The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From the two lectures I gave yesterday and the day before yesterday, you will have seen how important it is from an anthroposophical point of view to build on what happened in Europe in the course of the 19th century in the right way. And we were indeed able to link the phenomena that we have placed before our minds to many of the things that have emerged as the actual characteristic of the modern era, which we consider to be the actual characteristic of the spiritual and other historical developments in Europe from the mid-15th century onwards.

Today, precisely because I regard yesterday and the day before as a kind of substructure, as a kind of starting point for a perspective, I would like to look a little further ahead, and also a little further back in time.

We must be clear about the fact that in the course of the 19th century, materialism emerged in European development on the one hand. And I count as materialism everything that can only turn to material phenomena if it wants to say something about the world that does not feel the need to turn to a spiritual thing when it is about that which sustains man in the world, which instructs man in the world about his path. On the other hand, added to this materialism was what may be called intellectualism, rationalism, the view of the intellect, which only, I might say, wants to live and weave in logical concepts.

Now do not take this as if I meant that this logical way of thinking should be opposed to another non-logical or even anti-logical one. Of course that does not occur to me at all. But the logical alone is to reality what the skeletal system is to the human being, and in all things the logical actually represents not the living but the dead. And so what man had naively arrived at, this mere intellectual logic that contains dead concepts, promoted materialism, which only tied in with dead substance.

Now, nothing less than a completely disillusioned looking into the true reasons that, on the one hand, brought forth materialism and, on the other, rationalism, can help us today to further develop human civilization. And here we must also reach a little further back in time, so that yesterday's and the day before yesterday's description has an even broader background.

I have often pointed out the deep rift that exists between everything that was once Greek culture – let us say, the culture that developed partly in the Greek language – and what then gradually developed to the west as Roman, as Latin culture. Attention has often been called to the view of Herman Grimm, who says: Today's man can still understand the Romans, because he basically still has the same concepts as the Romans; the Greeks appear to him like the inhabitants of a fairy-tale land. Well, I have indeed spoken about this fact in more detail in the essays that recently appeared in the “Goetheanum”.

But now we must be clear about the fact that the East of Europe, which I tried to describe yesterday, so to speak, only as an appendix and perhaps in a way that is contestable for some of those sitting here, experienced a wave of civilization that was strongly influenced by Greek in later times. In the East of Europe we find the late forms of Greek feeling, of Greek sensibility. In the west and also in central Europe, on the other hand, Latin culture is developing in a very intensive way. And the very differentiation across Europe that I have described to you over the last two days is fundamentally under the influence of what existed in the east as a continuation of Greek culture and in the west as a continuation of Latin Roman culture.

We must not forget the following. We must be clear about the fact that the West was in a very different position to digest the Latin-Roman essence inwardly, spiritually, than Central Europe. The West has absorbed the Latin within itself. Central Europe has become ill from the Latin. And only those who are able to properly consider this phenomenon, which is currently showing itself in its last stages in the most intense way imaginable, actually know how to find their way around within the current concepts of education.

Let us first look at the matter from a Central European point of view. I would like to draw attention once more to what Fritz Mauthner, who died recently, asserted from the point of view of language, from the criticism of language. Fritz Mauthner did not want to write a critique of reason, that is, actually, a critique of concepts, like Kant, but rather a critique of language. He had made the supposed discovery that when people talk about higher things, they are really only talking in words and do not realize that they are only talking in words. But if you look at how people use words, for example, God, spirit, soul, good and so on, you can see that when people use words, they believe that they are dealing with a thing, but they are just using words without pointing to a real thing.

Now, as I have already indicated, I believe that Mauthner's entire view does not apply when it comes to natural things, because then people can distinguish quite well between the word and the thing. At least I have never yet heard of anyone who, for example, had the intention of mounting not a real white horse when he wanted to ride, but merely the word “white horse”! So in relation to things of nature, people can distinguish the word and its content from reality.

But the situation changes – and this gives Fritz Mauthner a certain semblance of justification – the moment we enter the realm of the soul on the one hand and the ethical-moral realm on the other. In relation to the soul, words from ancient times have been preserved that people continue to use, but the views on the matter have not been preserved. So that people use words like soul and spirit, but do not have the view of the matter. And since Mauthner noticed this in the realm of the soul, he thought he could generalize. But in the realm of the soul, and also in the ethical-moral realm, it is the case that, for example, in the ethical-moral realm, moral impulses have gradually lost their factual content for man and actually figure today only as external commandments or even as external laws.

Thus, for a good part of the vocabulary, the view of the matter has been lost. That is why it takes so much effort today to work on the most important abilities of the human soul - thinking, feeling and willing. Because thinking, feeling and willing are things that everyone discusses today, but people do not really have a view of the corresponding things. And it is a matter of coming up with what is actually behind it.

Now we must be clear about the fact that education, which actually led to intellectual life, was carried by the Latin language for many, many centuries in the Middle Ages, and that the Latin language really became a dead language not only in the sense of an external designation, but in a very inner sense. The Latin language, which one had to acquire in the Middle Ages if one wanted to access higher education at all, became more and more a, if I may express it thus, mechanism in itself. And it became precisely the logical mechanism in itself.

This process can be easily followed if you look at history the way we did yesterday and the day before yesterday for the 19th century. If we look at the inner life in the continuation of human existence, we see that in the fourth century AD the Latin language gradually ceased to be experienced inwardly, that it no longer embodied the logos but only the shells of the logos. What then remained of the Latin language as a latecomer, the Italian language, the French language, they have indeed absorbed much of the Latin language. In this way they participated in the dying process of the Latin language. But they also took in what was transmitted by the various peoples who moved from east to west and inhabited the west. So that in Italian and French the completely different element lives on, not only in the words, but above all in the shaping of the language, in the drama of the language. In contrast, the real Latin has died out. And in this deadness, where gradually the views have fallen away, it has become the all-dominant scientific language. And one must inquire precisely about language if one wants to understand: Why did the medieval world view take the form that it did?

Just think that the human being was pushed into this Latin during his boyhood, so that the process was not such that he shaped the language from the living soul, but the language was poured into him as a finished logical instrument, and he learned logic, so to speak, from the way the words were grammatically connected. Logic became something that filled man from the outside.

And so the connection between the human soul and spiritual education became increasingly loose and loose, and one did not grow into education with enthusiasm from what one already had within oneself, one was absorbed by a foreign element of education, by the foreign element of education that had been perverted in Latin. It radiated out, so to speak, into the soul and drove what one originally had out of the person or deeper into the person, into such a region where one made no claim to logic.

Just think how it was for many centuries in the Middle Ages and how it was in our youth, in the youth of those who are now creatures as old as I am. It was the case that if someone had expressed something in their mother tongue and it did not appear clear in the society in which one was, one quickly translated it into Latin, because then it became clear. But it also became cold and sober. It became logical. You immediately understood when something was expressed in a Latin case; you immediately understood exactly and precisely how the matter was meant.

But that was always done through the centuries of the Middle Ages. People allowed themselves all kinds of sloppiness in the spoken language because they attributed exactness and precision to thinking in the Latin language. But that was something foreign to man. And because it was foreign and man can only come to the spirit through his soul, the Latin language became so fossilized that you could no longer use a word in any way if you did not have the thing out there in physical sensuality. With the horse, it would not have worked if you only had the word, because you could not ride on it. But with those things that are supersensible, the content gradually evaporated from the word, and people only had the word. And then later, when their mother tongue emerged, they also only said the word in the mother tongue, the simply lexicographically translated word. In doing so, they did not bring in the idea. By putting anima and soul together and anima having lost its reality as content, the content of the soul was also lost. And so it came about that the Latin language was only applicable to the external sensual.

From the language you have one of the reasons why, in the middle of the Middle Ages, theology said: One can only understand external sensual things through science, and at most their context, and one must leave supersensible things to faith. If these people had developed the full strength to express what is true, then they would have said: Man can only recognize as much of the world as can be expressed in Latin, and the rest he must leave to a not quite expressible, only felt faith.

You see, in a sense that is the truth, and the rest is just an illusion. The truth is that over the centuries the view has taken hold that only what can be expressed in Latin is scientifically true.

And only in the 18th century did the pretension of the vernacular actually come into play. But at that time, when the pretensions of the vernacular were emerging, the various regions of Europe had a very different relationship to the vernacular. Where Latin still had an effect, the vernacular was more easily combined with education. Hence we have these phenomena in Western Europe, which we described the day before yesterday, that actually the connections in social life, the social bonds, as I have called them, develop in a way that is popular, in which everyone participates, because in the West, when folklore emerged, to a certain extent this folklore snapped into a related form in Latin.

In Central Europe this was quite impossible, because there the vernacular had not adopted anything Latin. There the vernacular was something quite different from Latin. And on top of that was the layer of education, which learned Latin if it wanted to be educated. So here the difference was enormous. Yes, it is precisely from this difference that the tragedy for Central Europe, of which I spoke yesterday, stems, the tragedy that existed between the people of the broad masses, who did not learn Latin, who therefore had no science either - because science was what could be said in Latin - and those who acquired science, who simply switched over the moment they acquired it. In their everyday lives, when they ate and drank and when they were otherwise with their fellow countrymen, they were unlearned people, because they spoke the language, which did not have any learning in it at all. And when they were scholars, they were something quite different; then they donned an inner robe. So that basically a person who was educated was actually a divided person.

You see, this had a particularly profound effect on the intellectual life of Central Europe. For in the vernacular, through all kinds of circumstances, which we will also touch on one day, there was actually only what I hinted at yesterday, on the one hand as an astrological element, on the other as an alchemical element. This was already alive in the vernacular, and the vernacular actually had an inner spirituality, an inner spirituality. The vernacular had no materialism in Europe. Materialism was only imposed on the vernacular from the materialism of the Latin language, in that the Latin language, when it was no longer the language of scholars, still left the people with the airs and graces that had developed when it became the language of scholars. And so the Central European language could not find a way to balance or harmonize with what had become established in Latin as education.

This is an extremely serious matter. It can be seen in an intensive way to this day. I will give a concrete example in a moment of how intensely this can be seen. You see, so-called political economy is also taught at various universities today. This political economy has actually grown out of legal ideas, and these are entirely a child of the Latin world. To think legally is to think in Latin, even today. And the ideas of political economy – yes, in an unfortunate way for the Latins, one comes down to things. Just as you can't ride the mere word Schimmel, you can't eat the mere economic terms. You can't do business with the mere economic terms. But since science has only developed from Latin - it's just that people don't realize the context - the economic sciences of the present have no content at all. Political economy, as it is taught today, actually only understands something that no longer has anything to do with reality because it comes from Latin, but it has not found the connection to present reality at all, instead spinning everything out of concepts.

One could say that it is precisely in the field of economics that a contrast becomes apparent. Yesterday I spoke to you about the fact that in Central Europe there were people going around among the people who were called thinkers – they worked from the folk tradition, which is why they had the old astrology, the old alchemy – thinkers, that is, those who reflect. Those who then carried Latin in that sublimated form into political economy are not those who speculate, but those who spin yarns. Yes, really, I am not joking, but am quite serious, because a mere logical web, into which the Latin language has been transformed, is spun out to form what is developed as a single science.

Last fall, I taught a course in economics here. It was based on facts, not on a web of words. And because it was based on facts, because it was based on the realities of economic life, it became more and more apparent that Students of political economy cannot reconcile this with what is mere fiction! The one does not flow into the other. And now someone could suggest that a supplementary course should be held to concretize the conceptual framework of today's political economy with what has been drawn from reality. But that would be like explaining the fertility of an orange to someone looking at discarded orange peel, and that is simply not possible. When it comes to gaining knowledge from reality, you cannot draw parallels to what is mere fiction. You have to start from scratch and work from the original, elementary level if reality is to have an effect.

And because in the education of the people, which was not interspersed with Latin, even if the old celestial and terrestrial knowledge, astrology and alchemy, lived on in a form that was no longer contemporary, the feeling that knowledge is that which one can say in Latin was gradually joined by the other feeling: superstition is everything that cannot be said in Latin but must be said in the vernacular. Only people do not express it that way because they add all kinds of embellishments. But our entire education is permeated on the one hand by the sentence: everything that can be expressed in Latin sentences is scientific; and on the other hand: everything that cannot be expressed in Latin sentences but must be expressed in the vernacular is superstition.

This is something that has been experienced much less in the West, but which has been experienced in a terribly tragic way, especially in Central Europe. In the East, again, to a lesser extent. Firstly, the East had allowed Greek, which was still imbued with the juice of reality, to flow into its civilization in many ways, and secondly, it did not take to heart what became the terrible inner struggle of the soul between the lively, popular and the dead dead Latin, did not take it very much to heart, but sat down and said to himself: “Oh, come now, only people who have fallen out of paradise get into such struggles in life; but we in the East have actually remained in paradise.” It is only an outward appearance that we have fallen out of paradise; we are inward people - inward; inward people!

You see, these things must be thoroughly understood if we are to comprehend the terrible split that exists today between people who live in what has been built in the Latin way and people who, as homeless souls – I used the expression here recently – want to seek the path to the spiritual from the elementary nature of their own being. And then the tremendous authority of something that is a branch of Latin confronts them. The respect for Latin is contained in the belief in authority that is shown towards our present-day science.

Just think what it meant over the centuries when a farmer's boy went to a monastery grammar school and learned Latin there! Then he came home during the holidays and knew Latin! Nobody understood anything of what the farm boy had learned, but all the others knew, well, that one must not and cannot understand anything that leads to science, to knowledge. They knew that now. Because the peasant boy who had come to the monastery school spoke in a language in which one seeks knowledge, and the other peasant boys who were peeling potatoes – well, that was not the case in earlier times – who were, let's say, somehow working in the meadow or in the fields, they had tremendous respect.

For one does not have respect for what one knows, but for what one cannot know. And this settled as a tremendous respect for what one cannot know, where one refrains from it from the outset. Yes, that then continues, and such things take paths that one can only follow if one really has the goodwill to follow the spiritual paths of humanity. The peasant boy in the 13th, 12th century, who only held the plough outside and otherwise helped, perhaps at most helped to crush the bacon into greaves and so on, the peasant boy knew: we cannot know anything, we will never be able to know anything, because only those who learn Latin can know something. The country boy says that, and then it goes the secret ways, and then, in more recent centuries, a naturalist gives a speech before the enlightened naturalists' assembly, and it culminates in the same words that the monastery farmer's boy said in the 12th century: We will not know ignorabimus! If one had the sense today to go back over historical facts, then going back centuries, one would find the origin of the Du Bois-Reymond impulse in the farmer's boy who did not learn Latin, compared to the farmer's boy who did learn Latin.

Now, when a language becomes dead, a language that undergoes the same regression as Latin has, tends to incline towards the dead in its words as well. But the dead in the world is the material. And so the Latin language, even where it was particularly dominant, drove things towards the dead, namely towards the material. Originally, as I have already mentioned, people everywhere knew what the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ meant because they still knew the facts from living experience. The people could have known it too, but popular alchemy was considered superstitious, it was not in Latin. But the Latin language could not capture the spiritual. And so the trivial belief arose that what was imagined under the matter of bread and wine should change, and all the discussions about the doctrine of the Lord's Supper actually arose in such a way that those who discussed it proved nothing other than that they had adopted this doctrine in Latin. But there the words had only a dead character, and one no longer understood the living, just as today's anatomists no longer understand the living person from the dead corpse.

Central Europe has gone through this in a deeply tragic way, in that its language had nothing of what the Latin language brought forth. Central Europe had a language that would have been dependent on growing into the living. But thinking was dead because, after all, this thinking was also a dependency of Latin. And so the concepts did not find the words and the words did not find the concepts.

For example, the word “soul” could have found the living just as the word “psyche” once found the living in Greek. But the previous education was in Latin, and there was no knowledge of this living, and the living that was in the folk words was also killed off. That is why it is so important today to look again at the deep rift that had occurred between Greek and Roman civilization. And this deep rift is particularly evident when we look into the mystery being.

If we go to Greece, I would like to say that the most popular mysteries are the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Mysteries of Eleusis. They were the mysteries that had, so to speak, made the path to the spiritual most popular. And those who were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries were the Telests; they were initiated into Eleusis. Let us first look at what is meant by the term “Eleusis” and then at what is meant by the term “Telests”.

Eleusis is only a linguistic transformation of Elosis and actually means: the place where those who are to come are, those who want to carry the future within themselves. Eleusis means: the future. And the Telests are those who are to come, the Eleusinian initiates are those who are to come. This indicates that people were aware that they are more of an imperfect being as they stand, and that they must become a coming being, one who carries the future within themselves. Telos anticipates the future, that which will only gradually be realized in the future. So that in the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the place of the coming, the coming ones, the imperfect human beings were trained to become perfect. They were telestai.

The whole meaning of this initiation was disrupted when it came to Romanism. In Greece, everything in the initiation pointed to the future, to the end of the earth. One should shape oneself with a strong inner impulse so that one would find the way after the end of the earth in the right way. Then one was a telest, one who should develop in the right way after the end of the earth.

When this came to the Romans, the expression of the Telesten gradually became that of the initiates – Initium, beginning. The goal was, so to speak, moved from the end of the earth to the beginning of the earth. The Telesten became initiates. Those who were initiated into the secrets of the future became knower of the past. The Promethean striving became Epimethean, striving for knowledge of the past. But only abstract knowledge of the past can remain; if one wants to penetrate into the future, one needs a living knowledge borne by the will, for there the will must develop itself into. The past is past. One can gain a higher knowledge by going back to the initium, to the past; but it remains knowledge; it becomes more and more abstract.

And with that, the impulse towards abstraction, that is, towards the reification that occurred from the 4th century AD and then more and more, moved into the Latin language. People wanted to return to the past, when ideas were still connected to life, because they knew that now they were no longer connected to life, that now one enters into inanimate speech when one rises to the level of ideas. And to be initiated in Greece meant to receive a higher life in one's soul. To be initiated in Roman times meant to resign oneself to a higher activity for one's life on earth and only to think about it: At the beginning of the world, man once had a higher activity, but from that he has descended; one cannot be a doer, at most a knower in relation to the higher knowledge.

You see, these are the difficulties we face today. When we use the word “initiation”, for example, it is so terribly vivid, because “initiation” is part of the whole concept: to immerse a person under water, to take them away from the sharp contours of physical life, to bring them into the liquid element of the world, so that they can move with their soul in the living, breathing, fleeting, fluid spiritual realm. To initiate is to introduce someone into the mobile, fluctuating, fluid world of life. Now this has to be translated somehow. And it is translated into the opposite. For example, one must say: initiation for the initiation.

It is necessary to know that such contradictions and difficulties are inherent in our present civilization. We must be clear about these skewers, I would say, that hurt us so much in our present civilization. Only then can that which really advances humanity come to life.

It is, of course, very far from my intention to turn these lectures into a diatribe against learning Latin. On the contrary, I would like people to learn even more Latin so that they can also come to feel that only the dead can be designated with Latin, that Latin quite rightly belongs in the dissecting room, but that if one wants to get to know what is not dead but alive, one must resort to the living element of language. Today, we cannot enter the future with some abstract intention, but only with an understanding, free of illusions, of what can again beat the life of the spirit out of the dead. And we are indeed living at a moment when the matter has actually been pushed to a decision in the spiritual life. We are living at an extremely important moment.

I don't know how many of you took seriously what I said in the last few issues of the “Goetheanum”, that only twenty, fifteen, ten years ago one could quote a person like Herman Grimm as a contemporary. Today he is a man of the past and one can only speak of him as of a man of the past. I meant what I said in these four articles in connection with Herman Grimm with immense bitterness. As you know, I myself used to quote Herman Grimm in a completely different sense than I quote him now. I quoted him where he could be used in his expression as a spirit that leads into the future. Today he is a thing of the past, belongs to history, and at most one can quote in such things, where he refers to ancient Greece and Rome, that which was still present only recently; that is already past today.

But I admit that this strange survival of a time that is quickly becoming the past demands something quite different in our time – and much of it is gently overslept! Because gently oversleeping is something that people love so much today.

But anthroposophy is the kind of knowledge that one does not merely collect in ideas, but that one should awaken to. That is why there are so many arguments, and also the one I have just given, is meant to have an awakening effect.

In the present time, when many things are being decided and very big questions are being asked of humanity, it is necessary to also raise oneself to the spiritual when considering contemporary phenomena. The spiritual is, after all, not an abstraction, but something that rises above the physical and sends its effects into the physical. And the person who sees only the physical, or even the physical permeated by the spiritual, is after all observing only a part of the world in which man, with his thinking and doing, is involved. For centuries this had a certain justification. But this is no longer the case for the present and the near future. And so you will see that today we are beginning to point out events of our present time in their direct connection with events that are taking place in the spiritual world and with the physical that is happening on earth.

Before this is possible, however, we must recall some of what was present spiritually in the development of mankind and led to the present historical moment. For a long time, in fact, only one part of world evolution was decisive for Western civilization and for everything that grew out of it. And this was justifiable. It was perfectly right that in the times when the Bible, with its Old Testament, was a necessity, the starting-point was taken from that moment in the development of the world when the creation of man was brought to mind through the intervention of Yahweh or Jehovah.

In an earlier period of human thought and world view, this moment in the development of the world, in which Yahweh or Jehovah intervened in it, was just one of many moments, not the one that was looked back on as the one that was actually decisive. In the Olden Days, what may be called the creation of the world by Jahve or Jehovah, according to the Old Testament, was preceded by a different development, one whose content was conceived much more spiritually than anything that was then presented in connection with the Bible, as it was usually understood. The moment that was grasped in the Bible, the creation of man by Jahve or Jehovah, was in fact a later moment in older times, and it was preceded by a different development that presented Jahve or Jehovah as the being that intervened in world evolution only later than other beings.

In Greece, when reflecting on the first stages of world evolution, one still pointed back to an older entity, to grasp which required something much more spiritual in cognition than is present in the Old Testament; one pointed back to the being that was understood in Greece as the actual creator of the world, as the Demiurgos. The Demiurge was imagined as a being existing in spheres of the highest spirituality, in which there was no need to think of any material existence, which can be linked to the kind of humanity that, according to the Bible, Yahweh or Jehovah is seen as the creator of.

We are therefore dealing with a very exalted being in the Demiurge, with a being as creator of the world, whose creative power essentially consists in expelling spiritual beings, if I may express it in this way, from itself. Gradually, as it were, lower and lower – the expression is certainly not quite accurate, but we have no other – gradually lower and lower were the entities that the demiurge allowed to emerge from himself; but entities that were far from being subject to earthly birth or earthly death.

In Greece, it was pointed out that they were called eons, and I would say that one distinguished between eons of the first kind, eons of the second kind, and so on (see diagram). These eons were the beings that had emerged from the Demiurge. Then, in the series of these eons, there was a relatively subordinate eon being, that is, an eon of a subordinate kind, Yahweh or Jehovah. And Jahve or Jehova united with matter – and now comes that which, for example, was presented in the first Christian centuries by the so-called Gnostics, but where there was always a gap in their understanding of what had been presented as a kind of renewal of the biblical content, but, as I said, there was always a gap in their understanding – Jahve or Jehova united with matter. And from this connection, man emerged.

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So that the creation of Yahweh or Jehovah consisted - always in the sense of these thoughts, which extended into the first Christian centuries - in that He Himself, as a descendant of a lower species from the more exalted eons up to the Demiurge, united with matter and thereby brought man into being. All that now arises, so to speak, is understandable for the older humanity, but no longer for the later humanity. All this arises on the basis of that which surrounds us in earthly life, and is sensually perceived. All this was summarized under the expression Pleroma (see diagram). The pleroma is therefore a world populated by individualized beings that rises above the physical world. In a sense, man, called into existence by Jahve or Jehovah, appears on the lowest level of this pleroma world. On the lowest level of this pleroma, an entity arises that actually does not live in the individual human being, nor in a group of peoples, but in all of humanity. It is the entity Achamoth, with which the striving of humanity towards the spiritual was indicated in Greece. So that through Achamoth there is a return to the spiritual (red arrow).

Now this world of ideas was joined by the other, that the Demiurge met the striving of Achamoth and sent down a very early aeon, who united with the man Jesus so that the striving of Achamoth could be fulfilled. So that in the man Jesus there is a being from the evolution of the eons, which was conceived by a much higher spiritual being, of a higher spiritual nature than Yahweh or Jehovah (green arrow).

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And in the case of those who had this idea in the first centuries of Christianity – and many people who looked up to the Mystery of Golgotha with deep fervor and sincerity had it – the idea developed in connection with this idea that a great secret surrounds the man Jesus with his indwelling of an ancient and thus primeval aeon.

The investigation of this mystery was cultivated in the most diverse ways. Today it is no longer very important to reflect in depth on the individual forms in which, in the first Christian centuries, through Greece, but especially in Asia Minor and the neighboring regions, it was imagined how this aeon being dwelled in the man Jesus. For the conceptions by which they sought to approach such a mystery in those days have long since vanished from the realm of human thought. What surrounds man sensually, what is connected with man between birth and death, lies in the realm of what man thinks today, and at most man infers from what he has around him between birth and death to what could spiritually underlie this physical-natural world. That direct relationship, that intimate relationship between the human soul and the pleroma, which once existed and was expressed in the same way as the relationship between man and the spiritual world, as the relationship between man and tree and bush, between cloud and wave, everything that was present in human conceptions in order to form an overview, a picture of the connection between man and that spiritual world, which interested man much more at that time than the physical world, all that has disappeared. The direct relationship is no longer there. And we can say: the last centuries in which such ideas could still be found in the civilization on which European, Western civilization then became dependent are the first, second, third and still a large part of the fourth century AD. Then the possibility of rising to the pleroma world disappears from what is human knowledge, and a different time begins.

The time begins that had thinkers such as Augustine, who was one of the first among them, or Scotus Erigena; the time begins that then had the scholastics, the time in which European mysticism flourished, a time in which one spoke quite differently on the basis of knowledge than in those ancient times. On the basis of knowledge, one spoke in such a way that one simply turned to the sensual-physical world and tried to extract the concepts and ideas from this physical-sensual world through a supersensible one.

But what humanity had in earlier times, the direct sense of the spiritual world, of the pleroma, was no longer there. For man was to enter a completely different stage of his development. It is not at all a matter of somehow defining the older time or the time of medieval human development according to values, but rather of recognizing what tasks humanity, insofar as it was civilized humanity, had in the different ages. One can say that the older time had indeed developed the direct relationship to the Pleroma. They had the task of developing those spiritual powers of knowledge that reside in the depths of the human soul, those powers of knowledge that go to the spirit, again.

Then, from the depths of humanity, there had to come a time - we have often spoken of it - when the pleromatic world was obscured, when man began to exercise those abilities that he did not have before, when man began to develop his own ratio, his rationalism, his thinking. In those older times, when the direct relationship to the pleroma was, one did not develop one's own thinking. Everything had been attained by way of illumination, inspiration, the instinctive supersensible attitude; the thoughts that men held were revealed thoughts. That welling up and springing forth of thought, that forming of one's own thoughts and logical connections, that only came about in later times. Aristotle had a presentiment of it, but it was only developed from the second half of the fourth century A.D. Then, during the Middle Ages, every effort was made to develop thinking as such, so to speak, and to develop everything that is connected with thinking.

In this respect, the Middle Ages, and in particular medieval scholasticism, made an enormous contribution to the overall development of humanity. It developed the practice of thinking in the formation of ideas and in the context of ideas. It developed a pure technique of thinking, a technique that has now been lost again.

What was contained in scholasticism as a thinking technique should be appropriated by people again. But in the present, people do not like to do it because in the present, everything is geared towards passively receiving knowledge, not actively acquiring it, actively conquering it. The inner activity and the urge for inner activity are missing in the present; scholasticism had this in the most magnificent way. That is why anyone who understands scholasticism is still able to think much better, much more vividly, and much more cohesively than, say, in the natural sciences today. This thinking in the natural sciences is schematic, short of breath, this thinking is incoherent.

And actually, people of the present should learn from scholasticism in this technique and practice of thinking. But it would have to be a different learning from what is loved today; it would have to be a learning by doing, by being active, and not merely consist of acquiring what has already been formed or read from the experiment. And so the Middle Ages were the time in which man was to develop inwardly, in soul and thought. One might say that the gods postponed the Pleroma, postponed their own revelation, because if they had continued to influence European humanity, this European humanity would not have developed that magnificent inner activity of thinking practice that was brought forth during the Middle Ages. And again, from this thinking practice emerged what is newer mathematics and such things, which are of direct scholastic descent.

So that one should imagine the matter thus: Through long centuries, the spiritual world, as if through a grace from above, gave humanity the revelation of the pleroma. Humanity saw this world full of light, this world revealing itself in and through light in ideas. A curtain was drawn in front of this world. In Asia, the decadent remnants of what was behind the curtain remained in human knowledge. Europe had a curtain, so to speak, that rose vertically from the earth towards the sky, which had its basis, I would say, in the Urals and the Volga, across the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Imagine that a huge wall of wallpaper had been erected for Europe through the course I have just indicated, a wall through which one cannot see where in Asia the last decadent remnants of the pleroma developed, but in Europe nothing of it was seen and therefore the inner thinking practice was developed without any prospect of the spiritual world. Then you have an idea of the development of medieval civilization, which developed so great things out of man, but which did not see all that was behind the wall that ran along the Urals, along the Volga, along the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, which could not see through this wall and for which the East was at most a yearning, but not a reality.

They not only hinted symbolically, but quite literally, at what the European world actually was, how, as it were under the influence of a Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, Galilei, people said to themselves that they now wanted to get to know the earth, they wanted to get to know the ground, the lower regions. And then they found a science of heaven that was modeled on the science of the earth, while the old science of the earth was modeled on the science of the heavens with its pleromatic content. And so, as it were, in the darkness - for the light was blocked by the wall of the world described - the newer knowledge and the newer life of humanity arose.

It is a fact of human development that in certain epochs, when something specific is to emerge from humanity, other parts of what connects man are veiled, hidden. And basically, on the ground of the earth, behind the 'wallpaper for the earthly, only decadent Eastern culture developed. In Europe, Western culture remained stuck in its initial beginnings.

And this is basically the state of the European world still today, except that it is trying to inform itself about what, with the exclusion of all insight into the pleroma, has been acquired in the world of dark existence like a science, like a knowledge that is not, through all kinds of external, historical means. One has the opportunity to see through these things in their significance for the present when one realizes how, to a certain extent, behind the wallpaper, the earlier insight into the pleroma has become more and more decadent and regressive in the East, that a high, but instinctive, spiritual culture acquired by humanity has taken on decadent forms in Asia; that in Europe, the weaving and living of the human soul in the spirit has been pushed down into the sphere of the physical-sensual, which, for the time being, was only accessible to people in the medieval centuries. And so, beyond the wall-papered wall in the East, a culture arose that is not really a culture at all, that seeks to magically reproduce in earthly-physical forms what was to be experienced pleromatically in the weaving of the spirit. The rule and weaving of the spiritual beings in the Pleroma was to be carried down to earth in stone and wood, and their interaction was to resemble the weaving and nature of spiritual beings in the Pleroma. What gods actually do among themselves was thought to be the actions of physical, sensual idols. Idolatry took the place of divine service. And what can now be called oriental, North Asian-oriental magic, which has a bad effect, is the world of facts of the Pleroma, to which the soul's gaze was once directed, but which has been unlawfully transferred into the sensual. The magical sorcery of the shamans and its resonance in Central and North Asia (South Asia was also infected but has remained relatively freer) is the decadent form of the ancient pleroma view. Physical-sensory magic took the place of the human soul's participation in the divine realms of the pleroma. What the soul should do and had done in the past was attempted with the help of sensual-physical magic. A completely Ahrimanized pleroma activity became, so to speak, that which was practiced on earth and especially by the nearest spiritual beings bordering on the earth, but from which human beings were infected.

If we go east from the Urals and the Volga to Asia, we find, especially in the astral world adjoining the human earthly world, in the centuries of the second Middle Ages, in the centuries of the modern age, we have, to this day, an Ahrimanized magic, which is practiced by certain spiritual entities who, in their etheric-astral education, are indeed above man, but in their soul and spiritual education have remained below man. Throughout Siberia and Central Asia, and across the Caucasus, terrible ahrimanic, etheric-astral beings roam everywhere in the world immediately adjacent to the earthly, practising ahrimanic sorcery that has been lowered into the astral and earthly realms. And this has a contagious effect on people, who, after all, cannot do everything themselves, who are clumsy in these matters, but who, as I said, are infected, influenced by it and thus stand under the influence of the world bordering on the earth, immediately adjoining the astral. When something like this is described, it must be clear that what was called a myth or the like in ancient times is always based on a magnificent spiritual view of nature. And when people in Greece spoke of the fauns and satyrs, who, through their activity, interwove themselves into earthly events, they did not, as fanciful scholars of today imagine, construct beings in their fantasy, but in his spiritual nature he knew of those real beings, which populated the astral territory immediately adjacent to the earthly world everywhere as fauns and satyrs. At about the turn of the third or fourth century after Christ, all those fauns and satyrs moved over to the regions east of the Urals and the Volga, to the Caucasus. That became their homeland. There they underwent their further development. Before the carpet, before this cosmic carpet, what has emerged is that which developed out of the human soul as thinking and so on, as a certain dialectic. When people held fast to the inwardly strict and pure forms of thinking, to that which one must really develop within oneself, when one wants to develop the pure forms of scholastic thinking, then they have indeed cultivated that which was to be cultivated according to the counsel of the spirituality guiding the earthly, then they have worked in preparation for that which must come in our present time and in the near future. But this purity was not everywhere to be found. While in the East, beyond the wallpaper, if I may put it that way, the urge arose to draw down from the Pleroma the deeds of the Pleroma, to transform the happenings of the Pleroma into earthly magic and Ahrimanic magic, west of the wallpaper wall, the striving for reason, for dialectics, for logic, for the ideal understanding of the world of the earthly, all that which human feelings of pleasure signify, what human feelings of well-being signify in sensual existence. Human, earthly, luciferic drives mixed in with the pure use of reason that had been developed.

But as a result, alongside what developed as the pursuit of reason and ideal practice, directly adjacent to the earthly world, another astral world developed: an astral world developed that was, so to speak, in the midst of those who, as purely as Giordano Bruno or Galileo or even those who came later, strove for the development of earthly thinking, for an earthly maxim and technique of thinking. In the meantime, so to speak, the entities of an astral world arose, which now absorb all this into themselves, namely also into religious life, what sensual feelings are, to which rationalistic striving should be made subservient. And so, gradually, pure thinking acquired a sensual-physical character.

And much of what developed as such a thinking technique in the second half of the 18th century, but especially in the 19th century, is permeated and interwoven with what is present in the astral world, which now permeates this rationalistic world. The earthly desires of people, which were to be cleverly interpreted, cleverly recognized by a degenerate technique of thinking, developed in people an element that was nourishment for certain astral entities, which were out to use the thinking that was so highly developed to merely penetrate the earthly world.

Theories such as Marxism arose that limited thinking, instead of elevating it into the spiritual, to the mere weaving of sensual-physical entities and sensual-physical impulses.

This was something that made it increasingly possible for certain Luciferic entities weaving in this astral realm to intervene in human thought. Human thought was completely permeated by what certain astral entities then thought, and the Western world became just as obsessed by them as the descendants of the shamans in the East.

And so finally arose beings who were possessed by such astral beings, who introduced human desires into astutely earthly thinking. And beings arose such as those who then, from the astral plane, possessed the Lenins and their comrades.

And so we have set two worlds against each other: one east of the Urals and Volga and Caucasus, the other west of them, which, I might say, form a self-contained astral area. We have the Ural area, the adjoining Volga area, the Black Sea, where the former wallpaper wall used to be. East and west of the Urals and Volga, we have an astral territory of the earth in which, in an intensive way, beings are striving together as if in a cosmic marriage. Those beings have the luciferic thinking of the West as their life air, while those beings, east of the Urals and Volga in the adjoining astral territory, have the earthy magic of the former pleroma acts as their life element. These beings of an Ahrimanic and Luciferic nature are gathering together. And we have a very special astral territory on earth, in which people now live with the task of seeing through this. And when they fulfill this task, they fulfill something that is imposed on them in the overall development of humanity in a magnificent way. But if they turn their eyes away from it, then they will be inwardly permeated and possessed by all this in their feelings — possessed by that ardent marriage that is to be concluded in the cosmic sense by the Asian Ahrimanized entities and the European Luciferized entities, which strive towards each other with all cosmic voluptuousness and create a terribly sultry astral atmosphere and in turn make people possessed by themselves. And so, gradually, an astral region has come into being to the east and west of the Urals and Volga, rising up directly from the earth's surface, which represents the earthly astral region for entities that are the metamorphosed fauns and metamorphosed satyrs.

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When we look towards this part of Eastern Europe today, we see not only people when we see the whole of reality, but we also see, so to speak, what has become a kind of paradise for fauns and satyrs in the course of the Middle Ages and modern times, who have undergone their metamorphosis, their development. And if we understand in the right way what the Greeks saw in fauns and satyrs, then we can also look at this development, at this metamorphosis that the fauns and satyrs have undergone. These beings, who, I might say, always go about among human beings and carry on their voluptuous work in the astral plane, driven by magic from Asia, which they have corrupted with Ahriman, and by European rationalism, which they have corrupted with Lucifer. But they infect human beings with it. These transformed, metamorphosed satyrs and fauns are seen in such a way that, towards the lower the lower physical form, the goat-like form has become particularly wild in them, so that they have a goat-like form that shines outwardly through the lust, while upwardly they have an extraordinarily intelligent head, a head that has a kind of radiance but that is the image of all possible Luciferian, rationalistic sophistication. Shapes between bears and rams, with a human physiognomy that is cunningly drawn into the voluptuous, but at the same time into the incredibly clever, these entities inhabit the paradise of satyrs and fauns. For this region in the astral has become a paradise for satyrs and fauns in the last centuries of the Middle Ages and the first centuries of the modern era – a paradise of transformed satyrs and fauns that inhabit it today.

I would say that, beneath all that is happening, humanity, which has been left behind, dances around with its dulled concepts and describes only the earthly, while those things that truly belong to reality no less than those that can be seen with the sensual eyes and comprehended with the sensual mind play into the earthly.

What is now developing between Asia and Europe can only be understood when it is understood in its astral-spiritual aspect, it can only be understood when one can see what has remained over there from a reality as decadent shaman ism in Central and North Asia has remained over there from a reality, what is voluptuously striving there as today's decadent magism, in order to connect, so to speak, in a cosmic marriage with what has been given the name Bolshevism for external reasons. There, east and west of the Ural and Volga region, a marriage is sought between magism and Bolshevism. What is taking place there appears so incomprehensible to humanity because it is taking place in a strange mythical form, because the Luciferic-spiritual of Bolshevism is combining with the completely decadent forms of shamanism that are approaching the Urals and Volga and crossing this area. From west to east, from east to west, events interact in this way, which are precisely the events of the paradise of satyrs and fauns. And what plays into it from the spiritual into the human world is the result of this lustful interaction of the satyrs and fauns who have migrated here from ancient times and of what the Western spirits, who only develop the intellectual, the things belonging to the head, have formed in themselves, and who then want to connect with the satyrs and fauns who have come over from Asia.

I would like to say that, outwardly, it looks as if those cloud-like spiritual forms are clumping together the further they penetrate eastward toward the Urals and the Volga, whereby the other body remains unclear remains unclear – as if these formations were clumping together into, one might say, voluptuous-looking, sophisticated-looking heads; as if they were constantly becoming heads and losing the rest of their physicality. Then, from the east, towards the Ural and Volga region, come the metamorphosed satyrs and fauns, whose nature as goats has almost become nature as bears, and the more they come from the west, the more they lose their heads. And in a kind of marriage, a cosmic marriage, such a being that loses its head meets a being coming from Europe that offers its head. And so these metamorphosed organizations, endowed with the superhuman head, come into being; so these metamorphosed satyrs and fauns arise in the astral realm. They are the inhabitants of the earth just like physical humanity. They move within the world within which physical people also move. They are the seducers and tempters of physical people because they can make people obsessed with themselves, because they not only need to convince them by talking but can make them obsessed with themselves. Then it happens that people believe that what they do is done by themselves, by their own nature, whereas in truth what people do in such a field is often only done because they are inwardly imbued with such a being, which from the East has attained the body of a goat transformed into something bear-like and the European human head metamorphosed in the West into something superhuman.

It is our task today to grasp these things with the same strength with which myths were once formed. Only by consciously entering the realm of the imagination can we understand today what we must understand if we are to and want to consciously place ourselves in the development of humanity.

If we want to categorize what we can get to know as the stages of the path into the spiritual world into what is already known from ordinary life, it is important to be able to correctly assess the three states of consciousness in which a person already finds themselves in ordinary life. We have already described these three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming and sleeping. And we also know how a person actually only experiences true waking consciousness in their thinking, in their imagining, and how feeling already works in such a way that, although it appears different in its experiences than the world of dreams, in its overall constitution, in the way it relates to the person, it is the same as the world of dreams. We experience feelings in our ordinary consciousness in an equally indeterminate way to dreams, but not only in such an indeterminate way, but also in a context similar to that of dreams.

The dream strings image to image. It does not care about the connections in the outside world as it strings image to image. It has its own connections. It is basically the same with the world of feelings. And the person who, for ordinary consciousness, would have such an emotional world as he has a world of ideas would be a terribly sobering, terribly dry, icy person. In the world of ideas, that is, in full wakefulness, one must pay attention to what is commonly called logic. It would be impossible to get on in real life if one were to feel everything as one thinks it.

And then we have mentioned several times: the will emerges from the hidden depths of human existence. It can be imagined, but its actual nature, how it works and weaves in the human organism, remains as unknown or unconscious to the human being as the experiences of sleep itself. And it would also be extremely disturbing for the human being if he were to experience what the will actually does.

The will is in reality a process of combustion, a process of consumption. And to always perceive how one consumes one's own organism in the act of willing, and then having to replace what has been consumed again and again through nourishment or sleep, would, if it accompanied the entire waking life, not be a very comfortable process for ordinary consciousness.

Now, in a sense, we can compare the world of human feelings in a waking state, so to speak waking dreams, and the world of dreams in a state of drowsiness or half-sleep, in their images, more so that the human being does not initially perceive these images as I, but as something that is the outside world. The dreaming person experiences what is happening as dream images so strongly as an external world that he can sometimes perceive himself within these dream images.

What should interest us particularly about these dream images today is this: we live through ordinary life, one experience after another. The dream shakes these experiences up. It pays little attention to the way a person in an awake state has experiences in context. It is a poet that unfolds the strangest inclinations.

A philosopher told of himself that he often dreams that he has written a book that he has not actually written, but in the dream he believes that he has written the book, a book that is better than all his other books. But at the same time he dreams that the manuscript has been lost. He can't find it, he has misplaced it. And now he rushes from drawer to drawer, searching through everything in his dream, but he can't find the manuscript. He is overcome by an incredibly uncomfortable feeling that he has lost this manuscript of his very best book and may never find it again. He then wakes up to this unease. Of course, this is quite an experience, especially for the philosopher I mean, who has written many books. They have been published in such large numbers that once, when I was visiting this philosopher, where the philosopher's wife was also present, the wife told me: Yes, my husband writes so many books that one always competes with the other.

It was actually always rather practical in this philosopher's house, so that I once, when I was visiting this philosopher with a publisher, actually got a little annoyed because I wanted to discuss epistemological problems with him. Now I had dragged the publisher along, actually he had dragged himself along, and the philosopher immediately started: Can you tell me from your expertise whether a great many copies of this or that work of mine are available from antiquarians? – So there was a very practical sense in the philosopher's house. I don't want to disparage that, I am just telling it as something characteristic. Now, someone else might have dreamed something else, which would have colored the experiences in a fantastic way as well.

Everyone can know that the dream does not proceed in the same way as the external experience, but that other connections are created in the dream. But on the other hand, everyone can also know how the dream is intimately connected with what the human being actually is. It is indeed the case that many dreams are actually reflections of even the physical human interior, and one already weaves in dreams as in something that is intimately connected with one.

Now one gradually becomes really aware of how the dream arranges the experiences in its own way. If you keep this very clearly in mind, you will gradually come to know that you do live in this dreaming after all. Only in this dreaming you live in the times when you either just go out of the physical body and the etheric body or when you return to them. It is actually in these transitions between waking and sleeping, sleeping and waking that the dream takes place. I have repeatedly given examples showing that the most important part of the dream takes place during waking and falling asleep. Among the characteristic examples, I have given this one – you remember it – in which a student dreams that two students are standing at the door of a lecture hall. One of them says something to the other that, after the thing called a comment, absolutely demands satisfaction. It comes to a duel. Everything is vividly dreamt, going out to the duel, first choosing seconds and so on, until the shooting begins. He still hears the bang, but it immediately turns into the blow that a chair, which he has knocked over at that moment, has done. So at that moment he wakes up. This fall of the chair triggered the whole dream. The dream thus fades at the moment of waking, it only appears to do so because it has its own time within it, not the time that it would last. Some dreams last so long according to their inner time that you don't sleep as long as you would have to sleep if the dream lasted the time it carries within itself. Nevertheless, a dream is intimately connected with what a person experiences inwardly, but experiences inwardly down to his physical body.

People in ancient times were well aware of such things, and for a certain kind of dream – you can read about it in the Bible yourself – the ancient Jews said: God has punished you in your kidneys. So they knew that a very specific kind of dream was connected with the function of the kidneys. On the other hand, you only need to read something like “The Seer of Prevorst” and you will find how people actually describe the damage to their organs in their dreams, people who are particularly predisposed to doing so, so that some diseased organ is symbolically visualized in powerful images, which can lead to the remedy being presented alongside this diseased organ. In ancient times this was even used to induce the patient himself, in a certain respect, to indicate his remedy from his own dream interpretation. And what was practiced in the authorized temple sleep must also be studied in this direction.

When we look at the whole relationship between dreams and external experiences, we have to say that dreams protest against the laws of nature. From waking to sleeping, we live by natural laws. Dreams pay no heed to these natural laws. In a sense, the dream turns its nose up at the laws of nature. And what is being researched as the laws of nature for the external physical world is not the lawfulness of the dream. The dream is a living protest against the laws of nature. If, on the one hand, you ask nature what is true, it answers in the laws of nature. If you ask the dream what is true, it does not answer in terms of natural laws. And the person who judges the course of a dream according to natural laws will say that the dream is lying. In this ordinary sense, it does lie. But this dream does come close to the spiritual and supersensible in man, even if the images of the dream belong to the subconscious, as one can say in the abstract, and one does not judge it correctly if one does not know that it comes close to the inner spiritual reality of the person.

Now, however, this is something that is difficult to admit in our time. One wants to abstract the dream. They want to judge it only by its fantastic nature. They do not want to see that in a dream we have something before us that is connected with the inner being of man. Is it not true that when a dream is connected with the inner being of man and protests against the laws of nature, it is a sign that the inner being of man itself is something that protests against the laws of nature.

Please understand that this is a weighty word, that when you get to the person, their inner being actually protests against the laws of nature. For what does that mean?

When today, the scientific way of thinking observes the laws of nature in a laboratory-like manner from what is outside in nature, then this scientific world view also approaches the human being and treats him as if the laws of nature were also continuing within him, in his inner being, or, to put it better, within his skin. But that is not the case at all. This inner being is much closer to the dream with its denial of natural laws than to the natural laws; the human inner being is such that it does not act and develop its activities according to natural laws. The dream, which in a certain sense is a reflection of this human inner being in its composition, is a testimony to this. And for those who understand this, it is simply the case that they have to say that it is actually absurd to believe that the same laws prevail within the heart and liver as externally in nature. Logic belongs to the external nature. The dream belongs to the inner being of man, and whoever calls the dream fantastic should also call the human inner being fantastic. He can feel that, because the way the human interior unfolds between birth and death here in earthly life, where an illness emerges from one corner and a sense of well-being from another, is much more similar to the realm of the 'I' than to external logic. But our present way of thinking completely lacks this way of approaching the human interior, because our present way of thinking is completely absorbed in what is observed in the outer nature or in the laboratory. One wants to find this in the human interior as well.

In this respect, it is really of great importance that we learn, for example, how the way in which science often deals with what plays a role in the physical aspect of human beings is treated today. We know that proteins, fats, carbohydrates and salts are essential to human life - in essence, of course. We know that. So what does science do? It analyzes the protein and finds so much oxygen, so much nitrogen, so much carbon in it, in percentage terms; it analyzes the fats, the carbohydrates, and so on. We now know how much of each is present. But you never learn from such an analysis what influence, for example, the potato has played in European culture. There is also little mention of this influence of potato food on European culture, because from this analysis, where you simply find how differently carbon, nitrogen and so on are distributed in one food and in another, you never find out why, for example, rye is preferentially digested by the forces of the lower digested by the forces of the lower abdomen, while the potato, on the other hand, requires forces up to the brain to digest it, so that when a person eats an excessive amount of potatoes, his brain has to be used to digest the potatoes, and so some of the brain power is lost for thinking.

It is precisely in such things that one notices how neither today's materialistic science nor the more theologically colored views come close to the truth. Science describes food in much the same way as if I wanted to describe a watch, and now I begin: the silver is mined in a silver mine; it is done in such and such a way. Then the silver is loaded up and shipped to the cities, and so on. But we stop at the watchmaker. We no longer look into his workshop. Then, perhaps, you describe the porcelain dial and how the porcelain is made. Again, they stop at the watchmaker's workshop. This is how today's science deals with food. It analyzes it. In doing so, it says something that actually says nothing about the importance of food in the human organism, because despite all the analysis, there is a big difference between enjoying the fruit of something, for example rye or wheat, and enjoying the tubers, as with potatoes.

Tubers fit into the human organism quite differently than fruits or seeds. So we can truly say that today's way of thinking no longer sees through material existence at all. Therefore, materialism is the world view that does not even know matter in its effects. Spiritual science must shine into it so that we can get to know matter. That is why the materialistically minded say: Anthroposophy is fantastically spiritual. And those who have theosophy or theology and want to stop at the abstracted spirit, which never comes to real work, where it never comes so far that it really shows how it intervenes as spirit in the material effects, they say that Anthroposophy is materialistic because it brings its insights to matter.

And so one is actually attacked from two fronts, both by those who treat everything ideally and abstractly and by those who treat everything materially. But those who treat everything ideally and abstractly do not get to know the spirit, and those who treat everything materially do not get to know matter. In this way, a way of thinking is developing more and more today that cannot reach people at all.

Now, however, something very strange has actually happened in our spiritual development in recent times. People can no longer help but admit at least the dark sides of spiritual life if they do not want to be completely stubborn. And it is a characteristic monument to the way in which people who are so completely immersed in science behave when they enter these dark areas of spiritual life, or something else that I will mention in a moment – but cannot deny.

A notable example of this is the book by Ludwig Staudenmaier: “Magic as an Experimental Science”. It is almost as if one were to say: “The nightingale as a machine”. But after all, this book could be written as something quite characteristic of our time.

So how does this man actually work? The strange thing about him is that his life has driven him to it, that the magical has been approached experimentally through himself. He had to start experimenting with himself one day, I would say, out of a dark destiny. After some of his experiences, he could no longer deny that, for example, there are writing mediums. You know that I don't recommend these things and always explain their dangers; but when there are writing mediums, as there are, something very strange happens, and one must very critically separate truth from error. Well, this writing of things that the person does not have in mind at the moment when he writes them, this mediumistic writing became an experimental problem for Staudenmaier, and he began to put the pencil to paper himself, and lo and behold, things came out that he had never thought of. He wrote the strangest things. Do you think it is also a surprise when someone who thinks entirely scientifically takes a pencil in his hand, makes himself the writing medium and now believes that it will not work. But now this pencil suddenly acquires power, guides the hand, writes down all kinds of things that amaze you. That happened to Staudenmaier.

And what surprised him most was that this pencil became moody – that's what people say – just as a dream becomes moody, writing completely different things than he had intended. It seems, you can tell from the context, that the pencil once exerted a compulsion on the hand: “You are a cabbage!” and to write similar nice things.

Now, these are things that the gentleman certainly did not think of himself! And after such things had accumulated, and the pencil had repeatedly written the craziest things, Staudenmaier asked: Yes, who is it actually that is writing? – Now it answered: It is spirits who are writing. That was not true in his opinion, because ghosts do not exist for a scientifically minded person. What should he say now? He can't say that the spirits have lied to him, so he says: his subconscious is constantly lying. It's a terrible story, isn't it, when the subconscious suddenly comes to the conviction in the person himself that, for example, he is a cabbage and writes it down, so that, as they say in ordinary life, it is in black and white.

But he continued to behave as if spirits were speaking. So he asked them why they didn't tell the truth. They replied: 'Yes, that is our nature, we are just the kind of spirits who have to lie to you; it is in our character, we have to lie.

That was extremely characteristic. Now, however, we are entering a realm where things really get quite tricky, because, you see, if it turns out that the truth only sits up there and lies are constantly told down there, it naturally creates an uncomfortable situation. But if you are completely caught up in a natural scientific world view, then in such a case you cannot help but come to the conclusion that there is a liar inside you.

Nevertheless, Staudenmaier comes to the conclusion that objective spiritual beings never speak, but only the subconscious. You can put everything into such general terms.

But you see, it is characteristic that these spirits did not even try to guide Staudenmaier's hand in such a way that they might have written down a new mathematical proof for him or solved a scientific problem. That is actually the most characteristic thing, that they always said something different.

There were occasions when Staudenmaier was beside himself, and then a doctor friend would advise him to go hunting. Such instructions are common in medical advice. For example, getting married is sometimes a particularly popular piece of advice in medicine. In this case, the advice was to go hunting to get out of this crazy stuff, to distract himself, so to speak.

But lo and behold, even though he went hunting magpies, as he describes in detail, always looking out for magpies, all sorts of demonic figures peered down from the trees, not magpies. There sat on some branch such things, like something that was half a cat and half an elephant, turning up its nose at him or sticking out its tongue at him. And when he looked away from the tree into the grass, he saw not hares, but also all kinds of fantastic figures, who did their juggling with him.

So not only had the pen written down all sorts of stuff, but now the higher imagination was also stimulated in such a way that not magpies appeared, but demons, all sorts of ghostly creatures, so again a lie.

In any case, we can say that this experimenter came close to a world very similar to the world of dreams, and that this world is also a protest against the whole natural-law context. For what would the natural-law context have been? Well, he would have taken his gun off his shoulder, shot a magpie, and there would have been a magpie down there. But none of that appeared, only what I have characterized to you: once again a protest against natural law, from the spiritual world of the night side, into which the man had pushed. And if the man had stopped at the subconscious, he should at least have said to himself: If all this is down there in the subconscious, then my subconscious protests against the laws of nature. - For what does this subconscious actually tell him? Yes, it conjures up all kinds of demons and the like, as I have described. That tells him something quite different from what he has imagined about himself. So he should at least conclude from this: If the world were only organized according to natural laws, then my inner self could not exist at all, then I could not exist as a human being, because when this inner self speaks, it speaks quite differently than in natural laws. So a completely different world belongs to the inner self of man than the one over which the laws of nature are spun, a world that protests in its coherence against the laws of nature.

That, after all, is the only interesting thing about this magical experimenter or experimenting magician, who has impressed so many people so extraordinarily. It is something that shows us how, in fact, man can come to perceive such a world in other ways as well, as the world of dreams, which otherwise more or less always occurs in life, is in its contexts.

And this leads to the realization, through a correct view of ordinary life, that simply because man is there, the ordinary world, interwoven with natural laws, is adjacent to another world that is not interwoven with natural laws.

If you look at these things correctly, you have to say to yourself: there is the world interwoven with natural laws, which we study. Bordering on this is another world that has nothing to do with natural laws; quite different laws prevail in it. So, by immersing oneself in a real way in the world of dreams, one arrives in a world where natural laws cease. The fact that the human being's ordinary consciousness initially perceives this world in a fantastic way is merely due to the fact that he does not have the ability to recognize the connections that confront him. He brings the fantasy with him. But that which lives and weaves there is precisely another sphere of the world, into which the human being plunges in his dreams.

This leads us directly to something else. If you talk to someone who is completely absorbed in the world view that is currently in vogue, they will say: I study the laws of falling by looking at a falling stone. I discover the laws of gravitation. Then I go out into the world and apply them to the stars as well. And then it is thought: Here is the earth, where I find the laws of nature, and there is the cosmos. I think, blackboard 10, the laws that I have found here on earth also apply to the Orion Nebula or to anything.

Now everyone knows that, for example, gravity decreases with the square of the distance, that it becomes weaker and weaker, that the light decreases, and I have already said: So the truth of our natural laws also decreases. What is true in relation to natural laws on our earth here is no longer true out there in the universe. That is only true up to a certain distance. But out there in space, outside a certain width, the same lawfulness begins that we encounter when we immerse ourselves in a dream. Therefore, people should realize that when they look out at the Orion Nebula, they should actually not think physically, using the experimental method, to understand the Orion Nebula, but rather begin to dream, because the Orion Nebula shows its lawfulness according to dreams.

One can say that people actually knew about such things at one time, and intuitions still remained for later times, especially with thinkers who were able to concentrate quite well.

One such naturalist, who did not live in the second half of the 19th century but in the first, was Johannes Müller, who was the teacher of Haeckel. He was a man who could truly concentrate at all times. He was completely absorbed in whatever he was doing. The fact that one can really live like that, concentrated in whatever one is doing, sometimes leads to more; in some respects, as I will mention in a moment, it may have downsides. Johannes Müller, for example, was once asked about something during a summer course he taught. He said, “That is something I only know during the winter lectures, not in the summer.” He was so focused on the material for his summer lectures that he freely admitted that he only knew the rest during the winter.

But this Johannes Müller, for example, once confessed the very interesting fact that he can really cut up corpses for a long time to come to something; he does not come to it, he does not get into what he actually wants to understand. But sometimes he succeeds in dreaming about what he has experimented on, and then he sees much deeper into the matter, then things open up for him. It was in the first half of the nineteenth century. Then someone could still allow himself such extravagances, even if he was a famous natural scientist.

So, man enters into a completely different world, into a completely different order of things, when he dreams. And on proper consideration, it must be assumed that actually, if one were to do as Johannes Müller did, one would not have to think about the Orion Nebula as one does in the observatories or in the astronomical institutions, but one would have to dream about it, then one would know more about it than if one thought about it. I would like to say that this is connected with the fact that in pastoral ages, when shepherds slept in the pasture at night, they actually dreamed about the stars, and they knew more than later people know. It is really true, it is so.

In short, whether we go into the depths of man and approach the world of dreams or whether we go out into the wide universe, we meet, as the ancients said, outside the zodiac a world of dreams.

And here we are at the point where we can understand what the Greeks meant when they used the term “Chaos”. I have read all kinds of explanations of Chaos, but I have always found them far from the truth. What did the Greeks mean when they spoke of Chaos? He meant the lawfulness that one gets a glimpse of when immersed in a dream, or that one must assume in the outermost circumference of this universe. This lawfulness, which is not the lawfulness of nature but something else, the Greeks attributed to chaos. Yes, they said, chaos begins where the lawfulness of nature can no longer be found, where a different lawfulness reigns. For the Greeks, the world was born out of chaos, that is, out of a context that was not yet natural law, but rather like a dream or, as it still is today, the worlds of the constellation of Orion, the hunting dog and so on. First, you enter a world that at least announces itself to man in the fantastic but vivid world of dream images.

But now it is the case that when the physical natural world lies here, we enter into a second current, so to speak, by immersing ourselves in dreams. But then we enter into a third current, which lies beyond the world of dreams and no longer has any direct relationship to the laws of nature. The world of dreams protests in its imagery against the laws of nature. In this third world, it would be quite nonsensical to say that it follows natural laws. It completely and boldly contradicts natural laws, because it also approaches people. While the dream still comes to light in the world of vivid images, this third world first comes to light through the voice of conscience in the moral world view.

When we have the world of nature on the one hand and the world of morality on the other, there is no transition. But the transition lies in the world of dreams or in the world that the experimenter has experienced in the field of magic, where things have told him something quite different from the connections of natural law.

Between the world interwoven with natural laws and the world from which our conscience speaks as it flows into us, lies the world of dreams for ordinary consciousness. But this leads directly to the fact – because this is at the same time the waking world, this the dream world, this the sleeping world – that this brings us to the idea that during sleep the gods actually speak to man of what is not natural but moral, what then remains for man as the voice of God in his inner being when he wakes up, as conscience.

In this way, the three worlds are connected, and two things can be understood: on the one hand, why the world of dreams protests against the natural context, and on the other hand, to what extent this world of dreams is a transition to a world whose reality remains hidden from ordinary consciousness, to the world from which moral views also come.

If one then finds one's way into this world, one finds there the further spiritual world, which can no longer be grasped in terms of natural laws, but in terms of spiritual laws, while in dreams natural laws mix colorfully with spiritual laws, spiritual laws with natural laws, because the dream world is a transitional current between the two worlds.

Thus we have illuminated from another side how man integrates himself into the three worlds.

The contemplation of the world of dreams, as we did yesterday, has drawn our attention to the fact that in the moment when we enter from the world that is spread out before our senses as the world of natural laws into another world, the natural laws actually cease. I would like to say that they cease gradually, they cease little by little. In dreams, one can still clearly see how they are still based, on the one hand, on what is natural and lawful, but how, on the other hand, moral and ethical connections play into the dream, how one thing is connected to another in such a way that something is expressed in the context, such as, let us say, the moral value of the dreamer or the like. The dream is just a gentle transition from the physical-sensual world into completely different worlds, into worlds that then have nothing at all to do with the merely natural-law contexts.

Now, however, through such ideas and feelings, as they can be aroused by directing one's soul towards such transitions as are given in dreams, a, I would say, human understanding of world connections must be brought about, which otherwise should simply stand before the human soul as unrevealed secrets. You will soon feel what I actually mean. What matters is not intellectual comprehension of these things. What matters is to gain a totally human understanding, to gain a human relationship to the things with which man is connected, connected in his whole life and through the fact that he belongs to humanity. And it is impossible to say or present something about certain things in life if you have not allowed your feelings to be touched by something like what was discussed yesterday about 'Iraum. The things that depend on this coloring that the feeling gets as a result. And so today, in response to what was said yesterday about dreams and the strange utterances of the experimental magician, I want to put forward something that is linked to phenomena of life that should actually be felt as much greater mysteries than is usually the case. In connection with yesterday's considerations, such people, who from a certain point of view, bear the collective name “somnambulists”, people who show all kinds of deviations in their lives, which, for my sake, even go so far as to get up from their beds at night, climb around on roofs without falling off, and so on, that is, those people who are somnambulistic.

And secondly, from a certain point of view, I would like to discuss an appearance today that we have already discussed several times from other points of view, an appearance like that of Jakob Böhme or, for that matter, Paracelsus. And thirdly, in connection with this, I would like to discuss the appearance of Swedenborg. It can be said that today's humanity has become indifferent to everything, because the kind of interest that I would call a feuilletonistic one has spread so tremendously. Basically, phenomena such as somnambulists, Jakob Böhme or Swedenborg should be eating at people's souls, for they are quite different human phenomena that are placed in human life than ordinary citizens are.

Let us now try to understand such phenomena. Take the ordinary somnambulists. You know that in a certain way what they represent is connected with the manifestations of the moon. We have just recently spoken about the significance of the moon in the universe, and therefore this belongs in this context. I have told you that those beings who once were on Earth and brought man the original wisdom, which gradually faded away but which we find when we go back in history, that these entities have withdrawn to the Moon, as it were, to a kind of world colony, and that they populate the Moon internally. It is really the case that only the last remnants of what is characteristic of these beings have remained on earth in a coarser form. People were quite different back then, when these present-day moon beings were still on earth as the great teachers or guides of earthly humanity.

What these entities have left behind on earth are physical phenomena, the facts of reproductive life. These facts of reproductive life in its present form were not present on earth at the time when these entities gave people the original wisdom. Just as when you have dissolved any substance in a liquid, the liquid can look quite pure and even, but when the substance turns out to be sediment, then the substance is coarse and the liquid is even finer than it used to be – that is roughly what I mean here. What lives on earth today as the reproductive life is coarse in relation to what it once was. And what these beings have taken with them into the sphere of the moon is infinitely refined, has become infinitely more spiritual. But both belong together, both have been differentiated from each other. And what the moon really exerts on the earth as a force, what still works on the earth today as lunar force, is, as I told you when I discussed the position of the moon in the cosmos, that the moon actually reflects everything that is in the cosmos, not just the light of the sun, but actually reflects everything. So that we have two things in the moon: the interior of the moon, which is not currently emerging to the outside, but has closed itself off and been given a different task in the world, and that which is reflected back.

Now, in relation to his physical body, man is subject to the most powerful earthly force, gravity, in the way he moves, and also, incidentally, in the way he sits. It is always gravity that he appeals to. If he did not succumb to gravity with his physical body, he would not have these different states of equilibrium when walking, sitting, standing, and so on.

But with his etheric body, man is not so exposed to the earth force, but to the moon force. He is exposed to this force radiated back from the universe, and it pulls him out. While the force of gravity on earth pulls him down, this lunar force pulls him out into the cosmos. And this lunar force is temporarily predominantly active in somnambulant personalities. For moments, the lunar force overcomes the earthly force, and these personalities behave as if they had only an etheric body with which they can freely follow the lunar force. They drag their physical body along with them, and, as I said, climb around in the most daring way possible, as only the etheric body can, as the physical body cannot at all, but it is dragged along in such moments. So it is essentially, I would say, a breaking in of special lunar effects that occur in these somnambulistic personalities.

But now we must ask further, because everything is part of the great cosmic context, which ultimately leads back to nothing but beings. For the phenomena outside of the beings are only apparent, only the beings in the universe are truly real. So the beings in the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom, are truly real, as are the human beings, the angels, the archangels and so on. These are the realities; individualized beings are the realities. The other is something that takes place between beings, the other is an appearance, it is not a reality. So when we speak of realities, we are dealing with beings.

Now, when such beings appear, individualized human beings, that is, sleepwalkers, how does the appearance of such sleepwalkers fit into the whole of the universe? How is it that there are sleepwalkers at all in the context of the universe?

Now you really must grasp what I am about to say not in a logical, intellectual context, but in an emotional one, for that is the right logic in this field. Try to penetrate your feeling with the idea that one must go, I would say, from the world of natural law, beyond the currents of the dream-like into quite different worlds where natural laws no longer apply but where other connections prevail. Try to really feel your way into it, then you will also feel that one can speak of it: what is it like for those people who, in some earth life, appear as somnambulists, with what is not of this earth life, let us say, in the pre-earthly existence or in the post-earthly existence?

Surely, we could point out all the shortcomings and dark sides of the somnambulist, and even include the mediumistic aspect, but you know all that already, or at least you can know it. They behave differently in life, they act differently, they are different. Now, if they are different in earthly life, then one would have to ask, if one were to reach the spiritual world with its feelings in this way, I would like to say, quite literally through dreams: Are they perhaps also different in the neighboring extraterrestrial life, in the pre-earthly existence? What are they like there?

You see, it is evident from such entities, which are somnambulists in earthly incarnation, that in their pre-earthly existence they were actually extremely hostile in the spiritual world towards all spiritual beings.

If we use the means that already exist and that I have often spoken to you about, to investigate a somnambulant to find out what it was like in the pre-earthly existence – since the French Course we have often spoken of this pre-earthly existence in its concrete details – if we now investigate: What were such somnambulants like before they descended to their earthly existence? As grotesque as it may seem, it must be said: they were quite out of place in their pre-earthly existence – but they were materialists in the spiritual world in their pre-earthly existence.

Of course, one is not so materialistic there as to develop theoretical views about materialism. One moves, after all, first in the world of sympathies and antipathies; not in the world of concepts and judgments, but in the world of sympathies and antipathies. These somnambulists lived in the spiritual world, but most of what they experienced in the spiritual world was unpleasant to them. Everywhere they encountered spiritual beings they felt a sense of hatred for them. And so, when they descended to earthly existence, they could not anchor their astral body in the right way within themselves. One must indeed consolidate the astral body when one descends into earthly life. This consolidation suffers from the fact that these beings have constantly taken up these forces of antipathy towards the spiritual. And then the karma, which I would call cosmically directed, arises, that these entities, in their earthly life, because they have a physical body, must be connected to this physical body in just the way that a not quite consolidated astral body must be connected to the physical body.

Now I have also shown you how one passes through the sphere of the moon when descending back to earth, how one absorbs the lunar forces. Such beings have too little independence in relation to the lunar forces. They are not sufficiently consolidated in themselves, so that a relationship with the lunar forces remains in them when they enter their physical body. The result of this is that such beings actually show less consideration for their physical body than the average person shows for his physical body. And it is this, that they remain subject to the lunar sphere, the means of education in the entire plan of the world, to cure these people of their hostile attitude towards the spiritual. So that one stands with the moon-sick before people who, in this earthly life, are to be educated to get rid of their hostility towards the spiritual by being moon-sick. Through this non-grasping of the physical body, they experience the spiritual on earth, while in the spiritual world itself they have not sufficiently experienced the spiritual.

The normal citizen, who is now firmly seated in his physical body, is much more firmly seated in it today than is desirable for the good of humanity; he is terribly stuck in it. But the somnambulists pay very little attention to this physical body. Therefore, under certain constellations, they may experience moments when they are more given to the forces of the moon than to the forces of the earth.

Let us now move on from these personalities to one who, I would say, stood there in a certain greatness in Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus. Of course, such personalities also appear in history in a less grandiose way, not now in the present time, but it is not so long ago that such personalities were around. I would say there have always been more or less little Jakob Böhmes. Until a few decades ago, you could still find such little Jakob Böhmes, these personalities who, when you look at them so outwardly in ordinary life, are distinguished by the fact that they look into nature in a different way than is the case with the average citizen.

Take a characteristic manifestation in the case of Jakob Böhme. What was in his whole human character was already manifested in his youth. Take the characteristic manifestation: he tends animals like others do, when suddenly he has the urge to leave the animals, the herd and the others who are there, and to go to a place up in the mountains. Driven by instinct, he looks at a particular place. There he finds a hole in the ground, the earth is open. He looks down and finds a treasure down there. It shines up at him. He is amazed by this apparition, but he goes away in prayer. It does not even occur to him to take any of it. He often went back to look again. The hole was no longer there, the treasure must have been covered, and so on. He should have thoroughly convinced himself that what he had seen did not exist in the physical world, but of course, given his whole spiritual makeup, he never came to believe that he had not seen something after all.

Thus, what later emerged as his special way of thinking was prepared in him: to see into the borderline processes of things, the essence of things, everywhere. Anyone who reads Jakob Böhme's writings with even a little understanding will notice that the man saw salt and sulfur differently than a normal chemist of the time, of course. He speaks out of completely different insights. He even speaks out of insights that are not quite so familiar to him, so that language everywhere meets what he sees, because language is really sometimes confused and chaotic, and you have to live in it if you want to understand what this Jakob Böhme actually saw.

Now, to help you visualize the whole phenomenon of Jakob Böhme, I remind you of what I told you about the Druids. They dimmed the physical sunlight with their cromlechs, looked into the shadows, and in the shadows they saw the spiritual that radiates from the sun. For other people, shadows are just shadows, they are not light, they are something negative. For the Druids, however, it was something very real. And the shadow was not only different in its direction, depending on whether it appeared in March or October, but also in its inner attitude, in its coloring, in its coloring, but also in particular in the spiritual that it contained. If you push back the physical rays of the sun, so to speak, then the spiritual that the sun radiates appears precisely in the shadow. But for Jakob Böhme, this was what followed from his entire human essence. I would say that when he gave himself an inward jolt in a certain direction – it's a rough way of speaking, but that's how it is – when he gave himself an inward jolt, he could extinguish the physical sunlight and actually see into the darkness.

And what happens when you look through something where you don't follow the light, so to speak, but where you have something like a boundary in front of you? Something like a mirror appears. But when you look, let's say, like this - I'm drawing the physical eye, but it's not so much the physical eye that matters - there is light everywhere. Well, then you just see the physical things. But when you can extinguish this physical sunlight through your own power, then looking into the darkness actually occurs in the back. You don't even need the shadow, looking into the darkness occurs. But when this looking into the darkness occurs, then it has the effect of a mirror. And because Jacob Böhme could see like this, he saw things as if they were reflected in the darkness, and they gave back to his soul's eye what they had inwardly spiritually. So he saw the most ordinary objects when he tuned into them, especially the characteristic objects he speaks of, salt, sulfur, mercury and so on, not as one sees them when looking at them under ordinary circumstances, but he saw their essence, that which underlies them spiritually, mirrored in the darkness.

This was the special way in which he saw: He saw what underlies things spiritually, mirrored in the darkness. He saw them in the glow of the sun's effects, but excluding the physical effects of light and heat. While the somnambulists bring their will into the lunar effects and are thus less subject to the gravity of the earth for moments, and are more exposed to the lunar effects, while the ordinary somnambulists follow the lunar effects with their organs of will, Böhme was able to follow the solar effects with his organ of knowledge, and was thus a solar man, so to speak, a solar addict in contrast to the lunar addicts. And in such people, as Jakob Böhme was in his particularly characteristic greatness, we again have human individualities that stand out from ordinary humanity through a special relationship to the spiritual: sun people.

Again, with these sun people, we must ask: What were they like in their pre-earthly existence? Yes, you see, the pre-earthly existence of such people is actually extremely interesting. I have often reminded you that in the early days of human development, people always looked back to their pre-earthly existence. Something occurred in their consciousness that allowed them to have a kind of memory of their pre-earthly existence. They knew: I descended from spiritual worlds into the earthly world.

Something like this, not like a personal looking back, but a looking back on the way one looked at the spiritual world before one's earthly existence, emerged atavistically in Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus. As a result, such people have more of a connection to the elemental spirits of nature than to what natural things outwardly represent on their surface. They see more the spiritual entities that are within nature. For example, what is called sulfur on earth is not seen in the pre-earthly existence, but, if I may express it this way, the elemental spirit that underlies sulfur is seen. This is seen in the pre-earthly existence.

The yellow sulfur or sulfur of a different color – this concept does not exist in the pre-earthly existence. For the pre-earthly existence, there is not even an idea of the “sulfur” that people on earth talk about. There is absolutely nothing of the physical sulfur, but there is an idea in the pre-earthly existence of the very different spiritual essence that underlies the sulfur. These are the qualities that people like Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus possess.

As a result, they have precisely the power to exclude physical sunlight and, in physical darkness – I cannot say to see the spiritual effects of the sun, just as one does not see light or color, and so not see the spiritual effects of the sun either – I would say that with the vision, one encounters this physical darkness, but in spiritual elevation, which then reflects the spiritual that is present in the nature beings and natural forces. |

And basically it is actually like this: if there were not occasionally people who provide such inspiration – the channels through which such inspiration enters humanity are usually not taken into account – people would not know much about nature at all, because these inspirations are also necessary for even the most abstract knowledge of nature. The others then put everything into intellectual terms. But this looking into the living nature of things comes from such sun people.

You see, it became more and more difficult to express such things in the world the closer we came to the 20th century. Most of you know the biography of Jakob Böhme. You know how he was persecuted. If he had appeared in the last third of the 19th century, or if someone like Jakob Böhme, with the particular way he spoke, had appeared in the last third of the 19th century, he would probably have been locked up in an asylum. He would have fared much worse than he did in his environment at the time, but it was difficult even then to appear. After all, Jakob Böhme had, in a sense, still been able to feel the benefit of that time, and this benefit consisted, for example, in the fact that he was not maltreated with what we already have to learn in schools today. School education, elementary school education, was not so advanced. Please do not think that I am speaking against elementary education, but it must be said that things must also be judged from a different point of view. Perhaps not many of you have lived in such places where some retired shoemaker was a teacher. In such places, children have not learned all that much wisdom in the time that people in the present day have been able to live through in their youth; they remained much more untouched. But what one is exposed to in today's normal school not only trains something, but also kills something. Jakob Böhme had the good fortune not to have been subjected to such a school education, and therefore what was in him as a sun-person could push its way to the surface.

Yes, it is already there in the person; but sometimes it has to come out in a completely different way. I could quote you some compositions from the last third of the 19th century in which I could show you how people, because they went through school education from the end of the 19th century, naturally could not speak like Jakob Böhme - but in some musical compositions it comes out anyway. There is also a keynote and a basic mood as in the writings of Jakob Böhme. It breaks through somewhere, especially in music, but not in what has particularly reached the heights. Don't think that I would have to talk to you about a Wagnerian composition, nor about “Hänsel and Gretel”, of course, when I tell you these things. I would have to mention completely different compositions. But there are such musical achievements where something like this breaks through. Now, as I said, it is precisely such impulses, which are then realized, that have a certain significance for earthly life.

Now we can consider the third type, which has emerged so characteristically in Swedenborg. Swedenborg looks quite peculiar when you look at the externals. Swedenborg had already ascended to the forties of his life on earth; he was a recognized great scholar of his time, encompassing the entire science of his time, as much as one could possibly encompass this science of his time. There are works of his that have been published. But there are an enormous number of manuscripts that were written entirely outside the science of the time, that were written so strongly outside the science of the time – they then remained manuscripts – that a Swedish society of the greatest Swedish scholars has now been formed to publish those works of Swedenborg's that he wrote in the sense of normal science until well into the 1740s.

But then something like this begins with Swedenborg, where people say: He has gone mad. He has just gone mad! — One publishes his works as those of one of the greatest men of his time and explains that not just anyone is good enough to publish them, but that today entire academies are needed to make Swedenborg accessible to the world up to the age of forty-four or something like that. The future is not taken into account! But it is important that Swedenborg lived to a certain age in the intellectual and scholarly environment of his time, which was already so intellectual and scholarly, and that a certain spiritual insight then dawned on him.

Such a spiritual view, as it specifically occurred in Swedenborg, has very special characteristics. It is like this: If you imagine a human being and what the human being has as a brain, then, in a certain way, for the normal person, the etheric body fills the brain. What I have indicated here in red would be the physical brain. The etheric body fills the physical brain and extends somewhat beyond it.

Now, in the normal way, in the right, I could also say bourgeois way, his etheric body was formed, his brain, his head constitution was formed so normally by Swedenborg until he was in his forties. Then a force overcame him that contracted this etheric body somewhat, not behind the skin, of course, but contracted somewhat, into itself, so that it became denser, thereby also becoming more independent of the brain, but still retaining all the cleverness. Because it is not true that he then became more foolish; he was just as clever as before.

When you walk around as a sleepwalker, your astral body is so strongly subject to the power of the moon. The organs of will then often adjust to the power of the moon. When you are like Jakob Böhme, your cognitive faculty is aligned with the powers of the sun, and it repels the physical effects of the sun. When one becomes like Swedenborg, when there is such a contraction of the etheric body, there is the power that causes it, the Saturn power, that power of Saturn – I described it to you cosmically a short time ago – in which there is actually something like a kind of inwardness of our entire planetary system, as one can also say, Saturn contains the powers of the memory of our planetary system. What had been passed on to Swedenborg was precisely this Saturn force, this inwardness of the entire planetary system. This is how he was able to see things in such visions as he just described them. He saw angels, archangels, processes between angels and archangels, as he just described them. But what was it actually? What did he enter through this contraction of the etheric body of his head? He did not succeed in seeing the real processes in the hierarchies. You have to imagine what he saw like this: if this is the Earth, then we are drawing the Earth's ether sphere. This now extends into the cosmic expanse, about which I told you yesterday that we would encounter the Orion Nebula and so on, that there is a lawfulness, not a natural lawfulness, but a lawfulness, as it is in a dream. Where space would end, we would only encounter the processes in the hierarchies. Swedenborg did not see into this with his ability to see, but all the processes that really take place outside the ether sphere are not merely reflected in the ether, but they call forth, I would say, real image processes in the ether. So that something is going on up there in the hierarchies that should be described quite differently, but which has an effect on the ether sphere of the earth, so that the ether forms act in the earth's ether. Figures are acting around us, these are not the real angels, these are the ether figures, the figures formed out of the ether, but which now also implement their deeds in such a way that they are understandable to man.

These – one cannot call them reflections, but perhaps real reflections – these real reflections of the higher hierarchies in the earth's ether were seen by Swedenborg. He did not see what angels were doing, but he saw what one can see when one is up there in the angelic deeds, not seeing them as such, but seeing what is going on down there in the earth's ether in the sphere of men. What the angels do up there cannot have a direct effect on people on earth; it is precisely these real reflections that then have an effect among people. The reflections in the ether have an effect among people, they walk among us. Swedenborg saw them, he became aware of them.

So if those people we call moonstruck cause us to look at their pre-earthly existence, if, when we look at people like Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus, we look at their present earthly existence, then we have every reason to look at the post-earthly existence of people like Swedenborg. Our earthly existence only makes sense when we look forward to the afterlife. For it is these people in particular who are still able, after death, to have an instructive effect on others who have passed through the gate of death, to tell them much of what must remain incomprehensible in the higher worlds if one has not already become acquainted with something of the higher worlds in the earthly world.

And one would like to say: It is so in the general spiritual plan of the world that human personalities of the kind of Swedenborg are introduced here on earth into the real shadows, real mirror images of the processes in the higher hierarchies, so that they are well prepared when they go up there, because they will need it precisely in the post-mortal existence. While the earth-lives of somnambulists, because of their condition, have something of the character of a reformatory in relation to the spiritual worlds, the lives of personalities such as Swedenborg have something preparatory for the achievements they have to accomplish after death. And so we can say that people are different in their individualities, and especially in those who are very different from the others, it can be shown how man can only be understood if we not only consider his relationship to the earthly environment, but if we know that he also has a relationship to the spiritual worlds in every moment of his life, even here in earthly existence has a relationship to the spiritual worlds. Everything that happens here in earthly existence, even in people in whom it manifests itself as strikingly as in Böhme and the others, has a connection to the pre-earthly existence, to the spirit that also lives in earthly existence, or to the post-earthly existence. Only in these special types, somnambulists, the Jakob Böhme type, the Swedenborg type, do we notice very strongly what is present to some extent in every human being: a being of earthly existence in relation to the pre-earthly existence or to the simultaneous earthly spiritual existence or to the post-earthly spiritual existence. In particular, those beings who, I might say, behave in the cosmos as I described to you at the time, that is, the moon beings, sun beings, Saturn beings, they need the forces that play in particular human beings to carry out their tasks.

And that is where a perspective can open up to us, which I will mention only at the end of these reflections. What this perspective opens up, I will talk about when I give the next lecture here. But a very specific perspective can open up for us. We really have to consider that the human interior, even the physical human interior, the ordinary physical human interior, which lies within the human skin, actually falls outside of what we usually call the cosmos.

We can, roughly speaking, say the following: if we have the earth here, then the mineral, plant, animal, physical-human effects and so on happen on it, and so what can be observed with the senses and combined with the mind happens on it. Then there are people on this earth on it. But there is also a world inside people, it is not the same world as outside. I could do it like this: I could draw many people schematically, always showing the inside of the people. What is going on inside the people could be the red, and the white around it could be the natural effects that can be seen with the senses and so on. Now you can make an abstraction. Do you think I will now erase everything that is there in the way of natural effects, I will only leave the red, I will erase everything so that only the inner being of people remains and everything else is gone. So imagine that I would first remove all the minerals from the earth, remove all the plants and remove all the animals, everything else that would be there in the way of natural effects – but if you remove the three natural kingdoms , everything is gone, and then there are the skins, so that you then have the physical skin gone, but not only the skins, but also all the physical matter that you have within you. I would take all that away, then something would remain of the whole globe: these are divine effects. We would still have the hierarchies in it, angels, archangels and so on. We would actually only then have taken away the earth and kept heaven.

And if you follow this sensation, then you come to adjust the human interior in the right way to the actual spiritual supersensible world and to imagine in a comprehensive way where that is that could be called heaven. It is actually in the person, in that which remains when all that is gone that I have described.

If you describe sleepwalkers, Jakob Böhme, Swedenborg as I have today, who are you actually talking about? Then you are not on earth, but in the cosmos. It is necessary in our time that we no longer talk about the human being as if he were a connection between the laws and effects of nature that are outside, as has been the case in the last few centuries. Instead, we must today become aware of what would be there if we were to remove everything – I do not want to repeat the horrible image again repeat the ghastly image — if one were to remove all that I have just said would be removed, and leave only the inner man, then one would not only come upon the spiritual world in a general, vague, abstract-pantheistic sense, but one would come upon the concrete spiritual world of supersensible entities. They have their dwellings in man. And humanity must gradually become aware of this again, that the human body is indeed the dwelling of the gods.

Only when this is taken up in our time consciousness is the right ingredient in this time consciousness, whereby culture, instead of going down, can go up. This is a truth that can be expressed from a variety of perspectives. Today I wanted to present it to you as a link to what I said yesterday about dreams and today about these so-called abnormal states of mind.

It was in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century that materialism had its period of greatest development. In today's lecture we will center our interest more on the theoretical side of this materialistic evolution. A great deal of what I shall have to say about the theoretical aspect can also be said in almost the same words of the more practical aspect of materialism. For the moment, however, we will leave that aside and turn our attention more to the materialistic world conception that was prevalent in the civilized world in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century.

We shall find that we are here concerned with a twofold task. First, we have to gain a clear perception of the extent to which this materialistic world view is to be opposed, of how we must be armed with all the concepts and ideas enabling us to refute the materialistic world view as such. But in addition to being armed with the necessary conceptions, we find that from the point of view of spiritual science we are required at the same time to do something more, namely, to understand this materialistic world view. First of all, we must understand it in its content; secondly, we must also understand how it came about that such an extreme materialistic world view was ever able to enter human evolution.

It may sound contradictory to say that it is required of man on the one hand to be able to fight the materialistic world view, and on the other hand to be able to understand it. But those who base themselves on spiritual science will not find any contradiction here; it is merely an apparent one. For the case is rather like this. In the course of the evolution of mankind moments must needs come when human beings are in a sense pulled down, brought below a certain level, in order that they may later by their own efforts lift themselves up again. And it would really be of no help to mankind at all if by some divine decree or the like it could be protected from having to undergo these low levels of existence. In order for human beings to attain to full use of their powers of freedom, it is absolutely necessary that they descend to the low levels in their world conception as well as in their life. The danger does not lie in the fact that something like this appears at the proper time, and for theoretical materialism this was the middle of the nineteenth century. The danger consists in the fact that if something like this has happened in the course of normal evolution, people then continue to adhere to it, so that an experience that was necessary for one particular point in time is carried over into later times. If it is correct to say that in the middle of the nineteenth century materialism was in a certain sense a test mankind had to undergo, it is equally correct to say that the persistent adherence to materialism is bound to work terrible harm now, and that all the catastrophes befalling the world and humanity that we have to experience are due to the fact that a great majority of people still tries to cling to materialism.

What does theoretical materialism really signify? It signifies the view regarding the human being primarily as the sum of the material processes of his physical body. Theoretical materialism has studied all the processes of the physical, sensory body, and although what has been attained in this study is still more or less in its first beginnings, final conclusions have nevertheless already been drawn from it in regard to a world view. Man has been explained as the confluence of these physical forces; his soul nature is declared to be merely something that is produced through the workings of these physical forces. It is theoretical materialism, however, that initiated investigation of the physical nature of the human being, and it is this, the extensive examination of man's physical nature, that must remain. On the other hand, what the nineteenth century drew as a conclusion from this physical research is something that must not be allowed to figure as more than a passing phenomenon in human evolution. And as a passing phenomenon, let us now proceed to understand it.

What is really involved here? When we look back in the evolution of mankind—and with the help of what I have given in Occult Science¹ we are able to look back rather far—we can see that the human being has passed through the greatest variety of different stages. Even if we limit our observation to what has taken place in the course of earth evolution, we are bound to conclude that this human being started with a form that was quite primitive in comparison to its present form, and that this form then underwent gradual change, approaching ever nearer to the form the human being possesses today. As long as we focus on the rough outline of the human form, the differences will not appear to be so great in the course of human history. When we compare with the means at the disposal of external history, the form of an ancient Egyptian or even an ancient Indian with the form of a man of present-day European civilization, we will discover only relatively small differences, as long as we stay with the rough outlines or superficial aspects of observation. For such a rough viewpoint, the great differences in regard to the primitive forms of development emerge only in early man in prehistoric ages.

When we refine our observation, however, when we begin to study what is hidden from outer view, then what I have said no longer holds good. For then we are obliged to admit that a great and significant difference exists between the organism of a civilized man of the present and the organism of an ancient Egyptian, or even an ancient Greek or Roman. And although the change has come about in a much more subtle and delicate manner in historical times, there has most assuredly been such change in regard to all the finer forming and shaping of the human organism. This subtle change reached a certain culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. Paradoxical as it may sound, it is nevertheless a fact that in regard to his inner structure, in regard to what the human organism can possibly attain, man had reached perfection at about the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then, a kind of decadence has set in. Since that time, the human organism has been involved in retrogression. Therefore, also in the middle of the nineteenth century, the organs that serve as the physical organs of human intellectual activity had reached perfection in their development.

What we call the intellect of man requires, of course, physical organs. In earlier ages, these physical organs were far less developed than they were in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is true that what arouses our admiration when we contemplate the Greek spirit, particularly in such advanced Greeks as Plato and Aristotle, is dependent on the fact that the Greeks did not have such perfect organs of thinking, in the purely physical sense, as had men of the nineteenth century. Depending on one's preference, one might say, “Thank heaven that people in Greek times did not possess thinking organs that were as perfect as those of the people in the nineteenth century!” If on the other hand, one is a pedant like those of the nineteenth century, wishing to cling to this pedantry, then one can say, “Well, the Greeks were just children, they did not have the perfect organs of thought that we have; accordingly, we must look with an indulgent eye upon what we find in the works of Plato and Aristotle.” School teachers often speak in this vein, for in their criticism they feel vastly superior to Plato and Aristotle. You will only fully understand what I have just indicated, however, if you make the acquaintance of people—and there are such!—who have a kind of vision that one may call, in the best sense of the word, a clairvoyant consciousness.

In such people, the presence of clairvoyant consciousness—if there are any in the audience who possess a measure of it, they will please forgive me for telling what is the plain truth—is due to the inadequate development of the organs of intellect. It is quite a common occurrence in our day to meet people who have a measure of clairvoyant consciousness and possess extraordinarily little of what is today called scientific intellect. True as this is, it is equally true that what these clairvoyant people are able to say or write down through their own faculty of perception, may contain thoughts far cleverer than the thoughts of people who show no signs whatever of clairvoyance but function with the best possible organs of intellect. It may easily happen that clairvoyant people who, from the point of view of present- day science are quite stupid—please forgive this expression—produce thoughts cleverer than the thoughts of recognized scientists without being themselves any the cleverer for producing them! This actually occurs. And to what is it due? It comes about because such clairvoyant persons do not need to exercise any organs of thought in order to arrive at the clever thoughts. They create the corresponding images out of the spiritual world, and the images already have within them the thoughts. There they are, ready-made, while other people who are not clairvoyant and can only think have to develop their organs of thought first before they can develop any thoughts. If we were to sketch this, it would be like this. Suppose a clairvoyant person brings something out of the spiritual world in all manner of pictures (see drawing, red). But in it, thoughts are contained, a network of thoughts. The person in question does not think this out, instead, he sees it, bringing it along from the spiritual world. He has no occasion to exercise any organ of thought.

Consider another person who is not gifted with clairvoyance, but who can think. Of all that has been drawn in red below, there is nothing at all present in him. He does not bring any such thing out of the spiritual world. Neither does he bring this thought skeleton with him out of the spiritual world (see drawing on left). He exerts his organs of thinking and through them produces this thought skeleton (see drawing).

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In observing human beings today, one can find among them everywhere examples of all the stages between these two extremes. For one who has not trained his faculty of observation, it is nevertheless most difficult to distinguish whether a person is actually clever, in the sense that he thinks by means of his organs of reason, or whether he does not think with them at all, but instead by some means brings something into his consciousness, so that only the pictorial, imaginative element is developed in him, but so feebly that he himself is not even aware of it. Thus, there are any number of people today who produce most clever thoughts without having to be clever on that account, while others think very clever thoughts but have no special connection to any spiritual world. To learn to apprehend this distinction is one of the important psychological tasks of our age, and it affords the basis for important insight into human beings at the present time. With this explanation you will no longer find it difficult to understand that empirical super-sensible observation shows that the majority of mankind possessed the most perfectly developed organs of thought in the middle of the nineteenth century. At no other time was there so much thinking done with so little cleverness as in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Go back to the twenties of the nineteenth century—only, people do not do this today—or even a little earlier, and read the scientific texts produced then. You will discover that they have an entirely different tone; they do not yet contain the completely abstract thinking of later times which depends on man's physical organs of thought. We need not even mention what came from the pen of people like Herder, Goethe or Schiller; grand conceptions still dwelled in them. It does not matter that people do not believe this today and that commentaries today are written as if this were not the case. For those who write these commentaries and believe that they understand Goethe, Schiller, and Herder simply do not understand them; they do not see what is most important in these men.

It is a fact of great significance that about the middle of the nineteenth century the human organism reached a culmination in respect of its physical form and that since that time it has been regressing; indeed, in regard to a rational comprehension of the world it is regressing rapidly in a certain sense.

This fact is closely connected with the development of materialism in the middle of the nineteenth century. For what is the human organism? The human organism is a faithful copy of man's soul-spiritual nature. It is not surprising that people who are incapable of insight into the soul and spirit of man see in the structure of the human organism an explanation of the whole human being. This is particularly the case when one takes into special consideration the organization of the head, and in the head in turn the organization of the nerves.

In the course of my lectures in Stuttgart,² I mentioned an experience that is really suited to throw light on this point. It happened at the beginning of the twentieth century in a gathering of the Giordano Bruno Society of Berlin.³ First, a man spoke—I would call him a stalwart champion of materialism—who was a most knowledgeable materialist. He knew the structure of the brain as well as anyone can know it today who has studied it conscientiously. He was one of those who see in the analysis of the brain's structure already the full extent of psychology—those who say that one need only know how the brain functions in order to have a grasp on the soul and to be able to describe it. It was interesting; on the blackboard, the man drew the various sections of the brain, the connecting strands, and so on, and thus presented the marvelous picture one obtains when one traces the structure of the human brain. And this speaker firmly believed that by having given this description of the brain he had described psychology. After he had finished speaking, a staunch philosopher, a disciple of Herbart,⁴ rose up and said, “The view propounded by this gentleman, that one can obtain knowledge of the soul merely by explaining the structure of the brain, is one I must naturally object to emphatically. But I have no cause to take exception to the drawing the speaker has made. It fits in quite well with my Herbartian point of view, namely, that ideas form associations with one another, and connecting strands of a psychic character run from one idea to another.” He added that as a Herbartian, he could quite well make the same drawing, only the various circles and so on would for him not indicate sections of the brain but complexes of ideas. But the drawing itself would remain exactly the same!

A most interesting situation! When it is a matter of getting down to the reality of a subject, these two speakers have diametrically opposed views, but when they make drawings of the same thing, they find themselves obliged to come up with identical drawings, even though one is a wholehearted Herbartian philosopher and the other a staunchly materialistic physiologist.

What is the cause of this? It is in fact this: We have the soul-spirit being of man; we bear it within us. This soul-spirit being is the creator of the entire form of man's organism. It is therefore not surprising that here in the most complete and perfect part of the organism, namely the nervous system of the brain, the replica created by the soul-spirit being resembles the latter in every way. It is indeed true that in the place where man is most of all man, so to speak, namely in the structure of his nerves, he is a faithful replica of the soul-spiritual element. Thus, a person who, in the first place, must always have something the senses can perceive and is content with the replica, actually perceives in the copy the very same thing that is seen in the soul-spiritual original. Having no desire for soul and spirit and only concentrating, as it were, on the replica, he stops short at the structure of the brain. Since this structure of the brain presented itself in such remarkable perfection to the observer of the mid-nineteenth century, and considering the predisposition of humanity at that time, it was extraordinarily easy to develop theoretical materialism.

What is really going on in the human being? If you consider the human being as such—I shall draw an outline of him here—and turn to the structure of his brain, you find that first of all man is, as we know, a threefold being: the limb being, the rhythmic man, and the being of nerves and senses. When we now look at the latter, we have before us the most perfect part of the human being, in a sense, the most human part. In it, the external world mirrors itself (see drawing, red). I shall indicate this reflection process by the example of the perception through the eyes. I could just as well sketch the perceptions coming through the ear, and so on. The external world, therefore, reflects itself in the human being in such a way that we have here the structure of man and in him the reflection of the outer world.

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As long as we consider the human being in this way, we cannot help but interpret him in a materialistic manner, even though we may go beyond the often quite coarse conceptions of materialism. For, on the one hand, we have the structure of the human being; we can trace it in all its most delicate tissue structures. The more closely we approach the head organization, the more we discover a faithful replica of the soul-spiritual element. Then we can follow up the reflection of the external world in the human being. That, however, is mere picture. We thus have the reality of man, on the one hand, traceable in all its finer structural details, and on the other hand we have the picture of the world.

Let us keep this well in mind. We have man's reality in the structure of his organs, and we have what is reflected in him. This is really all that offers itself initially to external sensory observation. Thus, for sensory observation, the following conclusion presents itself. When the human being dies, this whole human structure disintegrates in the corpse. In addition, we have the pictures of the outer world. If you shatter the mirror, nothing can mirror itself any longer; hence, the pictures, too, are gone when the human being has passed through death. Since external sense observation cannot ascertain more than what I have just mentioned, is it not natural to have to say that with death the physical structure of the human being disintegrates? Formerly, it reflected the outer world. Human beings bear but a mirror-image in their soul and it passes away. Materialism of the nineteenth century simply presented this as a fact. It could not do otherwise, for it really had no knowledge of anything else.

Now the whole matter changes when we begin to turn our attention to the soul and spirit life of man. There, we enter a region which is inaccessible to physical sensory observation. Take a fact pertaining to the soul that is near at hand, the simple fact that we confront the outer world by observing it. We observe and perceive objects; then we have them within us in the form of percepts. We also have memory, the faculty of recollection. We can bring up in images from the depths of our being what we experience in the outer world. We know how important memory is for the human being.

Let us consider this set of facts some more. Take these two inner experiences: You look through your eyes at the external world, you hear it with your ears, or in some other way you perceive it with your senses. You are then engaged in an immediately present activity of the soul. This then passes over into your conceptual life. What you have experienced today, you can raise up again a few days later out of the depths of your soul in pictures. Something enters into you in some manner and you bring it up again out of your own being. It is not difficult to recognize that what enters into the soul must originate in the external world. I do not wish to consider anything else for the moment except the fact that is clearly obvious, namely, that what we thus remember has to come from the outer world. For if you have seen some red object, you remember the red object afterwards, and what has taken place in you is merely the image of the red object which, in turn, arises again in you. It is therefore something the external world has impressed upon you more deeply than if you occupy yourself only with immediate perceptions in the outer world.

Now picture what happens: You approach some object, you observe it, that is to say, you engage in an immediate and present soul activity in regard to the observed object. Then you go away from it. A few days later, you have reason to call up again from the depths of your being the pictures of the observed object. They are present again, paler, to be sure, but still present in you. What has happened in the interval?

Let me ask you here to keep well in mind what I have just said and compare this singular play of immediate perceptual thoughts and pictures of memory with something that is quite familiar to you, the pictures appearing in dreams. You will easily be able to notice how dreaming is connected with the faculty of memory. As long as the dream images are not too confused, you can easily see how they tie in with the memory images, hence, how a relationship exists between dreams and what passes from living perceptions into memory.

Now consider something else. Human beings must be organically completely healthy if they are to tolerate dreaming properly, so to speak. Dreaming requires that a person has himself fully under control and that at any time a moment can occur when he is certain he has been dreaming. Something is out of order when a person cannot come to the point of perceiving quite clearly: This was a dream! You have met people who dreamed they were beheaded. Suppose they could not distinguish afterwards between such a dream and the actual beheading; suppose they thought they really had been beheaded and yet had to go on living! Just imagine how impossible it would be for such people to sort out the facts without becoming totally confused! They would constantly feel that they had just been beheaded, and if they presumed they had to believe this—one can just about imagine what sort of words would break from their lips!

You can see, therefore, that human beings should be able at any moment to have themselves in hand so well that they can distinguish dreams from the thought life within reality. There are people, however, who cannot do this. They experience all kinds of hallucinations and visions and consider them realities. They cannot distinguish; they do not have themselves well enough in hand. What does this signify? It means that what dwells in dream has an influence on their organization, and that the organization is adapted to the dream picture. Something in their nervous system is not fully developed that should be developed; therefore, the dream is active in them and makes its influence felt.

Thus, if someone is not able to distinguish between his dreams and experienced realities, it means that the power of the dream has an organizing effect on him. If a dream were to possess itself of our whole brain, we would see the whole world as a dream! If you can contemplate such a fact and appreciate its full value, you will gradually learn to apprehend the facts to which ordinary science today does not wish to aspire because it lacks the courage to do so. You will learn to perceive that the very same power that energizes the dream life is present in us as organizing and quickening power, as power of growth. The only reason why the dream does not have the power to tear asunder the structure of our organism is that the latter is too strongly consolidated, that it has so firm a structure as to be able to withstand the effects of the ordinary dream. Thus, the human being can distinguish between the dream experience and that of reality.

When the little child grows up, becoming taller and taller, a force is at work in it. It is the same force as the one contained in the dream; only in the case of the dream we behold it. When we do not behold it, when it is instead active inside the body, then it, the very same power that is in the dream, makes us grow. We need not even go so far as to consider growth. Every day, for example, when you eat and digest and the effects of digestion spread throughout your organism, this happens by means of the force that dwells in dreams. Therefore, when something is out of order in the organism, it is connected with dreaming that is not as it should be. The force we can, from the outside, observe working in dream life is the same as the one that then works inwardly in the human being, even in the forces of digestion.

Thus, we can say that if we only consider the life of man in the right way, we become aware of the working of the dream force in his organism. When I describe this actively working dream force, I actually enter upon the same paths in this description that I must tread when I describe the human etheric body.

Imagine that someone were able to penetrate with his vision everything that brings about growth in the human being from childhood on, everything that causes digestion in man, everything that sustains his whole organism in its state of activity. Imagine that I could take this whole system of forces, extracting it from the human being and placing it before him, then I would have placed the etheric body before the human being. This etheric body, that is, the body that reveals itself only in irregularities in a dream, was far more highly developed prior to the point in time in the nineteenth century to which I have referred. Gradually it became weaker and weaker in its structure. In turn, the structure of the physical body grew correspondingly stronger. The etheric body can conceive in pictures, it can have dreamlike imaginations, but it cannot think. As soon as this etheric body begins to be especially active in a person of our time, he becomes a bit clairvoyant, but then he can think less, because, for thinking, he particularly needs the physical body.

Therefore, it need not surprise us that when people of the nineteenth century had the feeling that they could think particularly well, they were actually driven to materialism. For what aided them in this thinking the most was the physical body. But this physical thinking was connected with the special form of memory that was developed in the nineteenth century. It is a memory that lacks the pictorial element and, wherever possible, moves in abstractions.

Such a phenomenon is interesting. I have frequently referred to the professor of criminal anthropology Moritz Benedikt.⁵ Today as well, I would like to mention an interesting experience he himself relates in his memoirs. He had to address a meeting of scientists, and he reports that he prepared himself for this speech for twenty-two nights, not having slept day or night. On the last day before giving the address, a journalist who was supposed to publish the speech came to see him. Benedikt dictated it to him. He says that he had not written down the address at all, having merely impressed it onto his memory. He now dictated it to the journalist in his private chamber; the following day he gave this speech at the meeting of scientists. The journalist printed what he had taken down from dictation, and the printed speech agreed word for word with the speech Benedikt delivered at the meeting.

I must confess, such a thing fills me with admiration, for one always admires what one could never find possible to accomplish oneself. This is indeed a most interesting phenomenon! For twenty-two days, the man worked to incorporate, word for word, what he had prepared into his organization, so that in the end he could not possibly have uttered a single sentence out of the sequence impressed onto his system, so firmly was it imbedded!

Such a thing is possible only when a person is able to imprint the whole speech into his physical organism purely out of the gradually developing wording. It is actually a fact that what one thinks out in this way stamps itself onto one's organization as firmly as the force of nature firmly builds up the bone system of man. Then, the whole speech rests like a skeleton in the physical organism. As a rule, memory is tied to the etheric body, but in this case the latter has imbedded itself completely in the physical organism. The entire physical system then contains something in the way it contains the bones, something that stands there like the skeleton of the speech. Then it is possible to do what Professor Benedikt did. But this is only possible when the nerve structure of the physical organism is developed in such a way that it receives without resistance into its plasticity what is brought into it; gradually, of course, for twenty-two days, even nights, it had to be worked in.

It is not surprising that somebody who relies so much on his body acquires the feeling that this physical body is the only thing working in the human being. Human life had indeed taken such a turn that it worked its way completely into the physical body; people therefore arrived at the belief that the physical body is everything in the human organization. I do not think that any other age but ours, which has attached this high value on the physical body, could have come to such a grotesque invention—forgive the expression—as stenography. Obviously, when people did not rely as yet on stenography, they did not attach so great a value to preserving and accurately recording words and the sequence of words such as is the aim in stenography. After all, only the imprint in the physical body can make so fast and firm a record. It is therefore the predilection for imprinting something in the physical body that has brought about the other preference for preserving this imprinted word, but by no means for retaining anything that stands one level higher. For stenography could play no part if we wished to preserve those forms that express themselves in the etheric body. It takes the materialistic tendency to invent something as grotesque as shorthand.

All this, of course, is added only by way of explanation of what I wish to contribute to the problem of understanding the appearance of materialism in the nineteenth century. Humanity had arrived at a certain condition that tended to engrain the soul-spiritual into the physical organism. You must take what I have said as an interpretation, not as a criticism of stenography. I do not favor the immediate abolition of stenography. This is never the tendency underlying such characterizations. We must clearly understand that just because one understands something, this does not imply that one wishes to abolish it right away! There are many things in the world that are necessary for life and that yet cannot serve all purposes—I do not want to go further into this subject—and the need for which still has to be comprehended. But we live in an age, and I have to emphasize this again and again, when it is absolutely necessary to penetrate more deeply into the development of nature as well as into that of culture, to be able to ask ourselves: Where does this or that phenomenon come from? For mere carping and criticizing accomplish nothing. We really have to understand all the things that go on in the world.

I would like to sum up what I presented today in the following way. The evolution of mankind shows that in the middle of the nineteenth century a certain culmination was reached in the process of the structural completion of the physical body. Already now, a decadence has set in. Further, this perfection of the physical body is connected with the rise of theoretical materialism. In the next few days, I shall have to say more about these matters from one or another viewpoint. I wished to place before you today what I have just summed up.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1972.
• 2. See lecture of March 21, 1921 (in GA 324), where a more detailed description is given, also in regard to the conclusions.
• 3. Meeting of the Giordano-Bruno Society in Berlin: Date and title of this lecture could not be ascertained. Concerning this society, see Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, chapter XXIX; Anthroposophic Press, NY, 1970.
• 4. Johann Friedrich Herbart, 1776–1841; German philosopher, psychologist and educator.
• 5. Moritz Benedikt, 1835–1920; Criminal psychologist. See Moritz Benedikt, Aus meinem Leben. Erinnerungen and Eroerterungen; Vienna 1906, vol. III, p. 315.

Before I begin, let me emphasize that this lecture does not form part of the sequence of lectures presented in the context of the courses,¹ but in a certain respect is intended to relate to what I have outlined yesterday evening. There, we dealt with studying that particular form of development within humanity's historical evolution that occurred in the middle and also in the second half of the nineteenth century; the evolutionary impulse of materialism. I said that in these considerations our attention should not be turned so much to materialism in general, which calls for other viewpoints, but rather to theoretical materialism, to materialism as a world view. I drew attention to the fact that this materialism must be confronted with a sufficiently critical mind, but that, on the other hand, materialism has been a necessary phase of evolution in the history of mankind.

We cannot simply speak of rejecting it and say that it is an aberration; materialism needs to be understood. For the one does not exclude the other. Particularly in these reflections it is important to extend the sphere of thoughts relating to truth and error further than is ordinarily the case. It is generally said that in the logical life of thoughts it is possible either to err or to find the truth. What is not mentioned is that under certain circumstances the glance we cast upon the external world may discover errors in outer reality. Difficult though it may be for modern thought to admit to errors in the events of nature—something that spiritual science has to do—it is obvious for people today to admit that there are actual errors in the results that arise in the course of the historical development and manifest themselves, so to speak, in the communal, social sphere. These errors cannot be corrected by mere logic, but demand comprehension based on the conditions that gave rise to them.

In thinking, all we have to do is reject error. We have to extricate ourselves from error and, overcoming it, reach truth. But in the case of errors rooted in the factual realm we must always say that they also have a positive aspect and are of value in a certain sense for the development of mankind. Theoretical materialism of the nineteenth century should therefore not merely be condemned in a narrow, one-sided manner; instead, we should grasp its significance in human evolution.

Theoretical materialism consisted in the fact—and what remained of it still consists in this—that man devotes himself to a conscientious and exact investigation of the external material facts, that in a certain sense he loses himself in this world of facts. Then, proceeding from this investigation of facts, he attains to a view of life that tends to the conclusion that there is no other reality except the world of facts, and that everything pertaining to soul and spirit is, after all, merely a product of the material course of events. Even a conception of life such as this was necessary during a certain epoch of time, and the only danger would be a rigid adherence to it so that it could influence the further development of humanity in an age when other contents have to enter human consciousness.

Let us try today and investigate the actual basis of this evolutionary impulse leading to theoretical materialism. We come to it when, from a certain standpoint, we picture once more the threefold nature of the human organism.² I have characterized it on many occasions. I have said: We must distinguish within the whole organization of the human being the part that, in regard to his physical being, may be designated as the organization of the senses and nerves. This is chiefly concentrated in the human head, but in a certain sense it extends over the whole human organism, also penetrating the other parts of it. As a second member we have the rhythmical organization. We encounter it chiefly in the rhythm of breathing and in the circulation of the blood. The third part in a wider sense is the metabolic organization of the human being, including the whole system of the human limbs. The human limb system is a system of movement, and every form of movement is basically an expression of our metabolic processes. One day, when people will investigate more closely what really takes place in the metabolic processes whenever the human being moves, they will discover the intimate connection between the limb system and the metabolic system.

In considering these three systems in the human being, we have, first of all, pointed out the fundamental difference between them. I have already drawn your attention yesterday to the fact that, by means of the same drawing, two men with entirely different world views wanted to clarify matters relating to the human head organization as well as to the processes of human thinking. I pointed out that it so happened that I was once present at a lecture given by an extreme materialist. He wished to describe the life of the soul, but he actually described the human brain, the individual sections of the brain, the connecting fibers, and so on. He arrived at a certain picture, but this picture he drew on the blackboard was, for him, only the expression of what goes on materially and physically in the human brain. At the same time, he saw in it the expression of soul life, particularly the conceptual life. Another man, a philosopher of the school of Herbart, spoke of thoughts, of associations of thoughts, of the effect one thought has upon another, etc., and he said he could make use of the same picture on the blackboard. Here, quite empirically, I should say, we encounter something most interesting. It is this that somebody for whom the observation of the soul life is something quite real, at least in his thoughts—this must always be added in case of Herbartianism—clarifies to himself the activity of the soul life by using the same picture employed by the other lecturer, who depicts the soul life by trying to set forth only the processes in the human brain.

Now, what lies at the foundation of this? The fact is that in its plastic configuration the human brain is indeed an extraordinarily faithful replica of what we know as the life of thought. In the plastic configuration of the human brain, the life of thought really does express itself, we might almost say, in an adequate manner. In order to follow this thought to its conclusion, however, something else is needed. What ordinary psychology and also Herbart's psychology designate as chains of thoughts, as thought associations in the form of judgments, logical conclusions and so on, should not remain a mere idea. At least in our imagination—even if we cannot rise to clairvoyant Imaginations—we should allow it to culminate in a picture; the tapestry of logic, the tapestry presented to us by psychology of the life of thought, the teaching of the soul life, should be allowed to culminate in a picture. If we are in fact able to transform logic and psychology in a picture-like, plastic way into an image, then the human configuration of the brain will emerge. Then we shall have traced a picture, the realization of which is the human brain.

On what is this based? It is based on the fact that the human brain, indeed the whole system of nerves and senses, is a replica of an Imaginative element.³ We completely grasp the wonderful structure of the human brain only when we learn to investigate Imaginatively. Then, the human brain appears as a realized human Imagination. Imaginative perception teaches us to become familiar with the external brain, the brain we come to know through psychology and anatomy, as a realized Imagination. This is significant.

Another fact is no less important. Let us bear in mind that the human brain is an actual human Imagination. We are indeed born with a brain, if not a fully developed one, at least with a brain containing the tendencies of growth. It tries to develop to the point of being a realized Imaginative world, to be the impression of an Imaginative world. This is, as it were, the ready-made aspect of our brain, namely, that it is the replica of an Imaginative world. Into this impression of the Imaginative world we then build the conceptual experiences attained during the time between birth and death. During this period we have conceptual experiences; we conceive, we transform the sense perceptions into thoughts; we judge, we conclude, and so on. We fit this into our brain. What kind of activity is this?

As long as we live in immediate perception, as long as we remain in the interplay with the external world, as long as we open our eyes to the colors and dwell in this relationship with colors, as long as we open our organs of hearing to sounds and live within them, the external world lives on in us by penetrating our organism through the senses as through channels. With our inner life, we encompass this external world. But the moment we cease to have this immediate experience of the outer world—something I already called your attention to yesterday—the moment we turn our eye away from the world of colors, allow our ear to become inattentive to the resounding of the external world, the moment we turn our senses to something else, this concreteness—our interplay with the external world in perceiving—penetrates into the depths of our soul. It may then be drawn to the surface again in the form of pictures by memory. We may say that during our life between birth and death insofar as our thought life is concerned, our interplay with the external world consists of two parts: the immediate experience of the external world in the form of perceptions and the transformed thoughts. We surrender, as it were, completely to the present; our inner activity loses itself in the present. Then, however, this immediate activity continues. To begin with, it is not accessible to our consciousness. It sinks down into the subconscious but may be drawn to the surface again into memory. In what form, then, does it exist in us?

This is a point that can be explained only by a direct view attainable in Imagination. A person who honestly pursues his way in his scientific striving cannot help but admit to himself that the moment the riddle of memory confronts him he cannot advance another step in his research. For due to the fact that the experiences of the immediate present sink down into the subconscious, they become inaccessible to ordinary consciousness; they cannot be traced further.

But when we work in a corresponding way upon the human soul by means of the soul-spiritual exercises that have frequently been discussed in my lectures, we reach a stage where we no longer lose sight of the continuations of our direct life of perceptions and thoughts into conceptions that make memories possible. I have often explained to you that the first result of an ascent to Imaginative thinking is to have before your soul, as a mighty life-tableau, all your experiences since birth. The stream of experience normally flows along in the unconscious, and the single representations, which emerge in memory, rise up from this unconscious or subconscious stream through a half-dreamy activity. Those who have developed Imaginative perception are offered the opportunity to survey the stream of experiences as in one picture. You could say that the time that has elapsed since birth then takes on the appearance of space. What is normally within the subconscious is then beheld in the form of interconnected pictures. When the experiences that otherwise escape into the subconscious are thus raised to direct vision, we are able to observe this continuation of present, immediate perceptual and thought experiences all the way into conceptions that can be remembered. It is possible to trace what happens in us to any sort of experience we have in our mind, from the point in time when we first lose sight of it until the moment we recall it again. After all, between experiencing something and remembering it again something is taking place continuously in the human organism, something that becomes visible to imaginative perception. It is possible to view it in Imaginations, but it is now revealed in a quite special way.

The thoughts that have lost themselves, as it were, in the subconscious region an activity connected with our life-impulses, our impulses of growth; they stimulate an activity in us that is related to our impulse of death. The significant result revealing itself to Imaginative perception in the way I could only allude to today is the following: Human beings do not connect the memory-activity, leading to the renewal of thinking, of thought and perceptual experiences, with what calls us into physical life and maintains digestion in this life, so that substances that have become useless are replaced by usable ones, and so on. The power of memory that descends into the human being is not related to this ascending life system in man. It is linked to something we also bear within us ever since our birth, something we are born with just as we are born with the forces through which we live and grow. It is connected with what then appears to us, concentrated into one moment, in regard to the whole organism in dying.

Death only appears as a great riddle as long as it is not observed within the continuous stream of life from birth to death. Expressing myself paradoxically, I might say that we die not only when we die. In reality, we die at every moment of our physical life. By developing within our organism the activity leading to memory as recollective thinking—and in ordinary physical life every form of cognition is actually linked up with memory—insofar as this cognition is developed, we die continuously. A subtle form of death, proceeding from our head organization, is forever going on within us. By carrying out this activity that continues on into memory, we constantly begin the act of dying. But the forces of growth existing in the other members of the human organism counteract this process of death; they overcome the death forces. Thus we maintain life. If we only depended on our head organization, on the system of nerves and senses, each moment in life would really become a moment of death for us. As human beings we continuously vanquish death, which streams out, as it were, from our head to the remaining organism. The latter counteracts this form of death. Only when the remaining organization becomes weakened, exhausted through age or some kind of damage, thus preventing the counteraction against the death-bearing forces of the human head, only then does death set in for the whole organism.

Indeed, in our modern thinking, in the thinking of today's civilization, we really work with concepts that lie side by side like erratic blocks, without being able to correctly recognize their interrelationship. Light must enter into this chaos of erratic blocks constituting our world of concepts and thoughts. On the one hand, we have human cognition which is so intimately tied to the faculty of memory. We observe this human cognition and have no idea of its kinship to our conception of death. And because we are completely ignorant of this relationship, what could otherwise be deciphered in life remains so enigmatic. We are unable to connect the experiences of everyday life with the great extraordinary moments of experience. The insufficient spiritual view over what lies around as fragmentary blocks in our conceptual world brings it about that despite the splendid achievements of the nineteenth century life has gradually become so obscure.

Let us now consider the second system, the second member of the human organization, the rhythmical organization. It is also present in the human head organization. The interior of the human head breathes together with the breathing organism. This is an external physiological fact. But the breathing process of the human head lies, as it were, more within; it conceals itself from the system of nerves and senses. It is covered over by what constitutes the chief task of the head organization. Still, the human head has its own concealed rhythmical activity. This activity becomes evident mainly in the human chest organization, in those processes of the human organism that are centered in the organs of breathing and in the heart.

When we observe the outward appearance of this organization, unlike in the case of the head organization, we cannot see in it a kind of plastic image for what exists as its counterpart in the soul, namely, the life of feeling. When we observe the soul experiences, our feelings manifest as something more or less undefined. We have sharp contours in our thoughts. We also have clear concepts of thought associations. In the details pertaining to our life of feeling we have no such sharp outlines. There, everything interpenetrates, moves and lives. You will not find an Herbartian who, in making an outline of the life of emotion, would characterize this in a sketch that might resemble one drawn by an anatomist or a physiologist for the lungs or the heart and circulatory system. Here, you find that such a relationship does not exist between the inner soul element and the outer aspects. This is also the reason why Imaginative cognition does not suffice to bring before the soul this relationship between the soul's life of feeling and the rhythmical system. For this we need what I have characterized in my books as Inspiration, Inspirative perception. This special form of perception through Inspiration attains to the insight that our emotional life has a direct link to the rhythmical system. Just as the system of nerves and senses is linked to the conceptual life, so the rhythmical life is linked to the life of feelings.

But, metaphorically speaking, the rhythmical system is not the wax impression of the emotional life in the same way that the brain's configuration is the wax impression of the conceptual life. Consequently we cannot say that our rhythmical system is an Imaginative replica of our life of feeling. We must say instead that what unfolds and lives in us as the rhythmical system has come about through cosmic Inspiration, independently of any human knowledge. It is inspired into us. The activity carried out in the breathing and in the blood circulation is not merely something that lives within us enclosed by our skin; it is a cosmic event, like lightning and thunder. After all, through our rhythmical system, we are connected with the outer world. The air that is now within me was outside before; it will be outside again the next moment. It is an illusion to believe that we only live enclosed within our skin. We live as a member of the world that surrounds us, and the form of our rhythmical system, which is closely connected to our movements, is inspired into us out of this world.

Summing this up, we can say: As the basis of the human head we have, first of all, the realization of an Imaginative world. Then, in a manner of speaking, below what thus realizes itself as an Imaginative world, we have the realm of the rhythmical system, an Inspired world. Concerning our rhythmical system, we can only say: An Inspirative world is realized within it.

How do matters stand in regard to our metabolic system, our limb-system? Metabolism belongs together with the limb-system, as I have pointed out already. Our metabolic processes stand in a direct relationship with our volitional activity. But this relationship reveals itself neither to Imaginative nor to Inspirative perception. It discloses itself only to Intuitive cognition, to what I have described in my books as “Intuitive knowledge.” This explains the difficulty of seeing in the external physical processes of metabolism the realization of a cosmic Intuition. This metabolism, however, is also present in the rhythmical system. The metabolism of the rhythmical system conceals itself behind the life-rhythm, just as the life-rhythm conceals itself behind the activity of nerves and senses in the human head.

In the case of the human head we have a realized Imaginative world; hidden behind it a realized Inspirative world in regard to the rhythm in the head. Still further behind this, there is the metabolism of the head, hence a realized Intuitive element. Thus we can comprehend our head, if we [see] in it the confluence of the realized Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive elements. In the human rhythmical system the Imaginative is omitted; there we have only the realization of the Inspired and Intuitive elements. And in the metabolic system Inspiration, too, is omitted; there, we are dealing only with the realization of a cosmic Intuition.

In the threefold human organism, we thus bear within us first the organization of the head, a replica of what we strive for in cognition through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. In trying to understand the human head, we should really have to admit to ourselves that with mere external, objective knowledge gained through the observation of the outer sensory world, which is not even Imagination and does not rise up to the Intuitive element, we should stop short of the human head. For the inner being of the human head begins to disclose itself only to Imaginative knowledge; behind this lies something still deeper that reveals itself to Inspiration. In turn, behind this, lies something that makes itself known to Intuitive knowledge. The rhythmical system is not even accessible to Imagination. It reveals itself only to Inspirative cognition, and what is concealed beneath it is the Intuitive element. Within the human organism, we certainly ought to find metabolism incomprehensible. The true standpoint in regard to the human metabolism can be none other than the following. We can only say that we observe the metabolic processes of the external world; we try to penetrate into them with the aid of the laws of objective perception. Thus we attain knowledge of the external metabolism in nature. The instant this outer metabolism is transformed and metamorphosed into out inner metabolism it becomes something quite different; it turns into something in which dwells the element that discloses itself only to Intuition.

We would therefore have to say: In the world that presents itself to us as the sensory realm, the most incomprehensible of all incomprehensible problems is what the substances, with which we become familiar externally through physics and chemistry, accomplish within the human skin. We would have to admit: we must rise up to the highest spiritual comprehension if we want to know what really takes place within the human organism in regard to the substances we know so well in their external aspects in the world outside.

Thus we see that in the structure of our organism there are, to begin with, three different activities. First of all, something that discloses itself to Intuitive knowledge is active in the structure of the human organism, building it up out of the world's substances. In addition something is active in this organism that reveals itself to Inspirative knowledge; it fits the rhythmical system into the metabolic organism. Finally, something is active in the human organism that reveals itself to Imaginative knowledge; it builds in the nervous system. And when this human organism enters through birth into the external physical world, all that is ready-made, as it were, by virtue of its own nature, then evolves further inasmuch as human beings develop objective knowledge between birth and death.

Concerning this objective knowledge we have seen that it is tied to the activity of memory; it is not connected with constructive but with destructive forces. We have seen that this form of knowledge is a slow dying proceeding from the head. We may therefore say that the human organism was built up through what could be comprehended by means of Intuition, Inspiration, and Imagination. This dwells in this human organism in a manner inaccessible to present-day cognition. On the other hand, what is built into our organism between birth and death by means of our objective insights breaks down and destroys this organism. We actually think and form concepts on the basis of this destruction when we unfold our conceptual life, the life of thoughts.

We really cannot be materialists when we comprehend what this knowledge, so intimately linked with the faculty of memory consists of. For if we wanted to be materialists, we would have to imagine that we are built up by forces of growth; that those forces are active that absorb the substances and transmit them to the various organs in order to bring about, in a wider sense, the digestive processes within our organism. We should have to picture this faculty, inherent in growth, digestion, and the constructive forces in general, continuing and culminating somewhere in the conceptual process, in thinking which arrives at objective knowledge. Yet this is not the case. The human organism is built up through something that is accessible to Intuition, to Inspiration, and to Imagination. Our organism is built up when it has absorbed these forces into itself. But then regression begins, the process of decay, and what brings this decay about is ordinary knowledge between birth and death.

Through the processes of ordinary perception we do not build anything into the constructive forces; rather, by destroying what has been built up, we create, first of all, the foundations for a continuous element of death in ourselves. Into this continuing element of death we place our knowledge. We do not immerse ourselves in material elements when we think; no, we destroy the material element. We hand it over to the forces of death. We think our way into death, into the destruction of life. Thinking, ordinary perception, is not related to growing, budding life. It is related to death, and when we observe human perception, we do not find an analogy for it in the natural formations including the human brain. We discover an analogy only in the corpse that decays after death. For what the decaying body represents, I might say, intensively, in a certain greatness, must continuously take place within us when we perceive objectively in the ordinary sense of the word.

Look upon death if you wish to comprehend the cognitive process. Do not look upon life in a materialistic manner; look upon what represents the negation, the elimination of life. Then you arrive at a comprehension of thinking. To be sure, what we call death then acquires an entirely different meaning; based on life it attains to a different significance.

Even external phenomena enable us to grasp such things. Yesterday, I said to you that the culmination of the materialistic world view lies in the middle or in the last third of the nineteenth century. This culmination viewed death as something that must absolutely be rejected. In a sense people at that time felt noble by viewing death in this way, as ending life. Life alone they wanted to consider and wished to see it as ending with death. Frequently, one looks back somewhat disdainfully upon the “child-like folk-consciousness.” Take the word “verwesen,” (to decompose) which points to the process of what occurs after death. The prefix “ver” always indicates a movement towards what the word expresses. “Verbruedern” (to become like brothers, to fraternize) means to move in the direction of becoming brothers; “versammeln” (to gather together) indicates moving in the direction of gathering, of meeting. In the vernacular, “verwesen” does not mean decomposing, ceasing to be; it means moving in the direction of Wesen, of being, of life. Such word formations, connected with a spiritual way of grasping the world during the epoch of instinctive knowledge, have become exceedingly rare. In the nineteenth century people materialized everything; they no longer lived in the spiritual essence permeating the word. Many examples could be cited to show that the culmination of materialism became evident even in speech.

We can therefore understand that after the human being had been developed, as I said yesterday, to a point of culmination by forces that disclose themselves to Inspiration, Intuition, and Imagination, he then attained to the highest culmination in the nineteenth century, followed in turn by a decadence. We can understand that the human being distanced himself, as it were, from the power enabling him to comprehend himself inwardly by developing in the strongest measure the forces that, as conceptual forces, are most akin to death, the forces of abstraction. It is from this point that it is possible, proceeding from today's lecture, to advance to what constitutes the actual, essential impulse within what we may call the materialistic impulse of knowledge in human history.

• 1. Reference to lectures of the Second Course of the School for Spiritual Science.
• 2. The threefold human organism was first mentioned by Rudolf Steiner in Von Seelenraetseln, GA 21. (The Case for Anthroposophy)
• 3. Concerning Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, three forms of higher perception, see Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, chapter: “Knowledge of Higher Worlds”; Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1972.

This evening, I do not wish to continue directly with the considerations normally carried on here on Saturdays and Sundays. Instead—in order that the friends of our cause,¹ who have gathered here, can take along as much as possible of what is more or less closely connected with the studies undertaken during this week—we shall venture into still more intimate considerations intended to relate to the questions already touched upon.

Even in reference to fructifying philology by means of anthroposophical spiritual science, I have indicated that an original form of sensibility for language has been lost and that in its place a more abstract orientation towards the things of the surrounding world has come about. I have pointed out that a significant developmental force in human history is represented in the fact that through Aristotle, in the fourth century before Christ, there emerged what subsequently was called logic. For it does indeed signify an orientation towards the world in an abstract sense to find one's way consciously into the logical element, which earlier had been present more unconsciously and instinctively in the constitution of the human soul.

I said that an inner concrete process was still experienced in ancient times that is comparable to what we can study in the processes of puberty. What appears in the child when it learns to speak, is a metamorphosis, a more inwardly developing metamorphosis of the process that unfolds later on in the human being in the process of reaching sexual maturity. And what runs its course inwardly in this process of learning to speak, in ancient times had aftereffects for people's whole life. The human being experienced himself as if through the word something were coming to expression in him that lived also in the things outside, something the things do not express, however, because they have, in a sense, become dumb. As the word resounded, something was felt within that corresponds to processes in the outer world. What was experienced then was much more substantial, much more closely connected to human life than what is inwardly experienced today in comprehending the world through abstract concepts. What human beings then experienced through the word was more organic, I would say, more instinctive, more inclined towards the animalistic soul element than what we can now experience through the conceptual, abstract grasp of things. We were brought closer to the spiritual life through this abstract comprehension. Yet, at the same time, we arrived at abstraction. Thus, at precisely the world-historical moment, when human beings were in a sense elevated to the point of gradually grasping the spirit, their mental experience at the same time suffered a dilution into abstractions—I can express these matters only in a more or less pictorial manner since our language has not yet coined words for it.

Naturally, this process did not develop in the same way in all of humanity. It took place earlier in those folk groups that were the foremost bearers of civilization; others remained behind. I was able to point out that in the eleventh century the population settled in central Europe still occupied a standpoint that must be designated as pre-Aristotelian compared to the Greek development of civilization. In central Europe, people advanced much later beyond the point the Greeks passed with Aristotle. Through Aristotelianism, the Greeks anticipated much of what came about for the central European nations and those counted among them because of their culture only in the first third of the fifteenth century.

Now, two things are connected with this development in regard to the comprehension of language and the abstract element. I have already pointed out one. As human soul life was lifted into abstraction through Aristotelianism—which still was only a symptom for a general comprehension of things within the Greek culture—it became estranged from the direct experience of the word, of language. With this, the portal leading to man's unfolding life in the direction of birth was closed. In their everyday experience, human beings no longer found their way back to the point where they could have realized through the process of acquiring speech how the soul-spiritual element holds sway in them just as it does outside in the world. Due to this, they were also diverted from looking back still further. For the next stages would have shown what one might call overall union of the spirit with physical-corporeal matter. They would have yielded comprehension of preexistence, the insight that the human soul-spiritual element leads an existence in supersensory worlds prior to uniting with the corporeal nature that arises within physical matter. It is true that this insight did not exist in earlier times of humanity's evolution in the definitely conscious form in which we try to acquire it today through spiritual science; instead, it was present in a more instinctive manner. The remnants of it appear to us in the Oriental civilization, which consider looking upon the preexistent human soul a matter of course.

If the human being is then in a position of continuing further, something that is even more difficult to discern than preexistence becomes actual knowledge and perception, namely, repeated earth lives. This view existed in earlier ages of human development, though in an instinctive manner. It survived in a more poetic, imaginative form in the civilizations of the Orient when the former had already fallen into decadence, albeit a most significant, even beautiful decadence.

Thus, when we look back to former epochs of human evolution without the prejudices of modern anthropology, we find a mode of perception that, albeit instinctively, penetrated into things. Inasmuch as human beings still understood the processes of acquiring speech, they also grasped something of the soul activity within outer nature; and inasmuch as they understood the incorporation of the soul-spiritual into the physical corporeal element, they understood something of the spirit vibrating and weaving through the world.

To the extent that historical knowledge of the Greeks reaches back, only the sparse remnants of this ancient spirit perception are contained in the traditions of Greek civilization. If we go back beyond Aristotle and Plato to the Ionic philosophers, to around the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. in Greek development of thought, we find a philosophy, for example in the work of Anaxagoras,² that cannot be comprehended on the basis of today's assumptions. Motivated by a certain healthy insight, the philosophers of the Occident should really admit to themselves that Western philosophy simply lacks the prerequisites to understand Anaxagoras. For what Anaxagoras acknowledges—though already in decadent form—as his nous dates back to those ages I have just spoken of, ages when people still sensed and perceived how the world is infused and woven through by spirit, how, out of spirit, the soul-spiritual being of man descends in order to unite with the physical-corporeal nature. In former times, this was an instinctive, concrete perception. Then it diminished to the knowledge present in the instinctive insight into the process of speech, something that in turn was lost during the Aristotelian age, particularly as far as the most advanced civilizations are concerned.

As I have already explained, when people still had insight into this process of emerging speech, they sensed something in the resounding of the word that was an expression for an objective happening in nature outside. Here, I come to an essential difference: What was conceived as the universal soul by those who can be called “knowledgeable about speech” in the ancient sense, was predominantly thought of as filling space, and human beings experienced themselves as having been formed out of this spirit-soul element filling out space. Yet this was something different from what we discover when we go back further beyond the nous of Anaxagoras. Then we arrive at something leading into the preexistence of human beings; it is something that does not merely deal with the fact that the human soul weaves and exists in the present within the universal spirit and soul. Instead, we find here that this human soul dwells with the universal spirit and soul in time.

We must be familiar with these matters through an inner comprehension, if we wish to gain truly historical insight into a most significant process in the development of civilization in western Asia and Europe. Nowadays, people really have no relevant conception of the state of mind of humanity living in the age when Christendom was established. Certainly, if you consider the general human soul condition of today in its particular configuration, you have to picture the great majority of those people of western Asia and Europe as having been uneducated in comparison to the education of our modern age we are so proud of. Yet, in those times, there were individuals who towered above the great mass of uneducated humanity. I might say, the successors of the ancient initiates stood out because of significant knowledge, knowledge that indeed did not dwell in the soul the same way as does our knowledge, which is permeated everywhere by abstract concepts and has therefore attained to full consciousness. Something instinctive existed even in the highest knowledge of that period. Yet, at the same time, something forceful was inherent in this instinctive knowledge, something that still penetrated into the depths of things.

It is strange that many representatives of present-day traditional confessions have a curious fear of the possibility that somebody might discover that such penetrating knowledge did exist in past times, knowledge that arrived at refined concepts even if these were viewed more through instinctive pictures, as I said, and were expressed in forms of speech, for the comprehension of which there exists little feeling today.

Our anthroposophy is not intended as a renewal of what is called Gnosis, but it is the path that allows us to look into the nature of this Gnosis. In regard to its sources, our anthroposophy has nothing in common with the ancient Indian philosophies. It can nevertheless penetrate into the compelling, magnificent aspects, the outpouring from all things, of the Vedanta, Sankhya, or Yoga philosophies, because it once again attains in a conscious manner to those regions of the world that were then reached instinctively. Likewise, our anthroposophy can penetrate into the essence of the Gnosis. We know that this Gnosis was eradicated by certain sects of the first Christian centuries to the point where very little Gnostic knowledge is still available historically. The Gnosis has actually become known to modern humanity only through the documents of those who tried to disprove it. They included quotes from the recorded texts in their written refutations, whereas the original Gnostic texts themselves were lost. Thus, the Gnosis has really been handed down to posterity only through the documents of its enemies who naturally quoted only what they deemed suitable in conformity with their cleverness.

Just study the quotation skills of our opponents and you will gain an idea of how far one can penetrate into the nature of such a subject. When one has to depend on the documents of the opponents! Insight into the Gnosis has in most cases been dependent on the texts of its opponents—outwardly and historically it depends on them even today. Just imagine, it would certainly be in accordance with the wishes of somebody like Mr. von Gleich,³ if all anthroposophical texts should be burned up—surely, he would like that best—and that anthroposophy would be handed down to posterity only through his own proclamations! We only have to picture things by means of something that can truly call attention to them.

If, for these reasons, we are unable to look into what already existed in those times, we will go astray with all the treatises, be they ever so well meant and scientific that concern something most important in regard to the comprehension of Christianity. One point, where almost everything remains yet to be done because everything done so far by no means leads to what could be designated by an honest striving for knowledge as true insight, is the Logos concept we encounter at the beginning of the Gospel of John. This Logos concept cannot be comprehended if the soul-spiritual development of human beings belonging to the most advanced civilization of that age is not inwardly understood. This is the case particularly if there is no comprehension of the soul-spiritual development that ran its course in Greek culture and shone across into Asia, casting its shadows into what confronts us in the Gospel of John.

We must not approach this Logos concept merely by means of a dictionary or a superficial philological method. It can be approached only if we inwardly study the soul-spiritual development in question here, approximately from the fourth pre-Christian century until the fourth century A.D. No satisfactory history has yet been written about what then took place inwardly in the most advanced part of humanity and its representatives of wisdom. For this is related to the vanishing of any understanding for the process of learning to speak. The other matter, the comprehension of preexistence, was preserved in traditions until the time of Origen;⁴ yet it was lost to inward understanding much earlier than the comprehension of the process of speech, of the resounding of the word in man's inner being.

If we focus on the soul-spiritual condition of the representatives of wisdom in Asia Minor and Europe, we discover that a transition took place. What had existed as a uniform process in perception, namely the resounding of the word and in it the being of the world, became differentiated into an orientation towards abstract concepts, ideas, and a feeling, a dull sensation of what was pushed down more into subconsciousness—the world as such. And what resulted from this? A certain fact came about in regard to the human soul life because of it. The word content and the ideal, conceptual content of consciousness were experienced in an undifferentiated manner by human beings in ancient times. Now, the conceptual content became separated.

Initially, however, it did retain something of what human beings had once possessed in the undifferentiated nature of word, concept, and percept. People spoke of "concepts"; they spoke of “ideas,” but yet it is obvious—for example in Plato's case—that people still experienced the idea spiritually and full of content. As they spoke of the idea, it still contained something of what had earlier been perceived in the undifferentiated word concept. Thus, people already drew closer to the idea that is grasped as a mere concept, but this grasp still retained something of what was comprehended in the ancient resounding of words. As this transition developed, the content of the world grasped spiritually by the human being turned into what was then expressed as the Logos concept. The Logos concept is understood only when it is known that it contains this transition to the idea, but without any remnant of the ancient word concept in grasping this idea. As people spoke of the Logos as the world-creative element, they were not clearly but only dimly aware that this world-creative spirit element has something in its content that was grasped in earlier times through the perception of the word.

We must take into consideration this quite special nuance of the soul's experience of the outer world in the Logos. There existed a very special nuance of soul perception, the Logos perception. Aristotle then worked his way out of it, found his way closer to abstraction and attained from it subjective logic. In Plato, on the other hand, we find the idea as the world-creative principle; in Plato, it is still pervaded by concrete spirituality, because it still contains the remnants of the ancient word concept, being basically the Logos, though in diminished form.

Thus, we can picture that what came with Christ into the man Jesus was to be designated as the world-creative principle out of the views of that age. People had a concept for that, the concept that was indeed retained in the Logos concept. The Logos concept existed. With it, people tried to grasp what had been given to the world in the story of Christ Jesus. the concept, which had developed out of ancient times and had assumed a special form, was utilized to express the starting-point of Christianity; thus, the most sublime wisdom was used to see through this mystery. We must be able to place ourselves completely into that age, not in the sense of an external conception but in inwardly grasping the way people viewed the world at that time.

There is a great break between Plato and Aristotle. On the other hand, the whole style of the Gospel of John is composed in such a way that we see: It came about based on a living comprehension of the world-creative principle and, at the same time, because the one who wrote down the Gospel of John was familiar with the Logos concept that had already been lost. All translation of the Gospel of John is impossible if one cannot penetrate into the origin of the Logos concept. This Logos concept did indeed dwell in all vitality among the wise representatives of the most civilized part of the world between the fourth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D.

When Christianity became a state religion, something from which the later Catholic Church was developed, the era was reached when, in a sense, even the last nuance of the ancient “word,” of the old word concept, was lost from this idea. Fundamentally, Aristotle did nothing but separate subjective logic from the Logos and develop the theory of this subjective logic. Yet, at the time the dominant condition of soul and spirit of mankind paid little heed to what Aristotle had established as subjective logic. On the contrary, Aristotelianism was forgotten, only entering again into the later age by way of the Arabs. It did exist; but aside from being present in this roundabout way through tradition, people still clearly felt that one was dealing on the one hand with subjective logic, on the other with the perception of a world-creative principle in the Logos. In this concept, something was still contained of what one had grasped in the ancient conception of the resounding-of-the-word in man's inner being as the counter-image of the word-become-silent, namely, as the Logos creating nature in this becoming silent.

Then, in the fourth century A.D., this nuance was lost from the Logos concept. It can no longer be discovered; it vanished. It is retained at most in a few secluded thinkers and mystical seekers. It vanished from the general consciousness of even the representative Church Fathers and teachers. What then still appears as a most comprehensive, ideally spiritualized world view in somebody like Scotus Erigena⁵ no longer contains the ancient Logos concept, though that term is used. The former Logos concept is utterly filtered into an abstract thought concept. The world-creative principle is now understood not by means of the ancient Logos concept, but only through the sublimated or filtered thought concept. This is what then appeared in the text by Scotus⁶ concerning the division of nature, but it is something that basically had already completely disappeared from consciousness: this loss of the Logos concept, this transformation of it into the thought concept.

In regard to European humanity, concerning which I said that it retained for itself a more ancient development into a later age, it was considered necessary to go back even beyond the period during which the Logos concept had been active in its full vitality. But people traced it back in an abstract form, and this return in an abstract form was even dogmatized. At the Eighth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in A.D. 869, it was set down that the world and the human being are not to be conceived of as being membered into body, soul, and spirit, but merely into body and soul, and that the soul possesses a few spiritual qualities.

The other process of evolution I have just mentioned runs parallel to what had been dogmatically set down there. For a person who studies the development of Occidental civilization from the first Christian centuries, where much was still pervaded by Gnostic elements, up to the fourth and fifth centuries of our Christian era, it is an extraordinarily interesting fact to experience this diminishing of the Logos concept. Later, when the Gospels were translated, nothing, of course, could be brought into these translations of any feeling for the Logos concept as it had held sway within pre-Christian humanity in those eight centuries, in the middle of which lies the Mystery of Golgotha. This peculiarity of the period from which Christendom emerged must be studied also by means of such intimate aspects. Nowadays, people prefer to solve even the most difficult problems by means of the threadbare concepts, concepts that are easily acquired. Historical problems such as I have just mentioned, however allow a solution only if we seek the preparation for the solution in the acquisition of certain nuances of the human soul life, if we are willing to proceed from the honest assumption that in the present cultural age we simply do not possess in our soul life the nuance that leads to the Logos concept as it is meant in the Gospel of John. This is why we should not try to comprehend the Gospel of John with the vocabulary and conceptions of the present. If we attempt to understand the Gospel of John with present-day concepts, superficiality will dictate to us from the very outset. This is something that must be discerned with an alert eye of soul and this must be done in regard to history in these areas, for things are in a bad way at the present in regard to this history.

Only recently, I have had to call to mind an extraordinarily important fact in reference to this subject. A letter written by one of the most recognized theologians was brought to my attention—it was not addressed to me.⁷ This esteemed theologian of the present expressed himself on anthroposophists, Irvingites, and similar rabble. He confused everything. In his exposition, one point in particular stands out strangely. He says of himself that he has no sense for the sort of view that points to the super-sensible such as anthroposophy tries to do; he has to limit himself to what is given in human experience.

This is a theologian whose vocation it is to speak on and on about the super-sensible. He has become famous for having written fat historical volumes about the life of the super-sensible in human evolution. He is an authority for countless people of stature at present. Such a modern theologian admits that he has no sense for the super-sensible but, instead, wishes to stick to “human experience!” Yet he talks about the super-sensible and does not say, I wish to remain within human sensory experience; therefore, I negate all theology. Oh no, in our age, he becomes a famous theologian! My dear friends, it is so important for us to be alert to everything that is in a certain sense a determining factor today among our young people, yet at the same time proves itself to be an inner impossibility.

It is necessary to grasp with inner energy how one is to proceed to sincere and honest insight. Perhaps it can be discerned particularly in problems such as the Logos problem, and a person who sees what anthroposophy has to set forth about such a problem should realize from this that anthroposophy is certainly not taking the easy way out. It tries to do research earnestly and honestly and it is only because of this that it comes into conflict with a number of contemporary trends. For today people actually have either hatred or fear of such thoroughness, which must, however, be striven for and is needed in all areas of scientific life. I ask you: does the opposition, which so readily dispenses shallow judgments concerning anthroposophy, even know what anthroposophy occupies itself with? Does it know that this anthroposophy struggles with problems such as the Logos problem, which, after all, is only one detail, albeit an important one? It really would be the duty of those who are leaders in the sciences to at least have a look at what they judge from the outside. But this is the problem, that external life can be made comfortable—and this applies to many people—if one shuns the inconvenience of searching in an earnest manner. To be sure, for all this love of convenience, one is not aware of the strong forces of decline in our present civilization. The attitude of “after us the deluge” powerfully dominates the currently prevalent scientific world.

This is what I wished to illustrate today by means of one important problem of philological and historical research. After all, it is my hope that if particularly the esteemed students will realize more and more how the conscientious attempt is made to focus especially on those problems current research ignores, the young people above all others will come to the realization that such paths have to be pursued. I harbor the hope and I also know: If we work sufficiently in the direction of developing enthusiasm and confessing to the truth, what is needed to achieve again forces of regeneration in human civilization will be attained after all. Perhaps certain forces of darkness can suppress for a while what is being striven for here. In the long run, they will be unable to do so if the reality corresponds to the will, if, in fact, something light-filled is contained in what anthroposophy wills. Indeed, truth has means that only truth can discover and that are undiscoverable for the powers of darkness. Let us unite, old and young, young and old, in order to attain a clear view for discovering such paths to truth!

• 1. The participants of the second course of the School for Spiritual Science.
• 2. Anaxagoras, around 500–428 B.C., Greek philosopher. See Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1973.
• 3. A retired Major General, Gerold von Gleich emerged as an opponent of Rudolf Steiner in 1921/22 with his lectures that also appeared as brochures and contained an abundance of untruths and distortions of facts.
• 4. Origen, around A.D. 185–254, Greek Church writer. Compare also the lecture of June 2, 1921 (Lecture XV in this volume) and note 4 to Lecture XV.
• 5. Scotus Erigena, around A.D. 810–877, Irish philosopher and theologian at the court of Charles the Bald in Paris. See Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy.
• 6. De divisione naturae. See the detailed discussion of this work in the lectures of June 2 and June 3, 1921, in this volume (Lectures XV and XVI).
• 7. It could not be ascertained which one among the numerous theologians who were active opponents of Rudolf Steiner at that time was being referred to.

A study I began before our course started will become fully comprehensible only if we go back even further in considering the development of humanity in recent history. Basically, we have only given a few indications concerning the developments in the nineteenth century. It will be our purpose today to follow the spiritual development of mankind further back in time, giving special attention to an extraordinarily important and incisive event in the evolution of Western civilization. It is the turning-point that came about in the fourth century. There emerged at that time a figure still vivid in the memory of Western civilization, namely, Aurelius Augustinus.¹ We find in him a personality who had to fight with the great intensity, on the one hand, against what had come down from ancient times, something attempting during those first Christian centuries to establish Christianity on the basis of a certain ancient wisdom. On the other hand, he had to struggle against another element, the one that eventually was victorious in Western civilization. It rejected the more ancient form and limited itself to comprehending Christianity in a more external, material way, not to penetrate Christianity with ideas of ancient wisdom, but simply to narrate its events factually according to the course it had taken since its establishment, comprehending it intellectually as well as that was possible at that time.

These conflicts between the two directions—I would like to say, between the direction of a wisdom-filled Christianity and a Christianity seemingly tending toward a more or less materialistic view—these conflicts had to be undergone particularly by the souls of the fourth and the early fifth century in the most intense way. And in Augustine, humanity remembers a personality who took part in such conflicts.

In our time, however, we have to understand clearly that the historic documents call forth almost completely false ideas of what existed prior to the fourth century A.D. As clear as the picture may be since the fifth century, as unclear are all the ordinary ideas concerning the preceding centuries. Yet, if we focus on what people in general could know about this period prior to the fourth century A.D., we are referred to two areas. One area is that of knowledge, cultivated in the schools; the other is the area of ritual, of veneration, of the religious element. Something belonging to very ancient times of human civilization still extends into these two areas. Though cloaked in a certain Christian coloring, this ancient element was still more or less present during the first Christian centuries in both the stream of wisdom and that of ritual.

If we look into the sphere of wisdom, we find preserved there a teaching from earlier times. In a certain sense, however, it had already begun to be replaced by what we today call the heliocentric world system—I have spoken of this in earlier lectures here. Nevertheless, it still remained from former astronomical teachings, and might be designated as a form of astronomy, but now not from the standpoint of physical cosmological observation. In very ancient times, people arrived at this astronomy—let us call it etheric in contrast to our physical astronomy—in the following way: People of old were still fully aware of the fact that human beings by nature belong not only to the earth but also to the cosmic surroundings of the earth, the planetary system. Ancient wisdom had quite concrete views concerning this etheric astronomy. It taught that if we turn our attention to what makes up the organization of the upper part of the human being—and here I make use of expressions that are familiar to us today—insofar as we view the etheric body of man, the human being stands in interaction with Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. People thus considered certain reciprocal effects between the upper part of the human etheric body and Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. Furthermore, people found that the part of the human being that is of a more astral nature has a sort of interrelationship with Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. The forces that then lead man into his earthly existence and that bring it about that a physical body is fitted into this etheric body, these are the forces of the earth. Those forces, on the other hand, that cause the human being to have a certain perspective leading beyond his earthly life, are the forces of the sun.

Thus it was said in those ancient times that the human being comes out of unknown spiritual worlds he passes through in prenatal life but that it is not as if he merely entered into terrestrial life. Rather, he enters from extraplanetary worlds into planetary life. The planetary life receives him as I have described it, relating him to the sun, moon, earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The orbit of Saturn was considered to be the approximate sphere the human being enters with his etheric body out of extraplanetary into planetary life. Everything that is etheric in the human being was definitely related to this planetary life. Only insofar as the etheric body then expresses itself in the physical body, only to that extent was the physical body related to the Earth. Insofar as the human being in turn raises himself with his ego beyond the etheric and astral body, the ancients related this to the sun.

Thus, one had a form of etheric astronomy. It was certainly still possible for this etheric astronomy not merely to look upon the physical destinies of the human being in the way physical astronomy does. Instead, since people viewed the etheric body, which in turn stands in a more intimate relationship to the spiritual aspect of the human being, in an interplay with the same forces of the planetary system, the following possibility existed. Since the forces of destiny can express themselves out of the planetary system by way of the etheric body, it was possible to speak of the human constitution and to include in the latter the forces of destiny.

In this teaching of antiquity, this etheric astronomy, which was continued even after people already had developed the heliocentric system as a kind of esoteric-physical science, a last wisdom teaching had emerged from ancient instinctive wisdom investigations and had been retained as a tradition. People spoke of the influences of heaven in no other way but by saying, Indeed, these influences of heaven exist; they bear not only the affairs of nature but also the forces of human destiny. Thus, there certainly existed a connection between what we might call a teaching of nature, namely cosmology, and what passed over later into all that people now consider as astrology, something that in ancient times, had a much more exact character and was based on direct observation.

It was thought that when the human being has entered the planetary sphere on his way to a new birth and has been received by it insofar as his etheric body is concerned, he subsequently enters the earth. He is received by the earth. Yet, even here, people did not merely think of the solid earth. Rather, they thought of the earth with its elements. Apart from the fact that the human being is received by the planetary sphere—whereby he would be a super-earthly being, whereby he would be what he is only as a soul—it was said that like a child he is received by the elements of the earth, by fire or warmth, by air, water, and the solid earth. All of these elements were considered the actual earth. Consequently, it was thought, the human being's etheric body is so tinged by these external elements, so saturated, that now the temperaments originate in it. Thus, the temperaments were pictured as closely tied to the etheric body, hence to the life organization of the human being. Therefore, in what is actually physical in man—at least, in what manifests through the physical body—this ancient teaching also saw something spiritual.

The most human aspect of this teaching, I would say, was something that can still be clearly discerned in the medical science period. The remedies and the teaching of medicine were certainly a product of this view of the relationship of the etheric body to the planetary system as well as of the way the etheric human being penetrates, as it were, into the higher spheres, into air, water, warmth, and earth, so that the physical impressions of the etheric soul temperaments found their way into his organization: black gall, white gall, and the other fluids, phlegm, blood, and so on. According to this commonly held view the nature of the human constitution can be known from the body fluids. It was not customary in medicine in those days to study the individual organs, of which drawings could be made. The intermingling of the permeation with fluids was studied, and a particular organ was viewed as a result of a special penetration of fluids. People then thought that in a healthy person the fluids intermingled in a specific manner; an abnormal intermingling of fluids was seen in a sick person. Thus we may say that the medical insight resulting from this teaching was definitely founded on the observation of the fluid human organism. What we call knowledge of the human organism today is based on the solid, earthly organism of man. In regard to the view of the human being, the course taken has led from an earlier insight into the fluid man to a more modern insight into the solid human being with sharply contoured organs.

The direction taken by medicine runs parallel to the transition from the ancient etheric astronomy to modern physical astronomy. The medical teaching of Hippocrates² still corresponds essentially to etheric astronomy, and, actually, the accomplishments of this medical conception concerned with the intermingling of fluids in man remained well into the fourth century A.D. in an exact manner, not only in tradition as it was later. Just as this ancient astronomy was subsequently obscured after the fourth century and physical astronomy took the place of the old etheric astronomy in the fifteenth century, so, too, pathology and the whole view of medicine was then based on the teachings of the solid element, of what is bounded and expressed by sharp contours in the human organism. This is in essence one side of humanity's evolution in the inorganic age.

Now we can also turn our attention to what has remained of those ancient times in cultic practices and religious ceremonies. The religious ceremonies were mainly made available to the masses; what I have just been describing was predominantly considered to be a treasure of wisdom belonging to centers of learning. Those cultic practices that found their way from Asia into Europe and that, insofar as they are religious endeavors, correspond to the view I have just explained, are known as Mithras worship.³ It is a worship we find even as late as the first Christian centuries extending from East to West; we can follow its path through the countries of the Danube as far as the regions of the Rhine and on into France. This Mithras worship, familiar to you as far as its outer forms are concerned, may be briefly characterized by saying that along with the earthly and cosmic context the conqueror of the Mithras-Bull was depicted imaginatively and pictorially in the human being, riding on the bull and vanquishing the bull-forces.

Nowadays, we are easily inclined to think that such images—all cultic pictures, religious symbolizations which, if we may say so, have emerged organically out of the ancient wisdom teachings—are simply the abstract, symbolic product of those teachings. But it would be absolutely false if we were to believe that the ancient sages sat down and said, Now we must figure out a symbol. For ourselves we have the teaching of wisdom; for the ignorant masses we have to think up symbols that can then be employed in their ceremonial rites, and so on. Such assumptions would be totally wrong. An assumption approximately like that is entertained by modern Freemasons; they have similar thoughts about the nature of their own symbolism. But this was certainly not the view of the ancient teachers of wisdom.

I should now like to describe the view of these sages of old by referring in particular to the connections of the Mithra worship to the world view I have just outlined above. A fundamentally important question could still be raised by those who had retained a vivid view of how the human being is received into the planetary world with his etheric body, of how man is subsequently received into the sphere of earthly elements into warmth or fire, air, water, and earth, of how through the effects of these elements on the human etheric being black gall, white gall, phlegm, and blood are formed. They asked themselves a question that can occur now to a person who truly possesses Imaginative perception. In those times, the answer to this question was based on instinctive Imaginative perception, but we can repeat it today in full consciousness. If we develop an Imaginative conception of this entrance of the human being from the spiritual world through the planetary sphere into the terrestrial sphere of fire, air, water, and earth, we arrive at the realization that if something enters from the spheres beyond into the planetary sphere, hence into the earth's sphere, and is received there, this will not become a true human being. If we develop a picture of what is actually evolving there, if we have an Imaginative view of what can be beheld in purely Imaginative perception outside the planetary sphere, then enters into and is received by the planetary sphere and is subsequently taken hold of by the influences emanating from the earth sphere, we see that this does not become a human being. We do not arrive at a view of man; instead we attain to a conception that can be most clearly represented if we picture not a human being but a bull, an ox.

The ancient teachers of wisdom knew that no human beings would exist on earth if there were nothing besides this extraplanetary being that descends into the planetary sphere of evolution. They saw that at first glance one does arrive at the conception of the gradual approach of an entity out of extraplanetary spheres into the planetary and hence the earth sphere. But if one then proceeds from the content of these conceptions and tries to form a vivid Imaginative view, it does not turn into a human being; it becomes a mere bull. And if one comprehends nothing more in the human being but this, one merely comprehends what is bull-like in human beings. The ancient teachers of wisdom formed this conception. Now they said to themselves, In that case, human beings must struggle against this bull-like nature with something still higher. They must overcome the view given by this wisdom. As human beings, they are more than beings that merely come from the extra-planetary sphere, enter into the planetary sphere, and from there are taken hold of by the terrestrial elements. They have something within them that is more than this.

It is possible to say that these teachers of wisdom came as far as this concept. This was the reason they then developed the image of the bull and placed Mithras on top of it, the human being who struggles to overcome the bull, and who says of himself, I must be of far loftier origin than the being that was pictured according to the ancient teaching of wisdom.

Now these sages realized that their ancient teaching of wisdom contained an indication of what is important here. For this teaching did look upon the planetary sphere, upon Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus, moon, and so on. It also said that as the human being approaches the earth, he is constantly lifted up by the sun so as not to be submerged completely in the terrestrial elements, so as not to remain merely what proceeds from the etheric body and the mixture of black and white gall, phlegm, and blood when it is received by the planetary sphere and when the astral body is received by the other planetary sphere through Mercury, Venus, moon. What lifts man upward dwells in the sun. Therefore, these sages said, Let us call man's attention to the sun forces dwelling in him; then he will turn into Mithras who is victorious over the bull!

This then was the cultic image. It was not meant to be merely a thought-out symbol but was actually to represent the fact, the cosmological fact. The religious ceremony was more than a mere outer sign; it was something that was extracted, as it were, out of the essence of the cosmos itself.

This cultic form was something that had existed since very ancient times and had been brought across from Asia to Europe. It was, in a sense, Christianity viewed from one side, viewed from the external, astronomical side, for Mithras was the sun force in man. Mithras was the human being who rebelled against the merely planetary and terrestrial aspects.

Now, a certain endeavor arose, traces of which can be observed everywhere when we look back at the first Christian centuries. The tendency arose to connect the historical fact, the Mystery of Golgotha, with the Mithras worship. Great were the numbers of people at that time, especially among the Roman Legions, who brought with them into the lands on the Danube and far into central Europe, indeed even into western Europe, what they had experienced in Asia and the Orient in general. In what they brought across as the Mithras worship there lived feelings that, without reflecting the Mystery of Golgotha, definitely contained Christian views and Christian sentiments. The worship of Mithras was considered as a concrete worship relating to the sun forces in man. The only thing this Mithras worship did not perceive was the fact that in the Mystery of Golgotha this sun force itself had descended as a spiritual entity and had united itself with the human being Jesus of Nazareth.

Now there existed schools of wisdom in the East up until the fourth century A.D. that by and by received reports and became aware of the Mystery of Golgotha, of Christ. The further east we go in our investigations, the clearer this becomes. These schools then attempted to spread a certain teaching throughout the world, and for a time there was a tendency to let flow into the Mithras cult what agrees with the following supersensory perception: The true Mithras is the Christ; Mithras is his predecessor. The Christ force must be poured into those forces in man that vanquish the bull. To turn the Mithras worship into a worship of Christ was something that was intensely alive in the first Christian centuries up until the fourth century. One might say that the stream intending to Christianize this Mithras worship followed after the spreading of the latter. A synthesis between Christendom and the Mithras worship was striven for. An ancient, significant image of man's being—Mithras riding on and vanquishing the bull—was to be brought into relationship with the Christ Being. One might say that a quite glorious endeavor existed in this direction, and in a certain respect it was a powerful one.

Anyone who follows the spread of Eastern Christianity and the spread of Arianism⁴ can see a Mithras element in it, even though in already quite weakened form. Any translation of the Ulfilas-Bible⁵ into modern languages remains imperfect if one is unaware that Mithras elements still play into the terminology of Ulfilas (or Wulfila). But who pays heed nowadays to these deeper relationships in the linguistic element? As late as in the fourth century, there were philosophers in Greece who worked on bringing the ancient etheric astronomy into harmony with Christianity. From this effort then arose the true Gnosis, which was thoroughly eradicated by later Christianity, so that only a few fragments of the literary samples of this Gnosis have remained.

What do people really know today about the Gnosis, of which they say in their ignorance that our anthroposophy is a warmed-over version? Even if this were true, such people would not be able to know about it, for they are familiar only with those parts of the Gnosis that are found in the critical, Occidental-Christian texts dealing with the Gnosis. They know the quotes from Gnostic texts left behind by the opponents of the Gnosis. There is hardly anything left of the Gnosis except what could be described by the following comparison. Imagine that Herr von Gleich would be successful in rooting out the whole of anthroposophical literature and nothing would remain except his quotations. Then, later on, somebody would attempt to reconstruct anthroposophy based on these quotes; then, it would be about the same procedure in the West as that which was applied to the Gnosis. Therefore, if people say that modern anthroposophy imitates the Gnosis, they would not know it even if it were the case, because they are unfamiliar with the Gnosis, knowing of it only through its opponents.

So, particularly in Athens, a school of wisdom existed well into the fourth century, and indeed even longer, that endeavored to bring the ancient etheric astronomy into harmony with Christianity. The last remnants of this view—man's entering from higher worlds through the planetary sphere into the earth sphere—still illuminate the writings of Origen; they even shine through the texts of the Greek Church Fathers. Everywhere one can see it shimmer through. It shines through particularly in the writings of the genuine Dionysius the Areopagite.⁶ This Dionysius left behind a teaching that was a pure synthesis of the etheric astronomy and the element dwelling in Christianity. He taught that the forces localized, as it were, astronomically and cosmically in the sun entered into the earth sphere in Christ through the man Jesus of Nazareth and that thereby a certain previously nonexistent relationship came into being between the earth and all the higher hierarchies, the hierarchies of the Angels, of Wisdom, the hierarchies of the Thrones and the Seraphim, and so on. It was a penetration of this teaching of the hierarchies with etheric astronomy that could be found in the original Dionysius the Areopagite.

Then, in the sixth century, the attempt was made to obliterate the traces even of the more ancient teachings by Dionysius the Areopagite. They were altered in such a way that they now represented merely an abstract teaching of the spirit. In the form in which the teaching of Dionysius the Areopagite has come down to us, it is a spiritual teaching that no longer has much to do with etheric astronomy. This is the reason he is then called the “Pseudo-Dionysius.” In this manner, the decline of the teaching of wisdom was brought about. On the one hand, the teachings of Dionysius were distorted; on the other hand, the truly alive teaching in Athens that had tried to unite etheric astronomy with Christianity was eradicated. Finally, in regard to the cultic aspect, the Mithras worship was exterminated.

In addition, there were contributions by individuals such as Constantine.⁷ His actions were intensified later by the fact that Emperor Justinian⁸ ordered the School of Philosophers in Athens closed. Thus, the last remaining people who had occupied themselves with bringing the old etheric astronomy into harmony with Christianity had to emigrate; they found a place in Persia where they could at least live out their lives. Based on the same program, according to which he had closed the Athenian Academy of Philosophers, Justinian also had Origen declared a heretic. For the same reason, he abolished Roman consulship, though it led only a shadowy existence, people sought in it a kind of power of resistance against the Roman concept of the state, which was reduced to pure jurisprudence. The ancient human element people still associated with the office of consul disappeared in the political imperialism of Rome.

Thus, in the fourth century, we see the diminishing of the cultic worship that could have brought Christianity closer to man. We observe the diminishing of the ancient wisdom teaching of an etheric astronomy that tried to unite with the insight into the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. And in the West, we see an element take its place that already carried within itself the seeds of the later materialism, which could not become a theory until the fifteenth century when the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, but which was prepared in the main through taking the spiritual heritage from the Orient and imbuing it with materialistic substance.

We must definitely turn our minds to this course of European civilization. Otherwise, the foundations of European civilization will never become quite clear to us. It will also never become really clear to us how it was possible that, again and again, when people moved to the Orient, they could bring back with them powerful spiritual stimuli from there. Above all else, throughout the first part of the Middle Ages, there was lively commercial traffic from the Orient up the Danube River, following exactly those routes taken by the ancient Mithras worship, which, naturally, had already died away at the beginning of the Middle Ages. The merchants who traveled to the Orient and back again, always found in the East what had preceded Christianity but definitely tended already towards Christianity. We observe, moreover, that when the Crusaders journeyed to the Orient, they received stimuli from the remnants they could still discern there, and they brought treasures of ancient wisdom back to Europe.

I mentioned that the ancient medical knowledge of fluids was connected with this old body of wisdom. Again and again, people who traveled to the Orient, even the Crusaders and those who journeyed with the Crusades, upon their return always brought back with them remnants of this old medicine to Europe. These remnants of an ancient medicine were then transmitted in the form of tradition all over Europe. Certain individuals who at the same time were ahead of their age in their own spiritual evolution then went through remarkable developments, such as the personality we know under the name Basilius Valentinus.⁹

What kind of personality was he? He was somebody who had taken up the tradition of the old medicine of fluids from the people with whom he had spent his youth, at times without understanding it from this or that indication. Until a short time ago—today it is already less often the case—there still existed in the old peasant's sayings remnants of this medical tradition that had been brought over from the Orient by the many travelers. These remnants were in a sense preserved by the peasantry; those who grew up among peasants heard of them; as a rule they were those who then became priests. In particular those who became monks came from the peasantry. There, they had heard this or that of what was in fact distorted treasure of ancient wisdom that had become decadent. These people did undergo an independent educational development. Up until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the educational development an individual went through by means of Christian theology was something much more liberal than it was later on. Based on their own spirituality, these priests and monks gradually brought a certain amount of order into these matters. They pondered what they had heard; out of their own genius, they connected the various matters. Thus originated the writings that have been preserved as the writings of Basilius Valentinus.

Indeed, these conditions also gave rise to a school of thought from which Paracelsus¹⁰ even Jacob Boehme¹¹ learned. Even these individuals still took up the treasure of ancient medical wisdom that lived, I might say, in the folk group soul. One can notice this primarily in Jacob Boehme, but also in Paracelsus and others, even if one considers their writings only in a superficial way. If you look closely at, for example, Jacob Boehme's text “De Signatura Rerum,” you will find in the manner of his presentation that what I have said is very obvious. It is a form of old folk wisdom that basically contained distorted ancient wisdom. Such old folk wisdom was by no means as abstract as our present-day science; instead, there still existed a sensitivity for the objective element in words. One felt something in the words. Just as one tries to know through concepts today, one felt in the words. One knew that the human being had drawn the words out of the objective essence of the universe itself.

This can become evident in Jacob Boehme's efforts to feel what really lies concealed in the syllable, “sul,” or again in the syllable, “phur” of “sulphur”. See how Jacob Boehme struggles in “De Signatura Rerum,” to draw something out of a word, to draw out an inner word-extract, to draw something out of the word “sulphur” in order to come to an entity. The feeling is definitely present there that when one experiences the extract of words, one arrives at something real. In former times, it was felt, something had settled into the words the human soul absorbed when it moved from spheres beyond through the planetary sphere into earthly existence. But what the soul placed into the words due to its closeness to the intermingling of fluids when the child learned to speak was still something objective. There was still something in speech that was like instruction by the gods, not merely like human instruction. In Jacob Boehme we see this noble striving that can be expressed somewhat as if he had felt, I would like to consider speech as something in which living gods work behind the phenomena into the human organization in order to form speech and, along with speech, a certain treasure of wisdom.

Thus we see that the ancient body of wisdom does indeed continue on into later ages, though already taken up by modern thinking, which, it is true, is yet barely evident in such original and outstanding minds like Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus. Into what has thus been brought forth the purely intellectualistic, theoretical element is now imprinted, the element that is based on man's physical thinking and takes hold only of the physical realm. We see how, on the one hand, purely physical astronomy arises, and how, on the other hand, physiology and anatomy come about, which are directed exclusively upon the clearly defined organs of man—in short, the whole medical adumbration.

Thus, the human being gradually finds himself surrounded by a world that he comprehends only in a physical sense and in which he himself as a cosmic being certainly has no place. Concerning himself, he grasps only what he has become by virtue of the earth; for it is thanks to the earth that he has become this solidly bounded, physical, organic being. He can no longer reconcile what is revealed to him of the universe through physical astronomy with what dwells in his form and points to something else. He turns his attention away from the manner in which the human form indicates something else. He finally loses all awareness of the fact that his striving for erect posture and the special manner and means by which he attains to speech out of his organism cannot originate from the Mithras-Bull, but only from Mithras. He no longer wishes to occupy himself with all this, for he is sailing full force into materialism. He has to sail into materialism, for religious consciousness itself, after all, has absorbed only the external, material phenomenon of Christianity. It has then dogmatized this external, material phenomenon without attempting to perceive through some wisdom how the Mystery of Golgotha took place, but instead trying to determine through stipulations what truth is.

Thus we observe the transition from the ancient Oriental position of thinking based on cosmic insight to the specifically Roman-European form of observation. How were matters "determined" in the Orient, and how could something be “determined” about the Mystery of Golgotha based on Oriental instinctive perception? If we take the insight coming out of the cosmos, looking up at the stars, that insight, though it was an instinctive, elemental insight, should lead to, or was at least supposed to lead to, the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. This was the path taken in the Orient. Beginning with the fifth century, there was no longer any sensitivity for this path. By replacing the Asiatic manner of determination more and more with the Egyptian form, earlier Church Councils had already pointed out that the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha should not be determined in this manner, but that the majority of the Fathers gathered at the Councils should decide. The juristic principle was put in the place of the Oriental principle of insight; dogmatism was brought into the juristic element. People no longer had the feeling that truth must be determined out of universal conscience. They began to feel that it was possible to ascertain, based on resolutions of the Councils, whether the divine and the human nature in Christ Jesus was two natures or one, and other such things. We see the Egypto-Roman juristic element pervading the innermost configuration of Occidental civilization, an element that even today is deeply rooted in human beings who are not inclined to permit truth to determine their relationship to it. Instead, they wish to make decisions based on emotional factors; therefore, they have no other measure for determining things except majority rule in some form.

We shall say more about this tomorrow.

• 1 . Aurelius Augustinus, A.D. 354–430, Church Father and philosopher. See Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972.
• 2 . Hippocrates, 460–377 B.C., founder of Greek medicine. Explained illnesses as results of faulty mixture of four body fluids: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile.
• 3 . Mithras: Persian-Indian cult of Mithras, the god of light and sun, spread through Europe in first century B.C. by Roman troops. Celebrations in underground caves, knew baptism, communion, celebration of birthday of the god on December 25.
• 4 . Arianism, teachings of the presbyter Arius of Alexandria (died A.D. 336), who rejected the idea that Christ's being was identical with the being of God the Father.
• 5 . Ulfilas (Wulfila in Germanic), A.D. 311–383, missionary to the West-Goths in the Balcan region; founder of Arianic-Germanic Christendom, who translated the Bible into Gothic.
• 6 . Dionysius the Areopagite, member of the Areopagus in Athens, around A.D. 500. Converted by Paul (Acts 17:34). Connected Christianity with neo-Platonic philosophy. Also compare with Lecture XV of June 2, 1921, in this volume.
• 7 . Constantine I., the Great, A.D. 286 or 287–337. Roman emperor from 306 to 337, made Christianity the state religion in 324.
• 8 . Justinian I, A.D. 483–565, Byzantine emperor from A.D. 527–565, builder of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. In A.D. 529, he closed the Platonic Academy of Athens.
• 9 . Basilius Valentinus, born around 1394, alchemist of the fifteenth century. His collected writings were first published in Hamburg by W. S. Lange in 1677.
• 10. Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus of Hohenheim, 1493–1541. Concerning this great Swiss doctor and philosopher, see Rudolph Steiner: Eleven European Mystics, Rudolf Steiner Publications, New York, 1971.
• 11. Jacob Boehme, 1575–1624, concerning the mysticism of the master shoemaker, see above book.

Yesterday I referred to the significant turning point in the development of Occidental civilization in the fourth century A.D. I pointed out that, on the one hand, this was the time when Greek wisdom disappeared from European culture, wisdom through which people had tried to bring to expression the depths of Christianity in a wisdom-imbued way. The time of the outer expression of this disappearance falls somewhat later, namely, when Emperor Justinian declared the writings of Origen heretical, abolished Roman consulship, and closed the Greek Academy of Philosophy at Athens. The guardians of Greek wisdom thus had to flee to the Orient, withdrawing, as it were, from European civilization. The wisdom teaching that had extended from the East as far west as Greece and had assumed its special form there, is one aspect of the picture.

On the other hand, the Mithras worship was supposed to indicate in a significant external ritual how, with their soul-spiritual nature, human beings were to raise themselves above all that could be comprehended through the interplay of beings of the planetary sphere with terrestrial forces, how the human being could sense his full humanity. This was the object of the Mithras cult. This Mithras worship, which was intended to reveal to man his own being, likewise disappeared after it had spread through the regions along the Danube and on into central and western Europe. These two streams, one a cultic stream, the other a stream of wisdom, were replaced in Europe by factual narrations of the events of Palestine. Thus, one has to say that neither a cultic worship, which would have recognized in Christ Jesus the victor over all the human being, was meant to bring under his control in the course of world evolution, nor a wisdom that would have tried to grasp the actual mysteries of Christendom in a wise manner were able to enter Europe. Instead, the superficial narration of the events of Palestine became popular. The concepts that should have been found in these happenings in Palestine were instead steeped in the flood of juristic thinking, which replaced the investigation of cosmic secrets with the determination of dogmas by means of majority resolutions in Church Councils, and so forth.

This very fact indicates that a change of great and far-reaching significance had taken place in the fourth century A.D. in the development of Western civilization, and consequently in the evolution of the whole of mankind. Proceeding from the Orient, all the influences that had laid hold of eastern European civilization were in a sense pushed back again towards the Orient. Only the increasing tendency towards abstract thinking in the Roman world maintained itself in the Occident alongside the comprehension of the external, sensory world of facts.

How alive the conceptions of the Greek gods had been among the Greeks, and how conceptually abstract the ideas were the Romans entertained of their gods! Actually, in the later period, what the Greeks possessed of ideas concerning the super-sensible world was already lifeless, although quite alive as such within itself. Yet, it was a lifeless element in comparison to the living conceptions of the super-sensible worlds present during the ancient Persian and Indian civilizations, which represented a living within these higher worlds. In those times, albeit with a purely instinctive human perception, people lived in communion with the super-sensible worlds just as mankind in the present communes with the sensory world. For human beings in the ancient Orient, the spiritual world was readily accessible. For them, the beings of the spiritual world were present just as other human beings, our fellowmen, live side by side with us. Out of this living, super-sensible world, the Greeks built up their system of concepts. In the ages before Aristotle, up to the fourth century B.C., Greek ideas were not abstract ideas gained through external sensory observation and then lifted up into abstraction. These Greek ideas still originated from the living, super-sensible world; they were born of a primeval power of vision. These living Greek ideas still imbued a person with soul sustenance and warmth; insofar as he could share in them, they bestowed on him the necessary enthusiasm for his form of social order. Certainly, we must never forget that a large part of the Greek people was denied a share in this life of thought; this was the extensive world of the slaves. But the bearers of Greek culture certainly participated in a realm of ideas that was basically a downpouring of super-sensible, spiritual powers into the world of the earthly sphere.

In comparison with this, the Roman world—separated from Greece only by the sea—definitely had a quite abstract appearance. The Romans described their gods in the same prosaic, unimaginative ways as, shall we say, our modern scientists speak of the laws of nature. Although this is an indication of the significant change I have to point out here, we confront this change in a special way if we turn our attention to a factor in the life of soul that found only partial realization in world history and did not develop to its full potential.

Consider for a moment the destiny of the ancient Greek people. It is fraught with a certain tragedy. After its period of great glory, Greek culture pined away and, in essence, vanished from the stage of world history, for what replaced it in that territory cannot be said to have been a true successor. The Greek nation went into decline in a severe, world-historical illness, and from its ancient ideas it produced what, I would say, represents the dawn of all later culture. It brought forth Stoicism and Epicureanism,¹ systems or views of life in which the more abstract mode of thought, characterizing the later Western civilization, already found an early expression. But we can see in Stoicism and Epicureanism, even in the later Greek mysticism, that they express a decline of ancient Greece.

Why was it that this culture of Greece was destined to decline and ultimately to pass away from the stream of world evolution?² One could say that this decline and death of the ancient Greek people indicates a significant mystery in world history. With faculties of vision handed down to them as an echo of the ancient Oriental world view, the ancient Greeks still beheld the soul-spiritual human being in his full light. After all, in the earlier periods of Greek culture, every individual knew himself to be a being of soul and spirit that had descended through conception and birth from the spiritual worlds, that has its home in a super-sensible sphere and is destined for super-sensible spheres. Yet, at the same time, even in its prime, Greece sensed its decline in world history—I have often referred to this. It sensed that human beings cannot fully attain to humanity on earth by merely looking up into super-sensible worlds. It felt itself surrounded and pervaded by the earth's forces. Hence the ancient saying: “Better it is to be a beggar in the sense world than a king in the realm of shades”³ The Greeks of earlier periods had still beheld all the shining glory of the super-sensible world; at the same time, by attaining full humanity in ancient Greece, they sensed that they could not maintain this radiance of the spiritual worlds. They felt they were losing it and that their soul nature was becoming ensnared in the things of the earth. Fear of death arose in them because they realized that life between birth and death can estrange the soul from its spiritual home. Greek culture must definitely be described in accordance with this feeling.

Men like Nietzsche basically had true insight into these matters.⁴ Nietzsche had the right feeling when he designated the period of Greek development preceding the Socratic and Platonic age as the tragic epoch of Greek culture. For already in thinkers such as Thales,⁵ and particularly Anaxagoras⁶ and Heraclitus,⁷ we observe the twilight of a magnificent world view which modern history does not mention at all. We note the fear of becoming estranged from the super-sensible world, of becoming tied to what alone remains from the passage through life between birth and death, namely, of becoming linked to the world of Hades, the world of shades, which basically becomes man's lot. Nevertheless, the Greeks preserved one thing; they saved what appeared at its height in the Platonic idea. There emerged amid the onset of progressive decline this world of Platonic ideas, the last glorious remnant of the ancient Orient, though it, too, was then fated to perish in Aristotelianism.

Yet these Greek ideas did appear, and Greek thinking constantly sensed how the human ego is really something that is becoming lost in human life. This was a fundamental experience of the Greeks. Take the description I gave concerning ego evolution in my book Riddles of Philosophy,⁸ where I described that the ego was then connected with thinking, with external perception. But since the whole ego experience is bound up with thinking, the human being experienced his I not so much within his own corporeality. Rather, he felt it linked to all that lives in the world outside, to the blossoming of the flowers, to lightning and thunder in the sky, to the billowing clouds, to the rising mist and the falling rain. The Greeks experienced the ego connected to all this. They sensed with the forces of the ego, as it were, but without the housing of this ego. Instead, they felt, When I look out upon the world of flowers, there my ego is attached, there it blossoms in the flowers.

It is justifiable to say that this Greek culture could not have continued. What would it have become if it had continued? It was not inherently possible for it to continue on a straight line. What would it have become? Human beings would gradually have come to consider themselves earth beings that are subhuman. The actual soul-spirit being in us would have been experienced as something that really dwells in the clouds, the flowers, the mountains, in rain, and sunshine, a being that occasionally comes to visit us. If the development of Greek culture had continued in the same direction, human beings increasingly would have felt that at night, when they had fallen asleep, they could experience the approach of their own ego in all its radiance and that it paid them a special visit then. But upon waking in the morning and becoming involved in the world of the lower senses, they also would have felt that insofar as they are a being of the earth they are but the outer housing of the ego. A certain estrangement from the ego would have been the consequence of an unbroken development of what can be noticed or sensed as the fundamental keynote or actual basic temperament of Greek nature.

It was necessary that this ego, which was escaping, as it were, into nature and the cosmos, should be firmly anchored in the inner constitution of the human being, an organic being moving about on the earth. A powerful impulse was required for this to happen. It was, after all, the peculiar characteristic of the Oriental world view that while it clearly drew attention to the ego—precisely because of its teaching of repeated earth lives—it also had the inherent tendency to alienate this ego from the human being, to deprive us of the ego. This is how it came about that the Occident, unable to rise to the heights attained by Greece, lacked the inner strength to assimilate the wisdom of Greece in its full strength and allowed it instead to flow back, so to speak, towards the Orient. The West also lacked the strength to take possession of the Mithras cult and allowed it to flow back to the Orient. By dint of the robust, sturdy forces of human earthly nature, the West was capable only of listening to purely factual narrations of the events of Palestine and then of having them affirmed by dogmas laid down in the Councils. At the outset, the Europeans were confronted with a materialistic view of the human personality.

This became most evident in the transition in the fourth century. All knowledge that would have been capable of producing a deeper comprehension of Christianity gradually withdrew back into Asia, all insight that could have brought about a cult in which the Christ Triumphant would have appeared rather than He who is overwhelmed by the burdens of the Cross, whose triumph can only faintly be surmised behind the shadow of the Crucifix. For the Occident, this ebbing away of the wisdom and the ancient ceremonial worship was initially a matter of securing the ego. From the robust force dwelling in the barbaric peoples of the north, the impulse emerged that was intended to supply the power to attach the ego to the earthly human organism.

While this was happening in the regions around the Danube, somewhat south of there, and in southern and western Europe, Arabism was transplanted from the Orient in forms differing from those of the earlier Oriental wisdom. Arabism then made its way as far as Spain, and southwestern Europe became inundated by a fantastic intellectual culture. This was a culture that in the external field of art could not achieve anything more than the arabesque, since it was incapable of permeating the organic realm with soul and spirit. Thus, in regard to the cultic ceremonies, Europe was filled, on the one hand with the narration of purely factual events; on the other hand, it was engrossed in a body of abstract, fantastic wisdom that, entering Europe by way of Spain, turned in filtered form into the culture of pure intellect.

Within this region, where the stories about the events of Palestine referring solely to the external aspects prevailed, where only the fantastic intellectual wisdom from Arabism existed, there a few individuals emerged—after all, a few isolated individuals appear now and again within the totality of mankind—who had an idea of how matters really stood. In their souls a feeling dawned that there is a lofty Christian mystery, the full significance of which is so great that the highest wisdom cannot penetrate it; the most ardent feeling is not strong enough to develop a fitting ceremonial worship for it. Indeed, they felt that something emanated from the Cross on Golgotha that would have to be comprehended by the highest wisdom and the most daring feeling. Such ideas arose in a few individuals. Something like the following profound Imagination arose in them. In the bread of the Last Supper, a synthesis of sorts was contained, a concentration of the force of the outer cosmos that comes down to the earth together with all the streams of forces from the cosmos, penetrating this earth, conjuring forth from it the vegetation. Then, what has thus been entrusted to the earth from out of the cosmos, in turn springs forth from the earth and is synthetically concentrated in the bread and sustains the human body.

Still another element pierced through all the clouds of obscurity that covered the ancient traditions. Something else was passed on to these European sages, something that, it is true, had had its origin in the Orient but penetrated through the cloud cover and was understood by some individuals. This other mystery, which was linked with the mystery of the bread, was the mystery of the holy vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea had caught the blood flowing down from Christ Jesus. This was the other aspect of the cosmic mystery. Just as the bread was regarded a concentrated extract of the cosmos, so the blood was regarded as the extract of the nature and being of man. In bread and blood—of which wine is merely the outer symbol—this extract expressed itself for these European sages. They had truly stepped forth as if out of the hidden places of the mysteries and towered far above the masses of the European population who could only hear the facts of Palestine, and who, if they advanced to scholarliness, found their way only slowly into the abstract fantasy of Arabism. In these wise men, who distinguished themselves by something that was like the overripe fruit of Oriental wisdom and at the same time the ripest fruit of European perception and feeling, there developed what they called the Mystery of the Grail. But, so they told themselves, the Mystery of the Grail is not to be found on earth.

People have grown accustomed to developing the kind of intelligence that found its highest form in Arabism. They are in the habit of not looking for the meaning of external facts, but are satisfied with being told of these outer facts from the aspect of sensory reality. One must penetrate to an understanding of the Mystery of the Bread, which is said to have been broken by Christ Jesus in the same chalice in which Joseph of Arimathea caught His blood. As legend tells it, this chalice was then removed to Europe, but was preserved by angels in a region high above the surface of the earth until the arrival of Titurel⁹ who created for this Grail, this sacred chalice, a temple on Mont Salvat. Through the clouds of abstraction and narrations of mere facts, those who had become European mystery sages in the manner described above wished to behold in a sacred, spiritual temple the Mystery of the Grail, the mystery of the cosmos that had disappeared along with etheric astronomy and the Mystery of the Blood that had vanished along with the ancient view of medicine. For just as the ancient medicine had fallen victim to abstract thinking, the old etheric astronomy, too, had passed over into abstract thought.

At a certain period in time, this whole trend of abstract thinking had reached its prime and had been brought to Spain by the Arabs. It was precisely in Spain where the Mystery of the Grail could not be found outwardly anywhere among people. Only abstract intellectual wisdom prevailed. Among the Christians, there was only narration of bare, external facts; among the Arabs, the Moors, there existed a fantastic development of the intellect. Only in the heights, above this earth, hovered the Holy Grail. This spiritual temple, this Holy Grail, this temple that encompassed the mysteries of bread and wine, could be entered only by those who had been endowed by divine powers with the necessary faculties. It is not by chance that the temple of the Grail was supposed to be found in Spain, where one literally had to move miles away from what earthly actuality presented, where one had to break through brambles in order to penetrate to the spiritual temple that enshrined the Holy Grail.

It was out of such prerequisite feelings that the conception of the Holy Grail developed. The invisible Church, the super-sensible Church, which is nevertheless to be found on earth—this was what concealed itself in the Mystery of the Grail. It was an immediate presence that cannot be discovered, however, by those who turn their mind indifferently to the world. In ancient times, the priests of the mysteries went out into the world, looked around among human beings, and based on seeing their auras, concluded, Here is one we must receive into the mysteries; there is another one we must accept into the mysteries. People did not need to ask; they were chosen. Inner initiative on the part of the individual was not required; one was chosen and bidden to enter the sacred mystery centers. This age was over already around the eleventh, twelfth, and ninth and tenth centuries.

The impulse urging a person to ask, What are the secrets of existence? had to be grounded in the human being through the Christ force, which had moved into European civilization. No one could approach the Grail who passed through the outer world with a drowsy, apathetic mind. It was said that he alone could penetrate into the miracles, that is, the mysteries of the Holy Grail, who in his soul felt the inclination to ask about the secrets of existence, both the cosmic secrets and those of man's inner being. Fundamentally speaking, it has remained so ever since. After the first half of the Middle Ages, however, when human beings had been earnestly directed to pose questions, had been told that they should indeed ask questions, a great reaction set in beginning with the first third of the fourteenth century. By that time, those who asked about the Mysteries of the Holy Grail had become fewer and fewer in number, and inertia was creeping into the souls of men. They turned their attention wholly to the outer forms of human life on earth, to all that may be seen, counted, weighed, measured, and calculated in the cosmos.

Nevertheless, the sacred challenge had already entered European civilization in the early Middle Ages, the sacred challenge remained: To enquire into the mysteries of the cosmos as well as into the inner mysteries of man, namely, the mysteries of the blood. After all, it was in a great variety of phases that humanity has passed through what materialism with all its forces by necessity had to bring into European civilization. Momentous, stirring words were uttered, though in many instances they have died away. We have to consider how great the possibility was for momentous words to be spoken within European civilization. What was destined for a certain age, namely, the factual narration of the events of Palestine, the permeation of these outer facts with Arabism, which was accomplished by scholasticism¹⁰ in the Middle Ages, was indeed of great significance for that particular age. But just as it developed out of an age of greater wisdom and ceremonial practices, both of which had only been pushed back to the East, it also did not understand how to listen to the super-sensible mysteries of Christianity, the mysteries of the Holy Grail. All the truly compelling voices that resounded in the early Middle Ages—and there were more than a few of them—were silenced by Rome's Catholicism, which was becoming more and more engulfed in dogmatism, in the same way as the Gnosis—as I pointed out again yesterday—was eradicated root and branch.

We must not form a negative judgment of the period between the fourth and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries merely on the basis of the fact that of the numerous voices raised, as it were, in holy, overripe sweetness throughout European civilization—which, for the rest was barbaric—only the somewhat awkward voice of one man has remained who could not write, that of Wolfram von Eschenbach.¹¹ For all that, he was still great; he was spared by the dogmatism that had gripped Europe and had basically eradicated the powerful voices that had called amid strife and bitterness for the quest of the Holy Grail. Those who raised this call for the Holy Grail meant to let it resound in the spirit of freedom dawning in the dull souls. They did not wish to deprive the human being of his freedom; they did not mean to push anything on him; he was to be the questioning one. Out of the depths of his own soul he was to ask about the miracles of the Grail.

This spiritual life that later became extinct was truly greater than the spiritual life opposing it, although the latter, too, was not without a certain greatness. When what has been described by the servants of the Holy Grail as a spiritual path was then superseded by the earthly path of the journey to the physical Jerusalem over in the East, namely, when the crusade to the Grail was replaced by the crusades for the terrestrial Jerusalem, when Gottfried of Bouillon¹² set out to establish an external kingdom in Jerusalem in opposition to Rome, letting his cry, “Away from Rome!” ring out, his voice was really less persuasive than that of Peter of Amiens.¹³ His voice sounded like a mighty suggestion to translate into something materialistic what the servants of the Holy Grail had intended as something spiritual.

This, too, was one of the paths that was taken because of materialism. It led to the physical Jerusalem, not to the spiritual Jerusalem, which was said to enshrine in Titurel's temple what had remained of the Mystery of Golgotha as the Holy Grail. Legend held that Titurel had brought this Holy Grail down to the earth's sphere from the clouds, where it had hovered, held by angels during the age of Arabism and the factual narration of the events of Palestine. The age of materialism, however, did not begin to ask about the Holy Grail. Lonely, isolated individuals, people who did not have a share in wisdom but dwelled in a kind of stupor, like Parsifal, were the ones who set out to seek the Holy Grail. But they also did not really understand how to ask the proper, appropriate question. Thus, the path of materialism, which began in the first third of the fourteenth century, was preceded by that other path of materialism already expressed in the turn to the East, the eastward journey to the physical Jerusalem. This tragedy was experienced by modern humanity; human beings had to and still have to undergo this tragedy in order to comprehend themselves inwardly and to turn properly into people asking questions. Modern mankind had to and still has to experience the tragedy that the light that once had approached from the East had not been recognized as spiritual light. The spiritual light had been rejected, and instead people set out to find a physical country, the physical materiality of the Orient. In the Middle Ages, humanity began to seek the physical East after the spiritual East had been rejected at the close of antiquity.

Such, then, was the situation in Europe, and our age today is still a part of it. For if we understand the true, inner call resounding in human hearts, we still are and should be seekers for the Holy Grail. The strivings of humanity that emerged beginning with the crusades still await their metamorphosis into spiritual endeavors. We have yet to arrive at such a comprehension of the cosmic worlds so that we will be able to seek for the origin of Christ in these cosmic worlds. As long as these cosmic worlds are investigated only with the methods of external, physical astronomy, they naturally cannot be conceived of as the home of Christ. From what the modern astronomer teaches as the secret of the heavens, which he describes only by means of geometry, mathematics, and mechanics and observes only with the telescope, the Christ could not have descended to earth in order to incarnate in the human being Jesus of Nazareth. Neither can this incarnation be understood on the basis of knowledge about the physical nature of the human being, knowledge that is obtained by moving from people in actual life to the clinic, where the corpse is dissected for the purposes of research so that views concerning the living human being are arrived at based on the corpse.

People in antiquity possessed an astronomy inbued with life and medical knowledge filled with life. Once again, our quest must be for a living astronomy, a living medicine. Just as a living astronomy will reveal to us a heaven, a cosmos, that is truly pervaded by a spirituality and from where the Christ could descend, so an enlivened medicine will present to us the being of man in a way that enables us to penetrate with insight and understanding to the Mystery of the Blood, to the organic inner sphere where the forces of the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego transform themselves into the physical blood. When a true medical knowledge has grasped the Mystery of the Blood and a spiritualized astronomy has understood the cosmic spheres, we shall comprehend how it was possible for the Christ to descend from these cosmic spheres to the earth, how He could find on earth the human body that could receive Him with its blood. It is the Mystery of the Grail that in all earnestness must be sought in this manner, namely, by setting out on the path to the spiritual Jerusalem with all that we are as human beings, with head and heart. This, indeed, is the task of modern humanity.

It is strange how the essence of what ought to come to pass weaves objectively through the sphere of existence. If it is not perceived in the correct way, it is experienced outwardly, it is superficially materialized. Just as formerly the Christians flocked to Jerusalem, so now large numbers of Jewish people travel to Jerusalem,¹⁴ thus expressing yet another phase of materialism that indicates how something that ought to be understood spiritually by all of modern humanity is interpreted only materialistically. The time must come when the Mystery of the Grail will once again be comprehended in the right way. You know that I have mentioned it in my An Outline of Occult Science.¹⁵ It is, in a manner of speaking, woven into the text that refers to all we must seek to discover along this path of spiritual science. Thus, I indicated what we have to acquire as a kind of picture and Imagination for what must be sought in earnest striving of the spirit and with profound human feeling as the path to the Grail.

Tomorrow, we will discuss this further.

• 1 . Stoicism—philosophy and spiritual view of the Stoa (founded around 300 B.C. by Zeno).
  
  Epicureanism—teaching by Epicurus in the Philosophers' School of Athens, founded by him in 306 B.C.
  
  Both philosophical systems are mainly directed towards practical life, seeking “happiness” in it. The latter is understood to be a rational, moderate striving for self-control and spiritualization without negating nature. (The debauchery of the Epicureans belongs to a later age. )
• 2 . Concerning the reasons for this development, see also Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970; lecture of June 12, 1910.
• 3 . Homer, Odyssey, Song XI.
• 4 . See Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, 1874.
• 5 . Thales of Milet, around 625–545 B.C.
• 6 . See Note 2, Lecture III.
• 7 . Heraclitus of Ephesus, around 535–475 B.C., Philosopher of the age preceding Socrates.
• 8 . Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1973.
• 9 . Titurel, founder of the Grail-dynasty (grandfather of Herzeloide and great-grandfather of Parsifal) who erected the Temple of the Grail within 30 years. See Albrecht von Scharffenberg, who, continuing in the manner of Wolfram von Eschenbach, wrote “Juengerer Titurel” between 1270 and 1280.
• 10. Scholasticism: medieval philosophy attempting to justify Christian faith through reason. Based itself on Aristotelian philosophy.
• 11. Wolfram von Eschenbach, around 1170–1220, Medieval epic writer. Poet of Parsifal (1210), a novel in verses, as well as Willehalm and a fragment, Titurel.
• 12. Gottfried of Bouillon, around 1060–1100, leader of the first Crusade in 1096.
• 13. Peter of Amiens, around 1050–1115, Augustine prior who moved through France and summoned people to the Crusade; later, he joined Gottfried of Bouillon.
• 14. See Rudolf Steiner: Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Kulturgeschichte, Bibl. #31, 1966. Not translated.
• 15. An Outline of Occult Science, chapter VI: “The Present and Future of Cosmic and Human Evolution.”

During the last few days, I have tried to show how Western civilization originated and that a significant and mighty turning point can be noted in mankind's overall evolution in the fourth Christian century. It was also necessary to point out how Greece gradually developed in the direction of this twilight, so to speak; how, based on quite different impulses, the civilization of central and western European culture came about, and how a comprehension of Christianity developed under these influences. To begin with, let us try and refer to the facts under consideration once more from a certain different viewpoint.

Christianity originated in the western Orient from the Mystery of Golgotha. Insofar as its specific nature was concerned, Oriental culture certainly was already in decline. The ancient, primordial wisdom existed in its last phases in what developed in Asia Minor and Greece as Gnosticism. The Gnosis, after all, was a form of wisdom that combined, in the most manifold ways, what presented itself to the human being as phenomena of the cosmos and nature. This not withstanding, in comparison to the directly perceived, instinctive insight into the spiritual world that was the foundation of Oriental development, Gnosticism already had a more, shall we say, intellectual, rational character. The spiritual life that permeated all human perception in the ancient Orient was no longer present. It was actually from the last vestiges of the ancient wisdom that people sought to fit together the philosophical and humanistic view that was then employed as a body of wisdom for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha. The substance inherent in the Mystery of Golgotha was clothed in the wisdom retained from the Orient in Greece.

Now let us consider this wisdom from the point of view of spiritual science. If we view human beings as they devoted themselves once upon a time to this wisdom, we find that the main thing in the ancient Orient was that people saw the world with what was active in their astral body, with what they could experience in their soul through their astral body—even though their sentient soul and rational or intellectual soul had already developed. It was the astral body that worked into these soul members and enabled people to actually turn their glance away from the earthly phenomena and to still perceive quite clearly what enters in the spiritual, super-sensible sphere from the cosmos. As yet, human beings did not have a view of the world based on the ego. Their self expressed itself only dimly. For the human being the ego was as yet not an actual question. Human beings dwelled in the astral element, and in it they still lived in a certain harmony with the world phenomena surrounding them. In a sense, the really puzzling world for them was the one they beheld with their eyes, the one that ran its course around them. For them, the comprehensible world was the super-sensible world of the gods, the world in which the spiritual beings had their existence. Human beings looked across to these spiritual beings, to their actions, their destinies. It was indeed the essential characteristic of the view of the ancient Orient that people's attention was directed towards these spiritual worlds. People wished to comprehend the sensory world on the basis of these spiritual worlds.

Today, finding ourselves within our civilization, we take the opposite view. To us, the physical-sensory world is given. Proceeding from it, in one way or another, we try to comprehend the spiritual world—if we attempt that at all, if we do not reject doing so, if we do not remain stuck in pure materialism. The material world is seen as given by us. The ancient Orientals saw the spiritual world as given. On the premise of the physical world, we try to discover something with which to comprehend the wondrousness of the phenomena, the purpose of the structure of the organisms, and so on; based on this physical, sensory world, we try to prove to ourselves the existence of the supersensory world. The ancient Orientals tried to comprehend the physical, sensory environment on the basis of the superphysical, supersensory world given to them. Out of it, they wished to receive light—indeed, they did receive it, and without it, the physical, sensory world was to them only darkness and trepidation. Thus, they also experienced what they sensed to be their innermost being as still completely illuminated by the astral body, as having emerged from the spiritual worlds. People then did not say, I have grown out of earthly life. Rather, they said, I have grown and descended out of divine-spiritual worlds; and the best I bear within me is the recollection of these divine spiritual worlds. Even Plato, the philosopher, speaks of the fact that the human being has insights, memories, of his prenatal life, the life he led prior to descending into the physical material world. The human being certainly viewed his ego as a ray emerging from the light of the super-sensible world. For him, the material world, not the supersensory world, was puzzling.

This world view then had its offshoots in Greece. The Greeks already experienced themselves within the body, but in it they discovered nothing that could have explained this body to them. They still possessed the traditions of the ancient Orient. They viewed themselves in a certain sense as a being that had descended from the spiritual worlds but that in some ways had already lost the awareness of these spiritual worlds. It was actually the final phase of the Oriental life of wisdom that appeared in Greece, and it was on the basis of this world view that the Mystery of Golgotha was to be understood. After all, this Mystery presented the human being with the profound, tremendous problem of life, with the question how the super-sensible, cosmic being from other worlds, the Christ, could have found His way into a human corporeality. The permeation of Jesus by the Christ was the great problem. We see it light up everywhere in the Gnostic endeavors. People had no such insight of their own concerning a link between the super-sensible aspect of their own nature and the sensory-physical element of their being, and because they had no perception of the connection between the soul-spiritual and the corporeal-physical in reference to themselves, the Mystery of Golgotha became an unsolvable problem for the thinking influenced by the Greek world view. It was, however, a problem with which Greek culture struggled and to which it devoted its finest resources of wisdom. History records much too little of the spiritual struggles that took place then.

I have called attention to the fact that the body of Gnostic literature was eradicated. If it were still available, we would be able to discern this tragic struggle for a comprehension of the living union of the super-sensible Christ with the sense-perceptible Jesus; we would observe the development of this extraordinarily profound problem. This struggle was extinguished, however, an end was put to it by the prosaic, abstract attitude originating from Romanism which is only capable of carrying inner devotion into its abstractions by means of whipping up emotions. The Gnosis was covered up and dogmatism and Church Council decisions were put in its place. The profound views of the Orient that contained no juristic element were saturated with a form assumed by Christianity in the more Western world, the Western world of that age, the Roman world.

Christianity emerged from this Romanism imbued, as it were, with the legal element; everywhere, legal concepts moved in as the Roman political concepts spread out over Christianity. Christianity assumed the form of the Roman body politic, and from what was once the world capital, Rome, we see the emergence of the Christian capital city of Rome. We see how this Christian Rome adopts from ancient Rome the special views on how human beings must be governed, how one's rule must be extended over men. We observe how a kind of ecclesiastical imperialism gains ground because Christianity is poured into the Roman form of government. What had been molded in spiritual forms of conception was transformed into a juristic and human polity. For the first time, Christianity and external political science were forged together and Christianity spread out in that form. Such mighty forces and impulses dwell in Christianity that they could, of course, be effective and survive despite the fact that they were poured into the mold of the Roman political system. And as the Roman political system took hold of the Western world, side by side with it, the humble narrations, the factual reports concerning what had taken place in Palestine, continued on.

In this Western world, however, people had been prepared in a quite special way for Christianity. This preparation consisted in the fact that the human being was aware of himself based on his physical nature; he sensed his ego by means of his physical being. Here, the difference became evident between the way Christianity had passed, as it were, through the Greek world, which then declined, and the form of Christianity that then turned into the actually political Christianity, the governmental, Roman Christianity. Then, more from the northern regions, another form of Christianity emerged that was poured into the northern people, called Barbarians by the Greeks and Romans. It streamed into those northern people who due to their nature and in concentrating their own being, so to speak, sensed their ego. Out of the totality of man in the physical-sensory realm, out of the human physical and sensory ego incarnation, they arrived at self-comprehension. Now they also tried to grasp what reached them as a simple story about the events in Palestine. Thus, in this Barbarian world, the humble tale of the events in Palestine encountered the ego-feeling, I would like to say, the blood-ego-feeling, particularly in the central and northern European realm. These two aspects came together. On the premise of this ego comprehension of man, people tried to grasp the simple report of the events in Palestine. They did not wish to comprehend its deeper content. They did not try to permeate it with wisdom. They only tried to draw it into the physical-sensory, human sphere.

In the Heliand,¹ we can observe how these tales concerning the events in Palestine appear drawn completely down to the human level, into the world of European people, the ego-world. We see how everything is brought down to the human level; unlike the way it was in Greece, people later had no ability to penetrate the Mystery of Golgotha with wisdom. The urge developed to picture even the activity of Christ Jesus as humble human activity without looking up into the super-sensible, and increasingly to imbue these tales with the merely human element. Furthermore, into this were fitted the Church Council resolutions spreading out dogmatically from the Roman-Christian Empire. Like two worlds that were alien to one another, these two merged—the Christianity that in a sense had Europeanized the report from Palestine and the Christianity representing the Greek spirit in juristic, Romanized, abstract form. This is what then lived on through the centuries.

Only a few individuals could place themselves into this stream in the manner I described yesterday, when I spoke of the sages who developed the conception of the Grail. They pointed out that the impulse of Christianity had indeed once been couched in Oriental wisdom, but that the bearer of this Oriental view, the sacred vessel of the Grail, could be brought to Europe only by means of divine spirits who hovered above the earth, holding on to it. Only then, so they said, a hidden castle was built for it, the Castle of the Grail on Mont Salvat. To this was added that a human being could only approach the miracles of the Holy Grail through inaccessible regions. Then these sages did not say that the surrounding impassable region a person has to penetrate in order to reach the miracles of the Grail is sixty miles wide. They put it in a much more esoteric way when they described this path to the Holy Grail. They said, Oh, these people of Europe cannot reach the Holy Grail, for the path they must take in order to arrive at the Holy Grail takes as long as the path from birth to death. Only when human beings arrive at the portal of death, having tread the path, impassable for Europeans, the path that extends from birth to death, only then will they arrive at the Castle of the Grail on Mont Salvat.

This was basically the esoteric secret that was conveyed to the pupil. Because the time had not yet come when human beings would be able to discern with a clear consciousness how the spiritual world might once more be discovered, the pupils were told that they could enter into the sacred Castle of the Grail only by way of occasional glimpses of light. In particular, they were given strict injunctions that they had to ask, that the time had come in human development when the human being who does not ask—who does not develop his inner being and does not seek the impulse of truth on his own but remains passive—cannot arrive at an experience of his own self. For man must discover his ego by means of his physical organization. This I, which discovers itself through the physical organization, must in turn raise itself up by its own power in order to behold itself where, even in the early Greek culture, this self was still beheld, in super-sensible worlds. The I must first lift itself up in order to recognize itself as something super-sensible.

In the ancient Orient, people saw what occurred in the astral body; the consequences of former earth lives were beheld in it. This is why one spoke of karma. In Greece, this conception was already obscured. The cosmic events were observed only with dim astral vision. This is why people spoke vaguely of destiny, of fate. This view of destiny is only a diminished, weaker form of the fully concrete conception held by the ancient Orient concerning man's passage through repeated earth lives, the consequences of which make themselves known to experience within the astral body, though only instinctively. Thus, the ancient Orientals could speak of karma developing in the recurring incarnations on earth, the consequences of which were simply present in astral experience.

Now the development moved westward to the ego experience. This experience of the ego was initially tied to the physical body. It was egotistically self-enclosed. The first ego experience dwelled in dullness, even when it contained a strong impulse towards the super-sensible worlds. Parsifal, who undertook his pilgrimage to the Holy Grail, is described as a dim-witted man. It must be clearly understood that when the Mithras worship spread across the West from the Orient, it was rejected by the West; it was not comprehended. For he who sat on the bull, who was to become the victor over the base forces, experienced himself, after all, as emerging from these lower forces. If Western man beheld Mithras riding on the bull, he did not comprehend this being, for this being could not be the one the ego felt and experienced out of its own physical organization. An understanding for this riding Mithras faded away and disappeared.

It can be said that all this had to come to pass, for the ego had to experience its impulse in the physical organization. It had to connect itself firmly with the physical organization, but it must not allow itself to become set in this firm experience within the physical organization.

It was a profound reaction to the Orient's treasures of wisdom, when the West increasingly aimed for what developed out of the purely physical element. This reaction was a necessity. Any number of views did come together in Europe to make this reaction a very strong one. But it was not proper for it to extend into this spiritual striving for more than a few centuries. A new spirituality has indeed emerged since then in the first third of the fifteenth century, but it was an abstract spirituality, a sublimated, filtered spirituality.

Human beings took hold of physical astronomy and physical medicine, and, to begin with, they had to have this stimulus based on the ego impulse sensing itself in the physical element. But it must not continue to become firmly set in European civilization if this European culture wishes to avoid its decline. Truly, more than enough forces of decline are present, vestiges which should only be vestiges and which should be recognized as such.

Just remember how the most up-to-date theology—I have often emphasized this—has lost the faculty for comprehending Christ; increasingly it has arrived at the point of turning Christ Jesus completely into an earth being, a human being. It has put the “humble man from Nazareth”² in the place of Christ Jesus. Proceeding from Romanism, out of a materialistically oriented principle of authority, the living spirituality, by means of which the human being can really become familiar with the Mystery of Golgotha, was lost more and more. And observe how in modern times a science is developing that tries to comprehend everything external but that does not wish to penetrate to the human being. As a result of this science, see how impulses arise in society that try only to bring about a human, physical order but that do not want to penetrate the human, physical structures with any divine-spiritual, supersensory, spiritual principle.

During all this it is as if in human souls, in a few human souls, there remained an individual glimpse of light. When a ray of the astral element still dwelling within them combined with the ego, these individuals received such glimpses of light. It is part of the most impressive phenomena of modern Europe when we observe how, out of the East, there resounds a mighty admonition in the religious philosophy of Soloviev,³ a religious philosophy steeped, so to speak, in Eastern sultriness. But something resounds from there to the effect that a super-sensible, spiritual element must permeate the earthly social order. In a sense, we see how Soloviev dreams of a kind of Christ-state. He is capable of that because within him are the last vestiges of a subjective astral experience illuminating the ego.

Compare these dreams of a Christ-permeated state with what has been established in the East accompanied by the negation of all spiritual elements, something that harbors only forces of decline—what an overwhelming, colossal contrast! The world should pay attention to such a colossal contrast. If people had already today sufficient objectivity to observe these things, they would be able to see, on the one hand, the one who raises the demand of the Christ-permeated state, the Christ-permeated social structure, Soloviev. They would view him as somebody still stimulated by the Oriental element and casting, so to speak, a final spark into this Europe growing torpid, in order to revive it again from this viewpoint. On the other hand, Czar Nicholas or his predecessors could well be placed together with Czar Lenin; the fact that they give vent to different ideas in the historical development of mankind does not constitute a fundamental difference between them. What matters are the forces living in them and shaping the world, and the same forces dwell in Lenin that dwell in the Russian Czar; there really is no fundamental difference. It is naturally difficult to find one's way within this melee of forces that extend into European civilization from earlier times. Initially, it is indeed a melee of forces and a firm direction must be sought. Such a firm direction can be found in no other way than by lifting the ego up to a spiritual comprehension of the world. Through a spiritual comprehension of the world, the Christian impulse must be reborn. What has been striven for in regard to the external world since the first third of the fifteenth century must be striven for in reference to the totality of the human being; the whole human being has to be understood based on the knowledge of the world.

The comprehension of the world must be viewed in harmony with the understanding of humanity. We must understand the earth evolution in phases, in metamorphoses. We have to look at earlier embodiments of our earth, but we must not consider a primordial nebula devoid of human beings. We have to look at Saturn, sun, and moon as already permeated with the activity of human beings; we must observe how the present structure of the human being originated from the earlier metamorphoses of the planet earth and how the human form in an early phase was likewise active there. We must recognize the human being in the world, and out of this knowledge of man in the world an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha can well up once again. Human beings must learn to understand why an impassable region surrounds the Castle of the Grail, why the path between birth and death is difficult terrain. When they understand why it is difficult, when they grasp that the ego experiences itself based on the physical organization, when they sense how impossible a merely physical astronomy, a merely physical medicine are, then they themselves will clear the paths. Then people will bring something into this hitherto difficult terrain between birth and death that comes into being through their own soul efforts.

Out of the substance of the soul and spirit, human beings have to fashion the tools with which to break the ground on the field, the soul-field, leading to the Castle of the Grail, to the Mystery of Bread and Blood, to the fulfillment of the words, “Do this in remembrance of me” [Luke 22:19]. For this remembrance has been forgotten; people are no longer aware of what dwells in the words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” For this is truly done in remembrance of the mighty moment of Golgotha if the symbol of the bread, that is what develops out of the earth through the synthesis of cosmic forces is understood. It is done rightly if we understand once again how to comprehend the world through a spiritualized cosmology and astronomy, and if we learn to comprehend the human being based on what his extract is, namely, the element where the spiritual directly intervenes in him—if we grasp the Mystery of the Blood. Through work on the inner being of human souls the path must be discovered that leads to the Holy Grail. This is a task of cognition, this is a social task. It is also a task that, to the greatest extent possible, is hated in the present

For due to being placed within the ego education of Western civilization, human beings develop above all a longing to remain passive inwardly in the soul, not to allow earthly existence to give to them what could bring progress to their souls. The active taking hold of the soul forces, the inward experiencing, and this does not necessarily mean occult development but merely the experience of soul nature in general; yet this is something European humanity does not like. Instead, it wishes to continue what was natural for the epoch directly preceding it, namely, the ego development, which does, however, lead to the most blatant egotism, to the blindest raging of instincts, when it is extended beyond its own age. This ego feeling, extending beyond the time properly assigned to it, first of all has penetrated the sentiments of national chauvinism. It appears in national chauvinism; from these feelings arise the spirits who wish to keep the path to the Holy Grail in an impassable condition. But it is our obligation to do everything that can be done in order to call human souls to activity in the area of knowledge as well as in the social sphere. Yet, all those forces filled with hatred against such activity of the soul emerge in opposition to such a call. After all, haven't people been conditioned long enough so that they concluded, We must consider heretical all our own soul efforts to free ourselves from guilt; we must properly cultivate the awareness of sin and guilt, for we must not progress by means of our own efforts, but must be redeemed in passivity through Christ?

We fail to understand Christ if we do not recognize Him as the cosmic power that completely unites with us when through questions and inner activity we work our way through to Him. Everywhere today, from the denominations, from theology and those who were always connected to theology, from the military and science—from all this we see arise those powers today that try to obstruct the path of inner activity.

For a long time, I have had to call attention to the fact that this is the case, and I have had to say again and again: the arising opposing powers will become more and more vehement. Indeed, to this day this has certainly come true. It is definitely not possible to say that the opposition has already reached its greatest strength. Not by a long shot has it attained its culmination. This opposition has a strong, organizing power in concentrating together all the elements that, while they are in reality destined to decline, can obstruct in their very decline for the time being everything working with the forces of upward striving progress. The forces fostering the activity of souls are weak today in comparison to the opposing elements. Those forces that, based on the comprehension of the spiritual world, try to turn the progressive forces into forces of their own soul are weak. The world has taken on an ahrimanic character. For it was inevitable that the ego, having comprehended itself in the physical element, is taken hold of by ahrimanic forces if it remains in the physical element and does not lift itself up at the right time to a spiritual understanding of itself as a spiritual being. Indeed, we see this process of usurpation by the ahrimanic powers; we observe it in the fact that, little as the sleepy souls would be willing to admit this, an actual tendency towards evil is making itself felt everywhere today.

An inclination towards evil is clearly noticeable, for example, in the manner opponents fight against anthroposophical spiritual science and everything related to it. From the most questionable sources come the means with which individuals battle today against spiritual science, even individuals who enjoy a prestigious standing in the world in scientific or theological circles. The truth is not what people are concerned with. It is only a matter of what slander suits these individuals best and what they like better. It is truly a matter of humanity being strongly possessed by the forces of evil, by a love for evil. Those who are unable today to reckon with this tendency for evil, with this ever increasing love for evil in the battle against anthroposophy, will not be able to develop a feeling, an awareness of the kind of opposing forces and powers that will yet arise in the future. For years, reference has been made to this ever-increasing development. If nothing more can be attained than a clear feeling of it, then this clear feeling, which is, after all, also a force, must at least be maintained. We have to look into the world and be aware of the way it surrounds us. With a sober mind we must realize what is really facing us in the filthy slander that is now emerging from among our opponents and that is the more impressive the more tarnished its source.

It is really necessary to become acquainted with this particular tendency, with this love of evil, that will become more and more prevalent. It is truly necessary not to wallow groggily in excuses that the opponents are convinced of what they say. Do you really believe that in individuals such as the one who has emerged as the newest opponent against anthroposophical spiritual science even the possibility for an inner force of conviction is present? Not even the possibility of conviction is present in him. He acts out of quite different deeper motives. It is indeed a clever move to seek particularly in this direction, to seek for the manner of viewing things that is based on fooling the opponent. Who is the better commander? He who can best fool the enemy! But when this principle is transferred to the means of battling against truth, then such a battle is a battle of the lie, of the personified lie against truth. We must realize that this battle of the personified lie against truth is capable of anything, that it will definitely attempt to take away from us what we have tried and are still trying to attain in the way of outward supports in order to find bearers of truth in this civilization. It is not exaggerated to say that there exists the most profound and thoroughgoing wish to deprive us of the Waldorf School and this building.⁴ And if we pay no attention to this; if we do not even develop in us a feeling concerning the ways and means of this opposition, then we remain sleeping souls. Then we do not take hold with inner alertness of what is trying to pour forth out of anthroposophical spiritual science.

Basically, we should not be surprised now that the opponents could turn out the way they did for that could have been known long ago. The overwhelming impression for us today certainly is that there are too few individuals who can be active representatives of our spiritual movement. It is generally still easier to be effective among human beings by means of force, control, and injustice than by means of freedom. The truth that is to be proclaimed through anthroposophical spiritual science is permitted to count only on human freedom. It must find people who ask questions. One certainly cannot say, Why doesn't this truth possess in itself the strength to compel human souls by virtue of divine-spiritual power? It does not wish to do that; it cannot do that. The reason is that it will always consider inner freedom, the freedom of the human being in general, to be something absolutely inviolable. If the human being is to come to anthroposophy out of his own judgment, he must become one who asks questions; out of the innermost freedom of judgment he must convince himself. The word of spiritual truth will be spoken to him; convincing himself of it is something he must do on his own. If he wishes to cooperate and be active in society, he must do so out of the innermost impulse of his heart. Those who belong in the truest sense of the word to anthroposophical spiritual science must become people who ask questions.

What do we encounter on the side of the opposition? Do not believe that only those who band together who are in some way one-sided in any one creed. No, in a Catholic church in Stuttgart, a sermon tells its listeners, Go to the lecture by Herr von Gleich.⁵ There you can invigorate your Catholic souls and can vanquish the opponents of your Catholic souls! And these Catholic souls go there; the Catholic, General von Gleich, gives a lecture and concludes with a song by Martin Luther! A fine union of one side and the other—the opponents organize as one! It certainly matters not if they agree in any way in their faith, their convictions.

For us, what matters is the strength to stand firmly on the ground of what we recognize as right. Yes, nothing will be left undone to undermine this ground; of this you can be sure. I had to bring this up one more time, particularly in connection with the considerations concerning the course taken by European civilization; for it is necessary that at least the intention develops to place oneself firmly on the ground we must recognize as the right one. It is also necessary that among ourselves we do not give ourselves up to the popular illusions concerning the various oppositions. Their aim is to undermine the ground we stand on. It is up to us to work as much as is humanly possible, and then, if the ground under us should become undermined and we do slide down into the chasm, our efforts will nevertheless have been such that they will find their spiritual path through the world. For what appears now are the last convulsions of a dying world. But even if it is in its last throes of death, this world can still strike out like a raving maniac, and one can lose one's life due to this frantic lashing out. This is why we must at least recognize what kind of impulses give rise to this mad lashing out. Nothing can be achieved by what is timid; we must appeal to what is bold. Let us try to measure up to such an appeal!

I had to include this so that you would sense that we face an important, significant, and decisive moment, and that we have to consider how we are to find the strength to persevere.

• 1 . Heiland, (meaning “Heiland” or “Savior”), ancient Saxon poetical Gospel work from around A.D. 830.
• 2 . Reference to the overall tendency of descriptions of Jesus at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
• 3 . Vladimir Soloviev, 1853–1900, Russian philosopher and poet.
• 4 . Reference to the first Waldorf School, established in Stuttgart in 1919, and the first Goetheanum.
• 5 . Gleich completed his lecture of April 6, 1921, in Stuttgart with a quote from a song by Martin Luther. On the day before, a Jesuit, Sorel, had recommended that people attend this lecture.