abyss of evil, he would not have been able to attain what on the one hand we call love and on the other freedom; since to the occultist freedom is inseparably connected with the idea of love. It would be impossible for man to develop either love or freedom without the possibility of sailing down into the abyss. A man unable, of his own free decision, to choose good or evil, would be a being who would only be led on a leading-string to a good which must be attained of necessity and who had no power to choose the good of his own fully purified will, by the love which springs from freedom. If it were impossible for man to follow in the trail of the monster with the two horns, it would also be impossible for him to follow God out of his own individual love. It was in accordance with a wise Providence to give the possibility of freedom to the humanity which has been developing through our planetary system, and this possibility of freedom could be given on no other condition than that man himself has to make the free choice between good and evil.

But this is only an empty theory, you might say, and man rises but slowly to the point where he not only says this in words and accepts it in moments of speculation as a kind of explanation, but also experiences it in his feeling. Seldom does man now rise to the thought, “I thank thee, O wise Providence, that thou hast made it possible for me to bring thee a love which is not forced but springs up free in my own breast: that thou dost not force use to love thee, but that thou hast given me tine choice of following thee.” Nevertheless, man has to rise to this feeling if he wishes really to feel this theoretical explanation. We can, however, offer additional comfort, or, rather, another quieting assurance, from a clairvoyant observation of the world. For it was stated in our last lecture that at the present day, he alone has au almost unalterable tendency to the abyss who is already entangled in some way in the prongs of the two-horned beast, which leads men to the practice of black magic. Even for such as now fall into the arts of black magic it will still be possible to withdraw in the future. But those who do not come at all into any contact with black magic arts (and this is for the time being the case with most people), these may have nevertheless a certain tendency in the period following the War of All against All, towards final evil, but the possibility in the future of turning back again and following the good will be far greater than the compulsion unconditionally to follow evil.

From these lectures it may be seen that for those who now turn to a spiritual conception of the world, in order to live beyond the great War into the sixth epoch (which is represented by the opening of the seals), there is the possibility to receive the Christ-principle. They will be able to receive the spiritual elements which are laid down in the age signified by the community at Philadelphia, and in the near future they will manifest a strong tendency towards becoming spiritual. Those who turn to-day to a spiritual view receive a powerful disposition to enter upon the upward path. One must not fail to recognize how important it is even at the present time that a number of persons should not turn a deaf ear to the anthroposophical world conception, which is bringing to humanity in a fully conscious manner the first germs of spiritual life, whereas formerly this took place unconsciously. That is the important thing, that this portion of humanity should take with it the first conscious tendencies towards the upward movement.

Through a group of people dedicating themselves to-day to the foundation of a great brotherhood which will live over into the epoch of the seven seals, help will be provided for those others, who to-day still turn a deaf ear to the teachings of Spiritual Science. For the present, we have still to go through many incarnations of the present souls before the great War of All against All, and again up to the decisive point after the great War. And afterwards in the epoch of the seals we also have to go through many changes, and men will often have the opportunity to open their hearts to the spiritual world-conception, which is to-day flowing through the anthroposophical Movement. There will be many opportunities, and you must not imagine that future opportunities will only be such as they are to-day. The way in which we are able to make the spiritual view of the world known to others is still very feeble. Even if a man were now to speak in such a way that his voice were to sound forth directly like the fire of the spirit, that would be feeble as compared with the possibilities which will exist in later and more developed bodies in order to direct our fellow-men to this spiritual movement. When humanity as a whole will have developed higher and higher in future ages, there will be very different means through which the spiritual conception of the world will be able to penetrate into men's hearts, and the most fiery word to-day is small and weak compared with what will work in the future to give all souls the possibility of the spiritual conception of the world—all the souls now living in bodies in which no heart beats for this spiritual conception of the world.

We are at the beginning of the spiritual movement, and it will grow. It will require much obduracy and much hardness to close the heart and mind to the powerful impressions of the future. The souls now living in bodies which have the heart to hear and feel Anthroposophy, are now preparing them-selves to live in bodies in the future in which power will be given them to serve their fellow-creatures, who up to that time had been unable to feel this heart beat within them. We are only preparing for the preparers, as yet nothing more. The spiritual movement is to-day but a very small flame; in the future it will develop into a mighty spiritual fire.

When we bring this other picture before our minds, when we let it enter right into our feelings, then there will live in us a very different feeling and a very different possibility of knowledge concerning this fact. To-day it is what we call black magic into which men can, in a certain way, fall consciously or unconsciously. Those who are now living thoughtlessly, who are quite untouched by the spiritual conception of the world, who live in their comfortable everyday torpor and say, “What does it matter to me what these dreaming Anthroposophists say?” these have the least opportunity of coming into the circle of black magic. In their case they are now only neglecting the opportunity to help their fellow-men in the future in their efforts to attain the spiritual life. For themselves they have not yet lost touch. But those who to-day are beginning in an unjustifiable way to oppose the spiritual life, are really taking up into themselves in the very first beginnings the germs of some-thing one might call black magic. There are very few individuals to-day who have already fallen into black magic in the frightful sense in which this horrible art of humanity must really be spoken of.

You will best understand that this really is so if I give you but a slight indication of the way in which black magic is systematic-ally cultivated; then you will see that you may search high and low among all your acquaintances and you will find no one of whom you could believe that he was already inclining to such arts. All the rest is fundamentally only the purest dilettantism which may be easily got rid of in future ages. It is bad enough that in our day things are sometimes praised with the intention to defraud people—which in a certain sense is also the beginning of the art of black magic. It is also bad that certain ideas are percolating, which—although they do not absolutely belong to the black art—nevertheless mislead people; these are the ideas which rule the world to-day in certain, circles and which can flourish amidst materialistic thought, but which although not without danger, will not be irreparable in the next epochs. Only when a man begins to practise the ABC of black magic is he on the dangerous path to the abyss. The ABC consists in the pupil of a black magician being taught to destroy life quite consciously, and in doing so to cause as much pain as possible and to feel a certain satisfaction in it. When the purpose is to stab or to cut into a living being with the intention of feeling pleasure in that being's pain, that is the ABC of the black arts. We cannot touch upon the further stages, but you will find it horrible enough when you are told that the beginning in black magic is to cut and stab into living flesh, not like the vivisector cuts—this is already bad enough, but the principle of vivisection finds its overthrow in the vivisector himself, because in kamaloca he will himself have to feel the pain he has caused his victims, and for this reason will leave vivisection alone in the future. But he who systematically cuts into flesh, and feels satisfaction in it begins to follow the precipitous path of black magic, and this draws him closer and closer to the being described as the two-horned beast.

This seductive being is of quite a different nature from man. It originates from other world periods; it has acquired the tendencies of other world periods and will feel deep satisfaction when it meets with beings such as those evil ones who have refused to take up inwardly the good which can flow from the earth. This being has been unable to receive anything from the earth; it has seen the earthly evolution come but has said, “I have not progressed with the earth in such a way that I can gain anything from earthly existence.” This being could only have got something from the earth by being able to gain the rulership at a certain moment, namely, when the Christ-principle descended to the earth. If the Christ-principle had then been strangled in the germ, if Christ had been overcome by the adversary, it would have been possible for the whole earth to succumb to the Sorath-principle. This, however, did not take place, and so this being has to be content with those who have not inclined towards the Christ-principle, who have remained embedded in matter; they in the future will form his cohorts.

Now in order to understand these hosts more clearly we must consider two ideas which in a certain sense may serve as a key to certain chapters of the Apocalypse. We must study the ideas of the “first death” and the “second death.” What is the first death and what is the second death of man, or of humanity? We must form a clear picture of the ideas which the writer of the Apocalypse connected with these words. To this end we must once more recall to mind the elementary truths concerning human existence.

Consider a human being of the present day. He lives in such a way that from morning when he awakes until evening when he falls asleep he consists of four principles: the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the “I.” We also know that during his earthly existence man works from his “I” upon the lower principles of his being, and that during the earth existence he must succeed in bringing the astral body under the control of the “I.” We know that the earth will be followed by its next incarnation, Jupiter. When main has reached Jupiter he will appear as a different being. The Jupiter-man will have thoroughly worked from his “I” upon his astral body; and when to-day we say, The earth-man who stands before us in the waking condition has developed physical body, etheric body, astral body and “I,” we must say of the Jupiter-man: he will have developed physical body, etheric body, astral body and “I” but he will have changed his astral body into spirit-self. He will live at a higher stage of consciousness, a stage which may be described as follows: The ancient dim-picture-consciousness of the Moon, which existed also in the first epochs of the earth-consciousness, will again be there with its pictures as clairvoyant consciousness, but it will be furnished with the human “I,” so that with this Jupiter-consciousness man will reflect as logically as he does now with his day-consciousness on the earth.

The Jupiter-man therefore will possess spiritual vision of a certain degree. Part of the soul-world will lie open to him; the will perceive the pleasure and pain of those around him in pictures which will arise in his imaginative consciousness. He will there-fore live under entirely different moral conditions. Now imagine that as a Jupiter-man you have a human soul before you. The pain and pleasure of this soul will arise in pictures before you. The pictures of the pair of the other soul will distress you, and if you do not remove the other's pain it will be impossible for you to feel happy. The pictures of sorrow and suffering would torment the Jupiter-man with his exalted consciousness if he were to do nothing to alleviate this sorrow and thus at the same dine remove his own distressing pictures which are nothing but the expression of the sorrow around him! It will not be possible for one to feel pleasure or pain without others also feeling it.

Thus we see that man gains an entirely new state of consciousness in addition to his present “I”-consciousness. If we wish to understand the importance of this in evolution we must once more turn our attention to man when asleep.

During this condition the physical body and etheric body lie on the bed, and his “I” and astral body are outside. During the night (if we speak somewhat inexactly) he callously abandons his physical and etheric bodies. But through being able to liberate himself during the night from his physical and etheric bodies, through being able to live at night in the spiritual world, it is possible for man during this earthly existence to work transformingly from his “I” upon his astral body. How does he do this?

To describe this clearly let us take man in his waking state. Let us suppose that in addition to his professional work and duties he devotes a short time to higher considerations in order to make the great impulses his own which flow from John's Gospel, from the words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God ...” Let us suppose that he allows to rise within him the great pictures brought before him in John's Gospel, so that he is always filled by the thought: “At the beginning of our era a Being lived in Palestine whom I wish to follow. I will so order my life that everything may be approved by this Being; and I will consider myself as a man who has taken this personality as his ideal.” But we need not intolerantly think that John's Gospel alone may be taken. It is possible in many other ways to immerse oneself in something which can fill the soul with such pictures; and although in a certain way we must describe John's Gospel as the greatest revelation which has originated in humanity, which can exercise the most powerful effect, we may, however, say that others who devote themselves to the Vedanta wisdom or immerse themselves in the Bhagavad Gita or in the Dhammapada, will also have sufficient opportunities in following incarnations to come to the Christ-principle just through what they have thus acquired. Let us suppose that during the day a man fills his mind with pictures and ideas such as these, then his astral body is laid hold of by these thoughts, feelings and pictures, and they form forces in his astral body and produce various effects in it. Then when man withdraws from his physical and etheric bodies at night, these effects remain in the astral body, and he who during the day has been able to immerse himself in the pictures and feelings of John's Gospel has produced something in his astral body which during the night appears in it as a powerful effect. In this way man works to-day during the waking consciousness upon his astral body.

Only the Initiate can become conscious of these effects to-day, but men are gradually developing towards this consciousness. Those who reach the goal of the earth evolution will then have an astral body completely permeated by the “I,” and by the spiritual content which it will have formed. They will have this consciousness as a result, as a fruit of the earth evolution, and will carry it over into the Jupiter evolution. We might say that when the Earth period has thus come to an end man will have gained capacities which are symbolically represented by the building of the New Jerusalem. Man will then already look into that picture-world of Jupiter; the spirit-self will then be fully developed in him. That is the goal of the earth evolution. What, then, is man to gain in the course of his earthly evolution? What is the first goal? The transformation of the astral body. This astral body which to-day is always free of the physical and etheric bodies at night will appear in the future as a transformed portion of the human being. Mau brings into it what he gains on the earth; but this would not be sufficient for the earth evolution. Imagine that man were to come out of the physical body and etheric body every night and were to fill his astral body with what he had acquired during the day, but that the physical and etheric bodies were untouched by it. Man would then still not reach his earthly goal. Something else must take place; it must be possible for man during his earthly evolution to imprint, at least in the etheric body, what he has taken into himself. It is necessary for this etheric body also to receive effects from what man develops in his astral body. Man cannot yet of himself work into this etheric body. Upon Jupiter, when he has trans-formed his astral body, he will be able to work into this etheric body also, but to-day he cannot do this; he still needs helpers, so to speak. Upon Jupiter he will be capable of beginning the real work on the etheric body. Upon Venus he will work upon the physical body; this is the part most difficult to overcome. To-day he still has to leave both the physical and etheric bodies every night and emerge from them. But in order that the etheric body may receive its effects, so that man shall gradually learn to work into it, he needs a helper. And the helper who makes this possible is none other than Christ, while we designate the Being who helps man to work into the physical body as the Father. But man cannot work into his physical body before the helper conies who makes it possible to work into the etheric body. “No man cometh to the Father, but by me.” No one acquires the capacity of working into the physical body who has not gone through the Christ-principle. However, when he has reached the goal of earthly evolution, man will have the capacity—through being able to transform his astral body by his own power—to work upon the etheric body also. This he owes to the living presence of the Christ-principle on the earth. Had Christ not united him-self with the earth as a living being, had he not come into the aura of the earth, that which is developed in the astral body would not be communicated to the etheric body. From this we see that one who shuts himself up by turning away from the Christ-principle deprives himself of the possibility of working into his etheric body in the way that is necessary during earthly evolution.

Thus we shall be able to characterize in another way the two kinds of men which we find at the end of the earth's evolution. We have those who have received the Christ-principle and thus transformed their astral body, and who have gained the help of Christ to transform the etheric body also. And we have the others who did not come to the Christ-principle; who also were unable to change anything in the etheric body, for they could not find the helper, Christ. Now let us look at the future of mankind. The earth spiritualizes itself, that is, man must lose completely something which he now un his physical existence considers as belonging to him. We can form an idea of what will then happen to man if we consider the ordinary course of his life after death. He loses the physical body at death. It is to this physical body that he owes the desires and inclinations which bind him to the ordinary life; and we have described what man experiences after death. Let us take a person who is fond of some particularly dainty food. During life he can enjoy this, but not after death. The desire, however, does not cease, for this is seated, not in the physical body but in the astral body, and as the physical instrument is absent it is impossible to gratify this desire. Such persons look down from kamaloca to the physical world which they have left; they see there all that could give them satisfaction, but they cannot enjoy it because they have no physical instrument for the purpose. Through this they experience a burning thirst. Thus it is with all desires that remain in man after death and are related to the physical world, because they can only be satisfied through physical instruments. This is the case every time after death; each time man sees his physical body fall away, and as something remains in him from this physical body it still urges him to the ordinary world of the physical plane, and until he has weaned himself from this in the spiritual world he lives in the fire of desire. Now imagine the last earthly incarnation before the spiritualization of the earth, the laying aside of the last physical body. Those who are now living on the earth will have progressed so far through the Christ-principle that, in a certain way, it will not be very difficult for than to lay aside the very last physical body; they will, however, be obliged to leave something, for all that can give pleasure from the objects of this earth will have disappeared once and for all from the spiritual earth. Think of the last death possible in our earth evolution, think of the laying aside of the last physical body. It is this last death of the incarnations which in the Apocalypse is called the first death, and those who have received the Christ-principle see this physical body as a sort of husk which falls away. The etheric body has now become important to them for, with the help of Christ, it has become so organized that it is for the time being adapted to the astral body and no longer desires and longs for what is below in the physical world. Only through all that has been brought into the etheric body through the help of Christ do men continue to live on in the spiritualized earth. Harmony has been produced between their astral and etheric bodies by the Christ-principle.

On the other hand there are those who have not received the Christ-principle. These do not possess this harmony. They too must lose the physical body, for there is no such thing in the spiritual earth. Everything physical must first be dissolved. It remains as desires for the physical, as the unpurified spiritual, as the spiritual hardened in matter. An etheric body remains which the Christ has not helped to be adapted to the astral body, but which is suited to the physical body. They are the souls who will feel hot fires of desire for physical sensuality; in the etheric body they will feel unappeasable, burning desire by reason of what they have had in the physical life and which they must now do without. Thus, in the next period, after the physical has melted away, we have men who live in an etheric body which harmonizes with the astral body, and we have others whose etheric body lives in discord because they desire what has fallen away with the physical body.

Then in the further stage of evolution there comes a condition where the spiritualizing of the earth has proceeded so far that there can no longer be even an etheric body. Those whose etheric body completely harmonizes with the astral body lay aside this etheric body without pain, for they remain in their astral body which is filled with the Christ-Being. They feel the laying aside of the etheric body as a necessity in evolution, for they feel within them the capacity to build it up again for them-selves because they have received Christ. Those, however, who in this etheric body desire what belongs to the past cannot retain this etheric body, when all becomes astral. It will be taken from them, it will be torn out of them, and they now perceive this as a second dying, as the “second death.”

This second death passes unnoticed over those who have made their etheric body harmonize with the astral body through the reception of the Christ-principle. The second death has no power over then. But the others feel the second death when they have to pass over into the future astral form. The condition of humanity will then be such that those who have reached the goal of evolution will have entirely permeated their astral body with Christ. They will be ready to pass over to Jupiter. Upon our earth they have made the plan of the Jupiter evolution. This is the plan which is called the New Jerusalem. They live in a new heaven and a new earth, that is, Jupiter. This new Jupiter will be accompanied by a satellite, composed of those who are excluded from the life in the spiritual, who have experienced the second death and are, therefore, unable to attain the Jupiter consciousness.

Thus we have such men as have pressed forward to the Jupiter consciousness, who have attained to spirit-self; and such beings as have thrust away the forces which would have given them this consciousness. They are those who only upon Jupiter have attained to the “I”-consciousness of the earth, who exist there, so to speak, as man now exists on the earth with his four members. But such a man can develop himself only on the earth, the earth alone has the environment, the ground, the air, the clouds, the plants, the minerals which are necessary to man if he wishes to gain what may be gained within the four members. Jupiter will be quite differently formed, it will be a new earth, soil, air, water, everything will be different. It will be impossible for beings who have only gained the earth consciousness to live a normal life; they will be backward beings.

But now comes something more for our comfort. Even on this Jupiter there is still a last possibility, through the strong powers which the advanced will have, to move those fallen beings to turn back and even to convert a number. Only with the Venus incarnation of the earth will conic the last decision, the unalterable decision. When we reflect upon all this, the thought we recently considered will be seen in a new light. It will no longer call forth anxiety and disquietude, but only the determination: “I will do everything necessary to fulfil the earth mission.”

When we consider all this in the right way, a mighty picture of the future of humanity opens up before us and we get some idea of all that was in the illuminated soul of the writer of the Apocalypse who wrote down what we, in a faltering way, can discover from a study of it. Every word of the writer, indeed every turn of expression, is significant. We must only try to understand it clearly. Thus, according to our last lecture, in 666 we are referred to the beast with the two horns, and then a remarkable statement is made, “Here is Wisdom! Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man.” An apparent contradiction, but one of the many contradictions which are to be found in every occult work and exposition. You may be sure of one thing; that an exposition which runs so smoothly that the ordinary human intellect can find no contradiction is certainly not based on an occult foundation. Nothing in world-evolution is so shallow and trivial as that which the human intellect, the ordinary intelligence perceives as free from contradiction. One must penetrate more deeply into the substrata of human contemplation and then the contradictions will disappear. One who observes how a plant grows from root to fruit, how the green leaf changes into the petals, these into the stamens, etc., may say, “Here we have contradictory forms, the flower-leaf contradicts the stem-leaf.” But one who looks more deeply will see the unity, the deeper unity in the contradiction. So it is with what the intellect can see in the world. It is precisely in the deepest wisdom that it sees contradictions. Hence it must not disturb us when here in the Apocalypse we meet with an apparent contradiction: “Let him that hath understanding ponder over the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man.”

We must once more consider by what means it may be possible for a man to be led astray by the two-horned beast. We have pointed out that since the middle of the Atlantean epoch man has slept through the higher spiritual development, so to speak. This sleep still exists at the present time. But it was necessary. If it had not entered in, that which we call the intellect would never have been developed. Man did not possess this before our epoch, he acted from other impulses. His pictures drove him to action, without reflection. He had lost this ancient gift of spiritual vision and in its place he has developed intellect and thereby descended into matter. This has drawn a veil over the spiritual world, but at the same time the intellect has been acquired. This may be a great hindrance to the spiritual development. At the very last it will be nothing else but this misguided intellect, this misguided intelligence, which can prevent man from coming to the Christ-principle; and if those who at last succumb to the two-horned beast could look back upon what has dealt them the worst blow they would say, “The tendency to descend into the abyss only came later, but that which darkened the Christ-principle for me was the intellect.” Let him who has this intellect reflect upon the number of the beast; for only through man having become man, that is to say, through his being gifted with this ego-intellect, can he succumb to the beast 666. For the number of the beast is at the same time the number of a man. And only one possessing intellect can perceive that this is so. It is the number of that man who has let himself be misled by his intellect. Deep truths such as these are concealed in these things.

Thus you see that the writer of the Apocalypse gives you a great deal when you reflect upon the various intimations we have given. He expresses many of the truths known to Spiritual Science. He gives what he promises. He leads man to the vision of what is to come; to the vision of the beings and powers which guide the world. He leads us to the spirit in the first seal, and to the form presented in the last seal. Here we see how the regular form of the New Jerusalem is revealed to him spiritually. The regularity of the New Jerusalem is indicated in the last chapter by its description as a cube. To describe all that is in this last picture would take us too far.

It is now necessary to point out for what purpose the Apocalypse was written. I should indeed have to say a great deal if I were to describe this in detail, but you cm at least take away with you one hint, one which we find at a certain part of the Apocalypse. The writer of the Apocalypse says: A time will come when that high degree of consciousness will actually have developed, when man will see the beings who direct the world, the beings represented by the Lamb and by the appearance of the Son of Man, with the flaming sword. We are referred to this in tones which contain within them that assurance of which we have spoken. The writer of the Apocalypse, who is a great seer, knows that in ancient times men were gifted with a dim clairvoyance. We have described this and have seen how at that time inns were the companions, so to speak, of beings in the spiritual world, and themselves saw the spiritual world. But who has lost this gift of seership? Who? We must now put this forward as an important question. We have seen that fundamentally it was lost by those men who were led to the physical plane, the physical life, when the second half of the Atlantean epoch began. Man looked upon the solid formation of our earth, upon the clearly outlined objects of our earth. The ancient clairvoyance disappeared; he became self-conscious, but the spiritual world was closed to him. The formations which un ancient times filled the air like an ocean of mist, disappeared; the air became clear, the ground distinct. Man descended to the visible earth. This took place comparatively late, it coincided with the attainment of the present intellect, the present self-consciousness of man. Now let us remember what has been said about this earth as well as about the great Event of Golgotha. If some one had observed the earth at that time from a distance with spiritual vision at the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer, he would have perceived that its whole astral aura changed. The earth was then permeated by the Christ-force. Through this event the earth will be able to reunite with the sun. This power will grow. This is the power which preserves our etheric body from the second death. Christ becomes the Earth-spirit more and more, and the true Christian understands the words, “He who eats my bread treads me underfoot”; he considers the body of the earth as the body of Christ. The earth as a planetary body is the body of Christ; of course at present this is only at its beginning. Christ has still to become the Earth-spirit; He will smite himself fully with the earth, and when the earth later unites with the sun, the great Earth-spirit, Christ, will be the Sun-Spirit.

The body of the earth will be the body of Christ; and men must work upon this body. They began this when they entered upon the earth; they have worked upon this earth with their forces. In all traditions one can fund something which is little noticed because little understood. Thus, for example, in the Persian tradition we find that since the time men lost clairvoyant consciousness they have become beings who have pierced the earth. While they live in the phases which they pierce the earth—that is, while they work upon the earth—during this time when they pierce the body of Christ they do not see with clairvoyant consciousness the guiding powers and, above all, they do not see the Christ face to face. But the writer of the Apocalypse refers to the time when not only those who at that time had spiritual vision will see the spiritual, but when humanity will again have come to the stage where it is possible to see the Christ-Being himself. All will see him, including those who have pierced him, these who had to pass through a portion of their evolution in cultivating the earth, in the piercing of the earth, they will see the Christ. For these sayings are such that they lead those who gradually learn to unveil them deep into the imaginative world of the Mysteries, of the Apocalyptic language.

What, then, did the Apocalyptist wish to write, what did he wish to represent? This question will be answered if we briefly refer to the origin of the Apocalypse. Where do we first fund what is written down in the Apocalypse? If you could look back into the Mysteries of ancient Greece, into the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries, if you could go back into the Mysteries of ancient Egypt, Chaldea, Persia and India, you would find the Apocalypse everywhere. It existed, it was there. It was not written down, but lived from one generation of priests to another, through the generations of the Initiators, where the memory was so vivid that one could master such abundant material. Memory even in much later times was far better than ours; we need only remember the singers of the Iliad, how they went about and sang their songs from memory. It is comparatively not long ago, that memory has deteriorated so much. In the Mysteries these truths were not written down, but they lived from generation to generation of the Initiators. Why was the Apocalypse written? It was intended to serve as an instruction for those who brought the pupils into Initiation. At that time the one who was to be initiated was led out of the physical body and remained as if dead. But when he had been led out, the Initiator enabled him to see in his etheric body that which later through the Christ-impulse he would be able to see spiritually in the physical body. Thus the ancient Initiates were the prophets who could point to Christ; and they did so. They were able to do this, because Christ is shown in this Apocalypse as due to appear in the future. The Mystery of Golgotha had never yet taken place where a person in the physical body could set forth the whole drama of Initiation historically. Where then could the possibility of this Event of Golgotha be comprehended? At a certain stage the Initiates had comprehended it outside their body. That which took place on Golgotha had taken place before in another consciousness. There might have been thousands there, and yet the Event of Golgotha could have passed by them unnoticed. What would it have been to them? The death of an ordinary condemned person! It was only possible to understand what took place on Golgotha where the contents of the Mysteries were known. The Initiators could say, You can understand the one whom we have shown you during the three and a half days, whom the prophets announced to you, if you use the means which the Mysteries can give you. The Apocalyptist had received the tradition of the Mysteries orally; he said, “If I am permeated with what can be experienced in the Mysteries, Christ appears to me.” Thus the Apocalypse was nothing new; but its application to the unique Event of Golgotha was something new. The essential thing was that for those who have ears to hear it was possible, with the help of what is in the Apocalypse of John, to penetrate gradually to the true understanding of the Event of Golgotha. This was the intention of the writer of the Apocalypse. He received the Apocalypse from the ancient Mysteries; it is an ancient sacred book of humanity and has only been presented externally to humanity by the disciple whom the Lord loved and to whom he bequeathed the task of announcing his true form. He is to remain until Christ comes; so that those who have a more illuminated consciousness will be able to understand him. He is the great teacher of the true Event of Golgotha. He has given to man the means by which he can really understand the Event of Golgotha. At the beginning of the Apocalypse the writer says (I have tried to translate the first few words in such a way that they convey the true meaning): “This is the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave unto his servant, to show in brief what must needs come to pass. This is put in symbols and sent through an angel to his servant John, who wrote these things.” He wishes to describe it in brief; what does this mean? It means in other words: “If I were to describe in detail all that will take place from now up to the goal of the earth evolution, I. should have to write a very great deal, but I will show it to you in a short sketch.” This the translators who could not penetrate into the spirit of the Apocalypse have translated as “to show what must shortly come to pass.” They thought that what is described in the Apocalypse was to happen in the near future. But it ought to read: “I will briefly describe what will take place.” The original text fully admits of the true interpretation I have tried to give in the introduction to Seals and Columns.

We have said much in these lectures concerning this ancient sacred record of the human race, much concerning the secrets which the Lord imparted to humanity by the disciple whom he loved. You may have learnt from this that the Apocalypse is a profound book full of wisdom, and have perhaps many tines during these considerations been troubled because much in it is so difficult to understand. Now I should like to say one thing at the close of our studies. All that I have been able to say to you corresponds exactly to the intentions of the writer of the Apocalypse, and was always taught in this way in the schools which have kept to the intention of the writer of the Apocalypse. But it is by no means all that could be said and one can go much deeper into the truths, into the foundations of the Apocalypse. And if we were to penetrate fully into all the depths, what I have been able to say to you would seem only like a first superficial presentation. It cannot be done in any other way, we can at first give only a superficial presentation. One must go through this. One has to begin with the elementary things, and then, when one has gone a little further, greater depths will be found. For below the surface there is a very great deal of which we have been only able to unveil a very little. If you go further along the path which in a certain way you have begun by turning your attention to the exposition of the Apocalypse of John, you will gradually penetrate into the depths of the spiritual life. You will come into depths which cannot possibly be expressed to-day, because they could not be brought into consciousness, because no one has yet ears to hear. The ears must first be prepared to hear, by such explanations as have now been given. Then they will gradually be there, cars able to hear the Word which flows at such profound depths through the Apocalypse. If you have been able to receive a little of what could be imparted, you must be aware that only the most superficial things could be given, and of these only a few observations. May it give you the impulse to penetrate more and more deeply into what can only be surmised through these lectures. If I were to say only what can be said about the surface, I should have to lecture for still many, many weeks. These lectures could only be a stimulus for further study, and those who feel the impulse to penetrate more deeply into the Apocalypse will have received them in the right way.

My dear Friends,

Yesterday we touched upon one part or aspect of the Mysterium Magnum, and some of you will perhaps have felt a certain difficulty in approaching it from the standpoint that we were obliged to take in order to make the matter clear in detail. But the world is complicated,—let us admit that, once for all! And if we really have the desire to rise to the knowledge of higher truths, there is nothing for it but we must be ready to put up with some difficulties on the way.

Let us once more gather up for our consideration what we have to understand by the Mysterium Magnum. We saw on the one hand how it reveals man in his three members—or rather, reveals him as composed of three men each having seven members—so that we can distinguish an upper man, a middle man and a lower man. As we go through the world and have our experiences, these three men seem to be closely and intimately united; everyday consciousness does not distinguish one from another. That was one aspect of the Mystery. The other consists in this,—that the moment man lifts himself out of his ordinary Earth consciousness and attains a consciousness of a higher kind, he is at once faced with the event that I have described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, where I said how man must then expect his consciousness to be torn into three, his whole being to be rent asunder, so that he is divided into a thinking man, a feeling man and a willing man. Split up, as it were, into these three soul beings,—that is how man feels when he sets out on the path to a higher consciousness. We have thus on the one hand the three times seven-membered man, and on the other hand, as soon as we take a step beyond ordinary consciousness, we have at once a division of this consciousness into three, which means that every aspirant after occultism who becomes clairvoyant must, as you will know from the book; already quoted, strive with all his might to hold together the three members of his consciousness, that he may not fall to pieces in his inner life of soul. It were indeed a tragic destiny for his inner being if that were to happen. Whilst in ordinary life we are continually tempted to bring together the whole nature of man—which is threefold—into a unity and see it as a single and whole human form, for our inner life of soul on the other hand, the moment we step beyond ordinary consciousness, we are immediately made aware that we are in reality a threefold being, and are in imminent danger of being torn into three in our inner life of soul.

We shall best understand how matters really are in this connection if we take our start once again in quite an elementary way from certain facts of everyday life which manifest themselves in full clarity to the occult pupil, but are not at all generally observed. For it is indeed so that already in ordinary life the three soul powers of man—or rather, the several qualities of consciousness that correspond to them and that we are quite accustomed to distinguish one from another—do themselves direct our attention to what we learned to understand yesterday as the three-membered human being.

Look at man as he stands before you in everyday life! What has to take place in him for everyday consciousness to come about? For everyday consciousness to be there—the consciousness that you carry round with you as thinking Earth man—impressions from without must work upon your senses. The senses, in so far as they give us information of Earth life, are principally situated in the head, and the content of consciousness is in the main derived from these senses. Of the three men whom we learned to recognise yesterday in the human being, it is especially the head man, the upper man, that receives the daytime impressions,—the impressions of ordinary consciousness. They make themselves felt inasmuch as man is able to bring to meet them the instrument of his brain, indeed of his whole head.

A little reflection will quickly show you that man as Earth man cannot possibly be a head man alone. We saw yesterday that for occult consideration man falls into three parts, quite distinct from one another; and for man to stand before us as Earth man, the head must obviously be maintained in life by substances and forces which are continually being sent up into it from the second (middle) man. By means of the circulation of the blood, nourishment must flow for the sustenance of the brain. Then the brain is able to meet the external sense impressions in such a way that by means of the instrument of the brain thoughts and ideas arise in man as a result of these sense impressions. Man experiences in ordinary consciousness what arises in this way through the instrumentality of the brain. You know also that this ordinary consciousness ceases when man is asleep; the external sense impressions are not there any more, they have no longer any influence upon him. When man is asleep and the external sense impressions no longer work upon the brain that is sustained by the middle man, naturally the influences that work from the middle man upon the upper man, from the second man upon the first—influences, that is, upon the brain—still go on. For in this middle man breathing is maintained, even during sleep, and the other activities of the middle man continue. Blood is carried up into the brain when man is asleep as well as when he is awake,—though with a difference; for the way in which the instrument of everyday consciousness is sustained by the middle man is not quite the same in waking and in sleep. The difference finds expression in the fact that during sleep the number of breaths we take is considerably less in proportion than when we are awake, and the quantity of carbonic acid gas in our breath is reduced by about one fourth; the manner and method of nourishment also changes during sleep. When, under certain circumstances, the process of nourishment does continue to work in the same way during sleep, it can have very bad results. This is well known from the fact that after an excellent meal one does not generally sleep well; the brain is disturbed in its rest if a heavy meal is taken immediately before going to sleep. There is, therefore, a difference between the conditions of sleep and waking even in the way the middle man works up into the upper man.

Can we see, in ordinary Earth man, any result of this difference? The fact that man shuts himself off from the external world, and that only inside his body—wholly within what we have described as the form or figure of man—an influence is exerted by the forces of the middle man in the direction of the upper man, has the result that ordinary daytime consciousness is extinguished; so that, although during sleep man still has his brain, he does not perceive the influences that are at work from the middle man upon this brain. The influences go on just the same, but they are only present to what we generally term dream consciousness.

This dream consciousness is very complicated. You will, however, have no difficulty in recognising that a particular class of dreams is wholly connected with what takes place in the middle man, and owes its origin to the fact that the brain is able not only to perceive the external world when the sense impressions work upon it, but able also in some way to perceive influences proceeding from the middle man, beholding them in the form of dream pictures that make use of all kinds of symbols. If something is wrong with the heart, it can easily happen that one dreams of it in the symbol of a burning hot fire. If all is not in order in the intestines it may happen that one dreams of snakes. The character and condition of man's inside will often determine the dream, which can then be an indication of what is going on there. Whoever will take the trouble to observe this remarkable connection and study it with the help of external science, will come to the conclusion that irregularities in the middle man are perceived symbolically in dream pictures.

There are also, as you will know, people who have much more far-reaching experiences with dreams of this kind, people who are able to perceive in definite symbolic pictures the oncoming of certain illnesses. A clear connection can frequently be traced in such cases between dream pictures of a symbolic character recurring with absolute regularity and a disease of the lungs or heart or stomach which makes its appearance later.

As it is possible very often to establish, by means of accurate examination on awaking, that when one has dreamed of a burning stove one's heart is beating more quickly than usual, similarly it is possible for diseases of the lung or disorders of the stomach—in fact, for all manner of illnesses that have not yet shown themselves outwardly—to announce their approach symbolically in dream pictures. The human brain, or rather the human soul, is not sensitive only to external impressions that are communicated through the senses but also to the bodily inside,—with this difference, that in the latter case it does not receive correct and true ideas but builds up for itself imaginary and symbolical ideas of what is going forward in the middle man.

The explanation that has been given enables us to recognise the fact that in dreaming man perceives himself. We can truly say: In my dreams I behold myself. We are not, however, aware of this during the dream. We perceive our heart, but we do not know that it is our heart we perceive. We perceive instead a burning hot fire,—that is to say, an object outside ourselves. Something that is inside us is projected outwards and stands there, outside, for our perception. In dream consciousness, therefore, man has to do with the interior of his own body; this means that in dream consciousness he is divided, he is rent asunder. As you know, in the ordinary run of everyday life, we concern ourselves as a rule only with waking and sleeping.

Now, it is not only conditions of the middle man that are perceived in dreams, but also conditions of the upper man, the head man. There are, to begin with, the dreams that owe their origin to some disorder in the head itself. Through what is perceived as a disorder in the head, the brain—or I, should rather say the soul—perceives itself by means of the instrument of the brain. The upper man perceives himself. Such dreams are always extraordinarily characteristic. You have a dream and wake up with a pain in your head; the dream is in this case a symbolical and fanciful reflection of the headache. As a rule such dreams will take the form that they lead you out into vast distances, or you find yourself in a great vault or cave. Especially characteristic of these headache dreams is the experience of an immense vault above one. Something is creeping or crawling in the roof of the cave, or perhaps spiders' webs or some dirt or dust is clinging to it. Or you may dream you are in a great arched palace! In such cases you perceive yourself as upper man,—but again you transpose what you perceive into the world outside you. You go out of yourself and place outside you what is in you, in your head. So here once more we have a kind of division of the human being; he is, as it were, split asunder, he loses himself, extinguishes himself.

The conditions I have been describing are dream conditions, and they show us quite clearly that in dream consciousness man falls asunder; his ego consciousness, his unity of consciousness, does not remain intact, and his dream is in reality always a reflection, a symbolical reflection of what is going on inside his bodily nature.

For the disciple of occultism it is by no means merely a question of passing from ordinary waking consciousness to dream consciousness—there would be nothing unusual in that, No, he must make the transition to a totally different condition of consciousness. By practising the exercises outlined in earlier lectures of this course—through suppression, that is, of the intellect, the will and the memory—he has to get free of himself and attain to a completely new consciousness.

Although, as I have said, this new consciousness is not a dream consciousness, yet if one has no knowledge of clairvoyant consciousness, dream consciousness can help one to come to a fairly good understanding of it. For we can approach it in the following manner. Suppose we ask ourselves: What is it within him that man perceives in dream? then we must answer: Whatever is painful or out of order. A moment's reflection will show us that ordinary normal conditions are not perceived by dream consciousness, If a man is perfectly healthy in his upper and middle man, if everything is in order there, then he sleeps a normal healthy sleep; one cannot in ordinary circumstances—observe, I say advisedly, in ordinary circumstances—expect that his peaceful sleep will be forcibly interrupted with dreams. Now the path that has to be taken by clairvoyant consciousness is one that leads through stages and conditions that are similar to those of dream consciousness. Only, these stages are attained instead by occult training, and it is actually the case that in clairvoyance man does not merely come to a knowledge of the ordinary external painful conditions of his inside, but succeeds in perceiving also its normal conditions, which usually disappear from our consciousness in peaceful sleep. The pupil in clairvoyance comes to a knowledge of these conditions. In other words, he learns to know his brain, his head man, by learning to perceive it inwardly. Similarly, he comes to know his middle man. In the same way as in certain dreams man perceives when asleep his head and middle man, so has the pupil in clairvoyance to attain in the course of his training to a knowledge of his middle and upper man.

Let us now give our special attention to this middle man. If you consider a little, you will have to acknowledge that you find nothing in the middle man that can be immediately and specifically referred to the external world. In the head we have the eyes and the other sense organs that are in direct connection with the external world. Through the sense of touch the middle man has of course the possibility of coming into connection with the external world, for the sense of touch is, as we know, extended over the whole skin. The perception of the external world by the middle man is nevertheless slight and insignificant in comparison with the knowledge of the external world that we acquire through the head man. Even the perception the middle man receives of warmth affects in the main only his own inner experience, his inner sense of well-being. The middle man seems therefore to be a self-enclosed entity, with inner processes that are of very great importance for himself but have little bearing on his relationship to the outside world.

If, however, we go on to enquire whether this inner man has not perhaps some connection with the outside world that is not so obvious to ordinary consciousness, we shall discover that this inner, middle man has, after all, a connection of no little importance with the outside world. Everything depends on the fact that the middle man is adapted to Earth conditions. He has to breathe the air of the Earth, he needs for his nourishment the substances that are produced on the Earth. From this point of view the middle man and the Earth belong together. Were the substances that are necessary to maintain his life not present in his Earthly surroundings, then this middle man could not be as he is. So you see, we are obliged to look upon the middle man as part and parcel of what Earth existence gives to us, we must reckon him as belonging definitely to our existence here on Earth.

Nor is this all. For it is not a question only of what the Earth can give to man. The Earth could be there for a long time, and yet no middle man come into being! If the Sun did not come to the help of the Earth and cause to flourish and ripen upon it what the middle man needs, then the middle man could not exist. This middle man takes the substances he requires for nourishment, and these substances—apart from the air which is of course essential for his sustenance in life, all these substances that nourish him are dependent on the working of the Sun upon the Earth. Whatever man receives into himself as nourishment is produced by the Sun in man's Earthly environment. This means, in effect, that when we study the middle man we have to take account not only of a direct influence of the Earth upon man but also of an indirect influence of the Sun. Were it not for the physical sunlight that illumines the Earth, the middle man would not exist. All that is to be found in the middle man has come into him through the influence of the light of the Sun upon the Earth.

This remarkable fact—that the middle man is a product of the light of the Sun—comes to expression in the following way. When the pupil in occultism becomes clairvoyant, when he develops, that is, a clairvoyant consciousness, then, whereas in dreams pictures arise which are the expression of some disorder in man's inner organs, in the case of clairvoyant consciousness the pictures the pupil receives express what the Sun is doing in the middle man, they show the regular normal activity of the Sun in the middle man. When the pupil becomes clairvoyant and a perception arises in him of his own inner being in its healthy normal state, then he has before him the flowing light; all around him he sees the flowing light. As the dreamer is surrounded by pictures of disorders in his inner man, so is the aspirant after occultism surrounded by phenomena of flowing light. He has, to begin with, this perception of the activity of the Sun in his own inner being.

Compare for a moment ordinary external consciousness with this special consciousness that arises in the clairvoyant. When man, as upper man, directs his gaze to some object of Earth, he looks at it—it is, as you know, generally speaking, the sense of sight that predominates in perception—by means of the sunlight that is thrown back from the external Earth. External, everyday consciousness perceives what the external sunlight does to the things of the Earth; But now it is what the sunlight does to him, what it does in making possible his own middle man, how it penetrates the middle man with its activity,—this it is that reveals itself to man as flowing light when he becomes a pupil of occultism. He beholds the Sun in himself, in the very same way that he sees the Sun outside him from the time when the day begins for as long as it lasts And as he sees objects around him through the fact that sunlight is thrown back from them, so now he sees, when he has reached a certain stage of clairvoyance, something that is of the nature of Sun reflected back from his own inner being. It is the form of the middle man that shows itself thus illuminated. That is, then, one experience.

If you were to go back into olden times and study what was done and experienced in the ancient Mystery Schools, you would find that the aspirant after occultism learned to perceive the Sun in its reflection in his own middle man,—learned, that is, to perceive the workings of the Sun that continue even when man is asleep, and that escape him during waking consciousness because his attention is entirely claimed by the external consciousness. Man as a Sun being,—that was what the pupil came to perceive at a particular stage of initiation in the Mysteries. He learned to recognise the Sun being in himself, in his very own being, he learned how the Sun works not only outwardly in the objects, in the reflected light, but works also within the bodily form of man.

But now the pupil, who is beginning to be clairvoyant, has to learn something else. He has to discover something that is comparable with the dreams of the brain, those dreams that reflect back disordered conditions of the brain, where, as I told you, in typical cases man always perceives symbols, imagining, for example, that he is in a cave or a palace, having over him a great vaulted roof into which he is gazing. When the pupil in occultism is led on to perceive not only the conditions of his middle man but also the conditions of his upper man (in so far as the latter has form and figure), the conditions of the interior of the head man, then he never has the same experience as he has in his perception of the middle man. Instead he has now before him—I am simply relating the facts—what appears like a perfectly well-ordered and regular extension of the dream that is connected with excitement or irritation of the brain. Only, it is experienced in full consciousness. What man perceives when he has closed all his sense organs and has no external perception, when he directs all his attention in clairvoyant consciousness upon himself inwardly—upon the upper man, the brain man—is in very fact the starry heavens. He beholds the great vault of heaven with the stars.

It was a great moment in the life of the pupil, especially in the more ancient Mysteries—we shall hear later to what extent it underwent change in the later Mysteries—it was a great moment when the pupil perceived his own inner being, in so far as this inner being comes to expression in the human form. When he saw the upper man, it was as though he saw the heavens with all the shining stars; he looked out into the wide world—in spite of the fact that he had no physical senses open. The picture of the starry heavens stood before him. And then came the greatest moment of all when this pupil of occultism observed not what is, so to speak, on the upper surface of his head, but when he looked down from the upper man, from the head, to the middle man, when he perceived, without opening any of his senses, the lower surface of his brain and from it saw the middle man irradiated with light. Himself in total darkness (for his senses were closed, and to outward appearance he was like a man who is asleep), he perceived, looking downwards inwardly, the Sun in the night, in the midst of the dark surface of the heavens. This is what was called in the ancient Mysteries “Seeing the Sun at Midnight,”—seeing, that is, the flowing sunlight within the stars, whose influence in relation to the Sun seems so small. These experiences were important milestones in the life of every aspirant after occultism.

Having come so far, the pupil was then able to apprehend a truth of great significance, He could say: “In the same way as I perceive through the medium of myself, by beholding my middle man, the flowing sunlight, the true and real working of the Sun, so now can I perceive through the medium of the upper man the heavenly spaces with their stars. That I can see the stars, that all is not wrapped in darkness, is due to the fact that the brain is adapted to the stars, as the middle man is adapted to the Sun.” Thus did the pupil come to the knowledge that even as the middle man is sustained by the Sun, even as its whole being depends on the Sun and belongs to the Sun, so does the upper man, the brain man, belong to the whole world and its stars.

When the pupil had had this experience, then he could go to those who possessed only a day consciousness but who, nevertheless, felt an impulse—springing from a deep inner need, from a longing of their soul—to find relationship with a consciousness that should reach out beyond Earth man. In other words, the pupil in occultism could go to men who were religiously inclined, who were able in some way to feel their connection with the great world, and say to them: “Man as he stands on Earth, is not merely a being belonging to this Earth, he is a being that belongs in part, namely in breast and trunk, to the Sun,—and belongs also, as head man, to the whole of cosmic space.” This was what the pupil could tell the religious man, imparting it to him as information; and in the religious man it turned into prayer, into worship.

The disciples of occultism came in this way among men as founders of religion, and according as was the relation of the people to whom they came to the one or other part of man's nature, so they were able to speak more of the one or the other. To people who were more particularly disposed to experience a certain happiness in the sense of well-being in the inner man—people, that is, who were inclined to make their whole mood in life depend on the bodily well-being of the middle man—to such the pupils in occultism could come as founders of religion and say: “Your sense of well-being depends on the Sun.” These people then became, through the influence of the pupils in occultism, followers of a Sun religion. You may be quite sure that all over the Earth, wherever lived people of the kind I have described, for whom it mattered above all that they should have their attention drawn to the source of their sense of well-being, there a Sun worship arose.

To think that men just happened to become Sun worshippers without any deeper reason for it is a mere flight of imagination on the part of all obstinately materialistic science. When the scholar:, of our time speak of how this or that section of mankind came to be Sun worshippers, they are really only demonstrating their own powers of imagination and fantasy. The materialists of today are quite mistaken when they accuse theosophists of an inclination to be fantastic, implying that they themselves are the true realists. Taken as a whole, materialism is certainly not lacking in a tendency to be fantastic, as we can see in this case when it sets out to explain how certain peoples became Sun worshippers. For it builds up an imaginary picture and comes to the conclusion that through the working of certain external conditions or circumstances the people, moved by some unaccountable impulse, hit upon the idea of worshipping the Sun; whereas the truth of the matter is that the initiates, the aspirants after occultism, knew in the case of certain peoples:—We have here a people who manifest especially the virtue of courage, a people in whom one can see a striking development of the middle man; we must teach this people how in the super-sensible one can behold the fact that this middle-man is a product of the working of the Sun. And the initiates in occultism then led such people, in whom the middle man was of greatest importance, away from the mere sense of well-being, the mere living within themselves, to prayer and worship, teaching them to look up in religious devotion to the Being who was the source of this middle man. Thus did they guide these people to a worship of the Sun.

This one example can serve to show the tendency there is in materialism to build up fantastic theories. Other striking examples could be brought forward. We have, for instance, had perforce to read—for they have been thrust under our very eyes—all manner of descriptions of our Munich Building.¹ Through an indiscretion it came about that the project found its way into the newspapers, and the materialistic man of today has formed his own idea of what the Building is and what its purpose. A profusion of fantastic information has been spread abroad, quite enough to demonstrate that fantasy is a quality of present-day thinking. When it is a matter of speaking or writing about things of which he knows absolutely nothing, the man of today does not hesitate to have recourse to the wildest fancies in order to construct an explanation. This is so in ordinary everyday life, and it is so too in the realm of science. The majority of the explanations put forward by the scholars of today are sheer fantasy; and the attempt to describe or account for Sun worship is certainly no exception.

Other peoples on the Earth had less inclination to develop the middle man and were more disposed to think, to have ideas,—that is, to develop the upper man; and to them another kind of appeal had to be made. The occultists who went forth into the world as founders of religion turned the attention of these peoples to seek the source of the instrument whereby they were able to produce thoughts, to live in thoughts and in ideas. The occultists said to them: “If you want to have knowledge of the source of your life of thought, then—since you are not able to gaze into the super-sensible worlds of the heavens (of course the initiates did not say this, I am adding it)—you will have an external reflection of this source if you remain awake during the night and look up in prayer to the star-strewn heavens.”

A genuine Star worship—a worship, one can also say, of the Night, for the truth was often clothed in such a way that instead of speaking of the starry heavens the night was substituted—such a Star or Night Worship prevailed among peoples who were more given to thought. Peoples of ancient times who were fond of thinking and pondering and delving deep into things,—for them religions were founded that pointed them to the source of the instrument of their thinking, the source, that is, of their upper man. And many of the names borne by the most ancient Gods of certain peoples have to be rendered in modern languages by the word “Night.” The Night was the object of worship, the Night in all the mystery of her appearance as the Mother of the Stars, who brings them forth that they may shine in the heavens. For the initiates in occultism knew that the instrument of the brain is really and truly a product of the Star-strewn Night.

Similarly, we will often find that the people who were Sun worshippers were not only guided to look to the Sun; but as man was led from the Stars to the Mother Night and many old-time words for the ancient Gods are to be interpreted as meaning Night, so in the case of the Sun man's attention was drawn to the fact that the Sun gave rise to the Day, that the Sun made Day. In consequence, many words used for Sun worship among peoples who specifically worshipped the Sun as the highest divine Power, are to be translated with the word “Day.”

Speaking generally, we can say that where peoples felt themselves strong and courageous and ready for war, we find them to be in the main Sun worshippers or Day worshippers, because their initiates directed them to the Sun, to the Day, for their object of worship. The more thoughtful and enquiring peoples on the other hand are Night or Star worshippers, because they have been guided that way by their initiates.

We come, finally, to still another kind of people. For there are peoples who do not experience in so characteristic a manner the sharp division between Day consciousness and Night consciousness. When we go back into olden times, we find many peoples who had preserved middle or in-between conditions of consciousness, who did not merely alternate in their life between Day and Night, between consciousness and unconsciousness, but who had an old clairvoyant consciousness which came about through the merging of Day with Night consciousness into a kind of semi-consciousness. We find therefore this third condition of consciousness.

These people also divined through their condition of consciousness a connection between man and something outside the Earth. How was it they came to have such a feeling? To answer this question we must realise that they were possessed of a peculiar faculty or quality in the very form of their bodily nature. They were, as we have said, endowed,—as in olden times almost all men were endowed, the world over—with an ancient clairvoyance, and they had the peculiar faculty of being able to perceive in certain conditions of consciousness their “symmetry” man,—not, however, as symmetry man, but they could perceive this middle man in its working upon the upper man.

If you want to form a picture of what took place in such a person, then you must imagine a picture of the middle man in the brain. In ordinary normal life on Earth, the sense impressions from without work upon the brain and the brain throws back pictures; it places, that is, its own being in the way and holds up the pictures that come from outside. Our idea of the world comes about in this way as a reflected picture thrown back by the brain. For that is what all ideas of the outside world really are,—pictures thrown back, reflected by the brain. When you look at the world, then the outer impressions pass through the eye up to a certain place in the brain and are there caught. That an idea can come into being is due to the fact that the impressions are caught up at a certain point, not allowed to pass through—not, at all events, in their entirety—but reflected back. And when a man becomes clairvoyant, it is no longer external objects alone that make impressions on the brain, impressions are made from the middle man, which can then be reflected back by the brain.

What I have just now described—the impressions made by the middle man upon the brain and the reflection by the latter of these impressions—is still very far from the process I described as taking place in the true aspirant after occultism. The latter has direct and immediate perception of his middle man, he does not merely perceive it through the brain. He looks into himself and sees there what belongs to the Sun, sees too in his brain what belongs to the Stars. The clairvoyant state, on the other hand, of which we are now speaking, where the processes inside man, the Sun nature in the middle man, are reflected by the brain—even as the outer impressions that come through the senses are reflected by the brain,—is characteristic of the old clairvoyance of men in ancient time. For them, perception took place by way of the middle man. They did not, to begin with, perceive external things at all. They perceived only the Sun-like that was present in themselves and they perceived it in reflection, for it was held up by the brain and they perceived it as an idea of the Sun nature within them.

There have been peoples of this character, who in certain naturally clairvoyant states caught hold, as it were, with their brain of the Sun nature within them and made of the perception an idea. How did it then appear to them? It was projected outwards, but was not perceived like the ideas to which we are accustomed, and which have their source in the world outside; it appeared like inner Sunlight,—yet as coming from without. And when investigation was made into the source of the appearance, when the aspirants after occultism set out to learn how it was that they found themselves in such conditions, then they were made clearly aware of the Sun nature that is in the middle man. Man has this Sun-like element in him, because he is himself a Sun being. That which manifests in the instrument of the brain is connected with the fact that man is a Star being, that he is in very truth formed and shaped from out of the whole of Cosmic space. What he now perceives, however, has relation to the fact that the Earth has revolving around it the Moon, and that the Moon in her revolution round the Earth has a powerful influence on the being of man.

In those olden times man was so constituted that the Moon had a particularly strong influence on his brain. The consequence was that the ancient clairvoyance was very dependent on the phases of the Moon, and showed itself for the most part in connections that found expression in the phases of the Moon. For a space of fourteen days clairvoyance increased, and then for fourteen days it decreased again. Its influence was thus greatest in the middle of such a Moon period. There were times when men knew: We are Sun beings. They knew it because they could perceive the Sun through the inner idea formed in the brain. But this came about through the influence of the Moon. The old clairvoyance often worked in the way I indicated. Man gave himself up throughout the whole twenty-eight days to the waxing and waning of the Moon. There were days when the influence of the Moon was particularly strong and when in consequence clairvoyance was present in everyone; inner clairvoyant consciousness made itself felt in all men. When initiates in occultism came to people of this kind with the mission of determining for them the character of their religion, then for the same reason that other peoples were made Sun (or Day) worshippers and Star (or Night) worshippers, the initiates made this third kind of people Moon worshippers. Hence the worship of the Moon, that is to be found among many ancient peoples.

Moses learned to know this Moon worship in its original form from the Egyptian initiates, and was himself one of the greatest of those who made Moon worship into the religion of a people. For Moses made it the religion of the ancient Hebrew people. The Jahve worship of the ancient Hebrew people is a highly spiritualised Moon worship. And it enabled the Hebrew people to retain into later times the consciousness that man is connected with what is outside and beyond the Earth, that his being is not confined to the Earth.

Now it was so with the Moon worshippers of very olden times, as it was also with the Sun and Star worshippers, that there was very little knowledge among the people themselves of how Stars, Sun and Moon appeared to the clairvoyant—spiritualised, that is, and not at all as objects that are seen with external organs. The people of olden times would not have understood if they had been told: “Pray to what is the source and origin of your middle man, but do not imagine it like the picture of the Sun that can be perceived with the senses; think of it as something super-sensible that is behind the Sun.” Just as little would the Star worshippers have understood if they had been told that the organ of their thinking had its origin in the far Cosmic spaces, but that they were not to imagine that this meant, in the picture of the starry heavens as it can be perceived with the outer eye, they were to think rather of the invisible that is behind the starry heavens, the multitude of spiritual Beings that are in the Stars. This was known to the initiates, but it could not be said to the Sun and Star worshippers. Similarly it would have been of no use at all to say to the Moon peoples: “Imagine to yourselves an invisible Being who has as it were his outer body in the Moon.” It was, however, possible to say something else, and this is what Moses did say to the Hebrew people. It could not have been said to the more ancient Moon worshippers but only to the ancient Hebrew people. For Moses did not direct his people to the visible Moon, but to the Being in whom lay the origin of the ancient clairvoyance of all peoples. This clairvoyance had been given to man,—as a kind of compensation, when he was placed into the condition of having to alternate with his consciousness between day and night; and it brought him a knowledge of the world, that resembled what comes to expression in the reflected rays of the Sun. The reflection of the Sun could only be something external for man, could only give him an Earth consciousness—a day consciousness, and a night consciousness that at most was aware only of the external visible world of stars—and so a clairvoyance was given to the man of ancient times as a compensation; it was given him through the possibility of alternation in this day and night consciousness,—an old clairvoyance that is derived from the spiritual Being of the Moon and has also relation, locally, with the Moon.

When in the course of evolution the time came for this clairvoyant consciousness gradually to grow dim and fade away, a more spiritual substitute was created for the ancient Hebrew folk in the invisible Moon Being Jahve or Jehovah of whom Moses taught, and who, he said, must never be confused with anything that can be seen outwardly nor with any picture that is made of Him for outward vision. Therefore did Moses categorically forbid the Hebrew people to regard any picture in the outside world as a picture of Jahve; he forbade them any picture or image whatsoever that might represent something which is not a product of the outside world, forbade them also to make any picture taken from the outside world, of the invisible, super-sensible God.

The Jahve religion is thus seen to stand in a remarkable relation to a Moon religion that was given by the old clairvoyance in the very earliest days of mankind. For the sake of those to whom it is of interest, we may here mention that it was H. P. Blavatsky who, on absolutely authentic grounds, pointed out that the Jahve religion was in a certain respect a kind of revival of the old Moon religion. H. P. Blavatsky, however, did not come so far in her research as we are able to do today, consequently the connection that has here been set forth was not fully clear to her. The knowledge that the Jahve religion is a Moon religion rather suggested to H. P. Blavatsky that this old Jahve religion was a little less worthy on that account. This is, however, not the case at all. When one knows that the Jahve religion of the ancient Hebrew people has its origin in the old clairvoyance and preserves, so to speak, the memory of the old clairvoyance, then one is able to perceive and appreciate the sacredness and depth of this Jahve religion.

Our study has brought us to an understanding of certain important experiences of the aspirants after occultism, who in a higher consciousness are able to learn by real experience that man belongs in his being to the entire world, perceiving how the middle man is in reality a Sun man, and the upper man a Star man. And we have also seen what occultism is able to recognise in the external religions, namely, that they were in great measure given to mankind as very ancient religions and even as ancient theosophies. For when the man of olden times developed a need for worship and prayer, in that moment something of the old clairvoyance began to stir within him, so that he had no need merely to believe what the old initiates told him but was able to comprehend it even though he could not actually see it. The ancient religions are thus to a great extent theosophies. And the theosophical teachings that were given by the occultists were determined according to the section of the earth which that particular people was destined to inhabit.

As you will have seen, we have for the moment had to leave out the lower man,—the third seven-membered man. We shall return to it, and we shall find in what a remarkable manner the “Great Mystery” was brought before the pupil, and how the pupil undergoes still further development by means of the initiation which alone can lead to an understanding of the true nature of man.

• 1. It was at first intended to erect a Building for Anthroposophy in Munich. The project had, however, to be abandoned in 1914. (Note by Translator.)

[ 1 ] We can find an interesting parallel between what is revealed in the life of the individual and what rules in the development of humanity as a whole if we consider, for example, what the teachers and leaders of ancient Egypt told the Greeks about the guidance and direction of Egyptian spiritual life. The story is told that when an Egyptian was asked who had guided and led his people since ancient times, he answered that in remote antiquity gods had ruled and taught them and that only later did human beings become their leaders. He added that the first leader they acknowledged on the physical plane as a human-like being rather than a god was called Menes.¹ In other words, according to Greek accounts, the Egyptian leaders asserted that the gods themselves had guided and directed their people in earlier times.

We must always take care to understand in the right way reports that have been handed down to us from ancient times. We need to think carefully about what the ancient Egyptians meant when they said that the gods had been their kings and great teachers. They meant that in ancient times those people who felt in their souls a kind of higher consciousness, a wisdom from higher worlds, had to put themselves into a clairvoyant state before they could find their true inspirer and teacher, for their true teacher would approach them only when their spiritual eyes were opened. Such a person when asked, “Who is your teacher?” would not have pointed to this or that individual, but would have entered a clairvoyant state—and we know from spiritual science that it was easier to achieve a clairvoyant state in ancient times than it is today. In that clairvoyant state, a person would have met his teacher, for in those days beings came down from the spiritual worlds who did not become incarnate in human bodies. Thus, in the remote past of ancient Egypt, the gods still ruled and taught, using human beings as their channels. At that time, however, the term “gods” referred to beings who had preceded human beings in their development.

[ 2 ] Spiritual science teaches us that before becoming the “earth” as we know it today, the earth passed through an earlier planetary state or condition called the “moon state.”² During this moon state, human beings were not yet human in our sense of the word. Nevertheless, there were other beings on the old Moon who had evolved to the same level as humans have now reached on the earth, though they looked very different from us. In other words, on the old Moon, which perished and later developed into our earth, there were beings we can consider as our forerunners. In Christian esoteric ism these beings are called angeloi (angels), while those beings above them, who reached the human stage of their development even earlier than the angels, are called archangeloi (archangels).

The angeloi, known as dhyanic beings or dhyani in oriental mysticism, reached the human level of their development during the Moon stage. Consequently, if they completed their evolution on the old Moon, they are now one level above us. At the end of earthly evolution, we will arrive at the level they reached at the end of the moon stage.

[ 1 ] When the earth state of our planet began and human beings appeared on it, the angels could not manifest in outer human form because the human flesh body is essentially an earthly product appropriate only for beings now at the human stage of development. Since the angels are a level above the human, they could not incarnate in human bodies; they could participate in the government of the earth only by enlightening and inspiring human beings who had achieved a state of clairvoyance. These higher, angelic beings used clairvoyant individuals to intervene in the guidance of the earth's destiny. [ 3 ] Thus the ancient Egyptians still remembered a time when their leaders were vividly conscious of their connection with these higher beings, called variously gods, angels, or dhyanic beings. These beings who influenced humanity without incarnating in human bodies, without taking on fleshly human form, were our forerunners; they had already outgrown the level of development we have reached only now.

[ 4 ] The word “superhuman”³ is often misused these days, but in this case we can use it correctly and apply it to those beings who had already achieved the human level of development during the moon period—the planetary stage preliminary to our earth—and have now grown beyond it. Such beings could appear on earth only in an etheric body and thus could be perceived only by clairvoyant individuals.⁴ That is how they came down to earth from the spiritual worlds and ruled on the earth even in post-Atlantean times.⁵

[ 5 ] These beings had the remarkable characteristic indeed—they still have it today—that they did not need to think. In fact, it may be said that they cannot think at all the way we do. After all, how do we think? Well, usually we start from a particular point, and once we have understood it, we try to comprehend other things on the basis of this understanding. If our thinking did not follow this pattern, many people would have an easier time learning in school. Mathematics, for example, cannot be learned in a day because we must begin at one point and proceed slowly from there. This takes a long time. An entire world of ideas cannot be taken in at a glance because human thinking takes its course over time. A complex thought structure cannot be present in the mind all at once; rather, we must make an effort to follow it step by step.

The higher beings I have described are not encumbered by this peculiar characteristic of human thinking. Instead, they realize an extensive train of thought as quickly as animals know to grab something the moment their instinct tells them it is edible. In higher beings, then, instinct and reflective consciousness are one and the same. What instincts are for animals at their evolutionary level, in their kingdom, direct spiritual thinking, or direct spiritual conceptualization, is for these dhyanic beings or angels. And this instinctive, conceptualizing inner life is what makes these higher beings so essentially different from us.

[ 6 ] Obviously, the angeloi cannot possibly use the kind of brain or physical body we have. They must use an etheric body because the human body and brain can process thoughts only over time. The angeloi do not form their thoughts over time; they feel their wisdom flash up in them by itself, as it were. They cannot possibly make mistakes in their thinking the way we can. Their thinking is a direct inspiration. The individuals who were able to approach these superhuman or angelic beings were therefore aware of being in the presence of sure and reliable wisdom.

In ancient Egypt, then, those who were teachers or rulers knew that the commandments which their spiritual guides gave them and the truths they uttered were immediately right and could not be wrong. And the people to whom these truths were then imparted felt the same way. [ 7 ] The clairvoyant leaders of ancient times could speak in such a way that the people believed that their words came from the spiritual world. In short, there was a direct current flowing down from the higher, guiding spiritual hierarchies.

[ 8 ] Thus, the next higher world of the spiritual hierarchies guides the entire evolution of humanity; it works both on the individual in childhood and on humanity as a whole. The angeloi or superhuman beings of this realm are one level above us and reach directly up into the spiritual spheres. From these spheres they bring to earth what works into human culture. In the individual, this higher wisdom leaves its imprint on the formation of the body during childhood, and it formed the culture of ancient humanity in a similar way.

[ 9 ] This is how the Egyptians, who reported that they were in contact with the divine realm, experienced the openness of the human soul to the spiritual hierarchies. Just as the child's soul opens its aura to the hierarchies until the moment indicated in the previous lecture, so, through its work, humanity as a whole opened its world to the hierarchies with which it was connected.

[ 10 ] This connection to the higher hierarchies was particularly significant in the case of the holy teachers of India. These were the great teachers of the first post-Atlantean epoch, of the first Indian culture that spread in the south of Asia. After the end of the Atlantean catastrophe, when the physiognomy of the earth had changed and Asia, Europe, and Africa had developed in the eastern hemisphere in their new form, but before the time documented in ancient records, the culture of the ancient teachers of India flourished.

People today generally have a completely false picture of these great Indian teachers. If, for example, an educated person of our time were to meet one of the great teachers of India, he or she would look puzzled and probably say, “This is supposed to be a wise man? That is not how I imagined a wise man.” According to our current definition of the terms “clever” and “intelligent,” the ancient holy teachers of India would not have been able to say anything intelligent. By today's standards, these teachers were simple and very plain people who would have given the simplest answers to questions, even to questions pertaining to everyday life. Often, it was scarcely possible to elicit anything from them other than some sparse utterance that would seem quite insignificant to the educated classes of our day.

However, at certain times, these holy teachers proved to be more than merely simple people. At these times they had to gather in groups of seven, because what each could sense individually had to harmonize as if in a seven-tone harmony with what the other six experienced. Each wise man was able to perceive this or that, depending on his particular faculties and development. And out of the harmony of the individual perceptions of these seven individuals, there emerged the primeval wisdom that resounds through ancient times. Its reverberation can be heard even today if we decipher the occult records correctly. The records I am referring to are not the revelations of the Vedas, though the Vedas are certainly marvelous in their own right.⁶ The teachings of these holy men of ancient India precede the writing of the Vedas by a long time. The Vedas, those tremendous works, are only a faint echo of those earlier teachings.

When these wise teachers faced one of the angeloi or superhuman forerunners of humanity, and looked clairvoyantly into the higher worlds, listening all the while clairaudiently to this being, their eyes shone like the sun. And what they were able to impart then had an awe inspiring effect on the people around them; all who heard them knew that they were not speaking out of human wisdom or human experience, but that gods, superhuman beings, were intervening in human culture.

[ 11 ] The ancient cultures originated from this influx of divine wisdom. The gate to the divine-spiritual world was completely open for the human soul during Atlantean times. In the course of the post-Atlantean periods, however, gradually the gate closed. Little by little, people in many countries felt that human beings had to rely more and more on themselves. Here we can see again that the development of humanity as a whole parallels that of the child. At first the divine-spiritual world still extends into the child's unconscious soul, which is active in the formation of the body. Then comes the moment when each person begins to perceive himself or herself as an I, the first moment one can remember. Before this lies a time we cannot in any ordinary way usually recall. This is why it is said that even the wisest among us can still learn something from the soul of the child as it is in the time before memory develops. Thereafter, the individual is left to his or her own devices; I-consciousness appears, and we become able to remember our experiences.

In the same way there came a time when nations began to feel themselves cut off from the divine inspiration of their forefathers. For just as we are separated more and more from the aura guiding us during our early childhood years, so in the life of nations the divine forebearers gradually and increasingly withdrew. As a result, human beings were left to their own research and their own knowledge. In historical records that describe this development, we can feel the intervention of the guides of humanity.

The ancient Egyptians called the first founder of culture, who was human rather than divine, “Menes.” And they dated the human possibility of error from the same moment, because from then on human beings had to rely on the instrument of the brain. The ancient Orientals likewise gave the name “Manes” to the human being as thinker and called the first bearer of human thinking “Manu.” The Greeks called the first developer of the principle of human thought “Minos” with whom the legend of the labyrinth is associated. The fact that human I beings can fall into error is symbolized by the labyrinth. Labyrinths were first built at the time when the gods withdrew from human beings. They are, of course, images of the convolutions of the brain, in which the thinker can get lost. At the time of Minos people sensed that they had gradually moved away from being guided directly by the gods and were developing a new form of guidance in which the I experienced the influence of the higher spiritual world.

[ 12 ] To summarize: Besides the forerunners of the human race, who completed their human stage on the Moon and have now become angels, there are other beings who did not complete their development at that time. While the angeloi or dhyanic beings advanced one level above ours at the moment when human evolution began on earth, these other beings, like the higher categories of luciferic beings, did not complete their human evolution on the old Moon, and thus remain somehow incomplete.

Thus when the earthly condition of our planet began these early human beings were not alone; they received inspiration from divine-spiritual beings. Without their inspiration, like children without guidance, these early human beings would have been unable to progress. Therefore the beings who had completed their evolution on the old Moon were indirectly present on the earth with them. Between these angelic beings and early, childlike humankind, however, there lived beings who had not completed their evolution on the old Moon. These beings, of course, were on a higher level than we are because they could have become angels during the old Moon period. But they had not reached full maturity then and thus remained below the angels, although they are still far superior to us in terms of typically human attributes. Indeed, these beings who stand between us and the angels occupy the lowest level among the multitudes of luciferic spirits—the realm of the luciferic beings begins with them.

[ 13 ] It is extraordinarily easy to misunderstand these beings. We could ask why the divine spirits, the rulers of the good, permitted such beings to remain behind, thus allowing the luciferic principle to enter humanity. While we may object that the good gods will certainly turn everything to the good, this question nevertheless suggests itself. Another misunderstanding arises if we consider these beings as simply “evil.” To think that these beings are “evil,” however, is to misunderstand them because, although they are the source of evil in human evolution, they are not “evil” at all. Rather, they just stand midway between us and the superhuman beings. In a certain way, indeed, these beings are more perfect than we are. They have already achieved a high level of mastery in all the capacities we still have to acquire. At the same time, unlike the angelic forerunners of the human race, these luciferic beings, because they did not complete their human stage of development on the old Moon, are still able to incarnate in human bodies during earthly evolution. The angeloi, on the other hand, the great inspirers of humanity upon whom the ancient Egyptians still relied, cannot appear in human bodies but can only reveal themselves through human beings. Thus, in the remote past, besides human beings and angels, there existed beings who were neither angels nor humans and were able to incarnate in human bodies. Indeed, in Lemurian and Atlantean times a number of individuals bore such “retarded” angelic beings within them as their innermost core. During those periods ordinary human beings, who were to develop through successive incarnations to an appropriate level of the human ideal, coexisted with beings who looked outwardly like ordinary people. These luciferic beings had to clothe themselves in human bodies because earthly conditions require the outward form of a physical body. Thus, particularly in ancient times, humanity lived side by side with these other beings who belong to the lowest category of luciferic individualities.

While the angels worked on human culture through human individuals, the luciferic beings incarnated and founded cultures in various places. The legends of ancient peoples often talk about great persons who established cultures in this or that particular place. These were embodied luciferic beings. However, it would be wrong to assume that because such an individual was an incarnation of a luciferic being he or she was therefore necessarily evil. In fact, human culture has received countless blessings from these beings.

[ 14 ] According to spiritual science, in ancient times, specifically in the Atlantean period, there existed a kind of human primal or root language that was the same over all the earth because speech in those times came much more out of the innermost core of the soul than it does today. The following will make this clear. In Atlantean times people experienced outer impressions in such a way that to give expression to something external the soul was compelled to use a consonant. Thus, what was present in space—the universe and everything in it—induced people to imitate everything around them with consonants. People felt the wind blowing, the sound of waves, the shelter a house provides, and imitated these experiences by means of consonants. On the other hand, people's inner experiences, such as pain or joy, were imitated by vowels. Thus, one can see that in speech the soul became one with external events or beings.

[ 15 ] The Akashic chronicle reveals, for example, that when people in the past approached a hut arching over a family, sheltering and protecting the people, they observed primarily its shape curving around the inhabitants.⁷ This protective curving of the hut was expressed through a consonant, but the fact that there were ensouled bodies in the hut—people could feel this sympathetically was expressed through a vowel. Gradually, the concept of protection emerged: “I have protection, protection for human bodies.” This concept was expressed in consonants and vowels, which were not arbitrary, but an unambiguous and direct expression of the experience. [ 16 ] This was the case everywhere on earth. The existence of a “primal language” common to all people is not a figment of the imagination. To a certain extent, the initiates of every nation are still able to understand this original language. Every language contains certain sounds reminiscent of it; in fact, our modern languages are the relics of the primeval, universal human language.

[ 17 ] This original language was inspired by the superhuman beings, our true forerunners, who completed their development on the Moon. If there had been no other influence than this, the entire human race would basically have remained unified; there would have been one universal way of speaking and thinking everywhere on earth. Individuality and diversity could not have developed, and human freedom likewise could not have been established. Divisions and splits in humanity were necessary for the development of human individuality. Languages became different in each region of the earth because of the work of those teachers who were an incarnation of a luciferic being. These luciferic or “retarded” angelic beings used the language of the nation in which they incarnated for their teaching. Thus, we owe the fact that every nation speaks a particular, non-universal language to the presence of such great, enlightening teachers, who were, in fact, “retarded” angelic beings who had reached a far higher level than the human beings around them. Beings like the early heroes celebrated by the ancient Greeks who worked in human form, for example, as well as beings who worked in human form in other nations, were such incarnations of angelic beings who had not completed their development.

Clearly, then, these beings cannot be dismissed as completely “evil.” On the contrary, they have provided what has destined the human race to be free by introducing diversity into what would otherwise have remained universally uniform over the whole earth. This is true for many other aspects of life as well as for languages. Individualization, differentiation, and freedom are due to the beings who remained behind on the Moon.

To be sure, it may be said that the wise leadership of the world intended to guide all beings to their goal in the planetary evolution. However, if this had been done directly, certain other things would not have been achieved. Certain beings are held back in their development because they have a special task in the evolution of humanity. The beings who had completely fulfilled their task on the Moon would have created only a uniform humanity and, therefore, they had to be opposed by the luciferic beings. And this in turn gave these luciferic beings the possibility of changing something that was actually a defect into something good.

[ 18 ] On this basis we can consider the question of why evil, imperfection, and disease exist in the world from a wider perspective. We can look at “evil” in exactly the same way we have just looked at the imperfect, “retarded” angelic beings. Everything that is at one time imperfect or retarded in its development is changed into something good in the course of evolution. This is, of course, no justification of our evil deeds.

[ 19 ] This also tells us why the wise government of the world holds back the development of certain beings and prevents them from reaching their goal. The reason is that the holding back will serve a good purpose in subsequent evolutionary periods. In ancient times, when the nations were not yet able to direct themselves, teachers guided particular eras and particular individuals. In a sense, all the teachers of the nations—Kadmos, Kekrops, Pelops, Theseus, and so on—bore an angelic being in the innermost depths of their soul.⁸ This is a clear indication that humanity is in fact subject to guidance and direction in this respect as well.

[ 20 ] Thus, at each stage of evolution there are beings who fail to reach the goal they should have attained. In ancient Egyptian civilization, which flourished several thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile, superhuman teachers revealed themselves to the people and were considered by them to be divine guides. At the same time, however, other beings were active who had not yet completely reached the level of angels.

The ancient Egyptians had attained a certain level of development—that is, the souls of people today had developed to a certain level during the Egyptian period. Thus the guidance I am talking about here has a twofold benefit: it helps the person who is guided to achieve something, and it also helps the guiding beings to advance in their development. For example, an angel is more after having guided people for a while than it was before taking this guiding role. In other words, angels advance through their guiding work—“full” angels as well as those who have not yet completed their development. All beings can advance at all times; everything is in continuous development. Nevertheless, at each stage some beings remain behind and fail to complete their development.

Ancient Egyptian culture, therefore, was influenced by three categories of beings: divine leaders or angels, semi-divine leaders who had not yet fully reached the level of angels, and human beings. Now while the human beings on earth progressed in their evolution during the ancient Egyptian period, some superhuman beings or angels were held back, that is, they did not fulfill their guiding role in a way that would have allowed them to bring all of their powers to expression. Consequently, these beings remained behind as angels and did not develop further. Similarly, the imperfect, “retarded” angelic beings, who had not yet developed to the level of the “full” angels, were also arrested in their development. Thus, when the Egypto-Chaldean cultural period drew to a close and the Greco-Latin period began, guiding beings from the earlier cultural epoch who had not finished their development were still present. However, they could now no longer use their powers because their place in guiding humanity had been taken over by other angels or semi-angelic beings. As a result, these beings who were left over, so to speak, were unable to continue their own evolution. [ 21 ] Thus we have a category of beings who could have used their powers during the Egyptian period, but did not do so to the full extent possible and so were unable in the subsequent Greco-Latin period to use their own forces because other guiding beings had taken their place. In addition, the nature and character of the Greco-Latin epoch also made their intervention impossible.

Earlier we saw that the beings who had not evolved to the level of angels on the old Moon later had the task of actively participating in the earthly evolution of humanity. By the same token, those guiding beings who did not complete their development in the Egypto-Chaldean period are similarly meant to intervene in human development in a later epoch. This is to say that, in a given later cultural epoch, the normal progress of human evolution is to be directed by beings whose turn it is to take on a guiding role; but, at the same time, other beings will be active who did not develop fully in earlier times, for instance, those who failed to complete their development in the ancient Egyptian epoch. This characterization applies to our own period as well; that is, we live in a time when, besides the normal leaders of humanity, the incompletely developed beings from the ancient Egypto-Chaldean cultural period actively intervene.

[ 22 ] To understand the unfolding of events and beings, we must see events in the physical world as effects (revelations) of causes or archetypes that lie in the spiritual world. Our culture, by and large, is characterized by a trend toward spirituality. The urgent striving for spirituality we see in many people is the result of the work of those spiritual guides who have attained the developmental level appropriate to them. These normally developed spiritual guides of our evolution are at work in everything that can lead us to the great treasures of spiritual wisdom that theosophy [ anthroposophy] can impart to us.

However, the beings who did not develop properly during the Egypto-Chaldean period are also shaping the cultural trends of our time. They are at work in much that is thought and done in the present and the near future. In particular, these beings are active in everything that gives our culture a materialistic cast, but often their influence can be felt even in the trend toward the spiritual. Indeed, we are experiencing what amounts to a resurrection of Egyptian culture in our time.

The beings invisibly guiding events in the physical world thus belong to one of two classes. The first comprises those spiritual individualities who developed properly and normally up to our time. These were able to help in the guidance of our culture at the time when the leaders of the Greco-Latin period preceding our own gradually completed their mission of guiding humanity through the first Christian millennium. The second class works together with the first and consists of those spiritual individualities who did not complete their development in the Egypto-Chaldean period. These had to remain inactive during the Greco-Latin period, but they can actively participate in guiding us now, because our time is very similar to the Egypto-Chaldean period.

That is why much in contemporary culture seems to be a resurrection of ancient Egyptian forces. However, the forces that worked spiritually in ancient Egypt now frequently appear recast in materialistic form. Let us look, for example, at the way ancient Egyptian knowledge is being revived today. In this connection, we may think of Kepler, who was imbued with a sense of the harmony of the structure of the cosmos and expressed this harmony in the important mathematical laws of celestial mechanics called Kepler's laws.⁹ These laws may appear to us now rather dry and abstract, but they grew directly out of Kepler's perception of the harmony of the universe. Kepler himself wrote that to be able to make his discoveries he had to penetrate the holy mysteries of the Egyptians and steal the holy vessels from their temples.¹⁰ What he thus brought the world will not be understood in its full significance for humanity until much later.

Kepler's words are not mere phrases; rather, they indicate that he vaguely sensed that he was re-experiencing what he had learned in Egyptian times during his incarnation in that epoch. Indeed, we can assume that, in a past life, Kepler had deeply studied and penetrated ancient Egyptian wisdom which then reappeared in his soul in a new form appropriate to modern times. Understandably, the Egyptian spirit brings a materialistic trend into our culture since a strong element of materialism existed in Egyptian spirituality. For example, the Egyptians embalmed corpses, that is, they attached great importance to the preservation of the physical body. Our funerary customs, though with appropriate modifications, derive from this Egyptian tradition.

The same forces that failed to develop properly at that time are now again actively participating in human evolution—though, of course, in a different way. The modern worship of mere matter grew out of the outlook that made the embalming of bodies important. The Egyptians embalmed the bodies of their dead and thus preserved something they considered very important. They believed that the further development of the soul after death was linked to the preservation of the physical body. In the same way, modern anatomists dissect the physical body and think that they are learning something about the laws of the human organism.

Today, the forces of the ancient Egyptian and Chaldean worlds that were progressive then have become regressive and are at work in modern science. To fully appreciate the character of our present time, we must come to know these forces. If we remain ignorant of their significance, these forces will harm us. Only if we are aware of their activity and can find a right relationship to them will they not be harmful. Only through knowing them will we be able to guide these forces to good ends. They must be put to use, for without them we would not have the great achievements of technology, industry, and so on. These forces belong to the lowest rank of luciferic beings. We must see them for what they are. Otherwise, we begin to believe that no other impulses than the modern materialistic ones exist, and we fail to see other forces that can guide us upward to the spiritual realm. For this reason, we must clearly distinguish two spiritual streams in our time.

[ 23 ] If the wise powers guiding the world had not retarded the development of these luciferic beings during the Egypto-Chaldean period, our era would lack a certain necessary gravity. Only the forces that would bring us at all costs into the spiritual realm would then be working on us. Of course, we would be only too inclined to give in to them and would become dreamers and visionaries; we would be interested in life only if it became spiritualized as quickly as possible. A certain contempt for the physical-material world would then be our typical attitude. However, to fulfill its mission, our present cultural epoch has to bring the forces of the material world fully to fruition, so that their sphere can be conquered for spirituality.

We can be tempted and seduced by the most beautiful things if we pursue them one-sidedly, and this one-sidedness, if it takes hold, can also turn every good endeavor and striving into fanaticism. It is true that humanity advances through its noble impulses, but it is also true that the impassioned and fanatic advocacy of the noblest impulses can bring about the worst results for our development. Only when we strive toward the highest goals with humility and clarity, and not out of impassioned enthusiasm, will wholesome and healthy developments for the progress of humanity result.

Therefore, the wisdom at work in guiding the world arrested the development of those forces that should have fully evolved during the Egyptian cultural epoch. This was done to give the achievements of our era a certain necessary weight, thereby enabling us to understand the material world, the things on the physical plane. These same forces now direct our attention toward physical life.

[ 24 ] Thus, humanity develops under the guidance of beings that have progressed properly and of other beings that failed to do so. People with clairvoyant vision can observe the cooperation of the two classes of beings in the supersensible world. They can understand the spiritual processes of which the physical events around us are the manifestation.

[ 25 ] Of course, opening our spiritual eye or spiritual ear to the spiritual world through exercises of some kind is not sufficient to enable us to understand what is happening in the world process. It only allows us to see what is there, to recognize that there are spiritual beings of the soul or the spiritual realm. In addition to this, we must also be able to distinguish, to cognize the different kinds of spiritual beings involved in the world process. We cannot tell just by looking whether a being of the soul or spiritual realm is developing appropriately or whether its development has been arrested. We do not know whether it advances or hinders our evolution. If we develop clairvoyant abilities but do not also gain a full understanding of the conditions of human development as we have described them, we will never be able to tell what type of being we are encountering. Thus, clairvoyance must always be accompanied by a clear assessment of what we perceive in the supersensible world.

This is particularly necessary in our own time. It was not always so. In very ancient cultures, things were quite different. In ancient Egypt, for example, clairvoyants could identify to what group a being of the supersensible world belonged, because that information was as if written on its forehead. Therefore, clairvoyants could not mistake one being for another. Nowadays, however, the danger of misunderstanding and mistaking one being for another is very great. In ancient times, people were still close to the realm of the spiritual hierarchies and could recognize the beings they encountered. Now, however, errors are easily possible, and the only way to protect ourselves against serious harm is to make an effort to grasp concepts and ideas such as those presented here.

[ 26 ] In esotericism, a person who is able to see into the spiritual world is called a “clairvoyant.” But, as I have said, just being a clairvoyant is not enough, because clairvoyants, though they can see in the supersensible world, cannot distinguish. Therefore, people who have developed the ability to distinguish between the beings and events of the higher worlds are called “initiates.” Initiation is what enables us to distinguish between various types of beings. People can be clairvoyant and see into the higher worlds without also being initiates. In ancient times, being able to distinguish between these beings was not especially important, for once the ancient mystery schools had brought their students to the point of clairvoyance, there was no great danger of making mistakes. Now, however, the danger of falling into error is very great. Therefore, in all esoteric schooling the development of clairvoyance must always be accompanied by initiation. As people become clairvoyant, they must also become able to distinguish between the particular types of supersensible beings and occurrences they perceive.

[ 27 ] In modern times, the powers guiding humanity are faced with the special task of creating a balance between the principles of clairvoyance and initiation. At the beginning of the modern period, the leading spiritual teachers necessarily had to consider what I have just explained. As a matter of principle, therefore, the esoteric spiritual movement that is suited to our time works to establish the right relationship between clairvoyance and initiation. This balanced relationship became necessary when, in the thirteenth century, humanity underwent a crisis in regard to its faculty of higher cognition. Around the year 1250, in fact, we find the period in which people felt most cut off from the spiritual world.

Clairvoyant exploration of this time reveals that even the outstanding minds striving for higher cognition had to admit that their ability to know the physical world was limited by their reason, intellect, and spiritual knowledge. They felt that human research and the human capacity to know would never enable them to reach the spiritual world. In fact, they only knew of the existence of a spiritual world because reports of it had been handed down from previous generations. In the thirteenth century, then, direct spiritual perception of the higher worlds had become darkened and more difficult. It was with good reason, therefore, that at the height of scholasticism people believed that human knowledge was restricted to the physical world.¹¹

[ 28 ] By about 1250, people had to draw the boundary between what they believed on the basis of the traditions handed down to them and what they could perceive and understand on their own. The latter was limited to the physical, sensory world. Later, a new era dawned when it began to be possible again to gain direct insight into the spiritual world. However, this new clairvoyance is different from the old one that had more or less disappeared by the year 1250.

For this new form of clairvoyance, Western esotericism had to lay down the strict principle that initiation must always guide our spiritual ears and eyes. This characterizes the special task that the esoteric stream, then introduced into Europe, had taken upon itself. As the year 1250 approached, a new way of guiding human beings toward the supersensible worlds began to take hold.

[ 29 ] This new guidance was prepared by the spirits that worked in that time behind the outer events of history. Already centuries earlier, they had prepared what would be necessary for esoteric schooling under the conditions that would prevail after 1250. If the term “modern esotericism” is not a misnomer, we can apply it to the spiritual work of these more highly developed individuals. Conventional history, focusing only on outer events, knows nothing of them. But their deeds have affected all cultural developments in the West since the thirteenth century.

[ 30 ] The significance of the year 1250 for the spiritual development of humanity becomes especially clear if we consider the following result of clairvoyant research. Even individualities who had already reached high levels of spiritual development in their previous incarnations and incarnated again around 1250 had to experience a complete, though temporary, obscuring of their direct vision of the spiritual world. Even completely enlightened individuals were as though cut off from the spiritual world and knew about it only from their memories of earlier incarnations. From this we can see that a new element obviously had to appear in the spiritual guidance of humanity. This new element is true modern esotericism. It enables us to fully understand how what we call the Christ-impulse can take part in guiding humanity as well as each individual in all activities and aspects of life.

[ 31 ] The Christ-principle was first assimilated by human souls in the period between the Mystery of Golgotha and the advent of modern esotericism. During this period, people accepted Christ unconsciously as far as their higher spiritual forces were concerned. Later, when people had to accept Christ consciously, they made all sorts of mistakes. In their understanding of Christ they were led into a labyrinth. In those first years of Christianity, the Christ-principle took root in lower, subordinate soul forces. This was followed by a time, one in which we are still living, in which people began to understand the Christ-principle with their higher soul capacities. In fact, even today, we are only at the beginning of this understanding. Indeed, as I will explain in the next chapter, the decline of supersensible cognition up to the thirteenth century and its slow revival in a new and different form since then coincide with the intervention of the Christ-impulse in human history. Modern esotericism, therefore, may be understood as the elevation of the Christ-impulse into the leading element in the guidance of those souls who want to work on gaining a knowledge of the higher worlds that is appropriate to current developmental conditions.

[ 32 missing ]

• 1. Menes, c.3400 B.C., Egyptian king. First king of the first dynasty.
• 2. For a description of the planetary stages, see Steiner, Occult Science, 108–254.
• 3. riedrich Wilhelm Nietzche, 1844–1900, elaborated his idea of the “superhuman” in the character of Zarathustra in his Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883). He portrays a future wherein humanity attains dominance and the realization of its earthly purpose through the free exercise of creative power. Nietzche believed that modern spirituality is a symptom of decadence, and that the “superhuman” would triumph over declining Western culture.
• 4. Etheric body. See note 3, Lecture One
• 5. or a description of earth evolution during the post-Atlantean epochs, see Occult Science, 229–254.
• 6. The Vedas are the most ancient of Hindu sacred texts. Steiner speaks of them in Occult Science, 231. Also The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul (lecture 3 and lecture 4) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1945) and The East in the Light of the West (Blauvelt, NY: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1986) 161ff.
• 7. The Akashic Chronicle refers to a pictorial record of every thought, feeling, and deed occurring since the world began. Accessible to psychic vision.
• 8. Kadmos, founder of the ancient Greek city of Thebes and its first ruler. Kekrops, legendary king of Athens. Pelops, son of Tantalus. King in Elis, father of Atreus and Thyestes. Theseus, king of Athens. Conquered the Minotaur.
• 9. Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630, German astronomer, physicist, and mathematician.
• 10. Steiner here refers to a passage in Kepler's foreword to the fifth volume of his work Harmonices Mundi (1619), which reads as follows: “Yes, I am the one; I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a shrine to my God out of them far beyond the boundaries of Egypt. If you can forgive me, I will be glad; if you will be angry with me, I will bear your anger. Here I cast the die and write this book for today's readers as well as for those of the future—what does it matter? Even if it has to wait a hundred years for its reader: God Himself has waited for six thousand years for him who looks at His creation with understanding.”
• 11. Scholastic thought was dominant in medieval Christian Europe from the 9th–17th centuries. Steiner describes the characteristics of scholasticism in Eleven European Mystics, (Blauvelt, NY: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1971), 168–174. Also The Redemption of Thinking, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).

Somebody who hears something about anthroposophy forms an opinion very often from this or that which he hears about the matter, that he has to deal with a sect or something similar. In particular since the building has been tackled in Dornach, one has considered this building and spiritual science stereotypically as a sectarian movement. It is hard to cope with such prejudices. I would almost like to say, the more one combats them, with the bigger fierceness they appear and the more they find belief.

Today I would only like to note that the bases of spiritual science do not have anything to do with a sectarian trend or purpose. This spiritual science has not developed from any religious impulse, but it takes the point of view that that which it intends is a necessary attempt of our time, just considering the great achievements of scientific thinking. If one proves the scientific thinking proves more precisely, it seems to be incapable to tackle the riddles of humanity concerning the area of the spirit. A historical necessity is that beside these natural sciences with the same seriousness spiritual-scientific research places itself in the recent time.

Well, I only wanted to point to the fact that someone who pursues the origin of the spiritual-scientific attempts detects that it has originated in straight development from demands that the really understood natural sciences themselves put. However, going more into such requirement, as we have discussed it the day before yesterday here, it becomes apparent that this scientific direction must be insufficient by that with which it has become great just for the questions of the moral-social life I want to treat today.

One often hears from this or that side: that what natural sciences have performed must be also made fruitful for the consideration of the moral ideas.

I would like to take my starting point from something that one hears very often. Today the judgement of the human beings is challenged by the tragic, catastrophic events that concern the whole humanity in manifold way. The one needs, because of his position and occupation, to form an opinion about this or that what the sad events bring; the other will do it out of the sympathy with the destiny of the whole humanity. Just from these drastic events, it became necessary to some people to form an opinion about the social life of humanity.

There one hears very often: what can one think about this and that? How has one to judge these or those things under the influence of the today's sad events? Then one hears as answer: history teaches this and that. History is, in the end, nothing but the enumeration of that what the human beings believe to know about the course of events of the social life up to now. History is understandably that for many people from which they want to form their opinion.

Someone who experiences the events of our time with heart and head has to say to himself that these events do not have that effect on many people that they have to learn something quite new that they need in many respects not to stop at the opinions which they had four, five years ago.

Someone who stands wholeheartedly in these events has to retrain. This is maybe just one of the saddest symptoms that most people have not yet realised that they must retrain, although these sad events take place for so long time that they believe that they can just still judge certain things as well as four or five years ago. Just the signs of the times could teach much in this respect.

I would like to bring in an example of our time and another of the past. Those who deal with contemporary history know that so-called experts believed to be able to forecast when this war broke out that it could last no longer than for four to six months on account of the general economic and social conditions.

In which way the events themselves have disproved such an apparently appropriate judgement! However, one is not yet inclined to say to himself, such appropriate judgements have been disproved, and one has to retrain. In such things, one has to retrain.—One must not simply stop at the prejudice that history teaches this and that. History has taught that the war could last no longer than for four to six months; but reality has taught how little history is applicable to reality!

Another example is: in 1789, Schiller (1759-1805) as professor of history held his inaugural speech What Is and to What Purpose Does One Study Universal History?. In this speech, he said the following: the European community of states seems to have changed into a big family; the housemates may be hostile to each other, but they do no longer tear each other to pieces as I hope.—Somebody pronounced that sentence who attempted to penetrate with ingenuity into that what history teaches. He said this, briefly before the French Revolution broke out with everything that it had as result.

Well, if one even envisages longer periods which followed—how does Schiller's quotation look? Something has to follow from that what today the signs of the times teach. This is that one learns something really from them.

What forms the basis of the sentence that history teaches this?—Above all, one has to be clear in his mind that one cannot judge life after outer symptoms. Spiritual science just wants this: penetrating away from the surface into the deeper undergrounds of life. The scientific way of thinking has originated from the habitual ways of thinking of the last centuries.

This is the expression of these impulses of thought. Not only the scientific thinking, but any thinking of humanity was involved in these habitual ways of thinking, so that these habitual ways of thinking work beneficially not only in natural sciences, but that they have also to work in other areas of life. One may say, one has taken great pains to bring also that what has made natural sciences great, as line of thought into other areas of the human life. Today the sociological moral impulses should mainly occupy us. Nevertheless, the impulses have worked different there. That who can pursue the contemporary history in deeper sense knows how intimately the effects of those impulses are associated with the catastrophic events in which we live today.

Excellent thinkers have attempted to transfer the scientific way of thinking to the sociological field. I would like to mention one example of many. The great English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1901) tried to apply biological concepts to the social living together. The concept of development has been applied to everything. Rightly, it has been applied also to the life of human beings.

Herbert Spencer said, one realises development in the life of the animals, of the human being; the single living being originates from the zygote and then forms the so-called ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm. The different organs develop from these three cell layers. Spencer now tries to apply this way of grasping a scientific process to the historical-social life, too. He transfers all those organic systems that belong to the ectoderm to the work of those human beings who belong to the military class; the human beings of the working class develop from the social endoderm, and those human beings who merchandise develop from the mesoderm. Then it is only logical if the great philosopher Spencer says, because from the ectoderm the nervous system and the brain develop, the best develops from the social ectoderm.—Of course, I will not defer to this hawkish view of the philosopher Spencer; if he says, the ruling circles of any state would have to arise necessarily from the military class because, otherwise, the state would have no nervous system, no head system.

This only as an example of directly transferring the scientific way of thinking to the social-historical life.

Someone who has a feeling for such things will realise that all these attempts show only that one cannot at all approach that which is effective in the social life with such scientific mental pictures. Why is that?

I have now to take my starting point from something that is far away and then to lead our considerations to the moral-social field. Spiritual science has just to fetch many a thing that is far away.

I would like to point out at first that people are little inclined to involve the whole life in their knowledge. What is involved in their knowledge is the wake day life. From the spiritual-scientific viewpoint one has to stress that the whole life consists of that which the human being experiences in the wake day life, and of that which positions itself in this life during sleep and dream, in which chaotic pictures surge up and down. One has formed the strangest views concerning the scientific images of sleeping and dreaming. It would be very interesting once to go into that, too. Nevertheless, I must be brief concerning these things that I would like to adduce briefly. Above all one has rather strange mental pictures of sleep. I have to bring this to your attention.

Today one is also convinced as a scientist that sleep originates from tiredness that the human being is just tired and then sleep has to come. Everybody can convince himself of the opposite if he observes a pensioner who anyhow visits a concert or a talk and falls asleep after few minutes that he does not at all fall asleep because of tiredness, but because there quite different reasons must exist.

Someone who more exactly investigates these things notices that tiredness originates more likely by sleep than sleep by tiredness. Sleeping and waking are a rhythm of life; they must alternate because one is as necessary as the other is.

I would not like to characterise this life rhythm further; but it is important that spiritual science has really to pursue this other side, the sleep with the dreams, and on the other side to note that sleep and dream extend more in the human life than one normally assumes.

Spiritual science does not at all want to take over old superstitious prejudices, for example, that dreams have any prophetic meaning for something future. However, in such old superstition a reasonable core is contained sometimes. However, one has to understand it not in such a way as one normally considers it. Recently I have pointed out in a cycle of talks how spiritual science has to envisage the problem of sleep, of dream. Against that, one has argued from psychoanalytic side that spiritual science speaks of a certain higher knowledge that one can probably compare concerning its strength with the dream images present in the consciousness that, however, psychoanalysis does the proper thing in this respect. Since it uses the dreams for investigating the human nature only in such a way that it regards the dreams, the so-called subconsciousness, only as symbolic; while , for example, I as a representative of spiritual science regard that what appears, otherwise, in the subconsciousness as real.

This is a big misunderstanding. Since it will occur to no spiritual scientist to regard the immediate contents of the dream even as symbolic. Spiritual science considers the contents of the dream not as reality, but it even shows that the contents of the dream do not have any real meaning. Against it, it says, what lives in the dream what is active in the dream, is associated with the everlasting essence of the human being.

If the human being works in the dream—if one may call it work—, a surplus of his usual consciousness works in the dream, that surplus which proves to be coherent with the everlasting essence of the human being that enters into the spiritual life after death. What lives in the dream is also that which works into our future. However, the images that the human being experiences in dream have nothing to do with that reality forming the basis of dreams.

Hence, the spiritual researcher never considers the dream in such a way that he disregards the following: if anybody dreams anything, a spiritual fact forms the basis of the dream, but the dream images may be quite different. A human being can experience the same as another in dream; but he can tell the dream quite different because his dream images have quite different meaning. What is important of the dream to the spiritual researcher? Not the dream images as those—whether one grasps them in their reality or in their symbolism—but the inner drama of the dream: how an image follows the other whether an image replaces the next, so that there is something relaxing or something frightening and the like. This inner subconscious drama makes known itself to the usual consciousness only while the subconscious experience dresses in the memories of the everyday life. That dresses in images what works there in his subconsciousness as the soul drama.

The same experience can appear in hundreds of different images. Hence, someone who gets to know a dream as a spiritual researcher knows that he does not see any contents, but the way in which the images surge up and down. In that are the essentials.

I mention this because I have to say in the context with it that—if with soul exercises the human being can behold his everlasting essence—he recognises what is real in sleep and dream. These things are processes of consciousness, and they have to be also recognised within the consciousness. The spiritual researcher who explores the consciousness in such a way, as I have given it the day before yesterday, understands that that which is so often misjudged in the recent time which no scientific way of thinking can understand is just confirmed by such psycho-physiologists like Ziehen (Theodor Z., 1862-1950) and others: the fact that the human being can have the ego-experience only because he is fixed in the life rhythm of waking and sleeping.

If one learns to recognise the soul, one also learns to recognise that the human being knows of his ego only because he is not always awake between birth and death. Imagine hypothetically the wake life extended to the whole human life between birth and death, that one could never sleep: then one would never have that abutment by which the ego becomes aware of itself in time. Because one can exchange the day consciousness with a consciousness between falling asleep and awakening that distinguishes nothing because it is vague, one has his ego-consciousness. The human being would not learn to say to himself “I” if he were not fixed in the rhythm of sleeping and waking.

It is strange how little one is inclined to go into such things. The great aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887) got involved with a consideration of dreams. He criticised the interesting book about dream imagination by Johannes Volkelt (1848-1930) and wrote a treatise about it. There one was inclined swiftly to call him a spiritist, although he did not get involved with such things in the wrongly mystic sense. Well, what does one not do if one wants to harm a human being? However, Vischer knew that people might say long, what expresses itself in the dreams is fantastic stuff.—Indeed, it is a fantastic stuff, but in it lives the everlasting essence of the human being. If the human being is not ready to develop mental pictures of such strength with his beholding consciousness as the dream has it only, then he cannot at all behold into the everlasting of the human soul. If anyone wants to do that, he must be able to raise that what works in the dream involuntarily into the free consciousness.

Nevertheless, Vischer brought something to our attention in very interesting way that casts intense light on the human life. He showed carefully that someone who cannot understand the dream properly does also not properly understand the human affects, passions and feelings generally. Why is that? Since Vischer completely found the proper thing! Just as the soul is active in the dream, save that it lives it up in images which are memories of life, the soul is during the wake day life active in the feelings, affects, and passions. We dream in them. Somebody who can really pursue the soul life knows: the same degree of intensity and the same quality of the soul life that expresses itself in the dream expresses itself during the wake day life in all human feelings. Spiritual research shows just because it really observes the soul with its methods that the human being has his wake day life only for the outer sensory observation and imagining.

Only concerning the sense perception and imagining, we are awake, while the dream penetrates into the wake day life, so that the emotional impulses are dreamt. We keep on dreaming while we are awake and, above all, we keep on sleeping while we are awake.

We dream in our feelings while being awake. We are not more aware of that which lives in our will in our wake day consciousness than the vague sleeping consciousness is. Just, therefore, philosophers have always argued whether the will can be free or not because they cannot look into the soul activities with the usual consciousness, even if they are ever so enlightened philosophers, if the soul expresses itself in the will just as little as they look into that what the soul experiences during the deep dreamless sleep. Since the will life is not only dreamt away, it is overslept in the usual consciousness.

We do not know more about any action that we commit than what reaches from the sense perception to imagining. You can convince yourselves of the fact that scientifically thoroughly thinking psycho-physiologists have already come on this thing. Study the very significant book about psychology by Theodor Ziehen: the fact that one has to stop at the mental picture with the will impulse, and that one cannot advance farther. Then only the ready action appears which enters into the imagining again. What is between the ready action and the mental picture is dived in darkness like that which the human being has experienced between falling asleep and awakening if no dream is there.

Thus, we dream and keep on sleeping during our wake day life. The emotional impulses arise from our dream life that penetrates the waking state, our will impulses arise from our sleeping life that penetrates the wake state. That which expresses itself in the social life, in history arises from our dream life and sleeping life.

However, if one investigates these things, one needs cognitive faculties which activate the soul quite different from the usual consciousness is able to do, and which enables someone to behold the soul life as such with the soul.

I would also like to insert something today that the consciousness has to do with itself to get to the view of these things. Since the misunderstanding emerges repeatedly that the spiritual researcher does not prove his things. He proves them by the fact that he shows what the soul accomplishes to get to the view of these things. However, one cannot get to the view of the things if one applies the usual consciousness only.

Nevertheless, I would like to emphasise one thing that can be essential just for this consideration: the way of imagining which is fully justified for the scientific thoughts must become different if the human being wants to envisage what I have said now and will still say. One cannot grasp that with such a formed thinking as one applies it rightly in the usual day life. There one does not reach down, for example, to the areas in which the impulses of the social, moral, juridical, ethical life are. One needs concepts there that are much more intensely related to reality than the scientific concepts are. These distinguish themselves just by the fact that they do not at all depend on immersing in the object, in the objectivity. With these concepts, one cannot penetrate into spiritual science.

For that, it is necessary that the concepts grow together with life that they immerse in life, so that they have such experience in themselves as it proceeds in the things inside. One can attain this only while one detaches himself from the way in which one is normally related with his mental pictures to the things. However, rightly this usual consciousness has extended over the whole view of nature because only thereby the great progress of natural sciences can be reached.

If the human being enters into the spiritual-scientific consideration, his mental pictures become something else. If one looks at a tree from four sides, takes a photo from four sides, these four sides are completely different from each other and, nevertheless, you will always have the same tree. From one photograph, you cannot see how the tree is real.

In the usual life, the human being is pleased if he has one concept as a copy of any process or any being if he can pronounce a physical law purely. In spiritual science, one has to apply concepts like these photographs from four sides. One can never get a mental picture of a being or a fact of the real spiritual world if one forms one concept only. You have to form your concepts in such a way that they envisage the thing from different sides if possible, although this word is meant only symbolically. In the outer life, the human beings are pantheists, monadists, or monists or some other “ists." One believes to investigate something of reality with such a mental picture so surely. The spiritual researcher knows that that is not possible. If it concerns the spiritual area, it is not possible that you do research pantheistically, that you look at the tree only from one side. You have to form your concepts internally versatile.

However, thereby you attain the possibility to immerse really in the full life. Thereby you become realistic in your concepts as I have shown in my book The Riddle of Man. You have to become more and more realistic in your concepts. The spiritual researcher aims at this. I would like to clarify this with an example.

The naturalist is completely right if he remains with his concepts in the sphere of the usual consciousness. He will just reach something significant in his field if he takes these concepts in such a way as the usual consciousness takes them. Since there they are appropriate to grasp the sense-perceptible facts. However, if then the naturalist wants to extend these concepts beyond the sense-perceptible facts, and then he must be aware that he does no longer remain in reality.

In this context, the following example is interesting. The physicist Dewar (James D., 1842-1923) has described from that what the researcher can observe today as processes, how the final state of the earth will be after millions of years. One can develop views even as a good physicist how in the course of short periods certain relations change and then he makes a projection how after millions of years the thing looks. There the professor describes in a very interesting way that then a time may come where, for example, the milk will be solid.—I do not know how the milk will originate; this is another thing!—He describes that one coats the walls of a room with the milk protein; the milk will be such solid. Indeed, then it will be colder many hundred degrees than now. All these things are thought with great scientific astuteness, and nothing at all is to be argued against such hypotheses on scientific basis.

The spiritual researcher conceives another idea straight away because he thinks vividly, really and not in the abstract. One can take the example of a human being of fourteen years as he has changed up to the eighteenth year, and then assemble these small changes after the method of Dewar and calculate how this human organism has to be after 300 years. It is completely the same method. However, the human being does no longer live after 300 years as a physical human being. Dewar's approach is quite right, makes use of all scientific-physical chicanes. One must not consider it as wrong, but it is not realistic, does not penetrate into the real. One could also start from the changes that the human organism experiences and then ask himself, how was this 300 years ago? One will get out something very nice—but the human being did not live 300 years ago. Nevertheless, that who forms theories forms his examples after this pattern.

The fundamental idea of the Kant-Laplace theory of the primeval nebula is a wrongful thought for the spiritual researcher because the earth did not exist in the time for which the Kant-Laplace theory was established; the solar system did not exist. I have brought in this only as an example that mental pictures may be quite right, may be derived from correct bases that, nevertheless, they are not be realistic.

The spiritual researcher reaches this just with his exercises to get to realistic mental pictures with which he grasps that what one can only grasp if one immerses in reality. By such immersing one learns to recognise how the ego would be in the usual consciousness if the human being could not sleep. Just the ego-consciousness would not exist at all if the human being did not live in the temporal rhythm of sleeping and waking. One also learns to recognise by immediate view that the emotional qualities are dreamt, actually, as the will qualities are slept, actually.

However, I would now still like to touch the other side of the human consciousness briefly. What happens, if with the mentioned inner processes the human being really raises that into his consciousness what remains, otherwise, always in his subconscious what is dreamt away what is overslept If he becomes aware of that, then the human being gets to know really, for example, that what he oversleeps otherwise in his will impulses. Nevertheless, as one learns to recognise that the ego-consciousness is dependent on the sleeping life, one learns to recognise, in another way, by raising the will life into the consciousness that one would have another consciousness if one did not oversleep the will life, it is that consciousness which really the spiritual researcher develops in a way. That which wills in us and in certain respect also that which corresponds to our feeling which lives in the emotional impulses, this would work if the human being faced it like his imagining life, on him like a second person whom he has in himself. The human being would walk around with a second human being.

One may say: the developmental plan full of wisdom has arranged that the uniform consciousness is enabled which the human being needs for his life between birth and death because the will life is pushed down into sleep, and the human being is not split into two because he has to face the other constantly who wills, actually, in him. On the other side, this other human being is connected with the everlasting essence of the human being.

Hence if the spiritual researcher is really successful in bringing up the will life and the emotional life into consciousness if he strengthens his inner activity so that he cannot only enliven the sensory life and the imagining life, but also the feeling life and willing life, the world is complemented with the other side, with the spiritual side;. Then the human being experiences as a reality that we are separated from those souls that have lost their bodies by death only by our sensory life and by our imagining life. When we consciously enter into our feeling life and willing life, we enter into the same region where the dead live.

Spiritual science builds a bridge between the living souls and the dead souls in quite exact way. However, the soul life must be transformed by a quite exact approach. If in this area into which the human being enters real percepts should be done—dreams appear involuntarily—if the human being wants to bring something into his consciousness that really comes from the area of the dead, then he must face the objects in the spiritual world with arbitrary but higher mental pictures than those of the wake day consciousness are as one faces, otherwise, the objects of the sense-perceptible world. In the usual dream one cannot distinguish that what induces us to imagine and ourselves. This distinction exists if the spiritual researcher approaches the realm of the dead.

Hence, dreams that arise involuntarily have always to be taken with a grain of salt, even if they apparently bring messages from any supersensible world. The spiritual researcher can only acknowledge that as his real observation, which he causes with full arbitrariness. Hence, if the researcher wants to contact any soul that is maybe dead long since, he can thereby contact it while he causes that with his will what he experiences with the concerning soul, but not in such involuntary way, as it happens by the dream.

You see, spiritual research induces us to acknowledge that another world projects in our world that has a deep meaning for our world because our emotional and our will life belong to this world. For the world at which natural sciences looks the abstract images of the usual consciousness are sufficient. For the world of the social-moral life one needs realistic mental pictures. Mental pictures, like the Kant-Laplace theory, like those of the final state of the earth can lead to error. They may be reasonable mental pictures if one remains in the area of theoretical discussions. When one adopts abstract but not realistic scientific mental pictures in the social life, in the political structure, one works destroying, one causes disasters within this reality. Now it becomes apparent—if one wants to look at that which impels the historical life further—that one cannot look at it with scientific imagination; since the human being with wake mental pictures does not stimulate the whole history, but it is dreamt. One has to envisage this important matter even if it sounds paradoxical.

The social life does not originate from such an impulse as we grasp it with natural sciences, but it is dreamt. The human being dreams the social life. It was always interesting when Herman Grimm repeatedly said in a conversation with me, if one applies the usual concepts, the scientific concepts to history, so that they should be suitable, one does not make any progress. If one wants to grasp it, if one wants to look into the impulses that work in it, then one can do this only with imagination. Herman Grimm was not yet a spiritual researcher, he rejected these things; but he meant, one could grasp this historical life only with imagination. However, with imagination one cannot grasp it, too. Nevertheless, Grimm was at least a person who knew that one could not enter the historical life with the usual concepts.

Nevertheless, just spiritual science can do it, while it adds the Imaginative consciousness, the Inspired consciousness, and the Intuitive consciousness, the beholding consciousness to the usual consciousness. Spiritual science generates awareness of that what is dreamt away, otherwise, what is overslept.

In former centuries and millennia, people had a certain instinctive consciousness of spiritual facts—I have mentioned this already the day before yesterday. However, this instinctive consciousness had to get lost. It got lost and will get lost more and more, the more the brilliant achievements of natural sciences prove themselves in their area.

From the other side that must come again what the instinctive consciousness has lost. Hence, one may say, during the human instinct life the moral-social ideas, the ethical ideas, the juridical ideas were able to flow into the historical and social life which are dreamt; and thus humanity can still wear that out what has originated from the instinctive consciousness. However, the age has entered in which humanity must attain the consciousness in which humanity has to attain full freedom. There the old instinctive consciousness will no longer be sufficient.

We live in that epoch in which one has to bring up those forces spiritual-scientifically which are effective in the social structuring of the society, in the ethical structuring of the society, in the political life. One can never grasp what lives in the social life with the concepts that are taken generally only from the usual consciousness.

Herman Grimm was completely right—but he knew half of the matter only—if he said, why is the English historian Gibbon so significant describing the first Christian centuries especially if he describes that what perished? Why does one find in his historical representation nothing of the significant growth and becoming which the Christian impulses caused in the human development? Because Gibbon just takes the usual concepts, too. However, they can even grasp that what perishes, they can grasp the corpse only.

That which becomes which grows is dreamt away and overslept. Only spiritual science can recognise this. Because the political impulses must become conscious because they can no longer be only instinctive, they must be understood spiritual-scientifically in future.

One has just to recognise that from the signs of the times in an area which is deeply associated with the human soul; even from outer things, one can recognise such things. We take an example very widespread today. While I speak of this example, one may not believe that spiritual science wants to be one-sided, wants to side with any direction, but it takes seriously that one lights up a matter only unilaterally with any concept and hence that one does something wrong if one wants to apply this concept directly to reality. I take, for example, the materialist, the historical-sociological view most evident to some people that Karl Marx and others have given about the social and historical life of humanity. If one pursues this social-democratic approach, one pursues with Marx how he really wants to show with a certain astuteness that everything that happens in history becomes manifest by certain class conflicts that material impulses determine the structure of the historical life. One can understand what Karl Marx says in this field only if one knows that he describes realities unilaterally. However, which realities does he describe? He describes the realities which were past at that time when he wrote his books!

Indeed, from the sixteenth century on the European life begins in such a way that beside that what one tells as history class conflicts are there, material impulses are there. What appeared until the age where Karl Marx attempted to apply concepts of the usual consciousness to it, humanity had already ceased dreaming. What was reality at that time when humanity has dreamt is grasped with usual concepts. Now it becomes apparent: if the realistic method of spiritual science is not applied, one finds nothing applicable to live on from that what one wants to grasp with the usual consciousness. Karl Marx's portrayal is right for a certain one-sidedness of life, for the last centuries.

It is no longer applicable, after humanity has dreamt away, has overslept what he describes. It is actual in such a way: if one wants to attain realistic concepts, one cannot deduce them from outer experience, as natural sciences have to do. Someone who has to intervene in any position of life in the social structure must have realistic concepts. However, you cannot deduce them from life. One can deduce that only from life what the usual consciousness can grasp.

One has to live in the social life if one wants to be concerned with living concepts. One has to know the laws that prevail, otherwise, only in the subconscious, and must be able to implement them in life. All those concepts that can be effective in future in the social structure arise from the Imaginative knowledge. That is why the social attempts have remained so hopeless; they have evoked so many real mistakes because one believed to be able to understand the social concepts like the scientific ones. From Imagination, from immersing in that which is experienced, otherwise, only like in the dream those impulses can be only fetched which someone needs who has to pronounce social ideas.

Any time is a transition period. Of course, that is a trivial truth, it matters what does transition. In our time, the instinctive consciousness transitions into that consciousness in which freedom prevails. The old impulses of the instinctive consciousness—the Roman Law still belongs to it—have to be superseded by that which arises from Imagination for the social life, from Inspiration for the ethical-moral life, from Intuition for the legal life. That is not so comfortable as if one constructs legal concepts and knows because one is a clever person how the whole world should be designed. One knows this!

As a spiritual researcher, one cannot do this; everywhere one has to penetrate into reality. Today one knows very little how this happens. One does not know, that, for example, the western peoples of Europe—as peoples, not as single persons!—have certain soul characteristics, the peoples of Central Europe, of East Europe, of Asia have certain other soul characteristics that these soul characteristics are associated with that what these peoples are. Today in this catastrophic time, we see a sad event that one cannot understand with the outer consciousness. It takes place in the world in which humanity can only find its way if it looks for realistic concepts. Realistic concepts are not those, which are formed after the pattern of natural sciences or after the pattern of the wake day consciousness if it concerns the social, the moral, and the legal life.

Here in Switzerland somebody made a beginning concerning legal concepts, he tried to get out the concepts of the usual contractual relationships from the concrete reality. For the first time Roman Boos (1888-1952) attempted this in his excellent book The Whole Employment Contract According to Swiss Law.

This has to progress if we want to search the realistic concepts. There is a simple means—there would be a simple means—which would be very helpful if it were tried in its radical form to show somewhere how the concepts of the usual consciousness cannot intervene in the moral-social life. One had only to attempt to assemble a parliament whose members are just great in the area of philosophical reflection with the concepts of the usual consciousness. Such a parliament would be most suitable to delete the community in shortest time because it would see the impulses of decline only.

Those belong to the creative life who can realise what only dreams, otherwise, in the outer life and in history what has dwindled down in sleep. Hence, utopias are also so hopeless. Utopias are real in such a way, as if one wanted to apply a thoroughly thought out chess match, without considering the partner. Designing utopias means to grasp that what should live with abstract intellectual forms. Hence, a utopia must always delete a community. Since what can build up reality, works only in living Imaginations and is related to, but not the same—I asks this expressly to note—as artistic creating. One becomes aware of manifold if one just looks at this social, this moral life from the viewpoint of spiritual science.

Above all, if that what develops as social-moral ideas, as juridical ideas this way penetrates life, it can always culminate in the human freedom. You can never understand this human freedom scientifically because natural sciences do not consider the human being as a free being. However, spiritual science shows the everlasting essence of the human being about whom I have said that he is like another human being in the human being. Natural sciences show only the one, not the other human being; however, the other is the free human being and lives in the human being. However, the social-moral life, the political life, the ethical life get out the free human being. Modern approach drives out freedom, actually, everywhere already in theory.

At the end let me state the following. There have always been in the recent time such considerations of the social-moral and the state and political life that compare the state, for example, to an organism. By an excellent researcher (Rudolf Kjellén, 1864-1922, Swedish historian and politician), a sensational book has appeared, The State as Form of Life (1917). It is just an example of that what one has to overcome. Some people have attempted to compare the state with an organism. One can compare everything. Nevertheless, it matters that the comparison is a realistic one.

Well, because of the shortness of time I cannot explain the matter in detail. However, if one really compares the social-moral life to the organic life, then the comparison applies only in this respect that one must compare the single state, the single community to a cell. If one wants to compare an aggregation of cells, as it is the organism, one can only compare the whole life earth to the organism. However, one can compare if one compares properly the single state to the cell and the entire earthly life on earth possibly to an organism built up from single cells.

Then that is not at all included in this organism what develops as soul, as mind in it. However, it matters very much that spirit is added to the whole life on earth. Only such a social structure of the earth is properly thought out which considers the entire human being and not only his outer nature. As little one can enclose soul and spirit in the organism, as little one can enclose that, even if one extends the organic consideration to the whole earth, in the mere state life in which human freedom is rooted. Since human freedom overtowers the organisation.

This can produce evidence that even the reflection that brings the usual abstract consciousness in the consideration of the state life must exclude the freedom concept. Spiritual science, which envisages that life which is free of anything bodily that one cannot compare with an organism, will only be able to implement the concept of the free human soul in life.

I have made a start already in 1894 with my Philosophy of Freedom, while I tried to show how the human being really develops a free soul life that breaks away from the causal concept that thereby the human being can realise his freedom. As long as one does not realise that natural sciences completely rightly denies freedom in their area because they only deal with that where no freedom exists, one also does not realise that one cannot grasp that with natural sciences to which freedom refers. However, spiritual science reaches this, which shows that the human being has his spiritual beside his body that is an expression of his soul and his mind that one can be only grasp with the beholding consciousness.

It is still rather paradoxical today if one says that sleeping and dreaming impulses exist in history, in the social life, in the moral life, in the juridical life, in the freedom life and one can only find it with spiritual science. Nevertheless, I have to mention repeatedly that that which spiritual science has to bring as a paradox for our time one can just compare with the paradoxical view of Copernicus when people still believed that the earth is stationary, the sun, and the stars move round it. He replaced this view with the opposite.

Finally, in 1822 the Catholic Church already permitted to accept the Copernican view! Well, how long it will last, until the scholars and the so-called sophisticated people will permit or will no longer be ashamed to accept that spiritual science explains life, extends it with realistic concepts, one has to wait for that. However, the signs of the times speak so intensely that one wished it could soon happen.

Nevertheless, outstanding spirits have always beheld the truth, even if only in single flashes of inspiration. Spiritual science is nothing new. It summarises that only systematically and with realistic looking what the flashes of inspiration of the most excellent personalities have always lighted up.

Yesterday I have mentioned Goethe. He also dealt with history. He felt, although he did not yet know spiritual science at that time: in that what pulsates in the historical life is not included what can be brought into the usual concepts. He felt: what lives in history contains impulses that are different from the abstract mental pictures of the usual spiritual life.

That is why Goethe said: “The best what we have from history is the enthusiasm which it excites”, a feeling which it excites if one can immerse in the historical becoming and one brings out something that does not speak only to the imagination and sensory percipience, but speaks to that which is dreamt in the emotional impulses which is even overslept in the will impulses. Then one has that which lives in history and not the corpse of history.

With reference to the social-moral life, with reference to freedom and the juridical life, one would like to say, humanity has to realise that it has to get to such a conception of the reality of these things in which the whole human being engages, also that what sleeps, otherwise, in the wake consciousness because the area of the social and moral life remains generally unaware as a rule.

Thus, it will concern that just that is stimulated which is similar to enthusiasm that works like art. Thus, one will probably have to pronounce the words at the end of this consideration which summarise in a way what I could inspire with this short consideration, the summary of that about which one has to speak—as I believe—inevitably under the influence of the signs of times. It matters that the human being finds the whole human being in order to work in the social-moral life in an appropriate manner in order to play a part in the creation of the social-moral structure and the political life. It matters that the human being gets not only to abstract ideas, not only to physiological views, but also gets to enthusiastic forces, to realistic forces. This sad time of hardship waits for that!

Spiritual science wants only to give the answer from that viewpoint that wants to form the right basis of this enthusiasm, and spiritual science is convinced that if humanity finds the way again to its everlasting, to its immortal, to that part of the human life from which the impulse of freedom arises, then humanity will also find the right ways to come out of the chaos not only by make-believe.

The social question, which is to occupy us today, did not, as will immediately become clear for everyone, arise out of a mere idea or out of the undoubted need of a few people, but is a question that confronts us with facts as strongly and clearly today as ever. One who looks around just a little in the surrounding world will know what a distinct language these facts speak. It could well be that someone who does not want to hear this language of the facts will find out in the not too distant future that he has closed his ears too long to what was necessarily going on. With regard to the social question, the human being of the present is standing within the battle that is at times still playing itself out under the surface of our social order. One who wants to say, more or less precisely, how the social battle has increased in extent and violence doesn't need to go any further into externals, he needs only to draw attention to the violent workers' movement on the occasion of the work stoppage at Crimmitschau, to the miners' strike on the occasion of the lockout of the electrical workers, and, in sum, to what is going on in Eastern Europe.¹ In all this we will have to discern the social question being lived out.

The reproach has often been addressed to Theosophy that it has a number of dreamers among its followers, that it seeks to work only in those areas to which one retreats from the great common questions of the time, where one wants to linger in leisurely contemplation of the human soul, and so they say: Theosophists are a few people who have nothing particular to do, who in an egoistical way want to retreat into the self and cultivate it in the manner of Theosophy. One easily makes the reproach to Theosophy that it wants to stand apart from the great battle of the day, from what touches humanity in the present time. The Theosophist should be setting this right again and again. He should ever and again point out that wherever there is something to investigate and think regarding warranted human affairs in the present, there the Theosophists must be, that he must have a clear heart and clear thinking, that he must not lose himself in some cloudy utopia, but rather must stand within the everyday, helping and caring.

And this other reproach can also easily be made: that Theosophy is touted as a universal cure for all the evils and injuries of the present. That also is otherwise. To be sure, it is claimed that Theosophy, the Theosophical movement, has something to do with all that must prepare itself in the present for a salutary future, but not like a mastering, not as a universal cure do we extol Theosophy; rather we only want to show that with it something so comprehensive is given that without it today we cannot progress in the mosl essential things that we should be concerned about, and that all speculation and reforming must remain half- baked unless the human being approaches the matter with the Theosophical view. The doctrines of thinkers about grand encompassing cosmic connections, about the universal law of world destiny and world events occupy us, in the inner circles of our Theosophical movement, not merely so we can gaze at the starry vastness at leisure, but rather because we know that these laws we are studying and which are active in the great world-all are also active in the human heart, in the soul, and in fact give this soul the capacity really to see into the life of the immediate present. We are sort of like an engineer who absorbs himself for years in his technical studies, but not in order to engage in contemplations of the mysteries of the calculus and marvel at them; rather we seek the laws which we then apply to human life, as the engineer builds bridges and applies the laws to reality.

There is also something here that is universal and widespread and opens up a further horizon. Who would dare to present thinking as a universal remedy, even though this thinking is necessary for what can happen in the cosmos? Theosophy is no dead matter, no dead theory. No, it is something life-awakening. It is not a matter of the concepts, the ideas, that we take on. What is told here does not have the intention of dealing with the ideas as such, nor the intention of developing interesting notions about hidden facts, but rather, what is here passed before the human soul has a very special quality. Non-Theosophists may believe it or not, but one who has occupied himself with it knows that what I am about to say is correct in practice. One that has applied himself to how, in Theosophy, the world and life are considered will notice his life of the senses and of soul becoming something different from what they were before. He learns to think in another way and will observe human circumstances in a more unbiased way than previously.

We have a distant future in mind when we speak of awakening higher powers through inner development. But for the near future we also keep an eye on the life that we can bring about through Theosophical development: that is, the possibility of coming to a comprehensive, clear, and unbiased assessment of the human situations immediately surrounding us. Our culture, with all the scientific character which it has developed up to now, has come up with theories that are impotent regarding life. The Theosophical world-view will not produce such impotent theories. It will teach mankind thinking, awaken thinking forces in mankind that are not powerless regarding reality, but will empower us to take hold of human evolution itself, to take hold of the immediate conduct of life.

Let me bring in a little symptom that will further clarify what I mean to say. Recently a clear example in the political field was provided by a Prussian government councilor who went on leave to find work in America, to take part in and get to know conditions there.² A state councilman is normally called upon to be active in human evolution. Taken in a higher sense, it is his duty and obligation to let something live in his heart that corresponds to real conditions and not merely to theories. And if he has nothing that chimes with the conditions, then his theory is impotent. This man, who for years previously had been called upon to deal with the human element, got to know the human element himself. Of course what I am saying entails not the least reproach against the individual man. This deed is to the highest degree honorable and bold, and admirable. But what he has written is a symptom of what is urgent. It shows the discrepancy in his orientation toward the world and toward workers. Here are just a few words from his book As a Worker in America [4th edition, Berlin 1905, p.31] { Bracketed statements [ ] are insertions by the German editor.}: “How often, earlier on, when I saw a healthy man begging, did I ask, with moral indignation, why doesn't the lout go to work? Now I knew why. In theory things look different from practice; even the most unappetizing aspects of the national economy are easy enough to handle at your desk.”

There is no greater mark of poverty than when someone who is called upon to participate says that the theory which he had doesn't agree with the conditions. Here's the point at which one can take hold of the matter, just as logic enables people to think at all, and just as no one can become a mathematician without manipulating logic, just so no one can develop the power of practical thinking without Theosophy. Look at the national economy that is overwhelming our developmental [free] market. If you set about looking into things with healthy, comprehensive thinking, Theosophical thinking, you will find that things that are supposed to be guideposts, emanating perhaps from university professors or party leaders, are gray theory suitable for being dealt with at the desk, but are useless when one is facing reality. Such things reveal themselves, for instance, at congresses. One just has to look more closely. Congresses in general bear this character. If those who busy themselves would care to descend into practical life, they would soon find that they are capable of nothing. Merely gazing at life doesn't do it. Nor can someone who judges from the standpoint of today's customary culture pass judgment on the women's question or the social question, nor can someone judge who merely looks at things, for nothing is done by that either.

Now if you were to ask this gentleman who wrote these words, What can lead to an improvement?, then you would find that he has only learned how it looks; but how things should be done, that is a different question altogether. It is also not a question that can be answered in an hour or a day. It can't be answered at all by theoretical debate. No Theosophist worthy of the name will say to you: I have this program for the social question, for the women's question, for the vivisection question, or about the care of animals and so forth, rather he will say: Put people who are Theosophists into the institutions dealing with all these questions, set such people in professorial chairs of national economy; then they will have the ability to develop the thinking which will lead to making the single branches of their activity into guideposts in the realm of public life. As long as this is not the case, people in this realm will be charlatans and will have to witness the world collapsing around them, and how this idle circumlocution in congresses shows itself in its uselessness.

I say this not out of fanaticism, rather from what in every Theosophist is a real Theosophical attitude, real Theosophical thinking. Theosophical thinking develops clarity about the various realms of life, a clear, objective view of the forces and powers working in the world. To look at the matter rightly, that is what Theosophical life enables you to do. Therefore Theosophy is not a panacea in the ordinary sense, rather it is the foundation of contemporary life.

After these introductory words let us give a few indications about what has given our social question, as it arises from the facts, its special stamp. Whoever wants to see what will happen must know the laws of becoming, may not have gray theories, must know the laws of the becoming of humanity. We cannot find these laws through some sort of abstract science. Theosophy does not proceed abstractly. It proceeds from clear contemplative thinking. And so let me indicate with at least a few words how the life of today has shaped itself, how this life today has come to be. One who looks more closely at life will realize that some self-knowledge also belongs in these realms in order to see clearly. First I will picture the outer facts, then I will say a few things concerning what it is actually all about.

Every one of us knows what the human being needs in order to live. We all have an idea of what food and clothing we need. A few figures will tell us how much the majority has of all these. All we need to do in this regard is to examine the tax structure. It has been told over and over, but we can bring it to mind again and again. In Prussia, someone who has an income of less than 900 marks pays no taxes. One can very easily check how many people in Prussia have an income of less than 800 or 900 marks. That's 21 million people. Ninety five percent of the total population have less than 3,000 marks income. Take England. Only those who have an income over 150 pounds are taxed. [...] You see, we have most ample figures that speak of how many people have what one must have as absolute necessity.

Look at statistics. They speak a distinct language. But what has that to do with our self-knowledge? A lot. For it is a matter of gaining the right standpoint for ourselves regarding these facts. And in this connection people let themselves miss out a great deal on what is right. What are people around us doing? What is the cause of their receiving this low income? It is what we give them for what they do for us. We are now making no distinction between workers and non-workers, between proletariat and non- proletariat. For if one makes this distinction, then the matter is already entirely false. And that is the mistake of all our national economic considerations, that one does not proceed from self-knowledge, but rather from theory.

[The following sentences of the transcript reveal a few discrepancies, so that the original wording cannot be reconstructed. By the gist of it, Rudolf Steiner most likely described how every person lives from the products that another has produced. Even for someone out of work, whose means of livelihood are insufficient, products are produced. Even the seamstress working for starvation wages wears clothes that have been produced in turn for a starvation wage. Compare the paragraphs written in the same year in the essay “Spiritual Science and the Social Question,” in Lucifer Gnosis.]

And if in our emotions and perceptions we are able to feel a certain pain over the fact that the clothes we have on have been produced for a starvation wage, then we are looking deep into the heart of the question. When in all this you think over what you wear in the way of clothing, what you put in your mouth for nourishment, where it comes from, only then will you grasp the social question in all its depth. Not through speculation, but rather through a living contemplation does one get an insight into what it is all about.

It isn't right when they say that today's misery, even if we could portray it in its direst colors, is greater than it was in former centuries. That is not the case. We would decisively be committing a falsification of objective reality. Just try to study conditions objectively in the city of Cologne today and 120 years ago, and you will see that much has gotten better. And even so we have the social question. We have it because human beings have gone through yet another evolution, and this is because in large measure they have come to thinking, to self-consciousness, and because their needs have greatly changed. And there, if we study the question thus, we are indeed of necessity directed toward the broad contexts that arise for us in world history if we are not, like the modern researcher, too shortsighted. In order to judge these things it is necessary to get to know the great laws of life. What has brought it about that social affairs have taken this shape? It is the manner and method which the human spirit has taken on. Look back to the time of the French Revolution. At that time they demanded something else. It was a question tending more toward the juridical that brought out the ideal of Liberty - Equality - Fraternity. The French revolutionary heroes in Western Europe called for Liberty. Those now battling in Eastern Europe call for bread. It is simply two sides of the same coin, two different demands of human beings who have learned to put such questions because their souls have undergone a transformation.

This transformation of the soul we have to study more closely. We must study and understand why the souls of the great masses of human beings today—and this will spread over the centuries—have come to these demands. At this point the Theosophical world conception comes in with practical application, underpinning our comprehension. Only someone who understands the case is qualified to judge it. The only one who is able to look into the soul is one who, in the great world framework, sees what is going on in this soul. And only one who understands something of the laws of the soul is able to effect something in souls and lead into the future.

A small side remark: The sciences of today, biology, Darwinism, Haeckelianism, [The worldview of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), German naturalist and philosopher.] have brought us great ideas. So also the idea that each living entity, in the first stages of its existence, even in its germinal state, recapitulates the forms of life that have previously been gone through out in nature. This brief recapitulation of the various stages occurs also in that being which includes them all, climbing higher on the ladder of evolution than all others: the human being. Assume that a spirit had consciousness at a time before there were any human beings, then he would have had to know not only what had already happened, but he would also—by contrast—have had to form a picture of future evolution. He would have had to form a picture for the future out of the animal condition of that time. Only the human being, who in his germinal configuration recapitulates the preceding conditions, can show us what to do. It is the doing that must pass beyond all knowing. No knowing occupies itself with anything but what was. But if we want to work into the future, we have to do things that haven't been there yet. The great laws that are to be realized in the future show us this. In a certain way everything that is to come about in the future has already been there in the past, namely through intuition. A spirit who had intervened at that time would have had to have had intuition in order to be able to find out about the hidden laws of existence that apply to the past and the future. That is why Theosophy cultivates intuition. That is what reaches out beyond the mere physical experience of the world. Theosophy looks for the laws that are to be cognized by intuition and which lead us into the future of the human race. [For a characterization of intuition as used by Steiner, see, for example, his essays from 1905, The Stages of Higher Knowledge.]

One of these great world laws that can be a guide for us is the law of reincarnation. First, it renders understandable for us how, in higher spiritual realms, what obtains as law is nothing else but what Darwin and Haeckel have intimated. It renders comprehensible why this or that was felt as a need in any given age. One who steeps himself in this knows the last time in which there was life thirsting for universal freedom, when human beings took up impulses for which they should be calling today. The ones who today call for liberty and equality—I say this with the same objective certainty with which the natural scientist has spoken about the physical—all those souls who today cry for liberty and equality have learned it at another stage of their existence, in an earlier incarnation. The greatest needs of the human being of today were embodied in the early time of Christianity, in the first Christian centuries. All human beings have taken up this press for equality, before which the human being of today stands in spiritual life. Christianity brought the message of equality before God. In times prior to that, there had been no such equality.

I do not say what I have just said in a derogatory way, I say it with the same sober objectivity with which I would speak of any scientific problem. If one considers the actual soul and everything which creates outward inequalities, the same soul that once took to itself as an impulse “they are equal before God and before mankind”—when one considers the actual soul—finds that everything that determines outward inequality has no meaning for contemporary life. When the grave closes over us we will all be and become equal. What the soul has taken up lives on in the soul and emerges in a different form. If we consider cultural progress from the perspective of the macrocosm we come to tremendous implications regarding education. I have already drawn attention to what this pedagogy on earth was like in pre-Christian times. Let us look back into Egyptian times. A large number of people there were occupied with work, the difficulty of which a man of today can no longer estimate. They labored willingly. And why? Because they knew that this life is one among many. Each one said to himself: The one who is in charge of my work is like the person I will be sometime. This life must be compensated in different incarnations, for it directs itself out of this knowledge.

Linked with this is the law of karma. What I have experienced in one life is either deserved or will be compensated for in later times. If it had merely gone on like that, however, then the human being would have overlooked the kingdom of the earth. This one life would not have been important to him. In that regard Christianity took measures for education in order to have this life between birth and death be of importance to him. It is merely illusory when Christianity deviates from that, for it has pointed strongly to the beyond; it has even made eternal punishment and eternal bliss a function of one life. Whoever believes that the one life is of primary importance learns to take this life seriously. It pivots around the truths that are suitable for the human being, and it is suitable for the human being to be raised in the idea of this one earth life. Such were the two tasks: education for the importance of earthly life between birth and death, and, on the other hand, that outside this earthly life everyone is equal before God. This earthly life has been bearable only by being so considered that all are equal before God. Whoever looks at it that way will observe, in the development of mankind since the rise of Christianity, a descent into the physical world. More and more the human being feels committed to physical existence. Through this he transferred the importance of the rule of the equality before God more and more to equality in material existence itself.

That picture should not be misunderstood. The soul that 1800 years ago was accustomed to claiming equality for the beyond now brings the impulse for equality with it, but in connection with what is important today: “equality before Mammon.” Please do not see a criticism or anything pejorative in this, rather the objective confirmation of a cosmic law of the developing soul. One must study the course of time this way. Then one will understand that only one thing will again bring about in this soul a change in direction, an ascent, namely if we get the soul who is calling for equality back into the beyond. Toward the beyond we looked up, from the here-and-now we looked out. Today, due to this impulse, the soul is turned back upon itself. Today it seeks the same thing in the here-and-now. If it is to find an ascent again, it must find the spirit in the present, the inwardness, in the soul element itself. That is what the Theosophical world movement is striving for: to prepare the soul for the third stage, [The German “drei Stadien” translates to “three stages.” We suggest this represents a stenographic error and take the liberty of correcting it for the sake of clarity.] because it is filled with God, filled with divine wisdom, and will thereby again know how to place itself in the world, so that it will again find the harmony between itself and the surrounding world.

Such thoughts have value in giving direction. We can't bring this about from one day to the next. But we also cannot consider only our individual deeds. Every deed must stand under some influence. Then it becomes practical, then it is something, then it is no gray theory, rather immediate life, because we are looking into the workings of the soul.

Our national economists and our social theorists today so often say: the human being is only the product of outer circumstances. The human being has come to this because he has lived in these or those outer conditions. Thus speaks, for example, in earnest, social democracy, saying that the human being becomes what the environment makes of him, that because he has become a proletarian worker, due to the entire development of industry, he has also become one in his soul, the way he has evolved through just these conditions. The human being is a product of circumstances. We can often hear that. Let us study the conditions themselves, let us consider what is round about us, what we are most dependent on. Are we dependent merely on nature? No! We notice what we are dependent on only when we stand starving in front of the bakery and have nothing in our pockets to buy anything with.

All these conditions are made and put into effect in turn by human beings. The spirit that is evolving through history has brought these conditions about. People have thought up, out of concern for their own welfare, sometimes only shortly before, what obtains today; they simply insert it. Thus the one who thinks people are dependent on circumstances is reasoning in a circle, because the circumstances were brought about by people. If we picture this to ourselves we must say: it isn't a matter of the circumstances, rather we have to look at how the circumstances have come to be. It is idle to insist on saying: the human being is dependent on his circumstances. In fifty years the human being will also be dependent on the conditions that surround him. You can concede to every social democrat [Social Democracy is “a political theory advocating the use of democratic means to achieve a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism.” American Heritage Dictionary, 1992. Social Democrat (with capitals) refers to a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany, which was founded in the late 19th century.] that the human being is dependent on circumstances, but on those that we cause today, that emanate from our disposition, from our soul. We create the social conditions! And what will live then will be the crystallized perceptions and feelings that we put out into the world today.

This shows us what it is all about: that one must learn the laws under which the world is evolving. It cannot be a matter of science, rather it can only be an intuition of what we must contribute as law. This comes directly out of a perception that seems most fantastic to most people, but which is much clearer and more objective than much of the fantastic fantasy of our scientists. One that can tell what lives in the soul and then crystallizes outwardly, can also, out of the wisdom, out of the divine in the soul, tell what an individual can spread out into the world and what is proper for humanity.

If in the future you want to have such circumstances around you, if you want to have it set up that way, as an institution which will satisfy people, about which people will be able to say: “That's it—we want to live under these conditions,” then you must first pour humanity into these conditions, so that humanity will stream out of them again. The deepest humanity, the deepest soul-inwardness must first stream out of our own hearts into the world. Then the world will be an image of the soul, and in this soul there will be an image of the world. This will be able to satisfy people again. Therefore the human being cannot expect anything from all those quackeries in the social area that are perpetrated by looking at outer circumstances. These outer circumstances are made by human beings; they are nothing else but human souls which have streamed outwards. The first things that have to be worked over, what we have to take up first as the social question, are the souls of today, which produce the environment of tomorrow. You can see how better conditions stream into the environment if only you would study it. Again and again I have had to hear from social politicians: Make the conditions better and human beings will become better. Just let these people study what individual sects, developing themselves cut off from world evolution pursue as soul culture, just let them study what the latter contribute to the shaping of outer conditions. If human beings realize that the improvement of conditions depends on themselves, if they acquire Theosophical knowledge, and if they cognize the first fundamental principle to establish the kernel of a universal brotherhood [Refers to the first fundamental principle of the Theosophical Society: “To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color.”] and develop it in themselves as a social feeling for the surrounding world, then the actual social is possible, and one is prepared for what will happen in the near future.

Our entire national economy today lives under false premises. Therefore our theories are mostly false because they proceed from assumptions entirely different from those that arise out of the human being and from humanity. One starts with production, or one believes one can achieve something with the development of compensation. All thinking moves in this direction. To be sure, an improvement will not occur immediately with a change in thinking. But it will occur when the direction is changed. Moreover, our proletariat has no inkling about what is here in question. What it demands is more pay and shorter hours. Take a look at the worker in any particular sector, say the electric sector, which has been unionized in order, through this collective, to get better pay and working conditions. What does he want with these better working conditions? He wants a different relation regarding compensation to take place between him and his employer. That's all he wants. The conditions of production don't change. All that happens is that the worker gets higher wages [...]. That's all that happens. If s just a shift in capital.

But that doesn't really change anything much at all, because if one gets more pay today, food will be more expensive tomorrow. It is not at all possible to bring about any kind of improvement for the future in this way. This ongoing endeavor is based on false thinking. There it's a matter of production and consumption. Here a great comprehensive worldwide law about work applies. One has to know this. Certain people who are used to thinking in today's national-economic terms will say perhaps that I am placing a foggy brain in front of them. One who has worked his way through to Theosophy has, as a rule, gone through today's thinking. Theosophy should be active in us as a life impulse. But as every thought will draw into us and stimulate every action in us, just so this also should stimulate us. We needn't think that we can realize it right away. Also, the government councilor who doesn't live in gray theories can look at life entirely differently. He doesn't need to travel to America in order to get the idea that someone who doesn't have any work has to be a lazy lout. In the course of time work has greatly changed its form.

Take a look at ancient Greece. What was work in those days? The worker stood in an entirely different relation to his master. At that time work was slavery. The worker could be compelled by force to work. What he received from his master was his living. But his master took the proceeds of the work; it had nothing whatever to do with the particular relation of the worker to his master. He had to work; moreover, he was maintained under precarious conditions; he was not compensated for the things he did. There we have labor under duress, without pay.

[A] commodity is the result of something other than directly compensated work. Thus its value also has nothing to do with what is to be paid in wages. Look at today's situation. Today we have jobs for which the worker is partly compensated—partly. What they bring in flows as profit into the pockets of the entrepreneur. Thus work is partly compensated. What, thereby, has the worker himself become? He invests his labor power into this work. In Greece, when one was confronting a unit of work, it was a product of slavery. Today's commodity involves something entirely different. Today the luxury that I receive is crystallized labor for which the worker is compensated. If we ponder this we will find that a half freedom has taken over from the old slavery. A contractual relation has taken its place. In that way labor has become a commodity in the figure of the laborer. So we have labor that is half compelled and half voluntary. And the course of evolution is in the direction of completely voluntary work. This path no one will change or reject. Just as the Greek laborer did his work under the compulsion of his master and a present laborer works under the compulsion of wages, just so in the future only freedom will obtain. Labor and compensation will in future be completely separated.

That will constitute the health of social conditions in the future. You can see it already today. Work will be a voluntary performance out of the recognition of necessity, out of the realization that it must be done. People perform it because they look at the person and see that he needs work done for him. What was labor in antiquity? It was tribute, it was performed because it had to be performed. And what is the labor of the present time? It is based on self-interest, on the compulsion that egoism exerts on us. Because we want to exist, we want labor to be paid for. We work for our own sake, for the sake of our pay. In the future we will work for our fellow human beings, because they need what we can provide. That's what we will work for. We will clothe our fellow men, we will give them what they need—in completely free activity. From this, compensation must be completely separated. Labor in the past was tribute, in the future it will be sacrifice. It has nothing to do with self-interest, nothing to do with compensation. If I base my labor on consumer demand, with regard to what humanity needs, I stand in a free relation to labor, and my work is a sacrifice for humanity. Then I will work with all my powers, because I love humanity and want to place my capacities at its disposal.

That has to be possible, and is possible only when one's living is separated from one's labor. And that is going to happen in the future. No one will be the owner of the products of labor. People must be educated for voluntary work, one for all and all for one. Everyone has to act accordingly. If you were to found a small community today in which everyone throws all one's income into a common bank account and everyone works at whatever he can do, then one's living is not dependent on what work one can do, but rather this living is effected out of the common consumption. This brings about a greater freedom than the coordination of pay with production does. If that happens, we will gain a direction which corresponds with needs. Already today this can flow into every law, every decree. Of course, not absolutely, but approximately. Already today one can organize factories in the right way. But that demands healthy, clear, sober thinking in the sense of Theosophy. If such things penetrate into human souls, then something will be able to live again in these human souls. And the way the one determines the other, just so this life of the human soul will also determine that the outer arrangements will be a mirror picture of it, so that our labor will be a sacrificial offering—and no longer self-interest—so that what controls the relations with the outer world is not compensation, but rather what is in us. What we have in our power to do, we offer to humanity. If we can't do much, then we can't offer much; if we have a lot, then we offer a lot.

We must know that every activity is a cause of endless effects and that we may allow nothing that is in our soul to go unused. We will be making every offering out of our soul if we completely renounce any pay that can accrue to us from external conditions. Not for our own sake, not for the sake of our welfare, but rather for the sake of necessity. We want to firm up the soul through the law of its own inner being, so that it learns to place its powers at the disposal of the whole from points of view other than the law of wages and self-interest. There have been thinkers who in some connection have already thought thus. In the first half of the 19th century there have been thinkers who have brought this feature of a grand soul-based contemplation of cosmic law. Is this feature not a sanctification of labor? Isn't it so that we can lay it on the altar of humanity?

Thus labor becomes anything but a burden. It becomes something into which we place what is most sacred for us, our compassion for humanity, and then we can say: Labor is sacred because it is a sacrifice for mankind.

Now there have been people who in the first half of the nineteenth century spoke of “sacred industry.” Saint Simon was one of those who had an inkling of the great ideas of the future.³ Whoever studies his writings will, if one deepens them in the theosophical sense, gain endlessly much for our time. Saint Simon spoke in a rudimentary way, but of a type of living together, as in an association. He has projected associations into which the single individuals deposited tribute, and thus existence became independent. He had great ideas about the development of humanity, and discovered several things. He said: The human races correspond to a planned development, and souls make their appearance one after the other and work their way upwards. That's the way to regard the development of humanity, for then one comes to the correct view. He also speaks of a planetary spirit that changes itself into other planets on which humanity will live. In short, here is a national economist whose works you can read and who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. You read his work like a Theosophical book.

Today the palingenesis [continued rebirth, metempsychosis] of soul existence can be proved. Whoever acknowledges Haeckel will also have to acknowledge reincarnation if one carries Haeckel's ideas further. Fourier⁴ also thought in this way. You can find in him a primitive Theosophy. Thus for one who looks at things the way they are, Theosophy's first major principle for our social life—to establish the kernel of a universal brotherhood—is the only thing that can propagate healthy conditions in the environment. This view of the Theosophists is not impractical, rather it is more practical than the view of all those social theorists (you'll have to admit this if you apply these theories to life), and only someone like that will say, with good old Kolb: Studying theories of national economy is no burden. Only if Theosophy comes to be heard in debates on the social question can a healthy way of looking at it, a healthy thinking come into it. So it is necessary for someone who wants to see and hear in this area to come to terms with Theosophy.

For the Theosophists two things are clear, not out of fanaticism, but rather out of a knowledge that comes from looking at life: it is possible to stick with gray theory and relegate the matter to people who will later have to admit that at the desk it looks different from what it turns out to be in life out there. Then one will have to wait a long time, and what must come will come anyway. In the end, living theory will have to intervene in life—one can hear it already today—already today one can argue about what Theosophy has to say about the social question. Then one can't hear just one lecture, rather one has to deal with Theosophy in its entirety. From it one will derive the gift, the ability, in a healthy way to view life from top to bottom in its most secret and intimate forces, then healing and blessing can soon come into our social order.

Let us achieve in ourselves, as much as we can, what should happen. The reshaping of labor, working not for pay, is a sacrifice. Then we will have done our duty, then we will have regarded life in a healthy way. Or else we will keep looking at the world with gray theories, alien to life. Then it could turn out that future humanity could say: Questions were raised. When these questions were there to be raised, when recovery in a good way was possible, that was just when they did not want to study them. Goethe once said: “Revolutions are entirely impossible if the rulers do their duty.” He knew who was to blame for revolution.⁵ Let us try to consider what the history of the future can say about our present. You have seen what time has wrought, until the earth was drenched with blood, and how the time has raised the most burning questions in an even more frightful way.

• 1. Crimmitschau strikes: Among the numerous work stoppages in the first years of the 20th century, the strike of the textile workers of Crimmitschau, from 7 August 1903 to 17 January 1904, stands out especially because the management reacted to the strike of 600 textile workers in five factories with an unprecedented mass lockout: they locked out the entire work force. Subsequently, in Crimmitschau, with a population of 23,000, around 8,000 textile workers and 1500 who worked at home stood in conflict with a management that was obviously intensifying its measures against the workers. For details on this strike see F. Deppe et al., Geschichte der deutschen Gewerkschaftsbewegung (History of the German Trade Union Movement), Cologne, 1978, p.77f.
  
  Miners' strike: A further high point in the strike movement was the miners' strike in the Ruhr from December 1904 to 9 February 1905, at the center of which stood the demands for am eight-hour day, higher pay, better worker protection, and recognition of the workers organizations. For this also see the portrayal of F. Deppe et al. op cit. p. 78f. what's going on in Eastern Europe: On 22 August 1905, “bloody Sunday,” in Petersburg, peaceful demonstrators were shot down by the military. The strike wave now turned into revolutionary unrest that soon spread over all of Russia. In the fall of 1905 the socialistically organized workers called for a general strike and, with the participation of Bolsheviks, Menscheviks, social revolutionaries and independents, formed the first Soviet (Council).
• 2. a Prussian government councillor, Alfred Kolb: Rudolf Steiner also deals with him in the essay “Spiritual Science and the Social Question” in Lucifer Gnosis, GA Bibl. No. 134, and in the Hamburg lecture of the same name of 2 March 1908 in Die Welträtsel und die Anthroposophie (Anthroposophy and the Riddle of the World), Bn/GA Bibl. No. 54.
• 3. Saint Simon (Claude Henri de Rouvroy), 1760-1825: social reformer. Lettres d'un habitant de Geneve a ses contemporains (1803) (Letters of an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries), Réorganisations de la societi europtenne (1814) (The Reorganization of European Society); Le nouveau christianisme (1825) (The New Christianity). Also see A. Voigt, Die sozialen Utopien, Leipzig, 1906 (Social Utopias). This book is also to be found in Rudolf Steiner's private library (Archives of the Rudolf Steiner Estate Administration) and contains numerous underlinings by him concerning Saint Simon. See p,107ff.
• 4. Fourier, François Marie Charles, 1772–1837; Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales (1808) (Theory of Four Movements and General Destinies), Lenouveau monde industrielet sociétair (1829) (The New Industrial and Societal World). See A. Voigt op.cit. p. 95ff.
• 5. Goethe once said: Literally it says: “I was also completely convinced that any great revolution is never the fault of the people, rather of the government. Revolutions are altogether impossible as long as governments are continually just and continually vigilant, so that they anticipate them with timely reforms and don't hold back until what is necessary is compelled from the bottom up” (Eckermann, 4 January 1824).

A scene in Faust such as that which leads Faust to contemplate the Earth Spirit may well trigger thoughts in our time that should follow on from some of the reflections we have been making here recently. Faust stands before the Earth Spirit. And we see that it is through the contemplation of certain things that stir meditation, which, as it says in Faust, become for him out of the book of Nostradamus, that he is transported into that state through which it can become vivid to him that which speaks to him as the Earth Spirit. Now, I have already spoken about these things here and today I just want to start from the idea of the earth spirit. Our present-day thinking is very soon satisfied with such a scene, in that it repeats a formula that is very convenient for this present-day thinking over and over again. This present time simply says: Well, the poet is allowed to conjure up before our soul that which can never be reality. For Goethe, such a formula contained the pinnacle of all that is trivial, for for Goethe there was a deep and meaningful reality in all that he wanted to develop about Faust's relationship with the earth spirit. And it is only how this reality is to be imagined now, in line with Goethe's intentions, that I would like to say a few words about in my introduction.

Even at the time when he wrote the scene about the earth spirit, Goethe was well informed about everything that could be known at that time – as I have already mentioned – about certain connections between people and the spiritual world; he had carefully informed himself about it. And whether he more or less brought these things clearly to his mind, whether he could have expressed them more or less in completely clear words, as we express these things today, is not important when one considers the time in which Goethe lived. But what does matter is that he composed the scene entirely in the spirit of correct views. If one wants to imagine this in reality, it can be done in the following way. One must imagine: through the insights that Faust gains from this so-called book of Nostradamus, in connection with soul exercises that Faust has of course already done earlier, the etheric body is uncovered, partially separated from the physical body, as is necessary for an insight into the spiritual world. But through this, the human being is brought into an etheric connection with the outside world and he really experiences the existence, the activity of spiritual beings that can only embody themselves in the etheric world, whose embodiment does not come down to the physical world. This is the case with what Goethe imagines under the earth spirit, a spiritual being that only comes down to the etheric world. So Faust must prepare himself to see the life and activity of the etheric world in this moment. And that is what he does. There is thus a real interaction between the earth spirit and the etheric body of Faust that has been released. This is, of course, as I have now described it, an imperceptible process for the external sense world, a process that can only be experienced spiritually.

Now, in the time that preceded our fifth post-Atlantic period, people who knew more than the later ones about the connection between man and the spiritual world, but in whom the old clairvoyant ability had more or less faded away, sought in the most diverse ways, one might say, for substitutes for a connection with the spiritual world. Consider, for example, that Faust receives images and words from the book of Nostradamus. By thinking these words, that is, by forming the thought-forms, he effectively paves the way for his soul to reach the earth spirit. Goethe was able to depict this because he knew that it corresponded to reality. In truth, one can say that the time in which the historical Faust lived was no longer conducive to people being able to experience such a spiritual connection so easily. For even earlier, even when the fourth post-Atlantic period, the Greco-Latin culture, came to an end in the 14th century, people were already trying to gain a connection to the spiritual world through surrogates.

Of course, today's enlightened world cannot get enough of these surrogates, descriptions of which are available, and can only laugh and sneer at them, reflecting on how wonderfully far we have come. But there is no need to listen to these very clever, these extremely clever people of the present, who, in their opinion, have of course moved beyond such things. One can visualize how people, in whom this ability had faded, in whom it was no longer as vividly present as it used to be, how people at the turn of the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantic period strove to pave the way through surrogates to observe certain spiritual processes, which in their truth can only be seen supernaturally. And that happened in many ways through external means. Let us say that such a man, who was trying to gain insights into the spiritual world and who could not summon the strong power within himself to gain these insights purely spiritually, did so by taking certain substances, burning them, and causing a smoke, produced by the mixture of very specific burning substances, to move in certain ways, which he evoked through very specific, again handed-down formulas. He had certain, as one might call them, magic formulas. So he developed a smoke from certain substances that he burned, and then he spoke certain words into the smoke. These words were also handed down and could be similar to the words that Faust finds in the book of Nostradamus. If he had been able to approach the spiritual world purely spiritually, he would not have needed the smoke. But perhaps he could not do that. Therefore he spoke certain magic formulas into the smoke. Through such magic formulas, when they are spoken in the right way, the smoke can immediately take on certain forms, and if the formulas were the right ones, then not only was the smoke made to take on certain forms, but these forms then also allowed the spiritual beings, who could not just approach him spiritually, to enter his sphere. The smoke was, so to speak, that which the person concerned formed through his formulas; and the forms that the smoke took made it possible for the spiritual entities of an elementary nature to enter into these formations, into these forms of smoke, and thus be there. We see that it is a surrogate, a holding on to that which cannot be held on to purely spiritually, through physical matter. .

Goethe avoided depicting such a surrogate; he could just as easily have had Faust take another book in which those herbs were compiled that one has to burn together to create such a column of smoke in order to then let the earth spirit approach in this way. He avoided that. He wanted to make the scene more spiritual. But of course Goethe was well aware of these surrogates. As I said, today people laugh at the idea that something like this could have any meaning.

Now there is something strange, something very strange. The 19th century actually came to gradually lose all spiritual views, even the view of the life force that is anchored in the life ether, and of everything that is anchored in the ether. This 19th century, with its materialistic view, has come to regard life itself only as an emanation of the material, to look at a living organism only as a more complicated machine, so to speak. Of course, this tendency to expel life from the way we look at things was part of the 19th century. The strange thing is that, once it has been expelled, life creeps back into the way we look at things, creeps back in a way that the thinking of the 19th and 20th centuries has so far been unable to deal with. It is interesting to observe how, one might say, after spirit and life have been expelled from research through one door, they enter through the other door, and in a way that research does not really know how to deal with. Today, certain people are already thinking about whether the inanimate might not also be alive, albeit in a rather wrong way. One has, so to speak, expelled life from the living; but today one already feels compelled to reflect on whether the non-living also lives. One says, for example, that what shows itself as living and yet cannot have different laws of life than the non-living has - more or less - a memory. Now that everything is being mixed up, memory is also attributed to animals and plants. Memory, it is said, is something that living things have. One does not want to accept this memory as something that comes from a spiritual source; so one tries to find this memory in inanimate things as well. How do you do that? Well, one says: What is memory? Memory consists in a so-called living being being exposed to a stimulus, and when this living being is exposed to the same stimulus a second time, the repetition is such that it is noted that the living being has been exposed to the same stimulus before. It is faster with the perception, with the assimilation of the stimulus; one notices that something has remained in the living being, which makes it suitable the second time to react to the stimulus in a faster way, in an easier way than the first time. Now one wonders: is this a property peculiar to the living to have memory of this kind? Then one would have to ascribe special properties to the living that one does not want to ascribe to it; so perhaps one can also find that the non-living, the merely physical, has memory. And there you find that, say, a magnet, so iron, which has been treated in a certain way so that it has become magnetic, attracts other iron, and you can now measure through certain processes, with what force iron is attracted when the magnet, say, has transmitted a certain amount of force. You can measure how much you had to do to magnetize the iron so that it attracts other iron.

Now we find very interesting facts. Absolutely correct facts can be found if you magnetize iron once and thereby bring it to a certain force. You then wait, then magnetize again: now you need to apply less force to bring the iron to the same magnetic force, to the same reaction as the first time, and the third time even less. So people say: You see, the magnet already has what you find more complicated in the memory of higher beings. The same can be demonstrated with other forces that adhere to inanimate substances, for example, when an elastic body is deformed. You can deform it by applying a certain force; it then returns, and in the snapback, in the restoration of its former form, it develops a certain reaction force, which has a certain strength that can be measured again by apparatus. The second time, one need not apply such a strong force to make the elastic piece in question spring apart and fold up again. And so one can say: So even in the concept of elastic force, the inanimate entities are afflicted with a certain memory.

This train of thought is very, very strange. We do not want to believe that animals have a memory because then we would have to deny them a spiritual life. Now it creeps in by thinking of magnets, elastic bodies, and thus of the inanimate, as being endowed with memory. But they went much further. As you know, a special property of the living is found, as you know, in the shadow side of all living things, in the possibility of falling ill. Now, people have thought again: could it be that the non-living, the inanimate, can also become ill? And certain people, who wanted to expel life from the living, so to speak, were actually extremely pleased that they were able to show that yes, the inanimate can also become ill! It is not just a privilege of the living that it can become ill, but the inanimate can also become ill.

It was a chemist, Erdmann, who first noticed that certain pieces of tin on a building showed quite remarkable phenomena. If such a piece of tin is (it is drawn), then they got something like such bubbles, which are raised in this way; underneath it is hollow. If you then squeezed these bubbles, the tin underneath was dusty, it was like dust at the spot. And lo and behold, it went further. We have reports that state that it did not stop with Erdmann's observations, but we find the following description, for example. “Later” — that is, after Erdmann — ‘the chemist Dr. Fritzsche took up this problem’ — of tin pest — ”again, after the head of a trading house in St. Petersburg had drawn his attention to the fact that whole blocks of pure metal that were to be shipped by ship simply disintegrated. Since uniform buttons had been turning into a gray powder in a military magazine around the same time, and since an extremely harsh winter was raging in St. Petersburg at the time, Dr. Fritzsche came up with the idea that it might be the cold that was affecting the tin. In 1893, the participants of the Naturalists' Assembly, meeting in the old city of Nuremberg, were led to the new post office building, whose roof, made of tin plates, had disintegrated in an inexplicable way. But none of the chemists and doctors present at the time knew what to do. Similar disintegration was found on the roof of the old famous town hall in Rothenburg ob der Tauber and in many other cases. In more recent times, Professor Dr. Ernst Cohen of the van't Hoff Laboratory at the University of Utrecht has now examined this decay of metals in great detail and found that it is indeed a disease, and an infectious disease at that."

So they came to ascribe a disease to the mere substance of tin, and they call this disease the tin pest. So today they already speak of the tin pest in these circles. But what is particularly interesting are such phenomena: There is a coin, a tin medal, which shows the following (a coin is drawn). It shows a head, in reality it is Balthasar Bekker, who was a reformer. This medal was cast in 1692. On this medal you will find such elevations everywhere, real pockmarked elevations that can be dabbed, then they come off. And underneath, the whole thing that is under these elevations has become dusty, dust-like. In this case, one speaks of pewter plague. But the strangest thing that has happened to people in particular is that if you now only have the dust on your fingers and transfer it to another pewter that is quite good, then this pewter is affected by the same disease. That means, according to popular belief, you are dealing with a very specific type of disease, and specifically with an infectious disease, a disease that can be transmitted by infection. Therefore, under the impression of such facts, people today say the following.

“Recently it has been recognized that there are infectious diseases of other metals as well. In the case of aluminum, there are even two different forms of infectious disease, one of which is caused by the carrier of infection being found in the water.” “Probably the doctrine of metal diseases,” writes Dr. Neuburger, “which is currently still in the early stages of development, will in the future represent a special branch of science... .”

So you see, in the future we will not only need medical doctors and veterinarians, but also “metal doctors”! Inanimate objects also fall ill; this is something that has now been incorporated into today's science. Inanimate objects also fall ill.

The living feels; it not only has memory and the ability to become ill, but it feels! It is indeed the simplest fact of life beyond the plant that it feels. Now, with this “sensation”, people today are already thinking in a strange way. It has been noticed for a long time that not only something that is born alive, for example, feels sound, but that something that is completely inanimate has a real sensation of sound. This is now particularly interesting. You just have to read what John Tyndall writes:

“When you strike the table, a column of smoke 45 cm high collapses into a bushy bunch with a stem only 2.5 cm long.”

So John Tyndall, the physicist, observed a column of smoke 45 centimeters high. Not by striking the same table where the column of smoke was, but by striking a completely different table, the column of smoke collapsed and changed its shape, becoming something like a cactus plant, but very low. And John Tyndall is seriously of the opinion that the column of smoke has perceived the sound and changed its shape as a result of the sound. He continues:

"The column of smoke also obeys the voice. A cough throws it down, and it dances to the sound of a music box. For individual tones, only the tip of the column of smoke gathers into a bouquet. With others, the bouquet forms halfway up, while with certain notes of a suitable pitch, the column contracts into a concentrated cloud that is barely more than 2.5 cm above the end of the burner. Not only individual words, but every word and every syllable of the quoted Spenserian verses sets a truly delicate jet of smoke in the greatest agitation.

So there you have the modern physicist, ascribing sensation to the column of smoke, who, after forgetting everything that old magicians spoke into the column of smoke to make it take on a different form, notices things again. John Tyndall, an ordinary physicist of the present day, of the fifth post-Atlantic period, observes how a column of smoke collapses through a sound, forms itself into a bush, and even dances when a music box plays. He observes how it follows certain verses by Spenser as it forms. We have the physicist, who basically behaves in the same way towards the column of smoke only in a more elementary, initial way than the old, despised magician behaved:

“Even more gripping is the behavior of the sensitive water jets in response to sound.”

So today, it is not only a column of smoke that is observed, but also the water jet. Tyndall describes this fascinating phenomenon in his book, in the book just mentioned on pages 316 to 326, and concludes with the words:

“The sensitivity of this jet is amazing; it can compete with that of the ear itself.” So not only does the ear hear, that is, perceive sound, but the water jet even perceives sound and changes under its influence, that its sensitivity can compete with the ear.

“If you place the two tuning forks on a distant table” – not on the same table, but on a different table – “and let the beats gradually fade away, the beam continues its rhythm almost as long as you can still hear something. If the beam were even more sensitive, it would even prove superior to the ear; an amazing fact when you consider the wonderful delicacy of this organ.

But even further. A certain Leconte made a remarkable discovery at a musical soirée in America, which he describes in the same way:

“Shortly after the music began, I noticed that the flame showed vibrations” - the gas flame - “that perfectly matched the audible beats of the music. This phenomenon was bound to catch anyone's eye, especially when the strong tones of the cello were added.

He observed how the flame heard the musical tones and how it reproduced them within itself.

"It was extraordinarily interesting to observe how completely accurately even the trills of this instrument were reproduced by the flame. To a deaf person, the harmony would have been visible. As the evening progressed, the gas consumption in the city decreased and the pressure increased, making the phenomenon more distinct. The jumping of the flame gradually increased, became somewhat irregular, and finally turned into a continuous flickering, accompanied by the characteristic sound indicating that more gas is flowing out than can be burned. I then ascertained by experiment that the phenomenon only occurred when the gas flow was regulated so that the flame approached the flickering. I also convinced myself by experiment that the effects did not show when the floor and walls of the room were shaken by repeated knocks.

So it was not caused by the vibration, but by the flame's perception of the sound.

“From this it can be seen that the fluctuations of the flame did not originate from indirect vibrations that might have been transmitted to the burner through the walls, but were produced by the direct influence of the sound wave of the air on the flame.”

It may be mentioned here that the electric arc lamp also reacts to sound in such an extraordinarily fine way that the idea of exploiting this phenomenon for telephonic transmission has been considered several times.

So you see how the same properties that were expelled from the living are supposed to come in through the other door for the inanimate!

It is truly very, very interesting to see the curious course of the alienation of the thinking and mentality of this nineteenth century and into our time. The researchers themselves, with their thinking, are basically not to blame, because they do not search systematically. If something like this comes to their notice, they discard it. They rarely search for such things systematically. But the facts themselves speak too loudly, so that even the most reluctant researchers come to such strange insights. Now, as a rule, it does not occur to researchers who notice this to interpret such things in any other than a purely materialistic sense. They say, of course, “Well, if the inanimate can also feel, can even become ill, can develop memory, then one does not need to ascribe anything special to the animate; then the animate is only a more complicated inanimate.”

More and more, the things that come in through the other door will besiege thinking, this thinking, which already seems so extraordinarily besieged if you look at it today with the healthy view that you get when you also have a certain view of the facts of the spiritual world. For it is a particular hallmark of this nineteenth century and the period extending into our own day that, when faced with the abundance of phenomena, one cannot, so to speak, come to terms with the thoughts that are available. For what conventional research has to say about such things today is, one might say, nothing more than the most miserable helplessness. But a trend is emerging: on the one hand, there is the proliferation of facts that urge us to broaden our horizons, and on the other hand, there is the marked helplessness of those who do not want to approach spiritual science to learn from it, the complete helplessness of those who do not want to do so in the face of the pressing facts. And here it is interesting to consider certain phenomena of our time. They can be understood if we place them in the light of what we have been considering here in recent weeks.

Let us first cite a few facts today in preparation. Above all, we should consider the fact that the onslaught of the natural sciences is putting severe pressure on theology in particular, as it seeks to engage in a discussion of the claims of science. In ancient times, in times not so very far back, theology expressed certain truths, truths about the spiritual worlds, among other things, but, let us say, also truths about the human soul. These truths need not be challenged. We know, after all, how spiritual scientific research in particular can reinforce the truths that theology has traditionally adopted. But as a rule the theologians themselves do not seek to create a balance with what is storming in as a scientific world view. They do not find that comfortable, not really comfortable. And so it often happens that the theologians may be speaking the words of the old truths, but science is laying claim to the object, the subject. Natural science has come and set up its things above the human soul, deals with the human soul, so to speak, takes the object, the soul, away from the theologian. The theologians also still speak, but they no longer have the object. That is precisely the peculiarity of spiritual science: that it engages with natural science; and it is only really spiritual science when it fully engages with natural science.

The matter I am alluding to takes on a serious character when one sees how this unwillingness to come to terms with natural science, which simply annexes the soul and other spiritual realms, how this unwillingness to create a balance leads to quite grotesque phenomena. I have already demonstrated such grotesque phenomena to some of you who were with me on this journey in recent days. Today I want to show some of them again.

There is a theologian; it is not so important to say who it is. Today one need only go into a bookstore and take a few books in any language, any old books, preferably ones that are intended to educate the “people”, that is, that belong to some collection that are intended to educate the people: in the third book that you get hold of, usually already in the second, and often even in the first, it becomes clear that the deficiency I have just characterized is a very widespread one in the present day. So it is not the name that matters, but the way in which what is at issue here works in the broadest circles. For today it runs through all popular, especially through the popular writings, and everywhere we hear the echo of that which lives and breathes. There is a theologian who gives lectures, a whole cycle of lectures, first on a scientific, then on an ethical, aesthetic worldview or way of life. He then goes on to take note of all kinds of other phenomena, in order to show, in his own way, how he arrives at his understanding of Christianity, which of course then calls itself the right Christianity – every such speech is the right Christianity, and all the others are false Christendoms. He begins by speaking of the scientific world view and says: Man as a natural being, man as nature, must be left to the scientific point of view; the “man of freedom” belongs to theology, to religious contemplation. One could perhaps still accept this if it were used only as words. If there is something behind this “man of freedom” and the man now goes to a clean divorce, so you could accept that. Then he says: It is really bad for the theologians if they do not give science its full right. You should give science its full right, you should divide the people: the people of nature, hand over to science, keep the people of freedom, theology. In this way, compromises can be made! The only question is whether it is possible to divide a person into two parts like a loaf of bread. Such a theologian speaks, so to speak, about how the relationship between Hans and Karl developed when they received a piece of bread from their father. Hans asks: How should I divide it? Then the father says: Do it in a Christian way. Hans asks: What is the Christian way of sharing? Well, says the father, you keep the smaller piece for yourself and give the bigger piece to Karlchen. Oh, then Karlchen had better share! says Hans.

Well, sometimes you notice that when people are divided between theology and science. But not everyone is so willing to divide in this way; some want to come to an amicable and peaceful agreement. And since the natural scientists have already become very powerful, the theologians do not want to tie them down with science; so they think of a different way to compromise. In a series of lectures that was held not long ago, we find a very strange way of reaching such a compromise: to hand over the human being of nature to science, and to keep the human being of freedom for theology. Whether one can divide it that way is precisely the question! For if we really give part of the human being to natural science, we should first ask whether a part of the other is not already contained in this part of the human being – after all, as we know, it is already contained in reality – and whether it is possible, whether we should not divide the bread in such a way that we make the flour for one part and the water for the other. But then neither part is bread anymore. But if we divide things rightly, it would be different: if we give natural science what it really needs, then it is not a real human being, but an abstraction, just as flour is not bread. But today's contemporary thinking is truly not suited to seeing through such things. And so we see how, for example, the following can be proclaimed with emphasis in our time.

It is explained by speaking about the naturalistic principle of life that man should be handed over to natural science because he belongs to natural science, and theology should keep the man of freedom. And now it is said how it is with this man as nature. Then we find that the following is said:

This is how a theologian speaks, educating people of today. But humans have feelings. Now it is unpleasant to tie in with these modern-day natural scientists, because it is quite disgusting: they even discover feelings in inanimate things. It is better to give in to them, and that is why a theologian would say the following:

"The mental functions that are accessible to the scientific approach are subject to just as strict a lawfulness as the bodily processes; and the sensations we have, as well as the ideas we form, are just as much forced on us by nature as the nervous processes that lead to feelings of pleasure and discomfort. They are just as much mechanical processes as those of a steam engine.

These are theological lectures, my dear friends, theological lectures! Now the man reserves himself the man of freedom! You see, he willingly gives up the man of nature. He reserves the man of freedom. Now that he has divided with the naturalists, what happens? We can see from the following sentences of the first lecture what happens, because he says:

Thus, by giving the naturalist the man of nature, man loses his freedom. He reserves the man of freedom for himself; but he no longer has that, because by giving the naturalist the man of nature, he loses his freedom. So in reality he retains nothing. Thus the good theologian, who now gives twelve theological lectures, has nothing at all to talk about. This is also very apparent at the end, because he has nothing but a torrent of words presented with tremendous pomp. He has surrendered the human being to natural science; he has retained the human being of freedom, but only in name, because the human being of nature loses his freedom. He also loses it honestly when the natural scientist comes over to him.

Now this is a man who means well. You can really say, as Shakespeare says in his famous speech: Brutus is an honorable man; they are all honorable men! — Why shouldn't you admit that? But one can detect a strange attitude in such people. Why, since he wants to be a theologian, is he so generous as to make himself the object of human contemplation? Yes, he reveals it in a strange way. He says:

“We must go even further. This determination of man by natural law concerns not only his bodily but also his mental functions. This was always what we theologians did not want to admit because we confused the scientific concept of the soul with the theological one and feared unpleasant consequences for the faith.”

He has now finally come to the point where he no longer fears unpleasant consequences. But how does he achieve this? Well, he achieves it like this:

“These arise precisely when science is not allowed to reach its full conclusion; because then you lose the trust of thinking people.”

There we have it! He wants the trust of thinking people, that is, of the few who think today! And he is also an honorable man in other respects – honorable men they all are, after all – because he criticizes certain materialistic excesses of the present. He reports on all the materialistic thinking and ways of life that exist in our present day, and he finally wants a theology that can measure up to all of this. He shows, albeit in a strange way, how little he, completely in line with the pattern of people today, who are thoroughly dependent not on science but on the scientific way of thinking that prevails in many ways, how little he has grown to the storming factual worlds. And that is what matters: that people are not up to the storming factual worlds. What people lack today is the ability to truly master the sum of facts that life offers with their thoughts. Their thoughts break off everywhere. Instead of their thoughts running along in a line according to the beliefs of these people, we see that they tie on, break off, then tie on again, break off again — their thoughts break off at every moment. So here too we see such breaking-off thoughts. Then he returns to the human being in nature, and says of this human being in nature:

“He is born into the fate of this world of phenomena by virtue of a mechanical necessity, by virtue of a supreme decree that he does not understand.”

What a fine thing for a theologian to say! Man is born into the fate of this world of phenomena, namely: by virtue of a mechanical necessity, by virtue of a supreme decree that he does not understand. That is one and the same thing: mechanical necessity, supreme decree! There you have the thought: mechanical necessity - it tears away, and another thought, which claims the opposite, is put forward as a more detailed explanation of this thought. We can often observe this in our contemporaries in small matters. We can recognize them by their complete inability to develop a thought. The man in question says again at one point in his lectures that man should not be tempted to read anything spiritual into nature, but that man of nature must submit to nature:

The limitations of creation, the barriers of existence, and so on, “they are a source of life inhibitions, suffering, evil, and ultimately death. In the face of these, Christianity points to a future redemption. Within earthly life, they cannot and must not be shaken off.

Of course, today people read over this: “They cannot and must not be shaken off.” Anyone who thinks in such a serious context cannot think. Because what does it mean when I say: Yes, dear man, you cannot and must not fly to the moon. If one cannot, then it is unnecessary to say that one may not. And the man who combines the two ideas, “They cannot and may not be shaken off,” cannot think; that is, he lives in complete thoughtlessness.

But this is also a main characteristic of our time, this complete lack of thought! Yet the man is an honorable man, and he really means well in many respects. That is why he says that materialism has taken deep root in our time, and that things must change. But now it seems that just by saying this, he is already seized by a terrible fear. You know, he doesn't want to tie up with the natural scientists! And then only tie up with all the time! Terrible thought, of course! You should say to time, which is dominated by materialism, things have to change. In the lecture in which he talks about all these things: sportism, comfortism, mammonism, he says:

The things that have existed until now “must no longer be the ultimate goal. There must no longer be a merchant for whom making money is an end in itself; enjoyment of life must no longer become the content of life; there must no longer be people who live only for their health.

So, what more could one want! But then he says:

“That is, everything that has been done so far should be continued, but something else must be kept in mind.”

Well then, we will achieve it! Then we will certainly overcome the damage of the times, if everything is done as before, but people only think of something else! We can be confident that these lectures, which will appear in a collection entitled “Science and Education”, will of course represent individual contributions in all fields of knowledge, and that they will be a spiritual nourishment for thousands upon thousands of people in our time. Can it be said in the preface.

“The content of this booklet consists of twelve speeches that I last winter” - I will not name the city, it does not matter, it is a typical phenomenon, something like this can take place in any city - “in... in front of an audience of more than a thousand people.”

Thus today, the crippled, stunted, corrupted thoughts of an official, privileged position – for it is one of the most famous theologians of the present day who speaks in this way – go out into the people of the present and live in them; no wonder that such things come out, as they do today from people! But how few people are inclined to grasp the evils of the present time by their roots. The good lambs of our time approach these things, publish such things in all languages, buy them and believe that they are receiving as spiritual food what modern times have produced. Only the most extreme brutality, which, even if it is unconscious, stems from a complete lack of self-awareness and is brought about by an unconscious abuse of official power, leads to these things. And it would be quite wrong to observe an ostrich-like policy towards these things. For then one would never be able to take up with the right impulses what one must take up as a spiritual science so that it can work in the course of the cultural development of our time.

How many will also be sitting among you who will think that what I am saying is exaggerated, and what I am only supporting with examples because there can of course be many who think it is an exaggeration. It is no exaggeration! It is something that, for anyone who really studies our time with a sharpened eye, allows this time alone to appear in the right light and, above all, shows what will be necessary from a healthy spiritual knowledge in order to lead this time to some extent away from its terrible aberrations.

For close upon the heels of such intellectual misuse of the power of thinking follows moral aberration. It is from such angles that the opposition to spiritual science sounds, but it has the ear of thousands upon thousands. Can it be believed that people who are incapable of thinking in this way are in any position to judge spiritual science? It is no wonder, then, to hear such opinions about spiritual science, opinions similar to those expressed not so long ago. Today I will mention only one thing that characterizes the whole spiritual outlook of the person concerned, who brings up such things

The one is: he cites two writings side by side, namely the lecture by Pastor Riggenbach and the lecture by me, which I gave in Liestal in January. Now, when these two things are juxtaposed, it is not just a matter of a discussion being held about this or that, but that my lecture proved that Pastor Riggenbach was misinformed altogether, that he repeated gossip. To mention these two things side by side, as if there were a speech and a reply, as if the lecture in question of mine contained such a thing, does not mean committing an error or a misunderstanding; that already looks very much like a deliberate falsification.

But further, after the man in question has told horrible things about anthroposophy, he then says:

"We now also recognize in what sense Dr. Steiner in particular can claim: we are not against Christianity, we are in fact ultimately the true Christians. In the eyes of the Anthroposophists, Christ was one who beheld the higher powers; Dr. Steiner, the teacher, will also believe that he beholds these powers and participates in them. But each of us should also be able to partake of these powers if we practice with sufficient perseverance in contemplation. So it comes down again to the same demand that the aforementioned Russian mystic Solowjow has already made: we could and should all be Christs, by the way, a demand that every mystic who has been kind enough to take Christianity into consideration has already made... ” “Old wisdom in a new guise..."

So the exact opposite of what is being said, of what is at the core of our spiritual science with regard to Christianity. The man has the brochure right in front of him, because he is quoting it, and yet he says this! What kind of moral state is this? What are we to make of such statements in the present day? Is it not imperative that we acquire the clearest possible view of the matter, so that we know what to make of voices such as these, which we must indeed encounter and encounter again and again, but which we must not in any case regard as being honestly meant.

I am referring to the lecture that was given on May 22 of this year at the Swiss Reform Day in Aarau on newer mysticism and free Christianity. Free Christianity, indeed! Well, in this lecture, we were also accused of something else. This other thing is a little more amusing. It says:

“But we could never agree with the further demand of mysticism to give up and disdain human thinking and intuiting.”

And that includes us as well. So go through everything we do and look at it in terms of the fact that it is a renunciation of all thinking and intuiting! So they have always had only one aspiration: not to think; for that is what the man said at the Swiss Reform Day in Aarau; that would be the main task of this kind of mysticism: to bring thinking to a standstill, not to apply thinking. After all, you can't believe otherwise, can you, than that the man probably ran out of his own thinking while pursuing these matters and that he is describing what occurred to him when he got a hold of the things. And just as with the theologian I spoke to you about first, we also notice with this theologian, who may only be of a lesser caliber because he has not attained such a high position as the other, we also notice, for example, that these theologians have become satisfied with the division in a somewhat strange way. But they should not force us — after they have surrendered everything to natural science and only retained the “man of freedom”, which natural science takes from them, but now also not to retain anything other than what they, in their “modesty”, seek.

We must present such things to the soul as the antithesis of what lives and pulsates in spiritual science; otherwise we cannot arrive at the right feelings towards it. So today I wanted to show you how the impulses arise in the world of present and historical facts, in order to have, so to speak, foundations that show how the opposing impulses I spoke of – the search for happiness, salvation, birth, death, kinship, evil, and so on – can balance each other out. We will continue this reflection, which will lead us into certain depths of life, tomorrow.

Last night dear Frau Dr. Leyh died. I believe from the very fact of her expending so much energy in playing her part in this organisation during the last weeks of her life on earth, in spite of severe illness that made it hard for her to come up and down here—I believe that from the keenness with which she shared in our work you will have been able simply through these facts, particularly when you have so constantly seen her here, to feel what a delightful and precious personality has left us if one is to speak in the terms of outer space.

Those of our friends who tended her devotedly during the last days of her earthly life, who stood by her in friendship and devotion, have shown in every case of this standing-by, in all the help given her, how fond they had become of this personality. I need not dwell at length on what we all feel in our hearts. Those who have now had the opportunity of knowing this personality so well in her intimate circle, not only during her suffering of the last weeks but all through her spiritual striving, her wonderful spiritual struggles, which came to such a grand conclusion that even on her last day she was deep in many great ideas about our world-outlook—those with her in her intimate circle, and also those less intimately connected with her (as I said, I need not labour this) will send their thoughts towards the spiritual region
where henceforth our good friend will be. They will be following her and will use every moment possible to be together in spirit with one whom physically they have been permitted to be so closely connected with in the spirit of our world conception, in times when the friend who has gone could joyfully follow but also in times when she had to follow only with sorrow, what our Anthroposophical development wills.

In token of this, my dear friends, we will rise from our seats.

Yesterday I wanted to make it clear that, looked at from one side, the actual content, the deeper content, of the Christ impulse that has come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, has not been entirely imparted to mankind either all at once nor during the relatively long time that there has been a Christianity up to now. During the whole of the future, ever more and more of the content of the Christ impulse will be imparted to mankind; in fact there is deep truth in the saying of Christ Jesus; “For, lo, I am with you away even unto the end of the world.” And Christ did not mean that He would be inactive among men but that He would be revealing Himself actively, entering into their souls, giving souls encouragement, giving them strength; so that when these souls know what is happening within them they find the way, they are able to find the connection with the Christ and feel themselves strong for their earthly striving.

But just in this age of ours, this age of consciousness, it is necessary for all this to be clear, as far as may be today, and as I have said the content will flow forth in an ever clearer and richer stream for men. For this very reason it is already necessary today to make clear to ourselves what actually belongs to the revelation of the Christ impulse. To come to a right understanding on this point we must first be permeated by the knowledge that the human race has really developed, really changed, in the course of the earth period. One can best describe the change by saying that when we look back into very ancient times on earth, times long before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find on close scrutiny that the bodily nature of man was more spiritual than it is today. And it was this bodily nature of man that allowed the visions to arise which in a certain way revealed to atavistic clairvoyance the supersensible world. But this faculty, this force, for making oneself acquainted with the spiritual world by atavistic clairvoyance, became gradually lost to mankind. And just at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching there was indeed a crisis. This crisis showed that the force in connection with the revelation of the spiritual had sunk to its lowest degree in man's bodily nature.

Now from that point of time, from that critical point, there had to arise a strengthening of the soul and spirit, a strengthening of the power of soul and spirit, corresponding to the weakening of bodily power. Here in the earthly body we have to count on our body as an instrument. Man would simply not have been capable of acquiring in his soul and spirit the new strength necessary to meet the lowering of his bodily forces, had he net received help from a region that was not of the earth, a region outside the earth, had not something entered the earth from outside—namely, the Christ impulse. Man would have been too weak to make any progress by himself.

And this can be seen particularly clearly if we look at the nature of the old Mysteries. What purpose did these old Mysteries serve? On the whole it may be said: the great masses of our forefathers (which means of ourselves, for in our former life we were indeed the very men we now call forefathers) these men in very ancient days were furnished with a much duller consciousness than that of today. They were more instinctive beings. And the men of this instinctive nature would never have been able to find their way into a knowledge that is nevertheless necessary for man's good, for his support, for his growing powers of consciousness. And certain personalities initiated into the Mysteries, whose Karma called them to do so could then proclaim to the others who led a more instinctive life the truths that may be called the truths of salvation. This instruction, however, could only be given in those olden days out of a certain constitution of the human organism, the human being, a constitution no longer existing. The Mystery Ceremonies, the organisation of the Mysteries in their various stages, depended upon a man becoming a different person through the Mysteries. Today, this can no longer really be pictured because through external arrangements (recently I have given an account of these in the Egyptian Mysteries) (cf. R LII.) it is not possible at the stage we are in today. By bringing about certain functions, certain inner experiences of soul, the man's nature really became so transformed that the spiritual was liberated in full consciousness. But the pupil in the Mysteries was prepared to begin with in such a way that this spiritual did not become free in the chaotic condition that it does today in sleep; a man could really perceive in the spiritual. The great experience undergone by Mystery pupils was that after initiation they knew about the spiritual world as a man through his eyes and ears knows about the physical world of the senses. After that they were able to proclaim what they knew of the spiritual world.

But the time came when a man's nature could no longer be straightway transformed in this manner by such doings as those in the ancient Mysteries. Man did indeed change in the course of history. Something different had to come and the different thing that came was actually what at a certain stage man had experienced in the Mysteries, the inner resurrection, enacted as historical fact on Golgotha. Now this had happened historically. A man, Jesus—for outwardly as a man going about He was the man Jesus—had gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. Those who were His intimates knew, however, that after a certain time He appeared among them as a living being (how this was we will not go into today) and that therefore the resurrection is a truth.

Thus we may say: In the course of human evolution the fact once came about that at a certain place on earth the news was proclaimed that through a force coming from beyond the the earth, the Christ impulse, a man had triumphed over death: and thus the overcoming of death could actually be one of the experiences, one of the practical experiences, of earthly existence. And what was the consequence? The consequence was that in the historical evolution of man there had taken place something intellectually incomprehensible, something which should now develop in a special way, something belonging to the progress of man. For it is incomprehensible to the human intellect that a man should die, be buried and rise again. To save the evolution of the earth something therefore was necessary, something had to happen, in the physical course of earthly evolution that is incomprehensible to the understanding which can be employed quite well where nature is in question, but incomprehensible to the intellect that is applied to nature. And it is only honourable to admit that the farther men progress in the development of this intellect—and development in the consciousness age is pre-eminently development of the intellect—the more incomprehensible must the event of Golgotha become for this intellect that is above all directed to external nature. We can put it like this—anyone only conscious of the way the ordinary intellect is applied when directed to Nature, must in honesty gradually come to own that he does not understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But he must give himself a shake for nevertheless he must understand. This is what is essential—to give oneself a shake, and simply think oneself out above the sound human understanding. This is essential, it is something that necessarily must happen—to give oneself this shake so as in spite of all to learn to understand something apparently incomprehensible precisely for the highest human force.

There must be ever more and more a going back—the greater the development of the intellect upon which the flourishing of science depends, the more the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha will have to retreat before the intellectual development. It was for this reason also that in a certain sense historically chosen for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha—in the way I have explained the Mystery of Golgotha to you—it was not the cultured Hebrews, nor the cultured Greeks, nor the cultured Romans, who as I said yesterday converted it into different conceptions, but above all it was the northern barbarians, with their primitive culture, who in their primitive souls received the Christ Who came to them just as He came to Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed in the sense of what I was discussing with you yesterday it may be said: The Christ came first to the man Jesus of Nazareth in the event of Golgotha. There mankind was shown—the mankind of the Hebrews, the mankind of the Greeks, mankind of the Romans—the most important of all happenings in earthly existence. But after that Christ came once again, united Himself with the men who peopled the East and the North of Europe, who by no manner of means possessed the culture of the Hebrews nor of the Greeks, nor of the Romans. There He did not unite Himself with individual man, there He united Himself with the folk souls of these tribes. Yesterday, however, we had to emphasise that these tribes gradually evolved. They had to a certain degree to overtake at a fifth stage what at a fourth stage had been accomplished by the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin peoples. And yesterday we dwelt on the fact that it was only at Goethe's epoch that the epoch of Plato was reached for this later time. In Goethe himself, for the fifth post-Atlantean period, the Platonism of the Greeks of the fourth post-Atlantean period was repeated. Yet in Goetheanism man still had not come to the point at which he already faced the entirely new form of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha, but, as I said yesterday, he was in a state of expectation.

This attitude towards the Mystery of Golgotha on the part of more recent mankind can be particularly well studied if one comes to a real understanding of the personality, but for the moment the personality of soul and spirit of Goethe. It is absolutely in accordance with Spiritual Science for us to ask the following question: Where do Goethe and those who belong to him, the various minds who were in connection with him, stand as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth; where does Goetheanism stand with regard to mankind's evolution, with regard to understanding the Christ impulse? We might first consider how Goethe actually stood within European evolution.

Now it will be well here to recall something I have often said to you during these years of catastrophe, it will be just as well to go back to the answer to the question—where are the European periphery tending with their American off shoots? We should not forget that whoever turns his gaze without prejudice to these civilisations on the periphery of Europe, knows that in what English culture consists, in the cultures too of France, Italy, the Balkans, as as there has been progression here, but even behind the culture of Eastern Europe, all this has been rayed out from the centre of Europe; all these cultures have been radiated out. Naturally it would be dreadfully prejudiced to believe that what today is Italian culture, Italian civilisation, is anything but what has been radiated throughout Italy from mid-Europe, but absorbed into the Latin nature, still there in the language and outer form. It would be shocking prejudice to think that English civilisation is intrinsically different from what has streamed out from mid-Europe, and actually merely appropriated again in its language and so on in another way, in reality far less than the Italian or French way. But all that France, England, Italy and, even in mare respects, what Eastern Europe is, has been rayed out from central Europe. And in this centre there has now remained what indeed we have just found left after the streaming out of these cultures, what has remained as the womb out of which Goetheanism has evolved. We are faced today by this fact, a fact to be calmly accepted, that what has rayed forth into the periphery is working with all its power to bring to naught, to
nullify, even where soul and spirit are in question, everything existing in mid-Europe from which it has streamed. There will come a time when the world will look in a quite different way from how it does today upon this monstrous phenomenon in human events, where the world is reedy to set up as idols fourteen corpses of western thought. At some future date mankind will realise that there came about what may be called the absolute desire to exterminate what thus radiated out in all directions. It goes without saying that the tragedy of this fact will bear its fruit.

For connected with this fact, we see appearing in a further step forward of Europe's evolution, with the exception of the period during recent decades when other forces may be said to have held sway, all that prepared a way for itself and developed throughout the centuries by reason of the personal characteristics of those who in the most various directions developed these civilisations—we see all this streaming forth from the whole of Central Europe. How little inclination mankind has today for forming unprejudiced judgment on this point: I think I may say that, at the time the last traces were to be found of what assured the matter a fully scientific basis, I myself actually stood in intimate connection with it; my old friend, Karl Julius Schröer, was studying the various dialects, the various languages and the various natures of those sections of the people looked upon as German nationals of North Hungary, of Siebenburg and formerly of the various districts in Austria. Whoever observes here all that refers to the unpretentious dictionary and grammar of the Zips-German of Siebenburg Saxony in Schröer's studies which, in personal collaboration with him in the studies he was then making concerning the spread of mid-European culture, I was permitted to comment upon, whoever does this may say that he was still connected with a knowledge unhappily no longer even noticed today amid the confusion and turmoil of events. But let us look at this Hungary where, you must know, purely Magyar culture has been-supposedly established in the course of recent decades, since the year 1867; let us look there, not with political unreality, political delusion, political hatred, let us look in conformity with the truth. It will then be discovered that in the regions that afterwards, later, were supposed to be magyarised as countries of the Magyars, men from the Rhine were moved in—like the Siebenburg Saxons, men from further west, like the Germans of Zips, men out of modern Swabia, like the Germans of Bana. All this is the leaven forming the basis of the Magyar culture over which is now simply poured what then in reality was only developed very late as Magyar culture. At the basis of this Magyar culture, however, though perhaps not in anything expressible in language, but rather in the feelings, in the experiences, in the whole national character, there has always flowed in what has for centuries come from Central Europe.

Astonishing as it is, were you just to take the whole of European history, you could make a study of this in all the periphery regions of Europe. In the east the Slav wave came up against what radiated from the centre, and what radiated from the centre was pushed aside by the Slav wave—in the west by the Latin wave. And through a tragic chain of events, having, however, an inner historical necessity, the periphery then turned against what still remained in the womb of the centre, turned in such a way that from this turning a fact becomes clear—it may be believed or not, it may easily be mocked or scoffed at or not—what remained in mid-Europe grew out of Goetheanism, grasped by soul ant spirit in its reality and its truth, all this no longer meets with any understanding in the best intelligence of the periphery. Of this it might be said: The actual substance of what is the essence of mid-Europe is spoken of everywhere, even in the American countries, as though people had no notion of it. People may have no notion of it, but world history will bring it to the surface. This is what can give one strength in a certain sense to be able to hold fast to it.

It is true, my dear friends, on Silvester eve I gave you here a picture worked out by a man who is well able to make a calculation about the future relations of central Europe. (see Z 269.) If everything is fulfilled, even if only part is fulfilled, of what the periphery countries are wanting, these relations cannot be otherwise. But out of all this, the extermination of which for external existence has been decided upon, indeed the extermination of which will be fulfilled above everything else during the next years, the next decades—for so it has been determined in the councils of the periphery powers—within all this there has been the last shaping of what we described yesterday; there was within it the last shaping of what is nevertheless important as a leaven for the evolution of men. It must flow in, this evolution simply must go on of which I gave you a picture in what has to do with the Magyars. This radiating will indeed continue.

But particularly in central Europe all that during the last decades has certainly been very little understood there, will have to be grasped. Something of the nature of what lies in the aims of the threefold ordering of social existence, as I have presented it, will have to be understood. It will be central Europe itself that will be called upon to understand this threefold ordering. And perhaps if this centre of Europe has no external state, if this centre of Europe is obliged to live tragically in chaos, there will then be the first beginnings of understanding that we have to overcome those old outlooks for which the periphery of Europe is at present struggling, for these old outlooks will be unable to be maintained even by the European periphery. The old concept of the state will vanish, it will give place to the separation into three parts. And what constitutes Goetheanism will indeed have to enter this external life. Whether or not it is given this name is immaterial. The essential thing is that Goethe's world-outlook foresees what simply must be made clear also where the forming of human society is concerned. But all this can be discovered only if we take the trouble to understand this representative, this most representative being of all Germans—Goethe. For he is such a perfect representative of the German nature just because he is so entirely without national Chauvinism or anything at all reminiscent of Chauvinism or nationalism, as understood today. There must be an attempt to understand this man who represents all that is new, this most modern man, at the same time this most fruitful of men in his being for all that is spiritual culture. It cannot be said that mankind have yet reached a high point in their comprehension of Goethe. In his environment Goethe felt very mush alone. And even were Goethe one of those personalities who accustom themselves to social intercourse, who even develop a certain adroitness and grace in society so that a possible relation is set up to their environment, even were this so, the real Goethe living in the inner circle of Weimar and later in outward appearance the stout Privy Councillor with the double chin—the man who inwardly lived in this stout Privy Councillor felt lonely. And in a certain way he may be said still to be alone today. He is alone for a quite definite reason and must feel himself alone. This feeling of cultural isolation, this feeling of his that he was not understood, perhaps underlay his remarkable saying of later years: “Perhaps a hundred years hence Germans will be different from what they are now, perhaps from scholars they will have grown into human beings.”

My dear friends, this saying must touch us in the very depths of our soul. For, you see, we may look at the last years of the eighties, for example. When after the death of the last of Goethe's grandchildren in Weimar the Archives of Goethe and Schiller and the Goethe Society were founded, these were founded by a gathering of men—truly I want to say it in the best sense of the word—by a gathering of scholars. In fact the Goethe cult was organised by men, by personalities, who really had not grown out of scholars into men. One may even go farther. You know how much I revere Herman Grimm, the art historian, the subtle essayist (cf. The Story of My Life, also E.N.43.) and I have never made any secret of my admiration nor spoken to you in any different way about my admiration for Herman Grimm. I have also unconditionally admitted to you that I consider what has come from Herman Grimm's pen about Goethe as the best book as biography, as monography, that has been written about him. But now take this book of Herman Grimm's; it is written out of a certain human affection and width of outlook, but take it as giving a picture of Goethe himself which arises when you have let the book have its affect upon you. What is this figure Goethe? It is just a ghost, a ghost rather than the living Goethe. If these things are taken earnestly and in a spirit worthy of them one cannot help feeling that should Herman Grimm meet Goethe today, or had he met Goethe during his life time, because he harboured fervent admiration for him in the tradition built up about Goethe, he would have been ready at any moment to say: Goethe is predestined to be the spiritual king not only of mid-Europe but of all mankind. Indeed Herman Grimm, had it come his way, would have even gone to great lengths to serve as herald, had it been a question of making Goethe king of all earthly culture. But neither can one get free of the other feelings Had Herman Grimm got into conversation with Goethe, or Goethe with Herman Grimm, Herman Grimm would hardly have found it possible to understand what was in the depths of Goethe's being. For what he portrays in his book, although undoubtedly the best he knew of Goethe, is nothing but the shadow thrown by Goethe on his surroundings, the impression he made upon his age. There is nothing here, not even the slightest suggestion, of what lived in Goethe's soul—but merely a ghost out of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and not what was living deep down in Goethe.

This is a remarkable phenomenon which must be pondered in the soul in all seriousness and with due consideration. And if we look away from all this well, not Goetheanism but Goethe-worship that even a hundred years after Goethe is in reality far more scholarly than human, if we look back at Goethe himself, beneath much of what is great, much of what is grandiose confronting us in Goethe, we see one thing above all. Much, curiously much in Goethe—just take The Mysteries Frau Dr. Steiner recited here a short time ago, take the Pandora, take the Prometheus Fragment, (cf. E.N. 36) or some other work, take the fact that The Natural Daughter is only the first part of an incomplete trilogy, or the fact that in this fragment there was expressed something of the very greatest that lived in Goethe, and you have the strange, the quite strange, fact that when Goethe set himself to express what was greatest he never brought it to a conclusion. This was because he was sufficiently honest, not outwardly to round off the matter, to bring it to perfection, as a poet, an artist, will even do, but simply to leave off when the inner source of strength became dry. This is the reason wily so much remained unfinished: But the matter goes further, my dear friends. The matter goes far enough for us to be able to say: In an external way Faust is certainly brought to a conclusion, but how much in Faust is inwardly unsound, how much in it is like the figure of Mephistopheles itself. Read what I have said about Faust and about the figure of Mephistopheles in the recently published booklet on Goethe, where I spoke of how Goethe in his Mephistopheles set up a figure that in reality does not exist, for In this figure the two figures of Lucifer and Ahriman merge into one another and interweave in a chaotic way. And in the course of the week you will see presented here the last scenes before the appearance of Helen, before the third Act of the second part of Faust, something completed in Goethe's advanced age, something, however, on the one hand impressive, deep, powerful, on the other hand though finished to outward appearance, inwardly quite unfinished. It contains everywhere hints of what Goethe was hankering after, which however would not come into his soul. If we regard Faust from the point of view of its human greatness we have before us a work of gigantic proportions; if we look from the point of view of the greatness that would have lived in it had Goethe in his time been able to bring forth all that lay in his soul, then we have a frail, brittle work everywhere incomplete in itself. (see R LV.)

What Goethe left to those coming after him is perhaps the most powerful testament. That they should not only acknowledge him, that they do not acknowledge him today as a great scholar, or even as a man of certain culture, is easy to understand but Goethe did not make our attitude to him as easy as that. Goethe has to live among us as if he were still alive; he must be further felt, further thought. What is most significant in Goetheanism does not remain where Goethe was, for in his time he was not able to bring it into his soul out of the spiritual, and only the tendency is everywhere present. Goethe demands of us that we should work with him, think with him, feel with him, that we should carry on his task just as though he were standing behind each one of us, tapping us on the shoulder, giving us advice. In this sense it may be said that the whole of the nineteenth century and up to our own time, Goethe has been given the cold shoulder. And the task of our time is to find the way back to Goethe. Strictly speaking nothing is more foreign to real Goetheanism than the whole earthly culture, external earthly culture, with the exception of the modicum of spiritual culture that we have—nothing is more foreign than the earthly culture of the end of the nineteenth century or even of the twentieth century. The way back to Goethe must be found through the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.

This can be understood only by one who can go straight for the question: where did Goethe stand actually and in reality? You have from Goethe the most honest human avowal (I spoke of this yesterday) that he started out from paganism as it also corresponded to Platonism. The boy erected for himself a pagan altar to Nature, then the man Goethe was most strongly influenced not by all that was derived from the traditional Christianity of the Church, this fundamentally always remained foreign to him because his world-outlook is a world-outlook of expectancy, of awaiting the new understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. Those who in the old, traditional sense embraced the faith of the Christian Church in comfort, or even wished within this Christian Church to carry through all manner of purely outward reforms, were not in reality, closely related to him inwardly, where soul and spirit are concerned. Actually he always felt as he did when, travelling with the two apparently good Christians Lavater and Baswdow; two men who represented a progressive but at the same time old ecclesiastical Christianity, he said: “Prophets to right, prophets to left and the worldling in the middle.” It was his actual feeling between two of his contemporaries that he thus gave voice to; as opposed to the Christians around him he was always the definite non-Christian for the very reason that he was to prepare mankind for the Christ mood of waiting.

And so we see three men in a remarkable war having the very greatest influence upon his spiritual culture. These three men are actually thorough worldlings in a certain sense; ordinary Christian ministers were not popular with Goethe. The three personalities having such a great influence upon him are, first Shakespeare. Why had Shakespeare such a decisive influence upon Goethe? This was simply because Goethe aimed at building a bridge from the human to the superhuman, not in accordance with any abstract rule, not out of an intellectuality open to influence, but out of what is human itself. Goethe needed to hold fast to the human so that within it he might find the passage over from the human to the superhuman. Thus we see Goethe making every effort to model, to form the human, to work out of the human as Shakespeare did to a certain degree. Look how Goethe took hold of The History of Godfried Von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, Berlichingen's autobiography; how altering it as little as possible he dramatised this history and moulded the first figure of his Götz von Berlichingen; how then he formed a second figure out of him, this time more transformed, having more shape—then a third. In a way Goethe seeks his own straight forward path which holding to Shakespeare's humanity, but out of the human he is wanting to form the superhuman.

This he first succeeded in doing when, on his Italian travels (read his letters), he believes he can recognise from what is near to him, from the Greek works of art, how the Greeks pursued the same intentions, the divine intentions, according to which nature herself proceeds. He goes on his own path, his own individual, personal,true, path of experience. He could not accept what those around him said—he had to find his own way.

The second mind that had an enormous influence upon him, was that of a decided non-Christian, namely, Spinoza. In Spinoza he had the possibility of finding the divine in the way this divine is found a man wishing to make a road for himself leading from the human to the superhuman. Fundamentally Spinoza's thoughts bear the last impression of the intellectual age of the old Hebrew approach to God. As such, Spinoza's thoughts are very far from the Christ-impulse. Spinoza's thoughts, however, are such that the human soul as it were finds in them the thread to which to hold when seeking that way. There within men is my being, from this human being I seek to press on to what is superhuman. This way that he could follow, that he did not have to have dictated to him, that be could fellow while following Spinoza, this path Goethe in a certain sense, at a certain stage in his life, looked upon as his.

And the third of the spirits having the greatest influence upon him was the botanist Linnaeus. Why Linnaeus? Linnaeus for the reason that Goethe would have no other kind botanical science, no other science of the living being, but one which simply placed the living beings in juxtaposition, in a row as Linnaeus has done. Goethe would have nothing to do with the abstract thinking that thinks out all kinds of thoughts about plant classes, species and so on. What he considered important was to let Linnaeus work upon him as a man who placed things beside one another. For from a higher standpoint than that of the people who follow up the plants in an abstract way, what Linnaeus conscientiously placed next to each other as plant forms Goethe wanted to pursue after his own fashion, just as the spirit makes itself felt in this side by side arrangement.

It is just these three spirits who really could give Goethe what was lacking in the intimate circle of his life at the time, but was something he had to find outside; it is just these spirits who had the strongest influence upon him. Goethe himself had nothing of Shakespeare in him, for when he came to the climax of his art he created his Natural Daughter, which certainly contained nothing of Shakespeare's art but strove after something entirely different. He could, however, develop his inmost being only by educating himself in Shakespeare. Goethe's world-outlook had nothing in it of the abstract Spinoza; what was deep within Goethe, however, as his way to God could only be reached through Spinoza. Goethe's morphology had nothing of the placing side by side of the organic being, as in the case of Linnaeus, but, Goethe needed the possibility of taking from Linnaeus what he himself did not have. And what he had to give was something new.

Thus then did Goethe develop and came to his fortieth year, brought up on Shakespeare, Linnaeus and Spinoza; and having gone through what in the way of art Italy could show him he said when there about these works of art: “Here is necessity, here is God”. And as he lived in the spirit of his epoch there took place in him in a strong but unconscious way, also, however, to a certain extent consciously, what may be called his meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold.

And now, bearing in mind his passing the Guardian of the Threshold in the early nineties of the eighteenth century, compare words sounding like prayers to Isis in ancient Egypt, reminiscent of the old Egyptian Isis, such as those in the Prose-Hymn to Nature just recited to you by Frau Dr. Steiner—compare these words in which Goethe had still a quite pagan feeling, with those that as powerful imagination meet you in The Fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, there you have Goethe's path from paganism to Christianity. But there in pictures stands what Goethe became after going through the region of the Threshold, after he passed the Guardian of the Threshold. It stands there in pictures which he himself was unable to analyse for people in intellectual thoughts, which all the same are mighty pictures. Whither are we obliged to go if we wish to understand the Goethe who wrote the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily? Consider what is written about the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in the little book on Goethe already mentioned. (see Goethe's Standard of the Soul) When we really look at this we are confronted by the fact that Goethe created this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily as a mighty Imagination, after passing the Guardian of the Threshold.

This fairy tale of The Green snake and the Beautiful Lily that has sprung from a soul transformed, sprang forth after the soul found the bridge from pagan experience as it still finds utterance in the Hymn in Prose. “Nature! we are surrounded and enveloped by her, unable to step out of her, unable to get into her more deeply. She takes us up unasked and unwarned into the circle of her dance, and carries us along till we are wearied and fall from her arms” . . . “Even the unnatural is Nature . . . Everything is her life; and death is merely her ingenious way of having more life . . .” and so on and so forth.

This pagan Isis mood is changed into the deep truths, not to be grasped at once by the intellect, lying in the mighty Imaginations of The Green Snake end the Beautiful Lily where Goethe set down uncompromisingly how all that man is able to find through the external science of Europe can only lead to the fantastic capers of a will-of-the wisp. He shows also, however, that what man develops within must lead him to develop the powers of his soul in such a way that the self-sacrificing serpent who sacrifices his own being to the progress of human evolution can became the model which enables the bridge to be built from the kingdom of the physical world of the senses to the kingdom of the superphysical; and between these there rises the Temple, the new temple, by means of which the supersensible kingdom may be experienced.

Certainly, in this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily there is no talk of Christ. But just as little as Christ asked of a good follower that he should always just be saying Lord, Lord! is he a good Christian who always says Christ, Christ! The manner in which the pictures are conceived, the way the human soul is thought out in its metamorphosis in this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, the sequence of the thoughts, the force of the thoughts—this is Christian, this is the new path to Christ. For, why is this? In Goethe's day there were a number of interpretations of this fairy tale and since then in addition to those there have been many more. We have thought to throw light on to the fairy tale from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. My dear friends, I may, (here in this circle I may venture to speak out about this) I have the right to speak about this fairy tale. It was at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century when the knot of this fairy tale untied itself for me. And I have never since forsaken the path that should lead farther and farther into the understanding of Goethe, with the help of the mighty Imaginations embodied In the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. It may be said that the intellect that leads us quite well in our search for scientific truths, this intellect that can quite well guide us in acquiring an external outlook on nature and its conditions, at this precise moment so favourable to such an outlook, when anyone wishes to understand the fairy tale, this intellect is found absolutely wanting. It is necessary here to let the intellect be fructified by the conceptions of Spiritual Science. Here you have, transformed for our age and its conditions, what is necessary to all mankind for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha.

For understanding the Mystery of Golgotha the intellect must first be re-forced; it must move itself, jerk itself. No jerk is needed for understanding external nature. It has become ever more impossible for Latin culture as well as for the German—for the Latin because it is too greatly decedent, for the German culture because up to now it has not sufficiently evolved—it has become ever more impossible out of mere intellectuality to school the soul so far that it can find the new way to the Mystery of Golgotha. When, however, you develop the possibility in you, can you re-shape the forces of the soul so that they begin in a natural inner speech to find the passage over to the pictorial for which Goethe strove, then you school the forces of your soul so that they find the way to the new comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what is important.

Goethe's significance does not lie only in that he accomplished; it lies above all In what he does to our soul when we fully surrender ourselves to the profoundest depths of his being. Then gradually mankind will be able even consciously to find the path an which to pass the Guardian of the Threshold, the path Goethe fortunately, took while still, unconscious, and on that account was unable to finish just those works in which he wished to express all that was deepest in him. In this soul of Goethe's there lived a shimmering and glimmering of what was conscious and what was unconscious, what was attainable and what was out of reach. When we let such a poem as The Mysteries work upon us, or when we let Pandora work upon us, or any of the things Goethe left unfinished, we have the feeling that in this very incompletion there lies something that must free itself in the souls of those following after Goethe, something that will have to be completed as a great spiritual picture.

Goethe was lonely. Where it was a question of Goethe's real being he was lonely, lonely in his evolution. Goetheanism contains much that is hidden. But, my dear friends, even though the nineteenth century has not yet produced human beings out of scholars, whereas Goethe struggled through out of a scholarly to a human world-outlook, evolution must indeed go forward with the help of Goethe's impulse. I said yesterday and repeat today that the force bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha once united itself in a little known province of the Roman Empire with the man Jesus of Nazareth, and then with the Folk souls at central Europe after that, however, this force became inward. And out of what was weaving there inwardly in central Europe came such results as we find in Goethe and the whole of Goetheanism. But it is just the nineteenth century that has had a great share in letting Goetheanism lie in its grave. In every sphere the nineteenth Century has done everything possible to leave Goetheanism in its grave.

The scholars Who in Weimar founded the Goethe Society at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century would much rather have belonged to those who buried Goetheanism than to those who could raise any thing of this Goetheanism from the deed. Quite certainly the time has not come for Goetheanism to be able to live yet for the external life. The time depends on what we have often spoken of, namely, on the renewal of the human soul through Spiritual Science. Whatever may come to this Europe that now in a certain sense would bring about its own death, the grave which above all, first of all, the lack of thought in modern culture is digging, this grave will nevertheless also be a grave from which something will rise again. I have already pointed to the fact that the Christ spirit united itself with the folk souls of middle Europe; Goetheanism arose in the bosom of these folk souls. A resurrection will come, a resurrection not to be conceived as political, a resurrection that will have a very different appearance—but resurrection it will be. Goetheanism, my dear friends is not alive, Goetheanism for outer culture is still resting in the move: Goetheanism must however rise again from the dead.

Let the building that we have sought to set up on this hill bear testimony to the sincerity of our purpose, with the necessary courage for the present time to undertake the bringing to life of G0etheanism. For this, it is true we should need the courage to understand and penetrate in its ungoethean way what has up till now called itself Goetheanism. We should have to learn to acclaim Goethe's spirit to the same degree as the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth have disowned it, denied it in every possible sphere. Then the path of knowledge acquired through Spiritual Science, a path that is to be found unconditionally, will be connected with the historical path of the resurrection of Goetheanism. But it will also be connected with what can come from this resurrection of Goetheanism, that is, the impulse towards a new understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, that right understanding of the Christ which is necessary for our particular age. Perhaps the pathfinder of the Christianity necessary for mankind in the future will be recognised as the decidedly non-Christian Goethe who, like Christ Himself, did not ask for the constant repetition of “Lord, Lord . . .” but that man should carry his spirit in his heart, in his mind; and that in Goetheanism it should not always be a matter of “Christ, Christ . . .” but all the more that what has flowed into men as reality from the Mystery of Golgotha should be preserved in the heart, so that this heart should gradually change abstract and intellectual knowledge, the present knowledge about nature, into something by means of which the supersensible world is seen, so that men may be given the force for a deeper knowledge of the world and for a shaping of the social structure that is worthy of the human being.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

Today, on the first day of our branch reflections, we want to make a reflection, as is appropriate to the circumstances of the times, that extends to what can fall from our spiritual-scientific endeavor as light on many things that time, questioning, demanding, and should at least fill him with tasks, tasks that are indeed posed in the most eminent sense by the spirit of the time and on whose grasp by each individual perhaps much of the fate of humanity in the near future could depend. Let us start from something that may be obvious to us. You will have noticed that for some time now there has been a change in the mood of the outside world towards our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, a change in mood to the effect that this spiritual science is viewed with growing hostility here and there. Only someone who does not appreciate the history of spiritual movements in the right way can be surprised when such a change of mood, such a change of mood, comes; it will come with even greater intensity. As long as a movement like this one is mainly confined to a certain sectarian activity, as long as it is confined to a few people coming together here or there in different cities, sectionally uniting in front or back houses to pursue this or that sectionally, as long as such emerging movements are viewed with a certain indulgent goodwill which here and there may develop into something else, but that is left at that. There is no need to take such movements seriously; they will disappear by themselves, and the rooms in the front and back buildings where such things are done in a sectarian, more family-like way will be claimed by something else. For many years such an attitude prevailed in the outside world towards our movement, and the hostility that arose was more or less an oasis in comparison with the general mood. But things have changed a little, in that at least one side has increasingly endeavored to cast off the sectarian character of the movement. Although resistance to this sectarianism and to uniting with the general culture of the present arises again and again, even from within the ranks of our own society, an energetic attempt must be made to come together with those who are otherwise striving in the culture of the present, despite all resistance and hostility. It will not be enough just to sit down and read out lectures in a comfortable way and the like – although that can of course be a nice family task – one will be obliged to grapple with what people want here and there, to to tie in with what is wanted here and there, in order to find, precisely through the interrelationship with the perhaps reluctant movements of the outside world, what must be found for the present through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

And a very important task for our friends will be to develop the necessary flexibility of mind that will be needed to truly find this way out of the comfortable, safe, warm, family-like environment. It is necessary, but the necessity is not yet felt everywhere. This leads directly to the question: How will the various impulses of our spiritual movement have to deal in the future with that which is traditional or newly arising, or with the belief that it may be something new? How will that which comes from us have to deal with such movements? How will that develop?

Well, first of all, despite all the apparent approval from this or that side, the resistance will be particularly strong on the part of the official representatives of religious, denominational world views. These religious and confessional representatives of world views, from whose ranks exemplary confessors of our movement will certainly emerge, will nevertheless, in their majority, repeatedly emphasize what they pick up from the inherited good of their views, and will find plenty of support among the masses of people today, who, of course, do not believe in authority themselves, but fall for every kind of authority. In particular, it will be difficult to push through spiritual scientific knowledge against the current mood, which is based on a certain extraordinarily comfortable way in which human souls have become accustomed to finding their relationship to the spiritual world. How many people in the present day actually say: “Ah, there come such spiritual researchers who construct a whole world of hierarchies!” One should ascend through the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on to a supreme spiritual, to a supreme divine. Such people find all this far too 'intellectual' to go along with, and they point to the simple, as they call it, naive relationship in which, through strong inner experience, the soul can come to God or even to Christ and the like. This is what you hear over and over again from those who think they know better: direct experience of the highest divine! Why should a person need so many hierarchical intermediaries to come to spiritual knowledge? They can find union with the highest divine in their childlike, simple experience.

But now we have to ask ourselves: What happens in the souls of those who, really with a certain honesty, even if this honesty is a comfortable one, characterize their striving in this way: They speak of the divine that they experience. There are people who have definitely experienced a certain change in their emotional life, through which everything they call divine, spiritual, appears to them differently than it did before. Some call it evangelism, others call it something else, but that does not matter. It is the belief that these people have found access to the highest divine in a childlike, naive way. Some people imagine that experiencing the Christ within is quite simple. But what do they really experience?

Now, I assume that the experiences that are meant here are genuine and honest, that people really experience something, that they have really experienced a change in their spiritual life. I start from a very honest conviction. I also start from a certain lack of prejudice towards the traditional confessional beliefs. What these people experience is then at most the next spiritual that a person can experience. And what is this next spiritual? This next spiritual is that being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, which is assigned to every person for his guidance, which one can call whatever one likes: Christ, the highest God, if one likes! - It does not depend on what one calls it, but on what it really is, which approaches the soul when one has an honest, real experience: It is the Angelos, the Angel, and this Angel one regards only as the highest God. One is too lazy to progress to something else, and the next thing one experiences one designates as one's God and constructs with it — yes, what actually? — the most egotistical religion one can possibly construct! It is not important that all people communicate by giving the thing a single name, because since people do not want to experience anything other than what has been suggested, everyone experiences only their own angel, everyone worships only their own angel. And no matter how many preachers speak of the unified God, of the seemingly monotheistic God, in truth they only speak of the millions of angels that people worship and to whom they give the same name, thus driving people into confusion that these millions of beings are only one being. That is the reality, and at the same time it points to the illusion that one falls prey to when one wants to unite with the most egotistical God in this way. |

There is already an external indication of what I have just mentioned. Try to resort to the learned aids that can also be used on such occasions, and you will be able to learn something strange: Take the most learned things in this field today and try to gain knowledge of the origin of a very common word. You will find a word in particular about which all scholars within the German-speaking area will tell you: the origin of it cannot be fathomed. That is the word God and its adjective divine. Take the German dictionary: the article 'spirit' in the dictionary is also not very satisfactory, but still more satisfactory than the article 'God'. All you can find out is that no one knows where the word God comes from. There are all kinds of hypotheses, but no one knows where it comes from. In the face of such a learned conclusion, will anyone still be able to shrink from the assertion that numerous people who speak of God and the divine do not know what they are talking about? Quite naturally, because they use a word of unknown origin for something, well, for whatever they would like to use it for. Things are more serious than they would like to admit. But one does not want to tackle these things. One does not realize how much one lives in clichés and how happy one feels to be able to live in clichés. That is one thing. But one can also find something else.

If you go for the reality that people experience when they speak of their God today, even transcending the denominational, and experience him in their own inner being, they may call it mystical or theosophical, you can experience over and over again that people say: It all comes down to experiencing God within yourself, to becoming one with God within yourself! What exactly does one become one with in this case? If one investigates the thing with which the human being then becomes one, without realizing it, it is nothing other than one's own soul as it was before it entered into physical existence through conception or birth, as this soul has lived between the last death and this birth. Today, even if he sincerely wants to be religious, man either worships his angel or his own ego as it was before birth or conception. He calls it his God and attributes it to the word of unknown origin; but what he really feels dawning from the unconscious is himself. And the curious thing comes to light for the one who sees through reality, that from all pulpits there is constant talk of predestination, and since one cannot think of this without repeated earth lives, so the truth is spoken of these earth lives, namely of one's own self that goes through them, and at the same time the fact of these repeated earth lives is denied. In truth, nothing is talked about more than what Anthroposophy wants to bring to conscious human knowledge.

Now people find that it is necessary to give the matter a name of unknown origin. They actually talk about something emerging from the subconscious that can be experienced in mystical experiences. They call it being with God. In reality, it is being with oneself, with one's self, as it was before birth. If you call it God and ask people to worship it, you are asking people to worship themselves. Self-idolatry is what is celebrated as religion in many cases today. It is necessary to say this today because it describes the full seriousness of reality. But at the same time it is uncomfortable because it points to the tremendously profound lie that permeates our lives.

This life lie has essentially been led to what I have already mentioned here: that in the year 869 at the Eighth General Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, the spirit was abolished. I mentioned that the philosophical, unprejudiced people who start from the so-called unconditional science, today speak of the fact that man consists of body and soul. In truth, he consists of body, soul and spirit. But in the year 869 it was forbidden to speak of the spirit. And there is nothing that Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages avoided more than speaking of the so-called trichotomy of the spirit. But as soon as one left trichotomy, from which, for example, Dionysius the Areopagite still started, from which copies were still made in the 6th century, all of which still speak of the higher hierarchies, as soon as one took leave of what is so eagerly fought against even in today's world, of the old Gnosis, which of course , which of course must present itself to us in a different form today, but which was an enormously lofty thing for its time. As soon as one took leave of it and took into account the comfort of the intellect, one was also condemned to speak gradually of something that actually leads the soul into a terrible life-lie. No wonder that because spiritual science must tell the truth about these things, it arouses the most violent opposition today. And today, in many cases, people do not really want to listen to what people actually want to express in their hearts. It is truly the case that today, for the most part, people have completely forgotten how to listen with their souls.

Sometimes this comes to the surface in grotesque examples. People no longer care about what is actually being said, but about saying something themselves, regardless of whether it is relevant or not. This is not an isolated phenomenon, it is typical, it happens everywhere at every turn. I could give you a hundred examples of this, and a thousand. This is how it is in the literary field, and this is also how it is on the big world stage.

But what is really driving the present, what is driving the present and has ultimately led to such a catastrophe, is intimately connected with such things, with such a spiritual state of the present. This must be pointed out again and again. Even today there are still people who feel compelled to speak of love for one's neighbor, to speak of the fact that one has to respond to the other with understanding and love. But in reality none of this exists. Instead, the prevailing mood is that which Fritz Mauthner expresses in the case of Boll, with which you are familiar, where he launches a terrible tirade against someone who actually agrees with him completely.

In such matters, what one has to clearly and sharply perceive in the present is expressed characteristically and typically. Only by developing the will to engage with such matters will one find the standpoint necessary to make progress today in some way in the sense of human evolution at a place to which one is placed by one's karma.

Above all, we must recognize the following today: we must really look at what has developed in the human being from the last death to the present birth. We can no longer deceive ourselves, we can no longer have illusions through self-idolization, through self-adoration, by calling that which we actually find within us as our real self, God. One will no longer be able to indulge in such deceptions, but will have to look at what everyone brings with them into their physical existence as a legacy from spiritual worlds through their birth. Where is it actually? Yes, my dear friends, we all bring it with us, we bring an enormous amount of wisdom and spiritual knowledge into our physical existence through our birth. Where is it then? We are all so wise when we are born that we cannot believe how wise we are. But where is this wisdom? On the one hand, it is enchanted in our physical body and its predispositions, with which it has united, and on the other hand in our destiny. It wants to be released from this. And in the present time cycle of humanity it lies that this heritage be released through the free activity of the human being, be brought up as higher I-knowledge of what lies enchanted in ourselves and our destiny. We can, by realizing that the human being of today lives differently than the human being of past cultural epochs, also come to some insight about such things.

Let me remind you of something I have already mentioned here. I said that in the first cultural period of the post-Atlantic epoch, people lived differently than they do today. He experienced spiritually and mentally what was happening physically in him. Just as we as children today experience the change of teeth as a special turning point, and experience sexual maturity as a turning point in our psyche, so until the 1950s, people in the first post-Atlantic cultural period experienced their physical development. Then came the time when this was only experienced until the forties, then until the thirties. Today we only experience these things until the twenties. Until the twenties, the human being today experiences what is going on in him physically; then he is, as it were, emancipated. He can no longer experience by himself what lives in the descending development of life; he must experience it by allowing himself to be spiritually stimulated by the soul. The spiritual science must give the impulse to redeem what lies enchanted in our body or in our destiny. Our present-day education has not even come close to achieving this, let alone penetrating it. It must be recognized that an impulse must be laid in man in his earliest youth so that man may learn to grow older. People today do not understand growing old. At most, they understand that they are getting gray hair or – particularly common today – early baldness or similar signs of aging. But there is not what there can be in people: the expectation, the hopeful expectation for each new year, with the certainty that by getting older, one experiences something every year that cannot be experienced earlier. Every year brings something new, every year brings a new revelation, if one knows how to use it.

Of course, the mood must come over people, through which they say to themselves: Now I am turning twenty years old, the thirty- to forty-year-old has experienced something that I cannot yet experience today. I have to wait, then it will reveal itself to me. Consider seriously in all its aspects what it would mean if education worked in such a way that one could look forward hopefully to the approach of one's life. The opposite mood is cultivated today. People want to be elected to state parliaments and other parliaments at a very early age because they believe that one is ready at the earliest age, that one already has it all. What is more common today than for the youngest badgers to say at every opportunity: “That's my point of view!” — Everyone today already has a point of view at the earliest age. It is completely unknown to people that hope lives expectantly, that life holds secrets that reveal themselves little by little. But it would mean a great deal if this were to be incorporated into our education. Then one would have the will to gradually release that which is enchanted into our body and into our destiny.

However, we will have to see the culture as it has gradually developed in a very special light if we want to educate ourselves about such things. We will have to ask ourselves: How do we actually find the right point of view to gradually release what is enchanted in us? — Yes, we may even have to ask ourselves something else: Why should we redeem what we have within us in the form of enchantment? Is it not much more comfortable to leave it to the flesh and the nerves and the blood down there? It can rest there until we die and enter the other world; it can eke out an existence there. We leave what lies within us in enchantment to the nerves, the muscles, fate. Why should one then release this? One should and must release it for the reason that the spirit is subject to very definite laws on its way. That which is given to us as inheritance from spiritual worlds wants to be released, wants to be freed from its captivity. And that occurs by being taken up into consciousness. What lies in the body and in destiny wants to make its way into our consciousness. It has its true home in our consciousness. It should live in our consciousness, not be enchanted in our nervous or circulatory systems, in our muscles or in our bones. For if it remains in the nerves, muscles, bones or in the vague, merely suffered destiny, then this spiritual element is transformed into something else: into evil forces. It is destined to be brought into life through consciousness. If it remains united with the person outside of consciousness, it will either turn into Luciferic or Ahrimanic forces, and will gradually be handed over to Ahriman or Lucifer.

But for a long time, our Western cultural development has reckoned with Luciferic forces, and now, through a particularly esteemed spiritual current, it is preparing to reckon with Ahrimanic forces and to live with them. Man is indeed to be placed in the midst of life, is to find his place in life: that is how he is educated. Certain impulses, certain perceptions, certain feelings are cultivated. What impulses and feelings were used for in particular? Look around you at what is happening in the world. It is on the decline and will soon mean very little, but for centuries it has meant a great deal: medals, decorations, titles, honors. But what is behind all this? Feelings, sensations that make one strive to develop instincts, desires, Luciferic tendencies in humanity. Think about how much Luciferic in human nature has been striven for, cultivated, in order to put man in the place where one wanted to put him, by taking a detour through this Luciferic. That was the Luciferic period. It is on the wane. There is hardly any need to talk about it today, because what is happening in this area is on the wane. Even if people do not yet realize how much this is the case, they will see it. One speaks of something that is on the wane when one speaks of the actually Luciferic cultural impulses.

But the Ahrimanic ones are looming ominously. An example of this: right now, what is expected to achieve so much for the cultivation of humanity in the future, what is called the gifted test, the testing of human talents, is going through the German and other cultural “forests of scholars” in glorious representation. In the world of scholarship, very particular plants have emerged in recent times: certain psychologists, certain soul experts. They do experimental psychology, they experiment on people in order to explore the soul. Now, in the very latest times, these people have also turned their attention to young people. Because they can no longer cope with the old examination system and the old social order, they are turning on young people and testing their abilities so that, as they say – and this has already been said in prominent places – the right man is put in the right place. Of course, you have to start with the child to test how to find the right one. First of all, one tests the ability to grasp things by conducting all kinds of experiments: how quickly a child guesses this or that, which is some kind of vague stuff into which they are supposed to put meaning. Then one tests the intelligence, one tests the memory. The intelligence, for example, by presenting two words to the child or young person that are as unrelated as possible, say, for example, 'mirror' and 'robber'. And then you instruct a number of young people, whose intelligence you want to test, to combine these words in a meaningful way, to say what they want to put between these words mirror and robber. One person puts in: Even a robber can look at himself when he sees himself in the mirror. — This person is considered the least intelligent. Another thought up: the person who is to be robbed or even killed by the robber has a mirror; from a distance he sees the robber approaching and can save himself. — This is a more intelligent boy or girl.

There are now magazines in which these hair-raising methods of testing intelligence are described; they are developed and analyzed as a special achievement of the present. In this way, memory and intelligence are tested. A statistical approach is taken. The person who has told the most stories, for example, about what can happen between the robber and the mirror, is given two or more marks, as with censorship, and the person who has the most dashes, who has been able to find the most ingenious connections, is the most intelligent. That is the man or woman who is to be promoted in some way at special colleges with all kinds of support, and so on. The characteristic of these things, which are really praised today as a special achievement of humanity – and the most courageous educators devote all their energy to these aptitude tests – is that in this way one does not approach the soul at all, but only tests what ahrimanic rests in his physicality, that in this way one only tests how strongly Ahriman can develop through one or the other young person. What will be introduced into human culture in this way will be the ahrimanic impulses. But today one indulges in such illusions, such deceptions.

But this must be the significant thing in our spiritual development, that its seriousness is recognized. Of course, in small groups you can sit together and, as I said, read lectures in a family-like comfort: That does not hurt, or rather, what comes from outside does not hurt. But as this spiritual science gradually begins to spread, seriousness also begins, and this seriousness can only consist in wholeheartedly engaging with what is to be taken in connection with what is developing around us. It is necessary to understand these things and to understand them as deeply as they can be understood. It is necessary to develop the flexibility of mind that makes it possible to move beyond sectarianism to a worldly grasp of what our spiritual science is supposed to encompass. For various impulses must come from this spiritual science, which are healthy impulses in the face of many things that are emerging in our time in the form of a decadent, a declining one. Above all, those who want to enter this spiritual current need freedom, a spirit of independence.

For us, it is not about believing in authority, but about acquiring free, independent judgment. For nothing that is said in the field of spiritual science can be generalized; everything applies individually, everything applies in the concrete for the particular case. It is indeed a certain comfort that the human mind seeks to generalize things in so many ways, but this cannot be done as soon as one enters spiritual realms. Today it is absolutely necessary, absolutely imperative, to also open oneself to such insights, which do not stop at the merely indefinite, abstract, mystical, but penetrate into reality from the spiritual. One may believe oneself to be a great mystic, untouched by world events, going one's lonely way through the world, experiencing God within. But all this is a thin spiritual life, so thin that it does not approach what is present in the world as reality. Such mystics are not required in the present time. The individual can demand such mysticism because it can lull him into the comfortable belief that he is experiencing something very sublime in his soul. But the present time demands a strong spirituality that penetrates into the immediate reality. It demands not only a discussion of the higher hierarchies, but also such an insight into the nature of the higher hierarchies that one can, starting from this knowledge of the nature of the hierarchies, gain insight into what surrounds us on earth. For now the time is coming when human order can no longer be found except through real insights into the nature of what is developing here on earth, even if it is uncomfortable to recognize it.

Read the cycle I gave in Kristiania long before the war, in preparation for the present time, about the individual souls of nations, about the connection between the structure of the individual nations. There you will see that what is recognized in the higher hierarchies can be taken seriously, that it can be applied to the configuration of the earth. Such knowledge is necessary for the present. For such knowledge must provide the practical basis for what is to be undertaken in the future. What has to be done will have to be recognized, not from the phrase-filled writings and speeches of people who today talk about the European nations on the basis of what they call their observations, but one will really have to penetrate into what lives on earth in the realm of the spiritual.

Of course, today we think that anyone who has experienced something has something to say under all circumstances. Yes, do you think that everyone who lived a dull existence in some village in Provence from 1789 to 1800 had something very clever to say about the French Revolution? He has experienced the event; but that does not mean that he necessarily has anything significant to say about it! Similarly, countless people can travel to America or Italy and, as they say today, judge a country and its people. But what they say is not necessarily very valuable for judging what is needed. This depends on having the opportunity to get into the depths of existence, and for that today it is necessary not to accept or reject materialism on the one hand for my sake, or to accept or reject spiritualism, no, for the researcher of reality, the spiritual researcher in our sense, it must be completely irrelevant whether one takes one's starting point from being a materialist or a spiritualist. We do not necessarily have to despise the materialists under any circumstances, because it does not matter whether one starts from matter or from spirit, if one only goes to the end! He who in true contemplation goes to the end of matter finds the spirit in the material things that happen around us. And he who wants to rely on the spirit and is always saying, “Spirit, spirit, spirit!” must above all see that he finds the way from abstract comprehension of the spirit to concrete comprehension of what happens materially. For that which happens materially is a revelation of the spirit, but one must develop the right faith in the spiritual. The one who does not have the expectant life, that each new year can radiate new secrets into us as we grow older, that person, no matter how much he speaks of God and the spirit, does not really believe in God and the spirit. For he believes that he is mature at twenty-five in all that makes a person capable of judgment. But then the rest of life is useless, worthless for the soul; the Godhead no longer reveals anything else.

One must penetrate with the spirit to the material, comprehend it. The spiritual must be so condensed that it can find the material. If we grasp what is otherwise going on out there in the world in terms of material phenomena only in terms of what is within us, we must say: there is an abyss between the external and what goes on within us. Only spiritual science is called upon to bring the external world closer to us and to bring us closer to the external world in such a way that the two meet. We can do this for the individual and for the evolution of the earth. Such things must be understood. As I stated yesterday, natural science is the least suited to grasp the fact that the head is in retrogression and the extremities are in over-development. It is particularly necessary to grasp these things. How can we grasp them? We grasp them by going beyond ordinary imagining, beyond abstractness, and forming an imaginative vision of our own imagining. You cannot look at your own imagination without at the same time approaching what is happening materially in your head as you imagine. If you have the ordinary imagination of the ordinary consciousness, you do not notice what is going on in your head. You only notice this when you ascend to imaginative thinking; you experience the material process.

And do you know what happens in the head, in the mind, while we develop ordinary consciousness? A process of hunger takes place. The waking life of imagination consists in our head starving. The false ascetics and false mystics have instinctively understood this. Therefore, they have let the whole body starve. But it is not normal for spiritual experiences to occur when the whole body is starving. That is always wrong. The hunger-asceticism that is supposed to lead to mystical raptures is one-sidedness, an unhealthy direction. But normally the equilibrium of our body is so arranged that from morning to evening, from waking up to falling asleep, not the whole body, but the head is in a continuous hunger process. It is always the head that is undernourished. This is something that belongs to the process of degeneration. And through the undernourishment of the head, we are able to make room for the imaginative spiritual life. And he who gets to know the imaginative spiritual life as imagination also gets to know what others only know in somewhat lower regions when they feel the growling of the stomach. He learns to recognize that from morning till evening, until he falls asleep, he has a growling in his stomach. What takes place is what one can call the approach of the spiritual to the material in our own body. One-sided mysticism is a comfortable sinking into the inner self, where one experiences not much more than what one experiences otherwise, only a little more condensed. True spiritual development is such a strengthening, such an invigoration of the spiritual life that, when one applies it to one's own experience, one gets to know oneself more precisely, but now really more precisely. One also gets to know the bodily more precisely because one moves so close to the bodily that one moves up into the spiritual with the bodily, that one bridges the abyss that is otherwise always there between the spiritual and the bodily.

And so one bridges the abyss that exists between the physical and the spiritual, even outside in the life of nations. Take a look at the European nations, at least some of them. You know that the leading beings from the higher hierarchies with regard to nations – you know this from the cycle on the souls of nations – are the beings of the archangelic hierarchy, the archangeloi. But how do they work? Of course, this is only an abstraction, to see any archangel as the conductor of this or that people. We have no more than when we talk about the human soul, which can only be present between birth and death because it develops out of something material, namely in our body. In the same way, the archangel, in guiding a people, is bound to the external material. The bridge between the purely spiritual nature of the archangel and the nature of the people is a material one, even if it is not as clearly defined and sharply contoured as our body. We ask, for example: What about the people who inhabit the Apennine Peninsula, what about the people who used to be Romans and are now Italians of Germanic origin? For basically, the majority of the inhabitants of today are only transformed Germanic peoples, but they get their configuration, their national determination, from something else, from the fact that in their breathing process, into the air of their breathing process, the archangel enters, not in the sense of incarnation, but in the sense of, well, let us say, permeation. And by breathing with the air, the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula are connected with their archangel. And anyone who really wants to study in order to recognize something of what is actually at work there must study the peculiar connection between the inhabitants of this peninsula (and also of the Iberian Peninsula, although to a lesser extent) and breathing, with the air. They must know how the air and the special breathing process are incorporated into the human inner being.

It is different with those who live in present-day France. Here the archangel takes a different approach, working through everything that is fluid in the human being's natural development. The French often drink their national character with their wines, but also with other things that figure in the organism as liquid elements. You see, in this way one does not merely arrive at abstract descriptions of the connection between the spiritual and the physical world. There is a description that only hints at the archangel, and below that teem with peoples, people, and the archangel guides people. Through true spiritual science one can understand the process in all its concreteness.

The inhabitants of Great Britain receive through the solid matter developing in their bodies what the archangel has to give them. They absorb it as the solid components form in their body, with the solid organization. Of course, this is only in one area where it expresses itself radically, but it is nevertheless not just a harsh truth, but a spiritual scientific truth: as the Englishman eats his beefsteak, the archangel works on him. Of course, this cannot be interpreted in a chauvinistic sense, because the individual individuality separates itself from it. Man belongs to this matter only with a part of his being, but insofar as man belongs to the people, it is effective in him. One only learns about the earth by not being afraid to go into these things in the future. Man has an inordinate fear of the truth because, of course, uncomfortable things come out through the truth. But as soon as the truth is taken seriously, it is necessary not to shy away from this discomfort. |

Let us cross over to America. Even outwardly, in its external configuration, it shows how dependent people become on what radiates from the soil! In Italy from the air, in France from the water, in England from what is destined to enter the body as solid ingredients or to become solid in it. In America it is still different.

You will see that spiritual-scientific truths, when measured against reality, find confirmation everywhere. It is just that today we do not seek this confirmation. In earlier years, I once pointed out that the development of the consciousness soul, which particularly emphasizes the egoism of man, is outwardly and materially increased by sugar. At the time, I pointed out how infinitely greater the consumption of sugar is in the British Isles than, for example, among the self-denying Russian people, where the consumption of sugar is infinitely lower. But if one describes how the consciousness soul only comes into being and develops from the 15th century onwards, one only has to look at the history of sugar production: it only begins in the 15th century. Where, then, does our sugar production actually come from? It is only in the 15th century that people begin to depend on sugar. Everything that is really evoked from the spiritual worlds in spiritual science is fully confirmed precisely when it develops so strongly in the spiritual that it can be submerged in the material, where it lives and must therefore be recognized. As soon as one crosses over to America, one finds not only externally that the Europeans who come to America gradually develop different arms and hands: the formation of arms and hands approaches that of the ancient Indians, the ancient Indian people who have been exterminated in America. And this also applies to the configuration of the facial features, even if it occurs only very gradually and only in the third or fourth generation. Of course, we should not imagine that a staid British philistine can suddenly become an Indian in the third or fourth generation, but it only shows in the finer facial features; but it does emerge. We must face these things squarely, for only by doing so will it be possible, through knowledge, to develop true love across the earth. Love can only be developed by truly empathizing with other people. But to do that, it is necessary to get to know them. The folk spirit works on the American people through the undergrounds of the earth, through the magnetic and electrical forces slumbering in the earth. It is the underground that radiates up and that in America provides the medium through which the national spirit directs the people.

And if we go to Central Europe, it is good to let the people think for themselves. But some things can be said: there is actually something very unstable, something very intimate, that is connected with the material expression of the folk spirit, with the material effect of the folk spirit. There it is essentially the effect of warmth on warmth. The differences in warmth that occur between external warmth and internal warmth, the warmth of winter, of spring, of summer, in short, everything that is expressed in the warmth conditions, that is the medium through which the folk spirit in Central Europe works. Everything that affects blood circulation and breathing as a result of warmth conditions is the indirect way in which the folk spirit works here. You can also follow this in the soul. We still have the opportunity - if we are not Fritz Mauthner - to feel something of the after-effect, I would say, of being warmed through, in the element of language. If you are not abandoned by all the good spirits of language, you are able, for example, in German, to feel your way into the language, not just to stop at the abstract element, but to feel your way into the spirit of the language, because warmth is physically related to the soul in warmth. Nothing is more physically akin to the soul than soul warmth and soul coldness are to physical warmth and physical coldness. That which lives in the sentient soul is already much more foreign to the air; that which lives in the intellectual or mind soul is much more foreign to the element of water, and even that which lives in the consciousness soul is foreign to beefsteak, that is, to the earth. And what is expressed in the human soul is terribly foreign to the magnetic and electrical forces that radiate from the underground into the human development of the American character. That is why there is so much in the American national character that appears as if the American is obsessed by what he does, in contrast to the Central European, who must be with the soul in everything he does, and who can therefore also develop mystical warmth, while the American can so easily develop a spiritualist attitude, can be obsessed by some spiritual thing, just as one can become obsessed by something that no longer flows directly into people, like air, water, earth, but only works up from the earth's underworld to form the structures of a people.

In the Russian national character, in what is being prepared in the East – we will continue to talk about such things the day after tomorrow – the folk spirit is at work, but it is only called upon to play a special role through its people in the future. the folk spirit works through the light, and indeed through the light in such a way that it does not work through the light that radiates directly from the sun, but through the light that is first absorbed into the vegetation and into the earth itself and radiates back again. The solar power reflected by the earth, especially by the vegetation, the solar power working from the ground, is what the Russian national spirit uses as its medium to bring about the structure and organization of the nation.

If we look at all these details — I will talk more about this the day after tomorrow — then we will see how the present and the near future need not a general, vague, phrase-like mysticism, but a spiritually so strong spirit-knowledge that it can immerse itself, that it can put itself into the material existence with which one has to live. So that material existence, when it can be contemplated in its kinship with the spirit, is not regarded, as one has done by mistake, as something one would like to get out of like one's skin in order to get to the spirit, but must be regarded precisely as a revelation of the spirit. He does not yet have the right relationship to the spirit who is unable to recognize that which is physical is in truth a manifestation of the spirit. Everything around us is the body of the spirit. And only when one grasps the spirit in such a way that one is able to see nature as the body of the spirit, only then is one capable of attaining true spiritual knowledge. But these are the things that must be striven for as concrete spiritual knowledge. But is it not actually the case with these things, as soon as one approaches them with complete sincerity, that they become uncomfortable for people, these people of the present day, who of course do not love such truths, who would prefer to hear only: People must love each other across the earth! Yes, certainly, but first they must recognize each other. And love must become independent of what meets one in knowledge, but it can only become independent if that meets one in knowledge. For what I have described, including what I have described about the souls of nations, you all know it, your nerves, your muscles, your blood knows it: it is enchanted in it, it must be brought out of it; and if it is not brought out in the near future, it will stir in the nerves, in the muscles, in the blood, and it will go over the earth as disharmony, as an impulse to conflict and war. The only way to prevent this from happening is to ensure that the spirit, which would otherwise transform into its ahrimanic or luciferic counter-image, is released from nerves and muscles and blood and guided into consciousness, because it wants to live here on earth only in consciousness. Only when he lives in consciousness is he established in his true existence and leads people to what they must come to in the future. He must not be left down there in the Ahrimanic and Luciferic realm, because he transforms when he cannot find his place. This ability of the spirit to transform must be recognized, for it is from this recognition that the tasks for the future arise. It is not easy to rise to the level required of humanity for the future, but it is necessary to dig deep with knowledge so that the tasks of the future can be solved. To do this, it is necessary for people to overcome certain inconveniences. And because they do not want to overcome them, they will often become enemies of spiritual development. This will have to be taken into account, especially when spiritual science spreads. The stronger such a thing becomes, and the more you are all called upon to make the transition from comfortable sectarianism to a cosmopolitan view, to work on the plan of the world, to carry this spiritual science out of the front and back parlors to those places where it is believed that the affairs of mankind must be negotiated. That is what I wanted to talk about today; I will continue the day after tomorrow.