The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we pause at times in the midst of our anthroposophical considerations and then ask ourselves: What leads us into a spiritual movement such as our anthroposophical movement? ... we may of course answer a similar question from many different stand-points. One of the standpoints (although it is not the only one, it is nevertheless the most important one) which is able more than any other to supply a satisfactory answer is the contemplation of the course of life which the human soul experiences in feelings between death and a new birth. Indeed, the events which take place during the long span of life between death and a new birth are not less important or detailed than the events which take place between birth and death; yet we are only able to single out a few of the important things which we must experience. We may say, however, that whenever and at whatever point we observe the life between death and a new birth it always convinces us that humanity must prepare itself for a time when it will know and feel something concerning the super-sensible worlds.

Let us now penetrate at once into definite and concrete facts. If a clairvoyant who is able to contemplate life between death and a new birth perceives what will be described below, this sight may indeed induce him to consider it as an urgent task to spread the knowledge of the spiritual world! Let us take the case of a man who has died. The clairvoyant seeks him, he tries to see him some time after the person in question has passed through the portal of death. In the manner in which it is possible to communicate with the dead, he may hear the following words spoken by the departed one. (This is a concrete case.) The departed one will speak to him as follows: “I have left my wife behind; I know that she is still dwelling in the physical world.” (Of course, the dead man does not express himself with physical words.) “While I was living with her in the physical world, and while I attended to my work at the office from morning to night, she has always been the sunshine of my life. Every one of her words filled me with happiness; indeed, my life was so that I could not imagine it without the sunshine shed over it by the partner of my life. I then passed through the portal of death and left her behind. Now I am longing to be back again, I feel how I miss everything and my longing soul seeks to find a path leading to the companion of my life. But I cannot find this soul, I cannot penetrate to where she is dwelling, it is just as if she were no longer there. And if at times I have an inkling of her presence and feel as if she were there, as if I were in her neighbourhood, she is dumb, so that I only compare this with the case of two people, one of whom is filled with the desire that the other one speak a few words to him, while the other silent and cannot speak. Thus the soul that has filled me with bliss for such a long time during my physical life has now grown silent”.

You see, if we investigate what may be the cause of all this we obtain the answer: there is no language in common between the departed and the living who have remained behind. Nothing fills the soul with a substance which would continue to render it perceptible. Because a language in common is lacking, two souls feel separated.

This was not always the case. If we go back further into human evolution we find that the souls possessed a certain spiritual inheritance, a spirituality rendered them perceptible to one another not only upon the physical plane, but also when one of them dwelt in the physical and the other in the spiritual world. But the old heirloom of spiritual inwardness has been used up and to-day it exists no longer, so that the distressing case may really arise that one soul who has been loved by the other as dearly as I have just described, cannot be found beyond death by the soul, because nothing of what can be perceived by the departed soul lives within the soul who has remained upon the earth. What can be perceived by the departed soul is spiritual knowledge and spiritual feelings: this is the link which connects the soul upon the earth with the spiritual world. If here upon the earth a soul who has remained behind has fostered the knowledge of spiritual world, and if thoughts connected with the spiritual world have passed through this soul, these thoughts may be perceived by the departed soul, even the old religious feelings suffice to give soul something which may be perceived by the other soul. If it were possible to trace this case still further, the seer would discover that even when both souls have passed through death the departed souls are only able to perceive one another dimly; they are quite unable to establish a reciprocal connection, or they have the greatest difficulty in doing this, because they have no language in common. Clairvoyance reveals the deeper meaning of Anthroposophy: it is the language which will gradually be spoken both by the living and by the dead, by those who dwell in the physical world and by those who live between death and a new birth. The souls who have remained behind and who have taken up within them thoughts concerning the super-sensible worlds become visible to the souls of the departed. If they have strewn out love before death, they will do this also after death. This may convince us that Anthroposophy is a language which renders perceptible to the super-sensible world what takes place in the world of physical events. Indeed, the danger threatening humanity upon the earth is that the souls will become more and more estranged from one another and will be unable to build a connecting bridge, if spiritual ideas do not enable them to find the thread which links up souls. This is the reality of Anthroposophy, for it is not a mere theory. Theoretical knowledge is the very least; what we take up within us is a real soul-elixir, real substance. This substance enables the soul who has passed through death to see the soul who has remained behind. We may say that the seer who has an insight into these things, who has once perceived a soul filled with longing to see what it has left behind upon the earth, but unable to see it because its family has not yet found Anthroposophy—the seer who has perceived how the souls suffer under similar privations, knows that he cannot do otherwise than to speak to his fellow-beings about spiritual wisdom, and to consider that the time has come when spiritual wisdom must enter the hearts of men. We may say that those whose mission is based upon the knowledge of the super-sensible worlds feel that it is an urgent necessity to speak about the super-sensible worlds, a necessity which cannot be overlooked, for this would be the greatest sin of all. Thus they feel the necessity of proclaiming anthroposophical truths, of making revelations concerning the super-sensible worlds.

What has just been said may show you the tremendous earnestness connected with the necessity of revealing spiritual truths. But there is still another aspect of the communication between the living and the dead. We have not advanced very far in this direction, but we shall gradually progress. In order to understand how the living will gradually be able to establish a kind of communication with those who have departed, we must bear in mind the following things. Very little indeed is known concerning the physical world. For how is this knowledge of the physical world acquired? By using the senses and applying thought, by feeling what comes toward us from the world outside. But this is only the very least part of what is contained in the world outside. It contains still other things. I would like you to have some idea of the fact that there are still other things in the world which are far more important than what is real in a physical sense. I do not mean the super-sensible world, but something else. Imagine, for instance, that you are accustomed to go to your office every day at 8 a.m. One day you discover that on that particular morning you are three minutes late, and you happen to cross a certain square where you would have been obliged to pass through a kind of garage with a roof supported by columns. On that particular day on which you cross the square three minutes later than usual you realise that had you been punctual—that is to say, had you not been three minutes late—you would have been killed by the collapsing roof. Try to imagine this quite vividly You may also take the case of a man who misses a train which is afterwards wrecked in a collision; he would have been killed had he left by that train! All these are things which have not taken place, and this is why people do not notice them. But if something similar faces you, so that you must hit upon it, it will undoubtedly make an impression upon you. The day's course from morning to night always contains things which have not occurred to you. These are beyond your range of sight, things which may perhaps seem “invented”, yet they belong to the most important ingredients of life. You will have an inkling of these facts if you consider, for instance, the case of certain man in Berlin who had booked a berth on the Titanic. He met an acquaintance who told him: “I wish you would not leave on the Titanic!” He actually succeeded in persuading him to postpone his departure. The Titanic was sunk, and so this man escaped death. This undoubtedly made an indelible impression upon him. This is a special case, yet similar cases continually occur unnoticed: if they are noticed, they make a deep impression upon the human soul.

Let us now observe things from another aspect: How many impressions and feelings escape our attention because we are unable to perceive the dangers from which we have been preserved!

If we could observe everything that is so closely connected with these things and that escapes notice, we would pass through the world with entirely different feelings. The seer discovers the following possibility: Let us suppose, that the above-mentioned example is true. You actually cross that square three minutes later than usual. The moment in which you cross the square is the most appropriate one in which to hear a dead person who wishes to be perceived by you, who wishes to speak within you. You may then think or feel: Whence do the feelings come which now arise within my soul? This is not necessarily restricted to these particular cases, it may occur in many ways. Men will begin to feel these things if they observe also the world of possible events, not only the world of physical happenings. Real are, for instance, a great number of herrings in the sea; but they are possible only because an infinite quantity of eggs has been laid. Thus an infinite wealth of possibilities lies concealed within the depths of life. What is real, is related to the example of the herrings in the same way as the life destroyed within the eggs. This is what makes such an infinitely significant impression upon the seer who reaches the boundary line separating the two worlds. The seer may there obtain the following impression: “How infinitely great and full of contents are, events which take place in the super-sensible world, yet only a small part of all this becomes real in our world of the senses!” If this has been experienced, also the following may be felt: “Infinite things lie concealed within the depths of life.“ This feeling will develop with the aid of anthroposophical thoughts. We shall be able to feel that every point containing something which is real in the physical meaning, conceals something within it. Behind every flower, every breath of air, little stone and crystal lie infinite possibilities. Anthroposophists will gradually develop this feeling, so that reverence and devotion for what lies concealed within things will gradually unfold. If human beings gradually develop this feeling they will discover quite independently that during moments such as those which have just been described they will enter into a relationship with those who are dead as far as earthly life is concerned. The dead will begin to speak. In the future, men will experience as something quite normal that a dead person is speaking within their soul. They will gradually learn to know the source of these communications; that is to say, they will recognise who is speaking to them. Only because to-day men pass by so carelessly before the infinite world of the dead and the infinite depth of what is possible, only because of this they do not hear what the dead wish to speak within the hearts of the living.

The twofold aspect of the things which I have just explained to you, namely, that through the living souls, through the thoughts of anthroposophists, something is formed here which can be perceived by the dead—and that the dead will be able to speak to the hearts that have found their way into anthroposophical feelings—may show you the transformation which can take place for the whole of humanity through the spreading of Anthroposophy. A bridge will be built uniting these worlds with the worlds beyond. And it is a fact that the life between death and a new birth will change. It will not merely be a theory, it will become a reality, so that communication will be established between the so-called living and the dead, who are, however, more alive than we. The souls upon the earth will then also be able to feel what can be so fruitful for the dead. For if we do not feel how beneficial it is for the dead, if we reach out to them, we cannot do this in the right way.

Let us now take an extreme case. You may experience it if you are an anthroposophist and live with someone else as brother or sister, father or mother, husband or wife. Whereas one of the two feels attracted by Anthroposophy, the other one may be filled with hatred while the former is approaching Anthroposophy! How often we come across this! It may indeed take on this form in the sphere of consciousness, but not within the soul. Something else may take place there. In the astral body there is the sub-consciousness. Whereas someone may be raging violently against Anthroposophy, his sub-consciousness may be filled with an intense desire to know something about Anthroposophy. The more someone inveighs against Anthroposophy, the more he will have in his sub-consciousness the longing and the impulse to know something about Anthroposophy. When we cross the threshold of death, things take on their true aspect and nothing can be masked. Here upon the earth we may tell lies and pretend to be different from what we really are; but after death everything becomes true and shows its real countenance. If during our life on earth we have inveighed strongly against Anthroposophy, a longing for Anthroposophy will arise after death, and we shall suffer torments because this longing cannot be satisfied. A person who is still alive could, for instance, imagine that he is sitting in front of a departed one; he should then harbour anthroposophical thoughts, for the departed soul will understand these thoughts, even if he has not been an anthroposophist during his lifetime. If the living person is an anthroposophist, the departed one will in that case be able to perceive him.

What we may call, a certain inclination toward the language spoken during life, this is a fact which should be borne in mind, because soon after death the dead person still has a certain connection with the language which he has spoken during his life. For this reason, we should clothe our thoughts in the language which the dead person was accustomed to speak; after five, six, eight years, however—in some cases even sooner—it is evident that the language of the Spirit is able to overcome the obstacles arising out of the external form of speech, and the deceased can understand anthroposophical thoughts even if he has spoken another language during his lifetime. In any case, it has proved to be something very beautiful if an anthroposophist has read to a departed friend, particularly to one who has not been an anthroposophist during his lifetime. This has proved to be an enormous benefit to the dead, one of the greatest services of love. We do not merely wish to spread Anthroposophy as a teaching—this should be done, of course, for it is necessary—but Anthroposophy should also be active within the soul in a far more unobtrusive way. Spiritual tasks, even spiritual offices, may, as it were, develop and be of great help to the souls in their development after death. And this is what we should strive after more and more: to help the souls who live between death and a new birth to overcome a great difficulty, consisting therein that the old spiritual inheritance does not exist any longer, for a time has come in which it is very difficult for the souls to find the right direction after death, in which it is almost impossible for the souls who dwell between death and a new birth to find their way about.

The seer may then discover that, between death and a new birth, there are souls who are forced to undertake certain tasks, which they do not, however, understand. This, for instance, is a fact: The seer who directs his clairvoyant gaze toward the life between death and a new birth may discern souls who are obliged to fulfil definite tasks. For a certain length of time they must be the servants of powers who are known to us as the spirits of death and illness. We must here speak of a death which does not occur as a regular phenomenon, but takes hold of men before their time, so that they die in the flower of their life. When illnesses arise, these are physical events, but they are caused by forces coming from the super-sensible worlds. The deeds of super-sensible beings lie at the foundation of illnesses which spread rapidly. It is the task of certain spirits to bring premature death. That this is nevertheless rooted in wisdom, is a fact which we cannot consider just now; but it is essential to observe that we come across souls who are under the yoke of these beings. And although the seer must have grown accustomed to a certain composure and calmness, it is nevertheless painful and distressing to watch these souls labouring under a yoke, who are obliged to bring illness and death to the human beings upon the earth. And if the seer tries to retrace the path of these souls until he comes to their preceding life upon the earth, he will discover why these souls are now condemned to be the servants of the spirits of illness and death. The cause lies in the unscrupulousness which these souls have unfolded during their physical life. To the extent in which they have been unscrupulous during their life upon the earth, they now condemn themselves to be the servants of these evil beings. Just as cause and effect are connected when two balls collide, so must unscrupulous people become the servants of these evil powers. This is a deeply moving fact! There is still another thing which the seer perceives: there are souls who are under the yoke of ahrimanic spirits; they must prepare the spiritual causes of everything which occurs here in the form of obstacles and hindrances to our actions. Ahriman also has this task. All the obstacles which arise here, are the result of influences emanating from the spiritual world. Servants of Ahriman do this. Why are these souls compelled to perform these services? Because they were addicted to a comfortable, indolent way of living during their existence between birth and death. And if you consider how many people are indolent and lazy, you will find that Ahriman may expect a very great number of recruits! It is this lazy indolence which influences human life to a great extent. Even modern political economists now take into account not only human egoism and competition, but also this inclination toward a comfortable life. Comfort has become a life-factor.

It is another matter, however, if we have these experiences so that we are able to find our way about and know why we must experience them, or whether we experience them unconsciously, without knowing why we must serve these spirits. If we know why we are under the yoke of the evil spirits who bring epidemic diseases, we also know what good qualities will be required in our next life in order to bring about a cosmic adjustment annulling the evil influences. If we cannot understand these experiences, we do indeed form the same karma, but we create something which will be adjusted only in the second incarnation, so that we retard our real progress. For this reason, it is important to learn to know these things here upon the earth, for after death we shall experience them. We must learn something about them here upon the earth. Also this shows us how urgently necessary it is to render this new knowledge accessible to men by spreading spiritual truths, because the old form of knowledge no longer exists. The question, “Why are we anthroposophists?” should be answered by the spiritual facts themselves, which appeal profoundly not only to our understanding, but also to our feelings. Thus we gradually learn to consider Anthroposophy as a universal language enabling us to break down the barrier between the worlds in which our soul alternately dwells within a physical body and outside a physical body. The dividing wall hiding the super-sensible world from our sight will fall if spiritual science really penetrates into the souls of men. We must feel this, and then we shall have a true, inward enthusiasm for Anthroposophy.

Let me speak of still another phenomenon. The seer will experience that a special moment enters the life of the souls between death and a new birth, a moment which has an enormous influence upon the seer, and also upon those who are passing through it. This moment will lie further back in the case of some souls, and in the case of others it will appear sooner. If we observe sleep with a clairvoyant eye, when the human being is outside his physical body with his astral body and his Ego and looks back upon the physical and etheric bodies, we shall generally gain the impression that the physical body appears to be slowly dying. Only during earliest childhood, until the child acquires an understanding and his memory begins, the sleep in the child's body appears as something which blossoms and flourishes; but very soon, and in a way which is clearly evident to the seer, the body begins to wither away soon after it has entered physical life; death is merely the last stage of this process of decadence. Sleep exists in order that the used-up forces may become regenerated. But this regeneration is incomplete. The unregenerated part which remains behind is always, to a small extent, a cause of death. If these unregenerated parts accumulate, so that the forces of regeneration can no longer assert themselves, the human being falls a prey to physical death. Thus, if we observe the human body, we see that death is a gradual process. We really die slowly and gradually from the moment of birth onward. This makes a very profound impression upon us when we first become aware of it.

Between death and a new birth the soul is faced by a moment in which it begins to develop forces enabling it to enter the next existence. Let me indicate an example showing you what I really mean: To-day there are already quite a number of books dealing with Goethe's character and natural dispositions. Scientists endeavour to discover the ancestors from whom Goethe may have inherited this or that capacity. The source and cause of spiritual capacities are therefore sought in the physical line of heredity. I do not wish to contest this, but if one follows the path of the soul between death and a new birth, the following fact may be discovered: Let us take Goethe's soul. Long, long before it is born, it already exercises an influence upon its' ancestors from the super-sensible worlds, and it is already connected with the ancestors through forces living within it. Its influence is even of such a kind that it brings together in an appropriate way the men and women who are able to supply, after a long time, the qualities required by the soul. This is not an easy task, for many souls are involved in it. If you bear in mind the fact that men of the 18th century descend from souls of the 16th century, and that all these souls have been working together, you will realise that such an understanding is most important. Souls who are born in the 18th or 19th century must come to an understanding with other souls already during the 16th century in order to arrange the whole net of relationships. A great deal of work must be done between death and a new birth. We do not only work in an objective way by filling up one part of our time with services rendered to the spirits of hindrance, and so forth, as explained above—but we must also develop forces which render it possible for us to reincarnate. It then appears that we must prepare our form in a primal image. This makes the very opposite impression of what the seer perceives when he looks clairvoyantly upon the sleeping physical body and the etheric body. During sleep, the physical and etheric body appear to be withering away; but what is formed there as a primal image which gradually penetrates into physical Nature gives us the impression of something which blossoms and flourishes.

An important moment, therefore, appears between death and a new birth: it lies between the recollection of the preceding life and the transition to the next existence, when the human being begins to build up his physical organism. If you imagine physical death and compare it with this moment, you will find that it is the exact opposite of physical death. Physical death is the transition from physical existence to a non-existence; the moment described above is the transition from non-existence to a growing existence. If we are able to understand this moment, we experience it in an entirely different way than if we do not understand it.

A thought such as this one, dealing with the opposite aspect of death and with what occurs between death and a new birth, should really become a feeling within the soul of an anthroposophist. It should not merely be grasped with the intellect, but should be felt and permeated with feeling. Then we shall be able to experience how much richer our life becomes if the soul takes up similar ideas. Something else will then arise: namely, that, generally speaking, the soul will gradually acquire a feeling for the many things which exist in the world. If we walk through a wood in the spring and have first meditated upon the idea which I have described above, we shall not be far—if we really notice these things—from perceiving the spirits that weave and work in between the physical things. The perception of the spiritual world would really not be so difficult if the human beings themselves would not render it so difficult. If we try to permeate our feelings with what we have taken up in our thoughts, if we try to awaken them inwardly to life, this striving will open our spiritual eyes. Things such as those which have been explained to-day are intended as a help, so that anthroposophical striving may acquire life. The description of similar things always makes us feel that it is like a stammering, because our language is adapted only for the physical world, and it requires a great effort in order to produce at least a faint idea of the reality of these things; in fact, special means of description must come to our aid. But just this way of speaking about these things may awaken within our hearts what we may designate anthroposophically as a substance of feeling.

Anthroposophy should become for us a substance of feeling and a life-substance, so that we may not look upon the acquisition of anthroposophical ideas as something insignificant, but gladly take hold of them, and attribute the chief importance not to the thoughts themselves, but to what Anthroposophy makes of us.

[ 1 ] If one observes how, up to the present time, the philosophical world conceptions take form, one can see undercurrents in the search and endeavor of the various thinkers, of which they themselves are not aware but by which they are instinctively moved. In these currents there are forces at work that give direction and often specific form to the ideas expressed by these thinkers. Although they do not want to focus their attention on the forces directly, what they have to say often appears as if driven by hidden forces, which they are unwilling to acknowledge and from which they recoil. Forces of this kind live in the thought worlds of Dilthey, Eucken and Cohen. They are led by cognitive powers by which they are unconsciously dominated but that do not find a conscious development within their thought structures.

[ 2 ] Security and certainty of knowledge is being sought in many philosophical systems, and Kant's ideas are more or less taken as its point of departure. The outlook of natural science determines, consciously or unconsciously, the process of thought formation. But it is dimly felt by many that the source of knowledge of the external world must be sought in the self-conscious soul. Almost all of these thinkers are dominated by the question: How can the self-conscious soul be led to regard its inner experiences as a true manifestation of reality? The ordinary world of sense perception has become “illusion” because the self-conscious ego has, in the course of philosophical development, found itself more and more isolated with its subjective experiences. It has arrived at the point where it regards even sense perception merely as inner experience that is powerless to assure being and permanence for them in the world of reality. It is felt how much depends on finding a point of support within the self-conscious ego. But the search stimulated by this feeling only leads to conceptions that do not provide the means of submerging with the ego into a world that provides satisfactory support for existence.

[ 3 ] To explain this fact, one must look at the attitude toward the reality of the external world taken by a soul that has detached itself from that reality in the course of its philosophical development. This soul feels itself surrounded by a world of which it first becomes aware through the senses. But then it also becomes conscious of its own activity, of its own inner creative experience. The soul feels, as an irrefutable truth, that no light, no color can be revealed without the eye's sensitivity for light and color. Thus, it becomes aware of something creative in this activity of the eye. But if the eye produces the color by its spontaneous creation, as it must be assumed in such a philosophy, the question arises: Where do I find something that exists in itself, that does not owe its existence to my own creative power? If even the manifestations of the senses are nothing but results of the activity of the soul, must this not be true to even a higher degree with our thinking, through which we strive for conceptions of a true reality? Is this thinking not condemned to produce pictures that spring from the character of the soul life but can never provide a sure approach to the sources of existence? Questions of this kind emerge everywhere in the development of modern philosophy.

[ 4 ] It will be impossible to find the way out of the confusion resulting from these questions as long as the belief is maintained that the world revealed by the senses constitutes a complete, finished and self-dependent reality that must be investigated in order to know its inner nature. The human soul can arrive at its insights only through a spontaneous inner creativity. This conviction has been described in a previous chapter of this book, “The World as Illusion,” and in connection with the presentation of Hamerling's thoughts. Having reached this conviction, it is difficult to overcome a certain impasse of knowledge as long as one thinks that the world of the senses contains the real basis of its existence within itself and that one therefore has to copy with the inner activity of the soul what lies outside.

[ 5 ] This impasse will be overcome only by accepting the fact that, by its very nature, sense perception does not present a finished self-contained reality, but an unfinished, incomplete reality, or a half-reality, as it were.

As soon as one presupposes that a full reality is gained through perceptions of the sensory world, one is forever prevented from finding the answer to the question: What has the creative mind to add to this reality in the act of cognition? By necessity one shall have to sustain the Kantian option: Man must consider his knowledge to be the inner product of his own mind; he cannot regard it as a process that is capable of revealing a true reality. If reality lies outside the soul, then the soul cannot produce anything that corresponds to this reality, and the result is merely a product of the soul's own organization.

[ 6 ] The situation is entirely changed as soon as it is realized that the human soul does not deviate from reality in its creative effort for knowledge, but that prior to any cognitive activity the soul conjures up a world that is not real. Man is so placed in the world that by the nature of his being he changes things from what they really are. Hamerling is partly right when he says:

Certain stimuli produce the odor within our organ of smell. The rose, therefore, has no fragrance if nobody smells it. . . . If this, dear reader, does not seem plausible to you, if your mind stirs like a shy horse when it is confronted with this fact, do not bother to read another line; leave this book and all others that deal with philosophical things unread, for you lack the ability that is necessary for this purpose, that is, to apprehend a fact without bias and to adhere to it in your thoughts. (Compare pages of this volume.)

How the sensory world appears when man is confronted with it, depends without a doubt on the nature of the soul. Does it not follow then that this appearance of the world is a product of man's soul? An unbiased observation shows, however, that the unreal character of the external sense world is caused by the fact that when man is directly confronted by things of the world, he suppresses something that really belongs to them. If he unfolds a creative inner life that lifts from the depths of his soul the forces that lie dormant in them, he adds something to the part perceived by the senses and thereby turns a half-reality to its entirety. It is due to the nature of the soul that, at its first contact with things, it extinguishes something that belongs to them. For this reason, things appear to the senses not as they are in reality but as they are modified by the soul. Their delusive character (or their mere appearance) is caused by the fact that the soul has deprived them of something that really belongs to them.

Inasmuch as man does not merely observe things, he adds something to them in the process of knowledge that reveals their full reality. The mind does not add anything to things in the process of cognition that would have to be considered as an unreal element, but prior to the process of knowledge it has deprived these things of something that belongs to their true reality. It will be the task of philosophy to realize that the world accessible to man is an “illusion” before it is approached in the process of cognition. This process, however, leads the way toward a full understanding of reality. The knowledge that man creates during the process of cognition seems to be an inner manifestation of the soul only because he must, before the act of cognition, reject what comes from the nature of things. He cannot see at first the real nature of things when he encounters them in mere observation. In the process of knowledge he unveils what was first concealed. If he regards as a reality what he had at first perceived, he will now realize that he has added the results of his cognitive activity to reality. As soon as he recognizes that what was apparently produced by himself has to be sought in the things themselves, that he merely failed to see it previously, he will then find that the process of knowing is a real process by which the soul progressively unites with world reality. Through it, it expands its inner isolated experience to the experience of the world.

[ 7 ] In a short work, Truth and Science, published in 1892, the author of the present book made a first attempt to prove philosophically what has been briefly described. Perspectives are indicated in this book that are necessary to the philosophy of the present age if it is to overcome the obstacles it has encountered in its modern development. A philosophical point of view is outlined in this essay in the following words:

The initial form in which reality confronts the ego is not its true manifestation but the final form, which the ego fashions out of it, is. The first form is altogether without significance for the objective world; it is of importance only as a basis for the processes of cognition. Therefore, it is not the form of the world that is presented by theory that must be considered subjective but the one the ego encounters initially as in mere perception.

A further exposition of this point of view is given in the author's later philosophical work, Philosophy of Freedom (1894) (translated also with the title, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity). There an attempt is made to give the philosophical foundations for a conception that was outlined in Truth and Science.

It is not due to the objects that they are given to us at first without their corresponding concept, but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sources, from perceiving and from thinking. The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I, as a spectator, confront the things.

And later on it is stated:

The percept is that part of reality that is given objectively; the concept the part that is given subjectively, through intuition. Our mental organization tears the reality apart into these two factors. The one factor presents itself to perception, the other to intuition. Only the union of the two, that is, the percept fitting systematically into the universe, constitutes the full reality. If we take mere percepts by themselves we have no reality but rather disconnected chaos. If we take by itself the law and order connecting the percepts then we have nothing but abstract concepts. Reality is not contained in the abstract concept. It is, however, contained in thoughtful observation, which does not one-sidedly consider either concept or percept alone, but rather the union of the two.

[ 8 ] In accepting this point of view we shall be able to think of mental life and of reality as united in the self-conscious ego. This is the conception toward which philosophical development has tended since the Greek era and that has shown its first distinctly recognizable traces in the world conception of Goethe. The awareness arises that this self-conscious ego does not experience itself as isolated and divorced from the objective world, but its detachment from this world is experienced merely as an illusion of its consciousness. This isolation can be overcome if man gains the insight that at a certain stage of his development he must give a provisional form to his ego in order to suppress from his consciousness the forces that unite him with the world. If these forces exerted their influences in his consciousness without interruption, he would never have developed a strong, independent self-consciousness. He would be incapable of experiencing himself as a self-conscious ego. The development of self-consciousness, therefore, actually depends on the fact that the mind is given the opportunity to perceive the world without that part of reality that is extinguished by the self-conscious ego prior to an act of cognition.

The world forces belonging to this part of reality withdraw into obscurity in order to allow the self-conscious ego to shine forth in full power. The ego must realize that it owes its self-knowledge to a fact that spreads a veil over the knowledge of the world. It follows that everything that stimulates the soul to a vigorous, energetic experience of the ego, conceals at the same time the deeper foundations in which this ego has its roots. All knowledge acquired by the ordinary consciousness tends to strengthen the self-conscious ego. Man feels himself as a self-conscious ego through the fact that he perceives an external world with his senses, that he experiences himself as being outside this external world and that, at a certain stage of scientific investigation, he feels himself in relation to this external world in such a way that it appears to him as “illusion.” Were it not so, the self-conscious ego would not emerge. If, therefore, in the act of knowledge one attempts merely to copy what is observed before knowledge begins, one does not arrive at a true experience of full reality, but only at an image of a “half reality.”

[ 9 ] Once this is admitted to be the situation, one can no longer look for the answer of the riddles of philosophy within the experiences of the soul that appear on the level of ordinary consciousness. It is the function of this consciousness to strengthen the self-conscious ego. To achieve this it must cast a veil over the connection of the ego with the objective world, and it therefore cannot show how the soul is connected with the true world. This explains why a method of knowledge that applies the means of the natural scientific or similar modes of conception must always arrive at a point where its efforts break down. This failing of many modern thinkers has previously been pointed out in this book, for, in the final analysis, all scientific endeavor employs the same mode of thinking that serves to detach the self-conscious ego from the true reality. The strength and greatness of modern science, especially of natural science, is based on the unrestrained application of this method.

[ 10 ] Several philosophers such as Dilthey, Eucken and others, direct philosophical investigation toward the self-observation of the soul. But what they observe are those experiences of the soul that form the basis for the self-conscious ego. Thus, they do not penetrate to the sources in which the experiences of the soul originate. These sources cannot be found where the soul first observes itself on the level of ordinary consciousness. If the soul is to reach these sources, it must go beyond this ordinary consciousness. It must experience something in itself that ordinary consciousness cannot give to it. To ordinary thinking, such an experience appears at first like sheer nonsense. The soul is to experience itself knowingly in an element without carrying its consciousness into that element. One is to transcend consciousness and yet be conscious! But in spite of all this, we shall either continue to get nowhere, or we shall have to open new aspects that will reveal the above mentioned “absurdity” to be only apparently so since it really indicates the direction in which we must look for help to solve the riddles of philosophy.

[ 11 ] One will have to recognize that the path into the “inner region of the soul” must be entirely different from the one that is taken by many philosophies of modern times. [ 12 ] As long as soul experiences are taken the way they present themselves to ordinary consciousness, one will not reach down into the depths of the soul. One will be left merely with what these depths release. Such is the case with Eucken's world conception. It is necessary to penetrate below the surface of the soul. This is, however, not possible by means of the ordinary experiences. The strength of these rests precisely in the fact that they remain in the realm of the ordinary consciousness. The means to penetrate deeper into the soul can be found if one directs one's attention to something that is, to be sure, also at work in the ordinary consciousness, but does not enter it while it is active.

[ 13 ] While man thinks, his consciousness is focused on his thoughts. He wants to conceive something by means of these thoughts; he wants to think correctly in the ordinary sense. He can, however, also direct his attention to something else. He can concentrate his attention on the activity of thinking as such. He can, for instance, place into the center of his consciousness a thought that refers to nothing external, a thought that is conceived like a symbol that has no connection to something external. It is now possible to hold onto such a thought for a certain length of time. One can be entirely absorbed by the concentration on this thought. The important thing with this exercise is not that one lives in thoughts but that one experiences the activity of thinking. In this way, the soul breaks away from an activity in which it is engaged in ordinary thinking.

If such an inner exercise is continued long enough, it will become gradually apparent to the soul that it has now become involved in experiences that will separate it from all those processes of thinking and ideation that are bound to the physical organs. A similar result can be obtained from the activities of feeling and willing and even for sensation, the perception of external things. One can only be successful with this approach if one is not afraid to admit to oneself that self-knowledge cannot be gained by mere introspection, but by concentrating on the inner life that can be revealed only through these exercises. Through continued practice of the soul, that is, by holding the attention on the inner activity of thinking, feeling and willing, it is possible for these “experiences” to become “condensed.” In this state of “condensation” they reveal their inner nature, which cannot be perceived in the ordinary consciousness. [ 14 ] It is through such exercises that one discovers how our soul forces must be so “attenuated” or weakened in producing our ordinary form of consciousness, that they become imperceptible in this state of “attenuation.” The soul exercises referred to consist in the unlimited increase of faculties that are also known to the ordinary consciousness but never reach such a state of concentration. The faculties are those of attention and of loving surrender to the content of the soul's experience. To attain the indicated aim, these abilities must be increased to such a degree that they function as entirely new soul forces.

[ 15 ] If one proceeds in this manner, one arrives at a real inner experience that by its very nature is independent of bodily conditions. This is a life of the spirit that must not be confused with what Dilthey and Eucken call the spiritual world. For what they call the spiritual world is, after all, experienced by man when he depends on his physical organs. The spiritual life that is here referred to does not exist for a soul that is bound to the body.

One of the first experiences that follows the attainment of this new spiritual life is a true insight into the nature of the ordinary mental life. This is actually not produced by the body but proceeds outside the body. When I see a color, when I hear a sound, I experience the color and the sound not as a result of my body, but I am connected with the color, with the sound, as a self-conscious ego, outside my body. My body has the task to function in a way that can be compared with the action of a mirror. If, in my ordinary consciousness, I only have a mental connection with a color, I cannot perceive it because of the nature of this consciousness, just as I cannot see my own face when I look out into space. But if I look into a mirror, I perceive this face as part of a body. Unless I stand in front of the mirror, I am the body and experience myself as such. Standing in front of the mirror, I perceive my body as a reflection. It is like this also with our sense perceptions, although we must, of course, be aware of the insufficiency of the analogy. I live with a color outside my body; through the activity of my body, that is, my eye and my nervous system, this color is transformed for me into a conscious perception. The human body is not the producer of perceptions and of mental life in general, but a mirroring device of psychic and spiritual processes that take place outside the body.

[ 16 ] Such a view places the theory of knowledge on a promising basis. In a lecture called, The Psychological Foundations and Epistemological Position of Spiritual Science, delivered before the Philosophical Congress in Bologna on April 18, 1911, the author of this book gave the following account of a view that was then forming in his mind.

On the basis of epistemology one can reach a conception of the ego only if one does not think of it as being inside the bodily organization and as receiving impression “from outside.” One should conceive this “ego” as having its being within the general order (Gesetzmässigkeit) of the things themselves, and regard the organization of the body merely as a sort of mirror through which the organic processes of the body reflect back to the ego what this ego perceives outside the physical body as it lives and weaves within the true essence of the world.

[ 17 ] During sleep the mirror-like relation between body and soul is interrupted; the “ego” lives only in the sphere of the spirit. For the ordinary consciousness, however, mental life does not exist as long as the body does not reflect the experiences. Sleep, therefore, is an unconscious process. The exercises mentioned above and other similar ones establish a consciousness that differs from the ordinary consciousness. In this way, the faculty is developed not merely to have purely spiritual experiences, but to strengthen these experiences to such a degree that they become spiritually perceptible without the aid of the body, and that they become reflected within themselves. It is only in an experience of this kind that the soul can obtain true self-knowledge and become consciously aware of its own being. Real experiences that do not belong to the sense world, but to one in which the soul weaves and has its being, now rise in the manner in which memory brings back experiences of the past. It is quite natural that the followers of many modern philosophies will believe that the world that thus rises up belongs in the realms of error, illusion, hallucination, autosuggestion, etc. To this objection one can only answer that a serious spiritual endeavor, working in the indicated way, will discipline the mind to a point where it will clearly differentiate illusion from spiritual reality, just as a healthy mind can distinguish a product of fantasy from a concrete perception. It will be futile to seek theoretical proofs for this spiritual world, but such proofs also do not exist for the reality of the world of perceptions. In both cases, actual experience is the only true judge.

[ 18 ] What keeps many men from undertaking the step that, according to this view, can alone solve the riddles of philosophy, is the fear that they might be led thereby into a realm of unclear mysticism. Unless one has from the beginning an inclination toward unclear mysticism, one will, in following the described path, gain access to a world of spiritual experience that is as crystal clear as the structures of mathematical ideas. If one is, however, inclined to seek the spiritual in the “dark unknown,” in the “inexplicable,” one will get nowhere, either as an adherent or as an opponent of the views described here.

[ 19 ] One can easily understand why these views will be rejected by personalities who consider the methods used by natural science for obtaining knowledge of the sense world as the only true ones. But whoever overcomes such one-sidedness will be able to realize that the genuinely scientific way of thinking constitutes the real basis for the method that is here described. The ideas that have been shown in this book to be those of the modern scientific method, present the best subject matter for mental exercises in which the soul can immerse itself, and on which it can concentrate in order to free itself from its bondage to the body. Whoever uses these natural scientific ideas in the manner that has been outlined above, will find that the thoughts that first seem to be meant to depict only natural processes will really set the soul free from the body. Therefore, the spiritual science that is here referred to must be seen as a continuation of the scientific way of thinking provided it is inwardly experienced in the right way.

[ 20 ] The true nature of the human soul can be experienced directly if one seeks it in the characterized way. In the Greek era the development of the philosophical outlook led to the birth of thought. Later development led through the experience of thought to the experience of the self-conscious ego. Goethe strove for experiences of the self-conscious ego, which, although actively produced by the human soul, at the same time place this soul in the realm of a reality that is inaccessible to the senses. Goethe stands on this ground when he strives for an idea of the plant that cannot be perceived by the senses but that contains the supersensible nature of all plants, making it possible, with the aid of this idea, to invent new plants that would have their own life.

Hegel regarded the experience of thought as a “standing in the true essence of the world;” for him the world of thoughts became the inner essence of the world. An unbiased observation of philosophical development shows that thought experience was, to be sure, the element through which the self-conscious ego was to be placed on its own foundation. But it shows also that it is necessary to go beyond a life in mere thoughts in order to arrive at a form of inner experience that leads beyond the ordinary consciousness. For Hegel's thought experience still takes place within the field of this ordinary consciousness.

[ 21 ] In this way, a view of a reality is opened up for the soul that is inaccessible to the senses. What is experienced in the soul through the penetration into this reality, appears as the true entity of the soul. How is it related to the external world that is experienced by means of the body? The soul that has been thus freed from its body feels itself to be weaving in an element of soul and spirit. It knows that also in its ordinary life it is outside that body, which merely acts like a mirror in making its experiences perceptible. Through this experience the soul's spiritual experience is heightened to a point where the reality of a new element is revealed to the soul.

To Dilthey and Eucken the spiritual world is the sum total of the cultural experiences of humanity. If this world is seen as the only accessible spiritual world, one does not stand on a ground firm enough to be comparable to the method of natural science. For the conception of natural science, the world is so ordered that the physical human being in his individual existence appears as a unit toward which all other natural processes and beings point. The cultural world is what is created by this human being. That world, however, is not an individual entity of a higher nature than the individuality of the human being.

The spiritual science that the author of this book has in mind points to a form of experience that the soul can have independent from the body, and in this experience an individual entity is revealed. It emerges like a higher human nature for whom the physical man is like a tool. The being that feels itself as set free, through spiritual experience, from the physical body, is a spiritual human entity that is as much at home in a spiritual world as the physical body in the physical world. As the soul thus experiences its spiritual nature, it is also aware of the fact that it stands in a certain relation to the body. The body appears, on the one hand, as a cast of the spiritual entity; it can be compared to the shell of a snail that is like a counter-picture of the shape of the snail. On the other hand, the spirit-soul entity appears in the body like the sum total of the forces in the plant, which, after it has grown into leaf and blossom, contract into the seed in order to prepare a new plant. One cannot experience the inner spiritual man without knowing that he contains something that will develop into a new physical man. This new human being, while living within the physical organism, has collected forces through experience that could not unfold as long as they were encased in that organism. This body has, to be sure, enabled the soul to have experiences in connection with the external world that make the inner spiritual man different from what he was before he began life in the physical body. But this body is, as it were, too rigidly organized for being transformed by the inner spiritual man according to the pattern of the new experiences. Thus there remains hidden in the human shell a spiritual being that contains the disposition of a new man.

[ 22 ] Thoughts such as these can only be briefly indicated here. They point to a spiritual science that is essentially constructed after the model of natural science. In elaborating this spiritual science one will have to proceed more or less like the botanist when he observes a plant, the formation of its root, the growth of its stem and its leaves, and its development into blossom and fruit. In the fruit he discovers the seed of the new plant-life. As he follows the development of a plant he looks for its origin in the seed formed by the previous plant. The investigator of spiritual science will trace the process in which a human life, apart from its external manifestation, develops also an inner being. He will find that external experiences die off like the leaves and the flowers of a plant. Within the inner being, however, he will discover a spiritual kernel, which conceals within itself the potentiality of a new life. In the infant entering life through birth he will see the return of a soul that left the world previously through the gate of death. He will learn to observe that what is handed down by heredity to the individual man from his ancestors is merely the material that is worked upon by the spiritual man in order to bring into physical existence what has been prepared seedlike in a preceding life.

[ 23 ] Seen from the viewpoint of this world conception, many facts of psychology will appear in a new light. A great number of examples could be mentioned here; it will suffice to point out only one. One can observe how the human soul is transformed by experiences that represent, in a certain sense, repetitions of earlier experiences. If somebody has read an important book in his twentieth year and reads it again in his fortieth, he experiences it as if he were a different person. If he asks without bias for the reason for this fact, he will find that what he learned from his reading twenty years previous has continued to live in -him and has become a part of his nature. He has within him the forces that live in the book, and he finds them again when he rereads the book at the age of forty. The same holds true with our life experiences. They become part of man himself. They live in his “ego.” But it is also apparent that within the limits of one life this inner strengthening of the higher man must remain in the realm of his spirit and soul nature. Yet one can also find that this higher human being strives to become strong enough to find expression in his physical nature. The rigidity of the body prevents this from happening within a single life span. But in the central core of man there lives the potential predisposition that, together with the fruits of one life, will form a new human life in the same way that the seed of a new plant lives in the plant.

[ 24 ] Moreover, it must be realized that following the entry of the soul into an independent spirit world the results of this world are raised into consciousness in the same way that the past rises into memory. But these realities are seen as extending beyond the span of an individual life. The content of my present consciousness represents the results of my earlier physical experiences; so, too, a soul that has gone through the indicated exercises faces the whole of its physical experience and the particular configuration of its body as originating from the spirit-soul nature, whose existence preceded that of the body. This existence appears as a life in a purely spiritual world in which the soul lived before it could develop the germinal capacities of a preceding life into a new one. Only by closing one's mind to the obvious possibility that the faculties of the human soul are capable of development can one refuse to recognize the truthfulness of a person's testimony that shows that as a result of inner work one can really know of a spiritual world beyond the realm of ordinary consciousness. This knowledge leads to a spiritual apprehension of a world through which it becomes evident that the true being of the soul lies behind ordinary experiences. It also becomes clear that this soul being survives death just as the plant seed survives the decay of the plant. The insight is gained that the human soul goes through repeated lives on earth and that in between these earthly lives it leads a purely spiritual existence.

[ 25 ] This point of view brings reality to the assumption of a spiritual world. The human souls themselves carry into a later cultural epoch what they acquired in a former. One can readily observe how the inner dispositions of the soul develop if one refrains from arbitrarily ascribing this development merely to the laws of physical heredity. In the spiritual world of which Eucken and Dilthey speak the later phases of development always follow from the immediately preceding ones. Into this sequence of events are placed human souls who bring with them the results of their preceding lives in the form of their inner soul disposition. They must, however, acquire in a process of learning what developed in the earthly world of culture and civilization while they were in a purely spiritual state of existence.

[ 26 ] A historical account cannot do full justice to the thoughts exposed here. I would refer anyone who seeks more information to my writings on spiritual science. These writings attempted to give, in a general manner, the world conception that is outlined in the present book. Even so, I believe that it is possible to recognize from it that this world conception rests on a serious philosophical foundation. On this basis it strives to gain access to a world that opens up to sense-free observation acquired by inner work.

[ 27 ] One of the teachers of this world conception is the history of philosophy itself. It shows that the course of philosophical thought tends toward a conception that cannot be acquired in a state of ordinary consciousness. The accounts of many representative thinkers show how they attempt in various ways to comprehend the self-conscious ego with the help of the ordinary consciousness. A theoretical exposition of why the means of this ordinary consciousness must lead to unsatisfactory results does not belong to a historical account. But the historical facts show distinctly that the ordinary consciousness, however we may look at it, cannot solve the questions it nevertheless must raise. This final chapter was written to show why the ordinary consciousness and the usual scientific mind lack the means to solve such questions. This chapter was meant to describe what the characterized world conceptions were unconsciously striving for. From one certain point of view this last chapter no longer belongs to the history of philosophy, but from another point of view, its justification is quite clear. The message of this book is that a world conception based on spiritual science is virtually demanded by the development of modern philosophy as an answer to the questions it raises.

To become aware of this one must consider specific instances of this philosophical development. Franz Brentano in his Psychology points out how philosophy was deflected from the treatment of the deeper riddles of the soul (compare page of this volume). He writes, “Apparent as the necessity for a restriction of the field of investigation is in this direction, it is perhaps no more than only apparent.” David Hume was most emphatically opposed to the metaphysicists who maintained that they had found within themselves a carrier for all psychic conditions. He says:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but perceptions. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself and may truly be said not to exist. (Treatise of Human Nature, Part IV, Sect. 6.)

Hume only knows the kind of psychological observation that would approach the soul without any inner effort. An observation of this kind simply cannot penetrate to the nature of the soul. Brentano takes up Hume's statement and says, “This same man, Hume, nevertheless, observes that all proofs for the immortality of the soul possess the same power of persuasion as the opposing traditional views.” But here we must add that only faith, and not knowledge, can support Hume's view that the soul contains nothing more than what he finds there. For how could any continuity be guaranteed for what Hume finds as the content of the soul? Brentano continues by saying:

Although it is obvious that a denial of a soul substance eliminates the possibility to speak of an immortality in the proper sense of the word, it is still not true that the question of immortality loses all meaning if a supporting substance for psychic activity is denied.

This becomes immediately evident if one considers that, with or without supporting substance, one cannot deny that our psychic life here on earth has a certain continuity. If one rejects the idea of a soul substance, one has the right to assume that this continuity does not depend on a supporting substance. The question as to whether our psychic life would continue after the destruction of our body will be no less meaningful for such a thinker than it is for others. It is really quite inconsistent if thinkers of this school reject the essential question of immortality as meaningless also in this important sense on the basis of the above-mentioned reason. It should then, however, be referred to as the immortality of life rather than that of the soul. (Brentano, Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint, Bk. I, Chap. 1.)

This opinion of Brentano's, however, is without support if the world conception outlined above is rejected. For where can we find grounds for the survival of psychic phenomena after the dissolution of the body if we want to restrict ourselves to the ordinary consciousness? This consciousness can only last as long as its reflector, the physical body, exists. What may survive the loss of the body cannot be designated as substance; it must be another form of consciousness. But this other consciousness can be discovered only through the inner activity that frees the soul from the body. This shows us that the soul can experience consciousness even without the mediation of the body. Through such activity and with the help of supersensible perception, the soul will experience the condition of the complete loss of the body. It finds that it had been the body, itself, that obscured that higher consciousness. While the soul is incarnated, the body has such a strong effect on the soul that this other consciousness cannot become active. This becomes a matter of direct experience when the soul exercises indicated in this chapter are successfully carried out. The soul must then consciously suppress the forces that originate in the body and extinguish the body-free consciousness. This extinction can no longer take place after the dissolution of the body. It is the other consciousness, therefore, that passes through successive lives and through the purely spiritual existence between death and birth. From this point of view, there is reference to a nebulous soul substance. In terms that are comparable to ideas of natural science, the soul is shown how it continues its existence because in one life the seed of the next is prepared, as the seed is prepared in the plant. The present life is shown as the reason for a future life, and the true essence of what continues when death dissolves the body is brought to light.

[ 28 ] Spiritual science as described here nowhere contradicts the methods of modern natural science. But science has to admit that with its methods one cannot gain insight into the realm of the spiritual. As soon as the existence of a consciousness other than the ordinary one is recognized, one will find that by it one is led to conceptions concerning the spiritual world that will give to it a cohesion similar to that that natural science gives to the physical world.

[ 29 ] It will be of importance to eliminate the impression that this spiritual science has borrowed its insights from any older form of religion. One is easily misled to this view because the conception of reincarnation, for instance, is a tenet of certain creeds. For the modern investigator of spiritual science, there can be no borrowing from such creeds. He finds that the devotion to the exercises described above will lead to a consciousness that enters the spiritual world. As a result of this consciousness he learns that the soul has its standing in the spiritual world in the way previously described.

A study of the history of philosophy, beginning with the awakening of thought in Greek civilization, indicates the way that leads to the conviction that the true being of the soul can be found below the surface of ordinary experience. Thinking has proved to be the educator of the soul by leading it to the point at which it is alone with itself. This experience of solitude strengthens the soul whereby it is able to delve not only into its own being but also to reach into the deeper realities of the world. The spiritual science described in this chapter does not attempt to lead behind the world of the senses by using the means of ordinary consciousness, such as reflection and theorizing. It recognizes that the spiritual world must remain concealed from that consciousness and that the soul must, through its own inner transformation, rise into the supersensible world before it can become conscious of it.

[ 30 ] In this way, the insight is also gained that the origin of moral impulses lies in the world that the soul perceives when it is free of the body. From there also the driving forces originate that do not stem from the physical nature of man but are meant to determine his actions independent from this nature.

[ 31 ] When one becomes acquainted with the fact that the “ego” with its spiritual world lives outside the body and that it, therefore, carries the experiences of the external world to the physical body, one will find one's way to a truly spiritual understanding of the riddle of human destiny. A man's inner life is deeply connected with his experiences of destiny. Just consider the state of a man at the age of thirty. The real content of his inner being would be entirely different if he had lived a different kind of life in his preceding years. His “ego” is inconceivable without the experiences of these years. Even if they have struck him serious blows of fate, he has become what he is through them. They belong to the forces that are active in his “ego.” They do not merely strike him from outside. As man lives in his soul and spirit with color that is perceptible only by means of its mirror-effect of the body, so he lives in union with his destiny. With color he is united in his soul life, but he can only perceive it when the body reflects it. Similarly, he becomes one with the effect of a stroke of destiny that results from a previous earth life, but he experiences this blow only inasmuch as the soul plunges unconsciously into events that spring from these causes. In his ordinary consciousness man does not know that his will is bound up with his destiny. In his newly acquired body-free consciousness he finds that he would be deprived of all initiative if that part of his soul that lives in the spiritual world had not willed its entire fate, down to the smallest details. We see that the riddles of human destiny cannot be solved merely by theorizing about them, but only by learning to understand how the soul grows together with its fate in an experience that proceeds beyond the ordinary consciousness. Thus, one will gradually realize that the causes for this or that stroke of destiny in the present life must be sought in a previous one. To the ordinary consciousness our fate does not appear in its true form. It takes its course as a result of previous earthly lives, which are hidden from ordinary consciousness. To realize one's deep connection with the events of former lives means at the same time that one becomes reconciled with one's destiny.

[ 32 ] For a fuller coverage of the philosophical riddles like these, the author must refer to his other works on spiritual science. We can only mention the more important results of this science but not the specific ways and means by which it can become convincing.

[ 33 ] Philosophy leads by its own paths to the insight that it must pass from a study of the world to an experience of it, because mere reflection cannot bring a satisfactory solution to all the riddles of life. This method of cognition is comparable to the seed of a plant. The seed can work in a twofold way when it becomes ripe. It can be used as human food or as seed for a new plant. If it is examined with respect to its usefulness, it must be looked at in a way different from the observation that follows the cycle of reproducing a new plant.

Similarly, man's spiritual experiences can choose either of two roads. On the one hand, it serves the contemplation of the external world. Examined from this point of view, one will be inclined to develop a world conception that asks above all things: How does our knowledge penetrate to the nature of things? What knowledge can we derive from a study of the nature of things? To ask these questions is like investigating the nutritional value of the seed. But it is also possible to focus attention on the experiences of the soul that are not diverted by outside impressions, but lead the soul from one level of being on to another. These experiences are seen as an implanted driving force in which one recognizes a higher man who uses this life to prepare for the next. One arrives at the insight that this is the fundamental impulse of all human soul experience and that knowledge is related to it as the use of the seed of the plant for food is comparable to the development of the grain into a new plant. If we fail to understand this fact, we shall live under the illusion that we could discover the nature of knowledge by merely observing the soul's experiences. This procedure is as erroneous as it is to make only a chemical analysis of the seed with respect to its food value and to pretend that this represents its real essence. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, tries to avoid this error by revealing the inner nature of the soul's experience and by showing that it can also serve the process of knowledge, although its true nature does not consist in this contemplative knowledge.

[ 34 ] The “body-free soul consciousness” here described must not be confused with those enhanced mental conditions that are not acquired by means of the characterized exercises but result from states of lower consciousness such as unclear clairvoyance, hypnotism, etc. In these conditions no body-free consciousness can be attained but only an abnormal connection between body and soul that differs from that of the ordinary life. Real spiritual science can be gained only when the soul finds, in the course of its own disciplined meditative work, the transition from the ordinary consciousness to one with which it awakens in and becomes directly aware of the spiritual world. This inner work consists in a heightening, not a lowering of the ordinary consciousness.

[ 35 ] Through such inner work the human soul can actually attain what philosophy aims for. The latter should not be underestimated because it has not attained its objective on the paths that are usually followed by it. Far more important than the philosophical results are the forces of the soul that can be developed in the course of philosophical work. These forces must eventually lead to the point where it becomes possible to recognize a “body-free soul experience.” Philosophers will then recognize that the “world riddles” must not merely be considered scientifically but need to be experienced by the human soul. But the soul must first attain to the condition in which such an experience is possible.

[ 36 ] This brings up an obvious question. Should ordinary knowledge and scientific knowledge deny its own nature and recognize as a world conception only what is offered from a realm lying outside its own domain? As it is, the experiences of the characterized consciousness are convincing at once also to this ordinary consciousness as long as the latter does not insist upon locking itself up within its own walls. The supersensible truths can be found only by a soul that enters into the supersensible. Once they are found, however, they can be fully understood by the ordinary consciousness. For they are in complete and necessary agreement with the knowledge that can be gained for the world of the senses.

[ 37 ] It cannot be denied that, in the course of the history of philosophy, viewpoints have repeatedly been advanced that are similar to those described in this final chapter. But in former ages these tendencies appeared only like byways of the philosophical inquiry. Its first task was to work its way through everything that could be regarded as a continuation of the awakening thought experience of the Greeks. It then could point the way toward supersensible consciousness on the strength of its own initiative and in awareness of what it can and what it cannot attain. In former times this consciousness was accepted, as it were, without philosophical justification. It was not demanded by philosophy itself. But modern philosophy demands it in response to what it has achieved already without the assistance of this consciousness. Without this help it has succeeded in leading the spiritual investigation into directions that will, if rightly developed, lead to the recognition of supersensible consciousness. That is why this final chapter did not start by describing the way in which the soul speaks of the supersensible when it stands within its realm. Quite to the contrary, an attempt was made to outline philosophically the tendencies resulting from the modern world conceptions, and it was shown how a pursuit of these innate tendencies leads the soul to the recognition of its own supersensible nature.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Has an interesting question occurred to someone?

Question: Sir, in reference to anthroposophy: what is it actually? What is its aim and its task in the world?

Dr. Steiner: The questioner wants to know what anthroposophy is and what its significance is for humanity in general. I think he means its significance also for the working class.

It is obviously difficult to speak briefly about these matters. Those who have been here for a considerable time will have become more and more convinced that anthroposophy is something that had to enter the evolution of humanity. Those who have not been here long will naturally have some difficulty and only gradually be able to understand.

First and foremost, we must realize that people are little inclined to accept something new when it comes into the world. Remarkable examples could be given of how new scientific discoveries have been received. Think, for instance, of the extent to which everything today has been affected by the discovery of the power of steam and the invention of the steam engine. Think what the world would be like today if there were no steam engines in their many different forms! When the steam engine was first invented, a small boat, driven by steam, made its way up a river and was smashed up by the peasants because they said they were not going to put up with such a thing; it was such a silly, useless thing! Nor has it always been the peasants who behaved in that way. When an account of meteorites was given for the first time in a learned assembly in Paris, the lecturer was declared to be a fool. And I told you recently about Julius Robert Mayer, who is regarded today as a most illustrious man and a very great scholar: he was shut up in an asylum!

The fate of the railroads has been particularly remarkable. As you know, they have not been in existence very long; they came into use for the first time in the 19th century. Before that, people had to travel by stagecoach. When it was proposed to build the first railroad between Berlin and Potsdam, the Director of Mallcoaches³³ said that two went empty from Berlin to Potsdam every week, so he couldn't imagine what use railroads would be. It didn't occur to him that once the railroads were there, more people would travel by them than by the stagecoach.

Even more interesting was the attitude of a body of medical men,³⁴ in the forties of the 19th century. When the railroad from Furth to Nuremberg was being built, these learned gentlemen declared that the work should be stopped, because the speed could very easily make a traveler ill by damaging his nerves. When the people refused to accept this ban, they were told that high plank walls must be erected on both sides of the tracks, in order to save the peasants from concussion of the brain when the trains passed! You can still read about this in delightful old documents. But despite all this opposition, the railroads made rapid headway. And anthroposophy, too, will make its way in the world, simply because it is a necessity, because nothing in the world can really be understood unless the spiritual foundation of things is recognized and known.

Anthroposophy has not come for the purpose of opposing natural science: it has come just because natural science is there. But science with its elaborate instruments and remarkably clever experiments has discovered a mass of facts which—in the way it presents them—cannot really be understood. Nor will they ever be understood until it is realized that the spiritual world is behind everything and within everything.

Let us take a very ordinary, practical matter: the eating of potatoes. Once upon a time there were no potatoes in Europe; they were introduced into Europe from foreign countries. It is maintained that Sir Francis Drake³⁵ introduced potatoes, but that is not correct; they were introduced from a different source. Yet in Offenburg there is a memorial statue of Drake. During the war we were once obliged to stop at Offenburg, and I was curious to find out why this statue had been erected. I looked in the encyclopedia and there it was: A memorial statue of Drake stands in Offenburg because he was the man who first brought potatoes to Europe.

But now what about potatoes? Suppose a scientist or a doctor were asked to say what effect potatoes have when they are eaten. As you know, potatoes have become a staple. In some places it is very difficult to dissuade the people from feeding almost exclusively on them. What does the modern scientist do when he tests potatoes for their nutritional value? He makes a laboratory investigation to find what substances are contained in the potato. He finds carbohydrates, which consist of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen in definite proportions; he also discovers that in the human body these substances are finally transformed into a kind of sugar. But he gets no further than that; nor can he do so. For think of this: if some animal is fed on milk, it may thrive. But if the milk is analyzed for its chemical components and if these chemical components are given to the animal instead of the milk, it will waste away for lack of nourishment. Why is that? It is because something is working in the milk in addition to the chemical components. And in the potato, too, there is something more than the mere chemical components: namely, the spiritual element. A spiritual element works everywhere, in all of nature.

If in spiritual science (anthroposophy is, after all, only a name) genuine investigation is made into how the potato nourishes the human being, the potato is found to be something that is not completely digested by the digestive organs, but it passes into the head through the lymph glands, through the blood, in such a way that the head itself must also serve as a digestive organ for the potato. When potatoes are eaten in large quantities, the head becomes a kind of stomach and also digests.

There is a very great difference between eating potatoes and, for instance, good, wholesome bread. When wholesome bread is eaten, the material part of the rye or wheat is digested properly and healthily in the digestive tract. And consequently only what is spiritual in the rye or wheat comes into the head, where it belongs.

This kind of knowledge can never be derived from natural science. When things are genuinely investigated with respect to their spiritual quality, it becomes apparent that in this modern age humanity has been seriously injured by the excessive consumption of potatoes. Spiritual science finds that the eating of potatoes has played a very large part in the general deterioration of health in recent centuries. That is a crude example of how spiritual science can investigate the excellent results of natural science by taking them as the basis for its research.

But there is something else as well. Every substance in the world can be examined to determine its spiritual quality. That is the only way in which real remedies for illnesses can be discovered. So spiritual science provides a very definite foundation for medicine as well.

Spiritual science is only an extension of natural science; it is by no means something that refutes natural science. And besides that, we have in spiritual science something that investigates the spiritual in a scientific way and therefore does not ask people simply to believe things that are said. Matters of faith are thus replaced by scientific inquiry.

It must also be said that in all provinces science acquires a certain amount of knowledge. Humanity cannot, of course, concern itself with scientific details, but every individual ought at least to know something about the essential things in the world.

I'd like to tell you something that will show you how important it is to be able to recognize how the spirit actually works. In the year 1773, a rumor suddenly spread in Paris that a distinguished scholar³⁶ was to give a lecture in a certain learned Society, in which he would prove that a comet was about to collide with the earth and destroy it. In those days it was believed that such a thing could be proven exactly and scientifically. So at that time, in the 18th century, when superstition was still rife, a terrible panic spread through the whole of Paris. If we read the records of what happened in Paris at that time, we find that there were enormous numbers of miscarriages: the women gave birth prematurely out of sheer terror. People who were seriously ill, died; others became ill because of fright. There was terrific agitation throughout Paris because it became known that a learned man would announce in a lecture the coming collision of a comet with the earth and the consequent destruction of the earth. The police—who, as you know, are ever on the alert—forbade the lecture, so the people never discovered what the professor had intended to say. But there was anxiety nevertheless! You may now ask: Was the professor who wanted to give the lecture right or wrong?

Well, the matter is not quite so simple as that. For since Copernicus propounded his new theory of the universe, everything has become a matter of calculation, and the calculations at that time led to the following conclusion: The sun is taken to be the center of the universe; then come Mercury, Venus, Moon, Earth, and Mars, then the planetoids, then Jupiter, then Saturn. And now the comets and their orbits. And now think of it: the earth is circling and men can calculate when it will reach a certain point where the comet will be approaching it. Bang!—according to the calculations-they will collide. And at that time, gentlemen, they would actually have collided—only the comet was so small that it dissolved in the air! Not exactly in the air over Paris, but somewhere else. The calculation was therefore quite correct, but there was no ground for anxiety.

In the year 1832 there was an even stranger story. For then it was calculated that a comet—it was the Biela comet—was about to cross the earth's orbit and would pass quite near to the earth. This comet was not such a midget as the other, and was likely to be more dangerous. But the calculation turned out happily, for it showed that when the comet would be passing the earth it would still be 13,000,000 miles away—and that's at least a tiny bit away, don't you think? So there was no need to fear that the earth would be demolished. But even so, the people were very alarmed at the time, because heavenly bodies are mutually attracted to each other, and it had to be expected that the comet would cause great convulsions in the oceans and seas through the force of gravity, and so on. Nothing very special happened-there was, it is true, a general unrest in nature, but nothing of particular interest. The comet was 13,000,000 miles away—the sun is thirteen times farther away—so no harm was done to the earth at that time.

In 1872, when I was a boy living with my parents at a small railroad station, we were always reading in the papers: “The world is going to be destroyed!”—for the comet was due to appear again. Certain comets always do return, and this one, on its return, would now be nearer to the earth and therefore more dangerous. This remarkable comet had already come in 1845/46 and again in 1852—but it had then split in two! Each half had become more rarefied in consequence of the split. And what was there to be seen in 1872? Something like a gleaming rain of shooting stars, a great number of shooting stars! The comet had indeed come nearer but it had split and was throwing off rarefied matter that came down like shining rain. Everyone could see it, for when such a tremendous array of shooting stars occurs in the night, they can be seen coming down from the sky. And some people who saw this happening believed that the Day of judgment had come. Again there was great alarm. However, the shooting stars dissolved in the atmosphere.

Now think of this: If the comet had remained whole, our earth would have suffered badly in the year 1872. As I said, papers reached our station announcing the imminent destruction of the earth. The astronomers had calculated the time. According to scientific reckoning this was quite correct. And it really would not do to put on record how many people at that time paid large fees to their priests—to be safely absolved from their sins. In 1773 too, in Paris, the father-confessors had made a great deal of money because the people wanted to be absolved from their sins immediately!

There was an astronomer called Littrow³⁷ who made a noteworthy calculation about what would have happened if things had remained as they were in the year 1832, that is, if the comet had not split up as it subsequently did. In the 19th century it was still thirteen million miles away from the earth, but every time it came it came closer. Littrow reckoned quite correctly that in September 1872 there would be the danger of the comet colliding with the earth. If the comet had then reached the point which as a matter of fact it did not actually reach in that year until November 27th, it would not just have been a matter of meteor showers but it would have been a serious matter. Such things do indeed happen. Littrow calculated that in 1933 (we are now in 1924), if the comet had remained as it still was in the 18th century, a collision would be inevitable and the earth would be demolished. The calculation was correct to the breadth of a hair. But the comet had not remained as it was! And so already at that time people could say: The comet has been merciful, for if it were still fiery, in 1933 it would be striking the earth in such a way that all the seas would surge from the equator to the North Pole and the whole earth would perish. Yes, the comet split up and it threw off the substance that had become too heavy for it, in the form of meteor stones that are not harmful.

So you see, we are living at a time when we can say: If that comet had not been merciful, none of us would be sitting here today! That is a fact. What has finally happened is this: The comet no longer appears as a comet, but on those dates when in the ordinary course of events it would have appeared, there are always showers of meteors. Gradually through the centuries it is throwing off its entire substance. Soon it will no longer be visible because it will have given up its substance to the universe and to the earth.

But now I want to show you the other side of this matter. It is obvious that in the process of human evolution man's spiritual faculties are constantly changing. Those who do not believe this simply do not understand the spiritual evolution of mankind. For think of it: All our modern discoveries would have been made long ago if men had possessed the same spiritual faculties that they possess today. In ancient times their spiritual faculties were not less, but they were different. I have explained this to you in the most various ways, also in answer to questions on the subject.

And now to return to the comets. The comet of which I've been speaking is not the only one that was merciful enough to split up and dissolve in cosmic space at the right time. There is a large number of other comets that have done the same. A great deal of superstition has always been connected with the subject of comets. Anthroposophy approaches the matter in an absolutely scientific way.

But now, what will happen if we go on developing in the same direction as we are developing today? Mankind is now so dreadfully clever! Just compare a man of today with all his cleverness, with all that he has learnt in school, with someone living in the 12th or 13th century, when very, very few people could write. Think of this: there is a beautiful poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach,³⁸ who was a nobleman of the 13th century. He composed the poem, but he could not write, so he was obliged to call in a priest to whom he dictated it. And that poem was the “Parzival” from which Wagner composed his opera. So you see, in those days people had different faculties. We need to go no further back than the 12th or 13th century. At that time a nobleman could not write. Wolfram von Eschenbach could read but not write.

These faculties of ours do not come to us ready-made; they are developed. And if we continue our present way of living, when between the ages of seven and fourteen we are crammed with scientific knowledge of every kind – there is, of course, a good side to this as well—we'll gradually all suffer from something that was previously quite unknown and that is now so prevalent. We'll all suffer from what you call “nerves”, from nervous illnesses. This shows you that those wise doctors in the forties of the last century who believed so “stupidly” that people would not be able to live if railroads were built, were—from the knowledge they had—not so stupid after all! For everything they knew at that time convinced them that if a man travels in trains, he will eventually become utterly incapable of work, lose his memory, exhaust his nerves and become shaky and abnormally restless. The science of their day justified them in their conviction. Moreover, what they said was correct, absolutely correct.

But there is one thing they left out of account. People have indeed become more nervous. You yourselves, when you get home from work, are not quite like the people of the thirties and forties of the last century who would simply put on their nightcaps in the evening and be snug and cozy without any trace of “nerves”. The world has certainly changed in this respect. But what was it that those Nuremberg doctors could not know at that time? They could not know that while they were learning all these things from their science, the comet was already in the process of dissolving. And what has the comet done? It gives us the meteors, the fine meteor rain. Instead of colliding with the earth and breaking people's heads it is giving all its substance away, and this substance, every piece of it, is in the earth. Every few years the comet gives something to the earth. And people who want to live by science alone and who will not admit that the earth receives something from the cosmos are every bit as stupid as someone who would say that when a person eats a piece of bread, it is not in him. Obviously, what the comet gives us is in the earth, but science takes no notice of it. Where, then, is it to be found? It goes into the air, is passed from the air into the water, from the water into the roots of the plants, from the roots of the plant into the food on our tables. From there it passes into our bodies. We eat what the comet has been giving us for centuries! This, however, has long been spiritualized. Instead of the comet putting an end to the earth in 1933, its substance has long been in the earth as a means of earthly nourishment, and it is a remedy, a cosmic remedy: it alleviates nervous troubles in human beings.

There, you see, you have a little piece of history. The comets appear out there in the heavens, and after a time they find their way into us out of the earth. By that time their substance has become spiritualized.

Such things play a real part in human life. History can no longer be presented as it is still being presented by those who want to be philistines; account must now be taken of what is going on in the world spiritually. That is possible only when light is shed upon the world through anthroposophy. You may say: Oh, well, life will go on just the same. All that comet business shows that it doesn't matter if we're stupid, and there is no need for us to bother about it! Although people want to be enlightened, in practice they are dreadfully fatalistic, thinking that everything in the world will go on “as it is meant to.” Well, perhaps—but there is also the opportunity either to take up a true science or to ignore it.

You recall, gentlemen, that for years I gave lectures to workers.³⁹ And I often called attention to a splendid lecture given by Lassalle⁴⁰ in 1863 entitled “Science and the Worker”. I don't know whether there is still any widespread knowledge of it, but in the meantime I've grown older and I've witnessed the rise of the labor movement. From my parents' house in the early seventies of the last century I could look out the window and watch the first Social Democrats—they still wore big hats, “democratic hats”—marching out into the woods where they held their meetings. So I've seen all stages in the development of the movement. At that time Lassalle was still greatly venerated; wherever workers' meetings took place, busts of him were displayed. Today these things have been more or less forgotten, for fifty years have elapsed since then. I was ten or eleven years old at the time, but I was already paying attention to what was happening. Lassalle had given this lecture, Science and the Worker, about eight or nine years earlier. In it he had stressed that science is absolutely crucial for the solution of the whole labor problem and that out of science the workers have developed a social outlook that has occurred to no one else. In a certain sense this was an extremely important thing that he said.

But now think what has happened since that time. I ask you: Are you satisfied? Can you be satisfied with the way the labor problem has developed, with the form it has taken? Are there not many widespread complaints about the way the workers are tyrannized by their labor unions and so forth? These things are in the air and the worker is aware of them. But what he does not perceive is where these conditions come from. Where do they come from? The answer is that in very fact the solution of the labor problem cannot be found without science. Formerly, these problems were solved through religion and the like; today they must be dealt with by means of science. But this requires genuinely scientific thinking—which was nowhere to be found because attention was invariably riveted upon matter, and science itself was sheer materialism. Nothing that is contained in our social problems will ever be solved until science becomes spiritual again.

This can happen only when science is prepared to look for the spiritual element in every single thing—whether it be a potato or a comet. For spiritual knowledge alone enables us to investigate the true connections of things. The true connections of social problems, too, can only be discovered through spiritual knowledge. These connections must be fully understood; and when they are, it will be found that the things which have been brought into prominence through Marxism, for example, were extremely well-meant, but they were based upon an erroneous science. I will show you in what respect this was the case. Nothing that is based on an erroneous science can really prosper.

Marx's arguments and calculations are uncommonly astute, uncommonly clever, and cannot be denied, because the principles upon which he bases them are from a science that is purely materialistic. Everything tallies, just as it tallied for the astronomers who calculated that the comet would collide with the earth in 1773, but then actually the comet had dissolved to such an extent that no harm was done to the earth! (This was the earlier, not the later comet.) The conclusions reached by Marx are based upon an equally meticulous but equally incomplete science.

One of his calculations was the following. He said: When a man is working, he uses up inner forces. The forces are given up to his work and in the evening he is fatigued. During the day he has used up a definite quantity of force or energy. Naturally, the worker needs something that enables his forces to be restored. It can be calculated with exactitude how much pay will make it possible for the worker to restore his forces. Yes, but along these lines expounded by Marx, does one really get at the right and proper wage for labor? The question is: Does one get at it in that way? Obviously, up to now no great progress has been made in this direction, but the fact is that it simply cannot be got at in that way—because although the science itself is admirable, it is untrue.

Think of someone who does no work the whole day long, someone who has private wealth. He can go for walks, or he can move from one armchair to another—and from morning till night he's using up his forces just the same. I've noticed at workers' concerts that those who had been working all day were much less fatigued than the well-to-do people who had done nothing at all. The latter kept yawning, while the others were bright and lively.

You see, there is an error in the calculation. The forces used up inwardly in our organism are not the ones we use in our outer work or labor. That is why the calculation cannot be based on scientific foundations. The whole matter must be approached in a different way; it must be based upon the intrinsic dignity of man, upon his rights as a human being, and so forth. The same applies in many other spheres. And the consequence is that science, as it has presented itself up to the present day, is responsible for dreadful confusion of thought, for ignorance in the social field.

Spiritual science will show you what nutritive value there is in potatoes, in cabbage, in salt, and so on. And then you can get at what the human being needs in order to be healthy and to thrive. You can only get at this through spiritual science, only on the basis of knowledge that comes from spiritual science. Then you can proceed to the study of social problems. And then the labor problem will look quite different. It will finally be given a sounder basis, because everything in connection with it will be looked at from a spiritual point of view.

People today simply don't understand how things are connected in this world; they believe everything goes on just as it is. But that is not true. People must understand how things in the world are constantly changing. And the greatest misfortune, one might say, is that in earlier times humanity was superstitious and now it is scientific! For little by little, superstition has crept into science itself. Today we have a natural science that is full of superstitions. People believe that when their stomach is full of potatoes, they have had a nourishing meal. The truth is that the health of their head is impaired, because the head itself then has to become a digestive organ.

Thus all problems should be dealt with in such a way that the spiritual aspect is not ignored as it has been for a long time now. It should be included in every consideration. In the sixties and seventies of the last century, people said: The worker must have science!—and rightly so. But it must be a true science. In those days it was not in existence. Now it is to be found in spiritual science, which has the name, anthroposophy. Anthroposophy refuses to put the cart before the horse as was done formerly. It will put spirit before matter, where it belongs. Then people will discover how things really are. And they will find proper educational methods. There will be a pedagogy that educates children as they really should be educated. Upon that, very much, very much indeed depends. And then human beings will find their right place in society.

In a single hour, naturally, I can give no more than hints; but we have arranged these lectures so that you could indicate by your questions what you want me to talk about. And so perhaps I should speak further on today's subject in the next session. Today I could only lay the foundation. But at least you have been able to glean something as to the real aim of spiritual science.

So we'll meet again next Wednesday.

• 33. Karl von Nagler, 1770–1846, Prussian statesman. Postmaster 1823 – 1846. Initiated our modern mail system.
• 34. See R. Hagen, “Die erste deutsche Eisenbahn,” 1885.
• 35. Sir Francis Drake, 1540–1596. Famous British navigator.
• 36. J.J.L. Lalande, 1732–1807. French astronomer.
• 37. Joseph Johann Littrow, 1781–1840, Über den gefürchteten Kometen des Jahres 1832 and über Kometen überhaupt, Wien, 1832.
• 38. Wolfram von Eschenbach, 1170–1220, “Parzival,” completed in 1210. Richard Wagner, 1813 – 1883, “Parsifal, a sacred dramatic festival” appeared as poem in 1877; the opera was finished in 1882.
• 39. Rudolf Steiner taught in the Arbeiterbildungschule, a workmen's college, Berlin, 1899 – 1904. See The Course of My Life chap. 28, Dornach, 1962. Anthroposophic Press, Hudson.
• 40. Ferdinand Lassalle, 1825–1864. Founder of Socialism in Germany.

Today I would like to address some fundamental anthroposophical questions about life and then move up from these fundamental questions, from the everyday to the all-encompassing, the fundamental. The most fruitful gain of our striving should be that we learn through spiritual science to judge life more and more in its truth, in its reality, to judge it in such a way that this judgment itself can lead us most efficiently and energetically into life and how it can place us in the position that we have to fill out of our karma, that we have to fill out of our greater or lesser mission in the time in which we are embodied in the earthly body.

And so I would like to start with some of life's qualities that present themselves to us every day, either in ourselves or in our surroundings. We only begin to understand the full scope and significance of these qualities when we are able to view them in the light of spiritual science. I would like to start with two vices in life and then talk about some virtues, starting with the virtues of goodwill and contentment and the vices of lying and envy.

Let us first consider these two vices, which we often encounter in life. It cannot be denied that in the broadest circles, both among the simplest people and among those who, so to speak, already belong to the leaders of life, there is a deep, deep aversion and antipathy towards what we can call envy and mendacity. To mention right away some people who were among the leaders of life, I refer to the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and to those passages in his autobiography where he says that on close self-examination he must accuse himself of many vices, but may still say that he was never really a liar. This artist therefore finds a certain satisfaction in the fact that, on the basis of his self-observation, he can exclude lying from his character traits. And Goethe once says, as a result of his self-observation, that he must accuse himself of many things, but that envy, this ugly vice, had not really eaten at his heart. Thus we see, as it were, at the summits of life, how one feels antipathy for mendacity and envy, how one is told everywhere, where one is accustomed to look at life a little deeper, even where great abilities are, as it were, inherent in the life of the soul: You must guard against these vices in particular. And who would deny that this fundamental antipathy to falsehood and envy runs through all, all layers of our humanity. You only need to remember how much it would eat away at your heart if, in a certain moment, you had to say to yourself during truly honest and correct self-observation: I am an envious person. If you had to admit this resolutely to yourself, you would certainly feel in this confession that you would have to take something into yourself, such as fighting against this envy, fighting against envy. It is a deeply rooted feeling that mendacity and envy are ugly human traits. Why do we feel that way, then? Yes, you see, people do not always realize why they have such a deep antipathy to this or that. They often do not realize what is slumbering in the more or less subconscious part of their soul life and is undoubtedly present. In the face of envy and mendacity, man feels that he is violating something that is connected with the very essence of humanity and the very essence of human value. We need only utter a word and we will feel this. Spiritual science should gradually make us aware that, in addition to the individual personalities incarnated in the flesh, there is something like a unified, universal humanity that dwells in all souls in the same way as the divine-human. And here it is precisely spiritual science that presents this to us as a great ideal and that gradually leads us to have an understanding of the universal human. And yet, in an emotional way, there is something in all human hearts that always says in a certain way: Seek a bond that holds all people together, that always entwines itself from soul to soul, and you will find it. — And the corresponding feeling is expressed in the word “compassion”. Compassion is such a general human quality that we have to say: In this compassion, it is darkly announced the bond that goes from every soul to every soul. And there one feels again in the subconscious how one is violating compassion, the recognition of what is common in all people in the most eminent sense, with falsehood and envy.

What do we actually do when we tell a lie? We do nothing else than erect a partition between us and the other person. What should connect us with him, the common knowledge of some truth that should live in our soul and in his, if things were right, we tear that apart by telling him a lie. We do not recognize, in the moment when we tell the untruth, that we should actually live in the other with the best part of ourselves.

And when we envy someone, be it for abilities or for something else in life, then we sin against compassion in the way that we do not recognize the person for what he or she should actually be for us, as something that actually belongs to us and whose advantages and gifts and strokes of luck we should actually rejoice in if we felt truly connected to him or her.

So we are sinning against the most beautiful thing in human life, against compassion, when we are envious and untruthful people. And why is this so vehemently expressed in the dissatisfaction with these two qualities? Why is that? Well, both qualities can show us how that which resides in our soul reproduces itself, progresses to the shells of our being and has a meaning for these shells.

Envy is something that, when observed occultly, is clearly expressed in a very specific nature of the astral body when it is present in a person. And an envious person, no matter how much he is able to hide this envy from the outside world, reveals the quality of envy in his astral body. Our astral body has very specific basic properties. Even if it is different in every person and shows the most diverse differences in different people, it still has certain basic properties. And when we look at it with clairvoyant vision as an aura, it has very specific color properties. These fade in a remarkable way in the case of envious people; they fade, they become weak and dull. And the astral body of an envious person becomes, as it were, poor in the strength that it should supply to the whole human organism.

In the case of untruthfulness, it is again the case that it, and also every single lie, expresses itself in the etheric body. The etheric body loses vitality and life energy when a person is untruthful. This can even be observed externally. However strange it may sound for our age, it is nevertheless true that wounds, for example, heal more slowly in people who lie a lot than in truthful people, under otherwise similar conditions. Of course, one should not draw absolute conclusions, there may also be other reasons. But all other things being equal, wounds are more difficult to heal in dishonest people than in truthful people. It is good to observe such things in life. And that is also easily explained. The etheric body of a person is the actual life principle, it is what must contain the life forces. But these are undermined by untruthfulness. So that the etheric body cannot give as much life force as is necessary for a healing if this etheric body has had its life force withdrawn through untruthfulness, if it has not always been permeated by those movements, by those facts that arise from truthfulness. We should pay attention to such things, for we shall understand life better in many respects if we do.

Now you know that we must see what is happening to people in the light of two powers that influence human life as it develops from incarnation to incarnation. We must look at human life under the influence of the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. The forces of Lucifer are those that act on our astral body, that radiate their power into our astral body and tempt us in relation to it. The forces of Ahriman are those that tempt us in relation to our etheric body. Yes, it is Lucifer who, so to speak, grabs us by the scruff of the neck when we are envious people. Envy is truly a Luciferic quality, a quality that comes from Lucifer, whereas untruthfulness is a quality that comes from Ahriman. For Ahriman sends out the forces and powers that radiate into our etheric body.

Now we can say: It was absolutely necessary that Lucifer and Ahriman were delegated by the wise powers of the world so that they could influence us to become independent. In that they cause us to abuse our independence, they are in a sense enemies of the higher development of mankind. But even if they are in a sense enemies of man in his higher development, they are very friendly and make very peculiar compromises among themselves. We can speak of these compromises when we consider human qualities such as envy and lying.

Envy! The moment a person who is not completely corrupt says to himself, 'I am an envious person', he will do anything to fight that envy. You don't have to be particularly high to do anything. But sometimes things are much deeper than our power, which comes from consciousness. And sometimes people imagine that it is too easy to fight such things. So it happens that they fight such things because they perceive them as ugly, but they do not go away, they actually only change their form, they reappear in a different area. They then appear in masks, in disguises. And because one hates envy so much, one fights against it, but if the soul is not yet strong enough to fight it thoroughly, it disappears as envy but reappears in another form.

You all know that human trait that is so common and that you could call: criticism and faultfinding, paying attention to the faults of our fellow human beings. When someone has to say to themselves, “I am an envious person, I don't want my fellow human beings to have advantages,” they feel bad. They feel that they have to fight it. But when they can say, He feels that the fault-finding is justified to a certain extent, and he feels right in his element. Just imagine, if that were not the case, how many coffee parties and beer societies would have to be abandoned, where basically nothing else is done so often but to give rein to this carping and fault-finding. And then man finds himself justified before himself. He says to himself: Yes, one sees the faults, one must see them, one cannot close one's eyes. — It is only a matter of why we see the faults of our fellow human beings, whether we see the intention to improve life, or whether we follow a tendency of our soul, which is often nothing more than a masked envy. People fight envy because they hate it, but they are too weak to uproot it. So it takes on the guise of a critical nature and continues to roam the soul in this way. Then you have not fought envy, you have only forced it into a different metamorphosis. In reality, what has happened is that man has fought Lucifer, because he is above the envy of the Regent, as he is above much. But Lucifer then says to Ahriman, if I may express it thus: 'See, dear Ahriman, man hates my mode of ruling envy; he does not want to be envious. Now you take him in relation to this quality! Then Ahriman says: Yes, I will press that into the etheric body. — And it is pressed into the etheric body as a critical mind, as a critical spirit, as a misguided judgment about the world. For the ability to judge always has something to do with the movements and forces of the etheric body. Here the command of our soul passes from Lucifer to Ahriman. And so many qualities, which if they presented themselves in their original form we would hate and fight against, appear in disguise. Sometimes they present themselves in such a way that we actually find them very justified and even take some pride in being able to see what is right in life. Then we are truly caught in the tentacles of the other power, the Ahrimanic power. We must not forget that a quality is much more dangerous when it appears in disguise than when it appears in its original form. Therefore, when we see this or that in life, it is always good to ask: Is it not perhaps only a transformed other vice? — This is extremely necessary so that we learn to look at life in its truth. We can only do this if we use the guidelines that anthroposophical wisdom gives us to properly observe life.

Now we must say: What appears in life as this or that vice, whether in its true form or in disguise, we often see as a karmic effect in a single incarnation. We do not even have to wait for the transition from one incarnation to another. We see the karmic effect of a quality that occurs in any period of life in one incarnation. And those who really want to observe life and pay a little attention, will not get to know life if they always forget tomorrow what happened today, but if they consider longer periods of human life, they will find karma at work even in one embodiment, in one life. It is really necessary to pay very, very careful attention to how the sins of life basically only show up after decades. But people are a forgetful generation. Of all the races, beginning with the human race and extending to all higher worlds, people are truly the most forgetful generation. Even if we have known someone for decades, we forget what came to light ten years ago; we are very happy to let it fade from our memory. I may have already mentioned a small example here, but it can show us how we have to look at life in larger periods of time if we want to recognize it in its true form – something external that I just want to insert. It concerns the time in which I had the opportunity to observe many children in different families. When you educate children, you not only have to observe the children you are educating yourself, but also the more or less young offspring of uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews, and so on. And you can take note of many things for life. Well, it was a long time ago, fashions change. When I had children of my own, it was fashionable for their teachers to give them quite a few tins of red wine with their meals during the day as a form of sustenance. It was done, and it was thought to be a good thing. If you made a note of it at the time: this child and that child were given red wine and the other was not, you can now, if you have the opportunity again, as I always try to observe what has become of these children, gather strange insights. I can say that the two- to three- to four-year-old children of yesteryear – now people of twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine years – who were given red wine as children, are fidgety, nervous people who sometimes find it extremely difficult to find their way in life. Of course, one should not just make one's observations over a period of five years. Today it is so common to try this or that, and if it shows some success in the next few months, it is quickly a widespread remedy. People are forgetful in this area too. How many remedies have gone out of fashion after five years, people have forgotten again. But, as I said, if you extend your observation over decades, then you can really feel how life works. There really is a big difference between children who were given red wine in those days and those who were not given any. But you would have to make your observations over three decades, so to speak, to see that. And that is how it is. I have included this to show that if you want to see karma at work, it is necessary not to be forgetful, but to extend your observations over longer periods of time. The same applies to what comes to light in a more psychological way.

If you look at the second half of a person's life in context with the first, you can see how a person who was untruthful or envious, or who expressed envy under the mask of criticism, will experience the karmic effect of this in the second half of their life. Dishonest people always show a certain karmic effect of dishonesty in one incarnation: a certain shyness, an impossibility, one might say, to look people straight in the eye. That will certainly come true. Just try to observe the matter. You will find it confirmed. Folk proverbs sometimes have a deep, wise core. It is not without reason that in many regions people say that one should beware of a person who cannot look another in the eye. This is because of the karmic effect of untruthfulness.

Envy, on the other hand, or envy masked as criticism, manifests itself in a later life epoch of the same incarnation in such a way that the person in question has the characteristic of not being able to stand on his or her own two feet, so that he or she has the longing to lean on others, to need advice on all sorts of things, and always wants to run to someone else for advice. Independence in life is lost through envy, criticism, and a tendency to find fault. Such a person becomes weak in spirit.

Now these qualities, with their karmic effects, confront us spiritually when we consider one incarnation. We will take a moment to consider how the karmic effects play out as we move from one incarnation to another.

But now, so as not to be one-sided, we also want to consider good qualities: goodwill and contentment. Everyone knows what a benevolent person is. A benevolent person is someone who feels satisfied when someone else succeeds or achieves something, when they notice good qualities in someone. Goodwill is present when, in a sense, one experiences what the other person experiences as one's own. This goodwill, in turn, has a very specific effect on our astral body, which is almost the opposite of the effect of envy. We see how the lights of the astral body shine when a person expresses goodwill. The astral body becomes brighter and more radiant when there are feelings of goodwill in the soul of the person. The aura becomes more luminous, more radiant and thus richer; it becomes more saturated, and it is then able to infuse into the person first something like warmth of soul and then even a sense of well-being.

And when we see a contented person before us, a person who is not inclined to be grumpy about everything from the outset, to be dissatisfied about everything, then the etheric body shows us very definite qualities. It is important that we take note of this in a certain way. For we should actually realize how much of our dissatisfaction basically really depends on ourselves. There are those who cannot do enough to ferret out everything that can make them dissatisfied. And we feel that not only happier natures, but also better natures, are capable of paying a great deal of attention to the fact that, however bad things may be, we still have reasons to be happy about this or that. There are such reasons. And if someone does not want to admit that these exist, it is their own fault. Satisfaction, especially when it is brought about by a better quality of our soul, strengthens the etheric body in terms of its life force. And again it is the case – all other conditions being equal – that wounds or other things heal more easily in a contented person who has good reason to be contented, and does not get worked up about what happens to him, than in a grumpy and discontented person who gets worked up about everything and, as I said, leaves unsatisfied, under otherwise similar circumstances. Now we can also see quite clearly in a lifetime – and this is important for us to bear in mind when educating others – that someone who is truly imbued with contentment during a certain period of their life and who strives to seek out things that can satisfy them, perhaps despite pain and suffering, that a karmic effect will occur in the same life, even if it takes decades. This is expressed in particular by the fact that such a person, who has endeavored to acquire contentment in a certain period of his life, radiates a certain beneficial balance of life to his environment. You know that this exists. There are people around whom others have to fidget, and there are those who simply by being there calm others. People who have endeavored to be content in one epoch of their lives gain, as a karmic effect for the next epoch of the same life, the possibility of having a harmonizing effect on their environment, so to speak, purely by their existence, being benefactors to their environment.

We can always observe that benevolent people who have endeavored to be benevolent reap the karmic effect of all things that depend on them and are intended by them succeeding in a later epoch of life. Sometimes it seems inexplicable to us that some people succeed in everything, that they feel up to whatever they undertake, while others do not succeed and everything they touch fails. This leads back to the karmic cause of goodwill or ill will. You can observe these things, which I am presenting to you as guidelines, in life. If you exclude the sources of error that exist, you will see that life confirms what I have said.

When we now pass from one incarnation to another, we have to say: in one incarnation, the karmic effects can actually only show themselves in the soul. The effects of envy show themselves in certain weaknesses and in a lack of independence, the effects of untruthfulness in shyness, the effects of goodwill and contentment as I have described them to you. In this incarnation we do not have the same thorough and profound influences on our bodily organization that would enable us to make more progress with the karmic effects than a psychic basis. These things only take effect in the body, in the structure and organization of the body, in the next incarnation. And while we make ourselves spiritually dependent on others in one incarnation through envy and a tendency to find fault, these have the effect of constituting the body weakly and building it up weakly into the next incarnation. A weak body is built up by someone who was formerly plagued by envy or by masked envy, by a tendency to find fault, to be critical.

But now, if we have studied spiritual science a little, we must also say that it is truly not by chance that we are brought together with this or that person in a new incarnation. We are led into the family and environment with which we have something to do. And so you will not find it very strange if I say: If someone in an incarnation was an envious person, he will be reborn with the people – be they his parents or others – whom he envied, judged or gossiped about, or blamed. He will be reunited with them. And we may be reunited with them because we are led into this environment with weak organization. This makes the matter very practical, bringing the teaching of karma close to our practical life. We can say that when a human child is born with weak organization, This is the consequence of the envious disposition of the previous incarnation, and we are the ones who were envied, and this human child has been brought together with us karmically because we are the ones who were the target of their envy and gossip. It is fruitful when we say to ourselves: If karma has any meaning at all, it is justified to look at it this way. So let's look at it that way.

Of course, the only way to make it fruitful is to ask ourselves: What should we do in the face of such a weak human being? We only need to ask ourselves: What seems morally best in ordinary life when someone persecutes us with their envy and criticism? Perhaps it is not always possible to do the best in our ordinary, everyday lives. But what seems best to us? - Now, most certainly, forgiveness seems to us to be the very best. We may say that our lives are perhaps not such that we can always forgive, but the best is undoubtedly the forgiveness, and the most effective and also the most fruitful in life is the forgiveness. We cannot always practise it in our ordinary lives, but if we can say that the best thing in life is to forgive, it turns out that the real application of the principle of forgiveness is in the right place in all circumstances. This is when we have to acknowledge what I have said as a karmic effect from past incarnations. If a weak human child is born into our environment or brought together with us, we must then say to ourselves: Since karma should not remain merely a theoretical idea, we must think that we were the envied ones, the gossiped about. Now, under all circumstances, we can practice in our deepest hearts the feeling of forgiveness and of forgiveness. We can, so to speak, envelop such a human child in an atmosphere of repeatedly stirred feelings of forgiveness. If we did that in life, if we felt united with people who are weak, and did not just grasp the idea of forgiveness in theory, but always renewed the feelings in our souls, I have something to forgive you for, I want to forgive you, and always renew this feeling, then that would be a practical introduction of the anthroposophical attitude into life. You would certainly see the effect. Just try to put it into practice and you will see that people who are born into our environment in a weak state will flourish when you forgive them in this way and renew the feeling of forgiveness, that our feeling has a healing and invigorating effect on them. And we can become healers, healers of the people with whom we have been brought together by karma. In this way, anthroposophy becomes fruitful if we do not merely regard it as a collection of ideas that interest us. It is basically quite selfish when we begin to get enthusiastic about anthroposophy because the thoughts of anthroposophy inspire us and seem true to us. For what are we satisfying then? We are satisfying our longing for a harmonious worldview. That is very beautiful. But the greater thing is when we permeate our whole life with what results from these ideas; when the ideas go into our hands, into every step and into everything we experience and do. Only then does anthroposophy become a principle of life, and until it does, it has no value.

We can also speak in a similar way with regard to the other qualities. If, for example, we have been liars in a previous incarnation and are born again, we will be brought together with those to whom we may have lied to their faces. It is not uncommon, if one is a true student of the occult, to find that a human being is born into an environment to which he cannot find the right relationship, is not understood by it and does not understand it. Sometimes we have a peculiar effect on our environment. I don't know if you have already observed that this has a much wider impact than just on people. There are certain people: if they want to raise flowers, these flowers thrive, they have a lucky hand for it. The fact that it is they who raise the flowers makes them thrive. Other people can do whatever they want: the flowers wither. That happens. There are simply much more mysterious relationships between the individual beings of existence than one usually thinks. These mysterious relationships are, of course, mainly from person to person. And if we are brought together through karma with a human child who brazenly lied to us in a previous incarnation, it is so that we, so to speak, find it difficult to relate to this child. We should pay attention to this. We should not judge this merely according to our temperament, but karmically. We should say: “This comes from the fact that we were perhaps often lied to by this human child.” Now we can in turn help this human child, strengthen and empower him.

What is the best way to forgive something that can be expressed something like this, another person tells you a lie. The best way to forgive that is to teach him a truth. With the other, by rectifying the lie, you are already doing some good, but you have not helped the person any further. You can help him further by trying to teach him a useful truth. You have to follow a kind of policy in your dealings with people, and that helps people to progress. If we are obliged to look at the matter karmically, it is particularly advantageous that we endeavor to be truthful to people with whom we are karmically brought together and who we know do not find a relationship with us because they are shy around us. Then we will see how these people in turn flourish under our openness and how this openness is of great advantage to them. Thus we see how we can gain life principles by looking at the workings of karma in a practical way.

What we have just characterized as the effect of goodwill in a single life, we can see as having the effect of harmonizing life, but initially in the soul. People in whom this has an effect from one incarnation to the next, we find that they are actually born with a happier organization, which we can call 'skillful'. Good will, contentment in one incarnation, brings about skillfulness in another incarnation. It is true that this is the case, because it can always be proven in the field of occult research. And one can very well observe oneself and experience some of the ways in which the previous incarnation works its way into the present one. We can be quite sure that it is so in the case of people whose fingers are quite unsuitable for sewing on a button that might tear, or in the case of people who, when asked to carry a glass into the cupboard, happily throw it to the floor – I am exaggerating a little now. But in more subtle nuances, there are very many people who are so organized that they cannot help but move their fingers in the wrong way, that they always make awkward mistakes. Whether one can use the instrument of one's body well or whether it presents treacherous obstacles at every turn has a profound significance for one's life. This is extraordinarily important. And when we see a clumsy child growing up, we must assume in most cases that in the previous incarnation he lacked contentment and goodwill. When we see skill emerging, so that the person, when he touches something, already literally knows how to do it, then that is most certainly the karmic effect of goodwill and contentment. |

If we look at it this way, we can say that we can actually have a wonderful effect from one incarnation to the next. It is possible for us to really work on our next incarnation. And we will change a lot for our next incarnation if we seriously resolve to observe whether we have a little bit of faultfinding and criticizing in us after all. If we try to examine ourselves to see if we have even a little of this, we find that we have it to a considerable extent. It is good to try to examine ourselves to see if we have even a little of it. Then the process of working on ourselves begins. And we may be able to avoid being born weak and pale in the next incarnation, avoid in this life becoming, so to speak, dependent human beings.

When we consider these things, we will say to ourselves: It is no longer a fantasy to combine the individual incarnations like links in a human chain and to really regard the earth as a kind of training through which we learn to use what is offered to us in the individual incarnations so that we come higher and higher, go further and further. After all, why are we incarnated, in principle? We can best understand this by asking ourselves what the two great differences are between our incarnations in the old, pre-Christian times and our present incarnations, which are taking place after the Christ Impulse has been present. There is a very, very significant difference.

This difference between our incarnations in ancient pre-Christian times and our present incarnations could best be described by saying: When you look back at the incarnations of people in the pre-Christian era, to a certain extent the souls in that pre-Christian era had all retained something of what all souls had at the beginning of their earthly incarnations. All souls had natural clairvoyance, an insight into the spiritual world. And the progress of incarnations consists precisely in the fact that this inheritance from the spiritual world, from the spiritual origin, has gradually been lost, that people have increasingly emerged onto the physical plane, and the spiritual world has increasingly faded from them. The Christ impulse means that when we find the possibility to receive the Christ in us, to connect him with our ego, we in turn begin to ascend more and more to what we were at the beginning, only richer. That we are again at the end of the incarnations in the spiritual as we were at the beginning of our incarnations, is effected by the reception of the Christ power, when we apply our next incarnations so that we absorb more and more of the Christ. These are the great differences between pre-Christian and post-Christian incarnations. We are actually still in a transitional period in this regard. We have been pushed far out of the reach of normal human perception onto the physical plane, onto mere physical perception, and today is actually a high point in terms of physical perception. For the Christ impulse is only just beginning, and in subsequent incarnations people will truly take up the Christ, will only come to love these incarnations because they give them the opportunity to experience what can only be experienced through earthly existence: the acceptance of the Christ impulse into the soul. We can observe this even in great personalities, how there is, so to speak, a tremendous difference between the incarnations before the Christ impulse on Earth and after. I would like to tell you a detail.

Some time ago I was called upon to spend a few days lecturing in our southernmost European branch – I mean in so far as we speak of Rosicrucian Theosophy – in Palermo. And when I entered Sicily from Naples by ship, I already had the very definite feeling that there was something to be learned there about occult facts that are difficult to study in the north alone. For there is a personality, an individuality that emerged, which I cannot name now, that played a certain role at the turn of the Middle Ages and the modern era, which made a lot of noise in our and neighboring areas and which makes the occultist wonder: What was the previous incarnation of this personality? That was an important research question for me, and strangely enough, I hoped to find out something about this question through the occult research that was possible there, especially at this entrance to Sicily. And that was indeed the case very soon. Of course, what is being told is something intimate, but within our branches, there is no longer any need to hold back on these intimate things. Something very, very remarkable has been poured out into the whole spiritual atmosphere of Sicily – I do not say the outer, but the spiritual atmosphere. And the pursuit of this remarkable thing really led at last to its origin, to a great sage who worked in Sicily and who is also dismissed with a few words in the history of philosophy, but whom we really know very little about in an outwardly exoteric way. His name is Empedocles.

If one wants to characterize Empedocles as an occultist – and I would like to do this for you – then one must say: in some respects, Empedocles was very much ahead of his time, he was overripe for his time. In other respects, however, he could not go beyond his time. There was a deep conflict in his soul. Empedocles is truly a great, all-embracing personality. He was active in Sicily not only as a philosopher, not only as a mystery teacher, but also as a statesman, as an architect, as all kinds of things – he was a kind of organizer, this wonderful Empedocles. Empedocles lived in Sicily about four or five centuries before the Christ Impulse, and he was ahead of his time in that he had the urge to delve into the material world. In the past, people had never delved into matter as superficially as they do today. When someone spoke of water, like T'hales, for example, they meant something spiritual. Empedocles was the one who, in a certain respect, nevertheless anticipated a materialistic principle by composing all being out of the four elements, which he, however, conceived materially. And by mixing and unmixing this matter, he conceived the constitution of the world. He lost the spiritual because he — precisely as an occult personality, looking back on his incarnations — should have found the Christ impulse; he would have been called to do so. When we look back in the Akasha Chronicle today, we find the Christ impulse at a very specific point; but the one who lived before the Christ impulse could not do so. He could not absorb it as an earthly impulse, because it had not yet existed physically. Empedocles lacked that, it could not pour into his soul. He did not have the counterweight against the materialism that flared up in him. But because he was a personality with strong impulses, albeit with the impulses of an occultist, this led him to live out this disharmony. That is what turned out to be the truth. This led him to want to be one with the material of the four elements, just as one would otherwise, when seeking the truth, want to unite with this spiritual in spirit. And he plunged into the Atna. He really did throw himself into it to be one with the elements. He sought the divine in the material, identifying with the divine that appeared to him in the material image. And I would like to say: this product of Empedocles' combustion in the fiery floods of Etna is still present today in the atmosphere of Sicily as a fertilizing force, like the effect of a sacrifice. Something great and mighty is present, but it is emanating from this, one might say, false, blasé, wrongly placed in time – do not misunderstand the term 'false' – materialism. Empedocles, who, looking back, could not find the Christ, although he should have found him, throws his life away. Thus it happened that he came to life again in such a remarkable way at the beginning of the newer time and lived quite differently. It is not yet time to speak of the personality in which he was reborn. A wonderful view of what the Christ Impulse actually is in the course of evolution arises. Between the previous and the later incarnation of Empedocles stands the Christ event in the midst. And by comparing the two incarnations of Empedocles, one can see, by observing his individuality, what effect it has, whether one, as a spirit belonging to the newer observation, can look back and find the Christ impulse or not. This makes an enormous difference. Just as souls in ancient times had to go back from incarnation to incarnation to see how they had allied themselves with the divine spiritual being in earlier incarnations, so we must have the opportunity, when we go back from our own incarnation and trace the time from our birth to our previous death and again from that to our previous birth and so on, to find the Christ impulse in this way. The spiritual researcher in particular must find it. This Christ impulse lights a light for him, whereas otherwise he would be plunged into darkness at this moment and everything that existed would lie in darkness. We need the Christ impulse like a torch in the field of spiritual research, otherwise darkness comes, otherwise we cannot see clearly into the true reasons of the Akasha Chronicle of ancient times. This can be observed in a wonderful way in examples such as that of Empedocles. Then one gets a feeling for how these incarnations follow one another in our earthly existence; how, so to speak, man has moved in a descending direction up to the Christ Impulse, how he has emerged further and further onto the physical plane, and how we are in the process of gradually ascending into the spiritual realm again. The last great spirit of descent is the great Buddha, the first great impulse for ascent is that of Christ Jesus, and perhaps there is no better way to feel the tremendous difference between the Buddha principle and the principle of Christ Jesus than by contemplating something that the great Buddha once said to his most intimate disciples, looking back at his enlightenment, which is symbolically called the enlightenment under the bodhi tree. There Buddha says: When I look back on earlier incarnations, I see how I proceeded from the divine-spiritual source of the world, how I went from incarnation to incarnation, always dwelling with the spiritual essence in the outer body temple, descending into the physical world. But now, in this incarnation, I have found the possibility of no longer having to return to an incarnation. From body temple to body temple I have gone, in every incarnation the Godhead has erected the temple of my body for me. But now, as I am embodied in it for the last time, I feel how the beams of this body temple are cracking and that I no longer need to return to such a temple. For that is what he proclaimed: that the true striving must be to escape from this earthly activity, to no longer have any connection with this temple of the body, but to strive out of it to the last incarnation, in order to live on only in the spiritual. That was the last reference to man's descent, to the memory that men can have of primeval wisdom, of what stands at the beginning of the human race.

Oh, it must move us when we see the Buddha standing, saying: From temple to temple of the body I have passed; now I feel that it is for the last time. If we compare this – and disregard all metaphysical backgrounds – with an intimate saying of Christ to his intimate disciples, with the words: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again”, we see that in the Buddha was a great longing for the beams of the temple of the body to collapse, so that there would be no need to return to it; but that in Christ there was the promise: “Tear it down, and I will rebuild it in three days.” The love for the earthly world expresses itself in the fact that for the following incarnations of human beings, in which they find the possibility to build their body temple again and again, so that they can learn again and again and ascend higher; so that then, when the earth has reached its goal, the earth itself will become a corpse, so to speak, fall away from the soul of all humanity, just as our body falls away from the soul when we pass through the gate of death. But then people will have come higher and higher. By becoming Christianized, people will be able to live on to new levels of existence as humanity. What is meant by Christ's saying that he himself wants to return to the physical body, but that he will return to the principle of building the body, that he will remain in the earthly existence until the end of the earth.

That is what I tried to express in what I say through Theodora, the seer in the Mystery Drama, where you can see how the Christ will become more and more familiar to human life, although he does not return to a physical body. But he is experienced in the physical body temples of human beings. And in this saying of his, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” lies the promise: Yes, I will make it true that I can enter into the souls of men, so that more and more people can come who, in the sense of Paul, can say, “Not I, but the Christ in me!”

Thus we see how we can contemplate in a small way spiritual science as a principle of life, by gaining the possibility of seeing certain qualities of our character and soul taking effect karmically between birth and death, and of seeing them working their way into the bodily organization of the next incarnation. And so we see how spiritual science presents the loftiest ideals to us and tells us what we will become — Christ-like human beings — when the Earth will become a corpse and fall away from the soul-like in man, when man will be called upon to progress to other planetary conditions. Spiritual science can thus give us the greatest ideals and can flow into the smallest circumstances of life. In this way it becomes practical for everyday life, and it can and should become more and more so. When we become anthroposophists in the sense that all our actions, no matter how remote from what might be considered anthroposophical activity, are imbued with anthroposophical thinking and feeling, only then can we say that our beings have been imbued with anthroposophy. Anthroposophy must be regarded not as a theory but as a way of life, but as a way of life that needs to be learned. And basically we must realize that we have to encourage ourselves through the true, concrete content of anthroposophy if it is to be a way of life for us, not wanting to say: I understand this from anthroposophy and that is the right thing to do, but rather that we first have to familiarize ourselves deeply with what spiritual science has to say to us. Then it must become the strength of our lives. And it can only do so when we permeate ourselves with it. But then it will do so in the smallest and in the greatest, then the perspective for the connections of human progress and for the smallest facts of everyday life will open up for us.

A writing,¹ I do not want to write a review about it. What I will say will be only words that express my subjective feelings when reading the writing and that may be directed from a deeply satisfied soul like a spiritual greeting to the author.

Only in this way can I speak about a writing that, from the point of view of my spiritual-scientific striving, characterizes Pastor Ernst.

I feel that, first of all, the writing expresses the deeply religious, but also the only truly plausible view, which knows that in the development of mankind nothing truly religious can arise or develop without a real intervention of the divine-spiritual into the physical world. Without a person or persons having real contact with the supersensible, nothing religious can come into the world: Edmund Ernst is quite clear about this.

That is why he starts from the reformers' supersensible experiences. He shows how Luther's whole life was basically oriented towards contact with the supersensible. How Luther was well aware of the dangers of this contact, how he knew that supersensible beings can sometimes appear in a good mask, while they are of a devilish nature. Ernst also shows how Zwingli, in a decisive point, made his behavior dependent on a truth that had been revealed to him from the spiritual world.

The spiritual-supernatural source is spoken of simply but forcefully in the book as a religious source.

In this way, however, the author's meaning is implanted in the book, which makes the religious man. The book proves to be one that is written from a spirit-filled heart living in the spirit. From such a heart-felt attitude, light-filled warmth always falls on the individual's execution. And with Ernst, this warmth is never channeled into the sought emotional exuberance; it remains objective throughout and seeks to get the “yes” and “no” for an assertion from the objective.

Given such conditions, should we not speak of the deepest satisfaction when Pastor Ernst courageously makes three main questions the content of his book? These are three questions that I myself should never have been allowed to speak about; to hear what is said about them from such a source, may be called an inner festival of life. “1. Is there a possibility, from the spiritual experience of the Reformation, to understand what presents? 2. Must the spiritually real element of the Reformation capitulate before what 'anthroposophically oriented spiritual science' possibly brings in the way of new ideas? 3. Must the results of the spiritual scientist's research be rejected from the point of view of the experience of the Reformation?"

It must be deeply satisfying to see these questions treated in a thoroughly religious way, after Ragaz, for example, has written about the spiritual science I have described: ”In this higher knowledge, God comes to Himself in man. The promise of the snake is fulfilled: Eritis sicut Deus, you will be like God. Thus Theosophy becomes Anthroposophy” (Leonhard Ragaz: Theosophy or Kingdom of God? Flugschriften der Quelle 3. Rotapfelverlag 1922, page 18). Or: “Woe to the world if it were to abandon the God of the Bible for the God of Theosophy – it would sink into dream and death, lose God and man.” Page 34. – Anyone who acquires knowledge of the human soul through spiritual research does not find a soul like Ragaz's in her dark storms against Anthroposophy incomprehensible. One can see through her in her conscious world of ideas, and also in the subconscious and semi-subconscious depths. And one recognizes how she cannot allow the feeling to arise in her from these depths: there is a path in anthroposophy to the spiritual world. Can this not lead to a renewed understanding of the biblical word of revelation, which also comes from the spiritual world? Ragaz' soul cannot come to this feeling because she has blocked the very path through the ways to the Bible that she has now chosen, through which the Bible itself - in accordance with the corresponding time - came about, and which has been recreated in anthroposophical spiritual research in a way appropriate to the responsibilities of knowledge in our time.

Now Ernst's statement (on pages 24f. of his book) is juxtaposed with a statement by Ragaz. I truly feel a spiritual blush as I transcribe the words here: “Insofar as Steiner represents the fact that it is possible to recognize the supersensible world and that it is possible to educate people to this knowledge, he presents himself as the recipient of a message from the spiritual world. Only that he also shows – and this goes beyond Luther – how others can also arrive at becoming such recipients through the path of seeing.

And Pastor Ernst understands in a clear way how I would like to apply anthroposophical spiritual knowledge to human life. It is far from my intention to appear in any kind of religious way or to interfere in any religious confession. I have no other aspiration than this: to communicate to present-day humanity, in a form of knowledge with the right sense of responsibility before today's science, what I am able to explore in the supersensible worlds. I present what I may say to myself is either appropriate for present-day humanity in its state of spiritual maturity, or something else for which individual groups of people are first acquiring the maturity in an (esoteric) preliminary training.

When the Christian Renewal movement came into being, it was not on my initiative, but on that of a number of Christian theologians who were seeking a new spiritual impulse precisely out of their genuine Christian sensibilities. believed that they could find this in the spiritual insights, especially those that are also possible through a cultus, of anthroposophy; and I was obliged to give this group of people everything I could give from my knowledge. I remained the one communicating the insights from the supersensible world; and the recipients and inquirers did what was necessary to establish the Fellowship for Christian Renewal.

Myths are stories containing great truths, which great initiates have related to men. The Trojan War, for instance, is the narrative of the battle waged between the third and the fourth sub-race of the fifth root-race. The representative of the former is Laocoon, priest of an ancient priest-kingdom, who was at the same time a king.¹ The representative of the latter is Odysseus, the personification of cunning and of the force of thinking which developed within the fourth subrace.

We find that initiates lead the course of evolution also in the North. In Wales we come across a brotherhood of initiates of the pagan period, a priesthood and knighthood culminating in King Arthur and his Round Table. They are faced by the brotherhood of the Holy Grail and its knights, working on behalf of the spreading of Christianity. Art and the development of politics are all connected with great initiates belonging to these two brotherhoods, representing a pagan and a Christian civilisation. The influence of the Holy Grail gradually begins to increase toward the end of the thirteenth century. This is a special turning-point in the civilisation of Europe: cities begin to be founded. The ancient rural civilisation, based on the possession of landed property, is replaced by a city-civilisation, a bourgeois civilisation. This implies a radical change in the whole life and thinking of men.

It is therefore not devoid of meaning if just at the time of the meister-singers' contest on the Wartburg a legend from Bavaria should have come to the fore—the legend of Lohengrin. What was the significance of this legend during the Middle Ages?

At the present time we no longer have the slightest idea of how a medieval soul was constituted; it was particularly receptive for spiritual currents flowing below the surface of things. We find to-day that the Lohengrin legend specially emphasizes the Catholic standpoint. But this element which may disturb us today should make us consider the fact that during the Middle Ages this legend could only have influenced men if clothed in something which was really able to stir human souls. This garment had to be supplied by the ardent religious feeling of that period, so that the legend contained something of what lived within the human hearts. What was the significance of the legend?

An initiation—the initiation of a disciple who advances to the degree of a Teacher.

Such a disciple must first of all become a man who has no country and no home; that is to say, he fulfils his duties just like other men, but he must strive to look beyond his own Self and develop his higher Ego.

What are the characteristics of a disciple?

1. He must overcome everything that is personal and develop the God within him.

2. He must be free from every doubt. The things pertaining to the spiritual world stand before his soul as true facts.

   He must also be free from every superstition since he himself is able to control everything he can no longer fall a prey to illusions.

   Upon a still higher stage the key of knowledge will be delivered to him. He is then said to have acquired the power of speech and becomes a messenger of the super-sensible world. The depths of the spiritual world are then revealed to him. This is the second stage.

3. The third stage is reached when he says “I” to every being in the world, just as he says “I” to himself. At this stage he has risen to the capacity of encompassing the universe. In mysticism a disciple who has reached the third stage is designated as a Swan, he is then a mediator between the Teacher and human beings.

The Swan-Knight therefore appears to us as an emissary of the great White Brotherhood. Thus Lohengrin is the messenger of the Holy Grail. A new impulse, a new influence was destined to enter human civilisation. You already know that in mysticism the human soul, or human consciousness, always appears as a woman. Also in this legend of Lohengrin the new form of consciousness, the civilisation of the middle classes, the progress made by the human soul, appears in the vestige of a woman. The new civilisation which had arisen was looked upon as a new and higher stage of consciousness. Elsa of Brabant personifies the medieval soul. Lohengrin, the great initiate, the Swan of the third degree of discipleship, brings with him a new civilisation inspired by the community of the Holy Grail. He must not be asked any questions, for it is a profanation and a misunderstanding to place questions to an initiate concerning things which must remain occult.

The influence of great initiates always brings about the promotion to new stages of consciousness. As an example illustrating how these initiates work, I will remind you of Jacob Böhme. You already know that Jacob Böhme proclaimed great, profound truths. Whence did he obtain his wisdom? He relates that when he was still an apprentice, he was one day sitting alone in his master's shop. A stranger entered and asked for a pair of shoes. Jacob, however, was not allowed to sell shoes during his master's absence. The stranger spoke a few words with him and then he went away. After a while, however, he called the boy Böhme out of the shop and told him: “Jacob, now you are still small and humble, but one day you will be quite another person, and the world will marvel at you!” What is implied in this?

It is an initiation, the description of a moment of initiation. At first, the boy does not realize what has happened to him, but he has received an impulse.

Also in the legend of Lohengrin we come across such a moment of initiation. These legends are important indications, which can only be understood by those who possess an Insight into the connections of things.

The Lohengrin legend (as explained, it is connected with the legend of the meister-singers) has a decidedly Catholic character. Richard Wagner used it for his Lohengrin poem. This reveals Richard Wagner's high inner calling.

Wagner used another ancient legend-theme in his Ring of the Nibelungs. These ancient Germanic legends set forth the destiny of the Aryan tribe. We must seek the origin of the Ring legends in a period which followed the great Atlantean flood, when the surviving peoples began to migrate over Europe and Asia. These legends are a reminiscence of the great initiate Wotan, the god of the Aesir. Wotan is an initiate of the Atlantean period, and all the other Aryan gods are only great initiates.

We can clearly distinguish three stages in Wagner's treatment of the Siegfried legend.

The first stage is a description of modern civilisation. In Richard Wagner's eyes modern men have become mere day-labourers of civilisation. He sees the great difference between modern human beings and those of the Middle Ages. Modern achievements are in part produced by machines, whereas during the civilisation of the Middle Ages everything was still an expression of the soul. The house, the village, the city, and everything it contained, was full of significance and men rejoiced in it. What do our storehouses, warehouses and cities mean to us to-day? In the medieval period the house was the expression of an artistic idea; the whole street-picture, with the market and the church in the middle, was the expression of the soul.

Wagner felt this contrast, and what he wished to achieve through his art was to place before man something which would make him appear complete and perfect at least in one sphere. In his Siegfried he wished to portray a perfectly harmonious human being in contrast to the labourers of industry. Our great men have always felt this: Goethe had the same feeling, and also Hölderlin, who said: “There are labourers in this world, but no men”, and so forth. Every great man has longed after truly great human beings.

A change could not take place in an external form, for the course of evolution cannot be turned backward. A temple was therefore to arise in which art in a complete and perfect form was to raise human beings above the ordinary level of life. The modern period of civilisation needed this temple, just because modern life is so torn and splintered. This was the first idea in Wagner's mind in connection with the Siegfried-poem.

But a second idea rose up before Wagner's soul as he descended into still more profound depths of the soul.

At the beginning of the Middle Ages an ancient legend found its way into German poetry—the legend of the Nibelungs. This kind of legend contained the deepest feelings of the folk-soul. Only those who really study the folk-soul can conceive what lived at that time within the heart of the German nation. These legends were the expression of deep inner truths, of great truths; for instance, the legends of Charlemagne. These tales were not related as they are related today, they were not connected with the historical Charlemagne, for people possessed a deeper insight into the historical connections. The Frankish kings took on the aspect of ancient Aryan ancestors; the Nibelungs were priest-kings who ruled over their kingdoms and provided at the same time the spiritual impulses. These legends were the reminiscence of a great time which had past. In this light Charlemagne's coronation in Rome was looked upon as something special. The Nibelungs were consecrated priest and kings during a remote past of the Aryan sub-race, and their memory was handed down in the legends of the German emperors. Wagner's attention was attracted by these legends and a character appeared to him which seemed to represent the contrast between the modern period of material possession and the medieval period which was still connected with the ancient spiritual culture. Wagner occupied himself with the legend of Barbarossa. Also in Barbarossa we find a great initiate. We are told of his journeys to the Orient; from there he brings back from the holy initiates a higher wisdom—knowledge, or the Holy Grail.

According to the myth of the 12th and 13th century the emperor is under a spell and dwells in the interior of a mountain; his ravens are the messengers informing him of what takes place in the world. The ravens are an ancient symbol of the Mysteries; in the Persian Mystery-language they symbolize the lowest stage of initiation. Hence they are the messengers of the higher initiates. What was this initiate (Barbarossa) supposed to bring? Richard Wagner wished to set forth how an ancient period is replaced by a new one, with its changed conditions of property. What once existed has withdrawn like Barbarossa. The influence of the initiates becomes crystallized for Wagner in Barbarossa.

This thought transpires in the Nibelungs. Taken at first from a more external aspect, but now upon a deeper foundation, it becomes the expression of the profound views of the Middle Ages, setting forth the dawn of a new civilisation. Once more Wagner seeks a still more profound description of this thought. Guided by an infinitely deep and intuitive comprehension of the Germanic sagas, he finally chooses the figure of Wotan, instead of Barbarossa. These sagas describe the setting of the Atlantean period and the rise of the fifth root-race out of the fourth. This is, at the same time, the development of the intellect. The human intellect, or self-consciousness, did not exist among the Atlanteans. They lived in a kind of clairvoyant condition. We find the first traces of a combining intellect in the fifth sub-race of the Atlanteans, the primordial Semitic race, and this intellect continued to develop within the fifth root-race. Self-consciousness arises in this way. The Atlantean did not say “I” to himself as forcefully as a human being belonging to the Aryan race. After the fall of Atlantis this ancient civilisation was brought over into the new one; the Europeans are a surviving branch of Atlantis. A contrast now arises between the Germanic spiritual civilisation and the initiates who work in an occult way and inspire the intellect in its external form.

The dwarfs of Nifelheim are the bearers of the Ego consciousness. Richard Wagner makes Wotan, the ancient Atlantean initiate, oppose Alberich, the bearer of egoism, who belongs to the dwarf-race of the Nibelungs and is an initiate of the Aryan period. When similar new impulses arise something entirely new is born. The bearer of intellectual wisdom is gold. Gold is deeply significant in mysticism, for gold is light, and out-streaming light becomes wisdom. Alberich brings the gold, the wisdom which has become hardened, out of the waters of the Rhine. Water always symbolizes the soul-element, the astral element. The Ego, gold, wisdom, come forth out of the soul. The Rhine is the soul of the new root-race out of which arises the understanding, the Ego consciousness.

Alberich takes possession of the gold, he captures it from the Daughters of the Rhine, the female element characterising the original state of consciousness.

This connection lived in the profound depths of Wagner's soul. He deeply felt what was connected with the rise of the new root-race, of the Ego-consciousness, and he characterised it profoundly in the first E flat major chords of Rhinegold. This streams and weaves musically throughout Wagner's Rhinegold. Wagner's themes were poems originating from ancient myths. In these legends lived something which, filled with force and life, is able to permeate the soul with a spiritual rhythm. What we experience and what we ourselves are, this comes to life and resounds through us in these ancient sagas.

• 1. Laocoon's struggle with the Serpent, the symbol of cunning.

During the course of these lectures we shall see how in his works Wagner rose up to the gods and at the same time came down to the human beings, in order to set forth, within the human race itself, redemption and salvation.

There were Mysteries also in the North. A special being, Wotan, plays a prominent part in these Mysteries. Particularly in the countries inhabited by the Celts the last traces of the old Druid Mysteries have been preserved. In England we may still find them at the time of Queen Elizabeth.

The old sagas relate first of all of Siegfried, an initiate, who was able, after a certain number of incarnations, to give up his body to an old Atlantean initiate for a dwelling. This we may find in all the Mysteries. Even Jesus sacrificed his body to a higher individuality when he was baptized by John the Baptist.

Wotan was initiated stage by stage, in order to bring about the higher development of the Northern tribes. After the transmigration of the surviving Atlantean peoples to the desert of Gobi, a few tribes had remained behind in the North. Whereas four sub-races were continuing their development in the South, four other sub-races developed in the North. Here, too, we find four stages of evolution; the last one is the Twilight of the Gods. The northern sagas tell us about this, and these legends were conceived by the four preparatory races. Wotan passes four times through an initiation within these four sub-races, and each time he rises by one degree. He hangs upon the cross for nine days; he learns to know the things connected with Mimir's head, the representative of the first sub-race. Also in this case crucifixion brings redemption.

During his second initiation he wins Gunlöd's draught of wisdom. In the form of a serpent he must creep into a subterranean cave, where he dwells for three days before he obtains the draught. During his third initiation, corresponding to the third sub-race, he is obliged to sacrifice one of his eyes in order to win Mimir's draught of wisdom. This eye is the legendary eye of wisdom, reminding us of the one-eyed Cyclops, who are the representatives of the Lemurian race. This eye has withdrawn long ago, and modern men do not possess it; sometimes, in the case of newly-born children, a faint trace of this eye may still be seen. It is the eye of clairvoyance. Why was Wotan obliged to sacrifice it? Every root-race must recapitulate the whole course of evolution. This also applies to the third northern sub-race. Clairvoyance has to be sacrificed once again, in order that something new might arise, which appeared for the first time in Wotan. This new element is the intellectual capacity, the characteristic way in which the Europeans contemplate the world.

Wotan's fourth incarnation is Siegfried, the descendant of gods. Human initiates now take the place of gods.

Siegfried passes through an initiation. He must awaken Brunhilde, the higher consciousness, by passing through the flames, the fire of passion. In this way he experiences a catharsis, a purification. Before his purification he has killed the dragon, the lower passions. He has become invulnerable. There is only one point between the shoulders where he can be wounded. This vulnerable point symbolizes that the fourth sub-race still lacks something which Christianity alone can give. The coming of One was necessary, who was invulnerable where Siegfried was still vulnerable—the coming of the Christ, Who carries the Cross resting between his shoulders at the very point where Siegfried could be wounded to death.

Christianity was called upon to check yet another onset of the Atlanteans. The peoples led by Atli (Attilas) are of Atlantean origin. The attack of these Mongolian races must give way to Christianity, personified in Leo, the pope.

Thus the myths described the course of evolution in symbolical images.

The same thing applies to the myth of Baldur. Also in Baldur we have before us an initiate. In this myth we find that all the conditions of initiation are fulfilled. The riddle of Baldur conceals a truth. The strange position of Loki in this northern saga can only be understood if we bear in mind this fact. You know that Baldur's mother, alarmed by evil dreams, made every living being promise to do no harm to Baldur. An insignificant growth, the mistletoe, is forgotten, and out of this mistletoe, which was not bound by any promise, Loge made the arrow which he gave to the blind god Hodur, when the gods were playfully hurling arrows at Baldur. Baldur is killed by this mistletoe arrow.

You know that another evolution preceded the evolution of the earth; namely, the kingdom of the Moon. At that time matter resembled our present living substance. Some of the Moon-beings remained behind upon the Moon-stage of development, and penetrated into the new world in this form. They cannot grow upon a mineral soil, they can only grow upon a living foundation, upon another living being. The mistletoe is one of these Moon-plants. Loge is the god of the Moon. He comes from the Moon-period and is now the representative of something imperfect, of Evil. This occult connection with the Moon-period also explains Loge's double nature, male and female at the same time. As you know, the division of the sexes coincides with the Moon's exit from the common planet. The Sun-god Baldur is the head of the new creation. The new and the old creation, the kingdoms of the Moon and of the Sun collide, and Baldur, the representative of the civilisation of the Sun, is the victim. Hodur is the blind inevitable force of Nature. Guilt contains a certain progressive element. Thus Baldur had to be called into life again in the Mysteries, after having been killed by Loge through Hodur.

These are the feelings which fill our soul when we penetrate into Richard Wagner's creations.

Man comes down to the earth as a soul-being; his body is formed out of the ether-earth; the human being is not yet man and woman, and he has no idea of possession or power. The soul is referred to as water; possession, implying power, is still guarded by the surging astral forces, by the Daughters of the Rhine. The Ego, or egoism coming out of Atlantis is gradually prepared. But this human being who was originally a soul-being possessed something which he must renounce: it is love, which does not, as yet seek another being outside, but finds its satisfaction within itself. Alberich must renounce this self-contained love; the human being must attain love by becoming united with another individual being. As long as the two sexes were united, the Ring was not needed; when the human being renounced psychical love, or the two sexes in one, then the Ring had to unite externally what had thus become severed. The Ring is the union of individual human beings, the union of the sexes in the physical world. When Alberich conquers the Ring he must renounce love. Now comes the time when the human being is no longer able to work within a united sphere encompassing everything. Once upon a time, soul, spirit and body were one; now the Godhead creates the body from outside. The sexes face one another in a hostile way; the two giants Fafner and Fasolt symbolized this. The human bodies are now endowed with one sex instead of two; they create external life.

The human body is represented in every religion as a temple: the Godhead builds it from outside. The inner temple of the soul must be built by man himself ever since he has become an Ego. The creative Godhead still contains love, it is still creative in the outer temple. The myth explains this in the passage where Wotan wishes to take away the Ring from the giants, and Erda appears advising him to abstain from this. Erda is the clairvoyant collective consciousness of humanity. The god must not keep the Ring encircling what should become free, in order to unite it again upon a higher stage, when the sexes shall have become neutral. Thus the prophetic, clairvoyant power of earth-consciousness prevents Wotan from securing the Ring, which remains the property of the giants. Ever since, every human being has one sex only. (The giant represents the physical bodily structure.) Now the giants begin to build Walhalla. During a quarrel over the Ring, Fasolt is killed by Fafner. This is the contrast between male and female: one sex must first be killed within every human being: the man kills the woman, and the woman kills the man within themselves.

Higher consciousness must first be born out of the all-embracing consciousness of the earth. This takes place through Wotan's union with Erda; Brunhilde is born out of this union. She still possesses something of a wide and deep world-consciousness. To begin with, however, this consciousness withdraws to some extent. Wotan also begets Siegmund and Sieglinde with an earthly woman. They represent the two sexes of the soul, the male soul and the female soul. It is not possible for one to live without the other. The female soul, Sieglinde, is captured by Hunding. The soul must now submit to the physical brain. Siegmund, the soul imprisoned within the body, now begins to go astray. The soul is not strong enough to approach the Divine; the gods renounce Siegmund and his sword is shattered by Wotan's spear.

The guidance must now be left to the human Self which is active entirely in the sphere of the senses: to Hagen, the son of Alberich. The lower earthly forces begin to play the chief role. All the powers conspire against the union of the male and female soul-element: even Wotan must help Fricka against Siegmund on account of Hunding. Fricka represent the male-female soul upon a higher stage. She urges Wotan to sever the connection between male and female soul upon the earthly plane.

Upon a cosmic plane the male and female soul-elements are united, but upon the earth the blood and the senses influence human life. This is deeply indicated in the love between brother and sister, the forbidden element. If the original chasteness is to maintain its rule, Siegmund and Sieglinde, the physical element, must die. Sieglinde is doomed to be killed by Brunhilde, the all-encompassing consciousness, if the whole evolution of the earth is not to be obstructed. Brunhilde, however, helps her and gives her Grane, her horse, which bears the human being through the events of the earth. Brunhilde withdraws into exile. Flaming fire surrounds her rock. Clairvoyant consciousness is now surrounded by the fire through which the human being must first pass in order to become purified, if he wishes to reach once more the all-encompassing consciousness and to experience the catharsis.

Siegfried.

Sieglinde, the female soul-element, gives birth to Siegfried, the human consciousness which must again rise to higher worlds. He grows up secretly, guarded by Mime. He must overcome the lower nature, the dragon, in order to obtain power. He also overcomes Mime. Who is “Mime”? Mime can bestow something which renders invisible, the tarn-cap, the outcome of a power which remains invisible to ordinary human beings. The tarn-cap is the symbol of magicians, both of the white and of the black order. Even a magician of the black path may walk about invisibly in our midst. Mime is one who can bestow the tarn-cap which he has obtained out of the black forces of the earth. He strives to turn Siegfried into a black magician, but Siegfried rebels. He has killed the dragon, has taken up a drop of its blood, the symbol of passions, and is thus able to understand the speech of the birds (of the earthly world of the senses). He is able to tread the path of the higher initiates and is shown the path leading to Brunhilde, the all-embracing consciousness.

We have so far considered three phases of northern evolution. First of all the dwarf, then the giants, and now the human being. The Valkyria belongs to the second phase, and in Siegfried the human being itself is born. Imprisoned within his body he must find his way back again to the pure, white wisdom.

The Twilight of the Gods.

The fourth part of the Twilight of the Gods expresses that in the northern world the human being has not yet reached maturity and has not attained a complete initiation. Siegfried still possesses one vulnerable spot, where Christ bore the Cross. Siegfried cannot as yet take the Cross upon himself. This symbolizes in a profound way what the peoples of the North still lacked, and it also shows that Christianity was still a necessity for them. Siegfried cannot unite himself with Brunhilde. He is the human soul born out of a mortal woman, out of the union of Siegmund and Sieglinde. Brunhilde has remained virgin; she is the higher consciousness.

In the last phase, knowledge must be reached because man is not as yet able to unite himself with virgin wisdom. Consequently his impulse toward higher knowledge takes on the farm of desire. This is the last stage which must be conquered. The fact that Siegfried wishes to become united with Brunhilde in earthly passion leads to an exchange of possessions; she gives him the horse and he gives her the ring. Until the union with the higher Self has been reached, the ring, symbolizing coercion from outside, does not lose its power.

The human being dives down into lower consciousness, he is struck with blindness. Siegfried forgets Brunhilde and weds Gudrun, the lower consciousness. He even agrees to court Brunhilde for another unworthy man. This signifies that during the last phase, before Christianity arises, the human being follows the dark path of d falls prey once more to dark powers. The unrighteous union of Brunhilde with Gunther is the cause of Siegfried's ruin. He must incur death through the lower powers in the nets of which he has become entangled. (Hagen.)

The last phase approaches; the Norns appear once more. It is the phase in which the all-embracing consciousness is lost:

“Zu End ewiges Wissen!
Der Welt melden
Weise nichts mehr.
Hinab zur Mutter, hinab!”

(“Ended is wisdom eternal!

The higher wisdom which was formerly given to the sons of the gods is lost upon the earth, it returns to the Eternal. Humanity must now rely upon itself

Tristan and Isolde.

One who has a deeper vision, like Wagner, will discover that the Tristan theme is able to give a clearer insight into the problem connected with the dual aspect of sex.

The male and female elements are important only upon the physical plane. Tristan has the deep longing to be whole and undivided, to reach perfect harmony and a consciousness which is no longer male or female. This note of longing re-echoing throughout the drama may be expressed as follows: Tristan does not wish any longer to be merely Tristan, merely “I”, but he wishes to take up within him Isolde, so that in him live Isolde and Tristan.

The two have lost every consciousness of a division. This re-echoes in the final verses of the poem expressing redemption from a separate, divided form of existence:

“In des Wonnemeeres
wogendem Schwall,
In der Duftwellen
tönendem Schell,
In des Welt-Atems
wehendem All,
ertrinken,
versinken,
unbewusst
höchste Lust!”

(“In the blissful ocean's
rising and fall,
In the tidal's fragrant
resonant call,
In the world's breath, wherein
stirreth the All,
to drown, and
sink down,
unconscious
highest bliss!”)

These words are born out of a deeper knowledge. The surging ocean of bliss is the astral world, and Devachan is the sphere resounding in fragrant tones. The life-principle is the breath of the world; everything must be contained within it. To be no longer severed and divided in the sphere of consciousness, but to “drown and sink down” unconsciously into an undifferentiated element—this is highest bliss. Within earthly life it is indeed highest bliss to overcome it, to overcome sense-life through spiritual life. Desire seeking to destroy what pertains to the earth still takes on the form of desire. Nevertheless it is a noble form of desire if the element of desire contained in this aspiration is overcome. This is the problem which Wagner tries to solve in his “Tristan and Isolde”. All these thoughts did not live consciously or abstractly in Wagner; they were thoughts contained in the myth itself.

It is not necessary for an artist to have these thoughts in an abstract form. Just as a plant grows in accordance with laws of which it knows nothing, so the cosmic forces within myths have a life of their own; these are forces which are also active within the human being and they penetrate into a work of art.

Wagner's Siegfried is still entangled in the earthly element; he must perish in it. Brunhilde realizes the relationship of facts and understands what is at stake. So she yields the ring to the Daughters of the Rhine, to an element which has not penetrated into the working influences of this world.

The whole evolution of the world goes back to the originally virgin substance. The older northern world conception is replaced by another one which does not appeal any longer to what pertains to the external world of the senses, but to what has remained virgin—to the soul.

Brunhilde, who has become involved in the external world of the senses through her union with Siegfried rides into the fire, and love is born out of it. The whole tragedy of this thought is deeply felt by the peoples of the north, because they realise that what they were once able to understand begins to perish.

Love is born out of the Spirit, out of the sea of fire, the originally virgin substance.

“Incarnatus est per Sanctum Spiritum ex Maria Virgine!”

The same element which gave birth to egoism, to a love which is selfish, now gives birth to a new feeling, high above everything that is entangled in the physical sphere. Wisdom withdraws in order to give birth to love out of that part of the elements which is still chaste and virgin. This love is the Christ, the Christian principle. Unselfish love opposed to selfish love, this is the great process of evolution which must take place through the mysterious involution-process of death, the destruction of physical matter. The contrasts of life and death are drawn by Wagner in sharp outlines.

The wood of the Cross symbolizes life which has withered away, and upon this Cross hangs the new everlasting Life which will give rise to a new epoch.

A new spiritual life proceeds out of the Twilight of the Gods. Richard Wagner's longing, to set forth the Christ principle in all its depth, after his description of the four phases of northern life, appears in his Parsifal. This is the fifth phase. Because Wagner felt so deeply the tragic note contained in the northern world conception of evolution he also felt it incumbent upon him to set forth the glorification of Christianity.

Parsifal.

The deeper we penetrate into Richard Wagner's work, the more we shall find in it cosmic-mystical problems, and riddles of life.

It is very significant that after having described the whole primordial age of the Germanic peoples in the four phases of the Ring of the Nibelungs, Richard Wagner created an eminently Christian drama, the work with which he closed his life: Parsifal. We must penetrate into Richard Wagner's personality if we wish to understand what lives in Parsifal.

For Richard Wagner, the character of Jesus of Nazareth was beginning to take on a definite shape ever since his fortieth year. At first he intended to create an entirely different work of art, by setting forth the infinite love for the whole of mankind which lived in Jesus of Nazareth. He conceived the fundamental idea of this drama when he was fifty, and it was to be entitled, “The Victor”. This work shows us the deep world-conception which was the source of the poet's intuitions. The contents of the drama is briefly as follows

Arnanda, a youth of the noble Brahmin caste, is loved passionately by Prakriti, a Chandala maiden, that is, of a lower, despised caste. He renounces this love and becomes a disciple of Buddha. According to Wagner's idea, the Chandala maiden was the reincarnation of a woman belonging to the highest Brahmin caste, who had haughtily spurned the love of a Chandala youth, and whose karmic punishment it is to be born again within the Chandala caste. When she has reached a point in her development enabling her to renounce her love, she also becomes a disciple of Buddha.

You see, therefore, that Wagner grasped the problem of karma in all its depth, out of the true spirit of Buddhism; when he was about fifty years old he had developed to the extent of being able to create a drama of such deep moral force and earnestness as “The Victor”. All these thoughts then flow together in his Parsifal, but at the same time the Christ-problem stands in the centre of the drama. Out of Parsifal streams the whole profundity of this medieval problem.

Wolfram von Eschenbach was the first one to give a poetical shape to the mystery of Parsifal. In him we find the same theme, created out of the deepest substance of the Middle Ages. In the highest minds of the Middle Ages who were imbued with spiritual life lived something which the initiated named the exaltation of love. Before and after, there were Minnesingers, minstrels of love. But there was a great difference between what was formerly understood as love in the Germanic countries, and what arose later on in Christianity as purified love.

This is illustrated and handed down to us in “Armer Heinrich” (“Poor Henry”). Hartmann von der Aue's “Poor Henry” is filled with the spiritual life which the crusaders brought back from the Orient. Let us place before us briefly the, contents of “Poor Henry”: A Swabian knight who has always been fortunate in life is suddenly struck by an incurable disease, which can only be healed through the sacrifice and death of a pure virgin. A virgin is found who is willing to sacrifice herself. They go to Salerno to a celebrated physician. At the last moment, however, Henry regrets the sacrifice and does not wish to accept it. The virgin remains alive. Henry regains his health after all, and they get married.

Here we have, therefore, a pure virgin and her sacrifice on behalf of a man who has only lived a life of pleasure and who is saved through her sacrifice. A mystery lies, concealed in this. From the standpoint of the Middle Ages, Minnesinging was looked upon as something which had been handed down from the four phases of ancient Germanic life, as contained in the sagas which Wagner placed before us in his Tetralogy. Love based on the life of the senses was considered at that time as something which had been overcome; love was to rise again spiritually, linked up with the feeling of renunciation.

In order to realise what took place, we must collect all the factors which reconstruct for us the expression, the physiognomy of that past period. And then we shall be able to understand what induced Wagner to set forth this legend.

The earliest Germanic races had a legend which we can trace throughout history, one of the root-legends which can also be found in a somewhat different form in Italy and in other countries. Let us place before you, the outline of this legend: A man has learnt to know the pleasures and joys of this world, and penetrates into a kind of subterranean cavern. There he meets a woman of exceeding great charm and attraction. He experiences the joys of paradise, nevertheless he longs to return to the earth. Finally he comes out of the mountain and returns to life.—This is a legend which we can find everywhere in Europe, and it appears to us very clearly in Tannhäuser. If we study this legend we shall find that it is, to begin with, the personification of love in the Germanic countries before the great turning point of the times. Life in the world outside is renounced for a retirement in the cavern to the joys brought by the old kind of love, by the goddess Venus.

In this form the legend has no real point of issue, no possibility of looking up to something higher. It arose before love underwent the already mentioned transformation. Later on, in the early times of Christianity when love began to take on a spiritual form, people sought to throw a glaring light on these earlier periods and on this paradise in the cave of Venus, as a contrast to the other paradise which they had found.

At this point we must consider our fifth root-race. When the floods had buried Atlantis, the sub-races of the fifth root-race gradually emerged: the Indian, the Median-Persian, the Assyrian-Babylonian-Semitic, the Graeco-Latin races. When the Roman culture began to flow off, our fifth sub-race emerged, the Germanic races in which we now live and which have a special significance for Christian Europe.

Not that Wagner was aware of all these things, but he possessed an unerring feeling for the world-situation and felt what tasks were incumbent upon the races; he felt it just as clearly as if he had known spiritual science.

You know that every one of these races was inspired by great initiates. The fifth root-race arose out of the ancient Semitic races. A trace of this origin still lives in all the sub-races which have so far constituted the fifth root-race. You know that after the destruction of Atlantis by the great flood the peoples who had emigrated and had thus been preserved from destruction were led by Manu, a divine guide, into Asia, into the desert of Gobi. Cultural influences went out from there to India, Persia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and even to our own countries.

History can no longer trace the first semitic streams of influence upon human civilisation when contemplating the ancient Aryan civilisation. This influence appears more clearly only in the third sub-race, in the Egyptian-Semitic-Babylonian peoples. The people of Israel even derive their name from it. Christianity itself may be led back, as a fourth influence, to a semitic impulse. If we continue studying the development of these influences we shall find the semitic impulse in the Moorish culture which penetrated into Spain, and spread over the whole of Europe influencing even Christian monks.

Thus the primal semitic impulse reaches as far as the fifth sub-race.

We see the impulses of one great stream penetrate five times into the earliest civilisations. We have one great spiritual stream coming from the South, which is met by another stream arising in the North, which penetrates into four phases of the early northern civilisation and develops until it meets the first stream, thus flowing together with it. A childlike, unworldly nation dwelt in northern Europe and these early inhabitants underwent the influence of the stream of culture coming from the South at the turning point of the 12th and 13th century. This new culture penetrated into these regions like a spiritual current of air. Wolfram von Eschenbach was entirely under the influence of this spiritual current.

The northern civilisation is symbolized in the legend of Tannhäuser, which also contains an impulse from the South. Everywhere we come across something which may be designated as a semitic impulse.

There was one thing, however, which was, felt very strongly: namely, that the Germanic races were a last link in this chain of development and that something entirely new would arise, preparing something completely different within the sixth sub-race: the higher mission of Christianity. The Germanic peoples longed for this new form of Christianity: a Christianity was to be called into life which had nothing to do with what had been taken over from the South. A contrast arose between Rome and Jerusalem; “Rome on the one side and Jerusalem on the other” was the battle-cry under which the crusaders fought. The idea that Jerusalem must be the centre was never lost.

A spiritual Jerusalem, rather then a physical one, was borne in mind: Jerusalem as a spiritual centre, and at the same time as an outpost of the future.

It was felt that the fifth sub-race had to serve still another purpose, that it had to fulfil a special task. The old impulses had ceased, something entirely new was to come, a new spiral curve in the civilisation of the world began. What had come from the South was only an attempt; the kernel was now to be peeled out of its skins. At the turn of the Middle Ages it was felt that something old, which had been experienced as a boon, was setting and had come to an end, and that the longing for something new contained a new impulse which was gradually coming into life. These were the feelings which lived particularly in the strong personality of Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Consider now the new period. Imagine this feeling rising up anew in a period of decadence, and then you will find in it something of what lived in Wagner. Many things had in the meantime taken place which were formerly experienced as decay of the race. Richard Wagner felt this particularly strongly ever since his conscious life began. The chaos which surrounds us to such a great extent to-day, the chaos in which the masses waste away through sickness, contain both the symptoms of decay and of a new life.

The misery of the great masses of European people, whose spiritual life remains hidden in darkness, who are cut away from education and culture, has never been experienced more deeply than by Richard Wagner, and for this reason he became a revolutionary in the year 1848, for the following thought weighed heavily on his heart: It lies within our power to help in accelerating the downward course of the wheel, or in guiding it up again.

This is the idea of Bayreuth. The events of 1848 were only an insignificant symptom of the coming spiritual movement. If we grasp this, we shall be able to understand how Richard Wagner came to his race-problem, dealt with in his prose-writings. He expresses himself more or less as follows: In Asia, in the Hindoo race, we may find something of the primordial force of the Aryan race. Some of the strong spiritual forces of the Aryan race exist for a chosen few, for the Brahmin caste. The lower castes are excluded, but a high spiritual standpoint is reached by the Brahmins. Then we may find in the North a more childlike race (thus Wagner continues), which has passed through the four stages of evolution within the race itself. These people delight in hunting; killing is a joy to them, but this pleasure in taking away life is a symptom of decadence. It is a deep, occult fact that life is strangely connected with knowledge, with the development of man in the direction of higher spiritual knowledge. Everything man doer, in the way of cruelty or of destruction of life takes away from him the pure spiritual forces. For this reason, those who increase the forces of egoism, who tread the black path, must destroy life. (In Mabel Collin's “Flita”, the story of a woman dealing in black magic, Flita destroys unborn existences, because she needs life in order to maintain her power.)

There is a deep connection between the taking away of life and the life of man. In the eternal course of evolution this is a lesson which must be learnt and experienced. But it is another matter if during a certain period of evolution people take away life in a naïve way. Once upon a time the act of killing made man feel his own strength. This may be said of the ancient Germanic races, the hunting peoples. Ever since Christianity has appeared, it is a mortal sin to kill, and killing is now a symptom of decadence in a race.

This was the foundation of the view which induced Wagner to become a strict vegetarian. In his opinion, the only way in which a race may grow in strength is through a nourishment which does not imply killing.

The feeling that a new impulse had to come produced in Wagner also his ideas concerning the influence of the Jews upon our present civilisation.

He was not anti-semitic in the present, odious way, but he felt that Judaism as such had finished to play its role, and that the semitic impulses must die out. This gave rise to his call for emancipation from these impulses. A powerful spiritual direction made him feel that something new must replace earlier influences. This is connected with his ideas about the Germanic races. He made a clear distinction between the development of the soul and of the race. This distinction must be made by saying: We were all incarnated in the Atlantean race. Whereas the souls have risen higher, the races have degenerated. Every step we ascend is connected with a descent. For every man who grows more noble-minded there is one who sinks down lower. There is a difference between the soul dwelling within the race-body and the race-body itself. The more a human being resembles the race to which he belongs, the more he loves what is transient and is connected with the qualities of his race, the more he will degenerate with the race. The more he emancipates himself, lifting himself out of the peculiarities of his race, the more his soul will have the possibility to incarnate more highly. Richard Wagner knows that in fighting against the Semitic element we should not fight against the souls who are incarnated within the race, but only against the race as such, which has finished to play its role. Wagner thus makes a distinction between the descending evolution of the race and the ascending evolution of souls. He felt the necessity of this ascending evolution just as keenly as a medieval soul, just as keenly as Wolfram von Eschenbach, or Hartmann von der Aue.

We must consider once more what is contained in the fact that in “Armer Heinrich” (Poor Henry) Henry is healed by a pure virgin. Henry has lived, to begin with, a life of the senses, his Ego is born out of his race. This “Ego” begins to all as soon as it begins to hear the higher call, the call meant for humanity in general. The soul grows ill because it connects itself with something which is only rooted in the race: with a form of love which is rooted in the race. Now this lower kind of love living within the race must develop into a higher form of love. What lives within the race must be redeemed by something higher, by the higher, purer soul that is ready to sacrifice herself for the striving soul of man.

You know that the soul consists of a male and a female part, and that the impressions of the senses which enter the soul push this soul-element into the background.

“The eternal Feminine draws us along!” (“Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan!” Goethe, Faust II). Salvation means that sense-life must be overcome. We find this redemption also in “Tristan and Isolde”.

The historical expression for the overcoming of sense-life is “Parsifal”. He is the representative of a new Christianity. He becomes the King of the Holy Grail because he redeems what has once been held in the bondage of the senses and thus brings into the world a new principle of love. What lies at the foundation of Parsifal? What is the meaning of the Holy Grail? The earliest legend which appears at the turning-point of the Middle Ages tells us that the Holy Grail is the cup which was used by Jesus Christ at the Lord's Supper, the cup in which he offered the bread and the. wine and in which Joseph of Arimataea caught up the blood streaming out of Christ's wound. The spear which caused this wound and the chalice were born up by angels, who held it suspended in the air until Titurel found them and built upon Montsalvat (which means: the Mountain of Salvation) a castle in which he could guard these treasures. Twelve knights gathered together to serve the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail had the power to avert the danger of death from these knights and to supply them with everything they needed for their life. Whenever they looked upon it they acquired new spiritual strength.

On the one side, we have the temple of the Holy Grail with its knights, and on the other, the Magic Castle of Klingsor with his knights, who are, in reality, the enemies of the knighthood of the Holy Grail. We are confronted with two forms of Christianity. One kind is represented by the knights of the Holy Grail and the other by Klingsor. Klingsor is the man who has mutilated himself in order not to fall a prey to the senses. But he has not overcome his desires, he has only taken away the possibility to satisfy them. Thus he lives in a sensual sphere. The maidens of the magic castle serve him, and everything belonging to the sphere of desires is at his disposal. Kundry is the real temptress in this kingdom: she attracts everyone who approaches Klingsor into the sphere of sensual love. Klingsor has not destroyed desire, but only the organ of desire. He personifies the form of Christianity which comes from the South and introduced an ascetic life; it eliminated a sensual life, but it could not destroy desire; it could protect against the tempting powers of Kundry. A higher element was perceived in the power of a spirituality which rises above sensual life into the sphere of purified love, not through compulsion, but through a higher, spiritual knowledge.

Amfortas and the knights of the Holy Grail strive after this, but they do not succeed in establishing this kingdom So long as the true spiritual force is lacking, Amfortas yields to the temptations of Kundry. The higher spirituality personified in Amfortas falls a prey to the lower memory.

Thus we are confronted with two phenomena. On the one hand, Christianity which has become ascetic and is unable to reach a higher spiritual knowledge; and on the other hand, the spiritual knighthood which falls a prey to Klingsor's temptation until the redeemer appears who vanquishes Klingsor. Amfortas is wounded and loses the sacred spear; he must guard the Holy Grail as a sorrow-laden king. This higher Christianity is therefore diseased and suffering; it must guard the mysteries of Christianity in sorrow until a new saviour appears. And this saviour appears in Parsifal.

Parsifal must first learn his lesson, he passes through tests; he then becomes purified and finally attains spiritual power, the feeling of the great oneness of all existence. Richard Wagner thus unconsciously comes to great occult truths. First of all to compassion. Parsifal at first passes through a scale of experiences which fill him with compassion for our older brothers, the animals. In his violent desire to embrace knighthood he has abandoned his mother Herzeleide, who has died of a broken heart. He has battled and killed. The dying glance of an animal then taught him what it means: “to kill”.

The second stage consists in rising above desire, without killing desire from outside.

So he reaches the sanctuary of the Grail, but he does not as yet understand his task. He learns his lesson through life, He falls into temptation through Kundry, but he stands the test. Just when he is about to fall, he rises above desire; a new pure love shines forth within him like a rising sun.

Something flares up which we already discovered in the Twilight of the Gods: “Incarnatus est de spiritum sanctum ex Maria Virgine”, born of the Spirit through the Virgin, (the higher love, which is not filled with sensual feelings).

The human being must awaken within him a soul which purifies everything transmitted by the senses. because virgin substance, virgin matter, will give birth to the Ego of the Christ. The lower female element in the human soul dies and will be replaced by a higher female element which lifts him up to the Spirit.

A higher virgin power faces the seducing Kundry. Kundry, the other female element pertaining to sex which draws man down, which seeks to draw him down, must be overcome.

Kundry has already lived once as Herodias who asked for the head of John the Baptist, Herodias, the mother of Ahasver. The force which cannot find peace and seeks everywhere a sensual love, this force takes on the form of a love which must first be purified, undergo a transformation, like Kundry. Emancipation from a love dependent on the senses—this is the mystery which Richard Wagner has woven into his Parsifal.

This thought permeates all the works of Richard Wagner. Even in his “Flying Dutchman” the intuitive force of his nature leads him to the same problem, for in this work we find that a virgin is willing to sacrifice herself for the Dutchman, thus redeeming him from his long wanderings. And the same problem is contained in “Tannhäuser”. The singer's contest on the Wartburg is set forth as a contest between the singer of the old sensual love, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Wolfram von Eschenbach, who is the representative of the new, spiritual Christianity. He overcomes Heinrich von Ofterdingen, who has called in the aid of Klingsor from Hungary, but Wolfram overcomes both. Now we are able to understand Tristan more deeply, because we know that what lives in him is not the killing of love, but the overcoming of the race, or the purification of love.

Richard Wagner rose from Schopenhauer's “Denial of the Will” to a purification of the will.

Wagner even expressed this purification in his “Meistersingers”, where Hans Sachs' feelings toward Eve undergo a purification when he seeks to win her for himself. This is expressed not so much in the text, as in the music.

All this has streamed together in his Parsifal. Richard Wagner looked back upon the ancient ideal of the Brahmins, and perceived with sorrow the symptoms of decay in the present race. He wished to give rise to a new impulse born out of art. In his Festivals at Bayreuth he had in mind to redeem the race by giving it a new spiritual content.

This was the spirit which prompted Nietzsche, so long as he was connected with Wagner, to write about “Dyonisian Art”. He felt that these Festivals contained something of the spirit of the ancient Mysteries. The Mysteries had contributed to the development of the human race up to the fourth sub-race. In the Mystery-temple of Dyonisos it was possible to experience this uplifting impulse, and in the North, the initiates, the druids, spoke of the twilight of the gods out of which a new race would come forth, would have to come forth.

Our civilisation, with its task of introducing Christianity, stands in the very midst of these ideas. Sorrowfully the Greek disciple of the Mysteries spoke of the man “who would come to fulfil the Mysteries”.

Richard Wagner saw the time approaching when Christianity, developing out of the fifth sub-race, would have to be fulfilled. He brought faith also to those “who could not see”. A time will come when the God of the Mysteries will rise again from the human into the divine sphere. The twilight of the gods of the ancient northern saga shows us this ascent, in the gods' journey to Walhalla along the rainbow-bridge. The time draws near and must be fulfilled when Christianity begins to speak its own characteristic language, when “those who believed will be able to see again”. Bayreuth thus shows us two currents of civilisation: The renewal of the Mysteries of Greece, and a new Christianity—thus uniting what had become severed.

Richard Wagner and all those who surrounded him felt this, and Edouard Schuré had the same feeling about this art. He saw in it the prologue introducing the union of what had become severed in the past.

Religion, art and science were united in the ancient primordial drama: then came the division and three separate currents began to flow out of the one source contained within the Greek Mysteries.

Each current owes its development to the fact that it went its own separate way. In the course of time a “religious” element arose for the soul, an “artistic” one for the senses, and a “scientific” one for the understanding.

This was inevitable, for perfection could be reached only if man unfolded every one of his capacities separately until they attained the highest point of development.

If religion is led toward the highest form of Christianity, it is willing to become reunited with art and science. Art—poetry, painting, sculpture and music—will reach the summit if it becomes permeated with true religion. And science, which has reached its full development in the modern period, has really given the impulse for the reunion of these three currents.

Richard Wagner, one of the first who felt the impulse leading to a reunion of art, science and religion, has offered this to humanity as a new gift.

He felt that Christianity is again called upon to unite everything. And he poured this new Christianity into his Parsifal.

The Good Friday music, expressing Wagner's own Good Friday feelings, re-echoes in our ear as if it were the great current of a new civilisation. The Good Friday experience revealed to him that the individual development of the soul and the development of the race must go separate ways, that the souls must be lifted up and saved, that it is our task to awaken the soul to new life, in spite of the tragic fate connecting the body with the race, with the forces which are doomed to decay.

To fill the world with tones pointing to a new future, this is what Richard Wagner wished to set forth at Bayreuth, this is the newly rising star which he pointed out to us. At least a small part of humanity should listen to the tones of the future age.

Wagner's life-work ends with apocalyptic words, the apocalypse which he wished to proclaim to his period, as a true prophet who knew that a new age would dawn very soon:

“Die Gesichte, die ich sehe,
Will ich Euch künden!”

“The visions I see

let me proclaim to you!”

In the evening hours of our Christmas Gathering,¹ I should like to give you a kind of survey of human evolution on the earth, that may help us to become more intimately conscious of the nature and being of present-day man. For at this time in man's history, when we can see already in preparation events of extraordinary importance for the whole civilisation of humanity, every thinking man must be inclined to ask: ‘How has the present configuration, the present make-up of the human soul arisen? How has it come about through the long course of evolution?’ For it cannot be denied that the present only becomes comprehensible as we try to understand its origin in the past.

The present age is however one that is peculiarly prejudiced in its thought about the evolution of man and of mankind. It is commonly believed that, as regards his life of soul and spirit, man has always been essentially the same as he is to-day throughout the whole of the time that we call history. True, in respect of knowledge, it is imagined that in ancient times human beings were childlike, that they believed in all kinds of fancies, and that man has only really become clever in the scientific sense in modern times; but if we look away from the actual sphere of knowledge, it is generally held that the soul-constitution which man has to-day was also possessed by the ancient Greek and by the ancient Oriental. Even though it be admitted that modifications may have occurred in detail, yet on the whole it is supposed that throughout the historical period everything in the life of the soul has been as it is to-day. Then we go on to assume a prehistoric life of man, and say that nothing is really known of this. Going still further back, we picture man in a kind of animal form. Thus, in the first place, as we trace back in historical time, we see a soul-life undergoing comparatively little change. Then the picture disappears in a kind of cloud, and before that again we see man in his animal imperfection as a kind of higher ape-being. Such is approximately the usual conception of to-day.

Now all this rests on an extraordinary prejudice, for in forming such a conception, we do not take the trouble to observe the important differences that exist in the soul-constitution of a man of the present-time, as compared even with that of a relatively not very far distant past,—say, of the 11th, 10th, or 9th century A.D. The difference goes deeper when we compare the constitution of soul in the human being of to-day and in a contemporary of the Mystery of Golgotha, or in a Greek; while if we go over to the ancient Oriental world of which the Greek civilisation was, in a sense, a kind of colony, we find there a disposition of soul utterly different from that of the man of to-day. I should like to show you from real instances how man lived in the East, let us say, ten thousand, or fifteen thousand years ago, and how different he was in nature from the Greek, and how still more different from what we ourselves are.

Let us first call to mind our own soul-life. I will take an example from it. We have a certain experience; and of this experience, in which we take part through our senses, or through our personality in some other way, we form an idea, a concept, and we retain this idea in our thought. After a certain time the idea may arise again out of our thought into our conscious soul-life, as memory. You have perhaps to-day a memory-experience that leads you back to experiences in perception of some ten years ago. Now try and understand exactly what that really means. Ten years ago you experienced something. Ten years ago you may have visited a gathering of men and women. You formed an idea of each one of these persons, of their appearance and so on. You experienced what they said to you, and what you did in common with them. All that, in the form of pictures, may arise before you to-day. It is an inner soul-picture that is present within you, connected with the event which occurred ten years ago. Now not only according to Science, but according to a general feeling,—which is, of course, experienced by man to-day in an extremely weak form, but which nevertheless is experienced,—according to this general feeling man localises such a memory-concept which brings back a past experience, in his head. He says:—‘What lives as the memory of an experience is present in my head.’

Now let us jump a long way back in human evolution, and consider the early population of the Orient, of which the Chinese and Indians as we know them in history were only the late descendants: that is, let us go back really thousands of years. Then, if we contemplate a human being of that ancient epoch, we find that he did not live in such a way as to say: ‘I have in my head the memory of something I have experienced, something I have undergone, in external life.’ He had no such inner feeling or experience; it simply did not exist for him. His head was not filled with thoughts and ideas. The present-day man thinks in his superficial way that as we to-day have ideas, thoughts, and concepts, so human beings always possessed these, as far back as history records; but that is not the case. If with spiritual insight we go back far enough, we meet with human beings who did not have ideas, concepts, thoughts at all in their head, who did not experience any such abstract content of the head, but, strange as it may seem, experienced the whole head; they perceived and felt their whole head. These men did not give themselves up to abstractions as we do. To experience ideas in the head was something quite foreign to them, but they knew how to experience their own head. And as you, when you have a memory-picture, refer the memory-picture to an experience, as a relationship exists between your memory-picture and the experience, similarly these men related the experience of their head to the Earth, to the whole Earth. They said:—‘There exists in the Cosmos the Earth. And there exists in the Cosmos I myself, and as a part of me, my head; and the head which I carry on my shoulders is the cosmic memory of the Earth. The Earth existed earlier; my head later. That I have a head is due to the memory, the cosmic memory of earthly existence. The earthly existence is always there. But the whole configuration, the whole shape of the human head, is in relation to the whole Earth.’ Thus an ancient Eastern felt in his own head the being of the Earth-planet itself. He said: ‘Out of the whole great cosmic existence the Gods have created, have generated the Earth with its kingdoms of Nature, the Earth

with its rivers and mountains. I carry on my shoulders my head; and this head of mine is a true picture of the Earth. This head, with the blood flowing in it, is a true picture of the Earth with the land and water coursing over it. The configuration of mountains on the Earth repeats itself in my head in the configurations of my brain; I carry on my shoulders my own image of the Earth-planet.’ Exactly as our modern man refers his memory-picture to his experience, so did the man of old refer his entire head to the Earth-planet. A considerable difference in inner perception!

Further, when we consider the periphery of the Earth, and fit it, as it were, into our vision of things, we feel this air surrounding the Earth as air permeated by the Sun's warmth and light; and in a certain sense, we can say: ‘The Sun lives in the atmosphere of the Earth.’ The Earth opens herself to the Cosmic universe; the activities that come forth from herself she yields up to the encircling atmosphere, and opens herself to receive the activities of the Sun. Now each human being, in those ancient times, experienced the region of the Earth on which he lived as of peculiar importance. An ancient Eastern would feel some portion of the surface of the Earth as his own; beneath him the earth, and above him the encircling atmosphere turned towards the Sun. The rest of the Earth that lay to left and right, in front and behind—all the rest of the Earth merged into a general whole.

Thus if an ancient Oriental lived, for example, on Indian soil, he experienced the Indian soil as especially important for him; but everything else on the Earth, East, West, South of him, disappeared into the whole. He did not concern himself much with the way in which the Earth in these other parts was bounded by the rest of Cosmic space; while on the other hand not only was the soil on which he lived something important, but the extension of the Earth into Cosmic space in this region became a matter of great moment to him. The way in which he was able to breathe on this particular soil was felt by him as an inner experience of special importance.

To-day we are not in the habit of asking, how does one breathe in this or that place? We are of course still subject to favourable or unfavourable conditions for breathing, but we are no longer so conscious of the fact. For an ancient Oriental this was different. The way in which he was able to breathe was for him a very deep experience, and so were many other things too that depend on the character of the Earth's relation and contact with cosmic space. All that goes to make up the Earth, the whole Earth, was felt by the human being of those early times as that which lived in his head.

Now the head is enclosed by the hard firm bones of the skull, it is shut in above, on two sides and behind. But it has certain exits; it has a free opening downwards towards the chest. And it was of special importance for the man of olden time to feel how the head opens with relative freedom in the direction of the chest. (See Drawing). And as he had to feel the inner configuration of the head as an image of the Earth, so he had to bring the environment of the Earth, all that is above and around the Earth, into connection with the opening downwards, the turning towards the heart. In this he saw an image of how the Earth opens to the Cosmos. It was a mighty experience for a man of those ancient times when he said: ‘In my head I feel the whole Earth. But this Earth opens to my chest which carries within it my heart. And that which takes place between head, chest and heart is an image of what is borne out from my life into the Cosmos, borne out to the surrounding atmosphere that is open to the Sun.’

A great experience it was for him, and one of deep meaning, when he was able to say: ‘Here in my head lives the Earth. When I go deeper, there the Earth is turning towards the Sun; my heart is the image of the Sun.’ In this way did the man of olden times attain what corresponds to our life of feeling.

We have the abstract life of feeling still. But who of us knows anything directly of his heart? Through anatomy and physiology, we think we know something, but it is about as much as we know of some papier-mâché model of the heart that we may have before us. On the other hand, what we have as a feeling-experience of the world, that the man of olden times did not have. In place of it he had the experience of his heart. Just as we relate our feeling to the world in which we live, just as we feel whether we love a man or meet him with antipathy, whether we like this or that flower, whether we incline towards this or that, just as we relate our feelings to the world—but to a world torn out, as it were, in airy abstraction, from the solid, firm Cosmos—in the same way did the ancient Oriental relate his heart to the Cosmos, that is, to that which goes away from the Earth in the direction of the Sun.

Again, we say to-day: I will walk. We know that our will lives in our limbs. The ancient man of the East had an essentially different experience. What we call ‘will’ was quite unknown to him. We judge quite wrongly when we believe that what we call thinking, feeling and willing were present among the ancient Eastern races. It was not at all the case. They had head experiences, which were Earth experiences. They had chest or heart experiences, which were experiences of the environment of the Earth as far out as the Sun. The Sun corresponds to the heart experience. Then they had a further experience, a feeling of expanding and stretching out into their limbs. They became conscious and aware of their own humanity in the movement of their legs and feet, or of their arms and hands. They themselves were within the movements. And in this expansion of the inner being into the limbs, they felt a direct picture of their connection with the starry worlds. (See Drawing). ‘In my head I have a picture of the Earth. Where my head opens freely downwards into the chest and reaches down to my heart, I have a picture of what lives in the Earth's environment. In what I experience as the forces of my arms and hands, of my feet and legs, I have something which represents the relation the Earth bears to the stars that live far out there in cosmic space.’

When therefore man wanted to express the experience he had as ‘willing’ human being—to use the language of to-day,—he did not say: I walk. We can see that from the very words that he used. Nor did he say: I sit down. If we investigate the ancient languages in respect of their finer content, we find everywhere that for the action which we describe by saying: I walk, the ancient Oriental would have said: Mars impels me, Mars is active in me. Going forward was felt as a Mars impulse in the legs.

Grasping hold of something, feeling and touching with the hands, was expressed by saying: Venus works in me. Pointing out something to another person was expressed by saying: Mercury works in me. Even when a rude person called some one's attention by giving him a push or a kick, the action would be described by saying: Mercury was working in that person. Sitting down was a Jupiter activity, and lying down, whether for rest or from sheer laziness, was expressed by saying: I give myself over to the impulses of Saturn. Thus man felt in his limbs the wide spaces of the Cosmos out beyond. He knew that when he went away from the Earth out into cosmic space, he came into the Earth's environment and then into the starry spheres. If he went downwards from his head, he passed through the very same experience, only this time within his own being. In his head he was in the Earth, in his chest and heart he was in the environment of the Earth, in his limbs he was in the starry Cosmos beyond.

From a certain point of view such an experience is perfectly possible for man. Alas for us, poor men of to-day, who can experience only abstract thoughts! What are these in reality, for the most part? We are very proud of them, but we quite forget what is far beyond the cleverest of them,—our head; our head is much more rich in content than the very cleverest of our abstract thoughts. Anatomy and physiology know little of the marvel and mystery of the convolutions of the brain, but one single convolution of the brain is more majestic and more powerful than the abstract knowledge of the greatest genius. There was once a time on the Earth when man was not merely conscious as we are of thoughts lying around, so to speak, but was conscious of his own head; he felt the head as the image of the Earth, and he felt this or that part of the head—let us say, the optic thalamus or the corpora quadrigemina—as the image of a certain, physical mountainous configuration of the Earth. He did not then merely relate his heart to the Sun in accordance with some abstract theory, he felt: ‘My head stands in the same relation to my chest, to my heart, as the Earth does to the Sun.’ That was the time when man had grown together, in his whole life, with the Cosmic Universe; he had become one with the Cosmos. And this found expression in his whole life.

Through the fact that we to-day put our puny thinking in the place of our head, through this very fact we are able to have a conceptual memory, we are able to remember things in thought. We form pictures in thought of what we have experienced as abstract memories in our head. That could not be done by a man of olden times who did not have thoughts, but still had his head. He could not form memory pictures. And so, in those regions of the Ancient East where people were still conscious of their head, but had as yet no thoughts and hence no memories, we find developed to a remarkable degree something of which people are again beginning to feel the need to-day. For a long time such a thing has not been necessary, and if to-day the need for it is returning it is due to what I can only call slovenliness of soul.

If in that time of which I have spoken one were to enter the region inhabited by people who were still conscious of their head, chest, heart and limbs, one would see on every hand small pegs placed in the earth and marked with some sign. Or here and there a sign made upon a wall. Such memorials were to be found scattered over all inhabited regions. Wherever anything happened, a man would set up some kind of memorial, and when he came back to the place, he lived through the event over again in the memorial he had made. Man had grown together with the earth, he had become one with it with his head. To-day he merely makes a note of some event in his head. As I have pointed out already, we are beginning once more to find it necessary to make notes not only in our head but also in a note-book; this is due as I said, to slovenliness of soul, but we shall nevertheless require to do it more and more. At that time however there was no such thing as making notes even in one's head, because thoughts and ideas were simply nonexistent. Instead, the land was dotted over with signs. And from this habit, so naturally acquired by men in olden times, has arisen the whole custom of making monuments and memorials.

Everything that has happened in the historical evolution of mankind has its origin and cause in the inner being of man. If we were but honest, we should have to admit that we modern men have not the faintest knowledge of the deeper basis of this custom of erecting memorials. We set them up from habit. They are however the relics of the ancient monuments and signs put up by man in a time when he had no memory such as we have to-day but was taught, in any place where he had some experience, there to set up a memorial, so that when he came that way again he might re-experience the event in his head; for the head can call up again everything that has connection with the earth. ‘We give over to the earth what our head has experienced’—was a principle of olden times.

And so we have to point to a very early time in the ancient East, the epoch of localised memory, when everything of the nature of memory was connected with the setting up of signs and memorials on the earth. Memory was not within, but without. Everywhere were memorial tablets and memorial stones. It was localised memory, a remembering connected with place.

Even to-day it is still of no small value for a man's spiritual evolution that he should sometimes make use of his capacity for this kind of memory, for a memory that is not within him but is unfolded in connection with the outer world. It is good sometimes to say: I will not remember this or that, but I will set here or there a sign, or token; or, I will let my soul unfold an experience about certain things, only in connection with signs or tokens. I will, for instance, hang a picture of the Madonna in a corner of my room, and when the picture is before me, I will experience in my soul all that I can experience by turning with my whole soul to the Madonna. For there is a subtle relation to a thing belonging so intimately to the home as does the picture of the Madonna that we meet with in the homes of the people, when we go a little way eastwards in Europe; we have not even to go as far as Russia, we find them everywhere in Central Europe. All experience of this nature is in reality a relic of the epoch of localised memory. The memory is outside, it attaches to the place.

A second stage is reached when man passes from localised to rhythmic memory. Thus we have first, localised memory; and secondly, rhythmic memory.

We have now come to the time when, not from any conscious, subtle finesse, but right out of his own inner being, man had developed the need of living in rhythm. He felt a need so to reproduce, within himself, what he heard that a rhythm was formed. If his experience of a cow, for instance, suggested ‘moo,’ he did not simply call her ‘moo,’ but ‘moo-moo,’—perhaps, in very ancient times, ‘moo-moo-moo.’ That is to say, the perception was as it were piled up in repetition, so as to produce rhythm. You can follow the same process in the formation of many words to-day; and you can observe how little children still feel the need of these repetitions. We have here again a heritage come down from the time when rhythmic memory prevailed, the time when man had no memory at all of what he had merely experienced, but only of what he experienced in rhythmic form,—in repetitions, in rhythmic repetition. There had to be at any rate some similarity between a sequence of words. ‘Might and main,’ ‘stock and stone’—such setting of experience in rhythmic sequence is a last relic of an extreme longing to bring everything into rhythm; for in this second epoch, that followed the epoch of localised memory, what was not set into rhythm was not retained. It is from this rhythmic memory that the whole ancient art of verse developed—indeed all metrical poetry.

Only in the third stage does that develop which we still know to-day,—temporal memory, when we no longer have a point in space to which memory attaches, nor are any longer dependent on rhythm, but when that which is inserted into the course of time can be evoked again later. This quite abstract memory of ours is the third stage in the evolution of memory.

Let us now call to mind the point of time in human evolution when rhythmic memory passes over into temporal memory, when that memory first made its appearance which we with our lamentable abstractness of thought take entirely as a matter of course; the memory whereby we evoke some-thing in picture-form, no longer needing to make use of semi-conscious or unconscious rhythmic repetitions in order to call it up again.

The epoch of the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory is the time when the ancient East was sending colonies to Greece,—the beginning of the colonies planted from Asia in Europe. When the Greeks relate stories of the heroes who came over from Asia and Egypt to settle on Grecian soil, they are in reality relating how the great heroes went forth from the land of rhythmic memory to seek a climate where rhythmic memory could pass over into temporal memory, into a remembering in time.

We are thus able to define quite exactly the time in history when this transition took place,—namely, the time of the rise of Greece. For that which may be called the Motherland of Greece was the home of a people with strongly developed rhythmic memory. There rhythm lived. The ancient East is indeed only rightly understood when we see it as the land of rhythm. And if we place Paradise only so far back as the Bible places it, if we lay the scene of Paradise in Asia, then we have to see it as a land where purest rhythms resounded through the Cosmos and awoke again in man as rhythmic memory,—a land where man lived not only as experiencing rhythm in a Cosmos, but as himself a creator of rhythm.

Listen to the Bhagavad-Gita and you will catch the after-echo of that mighty rhythm that once lived in the experience of man. You will hear its echo also in the Vedas, and you will even hear it in the poetry and literature—to use a modern word—of Western Asia. In all these live the echoes of that rhythm which once filled the whole of Asia with majestic content and, bearing within it the mysteries of the environment of the Earth, made these resound again in the human breast, in the beat of the human heart. Then we come to a still more ancient time, when rhythmic memory leads back into localised memory, when man did not even have rhythmic memories but was taught, in the place where he had had an experience, there to erect a memorial. When he was away from the place, he needed no memorial; but when he came thither again he had to recall the experience. Yet it was not he who recalled it to himself; the memorial, the very Earth, recalled it to him. As the head is the image of the Earth, so for the man of localised memory the memorial in the Earth evoked its own image in the head. Man lived completely with the Earth; in his connection with the Earth he had his memory.

The Gospels contain a passage that recalls this kind of memory, where we are told that Christ wrote something in the Earth.

The period we have thus defined as the transition from localised memory to rhythmic memory is the time when ancient Atlantis was declining and the first Post-Atlantean peoples were wandering eastward in the direction of Asia. For we have first the wanderings from ancient Atlantis—the continent that to-day forms the bed of the Atlantic Ocean—right across Europe into Asia, and later the wanderings back again from Asia into Europe. The migration of the Atlantean peoples to Asia marks the transition from localised memory to rhythmic memory, which latter finds its completion in the spiritual life of Asia. The colonisation of Greece marks the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory—the memory that we still carry within us to-day.

1. Localised Memory.
2. Rhythmic Memory.
3. Temporal Memory.

And within this evolution of memory lies the whole development of civilisation between the Atlantean catastrophe and the rise of Greece,—all that resounds to us from ancient Asia, coming to us in the form of legend and saga rather than as history. We shall arrive at no understanding of the evolution of humanity on the Earth by looking principally to the external phenomena, by investigating the external documents; rather do we need to fix our attention on the evolution of what is within man; we must consider how such a thing as the faculty of memory has developed, passing in its development from without into the inner being of man.

You know how much the power of memory means for the man of to-day. You will have heard of persons who through some condition of illness suddenly find that a portion of their past life, which they ought to remember quite easily, has been completely wiped out. A terrible experience of this kind befell a friend of mine before his death. One day he left his home, bought a ticket at the railway station for a certain place, alighted there and bought another ticket. He did all this, having lost for the time the memory of his life up to the moment of buying the ticket. He carried everything out quite sensibly. His reason was sound. But his memory was blotted out. And he found himself, when his memory came back, in a Casual Ward in Berlin. It was afterwards proved that in the interval he had wandered over half Europe, without being able to connect the experience with the earlier experiences of his life. Memory did not re-awaken in him till he had found his way—he himself did not know how—into a Casual Ward in Berlin.

This is only one of countless cases which we meet with in life and which show us how the soul-life of the man of to-day is not intact unless the threads of memory are able to reach back unbroken to a certain period after birth.

With the men of olden time who had developed a localised memory, this was not the case. They knew nothing of these threads of memory. They, on the other hand, would have been unhappy in their soul-life, they would have felt as we feel when something robs us of our self, if they had not been surrounded by memorials which recalled to them what they had experienced; and not alone by memorials which they themselves had set up, but memorials too erected by their forefathers, or by their brothers and sisters, similar in configuration to their own and bringing them into contact with their own kinsmen. Whereas we are conscious of something inward as the condition for keeping our Self intact, for these men of bygone times the condition was to be sought outside themselves—in the world without.

We have to let the whole picture of this change in man's soul pass before our eyes in order to realise its significance in the history of man's evolution. It is by observing such things as these that light begins to be thrown upon history. To-day I wanted to show, by a special example, how man's mind and soul have evolved in respect of one faculty—the faculty of memory. We shall go on to see in the course of the succeeding lectures how the events of history begin to reveal themselves in their true shape when we can thus illumine them with light derived from knowledge of the human soul.

• 1. Die Weihnachtstagung zur Begründung der Allgemeinen Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft. Jahresausklang und Jahreswende 1923/24 by Rudolf Steiner, Collected Works, Dornach 1962.