The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today there are still many people who maintain that a spirit-soul life may exist after death, but they wonder why we should concern ourselves with it now. We can simply live on earth with all that it offers and simply wait and see whether other forms of existence do come about after death!

Spiritual science shows, however, that during life between death and rebirth man encounters certain beings. Just as here he meets the many beings of the various kingdoms of nature, so after death he meets the beings of higher hierarchies and certain elemental beings. If a person goes through life without any sense of judgment, this is due to the fact that between death and rebirth he was unable to meet those beings who could have given him the appropriate forces to enable him to be morally and intellectually effective in this life. But the possibility and the ability to meet certain beings between death and rebirth depends on the last life. If during earthly life we do not occupy ourselves with thoughts relating to the super-sensible, if during our life we have been completely immersed in the external sense world, if we only lived in our intellect inasmuch as it was directed to the physical world, then we make it impossible for ourselves between death and a new birth to encounter certain beings and to receive abilities from them for a subsequent life. The realm beyond remains dim and dark for us, and we are unable to find the forces of higher hierarchies in the darkness. Man, then between death and a new birth, passes by those beings from whom he should receive forces for his next earthly life.

From whence comes the light by means of which we can illumine the darkness between death and rebirth? Where do we find it? Between death and rebirth no one gives us any light. The beings are there and we can only reach them providing we have kindled the light in our last earthly life by means of our interest in the spiritual world. After death we are unable to penetrate the darkness unless we have taken the light with us through the gate of death.

This shows how incorrect is the statement that we need not concern ourselves with things of a spiritual nature, but that we can afford to wait for what happens. In fact, if we wait and see, we shall only encounter darkness!

Earthly life is not merely a transitional stage. It has a mission. It is a necessity for the beyond, as indeed the beyond is for earthly existence. The lights for the life beyond must be carried upward from the earth. It may also happen that down here people remain dull to the super-sensible world, that they simply miss the opportunity to develop certain faculties, that they fail to create instruments for the next incarnation.

A person who lacked a certain ability in this or that sphere during life goes through the gate of death. Now you see what a hopeless situation it all makes. If nothing were to intervene, the person would become less and less able. For if a person has deliberately dulled himself toward the spiritual world in one incarnation, he will be even less able in a following life to prepare organs for himself. If nothing else were to occur, things would take their course along an ever steeper slope of decline.

Something else, however, does intervene. A man who goes through life with deliberate dullness in one incarnation will find that Lucifer approaches him with his powers in the spiritual world after the second earthly life. If Lucifer did not approach him at this point, he would stumble through the thickest darkness. Because he has lived as described, Lucifer can approach him and can illumine the forces and beings needed for the next earthly incarnation. The result is that they are colored with luciferic light. Now following the dull existence, and after having been led by Lucifer between death and rebirth, he enters a new earth existence. He is now fully equipped with talents and abilities which prepare his organs so that everywhere he is open to luciferic temptations on earth.

Now such a person may be clever, but his cleverness will be cold and calculating; above all it will be permeated by selfishness, by egoism. This manifests itself to the seer in many instances where people are clever but actually cold and selfish in their activity. When one meets them they are always seeking their own advantage and do all they can to place themselves in the limelight. A consideration of such people shows that in the spiritual world they were led by Lucifer. In the pervious incarnation they led a dull existence that was followed by a stumbling in the darkness after death and this was preceded by yet another life on earth during which they deliberately closed themselves to the spiritual world.

Such an insight reveals a sad prospect for materialists. Our contemporaries who are materialistically inclined and reject all concern for the spiritual world and consider the soul life as ending with death, can expect an existence as just described. It is of little consequence to gather abstractly certain thoughts about the interrelations of various earth lives. An exact, concrete survey reveals the most manifold connections between former and later earth lives and the life in the spirit that follows each incarnation. We should hold onto the fact that life on earth is of considerable importance for life after death.

Life on earth has yet another significance. It is only on the earth that we can meet certain beings, and man belongs above all among them. Unless the link is established between man and man on earth, it cannot occur in the spirit world. The relationships between human beings are forged here and continue in the spiritual world. If we miss the opportunity to meet certain individuals on earth who were predestined to be in incarnation, we cannot make up for it during the period between death and rebirth.

Let us take the example of Gautama Buddha. He was that human personality who lived during the sixth century B.C. as the son of a king, and who rose in his twenty-ninth year from the rank of bodhisattva to that of Buddha. This means that he became a Buddha and no longer needed to incarnate in physical human form. The Gautama Buddha thus accomplished his last earthly life. A considerable number of people met this individuality on earth during that time, and also in earlier incarnations people had been in contact with the Bodhisattva. All these connections could be continued later in the spiritual world. The connection to Gautama Buddha, which bore the character of a pupil to teacher relationship, could be continued in the spiritual world. But there were souls who during the evolution of humanity never made a connection with Gautama Buddha on earth. These souls, even if they now have reached a considerable degree of development, cannot at all easily come in contact in the spiritual world with the being of Buddha, with the soul of the one who was incarnated as Gautama Buddha. For Gautama Buddha what may be called a replacement appears; he has a replacement if one has been unable to make a connection with him on earth.

The Buddha has had a special destiny since he rose to buddhahood and no longer needed to return to the earth thus continuing to dwell in a pure spiritual region. He remained in touch with earthly happenings, however, and worked from the spiritual worlds down into the earthly sphere. We know that the being of Gautama Buddha radiated into the Jesus child spoken of in the Gospel of St. Luke. The super-sensible being of Buddha streamed into the astral body of the Luke Jesus child. It worked from the super-sensible down into earthly realms. Human beings on earth could no longer find access to him. Only those could make a contact with the being of Gautama who, like Francis of Assisi, for instance, had gone through a higher form of development. Before he entered life on earth, and previous also to the last life between birth and death, the being of Francis of Assisi lived in a mystery center situated in the southeast of Europe. In this center there were no physical teachers, but teachers belonging to the super-sensible hierarchy of whom Buddha, or more accurately, of whom the soul that had been incarnated in Buddha, was one. The pupils in such mystery centers had already developed lofty faculties for beholding the super-sensible world. Such pupils are able to be taught by teachers who work only from the spiritual world. Thus Buddha taught in that mystery center, and Francis of Assisi in a former incarnation was his faithful and devoted pupil. At that time Francis of Assisi absorbed everything that later enabled him to receive the light-filled impulses of the higher hierarchies, and that then allowed him to appear in incarnation as the great mystic who was to exert such a strong influence on his age. This was all due to the fact that the soul of Francis of Assisi, through the higher faculties he possessed at the time, was able to establish a connection with the Gautama Buddha after the Buddha was able to work down from the super-sensible world upon him.

For ordinary human beings who are dependent on life as it unfolds through the senses and the intellect, such a meeting is not possible. In that case what has been said earlier applies. We cannot meet a person in the spiritual world unless we have first met him on earth.

The exception that we have just considered in relation to the Buddha brings forth yet another. Although it is impossible for ordinary individuals to meet others in spiritual realms with whom they have not had a previous connection on earth, yet if a person has received the Christ impulse and permeates himself with it, he can nevertheless meet the Buddha after death. For the position of this being is a special one.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century another planet was involved in a crisis of development similar to that of the earth when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. As the Christ appeared on earth from higher realms at the time of Golgotha, so Buddha appeared on Mars during the Mars crisis of the seventeenth century. After Buddha had completed his incarnations it was no longer necessary for him to return to the earth, but he continued his activities in other realms. The Buddha wandered away from earthly affairs to the realm of Mars. Until then Mars had been the chosen center of forces designated by the Greeks as fearfully warlike. This mission of Mars came to an end in the seventeenth century. Another impulse became necessary and the Buddha accomplished a Buddha crucifixion there. The Buddha Mystery on Mars did not take the same course as the Christ Mystery on earth, but Buddha, the Prince of Peace, who, during his last earthly life had spread peace and love wherever he went, was transferred to the belligerent realm of Mars. The fact that a being who is fully permeated by forces of peace and love was transferred to a realm of strife and disharmony may in a sense be regarded as a crucifixion. For the seer two happenings come together in a most wonderful way. One beholds, on the one hand, the eighty-year-old dying Buddha, and this death has a deeply moving, deeply stirring quality. Buddha died in 483 surrounded by silver rays on a wonderful moonlit night, radiating peace and compassion. That was his last earthly hour. And then he was active again in the way described. The seer discovers him kindling the compassionate, silvery moral light of Buddha on Mars at the beginning of the seventeenth century. These two wonderful events are deeply related in the course of world history.

The human souls who have received the Christ impulse into themselves in the corresponding manner here on earth travel through the cosmic universe after death. We all go through these cosmic realms. To begin with, we go through the planets of our planetary system. We experience a Moon period, a Mercury period, a Venus period, a Sun period, a Mars period, a Jupiter period and a Saturn period. Following these we go into the surroundings of our planetary system and then later commence our return journey. Now we encounter those forces and the beings from whom we must receive what we need to build up our next earthly life. He who has received the Christ impulse on earth can also receive what streams from the Buddha in his passage through the Mars sphere. This belongs to the exceptional case in which souls who have not been together with Buddha in earlier incarnations nevertheless have the opportunity of meeting him between death and rebirth.

Supersensible perception reveals that a number of personalities who lived during the seventeenth century owed their remarkable talents to the fact that during their prenatal life in the spiritual world they received an impulse from Buddha. At present the ability to receive such talents is still limited among human beings because it is only comparatively recently that the Buddha accomplished the Mystery on Mars. In future, human souls will be more and more capable of receiving the Buddha impulse from the Mars sphere. But in the nineteenth century there were already some personalities—and this was disclosed to those able to perceive it—who were able to develop their faculties here on earth as a result of the influences they received from Buddha through their passage in the Mars sphere. The course of life between death and rebirth is indeed complex and wonderful.

Unless man is able to take with him the light to illumine his experience between death and rebirth, he stumbles in the dark. This also holds good for this exceptional case. A person who departs from the earth through the gate of death without having taken the Christ impulse into himself, who wished to know nothing of it, will not have the slightest intimation of the influences of Buddha during his next life in the spiritual world as he passes through the Mars sphere. For him it is as if the Buddha were not present. It should be borne in mind that we encounter the beings of the Higher Hierarchies, but whether or not we perceive them and establish the right connection with them depends on whether we kindled a light in our last earthly existence so that we do not pass them by and are able to receive impulses from them. That is why it is a complete fallacy to maintain that it is unnecessary to concern oneself with the beyond during earthly existence.

You will gather from the foregoing that from a higher aspect life on earth really constitutes a special case. We live embodied within a special organism on earth between life and death. Apart from an earthly incarnation one can speak of an “embodiment” between death and rebirth, or rather of an “ensouling.” What I have elaborated in connection with the spiritual world also applies to the earth. Consider that a human being living between death and rebirth may pass through the Mars sphere without entering it in the slightest connection with the beings who inhabit Mars. He does not see them, and they are not aware of him. This is true of the earth also. Beings belonging to other planets, just as man belongs to the earth, are continually passing through the earth sphere. The inhabitants of Mars spend the normal course of their life on Mars, and during their experience, which corresponds on Mars to the period between death and a new life but yet is different, they pass through the planetary spheres. So that in fact inhabitants of other planets are continually passing through our earth sphere. Human beings are unable to establish any contact with them because they live under quite different conditions and because they will in the main not have made the least connection with these beings on Mars.

What would be the conditions necessary in order to meet the beings from other planets as they pass through the earth sphere? One would have had to develop points of contact with them in their own planetary realms, but this is only possible if on earth one has already reached the stage of being able to contact beings other than those of the earth as a result of the development of super-sensible powers.

Thus the possibility is there for those who have undergone a higher development to encounter the beings who wander through from other planets. It may sound peculiar and yet it is so, that for those who have intercourse with the wanderers from Mars and learn to know of the nature of that planet, the strange theories that physics and astronomy weave about Mars inhabitants appear most comical, for the facts are quite different.

I bring forth these things so that you can widen your gaze from earthly existence into other realms extending beyond the visible beings that surround us to be beings who cannot be perceived unless we develop the organs to behold them. But between death and rebirth we also cannot establish a connection with conditions belonging to the mission of the earth unless we have first contacted them by way of the earth.

What is spiritual science or anthroposophy from a cosmic aspect? He who weaves theories might easily believe that spiritual science is something that can be taught and learned in all realms of the cosmos, but that is not the same. Each realm has its own particular task and it does not repeat itself in other realms. The creative powers have so made the earth that only here can certain things arise. Spiritual science can only arise on earth. Nowhere else can it be learned. It is a revelation of the super-sensible world but in such a form as can arise only here on earth.

One might well say that supposing all this to be true, surely one could be instructed about the super-sensible in the spiritual world in a form other than that of spiritual science! One can certainly think this, but it is not true. For if a person is at all predisposed to gain a genuine connection with higher worlds, he can do so only by means of spiritual science. If he fails to draw near to spiritual science or anthroposophy on earth, no other form of existence will help him to get to know it. But no other form of existence will help him to gain a genuine human connection with the super-sensible worlds, either.

This need not plunge us into despair about the many people who are still refusing to know anything about anthroposophy. They will return and establish a connection with it at a later stage. Anthroposophy has been established on the earth in such a way as to impart to people what has to be known about the super-sensible worlds in accordance with the nature of man. Only one form of communication is possible and that is by way of human beings. If a person goes through the gate of death without having heard anything of spiritual science on earth, he can become familiar with it through the fact that he knew a person who had a connection with spiritual science. This is a round-about path but a possible one.

Let us take the example of two people who were on friendly terms during their earthly life. One has made a connection with anthroposophy, the other not. The latter dies. The former can help him considerably by reading to him, by making him familiar with what surrounds him after death. A person can read an important work of spiritual science with the dead and, as the seer will confirm, the dead listens attentively.

It is also a fact that a simple person who has only just come in touch with spiritual science may be better able to read to a deceased person whom he genuinely loved than the seer who, though able to find the soul of the dead, had no affectionate connection with him in this life. From time to time it may also happen that seers give themselves the task of reading to the souls of the dead whom they have not known. Yet more often than not one is unable to read to a dead person with whom one has had no previous connection on earth.

These facts will impress upon you the importance of spiritual communities such as the anthroposophical one because here we find to a certain extent a replacement for what may be called a kind of living together and getting in touch.

Should such communities not exist, each soul after death would have to rely entirely on being read to by people close to them. Only such spiritual communities where spiritual ideals are commonly fostered can expand this sphere. Thus it can and does happen that one meets an anthroposophist who, because of what he has previously learned, is able in a special way, to read a spiritual content with much concentration or to let such thoughts pass through his soul. One might approach him, mention to him that a person who dies was also an anthroposophist, belonged to the same society, and show him a sample of the writing of the deceased. It may suffice that by seeing the writing or by hearing a favorite verse of the deceased, the more developed anthroposophist is able to read to such a soul in a most fruitful manner, though he did not know him on earth. It is indeed a fine task for a spiritual community to bridge so strongly the gap between the living and the dead.

Today anthroposophists still conceive of many tasks that lie merely on the physical plane because materialistic ways of thought are still prevalent among them, though theoretically they may have absorbed the science of anthroposophy. The true spiritual tasks will present themselves when spiritual science will have penetrated the soul more deeply. People will be found to take on the task of helping the dead so that they may evolve. A beginning has been made within our movement and what already has been achieved in this sphere can give us a high degree of satisfaction.

In fact, in certain circumstances when an anthroposophist goes through the gate of death carrying spiritual thoughts with him, he may be able to serve the dead and could become their teacher. This, however, is more complicated than is usually imagined. It is easier to do this from the earth because the communities that are formed after death depend entirely on the groups that were formed before death.

If two people, for instance, lived with one another on earth, the one an anthroposophist and the other not, the one who had an aversion towards spiritual science will long for it after death. If may happen that the anthroposophist who remains behind on earth concerns himself until his death with the departed soul by reading to him. Now after a certain period of time the anthroposophist also goes through the gate of death. He is then re-united with the other in the spiritual world. An echo of the earlier connection on earth is now felt, and this presents a difficulty. There was no difficulty as long as the one was on earth and the other in the spiritual world. Dissonances arise again as they did in the earthly relationship now that they are once more united. Just as on earth the one soul did not wish to know anything about spiritual science, so it becomes again the case in the world beyond. This shows to what extent the relationships after death are dependent upon the previous earthly connections. These matters are exceedingly complex and cannot be merely thought out intellectually.

Such instances clearly reveal the mission of spiritual science. The gulf between the living and the dead must be bridged. Under certain conditions the dead can also work into the earthly sphere, as the living are able to send their influence into the spiritual world, and we can investigate how the dead work into the physical world.

As a matter of fact, people know little of what surrounds them on earth. How do they view life? The events of life as they unfold are strung on a thread, as it were. Some are considered to be causes, others effects, but beyond this little thought is given to the matter. It may sound strange that the actual things that happen form the smallest content of real life. They only represent the external content. There is yet another sphere of life apart from the things that happen, and this is of no less importance for life.

Let us take an example. A person is in the habit of leaving home punctually every morning at eight. He has a definite way to go, across a square. One day circumstances are such that he leaves three minutes later than usual. He now notices something strange on the square, under the colonnade where he used to walk every day. The roof of the colonnade has collapsed! Had he left at the accustomed time, the falling roof certainly would have killed him.

There are many such instances in life. We often find that had circumstances been different, this or that might have taken quite another course. We are protected from many dangers. Much of what could happen does not come to pass. In life we consider the external realities, not the inner possibilities. Yet these possibilities constantly lie concealed behind the actual events. The events of a particular day only constitute the external reality of life. Behind them lies an entire world of possibilities.

Take the sea as an example. In it there lives a multitude of herring but for them to arise, not only as many eggs as herring had to be present. An endless number of eggs are destroyed. Only a relatively small number of herring come to life. So it is with the whole of life. What we experience from morning until night constitutes only a portion of an enormous number of possibilities. We are continually led past certain possible events that do not actually happen. When a possible event passes us by, this marks a special moment for us. Consider the instance of the man. If he had left his house at the usual time he would have been killed by the roof of the colonnade. Such possibilities constantly accompany us in life. Such a moment, when a man would have been struck had he arrived three minutes earlier, marks an opportune occasion for the spiritual world to light up in him. He may then have an experience that can bring him together with the dead. Today people are not yet aware of such occasions because fundamentally they only live on the surface of life.

Spiritual science aims gradually to become a life elixir. Man then will not only behold external reality but he will pay attention to the stirrings in his soul life. There he will frequently find the voices of the dead who still want something from the living.

As we have an example of how the living can influence the dead by reading to them, so we also see how the dead can influence the living. A time will come when man will converse spiritually with the dead. People will speak with the dead, and they will listen to the dead. Death only marks a change in the outer form of man; his soul develops further. At present we experience as yet a most imperfect condition of mankind inasmuch as men are unable to communicate with their fellow men who dwell in another form of life. When spiritual science is no longer a theory but has permeated souls, a living communion with the dead will continually be possible. In fact, conditions, which in a sense obtain only for the seer at present, will gradually become the common heritage of the whole of humanity.

You may say, “Well, that may be so for the seer. He can find human beings between death and rebirth.” Actually, this presents considerable difficulties today because the general lack of belief in the spiritual world, the lack of connection to the spirit, creates hindrances also for those who could establish a relationship to the spiritual world.

There are certain things that can take place unhindered only if they belong to the common possession of humanity. A man may be an outstandingly gifted master-builder. If nobody engages his services, he will not be able to build. This also can be the case for the seer. He may possess the faculties to ascend spiritually to the realm of the dead but if this process is hindered owing to the fact that communion with the dead is impossible for most people, the seer will only be able to succeed in establishing a contact in a few exceptional instances.

My dear friends, I wished to show you how spiritual science can be a life-giving impulse. More than anything we may learn theoretically, it is important to cultivate a feeling for the task of spiritual science in relation to the future of humanity. This enables each one who belongs to the anthroposophical movement to gain an impression of what he is really doing. He gains an impression of the tremendous task that has to be achieved by spiritual science or anthroposophy. This also enables one to connect oneself earnestly and worthily to spiritual science, not in a light-hearted way, as to something that is to refresh one but as an impulse which will become of ever increasing importance as mankind advances into the future. I wished to evoke a feeling for this by today's considerations.

For esoteric development—the true path to knowledge—the individual must find the way to understanding what it means to live in a world in which the senses, the whole physical organization, in not a facilitator; that is, to live with the psychic-spiritual, which is man's true identity, in a spiritual world. In order to do so there are many different more or less meditative exercises, mental exertions meant to affect the soul.

And to give a picture of what a human soul can pass through on the way from experiencing the physical sensory world to experiencing the spiritual world is what will be provided in these class lessons by means of the various considerations and the summarizing of such considerations in individual verses, which may then be meditated upon according to each member's possibilities and needs.

Once a certain time has passed the communications given in these class lessons, which, as I have often stressed, are real communications from the spiritual world, will coalesce in such a way that those who have participated—it is also karma for those who could be here—will have a complete picture of the first stage of esoteric development.

As a result of the various indications which are given here we can gradually rise above our earthly existence to an experience of the cosmos, we can develop the feelings which carry us out into those distant reaches of the universe from which the spiritual comes to meet us. But as long as we confine ourselves to using our senses and reason only in connection with the sense-perceptible world which surrounds us, it will be impossible for us to grasp what the spiritual world reveals as the truth accessible to man.

You see my dear friends, as I have often stressed, human common sense can understand everything offered by anthroposophy, if it exerts itself sufficiently and is free of prejudice. But it is just in reference to this common sense where a touchstone exists concerning whether or not someone is really destined by their karma nowadays to participate in anthroposophy.

There are two possibilities. One is that the person hears about anthroposophical truths, lets them work on him and considers them to be self-evident. It is obvious that everyone sitting here today belongs to that group. For if someone who does not belong to that group wishes to participate in a lesson as a member, it would not be honest of them. And honesty is the most important aspect of esoteric life—complete truthfulness penetrating the human soul and spirit.

There is another group of people who find what is presented by anthroposophy to be fantastic, somehow belonging only to visionaries. These people show by their behavior that they are not able, according to their karma, to sufficiently separate common sense from physicality and the senses to be able to grasp sense-free truth, sense-free knowledge.

It is therefore the extent to which common sense is bound to corporeality or not which determines such a great divergence between people. For if you honestly consider that you possess a common sense which understands anthroposophy, then at the moment it grasps anthroposophy honestly, it does so independently of corporeality. And this healthy common sense which grasps anthroposophy honestly is the beginning of esoteric striving. And we should treasure the fact that healthy common sense which understands anthroposophy is the beginning of esoteric striving. It should not be overlooked. For when one starts with this understanding through healthy common sense and then follows the indications given in the appropriate schools, one proceeds farther and farther along the esoteric path. You can use whichever of the verses provided here which you consider appropriate for you. But you should apply them together with the indications as to how they relate to the inner life of man.

Today I would like to again provide an indication of how you can leave the body—if only by means of so slight a jolt that you don't even realize it.

We should develop the ability to observe and study the minerals and plants in our environment to the extent that we feel them within—if only by means of thinking—and become truly aware of how this earthly environment is related to us, that due to our wearing a physical body we are directly related to the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms around us. And then we ask the question in all honesty: Why? Why did I absorb the physical substances of the earth just by being born? Why do I drag myself through life from birth till death in order to end physical life once my organism is no longer able to process its physical elements? We must deeply feel our relationship to our physical environment starting from such a personal enigma. Then, however, we will also feel more and more what the starting point for esoteric life can be. Then we feel that in physical earthly life we are blindly groping in the dark.

And finally, my dear sisters and brothers, consider the people of today who have been placed in earthly life after birth and educated according to the usual methods and called to this or that work due to purely external circumstances. They do not understand the relationship of this work to the totality of human existence. Perhaps they do not know much more than that they work in order to eat. They do not realize that in the plants they eat cosmic forces from the distant boundaries of the universe are present which pass through the human organism and therefore in a certain sense undergo a cosmic evolution. Many people today cannot even begin to glimpse this process due to the materialism of the times. But to admit that by the mere consideration of earthly relationships one stands spiritually blind in life and lives in the dark—that is the starting point for true esoteric development.

And then change the direction of your gaze from what surrounds you on the earth to the star-studded heaven—either in thought, or if you really want to be affected by it, in reality. Behold the planets, behold the stars, fill yourselves with the infinite transcendence of what shines back to you from the universe, and say to yourself: as human beings we are related just as much to what radiates down from the universe as we are to what surrounds us in the physical environment.

Then by gazing up to the star-studded heaven, we really have the feeling that we do not live in darkness, but that we are freed from life in the darkness by rising with our soul-spiritual being to the stars, rise to what the stars represent as pictures in their constellations. And, you see, if we can really enter meditating into this vision of the star-filled sky it becomes a plenitude of imaginations. You know the old pictures in which not only the constellations have been painted, but in which they have been recapitulated symbolically as animals. Not only the star group that is in Aries, or in Taurus has been represented, but also the symbolic images of the ram and the bull are included.

Today people think: Well, it was arbitrary on the part of those ancient inhabitants of the earth that just because the constellations were so named that the corresponding pictures were added. But that was not the case at all. In reality in ancient times the shepherds in the fields did not merely gaze up at the star-studded sky with physical eyes, but also in dream-consciousness or sleep-consciousness out there with their flocks they turned their souls with closed eyes towards outer space. They did not see the constellations which physical eyes see. But they actually perceived those pictures, those imaginations which fill universal space—albeit somewhat differently from what was later painted.

We can no longer go back to what the simple shepherds experienced by instinctive clairvoyance. But we can do something else. With far greater thoughtfulness we can imagine ourselves into the star-filled sky. We can feel the depth and at the same time the awesome majesty of what radiates back to us. And gradually we can come to a sense of veneration for what is expanding out there in cosmic space. And the more ardent the veneration is the more clearly can the experience be that the outer sense-images of the stars disappear and the star-filled sky becomes an Imagination for us. But only then, when the star-filled sky becomes an Imagination for us, do we feel ourselves carried away by our soul's vision.

You see, still in Plato's time one felt something special about the physical eye when it is observing. Plato himself described seeing as follows: When I look at a person something leaves my eye and encompasses him. People in ancient times sensed that something streams out of the eye and encompasses the object. The etheric streams out. Just as when I stretch out my hand and grasp something I know that I am connected to my hand until reaching the grasped object, so in the times of instinctive clairvoyance people knew that something etheric goes out from the eye and encompasses the thing looked at. Today people think, well,the eye is here, the object seen is there. So the object sends out ether-waves which drum against the eye and the drumming is perceived by some kind of soul—about which even the materialist talks about here, but without having any idea of what it is. But that is not true. It is not a mere impact on the person emanating from the object, but really also an emanation of the person's inner etheric substance.

And we perceive our ether body as belonging to the universe when the star-filled sky becomes for us the grand open page of the universe on which the imaginative secrets of cosmic being are written—if we are able to read it.

And then the feeling comes to us: When you are here on earth you are in the robust sense-perceptible reality. But you are blind, you live in darkness. When you rise up with your sensibility then you live in what otherwise only shines down to you from the distant universe, and you live in the illusion of the distant universe. But at the same time you take your own etheric being out into the distant flooding stream of this illusionary world.

And the illusion ceases to be illusion. It cannot be a nothing if we immerse ourselves in it. When we have this feeling—I will draw it—.

We live as blind people in the darkness of earthly existence, (white arc); then we journey out into the distant universe (yellow rays), at the end of which we can feel the cosmic Imaginations by means of reverence for the brilliance of the stars (red waves).

So now that we have journeyed out we are together with our etheric being within the imaginative cosmic web. If we can accomplish this, then we are no longer in the physical body. We have traveled through the etheric emptiness to experiencing the cosmic Imaginations.

You see, it's like when in the physical world someone writes something down and, because we have learned to read, we read it. By being out in the cosmos—the gods have written the cosmic imaginations for us in the cosmos—when we arrive we see the imaginations from the other side (arrows). At first we live here on the earth (inner circle). Then we draw ourselves up to the cosmic imaginations (outer wave-circle).

Yes, my dear friends, my sisters and brothers, the zodiac speaks a meaningful language when we do not observe it from the earth—Arias, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo—but rather when we encircle it from without. And it is a task of our consciousness to encircle it from without. Then we begin to read the cosmic secrets, which are the deeds of the spiritual beings. In a novel we read of the deeds of men. When we look at the zodiac from the other side and read what from the earth we see virtually from behind, as Moses was told that he always had to look at God from behind, that is, from the earth. Initiation consists of seeing from the other side—not a matter of gawking, but of reading. And what we read are the spiritual deeds of the spiritual beings who brought it all about.

And when we have silently read long enough, when our souls have concentrated deeply on this reading, then we begin to hear in a spiritual way. Then the gods speak with us. When the gods speak with us we are within the spiritual world.

Now you see, my dear sisters and brothers, the initiate can tell you: the soul can rise up to the cosmic heights, receive the cosmic imaginations, read them from the other side, the spiritual deeds, become capable of hearing in a spiritual way the language of the gods.

But if you really immerse yourself in what the initiate relates with your whole heart, your whole feeling, if you don't just listen to it greedily and say: Well, if I also could do that I'd like it, it would be interesting—but I'm not going to bother. But you receive it as something which you can revere, which you can love, which you can repeatedly meditate on, then it is the path to enter esoteric life yourself.

And you will find this path by meditating profoundly on the words:¹

1. I live in the dark domain of the earth,
2. I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
3. I read in the deeds of the spirits,
4. I hear in the speech of the gods.

When experienced with the necessary deeply meditative feeling this works wonders in the human soul, transforms the human soul. It must rhythmically flow through the soul again and again, for it leads the human being through his own interior cosmic being.

But it is necessary that such a thing be deeply interiorized. And even though it still speaks more to the head, the heart should also participate in the whole process of going out into the etheric universe, then into the spiritual universe, that is, on the other side of the universe. It is necessary in such a process that we take our hearts with us in the experience and that it stimulate in you the feelings which can come quite naturally by this excursion into the outer universe. But these feelings must be really stimulated. It is therefore good to look deeply into what the words say:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
I wander in the brilliance of the stars
I read in the deeds of the spirits.
I hear in the speech of the gods.

Then you try to imagine that someone is speaking to you from a spiritual depth, as though you were not thinking it, but as though you were hearing it, as if another being were speaking. You really imagine that another being is speaking to you from an unknown depth. Then you try to develop the right feelings for what you have heard.

These feelings live in the second part of the verse:²

5. The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,
6. The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me

When I am aware that I live blindly in the darkness of the earth, I long to get out. Then the brilliance of the stars becomes the comforter which expands my being:

The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

Now from the other side:

7. The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

—when I read them—

8. The speech of the gods is creating to me.

Only you must use it correctly. Imagine yourself vividly in this meditating which you are doing. As though someone were speaking to you from spiritual depths is how you hear the lines of the first verse. You bring the corresponding feeling to each verse, so that you experience in the meditation: first listen, then bring feeling; listen, then bring feeling; and so on.³

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me.

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me.

It is a meditation in dialog in which you always objectify the first line, but the second you feel as though streaming out of your heart. Now you try again to visualize how one acts and weaves into the other, and then try to feel with your will what you can experience through the dialog.⁴

From depth of spirit resounds:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,

The heart replies:

The darkness of the earth creates longing in me.

The will senses the impulse in the dialog between lines 1 and 5:

9. The earth's darkness extinguishes me.

After this dialog has taken place we recall the connection of lines 2 and 6:

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

10. The brilliance of the stars awakens me.

Afterward we recall what resounds from spiritual depths and the heart's reply:

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me.

The will now senses:

11. The deeds of the spirits call to me.

into the spiritual world.

And now the most sublime, where we feel ourselves in dialog with the gods themselves, where the gods not only let us read, but speak:

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me.

12. The speech of the gods engenders me.

—brings me forth, engenders me.

Now imagine the whole meditation. It runs as follows: dialog—line for line with a spiritual being present in the dim spiritual depths that always speaks the top line of the verse. And the heart always replies:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me,

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me.

Now I recall each one and add the outpouring of will as a remembrance of what had just gone before:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,
The earth's darkness extinguishes me.

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me,
The brilliance of the stars awakens me.

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,
The deeds of the spirits call to me.

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me,
The speech of the gods engenders me.

Conviction results from the dialog in meditation, from recalling the dialog and in strengthening the recollection by means of the will.

If, firstly, with inner devotional feeling, secondly with complete soul and interest we have done what I have just described, if we do it not as mechanical meditating but as a true experience of the soul, then this means of creating a relation to the spiritual world really does have an awakening effect on the soul.

Also in the case of the last verse, which in the way I have described should really be experienced as remembrance of speech and answering speech—speech of the spirit and answering speech of the heart, we must correctly feel how, firstly, consciousness, which we wish to achieve, is extinguished by the earth's darkness. We must sense how a moment of extinguishing sleep overcomes consciousness, and how upon awakening, at the second line, we hear the spirits calling us to them, how afterward we feel: the spirits have called us so that they can bring us forth, engender us in the spiritual world by their own cosmic word.

If these nuances of inner experience flow through the soul—and the representations of the spiritual being who speaks to us are included—and the heart reciprocates with its dedication to the spiritual being, then yes, then the stimulation exists in the soul which will gradually lead this soul onto the esoteric path. And we must be clear that as we experience these three verses in our souls in the way in which I have described as best we can, something powerful takes place in the subconscious mind. If we sincerely live in these three verses as I have described, then when the first line resounds, our soul unconsciously passes through the starting-point of earthly life when the etheric body was first formed.

If we can vividly imagine what from the spirit resounds:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,

then we approach—in the unconscious—with this hearing in spirit, the moment in which our etheric body was formed; and from pre-earthly existence, from life between death and a new birth, acts the force with which we sincerely reply from the heart:

The darkness of the earth creates longing in me;

because we have the longing for the spiritual as a heritage from pre-earthly existence.

And again we are transported to the beginning of earthly existence. And what acts from our hearts is inspired by the previous earthly existence.

I wander in the brilliance of the stars:

We are transported to the beginning of our earthly life. The real comfort the brilliance of the stars can give when we are transported back is in our heart's reply:

The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

And then:

I read in the deeds of the spirits:

We are transported back to the earth's beginning. Remember how we are taught by spiritual beings in pre-earthly existence.

The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

Among whom I lived and wandered before I descended to the earth.

I hear in the speech of the gods:

We heard them during the period between death and a new birth. We sense that what the gods say is not mere information as is what men say; we realize that the speech of the Gods is creative:

The speech of the gods is creating for me.

But then, if we can see it so, lines 9, 10, 11, 12 also acquire the correct meaning:⁵

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The earth's darkness extinguishes me,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,

—deletes me from my present earth life for I am led back, through the region between death and a new birth, to my earlier incarnation. I divine this; therefor my consciousness is extinguished, for my consciousness was, until now, that of my current incarnation. In this moment of sleep I am transported back so I can divine: I am wandering in my previous incarnation.⁶

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars awakens me
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me,

I am brought back to what I was in the previous incarnation as though awakened in it. My karma arises before me, the connection of destiny arises before me, it arises before me from the other side.⁷

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits call to me
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

to fulfill my karma with the forces which derive from my previous earth-life.⁸

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods engenders me.
The speech of the gods is creating for me,

Everything I am becomes clear to me when my earlier earthly existence penetrates the present one and shines through it and wanders through it and pulses through it. For here I am. My present I is in a process, it is a seed which will have meaning once I have passed through the gates of death. What shines and works in me from the previous earthly existence into the present one makes me into a human being, engenders me as an existing human being.

If we have the conviction that it is so, that—although we believe only to be in the ordinary world of physical existence—our soul really makes the journey back to the previous earth-life, then we will be aware of the gravity of what we are experiencing. And through this awareness a warmer, luminous current streams through our thinking, feeling and willing. And with that inner magical feeling, which is necessary for the meditation to work in the right way, our meditation will prevail. We may call it a magical feeling for it cannot be compared with any feeling we have on earth, because it is completely independent of all corporeality. If we cannot yet leave the physical body behind with our thinking, this magical thinking which we experience through the gravity of our soul's activity is present in the purely spiritual world.

According to the way we experience these things, our esoteric striving is fulfilled. And that is what I was obliged to lay before your souls today, my dear sisters and brothers.

In conclusion I would like to say one more thing. It should not happen that someone passes on the verses and the information given here without first asking permission. Only with permission may these things be passed on from one to another or to a group. It is especially frowned upon, my dear friends, that these verses or their interpretation be sent by post. They may not be sent by post, and I ask that this be strictly observed.

• 1. The first part of the verse is written on the blackboard.
• 2. The second part is written on the blackboard.
• 3. An arc is drawn connecting lines 1 and 5; another connecting 2 and 6, another connecting 3 and 7, and another connecting lines 4 and 8
• 4. The third part of the verse is arranged in connection with the first and the second parts while lines 9, 10, 11 and 12 are written on the blackboard.
• 5. Line 9 is written again, this time on the arc connecting lines 1 and 5.
• 6. Line 10 is written again, this time at the arc connecting lines 2 and 6.
• 7. Line 11 is written again, at the arc connecting lines 3 and 7.
• 8. Line 12 is written again, at the arc connecting lines 4 and 8.

Today¹ I should like to discuss a theme which can perhaps lead to some points of view from which to assess present-day cultural and spiritual life in connection with what has gone before in human evolution. As I have often said, cultural life since the first third of the fifteenth century is entirely different from that of earlier times, and now we are faced with the necessity to return, but in full consciousness and with deep thought, to an understanding of the spiritual part of our life in the cosmos. The spiritual part of our life in the cosmos was understood in ancient times by an instinctive clairvoyance, and this was the case most of all in the most ancient ages of earthly civilization. Then the capacity to push through to the spirit receded more and more, until a time came when mankind needed a new impetus, whereupon the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

Today I should like to mention that, before the Mystery of Golgotha, people who were concerned with spiritual life looked to those institutions known in general human cultural life as the Mysteries. In those most ancient days of human evolution it was unthinkable that spiritual vision and spiritual knowledge could have any other source than the Mysteries. When we try to observe the consciousness of those who turned to the Mysteries in those ancient days, if knowledge was what they desired, we arrive at the following picture: All external knowledge not stemming from the Mysteries, all intellectual knowledge gained by human beings by themselves, did not come into being until the later part of the Greek era. Only then did people want to discover certain truths out of themselves, without the help of the Mysteries. That is why the course of scientific development is reckoned, by those who understand these things, to have started in the time of Thales.² I have discussed this in my book Riddles of Philosophy.³ Before that time knowledge was sought with the help of the Mysteries. When we examine the consciousness on which this was founded, we discover that those who conducted the Mysteries, and also their pupils, saw something most important in what they called ‘the prince of this world’—they meant the earth—as opposed to the princes—that is, the spiritual beings—of other worlds.

In today's language, ‘the prince of this world’, as he lived in the consciousness of ancient times, would be called the being of Ahriman. The being of Ahriman would more or less be equivalent to this prince of earthly life. The spiritual revelations which can be derived from ‘the prince of this world’ are none other than those of intellectual knowledge. The leaders of the Mysteries would certainly have considered all that lived in the knowledge that grew up in Greece outside the Mysteries to have been inspired by ‘the prince of this world’. In contrast, they saw it as the task of the Mysteries to lead human beings towards a spiritual vision which tends away from ‘the prince of this world’, which tends to lead human souls into realms which are not ruled by ‘the prince of this world’. We cannot help but make use of such expressions in order to show properly what is meant, and no one should think that there is anything superstitious about using these expressions.

Let me give you a picture of what someone initiated in the ancient Greek, or the Egyptian, or Persian Mysteries would have thought in those old days about ‘the prince of this world’. We have to understand that these people also spoke about the Christ-being, though they used other names. Using the name of Christ is not the only way of speaking about the Christ-being. We naturally use the name of Christ when we want to speak about the Christ-being, for Christ to us actually means that Being who underwent the Mystery of Golgotha and united himself with earthly civilization. Before the Mystery of Golgotha this Being was not yet united with earthly civilization. He still lived as the great Sun-being outside the earthly world. The Mystery of Golgotha denotes the uniting with the earthly world of this Being who lived outside the earthly world. But those initiated in the Mysteries certainly knew this Being who lived outside the earthly world. And the being known as ‘the prince of this world’—that ahrimanic being—also knew him. That being—I am describing what lived in the consciousness of the initiates—felt himself to be the lord of the earth. He considered that whatever human beings possessed through the forces of the earth was something they had from him. But he knew that the Christ-being lived outside the earth and also had an influence on human life by way of the Mysteries, whose teachings were then popularized and brought amongst the peoples.

To describe more closely what lived in their consciousness, we may say that the initiates in the Mysteries thought as follows: The chief influence of ‘the prince of this world’ is on the physical bodies of human beings. These wholly do his bidding and he feels he is the lord of human physical bodies. But he could not feel himself to be the lord of the etheric and astral natures of human beings, of their life-bodies and their souls. The life-body and the soul were seen to be under the influence of a Being who lived outside the earth; the forces of the Christ-being had always been seen to flow into these. But with the forces of their own soul human beings were quite unable to receive what ought to flow into them from the Christ-being. They could only do so by turning to what the Mystery initiate received after the proper preparation. The Mysteries were seen to take hold of what came from outside the earth and pass it on to human beings. So ‘the prince of this world’ said to himself: Here on earth I am the master. From the earth the physical bodies of human beings draw their forces, and one of these forces is the human earthly intellect. Here I am the master and nothing can contest this here on earth. By way of the Mysteries, something from outside the earth flows into it. This I will tolerate.

But ‘the prince of this world’ rebelled against the Mystery of Golgotha because from then on he would have had to share his supremacy with the Christ who descended to the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. ‘The prince of this world’ felt the Christ to be a rival in his mastery of the earth. He would have tolerated the sharing of the rulership with another being from outside the earth, but he would not tolerate a rival here within the earthly realm.

Here, then, out of the spirit of the ancient Mysteries, we have an indication of the real opposition of ‘the prince of this world’ towards the Christ. Among those with knowledge about such things this opposition was strongly felt throughout the Middle Ages until well into the fifteenth century. Any mention of ‘the prince of this world’ and of the Christ took it into account. There was a certain awareness of two dominions. One of these had rightfully ruled the bodily nature of man before the Mystery of Golgotha, but since then this sovereignty over the bodily nature of man has had to be shared with the other, with the Christ. For now Christ no longer influences only man's soul element, that is, his astral and etheric bodies; his purpose is now to influence also man's physical bodily nature, or rather whatever is expressed by this physical bodily nature, namely, everything to do with the intellect and with man's own capacities in the widest sense. Christ should live in every aspect of human nature. This is what entered into mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha it never occurred to those who knew about such things to seek knowledge of external matters in any sphere which the human head or even the other soul or heart forces can reach on their own. Such things were left to the Mysteries. So before the Mystery of Golgotha there was certainly a strong awareness of the distinction between earthly wisdom and earthly sensing on the one hand, and a sensing of super-earthly forces on the other. The unique spiritual configuration of the early medieval centuries is only comprehensible in the light of a clear understanding of this fact.

Now this fact can be greatly clarified by something that was regarded as being of paramount importance in very many Mystery centres. The preparation and subsequent trials undergone by the Mystery pupils on the path of initiation varied, of course, in the different centres. But these variations were only really like the different paths up a mountain which, despite their different routes, all lead to one and the same summit in the end. They all led to one and the same Mystery goal. Despite the modifications, there were two measures within the Mysteries which every pupil had to undergo and which could be termed as being of paramount importance. These were, on the one hand, the draught of forgetfulness and, on the other hand, something which worked on the human being during the Mystery procedures like a powerful shock—like entering into a powerful fear. It is no longer permissible to use either of these for the purpose of achieving higher super-sensible knowledge. Today everything has to take place in the realm of soul and spirit, whereas the Mystery pupils in ancient times underwent procedures which always had to call on their physical body. What is achieved today is similar, but higher knowledge must now be striven for in the sphere of consciousness only, whereas in earlier times it took place in the sphere of instincts and dreams. Because all the Mysteries included something akin to the draught of forgetfulness and also something akin to the physical shock, the pupils’ external intellect was damped down. This intellect was less clear than it is today, but it nevertheless held sway in connection with everything relating to the external world.

So the pupil was led into a dulled consciousness both by the draught of forgetfulness and by the shock, which might be compared with the inducement of a state of fear. What was the significance of the draught of forgetfulness? The point was not the forgetting, though the pupil did forget. The effect it was to have came from its ceremonial preparation, from the special way it was mixed, to the accompaniment of certain preparations before it was drunk by the pupil. It was definitely a physical draught which, through the way it was served, brought it about that the pupil forgot the whole of his life since birth. This is something which is achieved nowadays through development in the realm of soul and spirit. Nowadays a clear consciousness of a great tableau of life encompassing everything that has occurred since birth is first conjured up. This is then suppressed and, in consequence, the human being is led into the spiritual form of his life before birth, or before conception. The same was achieved in a more physical way through the ancient draught of forgetfulness.

But the forgetting was not the essential point. Negative things are never the essential point. The positive thing achieved was that the pupil's thinking became more mobile and more intense. At the same time it became less clear. It became dreamy because the effect was achieved by influencing the physical organism. The effect of the draught of forgetfulness on the physical organism—it can be exactly described—was that the brain, if I may put it this way, became more fluid than it is in everyday life. Because the brain was made more fluid, because the pupil began to think more with his cerebral fluid than with the solid parts of the brain, his thoughts became more mobile and more intense.

Nowadays this must be achieved more directly, by means of developing soul and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of Occult Science. But in those days the brain was made more fluid by external influences. The goal was to make the spirit and soul element of the pupil—as it was before he made the connection with a physical body through conception: in other words, as it is in the spiritual world—capable once more of penetrating through the brain. This is the essential point.

In a drawing it would look like this. Suppose this is the mass of the brain (green). Once the human being has been born his spirit and soul element stops short before it (red). The brain is so constituted that the human being's inner spirit and soul element cannot pass through the brain. In his brain the human being is not filled with his spirit and soul element. Instead, external perceptions can enter and make themselves felt in the brain through the senses—let me draw an eye here. Put another way, the constitution of the brain is such today that the eternal aspect of the human being cannot rise up into it. Instead, external impressions can enter. By being given the draught of forgetfulness the pupil gained the possibility of receiving into his brain what was his spiritual and soul element before conception or before birth (red). That is the one side.

The other side is the shock which was administered to the pupil. Think how a shock affects human beings. They are as though paralysed. There can be shocks which bring about the paralysis of the whole human being. A paralysed person, a cataleptic person, cannot move about because his muscles are rigid. But in a human being who can go about his life in the ordinary way, his body absorbs this eternal aspect (white with red). In our blood, in our muscles down below, the element of spirit and soul, the eternal element, is absorbed. But because of this it cannot be perceived. It cannot penetrate the brain, but lower down it is absorbed. It cannot be perceived, but when the muscles go rigid it steps out freely as a matter of course.

The rigidity of the muscles was brought about by the effect of the shock. As a result, the element of spirit and soul was not absorbed by the rest of the organism—apart from the brain—but was freed. So now the spirit and soul element was in the brain because the brain had been softened by the draught of forgetfulness, while the rest of the organism was at the same time prevented from absorbing it. Thus the element of spirit and soul came to be perceived. From two sides came the possibility of perceiving the element of spirit and soul. In ordinary life the human being was incapable of perceiving it because the brain, with which everything else was perceived, was unable to take it in; it could not enter the brain. Neither could it be perceived from the rest of the organism, the will and so on, for the rest of the organism had absorbed it. But now the pupil's brain was softened—of course, only for the moment at which knowledge was to enter. So his element of spirit and soul rushed into his brain. Meanwhile, the rest of his body became rigid so that it could not absorb the spirit and soul element. There the pupil stood, with his softened brain on the one side and a rigidified organic system on the other, as though encased in a capsule. There he stood in his spirit and his soul which had been given to him from two sides.

This is the aim of these procedures which are described in such a practical manner. I must expressly point out, though, that these things cannot be imitated nowadays. People would, anyway, be at a loss as to how to imitate them and, if they tried, the result would not be agreeable. These days all such things have to be attained by working with soul and spirit. But of the past it can certainly be said: Having been enabled to perceive their element of spirit and soul by partaking of the draught of forgetfulness and by being shocked into physical rigidity, the pupils in the Mysteries became ‘Christians’. In the Mysteries they became Christians.

The early fathers of the church were certainly aware of this. But today people are not told about it, or it is even denied. But the early church fathers knew that human beings had been made Christians through the Mysteries. There are passages in the writings of the early church fathers⁴ which state that Heraclitus and Socrates, though they lived before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, were Christians, even though they were called atheists in their own time. I have often quoted from such passages in the writings of the early church fathers. It was the view of the ancient Mystery leaders and initiates that ‘the prince of this world’ was not interested in that human being who came forth out of the other; he left this human being to Christ. But he did not want Christ to come down to the earth in order to take hold of the human being in his entirety. This is described in the gospels in the way it is said that the demons, the lower servants of ‘the prince of this world’, when they heard that Christ had come, began to rebel. They recognized him and were furious.

We have to understand, when speaking about earthly evolution, that the spiritual powers whose influence on the human physical body was perfectly legitimate before the Mystery of Golgotha had, after the Mystery of Golgotha, to share this influence with the Christ. This is an essential aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha. That is why in the Middle Ages ‘the prince of this world’ came to be called ‘the unlawful prince of this world’. This expression would not have been justified in the ancient heathen world but when it came to be used in the Middle Ages it was a correct title, befitting the circumstances.

The essential aspect of all this, with regard to the spiritual evolution of mankind, is that in more ancient times the physical body was withdrawn from the element of spirit and soul. The working of the brain was counteracted because the brain was softened by the draught of forgetfulness, and the powers of absorption of the rest of the organism were counteracted by the hardening of the rest of the organism by means of the shock. So in these older times the body was withdrawn from the element of spirit and soul.

Today, our aspiration is not to withdraw the body but to draw out the spirit, by strengthening and enhancing our forces of spirit and soul. The opposite of what used to take place must happen now; now the spirit must be drawn out. No changes must be allowed to take place in the physical, bodily aspect. Since the fifteenth century the human being has been organized in such a way that changes in the physical body, of the kind that were customary in those of Mystery pupils, would denote a condition of sickness. It would be a pathological condition, which must not be allowed to come about in normal development.

I am describing all this in order to give you an idea of what is to be understood by the concept of ‘the prince of this world’, which keeps recurring in olden times. ‘The prince of this world’, who in the Middle Ages became ‘the unlawful prince of this world’, is an Ahriman-like being. We can find such a being everywhere, in external nature and in the inner being of man. Indeed, only when we are in a position to find such a being in its manifestation both in external nature and in the inner being of man can we gradually come to an understanding of its essence.

Look at external nature. You will find there two contrasts, but what matters is to be able to sense the essence of these contrasts. Think of the blue sky. Of course in southern climes the blue sky must be seen rather differently than is the case here. When the envelope of air round the earth is filled by the effect of the sun, this is not the pure essence of the blue sky, for it is then overcast with something else. But the pure effect of the blue sky is that of coldness. The blue sky as such is cold. What you sense in the coldness of the blue sky, unmitigated by earthly sultriness—this is an all-embracing ahrimanic influence. The ahrimanic influence causes space to be petrified, congealed into blueness. Take note of this expression! It is unusual, but if you gradually come to sense what it means to say that space is petrified, congealed into blueness, you will have discovered the ahrimanic tendency in external nature.

The contrasting effect is that of the reddish, yellowish clouds sailing past. The effect is one of warmth, exactly the opposite. This, too, can be disguised by the coldness of the earth's environment but, all in all, a cloud lined with red, a yellowish cloud, has something warm about it. This is the contrasting effect, the effect of air. Between these two polar opposites something takes place, and that is what benefits the earthly life of man. We can say, then, that the effect on the earth of space petrified, congealed into blueness was seen in the Middle Ages to be the cosmic working of ‘the prince of this world’.

And when we look into human beings we find that they can be in a condition which makes them pale. You know how there is something livid, something blueish about palor in human beings. When human beings turn pale, when they feel their way into coldness, they are then sensing something ahrimanic working in them. Flushed redness, on the other hand, shows something luciferic at work in their nature. Out of all these details together we can gradually build up a full picture of what this ahrimanic being, ‘the prince of this world’, really is. People's pallid, often so clever, thoughts, running along always in straight lines—the whole intellectual aspect of man—this is the ahrimanic influence, the influence of ‘the prince of this world’, on the working of the human head.

These things must be understood from the point of view of spirit and soul. In the livid blueness, in the way human beings grow pale, in the way they devour themselves inwardly and feel their way into coldness, in the way they are filled with pale, abstract thoughts—in all this we have to feel the ahrimanic influence, the rulership of ‘the prince of this world’. And then we have to feel the warming influence of the Christ-impulse.

For the present time it is rather revealing and also necessary to recognize how different was initiation in ancient times compared with the principle of initiation today. There are certainly people today who still lack the courage to approach the Anthroposophical Movement but who have a deep longing for what, in the end, only the Anthroposophical Movement can give. They long for a transformation of their soul, after which they would find their way to the knowledge they seek. Obviously the greater part of mankind today rejects this transformation of the soul and imagines that any knowledge man is capable of reaching can be achieved through the ordinary state of soul which is brought about by our ordinary education and through our ordinary life. On my last tour I met a man who was greatly concerned to achieve some knowledge through the philosophical possibilities offered today, but not through Anthroposophy. He said that it would be interesting and important to ascertain in Anthroposophy how this higher knowledge might be achieved, for everywhere—this ‘everywhere’ is very relative, of course—the different world views were recognizing that the achievement of real knowledge was a matter not only of the intellect but also of the will. And in the ancient Mysteries, too, it was a matter of transforming the will.

In the description of the ancient Mysteries in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact⁵ you will find that the decisive, radical difference between the ancient striving for knowledge and that of today lies in the fact that in ancient times it was necessary to prepare the will. The will had to be turned in a direction different from that of ordinary life. The will had to be purged, purified; it had to be transformed and lifted to a higher stage. The pupil had to give a new direction to his everyday will, which was dominated by ‘the prince of this world’. Through cultivation of his will, the pupil had to reach the point at which knowledge can be attained. Today, on the other hand, people imagine that we can stop at whatever point we have reached through our ordinary studies. And our intellectual life is merely the product of the ordinary configuration of our brain. If it is softened, as I have indicated, there is a strong possibility that thoughts can be willed, that everywhere thoughts can be willed. And when will becomes conscious through the rigidifying of the body, then thoughts appear in the will itself. This can also happen today when, on the path I have described, knowledge of higher worlds has become possible.

It is a very important sign today that once more there are people who know that the intellect alone is not enough and that it is necessary to cultivate the will in order to reach whatever knowledge is possible for man. So by looking at what is going on in a general way we come to see that a great many people are approaching who want to hear about spiritual matters. Also, from things which are shown to us as we go along, we see that there are people who once again realize that the will must be cultivated, if knowledge is to be achieved. All this goes to show that there is an urgent need for spiritual life today. Unfortunately, though, because people lack the courage to approach Anthroposophy, because they think Anthroposophy is something peculiar, they imagine that they can achieve what they are searching for along some other path. The world will have to come to the conviction that what is wanted can only be achieved on the anthroposophical path. Please do not misunderstand me. It is not my intention to maintain that what Anthroposophy has revealed so far is necessarily generally valid or particularly obvious. But I want to point out the importance of the direction in which Anthroposophy is going. This is what can lead to the satisfaction of the powerful longing that exists today, a longing which must be satisfied if human civilization is to move forward at all.

• 1 . Today: In his introduction to this lecture (contained in GA 255), Rudolf Steiner spoke words of appreciation for the way in which Albert Steffen had reported in the journal Das Goetheanum on a lecture denigrating Anthroposophy.
• 2 . Thales of Miletus, c.640-545 B.C.
• 3 . Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1973.
• 4 . For instance, St Justin Martyr, Apologia I, 46.
• 5 . Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972.

We have seen that out of the Mysteries grew something that made man aware of being related to the world in a way that can be expressed in the annual festivals; and in particular we have learned that Easter is an outgrowth of the principle of initiation. From all that has been set forth it will have become evident what a significant role the Mysteries played in the entire evolution of humanity. Really everything of a spiritual nature that has permeated the world and developed through mankind originated in the old Mysteries. In modern terms we could say that the Mysteries were all-powerful in guiding the spiritual life.

Now, it was intended from the beginning that mankind should develop freedom; and to this end it was necessary for the old Mystery system to recede and for humanity to be less closely linked, for a time, with the powerful guidance that proceeded from the Mysteries, to be cast more upon its own resources, as it were. We certainly cannot assert today that the time has arrived in which men have achieved their true inner freedom and are ready to pass over into the next phase of evolution that is to follow upon that of freedom. This is not the case. Still, many have already passed through a number of incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was less strongly felt than formerly; and though the seeds of these incarnations have not yet sprouted, they are nevertheless potentially present in the souls of men. And with the coming of a more spiritual age they will develop what they have not developed in their present dimness of vision. Above all things, however, it will be necessary that the wisdom, the vision, the experience of the spiritual such as can be attained by modern initiation, be met with esteem, with reverence; and this must be offered out of man's freedom. Without esteem and reverence, true enlightenment and a spiritual life of humanity is really not possible.

Surely we make the right use of festivals if with their help we try to implant in our souls this esteem, this reverence for things spiritual as they have evolved during the course of human history; if we try to learn how to observe in the most intimate way possible the spiritual significance of outer events, to understand how these carry spiritual meaning from one age over into another. For the time being men keep returning to Earth in repeating incarnations, thus carrying over their experiences of earlier epochs into later ones. Human beings are the most important factor in the further development of all that takes place within the history of mankind. But men of all periods live in a definite environment, and clearly, one of the most significant environments was that of the Mysteries. A most important factor in the progress of humanity is the carrying over of what has been experienced in the Mysteries and re-experienced, be it again through the medium of Mysteries, whence it acts upon mankind, or by other means of enlightenment. Today it must be the latter, for the true Mystery system has withdrawn from the present outer world and is to reappear only in the future.

If the impulse that went forth from here, from the Goetheanum, at the time of the Christmas Meeting, really takes root in the Anthroposophical Society, it is certain that by leading to ever deeper insight the Anthroposophical Society will be the foundation for the Mysteries of the future. These new Mysteries must be consciously nurtured by the Anthroposophical Society. We recall an event that can be utilized in our development as once a similar one was used: the burning of the Temple of Ephesus. Both were the result of a grave wrong; yet on different planes things have different meanings, and it is possible for a frightful iniquity, as it appears on one plane, to be employed on another for the advancement of human freedom—in the sense that precisely such horrible events can bring about a real advance in human progress.

But as I have already said, such matters must be grasped through their inner meaning if they are to be approached understandingly. One must enter into the particular manner in which the spiritual element of the world pervaded the Mysteries. Yesterday I pointed out how the establishment of the annual Easter Festival grew out of a spiritual conception of the constellation of Sun and Moon, and that from the Moon viewpoint the other planets were observed. And I said further that according to what is learned by observing the other planets, the human being, in descending from the pre-earthly to the earthly existence, is guided in forming his light-ether body.

If we would observe and rightly understand how this light-ether body, these ether forces, are transmitted to us by the Moon forces, Moon observations—by what I might call the spiritual Moon observatory, this can be done as we have just endeavored to do it: by turning to the cosmos where it is all inscribed and exists as a fact. But it is important to ponder in our souls the human element as well, the part it plays in the different epochs as a factor of these truths.

As a matter of fact, never did the souls of men take part so intimately, so fervently, in this last phase of the descent to Earth—the enveloping in an etheric body—as in the Mysteries of Ephesus. There the whole service of the Goddess of Ephesus, exoterically called Artemis, was directed toward co-experiencing the spiritual weaving life within the cosmic ether. When members of the Ephesian Mystery approached the image of the Goddess, the feeling this gave them may be said to have become intensified to hearing; and what they heard, as though the goddess were speaking, was something as follows: I rejoice in all that bears fruit in the wide expanse of cosmic ether.—A deep impression was created by this expression of intense joy on the part of the Goddess of the Temple, her joy in all that grows, sprouts and burgeons in the world-ether; and an ardent feeling of close relationship with blossoming and flowering was in particular something that permeated the spiritual atmosphere of the Ephesian Sanctuary as with a magic breath.

Nowhere else was the growth of the plant life, the drive of the Earth forces into the plants, co-experienced so intensely as in the Mystery of Ephesus, for the entire training here tended to that end. And this led to the next step: it was here that instruction was given, if I may so call it, specially intended to induce in the minds of members a feeling for the Moon secret, of which I spoke yesterday. It was everyone's own experience to feel himself as a light-being, because the act of receiving his light-form from the Moon was made so alive for the neophytes and initiates.

A part of the ritual ran something as follows—and one who could take part in it was actually transported into that act of forming himself out of the sunlight that circles around the Moon: as though proceeding from the Sun, there came to him the sound J O A.¹

He knew that this J O A activated his ego, his astral body. J O (ego, astral body) and A (the approach of the light-ether body), joining in J O A. Then, with the J O A vibrating in him, he felt himself to be composed of ego, astral body and etheric body.

And then it seemed as though he heard sounding up to him from the Earth—for he had been transported into the cosmos—something that saturated the J O A: eh v. JehOvA What rose up to him in the eh v were the Earth forces.

Now he realized that in this JehOvA he felt the complete human being. The premonition of the physical body, which he acquired only on Earth, he felt intimated in the consonants complementing the vowels that in the J O A indicate the ego, the astral and the etheric body.—This becoming one with the JehOvA was what enabled the disciple of Ephesus to sense in their full significance the last steps of the descent from the spiritual world.

But in feeling the import of this J O A the neophyte at the same time felt himself to be the sound J O A in the light. Then he was a human being: resonant ego, resonant astral body, in a shimmering light-ether body. He was sound in light. That is the nature of cosmic man; and in this state the initiate was able to grasp what he saw in the cosmos, just as on Earth he could perceive through his eyes what occurs in the physical environment of the Earth. When the neophyte of Ephesus bore this J O A within him he really felt transported into the Moon sphere, and he took part in all that could be observed from the point of view of the Moon.

In this condition the human being was man in general, in the sense that the differentiation between man and woman did not enter until the descent to Earth occurred. Man felt himself transported into this pre-earthly existence, the region immediately preceding his approach to the terrestrial. The Ephesian disciples were able to achieve this ascent to the Moon sphere in a particularly intimate way; and henceforth they carried in their heart, in their soul, what they had experienced there. It sounded for them something as follows:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might;

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing,
And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging;

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming,
And Venus' love-bearing beauty is on thee beaming;

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being and to ages now aborning consecrate thee.²

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,
Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen
Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit
Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

That expresses what permeated every Ephesian, and he counted it the most important of all that pulsed through his being. When a participant in the Ephesian Mysteries heard these words ringing in his ears, as it were, there was something about them that made him feel himself completely as a human being; for through them he became aware of the relation between the forces of his etheric body and the planetary system. This came to forceful expression. The cosmos speaks to the etheric body:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might.

Now the human being feels himself to be in the power of the moonlight.

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing.

The chiming, endowed with creative force, sounds across from Mars. And what gave strength to man's limbs, endowing him with the power of movement:

And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging.

From Jupiter there rays across:

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming.

And from Venus:

And Venus' love-bearing beauty ...

In order that then Saturn may gather up all that rounds off the human being within and without, prepare him to descend to Earth and there to clothe himself in a physical garb; and then further enable this physically garbed being, who bears the god within him, to live on the Earth:

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being
And to ages now aborning
Consecrate thee.

From what I have described you can readily see that the spiritual life in Ephesus was colorful and aglow with inner light. Epitomized in the thought of Easter, it comprised really everything that had ever been known about man's true dignity in the cosmos, in the whole universe. And many of the wanderers I mentioned yesterday—those who went from one Mystery to another in order to benefit by the totality of the Mysteries—many of these have repeatedly assured us that nowhere else as in Ephesus—at least, not so joyously—did they perceive so intimately and brightly the harmony of the spheres through that Moon point of view, where the radiant astral light of the world shone on them, where they sensed it in the spiritual sunlight flooding the Moon: in other Mysteries the saturation of man's soul and spirit with astral light was not felt with such an intense, inner artistic grasp.

All this was associated with the temple that went up in flames by the hand of a criminal or a lunatic. But as I mentioned during the Christmas Conference, initiates of the Ephesian Mysteries were re-embodied in Aristotle and Alexander; and these personalities came close to what was still capable of being sensed, in their time, of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

Now, what appears to be an outwardly fortuitous event can be of great spiritual significance in world evolution. Among ourselves it has frequently been mentioned for years that the Temple of Ephesus was burned at the hour in which Alexander the Great was born. But as this temple burned, something significant occurred.

What untold experiences had come to the dwellers in that temple through the centuries! What a wealth of spiritual light and wisdom had suffused its halls! And while the flames lept up from the Temple of Ephesus, all that wisdom was imparted to the cosmic ether, so that we may say: the perpetually recurring Easter Festival of Ephesus that had been locked in the temple halls was henceforth inscribed in the dome of the universe, in so far as this is etheric, though in less legible letters.

That is often the way things work out: much human wisdom that in olden times had been enclosed within temple walls was released, was inscribed in the world-ether, and there at once becomes visible to one who ascends to real imagination. And this imagination is the interpreter, as it were, of the secret of the stars: what once was secret within the temples has been inscribed in the world-ether, and there it can be read by means of imagination.

We can put it another way, but it means the same. I go out into the starlit night, contemplate the firmament and throw myself open to it. Then, if I have the right capacity, the forms of the constellations and the movements of the planets are transmuted as into vast cosmic script. And if I read this script, something emerges like that which I explained yesterday in referring to the Moon secret. When the stars no longer remain merely something to be mathematically and mechanically computed, but become the alphabet of cosmic script, these things can indeed be read there.

But I should like to develop the matter further. When Alexander and Aristotle approached the Kabirian secrets in Samothrace at a time when the old Mysteries were already on the decline,² something occurred to them at that moment through the influence of the Kabirian Mysteries like a memory of the old Ephesian time, which both had passed through in a certain century. And once more there resounded the J O A, and again they heard intoned:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might;

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing,
And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging;

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming,
And Venus' love-bearing beauty is on thee beaming;

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being and to ages now aborning consecrate thee.

But in this memory, this historical recollection of something ancient, there resided a certain power, the power to create something new. And from that moment there streamed forth this power to create something new—but it was something strange and little observed by mankind. For you must really first understand the nature of this creative power that went forth from the collaboration of Alexander and Aristotle.

Take any notable poem or other work of art—it can be a most beautiful one, such as the Bhagavad Gita or Goethe's Faust or his Iphigenia—anything you value very highly—and reflect on its rich and mighty content—let us say, on the content of Goethe's Faust. Now, by what means, my dear friends, is this rich content transmitted to you? Let us assume that it is transmitted in the ordinary way, as it is to most people. At some time during your life you read Faust. What did you encounter on the physical plane—on the paper? Nothing but combinations of a b c, and so forth. The means by which the mighty content of Faust is disclosed to us consists only of combinations of the letters of the alphabet. If you know the alphabet, the paper contains nothing that does not correspond with one of the twenty-odd letters. Something is conjured up out of these twenty-odd letters—if you know how to read—that evokes for you the whole glorious substance of Faust. You may find it excessively tiresome to recite the alphabet, and you may consider it as abstract as anything could well be; yet rightly combined, this superlative abstraction gives us the whole of Faust.

Now, when there was heard again the cosmic resounding from the Moon that disclosed to Aristotle and Alexander what the blaze of Ephesus signified, how that fire had carried the secret of Ephesus out into the world-ether, there came to Aristotle the inspiration to found the cosmic script. This, however, is not achieved by means of the alphabet, but rather through thoughts, as book writing is made up of letters. And so the letters of the cosmic script came into being.—When I write them down for you they are just as abstract as the alphabet:

There you have a number of concepts. They originated when Aristotle laid them before Alexander. Learn to accomplish with these concepts what you do with the alphabet, and you will have learned to read in the cosmos by means of Being, Quantity, Quality, Relationship, Space, Time, Position, Having, Doing, Suffering.

In our age of abstractions something peculiar happened to logic, as it is taught in the schools. Imagine a custom existing in some school to teach—not reading, but, for instance, to provide books from which the pupils had to keep learning the letters in all conceivable combinations, but never arriving at using them for envisioning the wealth of the contents: that would be the same as what the world has done to Aristotle's Logic. In the books on logic are listed his categories—that's what people call them. People memorize them, but have no idea what to do with them. It is exactly like memorizing the alphabet without knowing how to apply it.

Reading the cosmic records bases on something just as simple as extracting the content of Faust by means of the alphabet—it must merely be learned. And fundamentally, all that anthroposophy has ever brought forth or ever will has been experienced by means of these concepts, just as what is read in Faust is experienced through the letters. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are comprised in these simple concepts that are the cosmic alphabet.

Something intervened in Earth evolution at the time of Alexander that stands in contrast with the direct perception so characteristic of Ephesus. It did not develop till later, especially during the Middle Ages; and it is deeply hidden, profoundly esoteric. Profoundly esoteric is the meaning that dwells in those ten simple concepts; and actually we are learning more and more to live in them. But we must keep striving to experience them as livingly in our soul as we do the alphabet when a wealth of spiritual substance is in question.

Thus you see how something that for thousands of years had been a mighty instinctive revelation of wisdom flowed into ten concepts, whose inner power and light, however, remain to be re-disclosed. And when man will have learned again to read in the cosmos, when he will experience the resurrection of what has lain buried as though in a grave during this interlude in human evolution between the two spiritual ages, then it will come about at some future time that the world wisdom, the light of the world, will be found again. It is our task, my dear friends, to bring to light again what is hidden. We must make of Easter an experience for all humanity. And just as it could be said on other occasions that anthroposophy is a Christmas experience, so it is in its whole manifestation an Easter experience, a resurrection experience coupled with an experience of the grave. And it is especially important during this Easter gathering that we should feel, if I may so express it, the solemnity of anthroposophic striving by realizing that today we can turn to a spiritual Being Who may be close to us, directly beyond the threshold, and appeal to Him thus: Oh, how blessed was mankind at one time with divine-spiritual revelation that still shone so very bright in Ephesus! But now all that is buried. How can I uncover what is so deeply buried?—for one would like to believe that what once existed might in some historical way be found again in the grave where it lies.

Then the Being will reply to us, as did once before a like being in a similar case: What you seek is no longer here. It is in your heart, if only you will unlock your heart in the right way.

Anthroposophy is indeed latent in the hearts of men, but it is for these human hearts to open in the right way. That is what we must deeply feel. Then we will be led back—not instinctively, as of old, but in full awareness—to the wisdom that lived and shone in the Mysteries.

All this I would like to implant in your hearts, my dear friends, at this Easter time; for to permeate yourself with something that can enkindle a feeling of solemnity in every heart dedicated to anthroposophy, that is something which carries up into the spiritual world and which must be correlated with the Christmas impulse given at Dornach. For this impulse must not remain a thought-out, intellectualistic one, but must spring from the heart; it must not be formal or matter-of-fact, nor must it be sentimental: it must issue from the cause itself and bear the mark of solemnity. When the conflagration at Ephesus blazed up, first in the outer ether and then in the heart of Aristotle, it revealed anew to Aristotle the secrets that could then be epitomized in the simplest terms; and we may say in all modesty that, just as he was able to use the fire of Ephesus to this end, so it is our task—and we shall fulfill it—to use what the flames of the Goetheanum carried into the ether: the aims and purpose of anthroposophy.

What do we gather from all this, my dear friends? That at the memorial service in the Christmas-New Year time, the time in which the disaster struck us a year before, it was vouchsafed us to send forth a new impulse from the Goetheanum. How could this be? Because we are right in feeling that what had previously been a cause pertaining to this Earth, worked for and established as such, was carried by the flames out into cosmic space. Because this misfortune has come to us we are, recognizing its consequences, justified in saying, Now we understand that we may no longer represent a mere Earth cause, but must know it as one of wide etheric space in which the spirit lives: the cause represented by the Goetheanum is a cause of the cosmic ether in which lives the spirit-filled wisdom of the world. It has been carried out into the ether; and it is granted us to permeate ourselves with the Goetheanum impulses flowing in from the cosmos.

Take this in any sense—as an image, if you like: even as an image it signifies a profound truth, a truth that can be simply expressed: the Christmas impulse calls for the permeation of anthroposophical activity with an esoteric element. This is present because what had been earthly now reacts on the impulses of the anthroposophical movement through the astral light in the physical fire that rayed forth into cosmic space; but we must be able to receive these impulses.

Then, if we are able to receive them, we feel a certain important link in the chain of all that lives in anthroposophy: it is the anthroposophical Easter spirit, which can never in the world believe that the spirit perishes, but rather that it arises ever and again after dying through the world; and anthroposophy must hold fast to the spirit resurrected again and again out of eternal depths.

That is what we will take into our hearts as the Easter thought, the Easter feeling; and from this gathering we shall carry away feelings, my dear friends, that will fill us with courage and strength for work when we return to our allotted spheres.

• 1. Translator's Note:—For readers not familiar with German it must be explained that j is pronounced like our y in “yet”—in other words, like an excessively short German i. For this reason it is not too strange that one often encounters J for I (but only in capitals), and the above is a case in point. Indeed, there is no choice here but to use it, as the same letter must serve as a pure vowel in J O A and later as a modified vowel in Jehova.—The letters J O A must be pronounced Ee Oh Ah, and Jehova that appears later, Yay-hoh-vah.
• 2. Translation by Henry B. Monges.
• 2. Samothrace still existed as a memorial and also as a sanctuary for work, but in the main the Mystery schools had declined in the time of Alexander.

Dr. Steiner: Do any of you gentlemen have a question you would like to have discussed?

Question: I would like to ask what the world was like in primeval times. Had the planets Venus, Mercury, and so on deposited various metallic substances?

Dr. Steiner: If this is considered simply in the way it is frequently stated in old books—in the new ones nothing is said about it, except in our anthroposophical books—that the planet Venus has something to do with the copper deposited in the earth, for example, then this is merely a matter of belief. People gain nothing but a mental image of it by being told that though it was once known by men of old nothing is really known about it today. When something like this is to be discussed, one must really go into it in detail. I would like to call your attention to the fact that modern medicine also no longer knows much about these things. Only a few centuries ago when symptoms of illness appeared in people, the great majority of remedies were based on the use of a metal or one of the plant substances.

Nothing has remained of this knowledge except that for certain symptoms, which appear particularly in syphilis, quicksilver, or mercury, must be employed as a remedy. One therefore makes use of mercury. Please note that nobody in medicine today can really explain why mercury is effective; it is used simply because it has been seen to be effective. Regarding this effect of mercury on syphilitic diseases, one must also mention that in recent times a number of other medications have replaced mercury. The not entirely irreproachable effectiveness of the famous new remedies that have replaced mercury today has already been recognized, and medicine will soon return to the mercuric remedies.

You can be convinced in a remarkable way that the instinct for healing—not today's science but the instinct for healing—works in mercury in a very strong way. There are certain regions in which people who were not doctors but acted out of their instinct for healing treated a syphilitic illness in the following way (today this rarely happens, but three or four decades ago it still occurred). They took animals that live partly underground and that therefore take in some dirt along with their food, animals such as salamanders, toads, and similar creatures. People took these animals, dehydrated and pulverized them, and then gave this preparation to syphilitic patients. This was a kind of remedy.

Now, on the face of it, this is completely incomprehensible. It becomes comprehensible only when one knows that in some regions these toad remedies do not help syphilitics while in other regions they are most effective. When one investigates these regions where it is effective, mercury mines are found in them. It is curious that in regions where mercury is present, the animals absorb it with their food, and it is the mercury that effects the cure. It is not the toad but the mercury that the toad has consumed and assimilated into its body that has the healing effect.

You become aware of two things from this. First, that a remarkable instinct for healing is present in people who are not as yet spoiled by ordinary science; second, that if a living creature absorbs something—and a toad is indeed a living creature—it permeates its whole body, it spreads through its whole body. This is true to an even greater extent in the case of humans. Since we used the example of mercury-based remedies, I would like to mention the following.

Only in the last few decades have matters terribly declined in medicine as they have today. It was better when I was a little boy. In Vienna, there lived a splendid professor of anatomy, Joseph Hyrtl, who still knew a little—not very much, but still a little—of the more ancient medicine. When, in his clinic, he had the corpses of people available who at one time had undergone mercury treatments, he would break their bones open and show his students that little drops of mercury were deposited in them. This is how a substance that a person absorbs spreads throughout his body. It is the same in other living creatures, and so toads that had assimilated mercury into their whole bodies could be pulverized and used as a remedy against syphilis.

Now I will tell you how men hit on the idea of using mercury. for such illnesses in earlier times when science had a totally different character. When you observe the planetary system the way we know it from school, the sun is here in the center; near to the sun, the planet Mercury, a somewhat small planet, circles the sun. A little farther out, Venus circles the sun. Mercury is a small planet, and its orbit around the sun takes place in a short time, about ninety days. Then comes Venus, and it circles the sun more slowly. The next planet circling the sun is the earth. Beyond the earth is Mars. Then come a great number of tiny, miniature planets in orbit beyond Mars. There are hundreds and hundreds of these tiny little planets; they are in orbit. I would have to sketch a lot of planets, but they are not that important and lack the great significance of the larger planets. After these planets come Jupiter, circling the sun, and still farther out, Saturn. Then come Uranus and Neptune, but these two planets were discovered most recently. I need not sketch them, since they circle much farther out and their orbits exhibit such irregularities that in reality they cannot be counted among the planets even today. This is how the planets circle the sun, just as our moon circles the earth. It circles the earth just as the other planets circle the sun.

Now, astronomy today looks at such a planetary system without paying much attention to the influences that these planets have on the beings living on the earth. One calculates the position of a planet for a given time so that a telescope can be turned toward it. This can be calculated. One can also figure out how fast a planet moves. One can calculate all this. It is with these calculations that people are concerned today.

You see, however, that in the evolution of an entire universal system, a few millennia are not a long time, and it was only twenty-five to thirty-five hundred years ago that people looked upon the planets in a completely different scientific way. At that time the following was done. Illnesses, for example, appeared in which, due to thickened blood—I shall tell you why directly—people were afflicted with problems of the intestines. I can't go into detail concerning these critical illnesses now, because when these observations were made in ancient times, they were not as extensive as they are today. But in an illness of which observations were made in Babylonia, Assyria, Nineveh, and so on, even in Egypt, people became afflicted with an intestinal disorder that was due to thickened blood, to abnormal processes in the blood. Blood was present in the stools; typhoid-like diseases were after all much more common in ancient times than they are nowadays. Let's assume that the ancient doctors, who were also philosophers, had to study such diseases. They didn't wait until the patient was dead, because they knew that once a person had died, the cure was not applicable. So they did not examine those who had died of typhoid but proceeded differently. They noticed that patients suffering from cholera, typhoid, dysentery, or such felt better at certain times, and at others their overall condition took a turn for the worse. So they concluded that typhoid sometimes take? a good and sometimes a fatal course. There are some people who, when they fall ill with typhoid or cholera, occasionally undergo terrible attacks of dizziness almost to the point of losing consciousness; then events take a most critical turn. Some patients retain consciousness, however, and their heads remain clear. These patients can be helped.

Now, the ancient doctors maintained that man not only lives and depends on the earth but is also dependent on the entire universe. They therefore made the following observations. We can use here the planetary system taught us in school. Here is the earth with the sun's rays shining on it. The sun's rays fall on the earth. As you know, man depends much on sunlight, and we have always used this as a basis of our studies here. Now, these ancient doctors didn't put such great emphasis on the sun, because they felt that its effects were quite obvious, but they observed people who had severe diarrhea, for example, and they noted that some of them suffered attacks of dizziness at certain times; their heads became foggy. The heads of others who suffered from severe diarrhea remained clear, and they only became a little dizzy. These doctors realized that this difference was related to the time the illness occurred. At certain times, nothing could really be done for these patients; without fail, they became very dizzy and then died. At other times, the diarrhea took a lighter course.

So these doctors began to observe the stars and found that in those times when these typhoid-like illnesses took a good course, the planet Venus always stood in such a position that it was blocked by the earth. If the earth is there (see sketch on left), Venus can be located here. If a person is located there on the far side of the earth, no rays from Venus reach him. Since the light of Venus can't pass through the earth, the earth covers Venus for him. The ancients, of course, recognized this, since they could not see Venus, as it was blocked by the earth. Now, they continued their observations and discovered that the prognosis was good for a person ill with typhoid in the times when Venus was blocked by the earth. When Venus was not blocked, however, the typhoid patient was subject to Venus's light in addition to sunlight (see sketch on right). Then the prognosis was bad; the head became dizzy, and the typhoid could not be cured.

Having learned this, these doctors said that since Venus' shining rays pass through the earth, something must be contained in the earth that alters Venus' rays. Now they began to experiment, not with dead people but with patients who were still alive. Nothing happened to those ill with typhoid when lead was given. Regardless of Venus' position, remedies of iron also made no difference. When a typhoid patient was given copper, however, it had a remarkable effect. It offset the dizziness, and the patient began to recover. Aha, said these ancient doctors, copper must be contained within the earth somehow. This copper works within the earth and influences the course of typhoid in a way opposite to that of the detrimental influence of Venus' rays. When these rays hit a typhoid patient directly, they aggravate the effects of the disease, but when copper is given to them, it impedes the progress of typhoid. They now concluded that Venus in a certain way is connected with copper. It was not as if they had held seances and a medium had told them to use copper in cases of typhoid. Instead, they made observations of a kind no longer made today, which were based on an ancient instinct and functioned just as scientifically. So they concluded that in the earth there is copper. This copper is related to the force emanating from Venus. This is seen in the special effect it has on this illness.

They made other observations as well. Take, for example, the case of a patient with problems of vision, a disturbance in the eyes. People can get ailments of the eyes in which vision can become blurred; the pupils can contract. One can have any number of eye ailments. Now, the ancients again experimented and discovered that when the earth blocks Jupiter, eye problems improve more than if Jupiter shines directly on the earth. They explored further and asked what it is that is in the earth that counteracts Jupiter, and they found that it was tin, particularly when tin was extracted from plants.

Gradually, based on the effects on the human being, they thus discovered the correspondence between the planets and the metals contained in the earth. They found that Venus is connected with copper, Jupiter with tin, and Saturn with lead. They found that cases of bone diseases, which can also appear in lead poisoning, have something to do with the rays from Saturn; so, for Saturn, they discovered the effects of lead.

For Mars, which has something to do with ailments of the blood, it was easier to find the corresponding metal, iron. Therefore, Mars = iron. For the moon, which stands in a completely different relation since it orbits the earth, they discovered something similar, namely, silver: moon = silver.

Now, this way of looking at things was completely abandoned later on. Do not assume, however, that it was long ago that such observations were abandoned; it was only three or four hundred years ago that these observations were no longer made. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries these observations were still made. What was the conclusion? People told themselves that everything that is now separated into the different planets was once contained within one primordial mash [Urbrei], one universal mist. This concept is quite accurate; it is only wrong to picture that everything can develop out of such a universal mist without spiritual influences. Otherwise one imagines the great universal schoolmaster who controls everything, as I have told you earlier! No, but it was once known that everything was at one time dissolved in a kind of primordial mash. p here was no sun, moon, or earth; they were all dissolved in the primordial mash and separated only later.

Through the copper contained within the earth, the planet Venus still exerts an influence. When Venus was still dissolved in the primordial mash, it had a special affinity with copper. It was at that time that this bond between them arose. When the moon was still dissolved in everything, silver stood in a special relation to the moon. This knowledge was not a divine revelation, however, nor was it based on arbitrary, authoritarian dictation. Rather, it was founded on ancient observations.

It was due to special circumstances that syphilitic illnesses came into being; in modern centuries, the so-called civilized peoples came into contact with primitive peoples, and there was an interbreeding, a sexual interbreeding of the civilized with the primitive peoples. These syphilitic illnesses were less prevalent when the peoples of the earth were more segregated into races. The way illnesses have arisen, as with syphilitic illnesses, is that something first causes them, but then they reproduce themselves. They become contagious. Something originally must have caused them to arise. The syphilitic illnesses arose through individuals of different races interbreeding sexually with one another. A syphilitic infection cannot occur, for example, except through a small, concealed lesion or worn tissue through which the contagious substance may enter the blood stream. The contagious syphilitic substance can be smeared on the skin, but if the skin is completely impermeable an infection can't occur. An infection can arise only when the skin is so worn or broken in some spot that the infectious substance can enter through it. You can understand that the infectious substance of syphilis must first have originated where contrasting foreign bloods intermingled. After that, the poison naturally reproduced, but it arose originally when a great interbreeding increasingly occurred among different peoples. It would probably be interesting to explore the statistics of case histories of this illness in a certain part of Europe that employs various exotic peoples, since the occurrences of sexual excesses with them cannot always be prevented.

You see, isolated cases of syphilis have also occurred in the past, but the more numerous incidents are of recent date. They also occurred, however, in that age when something was still known of the ancient science. Observations then showed that syphilitic patients improve when Mercury is blocked by the earth. So it was discovered that quicksilver, or mercury, is related to the planet Mercury. In this way the metals were gradually assigned to the planets:

Mercury—quicksilver, or mercury
Venus—copper
Jupiter—tin
Saturn—lead
Mars—iron
Moon—silver

People told themselves that when everything was dissolved in the primordial mash, it was the Venus substance that caused copper to be deposited in the earth, and it was the moon that caused silver to be deposited in the earth.

You see, such observations can be extended. It is remarkable how, at a certain time, it became fashionable in particular circles to make a secret of this ancient science. To this day there are books that a person without knowledge of anthroposophy cannot really read, because he wouldn't be able to make anything of them. All kinds of things are written in them, but people no longer know how to read them today. A Swedish scientist, for example, obtained such a book by Basilius Valentinus, which is rather old, and, in writing about it from the standpoint of today's chemistry, he said that what Valentinus had stated was the purest nonsense. He is right to say this, of course, because chemists today use the terms mercury, iron, and so forth, in such a way that they have no reference at all to the human being. A chemist, therefore, though he may be a genius, cannot make anything of what is written in books such as those by Basilius Valentinus. He cannot help thinking that he is quite right in saying that it is complete nonsense.

This is not really so, however, because Valentinus still wrote in an age when, for example, it was known that a woman's period occurs every twenty-eight days, as does the full moon. The ancients were certainly clever enough not to attribute a woman's flow of blood to the moon's influence. They told themselves, however, that its rhythm was the same, so there must have been a connection somehow in earlier times. Now man has freed himself from this connection. This is something they knew, but they realized that a woman had a similar rhythm to that which the universe has in the moonlight.

They also knew that when a woman who is having difficulty giving birth and has been in labor for a long time is given a medication containing silver, the labor pains become less severe. This was known. It was also known that if there were no visible moon, it being blocked by the earth, as it were, a woman who might have a difficult time giving birth would not have such a painful labor. The influence of silver thus was seen to be connected with the moon.

In Basilius Valentinus' books, “moon” is often written in the place of “silver,” and “silver” instead of “moon.” When this Swedish scientist reads that, he obviously can make nothing of it, regardless of how well informed he is about silver and how it works in a chemical process. It is a complicated matter. You see, the one who wrote the works of Basilius Valentinus was a Benedictine monk. Such things as this science were nurtured to a significant degree in Benedictine monasteries in past times, and Benedictine monks were extraordinarily clever in such things.

Today, a Father Mager, who is also a Benedictine monk, travels from one German city to another giving everywhere the same lecture against anthroposophy. Everywhere in the German cities this Father Mager harangues against anthroposophy. Just recently he was in Cologne. The enemies of anthroposophy differ greatly from one another. When the Jesuits speak against anthroposophy, it differs from what the Benedictine monks say against anthroposophy.

Indeed, this is how it is today. The Church suppresses a science that reaches beyond the earth. Gentlemen, do you know what began in a particular time? In a particular time, the Church authorities began to conceal and gradually suppress this science that had flourished in the monasteries. Such a science requires a great deal of time, but the monks had this time; they cultivated this science and thereby were quite useful to humanity in the past. Gradually this was suppressed, however. This suppression of the spiritual science often came about in this way.

Today's secular scientists now condemn this ancient science without realizing that a direct line leads from such monks of the Church to them. When monists stand up against anthroposophy, they naturally also object to the Church, but they do not realize that they are its proper pupils. Today's scientists are, in a certain sense, truly Benedictine or Jesuit pupils. They never attended Jesuitical seminars, because such thinking really can be absorbed in the outside world. This is naturally something that must also be taken into consideration.

From what has been said, you can see that the earth on which we live and that yields its various metals to us was crystallized from the primordial mash. What we behold outwardly as the planets, however, has remained behind as metals in the earth. What the earth once did together with Venus has remained in the metal copper. To heal with copper—this is what is accomplished specifically through Venus.

Metals extracted from plants today are especially effective in healing. A metal deposited in the earth has hardened and has lost some of its potency, although it is still effective against head ailments. But copper from the leaves of a plant known to contain quite a bit of it—the amounts are always small, but one can say “quite a bit”—is especially effective. There are such plants in the leaves of which copper is dissolved. If remedies are then made from such plants, they are particularly useful in intestinal disturbances that are due to a thickening of the blood and that lead to typhoid, dysentery, and the like.

This is how healing is related to what can be known about plants. You can see that today things are no longer in order when even the thickest book on botany, although containing all kinds of information, nevertheless lacks the most important instruction medical men should have; that is, there is no mention in these books of the metals that are dissolved in blossoms or roots. If at all, they are noted only in passing. This is a most important point, however, because it shows us that a plant that still contains copper today, for example, is related in its growth process to the planet Venus; it actually opposes the force of Venus and develops its own Venus force by absorbing copper into itself.

We can thus say that once there was a connection between the earth and all the planets that circle the sun today, and this influence has remained behind in the metals. This is what can be said first in reference to this question.

From the foregoing, you can see how important it is to refer back to observations of this kind that existed in the past. We are no longer in the same position, however, that they were in then, because we no longer possess the instincts for healing they once had. Only oxen, cows, sheep, and other animals, not human beings, have really retained a marvelous healing instinct, and they avoid eating harmful things and pass up anything that wouldn't be good for them. This is no longer possible for a human being, since he no longer has the healing instinct. Today, by the roundabout way of a spiritual science, we must once again learn to recognize how everything in the planetary system and in the universe, is connected with the earthly plane. Here one must begin at the beginning, one must truly begin at the very beginning.

One must realize the following, for example. One must begin with illnesses that take hold of the human abdomen. If one has such an abdominal illness, one comes to know that the substances present in the blossoms or the highest leaves of plants are especially helpful. Good remedies can be produced for illnesses of the abdominal organs by extracting certain substances from the blossoms and leaves of plants.

Substances taken from the roots of plants, however, provide especially beneficial remedies for everything connected with the human head. Matters are reversed with plants and with the human being. With plants, the roots are at the bottom and the blossoms are at the top. Man, however, is an upside-down plant. What is root element in the plant is actually in the head of the human being, and the blossom element is more in his abdominal region. You can see this even in the external forms. Man has his head at the top, and his reproductive organs are below. The plant has its roots below, while the blossoms, containing the organs of reproduction, are above. This drawing will help you to understand this. Here is the human being; here at the head I draw the root of a correspondingly large plant; here are the stems and leaves. Then, with the blossoms, I come to the abdominal organs. An entire plant is contained within man. The only difference is that it grows from the top downward in him. In a certain sense, man is also a plant. Isn't this apparent? It really is so obvious that everyone must see it. The animal, however, is between the two; in it, the plant is in a horizontal position.

This is really not just a picture; the plant is truly contained within man. Of course, it develops in accordance with the human form. But imagine that I were to draw this plant in detail, sketching a real bulbous root and the various branches—in other words, a real tree. It would be inverted, however. Here it would have its branches, and the outermost tips would wither a little here and there; there you have the nervous system! The nervous system is truly an inverted plant within man that is continuously dying a little.

Now, we know that plants grow out of the earth. First, there is winter, then come spring and summer that coax the plants from the earth. Within the earth is the winter's force. Through this the plant forms its bulbous root and has its root force. Then comes the summer's force, and the plant is coaxed upward; it is from the earth's circumference that the plants are drawn forth. Within are the metals—copper, let us say. The sun cannot do anything but coax forth a plant from the earth. Then, once the plant has emerged, it defends itself against the Venus forces. The force of winter from the earth and the summer's force from the universe together make the plant grow.

The human being, however, must have this winter force within his head in order that this root of the nervous system grow downward throughout the year. Since a baby, for example, can be born at any time of year, this force must be present in man's head in summer as well as winter. In our day he cannot in summer receive from outside the winter force in his head. This really implies that in primeval times, when the earth was still one with the other planets in the primordial mash, the human being must have absorbed this winter force, which has been handed down to this day. Man owes the winter force in his head to those most ancient times. The head of man was really made in ancient times and today remains the same. So we again find that man's head must be related to what arose on earth in ancient times and today has become completely solidified.

Go out into the primal mountains of central Switzerland and you will find granite and gneiss to be especially prevalent. The most active element in granite and gneiss is silicic acid, which is present in quartz in pure form as silicic acid, or silica. It is also the oldest substance on the earth and must be related to the human head forces. This is why illnesses of the head can be most readily cured with remedies made of silica; one can approach the human head thereby. In the age when silica still played a particular role on earth within the primordial mash and was not as hard as it is today in granite and gneiss, rather flowing like a liquid, the force present in the human head was formed—the winter force—and it has been preserved ever since.

So one must really present information about the human being taking into consideration the natural history of the whole earth. This is still connected with the question you asked, gentlemen, and with what I wanted to tell you about it. So long!

My dear friends! When the Johannesbau-Verein followed on from our last General Assembly of the German Section of the Theosophical Society here in Berlin, I addressed a few words to you about the way in which the Johannesbau is to be placed in the whole development of art, especially architectural art; that it in the sense in which we also otherwise consider that which we want to achieve in the field of theosophy or anthroposophy - as something necessary in the whole spiritual development of humanity; so that what is to happen through theosophy or anthroposophy does not appear as some kind of arbitrariness, not as something that we give birth to out of ourselves as some kind of arbitrary ideal, but appears as we see it as a necessity, as it were, in that writing that reveals to us the necessary path of the human spirit through the evolution of the earth.

Now, one can choose many points of view to present this necessity that has just been characterized. At that time, I showed from a certain point of view how this necessary placing in human history of what is intended by the Johannesbau is to be understood. Today, I would like to choose a different point of view, so that my present considerations may, in a certain respect, supplement what was presented here in December 1911.

Architecture is actually bound to a very specific premise if we understand architecture in the sense that man wants to create a shell, as it were, using some material, through some forms or other measures, be it for profane living and working, be it for religious activities or the like. In this sense, the art of building, architecture, is definitely bound up with what we can call the soul, is connected with the concept of the soul, arises from the soul and can be grasped by grasping the whole extent of the soul.

Now, over the years of working in spiritual science, the soul has always presented itself to us from three points of view: from the point of view of the sentient soul, from the point of view of the mind or emotional soul, and from that of the consciousness soul. But then this soul-life also presents itself to us when it first announces itself, as it were, but does not yet really exist as soul-life when we speak of the sentient or astral body. And again, the soul-life presents itself to us when we say that the soul-life has developed to such an extent that it seeks a transition to the spirit-self or manas. If you look at my Theosophy, you will find the threefold soul in it: the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. But you will find the sentient soul bordering on the sentient body, so that the sentient soul and sentient appear as two sides of one and the same, the one side more soul-like, the other more spiritual; and then you will find, joining together again, consciousness soul and spirit self; the consciousness soul representing the more soul-like side, the spirit self, on the other hand, the more spiritual side.

Those who, as anthroposophists, gradually find their way into such an understanding of these terms, as our esteemed friend Arenson has very beautifully explained in these days, will not be able to stop at the words sentient soul, mind or soul, and consciousness soul, and only seek to find one or the other definition for these words , but as a true anthroposophist will long to gradually develop in his mind many, many concepts, feelings and insights, which lead from one feeling to another and so on, in order to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding, which in the case of these concepts is structured in the most diverse directions.

For the seer himself, the words quoted include, one might say, entire worlds. Therefore, in order to understand such concepts, one must also take into account what has been presented about human development, for example, in the post-Atlantic period: that the sentient body has particularly developed in the ancient Persian culture, the sentient soul in the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, the mind or emotional soul in the Greco-Roman period, the consciousness soul in the time in which we ourselves live, and that we see the next period, so to speak, as already approaching in its development, yes, that we ourselves, with what we want as anthroposophy, theosophy, are working on the approach of this next period, which in a certain way should show us the connection between consciousness soul and spirit self or manas.

Architecture, it was said, is closely linked to the concept of the soul. Someone might ask: Should architecture not then also be linked to the development of the soul, as it has just been characterized? And should not the forms, the designs of architecture show certain peculiarities in their succession, which are connected to this development of sentient body, sentient soul and so on? And would we not then have no justification at all for speaking of architecture in the case of certain periods – for example, the first post-Atlantean period, which particularly brought forth the etheric body – so as to be right in speaking of architecture? For if architecture is bound to the soul, then it should only begin to dawn when it begins to develop. Therefore, one would assume that it begins to emerge in the sentient body, because that is, as it were, the other side of the soul; and before that, one would have to refer to times when an actual architecture - in the sense in which we characteristically understand architecture - would not exist at all.

Now it is difficult enough to answer this question from the standpoint of external history; for everything that goes back beyond the Egyptian-Chaldean period can hardly be gained from historical monuments and traditions, but can only be derived from clairvoyant research. Even the time of Zarathustra, which we call the original Persian period, lies so far back that historical research is out of the question, let alone the time period that we know to be connected with the development of the etheric body, namely the original Indian period.

However, one can also have strange experiences with this matter if one approaches the very clever people of the present day with it. Recently, for example, one of these clever people said that these post-Atlantean periods, as they are recorded, for example, in my “Occult Science”, are untenable, because anyone who is familiar with the linguistic monuments of India would never believe that Indian culture had progressed as far ahead of Egyptian and Chaldean culture as it is presented in the sense of this “Occult Science”. Well, one can only be surprised that such very clever people of the present day have not yet managed to read a book written in their mother tongue with understanding, even if they can sometimes read Sanskrit. For it is expressly stated in “Occult Science” that the culture of India, including the Vedic culture, which is the subject of external science, is not the culture of ancient India, the first culture of the post-Atlantic period, but that in the case of the Vedic culture we are dealing with a time that can be counted as belonging to the third post-Atlantic cultural period, which thus runs parallel to the Egyptian-Chaldean culture. The original Indian culture, on the other hand, was one of which no external documents and no external monuments and the like exist and of which only the last echoes are contained in the Vedas. I do not want to dwell on this any further, but say this only because one or the other of you might hear this objection and perhaps not immediately have the concepts and ideas at hand that can dispel such an objection.

So the question remains, as indicated earlier, that in the first post-Atlantic period we would have to go back to times when an actual art of building, as for later times, could not yet be possible. But then we come to a strange boundary point, to which external research also points; we come, so to speak, to a preliminary stage of architecture: the building of spaces for religious, for worship in caves, carved into the rock, as one finds in India or Nubia. This is indeed the epoch that stands on the boundary of the development of the soul out of the physical. These cave structures confirm what spiritual research indicates regarding the development of the soul: Only in the period of human evolution in which we see the development of the soul out of the physical development do we also see the real higher art of building evolving out of what were previously rock caves, underground rock caves that had been hewn into the earth itself.

In this respect, the earth appears like the physical realm into which the human soul first works, as it also happens in the development of the human being itself, where the soul works into the physical realm, the sentient soul into the sentient body. And in the transition from cave rooms to architectural works that encompass human activities, we see at the same time the importance of the transition from the culture of the sentient body to that of the sentient soul.

There will come a time when the insights of Theosophy and Anthroposophy will be developed for all branches of human knowledge and for all branches of human development. And it will be found that everything that other human worldviews present one-sidedly has been cobbled together from some inadequate concepts and ideas, while spiritual science or anthroposophy shows the whole picture, with which one will be able to shine in everywhere. We can be completely reassured, even if people today do not yet believe it. That is not important, but that time will provide the evidence for it. We just have to give it time. The confirmations will gradually emerge in all areas of life and development. Also in the field of architecture.

And if we now go through the post-Atlantean development, we see that in the course of time the individual developmental epochs are, so to speak, bound to the soul, to the development of the sentient soul, then to that of the mind or mind soul and then to that of the consciousness soul, right up to our time. And in our own time we see, still in the preparatory stage, the time when the consciousness soul is being worked out of the spiritual self or manas, so that we are, as it were, standing before a reversal of the process that took place in the post-Atlantic epoch, when we passed from the bodily to the soul realm. Just as the sentient soul was worked out of the sentient body in those days, so we are now facing a time in which we have to work our way out of the soul and into a spiritual realm. For architecture, this means that we can expect the opposite again. That is to say, just as in those earlier times caves were hewn out of the rocks as the preliminary stages of human architectural works, so now, in the present rising time, we have to work into the spirit in order to create the complement, the counterpart to this.

Let us now try to visualize the following, initially without more precise details of time, for everyone can form for themselves what is necessary for parallelism.

Let us take the development through the sentient soul, the mind or intellect soul and the consciousness soul; first, therefore, the development through the sentient soul.

Through being endowed with the sentient soul, the human being enters into a reciprocal relationship with the world around him. Through the sentient soul, so to speak, what is present in the world as reality enters into the human soul, into the human inner self. The 'outside becomes an inside by way of the experience in the sentient soul. Therefore, in the development of architectural art, there should be something that emerges quite naturally from cave construction and shows something in itself that is characteristic of the sentient soul. That is to say, it should be built in such a way that one wants to represent an exterior as well as an interior. Here we need only recall the construction of the pyramids and similar buildings, and we can even think of more recent scientific research that has shown how astronomical-cosmic relationships are reflected in the dimensions of the pyramid construction. More and more will be discovered about the pyramid's strange structure based on cosmic conditions. Astronomical dimensions can be found in the ratio of the base to the height, for example. And anyone who studies the pyramid gradually comes to the conclusion that with the pyramid, the pyramid priests expressed everything that could be expressed in a structure as a perception of cosmic conditions. The pyramid was built as if the earth wanted to experience within itself what is perceived from the cosmos. Just as the sentient soul brings the outer reality to life within itself and presents what is outside as an inner reality, repeating in its own way what is outside, so the pyramid repeats in its proportions and forms outer cosmic relationships, for example, in the way sunlight falls within it. Just as external reality finds a kind of representation in the human being through the sentient soul, so the pyramid looks like a large sentient organ of all earthly culture in relation to the cosmos.

Let us move on. How should architecture behave in a cultural stage in which the characteristic is the intellectual or mind soul?

The mind or mind soul is the inner soul in man, which has the most work to do within itself, which, on the already inner foundation of the sentient soul, further develops this inner soul , but does not go so far as to reunite it into the actual I; thus it spreads and expands the soul-life without allowing it to culminate in the center of the I. The person who has developed precisely this soul element comes to us through the richness of his soul life, through the many inner soul contents and experiences that he has fought for and achieved; he has less of a need to build systems out of his inner experiences, but rather gives himself over to the breadth of these inner experiences. The soul of mind or feeling is a life of the soul that bears itself inwardly, closes itself inwardly, and totalizes itself inwardly.

What kind of architecture would be needed to correspond to such a soul? It would have to be an architecture that, unlike the construction of a pyramid, does not so much resemble or represent cosmic conditions, but is more of a self-contained, complete being in itself; something that is self-supporting and, in accordance with the intellectual soul or the soul of feeling, shows the breadth of development in the way the individual parts are supported, and is less concerned with uniting what already exists in the breadth of development. No one who is familiar with the nature of the intellectual soul or the soul of feeling, as it has just been characterized, can doubt that Greek and also Roman architecture can be understood as an external image of the life of the soul of intellect or of the soul of feeling.

If we look at Greek architecture, for example Greek temple architecture, as we have done many times before, by understanding it as the house of the god himself, so that the god dwells within it and the whole house presents itself as the dwelling of the god, the whole inwardly rounded as an inward totality. From our contemplation of the Greek temple, we have even been able to say: This Greek temple does not claim that a person or a community of people is within it. It is the dwelling place of the god and can stand alone, closed, as a totality in itself, just as the intellectual or emotional soul is an inner totality, a self-contained inner life, which does not yet lead to egoity, but which, even if unconsciously, is the manifestation of the god in man. And when we see how in Greek temple architecture each part supports the other, how everything is based on the columns striving upwards and supporting the beams, how the mutual forces are joined together into a totality without the whole any way systematically toward a unity, toward a pinnacle, we find in it – and in Roman architecture the same is actually the case – that breadth, that expanse, which we find in the intellectual or emotional soul itself.

'This is precisely what is striking about Greco-Roman architecture: it is based on statics, on the pure statics of the individual forces that unfold in a supporting or burdening way. But there is one thing you can forget about a Greek temple: you can forget that it has a sense of 'heaviness'. For anyone who feels in harmony with nature will, or at least can, feel that the columns are something that grows out of the earth. And with that which really does grow out of the earth, with plants, there is no sense of oppressive heaviness. That is why the column in the Greek temple gradually strives to become similar to the stem of a plant, even if this only becomes visible in the Corinthian column. And so, in our perception, the burden is not on the column, but for our perception the column is a carrier. But when we then come to the beam, to the architrave, we have the direct feeling that this weighs on the column, that is, the structure is inwardly permeated by static equilibrium. And anyone who has developed their inner life will also have the feeling that the perceptions, feelings and concepts they have arrived at, which they have worked towards inwardly, are supported inwardly in the same way that the column supports the beam. Because at the time when Greco-Roman architecture originated, the intellectual soul or soul of mind was particularly developed in humanity, therefore, when the soul wanted to express itself in the language of architecture, it naturally strove to express its inner experiences in static form. It was not intentional, but rather a natural expression of the human soul, to create a reflection of the soul in architecture.

And then gradually the development passed over to the consciousness soul. It is essential to the consciousness soul to summarize what the soul experiences in the total feeling: “You are! And you are this one human being, this one personality, this one individuality.” By living in the intellectual or emotional soul, God lives in you; but you allow God to live in all the vibrations of your soul, you are so certain of him that you do not need to summarize them as in one point and not to bring yourself to consciousness: “You are identical with your divine.” But you have to do that in the consciousness soul. In this soul, it is not the case that man rests inwardly in himself as in the soul of understanding or of feeling; but in the consciousness soul man strives out of himself to unfold his ego arbitrarily to reality, to existence.

If you have a feeling for the formation of words, you can literally see how the words that have just been spoken as the characteristic of the consciousness soul form themselves as if by magic into the Gothic pillar pillar and the Gothic arch, where the enclosures give us a structure that no longer expresses calm self-reliance, but rather the striving to escape from mere internal stasis through its forms. How great the difference is between the beam, which is carried in full static calm by its column, and the mutually supporting arches, which come together at the apex and hold each other, where everything pushes towards a point, just as the power of the human soul is concentrated in the consciousness soul.

And anyone who can empathize with the ongoing process of human development feels, especially when observing Italian or French architecture, that during the transition from the development of the intellectual or emotional soul to the development of the consciousness soul, it is no longer a matter of calm, static support and carrying it out of the inner totality, and one no longer strives for inward unity in form, as in Greek architecture, but seeks to pass over into the dynamic, as it were, to emerge from one's skin, in order to enter into connection with the reality of the outer world, as in the consciousness soul. The Gothic arches open up to the light of heaven in long windows. This is not the case in Greek architecture. In a Greek temple, it would make no difference to the perception whether light fell into it or not. The light is only incidental. This is not irrelevant to the Gothic cathedral; the Gothic cathedral is inconceivable without the light refracting in the stained glass windows.

There one can feel how the consciousness soul enters into the totality of the world and strives out again into general existence. The Gothic style is therefore the architectural striving that is characteristic of the age of the development of the consciousness soul.

And now we come to our own age, in which a world view that does not arise out of arbitrariness but out of the necessities of human development must realize that the human being must work his way out of the soul and into the spiritual, that the human being in the spiritual self rests in himself spiritually. The Gothic building, with its special architecture of the wall broken through by the windows, with its opening up for that which can come in, for that which must now come! Like the harbinger of what is to come – where the wall necessarily leads to a structure and in this respect is also only a filler, a decoration, not an enclosure, like the walls of the Greek temple – this Gothic building appears as a harbinger of what what the new building must now become for the envelopment of the coming Weltanschhauung, the new building whose essential peculiarities I have already hinted at here and there and of which some essentials have even already been attempted, for example in the Stuttgart building.

The essential thing will be that the complement to the preliminary stage of architecture, to cave construction, where the rock itself materially closed off what was hewn into it; that our new building opens up in all directions, that its walls are open on all sides, not to the material, but open to the spiritual. And we will achieve this by designing the forms in such a way that we can forget that there is any city or the like besides our building. In the Stuttgart Bau, such an attempt has already been made; its walls are open despite the material closure, open to the spirit. In the new building, too, we will shape the forms, the decorative, the picturesque, so that the wall is broken through, so that we can feel our way through color and form: even though we are closed off, the spiritual and mental view expands into the world. Just as the proportions of the cosmos were taken up in the pyramid, so we take what we can experience through anthroposophy and theosophy and create forms, colors, outlines and figures for it, but we create all this in such a way that precisely through what we create on the walls and , these walls themselves disappear, and we experience the closed space in such a way that we can feel the illusion everywhere: it expands out into the cosmos, into the universe, just as the consciousness soul, when it merges with the spiritual self, lives itself out of the merely human into the spiritual.

Thus in the new architecture the significance of the individual column will also advance to something quite different. If, as in the Greek temple, we are dealing with static relationships, with relationships in which inwardness is of primary importance, then it is natural that the forms of the columns and the capitals should repeat themselves. For how could one think of a column in one place as being different from another in the neighborhood if they have exactly the same function? It must be shaped in the same way as the other. It cannot be any different, because every column has the same function.

If we are now dealing with the new art of building in the cosmos, which is differentiated in the most diverse ways on all sides, we should forget that we are in an inner space, so the columns take on a completely new task, a task that is somewhat like that of a letter that points beyond itself by forming a word with the other letters. Thus the columns join together, not in their diversity, but like the individual letters of a weighty writing, pointing outward to the cosmos, from the inside out. And so we will build: from the inside out! And just as one capital letter follows the other, so they will join together and express something as a totality. This will be something that leads beyond the room. And what else we will add, for example inside the dome, will be added in such a way that we will not have the feeling: we are closed in by a dome – but that the whole painting seems to pierce the dome, to take it away into infinity. To do this, however, one will have to learn to paint a little in the way that Johannes Thomasius paints for Strader's sensibility, so that Strader gets the feeling: “The canvas, I want to pierce it to find what I am supposed to seek.”

One can see that in the mystery plays not a single word is written in vain, but always from the perspective of the whole, and that all the things we want from the preconditions of our culture necessarily come together. Today I just wanted to evoke a feeling for the fact that in the overall treatment of walls, architectural motifs, columns, and in the use of all decorative elements, the new architecture must aim at the destruction of the material, so to speak, overcome the wall and , so that the pictorial must also overcome the wall; I wanted to evoke a feeling that all this must occur and be attempted through the new architecture and that this is a necessity in view of the course of human development, as we recognize it as a necessary one.

However, in view of the necessity of such a building from the course of human development, it seems pathetic that it is so difficult to actually carry out the building, and pathetic are also all the objections that are being made by the authorities in Munich, and also by the artists who have been called upon to judge it and who have said that the building would overwhelm the neighborhood. Perhaps they had a slight feeling of unease about the building overwhelming the neighborhood, about it growing out of it into a very wide environment. They will feel it as oppressive at first.

Such objections, raised by artists who believe themselves to be at the cutting edge of their time, seem grotesquely comical when considered in the context of human evolution.

Let us hope, dear friends, and let us do our part, because it could be good for our cause, that our guardian spirit takes pity on us and turns his gaze to us, so that we, recognizing the necessity of our structure, may soon be able to truly create this covering for anthroposophy or spiritual science, which corresponds to the development of humanity.

Many people still consider anthroposophy, for example, as an uninvited guest within a society. One behaves rather refusing at first. Other scientific currents are well-invited guests of the modern spiritual striving because of the already recognised needs of the human beings. However, if one notes that the uninvited guest has something to bring that one had lost and that can be very valuable, nevertheless, in a certain respect, then one begins to treat the uninvited guest somewhat different from before. Anthroposophy is in this situation. It has to speak of spiritual-mental goods, which in a certain respect the modern civilised humanity has lost and which it has to receive again. They got lost because humanity had a certain instinctive cognition during millennia for that what is considered there; humanity cannot retain this instinctive cognition in the same way in future, it has even lost it up to a certain degree.

Just as little humanity could adhere to the medieval astronomy, it could adhere to the old instinctive knowledge about the being of the soul and with it about the real core of the human being. In the talks that I have held here weeks ago it was my task in particular to explain how in justified way the scientific thinking has taken possession of the human souls and has influenced the whole cultural development more and more. However, this scientific cognition is not suited on the other side to unveil the secrets of his own soul being to the human being, just if it wants to remain strong in the area that is assigned to it. This scientific imagination has the peculiarity that it destroys the old instinctive knowledge of the soul as it were.

Spiritual science wants to illuminate the spiritual area consciously with controlled cognition and to bring consciously again, what the human beings have lost as instinctive knowledge. Most certainly, the human beings who feel this anthroposophy as an uninvited guest will consider it just as a very welcome guest—I hope—if they have realised that this guest brings the knowledge of a lost treasure for life.

If we consider the different representations of the human soul and its being as they have appeared in the time in which the scientific way of thinking already had an impact, we realise that two of the most important questions, which were typical of the old doctrine of the soul, have disappeared almost from the scientifically oriented view of the soul. These two main questions are the question of immortality and the question of freedom. I have spoken in the last talks to what extent the question of immortality had to disappear more and more from the horizon of modern science, and I have already said that it should be my task today to approach the soul problem from the viewpoint of an at least sketchy consideration of the human freedom.

If natural sciences extend their way of thinking to the soul, they must focus their attention at first to what extent the soul has its basis in the bodily of the human being. However, this scientific view completely depends on considering the course of the outer processes causally, also of the soul processes as they take place in time. The scientific way of thinking can consider the soul only in the closest connection with the body. However, the body completely belongs to the material coherence of the outer world. The scientific way of thinking finds laws of this coherence. Nevertheless, these laws lead away from any consideration of the human soul life.

I would like to bring in one example only, while natural sciences took possession more and more of the consideration of the soul life, they also tried to apply their laws to the consideration of the soul. There they cannot but consider how a human action, how a human will impulse, how everything that the human being undertakes from his soul flows out of his bodily experience. They must experiment in their way as they are accustomed in their scientific field, and they feel deeply contented if they find with their experiments that also the soul life does not break what is ascertained scientifically for the outer natural life. One has only to consider such a thing that physiologists have experimentally found the amount of energy which the human being or the animal have taken up with their food is the amount of energy which the human being or the animal develop if they have emotions. The biologist Max Rubner (1854-1932) experimented with animals where he could show that everything that expresses itself as power in movements, in actions of animals is nothing but calculable energy of the food that they have taken up. Atwater (Wilbur Olin A., 1844-1907) carried out experiments that show that this law also applies to the human being. Everything that we exert in the work with movement and the like can be calculated as a transformation product of that what we take up materially with food as energy and transform it into warmth and the like in ourselves.

Thus, natural sciences trace the soul life back to the so-called principle of conservation of energy. They cannot but say from their viewpoint: where should something mental intervene of its own accord in the human being, create anything new like by a miracle if one can prove that everything that is active from the human being outwardly is only a transformation product of that what the human being takes up from the world? If the human emotion is that what the body has taken up in itself, then the principle of conservation of energy is fulfilled. Nowhere a new force appears; everything that appears as energy is only something that was already there. One cannot say if the human being accomplishes a so-called free, arbitrary action, it comes out of his soul, because then as if a new force would join the forces out of the blue which are already there.

Of course, someone who has familiarised himself with scientific mental pictures feels such a thing as a closed line of thought. Because this is in such a way, anthroposophy that wants to extend scientific severity to the spiritual area has a hard time. But not from some abstract sentences, but from the whole spirit of that what I have to bring forward in these talks should arise that anthroposophy does not contradict natural sciences, but that it continues and develops these natural sciences completely, although it follows a way from the sense-perceptible area to the spiritual life.

However, it meets countless prejudices there. As an anthroposophist, one knows best of all how enchanting prejudices are and how they evoke opposition. Since “proofs,” as one knows them in the usual science and in the usual life, absolutely exist within anthroposophy; but one has to understand them different from the “proofs” of the usual science. Above all that what one wants to investigate is a given. Nobody can deny that the world of the senses puts questions to us. This is not the case with anthroposophy. There the world itself must be disclosed first, about which one has to talk. Hence, a lot of the validity of anthroposophy depends on the fact that one realises: the preparatory work in the own soul that the spiritual researcher has carried out is necessary to come into the world at which he wants to look.

In science, one works on a certain basis, and then only the intellectual activity begins. In anthroposophy, the soul has to work at first, and its work is not something that finds laws about other things, but its work is something at first by which it prepares itself to observe what it concerns in the spiritual world, actually.

There one recognises that for the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science the following must be demanded what the present acknowledges only reluctantly: if one wants to attain insight of the supersensible world, one has to develop the appropriate abilities in the soul. Then it is possible to develop abilities from the undifferentiated human soul that lead to the view of the spiritual world.

Today I do not want to go into this preparation. Today I would like to refer only to my books, in particular to my writings How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and Occult Science. An Outline, in which I have shown what the soul has to carry out with itself, so that it becomes able to perceive in the spiritual world. It can attain this ability only if it makes its inner being independent from the body. Because I do not want to be repetitive, I will today not speak of how one attains such abilities. I would like only to state something of the peculiarities of this spiritual way into the supersensible area.

I would like to pronounce a truth which appears weird at first, concerning this way. The spiritual researcher must develop abilities of a path of knowledge that refers to things, which every human being would like to do the object of his consideration unless some scientific or other prejudices retain him from it. The everlasting of the soul, the nature of the human freedom and everything that is associated with it are questions for every human being. The old instinctive knowledge dealt with them. The spiritual-scientific knowledge has to go such a path of knowledge, which refers to something that everybody desires. However, the ways into this supersensible area are less popular, are almost rejected because of certain peculiarities of the human nature. There one has to consider the following in particular.

Forming mental pictures and concepts we are used to founding them on something essential that approaches us regardless of these mental pictures and concepts. We are connected as physical human beings with that which exists about which we form our mental pictures to which they refer. However, we are not immediately connected with that what the supersensible knowledge refers to. Hence, this supersensible knowledge makes use of a bigger strength of the soul than the knowledge of the sense-perceptible outside world that just is there from the start. Many people shrink from this inner strengthening of the soul life because it does not immediately refer to a being and appears as something fantastic. One can understand very well that someone who does not penetrate deeper into the matter considers the mental pictures and concepts of spiritual science as fantasy pictures because he is accustomed only to accept the mental pictures of the physical reality. However, that of the supersensible world in which the human being is interested above all must be grasped in such mental pictures of the supersensible cognition, which must be pulled out of the depths of the soul. This can happen only with stronger forces than they are necessary in the everyday life.

In the today's talk, I do not want to speak how one investigates them, but how they are in a certain respect.

The human being is used: if he forms a mental picture of something that proceeds as it were in reality, he just has a picture of something real; then he can remember it; it remains in his memory. This is a peculiarity of our usual imagining, which gives us life security, so that we can keep that, what depicts the outer world. If the spiritual researcher brings up those forces from the depths of his soul that enable him to behold into the supersensible world, he can look with the “beholding consciousness” as I have called this ability in my book The Riddle of Man. However, if he wanted to keep the beheld in mind in the same way as something of the outer sense-perceptible world, he would do a vain attempt at first. Experiences of the spiritual world, experiences that refer to the everlasting, to the immortal of our soul can be recognised with supersensible cognitive forces; but they cannot be added to the memory, they are fugitive as dreams are and are forgotten straight away.

Now you may say, may one consider this knowledge generally only as results of a fugitive dream?—One has to say, definitely yes, in a certain sense! Now the following is valid: one has to prepare the whole soul condition in a way to be able to behold into the supersensible realm; one must cause such an inner constitution every time anew so that the vision can appear. One can remember the activities that one carries out in the soul. If one has attained an insight of this or that event or being of the spiritual world, one knows which exercises one has to carry out, so that this vision can take place. Should this vision take place again after some time, one has to produce the same conditions in the soul. One can remember these conditions. What one beholds has to appear again anew. This is a big difference compared with the usual knowledge.

The spiritual researcher cannot experience something once—as paradox as it sounds—, and learn it by heart to bring it back to life again in himself like a memory.

No, if he wants to face the same spiritual being or the same spiritual event again, then he has to cause the opportunity in himself to experience it again. As weird as it sounds, if the spiritual researcher speaks of the most elementary truths—for example, during five successive days to any audience—, and he wants to speak in such a way that the spoken comes immediately from the spiritual experience, then he must do this spiritual experience every time anew. I want to express with it that one of the most important laws of our spiritual experience is: while our sensory images seem—it only seems so—, as if they could emerge later again from memory, as if they were a spiritual possession, this does not at all apply to the praxis of spiritual knowledge. One has to attain spiritual knowledge always anew.

Why do I explain just this? I would especially like to point out here that the appropriation of the spiritual-scientific way is by no means a necessity for everybody who wants to deal with spiritual science. Indeed, today it is a general aspiration to get to know to a certain degree what one should believe; and in this respect, it is justified if those who hear about spiritual science and its results ask, how can I myself conceive of such things?—However, the essentials of the relation of the human being to spiritual science are not at all that one becomes a spiritual researcher. Since the spiritual-scientific way can give life something, and the immortal life, too, only if that which appears in the vision is transformed into usual concepts. The spiritual researcher could be an ever so sophisticated being concerning supersensible knowledge, as a human being he would have nothing over any other human being because of his vision; since everything that takes place in this vision is only a way, is not the goal. The goal is to transform that what is attained with the vision into human concepts, in those mental pictures, which we have just attained in the outer sense-perceptible world even if a lot must seem to be pictorial what we express with such mental pictures attained in the sense-perceptible world.

Unless anybody wants to become a spiritual researcher, he could adopt what the spiritual researcher finds with his research. The results which he gets are clear for themselves if one is only enough unbiased. The possession of this knowledge in the usual human imagination—not in the supersensible beholding—constitutes the real treasure for life. The spiritual researcher would have nothing of his spiritual research if he wanted to indulge himself only in the supersensible beholding; this would be more transient than the usual outer sensory results. The point is that the transient vision is transformed into usual mental pictures. The soul can take them with it if it enters another spiritual life after death. You cannot take the visions as such with you, only that which the vision brings.

I have to say this once with any sharpness because even with many persons who are within the anthroposophic movement the prejudice prevails, as if a withdrawal from the outer world, from life, or a mystic deepening is important. That is not the point. The point is that one finds with certain soul exercises what applies to the supersensible world and that it can be transformed into usual human concepts. Nevertheless, it is entitled if the desire exists that everybody wants to behold into the spiritual world to a certain degree.

Literature accommodates this wish. This just corresponds to a demand of our time to believe not only, but to behold independently. However, this is not the central issue. When I have described the path of knowledge in detail with which one enters in the spiritual world, it is first to satisfy the mentioned needs, secondly, however, mainly because the spiritual researcher has to regard as a goal to give an account of how he has come to his truths.

Then, however, also that who reads such a writing as, for example, How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? or the second part of my Occult Science, can realise from the way, how the spiritual researcher describes the spiritual-scientific path that it does not concern any speculative fiction but a real entering into the supersensible world. He can realise as it were how an account is given of a reality.

This is something again that one has to add to the fact that in many respects the proofs that the spiritual researcher has to adduce have to be different from usual. The spiritual researcher has just to claim that one acknowledges the entitlement of the way that he gives bit by bit and which leads into the spiritual world. However, if he emphasises such a special peculiarity of the vision as the just suggested one is—that the beholding into the spiritual world does not at all comply with our usual soul life—, then I do this just because I want to characterise the supersensible world which you enter there.

For the usual soul life it is typical that we keep in mind what we have taken up once from the sense-perceptible world; this does not apply to the vision. While I pronounce such a thing, I point to the fact that the existence in the spiritual world is quite different from the existence in the sense-perceptible world. I state peculiarities of the spiritual world as it were; I show that one enters into a world that does not at all combine with our body as the sense-perceptible world combines with it. The sense-perceptible world combines in such a way if we perceive it with our body that we can keep the percepts in mind. The spiritual world is so far away from our body that it does not cause the changes in our body that induce memories.

This is just a peculiarity of the spiritual world that you have to consider. The right knowledge of this peculiarity is just a proof, that you are with the vision in a world that is not at all concerned with our body. That is why it is completely entitled to say, while everything that is perceived in the body causes memories more or less, that which is perceived if the soul is beyond the body, like in the vision, does not cause any memories because it is only related to our supersensible soul, not to our body.

Other peculiarities of the supersensible world are also mentioned for the same reason and in the same sense. In the usual sense-perceptible world, the matter is as follows: if you repeat a mental picture over and over again—how much educational is based on it!—, then it becomes more familiar to us, we can keep them better in mind, it combines better with our soul. The opposite is the case for what we experience in the spiritual area. As weird as it sounds, one can almost say, if I have a spiritual experience and I try to have it once again, it is not easier but more difficult. One cannot exercise to get spiritual experiences better and better.

With it something very typical is connected. There are persons who strain to get insights of the spiritual world by certain soul exercises. Forces slumbering in the depths of every soul are called that way. Thereby once a blissful, often great experience takes place, fugitive like a dream. It may not appear again for a second or third time even if the person concerned makes any effort to cause the same soul condition again. One can almost say, a right spiritual experience escapes from us if it has been there once, and we must make stronger efforts if we want to get it again.

Often those are surprised who have made the first efforts that a very significant spiritual experience does not always re-appear. I also bring in this to show how the experiences of the seer are quite different from the experiences that one has in the sense-perceptible world.

Another peculiarity is the following: you feel, while you advance in spiritual knowledge, that you have to cope with the events that face you spiritually with the ripe state of your power of imagination if you do not want to get to fantastic images. Hence, you have to realise that the preparation for the vision is of particular importance. You must already have developed a ripe and versatile power of imagination, so that you can cope with the spiritual experiences. This is again completely different from the usual sense-perceptible world. There this area of perception is spread out before us; we get more and more images of this area; we enrich our images with it. After we have had the perception, we enrich our mental pictures. With the spiritual experiences, it is just the opposite: We have first to make our mental pictures rich and versatile, so that they are prepared if we want to have supersensible experiences. This is something else than it is in the usual life and in the usual science.

With that, I wanted to indicate that the way leads us to quite different experiences and percepts in the supersensible area. Many people shrink from this other kind of perceiving, from this quite different kind of having concepts and mental pictures. Hence, spiritual science will depend, above all, on the fact that the human beings again find courage and strength to form such mental pictures that are not borne by the available sense-perceptible world.

However, mainly the scientific way of thinking develops these mental pictures. Because it has achieved great results, it has led the human beings away from the spiritual cognition for a while. Nevertheless, it will lead them back again to this spiritual cognition. Just because it points always to the material and the human beings also see through the material more and more, they will be urged to acknowledge that one has to search the spiritual in another way.

There I would like to show using certain research results of spiritual science how human knowledge will generally become something else if bit by bit the spiritual science intervenes in the pursuit for knowledge. Those listeners who listen to me more often know that I speak about something personal only reluctantly. However, I would like to indicate something because it is associated as it were with that which I have to argue: what I say now about the relation of soul and mind to the body is the result of my research for more than thirty years. Since in the spiritual area one does not obtain the things as in the laboratory one can infer from any object or any process what is to be said about it if one has developed the method. The spiritual research proceeds mainly in time. It concerns that then only one conceives of certain things if one can relate experiences with each other that are widely separated in terms of time.

The progress of the usual scientific knowledge and of the usual consciousness to the spiritual-scientific knowledge can be compared with the unmusical listening of single tones and the musical understanding of melodies or harmonies. If one hears a single tone, it is a perception just of this single tone; it is a single experience. If one wants to enter into the world of music, the single tone is to be related to other tones, and then it becomes what it is only because it is related to other tones. In the usual percipience, the soul relates to a sensory outside world. This one can compare with the perception of the single tone. In the spiritual cognition, the soul has to relate to that what proceeds in time. I want to indicate only that it is, for example, of big importance that the spiritual researcher is able to experience that which he experiences in his soul today not only as a single event of the immediate present existence but that he can relate it to an experience which maybe dates back a year as well as a tone of a melody relates to another tone of the melody if a musical conception should be there.

As one is connected by the usual percipience with the soul, with something spatial, one is connected by the spiritual experience at first with the present experience, relates it then to something that is brought up vividly from the past. One looks from an event of the past at a present experience and then from an event which is even further away. While looking within time, the soul experiences are structured, so that one may say, the usual cognition becomes something like a musical overview of the mental.

The soul is thereby not only enabled to adopt what it experiences in the body. But it relates what it experiences and remembers between birth and death—like the ear relates a tone to another in a melody—, to that which is there before birth or conception and which is there after death. However, the soul has to prepare itself for it while it relates single experiences like the tones of a melody to each other within the life between birth and death; it not only lives through the single experiences, but also extends the experience over time and experiences the different gradations, the differentiations in time like inner music.

What also appears is not only inner music, but also something that is like inner reading or listening of words where one hears not only tones which relate to other tones of melodies or harmonies, but also express a sense. Then that will originate for the spiritual researcher which I can characterise in such a way that I say, the usual scientific consideration looks at the things as one would look at a printed page if one described the form of the letters only. This method, applied to nature, is natural sciences. This is a description of the letters. The spiritual researcher learns to read. He goes adrift completely from reading letters. What he finds in nature as something supersensible relates to that what is spread out in nature before the senses like the sense of something read and heard that one takes in to the single tones that form the words, or to the single letters that are printed on paper.

However, this depends on an inner progress to which one also comes if one is not an esoteric student, but if one only grasps the concepts and mental pictures of spiritual research. One gets to know the world as it were in its real harmony; one gets to know the sense that is behind this “sounding” world, comparatively spoken.

In such a way, something has arisen to me spiritual-scientifically in the course of more than three decades that I would like to pronounce as the coherence of the mental-spiritual with the bodily that will also arise to natural sciences, which are still far away from it in the next time. Since spiritual research and natural sciences will meet each other in the middle, spiritual research from the spiritual side, natural sciences from the material side.

What I have to bring forward I have found spiritual-scientifically. However, already the modern natural sciences, physiology and biology, offer sufficient opportunity to harden completely what I have now to bring forward as a spiritual-scientific result. Considering the coherence of the soul with the body one cherishes, I would almost like to say, a fateful one-sidedness.

If you take a textbook of psychology, you will realise that you find a consideration of the nervous system as introduction. This is completely entitled from the scientific point of view. One can absolutely say, the naturalist can only relate the soul unilaterally to the nervous system. An entire consideration of life proves something else, namely that only one part of the mental experience may be directly related to the nervous system, namely only the imagining activity. So that we can say, the whole imagining activity finds—we use the term—its physical counter-image in the nervous system.

The nervous system is the physical basis of the imagining activity, but not of the emotional life. The scientific psychologists put the emotional life in second place. Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950) does not regard—rightly from his point of view—the emotional life as something independent; he speaks only of the “emotional emphasis of the mental pictures.” Every mental picture would have as it were an “emotional nuance.” This contradicts the usual soul experiences. For these the emotional life is as real as the imagining activity. It is not only any “emotional nuance” of our mental pictures, but the emotional life develops beside the imagining activity. If one relates this emotional life directly to the nervous life as the imagining activity refers to it, one commits an error. Since as the imagining activity is directly associated with the nervous system, the emotional life is directly associated with all rhythmical processes of respiration and blood circulation especially with the subtler ramifications of the rhythmical system. These rhythmical processes are the physical basis of the emotional life.

I know very well that numerous objections may arise if I pronounce such a thing. I cannot come on everything, but I would like to mention one thing only, bring in one example only how one has—indeed, much more precisely than the “exact” science—to bear down on these things if one wants to recognise them in their true figure.

There, for example, somebody could say, oh well, there comes somebody and explains amateurishly that the emotional life seizes the rhythmical processes in the body as directly as the imagining activity seizes the nervous life. Does he not know that, for example, if any musical impression takes place in us, we take it in with the ear that it is delivered at first as an image that in this living in the musical image the aesthetic experience is contained that it is nonsense to say, the feeling, which is connected with a musical impression, is not a result of the imagining activity?

I know that this objection, actually, must be generally valid for the today's mental pictures; however, it is not valid for the reality. We have only to realise that that which we take in as the sound picture with our ear is not yet the musical experience. It becomes musical experience only if the sound image is coming up to meet what reaches the brain from the ramifications of the respiratory rhythm. The rhythm of breathing, which reaches the brain, meets the sound image, which penetrates into the brain; it is the bodily counter-image of the musical impression. The whole emotional life is originally associated with the rhythmical life in our body.

Thirdly, we have the will in our soul. As well as the imagining activity is associated with the nervous life, the emotional life is associated with the rhythmical interplay of the forces which originate from the respiratory rhythm and from the blood rhythm, any will impulse is associated with metabolism. As weird as it sounds, all will processes are directly expressed in metabolic processes. I have published these scientific results in my last book The Riddles of the Soul for the first time, indeed, in a shorter form because of the present paper shortage.

However, one has to envisage that the nervous system, the rhythmical system, and the metabolic system are not next to each other in the organism. The nerves must be also nourished, of course. So that perpetually food processes take place in the nerves. Of course, all organs of the rhythmical movements must be nourished, too

Three members of the organism penetrate each other. But a precise research shows that that which is metabolism, for example, in the nerves has nothing to do with imagining but with the will process, which extends also into the imagining. Of course, if I want to imagine anything, I will imagine it; directing my attention upon the imagining is already a will process.

The embryonic state that is associated with the will is also associated with the metabolism in the nervous system. But the essentials of imagining are connected with processes which have nothing to do with the metabolism, but, on the contrary, which deal with a metabolic destruction which deal with something in the nerves that can be compared not with metabolism, but rather with a withdrawal of metabolism, with the emergence of hunger. Save that, one deals with a destruction in the nervous system that must not be confused with the destruction in the whole organism.

Such mistakes have happened. Just while I point to such mistakes, I can emphasise the characteristic of anthroposophy compared with older and even today-approved spiritual currents. Who does not know that what the new spiritual science attempts to attain with inner soul exercises which are not concerned with anything bodily, one tried to attain in former times on such ways which were much concerned with all kinds of bodily performances, with asceticism. Think only that certain mystics produced their union with the spirit by starving, by destruction of the organism. True spiritual research has nothing to do with those ways. However, spiritual research must point to the fact that a destruction that is not abnormal but normal, takes place in the nervous system if the imagining should find its expression by the nervous system. I have pointed out in the talk that I have here held weeks ago that the consciousness that one experiences in the imagining activity is associated with death. I have even pronounced the sentence: while we are imagining, we die down perpetually in the nervous system.

Only if such mental pictures are formed, natural sciences will be able to meet spiritual research. Hence, we have to say, the tripartite soul life, imagining, feeling, and willing, is connected with the whole body, not only with a part of the body; since the whole body is involved with its three organic members, the nervous system, the rhythmical system and the metabolic system. Our soul life is not unilaterally connected with our nervous system, but the whole soul finds its expression in the whole body. This is a result of spiritual science that thinking, feeling, and willing have their counterparts in the body.

However, just as these three members of the human soul life have their bodily counterparts, they have their spiritual counterparts. As imagining is connected with the nervous system, it is connected with something spiritual that can only be grasped with spiritual cognition, which I have called the Imaginative knowledge. It is the first level of spiritual knowledge, the first level of the beholding in the spiritual world.

As well as we find the nervous system as a bodily counterpart of the imagining activity, we find the imagining activity arising from something spiritual that can only be grasped with the first level of supersensible beholding with the so-called Imaginative knowledge. In a reality that appears in pictures, one can recognise what corresponds spiritually to the imagining activity. At the same time, we face what penetrates our whole existence from birth or conception until death as body of formative forces. While the substances of our physical body are substituted perpetually, the uniform body of formative forces that is at the same time the spiritual basis of our imagining activity remains to us from birth until death.

Let us consider the emotional life. To the bodily side it is connected with the respiratory rhythm and the blood rhythm; on the other side it is associated spiritually with something spiritual that can be grasped on a higher level of vision that I have called the Inspired knowledge in my writings, which does no longer need pictures, but arises without pictures in the supersensible world. However, if this spiritual origin of our emotional life is figured out with supersensible knowledge, it is not that which extends from birth to death, but which we possess in the spiritual world, before we go by birth to the bodily life with which we walk through the gate of death. Since uniting spiritually with that what forms the spiritual basis of the emotional life means: extending the vision beyond birth and death.

In such a way as our will life is associated with the metabolism of the body, it is associated with the highest that the human being can attain in vision, with that what I have called Intuitive cognition. I do not mean the usual washed out intuition, but that what I have characterised in my books as an Intuitive knowledge: I have called the real settling in the spiritual world Intuitive knowledge. This is the highest spiritual level that the human being can attain.

Now the strange appears: while the metabolism is the lowest of the body side, is that what spiritually corresponds to the will the highest that forms the basis of our being. What we have to acknowledge as the highest between birth and death, the nervous system that corresponds to the imagining activity is based on the lowest of the spiritual world, namely that what one can attain with Imaginative knowledge.

The human being realises one thing in particular if he gets to know the relationship of his spiritual-mental with this spiritual to be grasped with Intuition. However, I can characterise this only in the following way. It is not only anything that one experiences in the vision but something that every human being can experience who understands the results of spiritual research with common sense. If one accepts these spiritual-scientific results really, one gets to know what spirit is, then this means something special. This event may be described because it intervenes as something particular in the soul, this event that wakes our internal consciousness for the first time: now I know what, actually, spirit is what the everlasting is in my soul.

One can call this experience only in such a way that one says, it is an inner karmic experience. The whole human life changes possibly, gets another direction under the influence of this experience which makes known itself in the fact that we know what spirit is in us. We thereby do not need getting dull towards other karmic experiences. Indeed, we experience events in the outer life where we are on top of the world or down in the dumps. The spiritual researcher does not want to get dull towards these experiences. On the contrary, he becomes more sensitive of them because he also figures out the spiritual side of all that.

Whatever meets him in the outer life, the intervention of that what is the experience of the spirit, of the everlasting in itself is a bigger break in life, a more radical karmic situation. One recognises with it how one causes karma, because one must cause spiritual knowledge with own forces as one causes twists and turns in life, while spiritual knowledge becomes a vital question of the very first degree. This gives the understanding of the remaining human destiny, but also full understanding of Intuition. Then one notices with which the human will is associated on the spiritual side.

Then one evokes a force by such a karmic intervention in the soul life that does not only lead the supersensible cognition to that which appears in the life between birth and death, not only to that what takes place in the life between death and a new birth but to that everlasting-spiritual core that works in the repeated lives on earth. What the human being represents in his innermost core, he recognises it as associated with the impulses which have been there in former lives on earth. What he experiences now as destiny, while he performs own actions, becomes to him if the knowledge has become destiny, in such a way that he also knows it as basis of the following life on earth.

With the coherence of the tripartite soul life one gets to know the transient in the human being. With the relation of these three soul members with the spiritual one gets to know the immortal, the everlasting that goes through births and deaths, so that one surveys this entire human life which proceeds in successive lives on earth and in intermediate spiritual lives between death and a new birth. Thus, one beholds into the everlasting in the human life other than with philosophical speculations.

Not with conceptual analysis or conceptual synthesis spiritual research attempts to lead into that everlasting while it evokes the view of this everlasting. What we are as temporal-bodily beings has developed from the everlasting which consists of the Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive part, as our body consists of the nervous system, the rhythmical system and metabolism.

These are some research results about the everlasting in the human soul. The human freedom can only be attributed to this everlasting. The naturalist must stop within the transient experience: in the nervous system, in the rhythmical system that he does not at all investigate even in this respect, and in the metabolism that he confuses with the nervous life even today, while he also looks in the metabolism for the basis of the nervous life. The naturalist must stop within this material life. Hence, he also finds something for every act of volition that produces this act of volition. However, if one recognises the everlasting in the soul, one recognises that this everlasting has contents in itself which are independent of the bodily life, then that becomes reality which one experiences as freedom internally. Why?

Well, I have just explained in the last talks and in the today's one that in us a destructive process must take place that consciousness is similar in a way to death that there are death processes in the nervous system if we form a conscious mental picture. However, thereby it arises to spiritual research that not everything that belongs to the soul being is an outflow of the bodily being, but that the bodily being is only the basis of the soul experience and that this soul experience finds just its basis in the bodily life if this bodily life does not develop its growing forces, but if these growing forces are diminished. Processes of degeneration in us form the basis of the conscious soul life. Natural sciences will discover that this truth complies absolutely with the scientific results.

I point only to the fact that the nerve cells are not divisible, for example, while the reproductive cells are divisible. The typical abilities of the growing cells have just been diminished in the nerve cells and in the red blood cells for the same reason. No plant-like growing corresponds in the body to the conscious life but destructive processes. So that—where in us conscious life should develop—the bodily life must be deleted first.

Spiritual science recognises the soul life in its independence. With it, the concept of freedom gets a sense only, and it becomes completely compatible with the concept that natural sciences develop completely rightly in their area, with the concept: that our organism causes everything that appears in our actions, in our will impulses. These scientific mental pictures exist completely rightly.

Nevertheless, the organism just causes,—just because it serves as basis of the consciousness—that it annihilates its processes that it withdraws compared with the conscious processes. With it, the concept of freedom gets sense that we can characterise possibly in the following way with a comparison: the child is physically a result of the parents; but it goes adrift from the parents. If we look for the causes, we have to search them with the parents. However, if the child has grown up and acts independently, we cannot always ascribe its actions and that what it is to the parents. If the child carries out this or that, after it is thirty years old, we do not ascribe the causes to the parents. Thus, the spiritual life goes adrift from the bodily life, so that the law of the conservation of energy is accomplished after any causality. However, as with the child the cause is in the parents, and the child grows up and becomes independent, the soul life evolves into the independence from the body in which are the causes of the soul life.

With it, I have pointed out comparatively how the concept of freedom receives a sense, while we do not explain this soul life from the bodily conditions, but from the independent spiritual life that goes through births and deaths. We can ascribe freedom to this spiritual-mental being. Freedom was philosophically treated always in such a way that one spoke of either-or: either the human being is free, or he is not free. I have already shown in my Philosophy of Freedom that one copes with the concept of freedom if one envisages the independent soul life. However, this independent soul life is only gradually gained in the course of the physical human development. One cannot say that the human being is either free or is not free. One can only say that freedom is something that the human being acquires in the course of his development that he approaches it more and more. He approaches it, while he supplies the forces to the internal spiritual-mental being, which strengthen it in such a way that it can develop causality for the human action, for the human will.

This is a weird contradiction, isn't it? On one side, one states that from the body between birth and death everything has to come that the human being puts into his action; on the other side the independent free soul life is claimed.

I would like to bring to mind again by a comparison what it concerns. Let us assume that we have an air-evacuated container. The air flows into it if we open this container.

The free human decision is related in this way to an intended action. The following will already turn out by spiritual research: if the human being does not follow the impulses of his instincts, but that what I have called the purely spiritual impulses in my Philosophy of Freedom to which he has to bring himself. Then he does not let that willing immediately take place which originates from bodily causes. Indeed, the free action also takes place in such a way that bodily causes are there. However, these bodily causes are first prepared in such a way that the free concept, the free mental picture spiritually creates a void as it were, and the effect on our body follows that action which is completely conceived by our soul. As the air streams from without into the void after purely natural causes, the body carries that out according to its laws, which are now purely scientific ones, what was prepared only in it, while the free soul decision created the basis.

Tomorrow we will build on this concept of freedom, and then I will still explain it further. I wanted to show how the concept of freedom is only conceivable if one rises by spiritual research to that soul life which is independent of the bodily life. The free action only originates from the Intuitive, Inspired, and Imaginative parts of the human being.

What arises from spiritual science for the social-moral concepts that are for our tragic present of so big significance what arises for legal concepts, for the outer social life, I want to explain tomorrow. Today I only wanted to show that anthroposophy can absolutely compete concerning the seriousness and the precision of its research with natural sciences. However, I also wanted to show that for the spirit quite different ways must be taken that spiritual research itself throws its light also on nature that the whole spiritual-mental human being is assigned to the whole physical human being, his nervous system, rhythmical system and metabolism. Just because spiritual science will work with natural sciences in harmony, something great will arise for the progress of humanity.

Today one often likes to refer to Goethe. I have said in the last talk here that I would like to call my spiritual science “Goetheanism” and the building in Dornach “Goetheanum.”

The young Goethe already looked at nature not as anything that can be exhausted by such mental pictures as the modern monistic or similar worldviews have them. However, Goethe already appealed as a young man to nature in his prose hymn Nature: “She has thought and is continuously reflecting.” Spiritual science does not at all struggle for words. If anybody wants to call that “nature” what consists of matter and spirit in the world and looks for the spirit in nature only, then he may call the whole universe “nature.” If he goes so far like Goethe saying: “Nature thinks and is continuously reflecting”—even if not as a human being, but as nature, then already the concept of spirit is included for such a thinker like Goethe in the concept of nature.

To those who would like to derive from this recognition of the concept of nature that the Goethean view is consistent with any view of the limits of knowledge that one cannot penetrate into the spiritual world one has to answer repeatedly as Goethe did to the very meritorious physiologist Albrecht Haller (1708-1777) who was absolutely right from his viewpoint saying:

“No created mind penetrates

Into the being of nature.

Blissful is that to whom she shows

Her appearance only!”

Goethe protested against this naturalist. By his protest, he made clear that the human being can find those cognitive forces in himself that do not put the spirit as something unfathomable to him, but as something into which he can enter gradually with industrious, exact spiritual research. Since Goethe argued in old age against Haller's words on basis of a matured knowledge:

O you Philistine!

Do not remind me

And my brothers and sisters

Of such a word.

We think: everywhere we are inside.

“Blissful is that to whom she shows

Her appearance only!”

I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,

I grumble about it, but covertly,

I say to myself thousand and thousand times:

She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;

Nature has neither kernel nor shell,

She is everything at the same time.

Examine yourself above all,

Whether you are kernel or shell.

These words make us aware of the true Goetheanism, which acknowledges the possibility to penetrate with the human mind into the spirit of the universe and to recognise the immortality and freedom of the human nature.

Tomorrow, I would like to speak how necessary it is for our practical life to envisage such social ideas that originate from spiritual research to show that spiritual research is an uninvited guest only for those who attribute no other needs to the human being than those, which can be satisfied with the mechanistic knowledge. If one still gets to know other needs of the human being, one will also recognise the necessity of spiritual research in the social-moral area.

Let us recall a number of things that are already quite familiar and use them as a starting point for important considerations. In a sense these will continue the theme I discussed some days ago.

We know that there are four major aspects to the human being and that human beings may be characterized as possessing a physical body, a life body, an astral or sentient body, and an ego. We also know that we can only really understand human beings if we add other aspects to these four. Essentially the first four refer to aspects that are fully developed at the present time. Three more have to be added—the spirit-self, the life-spirit, and the spirit-man. We know, however, that these three aspects of human nature are such that we cannot consider them to be fully developed at the present time. We can merely refer to them as future potentials inherent in human beings.

We may say that we now have a physical body and so forth, going as far as the ego, and that in time to come we shall have a spirit-self, a life-spirit and a spirit-man. We know from the anthroposophical literature that is already available that those different aspects of the human being are connected with the whole cosmos and with cosmic evolution. In a sense we relate the physical body to the earliest embodiment of this earth, which we call Ancient Saturn. The life body relates to the Ancient Sun, the astral body to the Ancient Moon, and the principle we call our I or ego relates essentially to the earth as it is at present.

What do we mean when we say that we relate to the ego we bear to the present earth? It means that inherent in the elements of the earth, the forces of the earth that are known to us—or perhaps not known to us—is the principle that activates the ego. Our ego is intimately bound up with the forces of the earth.

If you consider the whole evolution of the human being you will find that human nature as we know it today relates largely to the past—the physical body to a far distant past, to Ancient Saturn, the life body to the time of the Ancient Sun, and so forth, and that our ego is not yet fully developed but in its essential nature relates to the present earth. This immediately suggests that the elements we refer to as spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man do not in fact have their basis in the earthly realm. As human beings we have the potential to evolve into spirit-man, life-spirit and spirit-self, and this means that we have something in us that needs to be developed to go beyond this earthly realm; we will have to develop it without taking the earthly realm as our guide. As human beings we are part of this earth and our mission is in the first place to achieve full ego development; to some extent we have already developed it. The forces of the earth, the intrinsic nature of the earth, served as our guide in developing the ego to the extent to which we have now developed it. We shall continue with this development for the rest of Earth evolution, deepening and to some extent enhancing what has developed so far, and for this we shall be indebted to the earth and its forces. Yet we also have to say to ourselves that if we were entirely dependent on the earth and its forces in developing our essential human nature, we would never be able to develop a spirit-man, a life-spirit and a spirit-self. The earth has nothing to give in that respect; it is only able to help us develop the ego. With reference to human nature, therefore, the earth must be seen as something that cannot in itself make us into full human beings. We are on this earth and we have to go beyond it. Anthroposophical literature makes reference to this by showing that our evolution depends on the earth being succeeded by Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods. During those periods we will have to achieve full development of the spirit-self, life-spirit- and spirit-man also in outer terms.

At present, however, we are on this earth. We have to develop on this earth. The earth cannot give us everything we need to develop, in order that in future times we may progress to spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. If we had to depend on the earth for everything we have to develop in ourselves we would have to do without spirit-self, life-spirit-and spirit-man.

It is easy to say such things in theory, but it is not enough to put such thoughts forward as mere theories. They will only really touch us as human beings if we allow them to take hold of the whole human being; if we come to feel the whole weight and burden of the riddle which lies in our having to say to ourselves: ‘As human beings we are on this earth. We look around us. None of the many things the earth has to give—its beauty and its ugliness, its pain and suffering—none of the ways in which it can shape our destiny can provide what we need to become full human being.’ There must be a longing in us that goes beyond anything the earth can give. This is something we must feel, something that must bring light and warmth into all the ideals we are capable of holding. We must be able to ask ourselves in all seriousness and very profoundly: ‘What shall we do, seeing that we have only the earth around us, and yet must progress to something for which this earth cannot serve as a guide?’ We must be able to experience, to feel, the full gravity of this question. In a sense we should already be able to say to ourselves that the earth is not enough for our needs, and that as human beings we will have to grow beyond this earthly realm.

Anthroposophy will be only be able to serve human beings rightly if they are able to ask themselves questions like these and really feel it; if they are aware of the gravity of such inner questions of destiny. Being aware of their gravity we can be guided in the right way to return to the Mystery of Golgotha, that has been so much part of the last two talks we have had. We may be guided back to the Mystery of Golgotha and we may be guided to consider again the event that is to happen in this century, during the first half of the 20th century, and will be like a spiritualized Mystery of Golgotha. Whenever the Mystery of Golgotha was discussed it had to be stressed that the Christ is definitely not of the earth and that the Christ entered into an earthly body from spheres beyond this earth—doing so at exactly the right moment, as it were. In the Christ something united with this earth that came from outside, from beyond this earth. If we really experience the Christ we are able to join our own essential nature to this principle from beyond the earth, and in this way gain an energy principle; a principle that will give inner strength, filling us with inner warmth and light. This will take us beyond the earthly realm because it has not itself originated in that realm; because the Christ has come to earth from spheres beyond the earth.

We look with longing to the spheres beyond this earth because we have to say to ourselves: Longing to become complete human beings—to develop the spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man which we shall have to develop in the future—we survey the earth and say to ourselves that the earthly realm itself does not contain what we need to develop our own nature and take it beyond the earth. We must turn our eyes away from the earthly realm and look to the principle that has come into the earthly realm from beyond the earth. We must look to the Christ and say to ourselves: The Christ has brought to earth the non-earthly forces that can help us to develop aspects that the earth can never help us to develop. We must take hold, with the whole of our being, of what to begin with is more in form of concepts, of ideas. We must use this to help us recognize the Christ as the One who has come to redeem our humanity. We must come to recognize Him as the spirit who will make it possible that we do not need to stay united with the earthly realm, we might say; that we will not be buried on earth, as it were, for all eternity, with the potential of development beyond this earth remaining undeveloped. When we thus come to see Christ as the One who will redeem our essential human nature, when we are able to see the way this world is made and come to feel there must be something within this earthly realm that will take us beyond it, when we feel that it is He who will lead us to become complete human beings—then we feel the power of Christ within us. And we really must come to realize that we cannot seriously speak of progressive development to spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man unless we are aware that there is no point in speaking of these things unless we appeal to the Christ, for the Christ is the principle that can take our evolution beyond anything the earth is able to give.

Basically this is the most important issue at the present time. Many people today, particularly those in the civilized world, want to shape things in a certain way on this earth; they want the whole potential of human beings to be achieved by creating some particular social configuration or other in this earthly life. That, however, can never happen. We shall never be able to evolve a political or economic life of that kind, nor indeed a cultural life of that kind, that would be entirely of this earth and make us into complete human beings. People still believe that such things are possible at the present time. They are making attempts in that direction but fail to realize that there is something in us that can only be taken further by a principle from beyond the earth.

The Christ Jesus first appeared in a physical body at a time the essential nature of which I have already characterized from many different points of view. We are now living in an age where He is to appear again to human beings and in a form that I also spoke of on the last occasion. It is clearly impossible for us to go exhaustively into the renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha, but I want to refer to it again and from a particular point of view.

The scientific element and everything connected with it has grown particularly strong over recent centuries, from the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In a recent public lecture I called it the ‘science-orientated spirit of the West’. This science-orientated spirit of the West did not initially relate at all to the Christ spirit. If you take an honest, unbiased look at modern science you will find that it has no real relationship to the Christ spirit. The best demonstration of this is the following: As I have said before, Christianity first entered into Earth evolution at a time when remnants of ancient clairvoyance were still persisting, and people grasped it with those remnants of ancient clairvoyance. Christianity then continued as a tradition. It gradually came to be diluted more and more to mental concepts, but it survived as a tradition. Finally it became mere word wisdom, but nevertheless it survived as a tradition. Over the last three or four centuries, however, the scientific spirit appeared on the scene. It also addressed itself to the Gospels. Very many people did and indeed still do today revere the Gospels because they tell the secrets of Golgotha. The science-orientated spirit of the modern age however addressed itself to the Gospels—this was particularly in the 19th century—and found them to contain contradiction upon contradiction. Unable to comprehend, it interpreted the Gospels in its own way. Basically the situation is now that thanks to scientific penetration, the Christ element in the Gospels has dissolved, particularly in the theology of the most recent kind. It is no longer there. If modern theologians say that the Gospels tell us something or other about the Christ they are not being entirely honest, not entirely truthful, or they construe all kinds of conflicting ideas. So we may indeed say that modern scientific thinking has destroyed the spirit of Christianity that consisted of remnants of ancient clairvoyance, and persisted as a tradition based on those remnants of ancient clairvoyance. The reason is that initially the Christ spirit was not present in modern scientific thinking. Science will only be filled with the Christ spirit again when new life comes into it through vision; through the things modern spiritual science is seeking to achieve.

Modern spiritual science wants to be as scientific in its thinking as any other science. The aim is however not to have a dead science but to let it become inner experience, just as we have inner experience of the vital powers we have as human beings. This newly enlivened science will succeed in penetrating to the Christ again.

What form will this enlivened science take? Some things are in preparation now, but I regret to say that they have not attracted much interest. I think I ought to mention that in the early nineties—well, in fact in the late eighties—of the last century I drew attention to a certain connection which exists between the way Schiller developed and the way Goethe developed.⁷⁸ I spoke of Schiller's attempt to solve the riddle of human evolution in his own way, in his letters on aesthetic education. He started with completely abstract ideas. The first was the idea of logical necessity. He said to himself: ‘This logical necessity is compulsive for us human beings. We have to think illogically. Freedom does not exist when logic has to be used to analyze something, for we are then subject to the laws of logic. Freedom does not exist in that case.’ The second idea in Schiller's mind was that human beings have natural needs; this concept encompasses everything that is instinctive and arises from the human capacity to have sensual desires. In this respect, too, human beings are not free but subject to necessity. In a certain way, therefore, human beings are the slaves of the highest intellectual achievement they are capable of, the logical necessity their abstract intellect is able to perceive by the process of reasoning. On the other hand, natural needs, human instincts, also rule and enslave human beings. It is possible, however, to find a middle position between logical thinking and instinctive feelings. Schiller felt that this middle state came to realization above all in the work of creative artists and in aesthetic pleasures. When we look at something beautiful or create something beautiful we are not thinking logically, yet our thoughts are at a spiritual level. We link ideas, but in doing so we do not pursue the logical connection but rather consider aesthetic appearance. On the other hand art seeks to make everything it brings to revelation visual, apparent to the senses. The object of natural necessity, of our instincts are also visual and apparent to the senses. Schiller therefore concluded that art and aesthetic pleasures are on the one hand suppressing logic to some extent, so that it can no longer enslave us but in a way merges into the things over which we gain personal mastery, overcoming them. On the other hand art raises the instinctive element to the sphere of the spirit, or in other words art enables us to feel that the instinctive element is also spiritual. It enables us to make logic the object of personal experience. Schiller wanted to make this condition generally applicable to human beings, saying that when they were in this condition human beings were not enslaved by a higher principle, nor by a lower one, but were indeed free. He wanted it to be the power that also ruled society—social life where people met face to face. People would then find that good things were also pleasing and that they could follow their instincts because they had purified them and made them spiritual, so that they could no longer drag them down. Human beings would then also share a social life that would give rise to a free social society. Schiller therefore considered three human conditions, albeit in an abstract way: the condition of ordinary physical needs, the condition of logical necessity, and the free condition of aesthetic experience.

Schiller developed this view of life in the early 1890s. He put it all into his letters on aesthetic education which he then presented to Goethe. Goethe was quite a different type of human being from Schiller. He felt: ‘This man Schiller is trying to solve a certain riddle, the riddle of the essential human nature, of human evolution and human freedom.’ Goethe was a more complex and profound character, however, and for him the issue could not be simply resolved by taking three abstractions and construing the whole essence of human evolution from them. Instead, the ‘tale’ of the green Snake and the beautiful Lily shone forth in his mind. Something like twenty different figures represented the potential capacities of the human soul, and the relations between them reflected human evolution. Schiller attempted to build everything up on the basis of three abstract ideas. Goethe's way was to create a picture composed of twenty Imaginations. The two men understood each other in a way. What exactly was it that they had done? Schiller used a scientific approach in writing his letters on aesthetic education. He really proceeded in exactly the scientific spirit that later became the scientific spirit of the 19th century. He did not go as far as that 19th century scientific spirit, however. He still remained at a personal level, as it were. 19th century science completely excluded the personal aspect and took pride in being entirely impersonal. The more impersonal knowledge can be made, the closer scientists feel they are to this ideal. 19th century scientists said, and present-day scientists still say: ‘We know this and we know that about one thing or another. We know it in a way that is the same for every individual, so that there is no personal element in it.’ Knowledge excludes the personal element to such an extent that modern people are only satisfied with their science once it has been coffined in the tombs we must come to recognize as the ‘giant's tombs’ of the life of the mind and spirit of today, i.e. in libraries, those tombs of the modern mind and spirit. Dead knowledge is stored in libraries, and we go there when we need some bone or other that we want to include in a dissertation or in a book. Those tombs are the true ideals of the modern scientific spirit. People walk about among all the highly objective knowledge stored there, but their personal interest is somewhere else; it is definitely not in there.

Schiller did not go as far as that in his letters on aesthetic education. He stayed at the personal level. He wanted personal enthusiasm, personal engagement, for every idea he developed. This is important. His letters on aesthetic education are certainly abstract, yet there is still the breath of an individual spirit in them. Knowledge was still felt to be connected with one's personal individuality. Schiller's abstract ideas therefore still had a personal element in them. He did not yet allow ideas to leave that realm and enter into a totally objective and impersonal, inhuman sphere. He did however go as far as the development of abstract ideas. Goethe did not find it possible to form such abstract ideas. He continued to use images, but he was very careful about this. He lived in an age.when spiritual science could not yet be established. He felt some hesitation about sharply defining the images he presented in his 'tale' of the green Snake and the beautiful Lily. He was hinting that he was really concerned with a social life of the future. This comes clearly to expression in the conclusion of the ‘tale’ of the green snake and the beautiful Lily. Goethe did not want to go as far as hard and fast definitions. He did not say that social life should have three aspects, like the three aspects represented by the Golden King as the king of wisdom, the Silver King as the king of outward show—of a life setter please note omission of semblance, political life—and the Brazen king who might represent life in the material sphere, in the economic sphere. Goethe also represented the centralized state in the figure of the King of Mixed Metals who collapsed in a heap. He did not, however, get to the point of making sharp definitions. It was not a time when such delicate fairytale figures could be converted into solid characterizations of social life. I think you will agree that Goethe's figures were subtle fairytale figures. The time had not yet come when ideas that were still half fantasy and half living in Imaginations could be applied to outer life.

Years ago the idea came up of putting on a play in Munich and the intention was to present the creative potential of the essential values to be found in Goethe's ‘tale’ of the green snake and the beautiful Lily on the stage. This proved impossible. The whole thing had to be made much more real. The outcome was the mystery play The Portal of Initiation. It is more than obvious that in Goethe's day the time had not yet come when things which had to be presented in subtle fairy-tale images could be transformed into the real characters that appear in The Portal of Initiation. When The Portal of Initiation was being written the time had indeed come when one would soon be able to carry these things out into life. It was not enough, therefore, merely to interpret the Golden King, the Silver King, the Brazen King and the King of Mixed Metals. It had to be shown that the social life of today, where the centralized state is supposed to encompass everything, must smash itself to pieces, and that clear distinction must be made between the life of mind and spirit (Golden King), the political element (Silver King) and the economic aspect (Brazen King). My book Towards Social Renewal is Goetheanistic, if properly understood, but it represents the Goetheanism of the 20th century.

What I am saying is that Goethe and Schiller were able to reach a certain point in their day and age, Schiller in developing abstract ideas in his letters on aesthetic education, and Goethe in his images. Goethe could get pretty nasty when other people tried to interpret his images. He had the feeling that the time had not yet come to transform these images into concrete forms that would apply to life. This shows very clearly that Schiller's and Goethe's time was not the time when the modern scientific spirit could be allowed to become inhuman and objective; it still had to be kept at a personal level. We will have to return to that level, and we can only do so with the help of spiritual science. Spiritual science must guide us to find the reality of what Schiller attempted to express in abstract ideas in his letters on aesthetic education and what Goethe, trying to solve the same riddle, hinted at in his ‘tale’ of the green Snake and the beautiful Lily.

The scientific spirit has to become personal again. The earth cannot help us with this. Science itself has to become Christ filled. By bringing the Christ idea into science we create the first beginnings for an evolution of the spirit-self.

Let us be clear about this: The earth has encouraged us to develop the ego. In its decline it will still be encouraging us to develop the ego yet further. This earth is something we shall have to leave behind in order to continue evolution on Jupiter and so on. We cannot connect the concept of ourselves as complete human beings with this earth. We have to take our human beingness back from the earth, as it were. If we were to develop only the earth-related science towards which Schiller and Goethe did not want to go—Schiller by keeping his abstract ideas personal, Goethe by not going beyond half-developed Imaginations—if we were to take our cues only from the ingredients of the earth, we could never develop the spirit-self. All we could develop would be a dead science. We would therefore be adding more and more to the field strewn with corpses to be found in our libraries, in our books, where everything human is excluded. We would walk about among these 'thought-corpses', they would cast their spell upon us, and we would thus live up to Ahriman's ideal. One of the things Ahriman wants for us is that we produce lots of libraries, storing lots of dead knowledge all around us. The ancient Egyptians walked among their tombs, even the early Christians walked about among dead bodies, and Ahriman wants us to do the same. He wants human nature to slide back more and more into mere instinct, into egotistical instincts, and he wants all the thoughts we are able to muster to be stored in libraries. It is possible to imagine that a time will come when a young gentleman or even a young lady, aged somewhere around twenty or twenty-three, cannot think of a way of progressing in the world of the Silver King—in external terms we call that taking one's doctor's degree. Little rises from below in the human being; if one wanted to write a doctorate thesis on what arises out of one's human nature—I am of course assuming that a time may come when Ahriman has won the day!—such a thesis would be rejected as being subjective and personal. The young person would therefore visit libraries, taking up one book after another and probably basing his or her choice on catalogues listing all references to one particular key word. A new key word would mean taking out yet another book. The whole thing would then be put together to make a thesis. Only the outer physical individual would actually be involved in all this, however. The young man or woman would be sitting at a desk piled with books. Personal involvement would consist in getting hungry when one has been at it for a few hours, and this hunger would be felt to be something that effects one personally. Personal involvement might also come in because one had human relationships with certain commitments that would have to be met when they came to mind after those few hours. The books would then be shut and all personal connection with them would cease. The thesis made up from what one has found in various books would then be yet another book, a small one or a large tome; it would go to join the others on the library shelves and wait for someone to come and use it. I am not sure if this stage has already been reached somewhere today, but if Ahriman's ideal ever comes to realization that is exactly how it will be. It would be a terrible situation. Human individuality would wither away in such a terrible objective, non-human and impersonal situation.

To combat this, knowledge has to become a personal matter. Libraries should shrink if possible, and people should carry the things that are written in books in their souls. Spirit-self can only develop out of knowledge made personal, and that cannot happen unless people learn about the things that are not of this earth. The earth has passed the mid-point of its evolution. It is dying. Knowledge is dying in our libraries. It is also dying in our books, for they are the coffins of knowledge. We must take this element of knowledge back into our individuality. We must carry it in us. Help will come above all from the renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha. This will help people who have knowledge; it will help the followers of the Golden King.

New life must also come in another sphere, the sphere of rights. Human beings have as little personal connection with the legal system nowadays as they have with the sphere of knowledge. I have presented a small but definite proof of this in a recent public lecture.⁷⁹ I said that the German Empire had free and equal general suffrage. You could not have asked for anything better. But did those voting rights relate to life? Did people cast their votes in a way that was in accord with this franchise? Was there something alive in the configuration of the German Empire that arose because of this franchise? Absolutely not. The franchise was merely written in the Constitution. It was not alive in people's hearts. A time must come when people will no longer need to lay down as an objective Constitution how one human being should relate to another; then living relationships between people will give rise to law that is also alive. What need is there for written constitutions when people have the right feeling for their relationship as one human being to another and when this relationship comes to be a personal matter? In the last three decades of the 19th century human relations grew impersonal, and they have remained impersonal under the strong materialism of the 20th century. The law will only come alive when human beings have the Christ spirit within them.

In the sphere of rights, then, people must become followers of the Silver King. In economic life, on the other hand, they must become followers of the Brazen King. This means no more and no less than that the abstract ideal of brotherhood or companionship must become something real. How can companionship become real? By associating, by truly uniting with the other person, by no longer fighting people with different interests but instead combining those different interests. Associations are the living embodiment of companionship. The life-spirit must be alive in the sphere of rights, and with the Christ spirit brought into economic life, spirit-man will come to life in its first beginnings through associations. The earth, however, yields none of this. Human beings will only come to this if they let the Christ, who is now approaching in the ether, enter into their hearts and minds and souls.

You see, therefore, that the spiritual renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha, as we might call it, relates to what anthroposophical cosmology teaches. We come to see this when we are able to say to ourselves that we have the potential to develop spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. Our thinking has grown so abstract, however, that is seems terribly dry and prosaic to hear that something as sublime and spiritual as the spirit-man, must first of all show itself in associations formed in economic life—in that ‘low’ economic life which has to do with material things. Surely a spiritual scientist cannot refer to economic life without 'lowering' himself? A spiritual scientist has to unite people in conventicles where no one speaks of anything connected with food and drink and one lives entirely in ‘the spirit’, which in fact means in abstract ideas.

The fact is however that when these people have been sitting in their conventicles or sects for long enough and have found their inner gratification they will finally emerge and of course take bread and—well, let us say ‘water’ lest we really offend. As a rule terribly little of all the principles they have established to gratify their souls in those conventicles will find application in life outside.

The true life of the spirit exists only where it is strong enough to overcome material life—and not leave it to one side as something that enslaves and compels us. This is something you really must come to realize.

I think when we come to consider things like these we realize that we must be serious in our approach to present-day life. Yet this seriousness can only come to full realization if we enter into things as deeply as spiritual science enables us to do. You see, the spiritual can only be brought close to human individuals through spiritual science. In a way Schiller and Goethe were the last who could still keep to the personal level, and this was due to something still accessible to them from the past. Schiller did not allow abstract ideas to develop the icy coldness of modern ideas. Goethe kept his Imaginations at a personal level and did not let them break through entirely into outer life.

Today we must go beyond this point. In the rough and tumble of present-day reality we cannot do anything with aesthetic letters—except maybe at aesthetic tea parties—nor with ‘fairy-tales’. At most one might perhaps have beautiful conversations about them in the salons; even in those caricatures of salons that have now become lecture theatres for modern literature and are competing with the old-established professorial chairs. What is needed today is that we break through into life with the things that Goethe and Schiller still kept at the personal level. This will need powerful ideas and on the other hand also powerful Imaginations; a true spiritual understanding of the outer world must arise. To achieve this, we must fill ourselves with the Christ spirit. We will all need to believe in the Christ spirit in its true sense, believe that the Christ principle is something we have to unite with the part in us, as human beings, that will take us beyond this and make us into complete human beings by helping us to develop spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man.

All the things we encounter through spiritual science have an inner connection. Seeing through these inner connections we shall be able to see spiritual science in the right light and know that it belongs to the present age. We shall also know that in the present age spiritual science must be made to have a very real influence in all spheres of practical life.

This means, however, that spiritual science must take the whole of life extremely seriously. A true spiritual scientist would feel that it is inner frivolity to fail to be extremely serious, to fail to do more than fashion beautiful abstract ideas that are gratifying to the soul but are in no way able to break through into life.

This is something which has been weighing heavily on spiritual science for more than a year; it has been weighing heavily on those of us who are working here in Stuttgart. This work at Stuttgart has now made it our responsibility to bring spiritual science to bear in the practical life that immediately surrounds us on all sides. Principles that Goethe presented in fairy-tale images of a Golden, a Silver and a Brazen King, and a King of Mixed Metals who collapsed in a heap, must now be brought to bear in life and must become the threefold social order. You will remember that the King of Mixed Metals collapsed in a heap in the tale and certain persons came and licked up all the gold. If you take a good look at the world around us today you will see this phenomenon. In November 1918 Central Europe's King of Mixed Metals collapsed, and don't you see now how the various ministers who have held office since that time, the various leaders, are licking away and will go on licking until they have removed all the gold? Then the whole form of the Mixed King, a form empty of all spirit, will collapse, and people will be horrified. So we really ought to be serious—not about fairy-tale images of a Golden, a Silver, and a Brazen King, but with firm understanding for the three elements of the social organism: the cultural and spiritual element, the element of the political sphere, i.e. the state, and the economic element.

It has to be said, however, that when one comes to speak of these things two thoughts immediately come to mind. One of these I want to talk about today, for the longer we have to go on working like this in Stuttgart the more obvious it becomes that, for the time being at least, it is simply impossible to find time to talk to the friends who have got used to coming and asking my advice in earlier years. For a long time now I have had to put people off, when they wanted to discuss things that it certainly has previously been possible to discuss in private, promising to try again later on. Although my visits have been getting longer and longer, all efforts have had to be concentrated on the great task. I feel it really has to be said that, this time in particular, it has been quite impossible to consider personal requests. This is as painful for me as it is for you and I know that we cannot go on like this in the long run, for that would deprive the Anthroposophical Movement of its foundations. We would be building on shifting grounds in that case.

On the other hand it also has to be realized that people always like to cling to the old ways. Yet we are doing something entirely new in really getting to grips with the Golden, the Silver and the Brazen King, as I would like to call it. It is an extremely serious matter. Spiritual science cannot do such a thing as licking the gold away from the King of Mixed Metals who is collapsing in a heap, and some people take this amiss. I know I am poking around in a hornets' nest, but I shall have to poke around in quite a few hornets' nests, for example by characterizing a person such as Hermann Keyserling⁸⁰ who is simply not telling the truth and is a liar.

Some people say there is too much criticism within the Anthroposophical Movement today. But let me repeat once again what I have said many times before: These people see what we have to do in order to defend ourselves—and they take exception to this. Exception is even taken by people who are sitting in this room and listening to the things that are being said. And they never say a word to give the lie to the people who throw mud at us from the outside—for that would mean becoming argumentative oneself. It is considered unkind for an anthroposophist to call someone a liar, when that is in fact the truth. Yet anyone who wants to tell lies about the Anthroposophical Movement is allowed to fling any kind of lie at us. The journal of our movement for a threefold order is often considered too polemical. You should turn against those whom we are simply forced to argue against; you should have the courage to address your words to them and not to us, for we are simply forced to defend ourselves. But that is a familiar bad habit. It shows that people are more interested in an Anthroposophy that provides self-gratification and not in a serious Anthroposophy that is considering the great problems of the present age.

Now and then it is really necessary to speak very seriously about these things. The things I said with reference to Count Keyserling in my public lecture, for instance, relate not only to the things said about Anthroposophy in that quarter; they relate to the whole inner insincerity of that kind of intellectual life. Read the chapter entitled ‘What we need. What I want’ in his most recent book.⁸¹ It does not say anything about Anthroposophy, but you will find there the whole schematism of unsubstantial ideas that is wholly without content; yet you get stuffed shirts who will say that they get such a lot out of it. That of course is the great evil in our time, that people reject the things that take their substance from the spirit—the living spirit—and want only to have the empty words, mere shells of words.

If people go on wanting things like this they will destroy humanity. The hollow phrases coming from that source—even if they are called the Diary of a Philosopher⁸²—undermine the whole of human culture. What are they, these hollow phrases? They are the phrases one produces if one licks the King of Mixed Metals. You may be fairly brutal in your licking, like some of the socialist leaders today, or you may be wearing elegant patent-leather boots like Count Keyserling—it really makes no difference.

I may be putting these things sharply, but please do not think this reflects an emotional involvement. They are put sharply because it has to be said, unfortunately, that there are some who want to be counted among the anthroposophists but whose hearts are not really in it. They cannot be sufficiently serious, they do not want to be sufficiently serious, they do not want their hearts to be involved. It is not being unkind to speak the truth when it is necessary to do so. But let me ask you if it is kind of anyone, who wants to be one of us, to allow others to sling mud at us and then call us unkind when we have to defend ourselves? It may seem regrettable that we have to use sharp words to defend ourselves, but just because of this you ought to uphold those sharp words and not indulge in feelings and the like and somehow or other start repeating the rubbish literary hacks have been producing—saying that polemics are not justifiable and are unkind.

The difficulty is that within the movement that is to develop as the Anthroposophical Movement we find so few people who are wholeheartedly with us. When it is necessary to achieve the kind of thing that we are supposed to achieve through the Anthroposophical Movement we need many such individuals today. We have found dedicated people in many different fields, above all the Waldorf School teachers in the educational field. We have also found dedicated individuals in some other fields—but it is simply not enough. The number of those who simply do not want to become completely involved is extremely large, right here in our own ranks, and yet we need people to be fully dedicated to our cause. That is why we are making so little progress. As time went on we found again and again that when we really got down to it, many of the people who had put their names down so that they would be able to hear the things that are said within the movement were in a way embarrassed to declare themselves openly for us on the outside. We have heard it said again and again that it would be better not to use the name Anthroposophy in public; that one should leave the name out and 'slip things in here and there' with reference to Anthroposophy. That is the delightful way people who do not want to take Anthroposophy seriously like to put it. So the gentleman, or particularly the lady, intends to ‘slip something in’ here and there by way of Anthroposophy, because she or he feels ashamed to speak openly about Anthroposophy. So they ‘slip things in'! You won't have to be all that valiant, then, and you won't create any awkwardness—just let it slip in’.

Now is not the time to let things slip in, however. It is time to be open and honest and to use words that tell the truth about things. The people who are against us do not let things slip in, they put things bluntly. And it should be considered an outrage by all who have joined our ranks that someone like Count Keyserling has the cheek to say that this spiritual science of ours is materializing the life of the spirit, that it is a physical science of the spirit. We know that this man used sneaky ways to get hold of our lecture courses from a large number of people, in order to find out what is said in them, and all one can say is that in writing the things he is writing today he is quite deliberately writing untruths. We call it lying. Anyone who objects to our saying this is a lover of lies. Anyone who says that we are too argumentative when we are rightly speaking the truth has no feeling for the truth and is a lover of lies. The love of lies should not be our business in the Anthroposophical Movement, for we must love the truth. You must feel the whole weight of these words: to love the truth; not to love lies for the sake of convention, for the sake of a pleasant social life. To be easygoing when it comes to lies is just as bad as loving them. In the immediate future the world will not progress through frivolous indifference where lies are concerned, but only if we freely and openly profess ourselves for the truth. Anthroposophy has to consider serious and sublime spiritual matters, and we have never failed in this. Anyone who says that it is spiritual materialism to speak of Saturn, Sun and Moon when he is free to open my Occult Science and read what it says about Saturn, Sun and Moon, is indeed lying. It does not say anything about making the spirit into something material. People cannot be aware of the true seriousness of the situation if they ask that we use polite untruthful terms to address mud-slinging opponents.

These are the very things that reflect real love. Real love demands enthusiasm for the truth. The world will only progress if we show enthusiasm for the truth.

There are profound spiritual reasons why I have to say these things today, as I am about to leave you again for a while. I am very sorry that I am quite unable to talk to individuals at present, because there simply is not the time. Yesterday the friends of our movement for a threefold order and of the Kommende Tag were again in session until 3 o'clock in the morning, and that is how it goes on, more or less day after day. I regret that many things have to be left aside, things that people have come to love. On the other hand there may be hope after all that, in view of the efforts now being made on a large scale, the Anthroposophical Movement will gain the rightful place in this world that it must gain, because it has the strength and the will to use the truth to move ahead. If we are to work in the truth, then we can do no other today than show untruthfulness up in its true light when it gets as blatant as this.

It has been necessary to remind you of our commitment to the truth. It is most necessary for all of us, dear friends, to let this spirit of longing for the truth fill our hearts and souls and minds. If it is still within the bounds of human capabilities, then this spirit in which we long for the truth will be the only thing that can prevent the barbarism that otherwise must come upon the human race. It will be the only spirit in which we shall make progress in a new culture which will be of the spirit.

• 78. ‘Goethe als Vater einer neuen Aesthetik’ lecture to the Goethe Society in Vienna on 9 November 1888; first published in Vienna in 1889, reprinted in Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie 1884–1901 GA 30 and Kunst und Kunsterkenntnis GA 271. English translation: Goethe as Founder of a New Science of Aesthetics. G. Metaxa tr. Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1922.
• 79. Stuttgart 16 November 1920, ‘Die Wahrheit der Geisteswissenschaft und die praktischen Lebensforderungen der Gegenwart’ (The truth of spiritual science and the practical requirements of present-day life). To be published in GA 335.
• 80. Keyserling, Hermann, Graf. German philosopher.
• 81. Keyserling, Hermann, Philosophie als Kunst (Philosophy as an art), Darmstadt 1920.
• 82. Keyserling, Hermann, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen (Travel Diary of a Philosopher, 1925), Darmstadt 1919.

In earlier lectures we have heard that the imperishable part of the human being which at death leaves the physical body and, to a considerable extent, the etheric body too, passes through a life between death and the new birth, and that during this period its forces are drawn from the world of the stars. We have also heard how the human being is able to draw these forces from the world of stars to the extent to which he developed moral and religious qualities during his life on Earth. It was said that, for example, from the region which receives forces radiated from the planet known in occult science as Mercury, a man will be able to draw the requisite forces if, during his life on Earth before death, he developed a genuinely moral disposition; from the Venus region he can draw the forces he needs for his further life in the spiritual worlds, also for his subsequent life on Earth, if he developed a truly religious attitude before his death. To sum up, we may say that as long as a human being is making use of his senses, as long as he lets himself be guided and directed by the intellect that is bound to the brain as its instrument, he is connected with the forces of the Earth; in the life between death and a new birth he is connected with the forces radiating from the worlds of the stars. In man of the present age, however, there is a certain difference between his connection with the forces of the Earth during his physical life and his connection with the forces of the stars between death and the new birth. The forces which man draws into his consciousness during his earthly life, that is to say, the forces he experiences consciously during earthly life, contribute nothing essential to what he needs for the up-building and vitalising of his own being; for they give rise to catabolic processes, processes of destruction. Evidence for this is the simple fact that during sleep the human being has no consciousness. Why not? The reason is that he is not meant to witness what happens to him during sleep. During sleep the forces used up during waking life are restored and man is not meant to witness this process, which is the antithesis of what is in operation during waking life and is concealed from human consciousness. The Bible uses profoundly significant words to express this fact. It is one of the passages in the Bible which, as is the case with all occult principles in religious records, is very little understood. In the story of the expulsion from Paradise it is said that the Divine Spirit resolved that when the human being had acquired certain characteristics, for instance, the faculty of distinguishing between good and evil, insight into the forces of life should be withheld from him. That is the passage in the Bible where it is announced that the human being was not to witness the revivification of his members either during sleep or during his entire existence on Earth. While man is awake the whole life-process is one of destruction, of wear and tear. During waking life nothing in man's being is restored. In the very earliest years of childhood, when any actual inflow of life can still be observed, the child's consciousness is still dim and the whole restorative process is concealed from the human being in his later years. Evidence for this is the fact that he does not remember his earliest childhood. We can therefore say that the whole life-giving, restorative process is concealed from man's conscious life on Earth. Processes of perception, of cognition, lie within the field of his consciousness; the life-giving process does not.

This is different during the period of existence between death and the new birth. The purpose of the whole of that period is to draw into the being of man the forces which can build up and fashion the next life, to draw these forces from the world of the stars. But this process is not as things are on Earth, when man does not really know his own being. What, after all, does he know about the processes working in his organism? He knows nothing of them through direct perception and what is learnt from anatomy or biology conveys no real knowledge of his being but is something quite different. In the life between death and rebirth, however, a man beholds how forces from the world of stars work upon his being, how they gradually rebuild it. From this you can gather how greatly perception between death and rebirth differs from perception on Earth. On Earth the human being stands at a particular point, directs his senses outwards and then his sight and hearing expand into space; from the centre where he is standing he faces the expanse of space. Exactly the opposite is the case during the life after death. There man feels as if his whole being were outspread and what he perceives is really the centre. He looks at a point. There comes a period between death and the new birth when the human being describes a circle which passes through the whole Zodiac. He looks out as it were from every point of the Zodiac, that is to say from different viewpoints, upon his own being, and he feels as if he were gathering from each particular section of the Zodiac the forces which he pours upon his being for the needs of the next incarnation. He looks from the circumference towards a centre. It is as if you could duplicate yourself, move around while leaving yourself at the centre, and could drink in the forces of the Universe, the life-giving ‘soma’ which, streaming as it does from different points of the Zodiac, assumes different characteristics as it pours into your being which you have left at the centre. Translated into terms of spiritual reality, this is actually how things are during the life between death and the new birth.

If we now think of the difference between a condition that is really very similar to life between death and rebirth, namely, the condition of sleep, this difference can be characterised very simply, although people who are not accustomed to these ideas will not be able to make much of it. Put simply, the condition of sleep can be characterised as follows.

When the human being sleeps during his earthly existence, that is to say when he has left his physical and etheric bodies and is living in his Ego and astral body which are then in the world of stars, he too is actually in that world. And it is a fact that our condition in sleep is objectively far more similar to the condition between death and rebirth than is usually imagined. Objectively, the two conditions are very similar. The only difference is that during sleep in normal life the human being has no consciousness of the world in which he is living, whereas between death and the new birth he is conscious of what is happening to him. That is the essential difference. If the human being were to awake in his Ego and astral body when these members are outside his physical body during sleep he would be in the same condition as he is between death and the new birth. The difference is actually only a state of consciousness. This is a matter of importance because as long as the human being lives on Earth, therefore also during sleep, he is bound to his physical body. Nor does he become free from the physical body until it passes into the lifeless condition and undergoes a change at death. As long as the physical body remains alive, the union is maintained between the spiritual man, that is to say, Ego and astral body and the physical and etheric bodies.

Our conception of the state of sleep is, as a rule, too simple; and that is quite comprehensible because usually we describe things from one point of view only, whereas when a human being passes into the higher worlds conditions are complicated. A complete picture becomes possible only as we progress patiently in Spiritual Science and learn to view things from all sides. We generally characterise the state of sleep—and rightly so—by saying that the physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed, while the Ego and astral body move outwards and unite with the forces of the stars. But correct as this is from one point of view, it nevertheless presents only one aspect of the matter, as we can realise if we consider from the standpoint of Spiritual Science the sleep that occurs at a more or less normal time. Objectively speaking, an afternoon nap is a quite different matter from ordinary sleep at night. What I have now said is concerned not so much with a man's ordinary state of health but rather with his whole relationship to the world. We will therefore not consider an afternoon nap but the sleep of a healthy human being, let us say at midnight, regarded from the standpoint of clairvoyant consciousness.

During the waking life of day there is a certain regulated connection between the four members of man's being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. This connection can be indicated if I make sketches to show how the so-called aura of the human being appears to clairvoyant consciousness—but of course the sketches are only very rough.

The important point is that what may be called the auric picture of the Ego when a human being is asleep, actually becomes twofold. During the waking state the Ego-aura holds together in the form of an oval (A) but during sleep divides into two parts (B), one of which turns downwards as the result of a kind of gravity and spreads out below. This part of the Ego-aura appears to clairvoyance as a very dark area tinged with dark red shades. The other, upper part streams upwards from the head and then expands into the infinitudes of the world of stars. The Ego-aura is thus divided—in appearance at all events; we cannot, however, speak of an actual division of the astral aura.

This occult spectacle is a kind of pictorial expression of the fact that the human being; with the Ego-forces that permeate him in the waking condition, goes forth into cosmic space in order to be united with the world of stars and draw its forces into himself.

(Note by translator. Dr. Steiner's drawings were probably made with coloured chalks which would have indicated the several members of man's being with greater clarity than is possible in the printed reproductions. Comments made in connection with the drawings have been abbreviated as follows:

Figure A. Waking state. The physical body is indicated by the innermost darker dotted outline, the etheric body by the fainter dotted outline, the astral body by the sloping lines; the Ego-aura seems to envelop the human form.

Figure B. Indicates the difference in the auric picture while a human being is asleep. The upper part of the Ego-aura radiates outwards and upwards without defined limit, and the lower part radiates downwards without defined limit.)

Now that part of the Ego-aura which streams downwards and becomes dark and more or less opaque while the part streaming up wards is luminous and radiant—all this lower part is particularly exposed to the influence of Ahrimanic powers. The adjacent part of the astral aura is, on the other hand, particularly exposed to the Luciferic forces. The account that has been given—quite rightly from a certain standpoint—that the Ego and astral body leave the human being during sleep is, however, strictly true only as regards the upper parts of the Ego-aura and astral aura. It is not correct as regards the parts of the Ego-aura and astral aura which correspond more to the lower areas of the human figure, particularly the lower parts of the trunk. Actually, during sleep, these parts of the astral aura and of the Ego-aura are more closely bound up with the physical and etheric bodies than is the case during the waking state, and below they are denser, more compact.

Now it is extremely important to know that in view of the evolution of our Earth and all the forces that have played their part in that evolution—which you will find described in the book Occult Science—an Outline,—it was ordained that man should not participate in this more lively activity of the lower aura during sleep, that is to say he was not to witness this activity. The reason for this was that the revitalising forces needed by man for the restoration of what has been used up during the waking hours, are kindled by the lower Ego-aura and lower astral aura. The vitalising forces must be drawn from these parts of the aura. That they work upwards and revitalise the whole man depends upon the upper aura developing powers of attraction drawn from the world of stars; it can therefore attract the forces which rising from below, act restoratively. That is the objective process.

Understanding of this fact is the best equipment for understanding certain information available to one who studies ancient records or records based on occultism. You have always heard—and from a certain standpoint the statement is quite correct—that man leaves his physical and etheric bodies in the bed and goes forth with his astral body and Ego; this is absolutely correct as regard the upper parts of the Ego-aura and astral aura, especially of the Ego-aura. But if you study Eastern writings, you will find a statement that is exactly the opposite. It is stated there that during sleep what is otherwise present in man's consciousness penetrates more deeply into the body. This is the opposite description of sleep. And especially in certain Vedanta writings you will find it stated that the part of man of which we say that during sleep it leaves the physical and etheric bodies, sinks more deeply into those bodies, and that what gives us the power of sight withdraws into deeper regions of the eye so that sight is no longer possible. Why is the process described in this way in Eastern writings? It is because the Oriental still has a different standpoint. With his kind of clairvoyance he pays more attention to what goes on within the human being; he pays less attention to the emergence of the upper aura and more to the permeation by the lower aura during sleep. Hence from his particular point of view he is right.

The processes which take place in the human being in the course of his evolution are very complicated and as evolution progresses it will become more and more possible for him to picture the whole range of these processes. But evolution consists in human beings having gradually acquired knowledge of particular processes, hence the differing statements in the different epochs. Although the statements seem to differ they are not for that reason false; they relate to the particular condition prevailing at the time. But the process of evolution as a whole becomes clear only when all the various processes are taken into account.

We ourselves have now reached the point when it is possible to survey a certain definite portion of the process of evolution. There is a most significant difference in the whole attitude and disposition of man's soul when we observe its development during incarnations, let us say in the Egypto-Chaldean period, then in the Graeco-Roman period and then again in our own. Even externally it is not difficult to discover what the soul is experiencing. I think that even in this enlightened audience there will be quite a number of individuals who when they look at a star-strewn sky cannot locate the particular constellations or perceive how their positions change in the heavens during the night. Speaking generally it can be said that the number of individuals who are still well-informed about the starry sky will steadily decrease. There will even be people, among town-dwellers for example, whom one might ask in vain: Is there now Full Moon or New Moon? This does not in any way imply reproach, for it lies in the natural course of development. What holds good for the soul now would have been utterly impossible during the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, particularly during its earlier periods. In those days men's insight into the heavens was very great. Our present age, however, has a definite advantage over the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, inasmuch as logical thinking—of which most people would be capable today if they were to make efforts—was quite beyond the men of that earlier epoch. They lived their lives and carried out their daily tasks more instinctively than we do today. It would be quite erroneous to imagine that when a building or, say, an aqueduct was to be constructed, engineers would sit in their offices and work out the project with the help of plans and the other methods employed nowadays. Engineers in those times no more worked from plans than the beaver does today when with such skill and accuracy he sets about building his den.

In those early times there was no logical, scientific thinking such as is general today; the activities of men during waking life were instinctive. They had acquired their knowledge—and stupendous knowledge has been preserved from the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—in a quite different way. They knew about the secrets of the stars in the night, about the heavens, although they had no Astronomy of the kind that is available for men of the present age. They watched the spectacle presented by the stars in the heavens on successive nights and the whole power of the astral forces in space worked upon them, not merely the sensory impressions made by what they observed. For example, the passage of the Great Bear or of the Pleiades was an actual experience within them and the experience continued while they were asleep, for they were sensitive to the spiritual reality connected with the passage of a constellation such as the Great Bear across the heavens; together with the spectacle perceived by the senses they were inwardly aware of the living spiritual reality in cosmic space. Something came into their consciousness which ours today is quite unable to experience. Nowadays man has eyes only for the material picture of the stars in the sky. And being very clever he looks at a chart of the heavens into which figures of animals are inscribed, and says: The ancients inscribed symbols here and there to represent their idea of the grouping of the stars, but we have now progressed sufficiently to be cognisant of the reality. A man of the modern age does not know that the ancients had actually seen what they inscribed into their charts; they drew something of which they had had direct vision. Some of them were more skilful draftsmen than others, but they drew what they had actually perceived. They did not, however, perceive in the way that is customary in physical life. When they experienced, for example, the passage of the Great Bear across the heavens at night they saw the physical stars implanted in a mighty spiritual Being whom they could actually perceive. But it would be childish to imagine that they saw an animal moving across the heavens in the way we should see a physical animal on the Earth. This experience of the passage of the constellation of the Pleiades, for example, across the heavens affected them intimately. They felt that the experience had an effect upon their astral bodies and caused changes there.

You can form an idea of this experience by picturing that there is a rose in front of you but you are not looking at it; you are merely holding it and what you experience is your own contact with it. You then form an idea of the rose. It was in this way that the ancients ‘contacted’ as it were with their astral bodies what they experienced about the constellation of the Great Bear; they ‘felt’ the astral reality and experienced their own contact with it. This brought about changes in their very being, changes which are still brought about today but are unnoticed.

Evolution leading into our modern scientific age with its power of rationalistic judgement consists in the fact that direct experience of spiritual processes has ceased and that we are left with the world of the senses and the brain-bound intellect. Thus when in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch men spoke of the spiritual Beings in space and drew figures of these Beings, inscribing physical stars as focal points, this was in keeping with the reality—which was an actual experience. Hence in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch men had a faculty of perception far more in line with the life between death and rebirth than is our present physical consciousness. When it is realised how the astral body and the Ego experience what is happening in the heavens it is also obvious that we are then living outside our physical and etheric bodies and there is not the slightest reason for believing that a life in which such experiences occur is impossible when the physical and etheric bodies are actually laid aside (at death). Thus in the men of old it was a matter of direct knowledge that between death and the new birth they would experience the happenings in the world of stars. A man living in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch would have thought it ridiculous if anyone set out to prove to him the immortality of the soul. He would have said: ‘But that needs no proof!’ He would not even have understood what a proof is in our meaning of the word, for logical thinking did not yet exist. If he had learnt in an occult school what in the future would be meant by ‘proof’, he would still have insisted that it is unnecessary to prove the immortality of the soul, because in experiencing the nocturnal starry heavens one is already experiencing something that is independent of the body. Immortality was thus an actual experience and the men of those times knew a great deal about what we today describe in connection with perception in the disembodied state.

And now, turning from the more remote worlds of stars to the planets, these men of old experienced the spiritual sphere that is connected, for instance, with Saturn. They were able to perceive—this is true especially of the earlier periods of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—what remains of a human being during his life in the Saturn sphere between death and the new birth. People would have thought it very strange if it had been suggested to them that they should try to establish connection with Mars as is sometimes hinted at today, for they were quite conscious of being related to these worlds. If someone has knowledge of Saturn or Mars or other planetary sphere and can follow its functions in our planetary system, this leads to knowledge of the pre-earthly conditions of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon described in the book Occult Science—an Outline. This was once a matter of actual experience. There would have been no need to lecture about it. All that was necessary would have been to make men conscious that it was simply a matter of inducing in those no longer capable of perceiving such things conditions which made perception possible. This could not otherwise have been achieved.

By the time of the Graeco-Latin epoch this state of things had already changed. Men had lost their sensitivity for everything I have been describing and remembrance of it alone remained. In the Graeco-Latin epoch, among the leading peoples, for example of Southern Europe, there was no longer any equal possibility of direct vision of the spiritual Beings of the heavens, but remembrance of that vision remained. Just as a man remembers today what he experienced yesterday, so did souls in the Graeco-Latin epoch still remember what they had experienced of the Universe in earlier incarnations. This radiated into the souls of men and was a living experience. Plato speaks of it as ‘recollection’, but men do not always call it so. Progress in evolution consisted in the suppression of this direct experience and the development during the Graeco-Latin epoch of the faculty of judgement and the formation of concepts. Hence the earlier vision was bound to recede and could survive only as recollection, remembrance. This is exemplified most clearly of all in Aristotle who lived in the fourth century BC. and was the founder of logic, of the art of judgement; he himself was no longer able to perceive anything of the spiritual realities in the worlds of the stars, but in his writings he brings all the old theories back again. He does not speak of the physical heavenly bodies as we know them today but of the ‘Spirits of the Spheres’, of spiritual Beings. And a great many of his utterances were an enumeration of the individual planetary Spirits and of the fixed stars, finally leading to the one universal Godhead. The Spirits of the Spheres still play an important role in the works of Aristotle.

But even the remembrance in Graeco-Latin times of the Spiritual Beings in the Universe was gradually lost to humanity and it is interesting to watch how the ancient knowledge disappears gradually as later epochs approach. The more spiritually minded among men still drew from their remembrance the consciousness that spiritual Beings are connected with all physical bodies existing in space—as Anthroposophy describes today. A great deal in this connection was presented magnificently by Kepler. But the nearer we come to modern times, the more does the possibility fade of even a remembrance of what the soul experienced in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch from contemplation of the heavens. As the age of Copernicanism approached even the remembrance that still survived in the Graeco-Latin epoch faded, and men had eyes only for the physical globes moving through space. Occasionally something plays into the consciousness of more modern men that there is still a possibility of gleaning from the constellations in the heavens genuine knowledge of spiritual events. Kepler, for example, set out independently to calculate from the stars the date of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Such a calculation was possible because Kepler's whole being was still permeated through and through with spirituality. The same applies to his realisation that a certain constellation of stars in the year 1604 would be followed by further suppression of the ancient remembrances.

The nearer we come to the modern age the more is humanity dependent upon the physical senses and the brain-bound intellect, because what the souls of men experienced in ancient times has been thrust down into the deeper strata of consciousness. The souls of all of you once harboured the experiences known to men when they were still able to be aware of the spiritual life pervading cosmic spheres. This is everywhere present in the depths of your own souls. But it is not possible today to lead souls during the hours of darkness and guide their vision, let us say, to the constellation of the Great Bear and enable them to experience as realities the spiritual forces emanating from that group of stars. It is not possible because the powers of vision and perception lie in such depths of the soul. During sleep at night man experiences the heavens with the radiating upper part of the aura but is not conscious of it. Hence for souls of the present age the right procedure is to raise into consciousness by valid methods the forgotten impressions received in olden times. And how is this done? As we do it in Anthroposophy! Nothing new is imposed upon souls but what they experienced in earlier epochs is drawn forth. What souls could no longer actually experience in the Graeco-Latin epoch but had not yet entirely forgotten—today it is entirely forgotten but can be drawn forth again. Anthroposophy is the stimulus for drawing forth the forces of knowledge which lie deep in the souls of men. All human beings who have partaken in evolution up to the time of Western culture have in the depths of their souls the conceptions which should be kindled to life through Anthroposophy; and the methods used in Anthroposophy are the stimuli for achieving this.

We will now consider the difference between these two attitudes to the world, between that of a human soul incarnated in the Graeco-Latin epoch and one incarnated today. We have heard that during the Graeco-Latin epoch, in earthly life too, the soul had a certain connection with and capacity for perception of what is lived through in the period between death and the new birth. These experiences had not yet withdrawn into such deep strata of the soul. Hence in those very ancient times there was much less difference between men's consciousness on Earth and between death and rebirth than there is today. The ancient Greeks had some remembrance of what they had once experienced, but even so the difference was already great. Conditions today have reached the stage when between death and the new birth, consciousness can still be kindled in a human being in the Venus sphere if, on Earth, he has cultivated a moral and religious attitude of soul. But in and especially beyond the Sun sphere it is impossible for consciousness to be kindled if during his life on Earth a man has made no attempt to raise to the level of waking consciousness the concepts lying in the depths of the soul. Here, in earthly life, Anthroposophy seems to be a kind of theoretical world-conception which we master because it interests us. After death, however, it is a torch which from a certain point of time onwards between death and rebirth illumines the spiritual world for us. If Anthroposophy is disdained here in the physical world, no torch is available in that other world and consciousness is dimmed. To pursue Spiritual Science is not merely a matter of imbibing so many theories; it is a living force, a torch which can illumine life. The contents of the spiritual teachings here on Earth are concepts and ideas; after death they are living forces! But this applies to consciousness only. It will be clear to you from what I said at the beginning of the lecture that already in earthly existence the spiritual ideas we acquire are life-giving forces. But a man cannot witness the outcome of these life-giving forces because knowledge of the powers from which they originate is withheld from him. After death, however, he actually beholds them. Here on Earth, Anthroposophy seems to be so much theory and the human being in his waking state has no consciousness of what is spiritually life-giving but nevertheless objectively present. After death man is a direct witness of how the forces he took into himself together with the spiritual teachings received during his life on Earth have an organising, vitalising, strengthening effect upon what is within his being when he is preparing for a new incarnation.

In this way spiritual teaching actually becomes part of the evolution of humanity. But if this spiritual teaching were to be rejected—at the present time it suffices if only a few accept it but in the future more and more individuals must do so—then, as they return to incarnations on Earth, human beings will gradually find that they lack the life-giving forces they need. Decadence and atrophy would set in during the subsequent incarnation. Human beings would quickly wither, be prematurely wrinkled. Decadence of physical humanity would set in if the spiritual forces were not received. The forces that were once drawn by men from the worlds of stars must now be drawn from the depths of their own souls and used for furthering the evolution of humanity.

If you reflect about these matters you will be filled through and through with the thought that existence on Earth is of immense significance. It was necessary that the human being should be so inwardly deepened by his union with the worlds of stars that the forces he had otherwise always drawn from those worlds would become the inmost forces of his soul and be drawn up again from its depths. But that can be done only on Earth. One could say: in primeval times the soma-juice rained down from the heavens into individual souls, was preserved there and must now be drawn forth again from those souls. In this way we acquire a conception of the mission of the Earth. And having presented this conception today we will proceed to study the life between death and the new birth in even greater detail.

When we observe how life takes its course around us, how it throws its waves into our inner life, into everything we are destined to feel, to suffer or to delight in during our present existence on the earth, we can think of several groups or kinds of experiences.

As regards our own faculties and talents, we find, to begin with, that when we succeed in something or other, we may say: being what we are, it is quite natural and understandable that we should succeed in this or that case. But certain failures, perhaps just those that must be called misfortune and calamity,—may also become intelligible when viewed in the whole setting of our nature.

In such cases we may not, perhaps, always be able to prove exactly how this or that failure is connected with our own shortcomings in one direction or another. But when we are obliged to say of ourselves in a general way: In many respects you were a superficial character in your present life, so it is understandable that in certain circumstances you were bound to fail—then we may not immediately perceive the connection between the failure and the shortcomings, but generally speaking we shall realise that if we have been frivolous and superficial, success cannot always be at our finger-tips.

From what has been said you may think that some kind of causal connection could have been evident between what inevitably happened and your faculties or incompetencies. But there are many things in life where, however conscientiously we set to work, we are not able at once to connect success or failure with these faculties or shortcomings; how we ourselves were at fault or why we deserved success, remains a mystery. In short, when thinking more of our inner life we shall be able to distinguish two groups of experiences: in the case of the one group we are aware of the causes of our successes and failures; in the case of the second group we shall not be able to detect any such connection, and that we failed in one particular instance and succeeded in another will seem to be more or less chance. To begin with, we will bear in mind that there is ample evidence in life of this latter group of facts and experiences, and will return to it later.

In contrast to what has just been said, we can think more about our destiny in outer life. There again, two groups of facts will have to be kept in mind. There are cases where it is inwardly clear to us that in connection with events that befall us—not, therefore, those we ourselves initiated—we did certain things and consequently are to blame for these happenings. But of another group of experiences we shall be very liable to say that we can see no connection whatever with what we resolved, what we intended. These are events of which it is usually said that they broke in upon our life as if by chance; they seem to have no connection whatever with anything we ourselves have brought about.

It is this second group of experiences in their relation to our inner life that we shall now consider, that is to say, those happenings where we are unable to perceive any direct or immediate connection with our faculties and shortcomings—outer events, therefore, which we call chance events, of which we cannot at the outset perceive how they could have been brought about by any preceding factor. By way of test, a kind of experiment can be made with these two groups of experiences. The experiment entails no obligations; it is a question merely of putting to the test what will now be characterised.

The experiment can take the following form.—We ask ourselves: How would it be if we were to build up in thought a kind of imaginary human being, saying of him just those things between which we can see no connection by means of our own faculties; we endow this imaginary man with the qualities and faculties which have led, in our own case, to these incomprehensible happenings. We there imagine a man possessing faculties of such a kind that he will inevitably succeed or fail in matters where we cannot say the same in connection with our own shortcomings or faculties. We imagine him as one who has quite deliberately brought about the events which seem to have come into our life by chance.

Simple examples can serve as the starting-point here. Suppose a tile from a roof has fallen upon and injured our shoulders. We shall be inclined to attribute this to chance. But to begin with as an experiment, we now build up in thought an imaginary man who acts in the following strange way. He climbs on a roof, quickly loosens a tile, but only to the point where it still has a certain hold; then he runs quickly to the ground so that when the tile has become quite detached, it falls on his shoulders. The same can be done in the case of all events which seem to have come into our life by chance. We build up an imaginary man who is guilty of or brings about all those things of which in ordinary life we cannot see how they are connected with us.

Such procedure may seem at first to be nothing but a play of fancy. No obligation is incurred by it, but one remarkable thing emerges. When we have imagined such a man with the qualities referred to, he makes a very memorable impression upon us. We cannot get rid of the picture we have thus created in thought; although the picture seems so artificial, it fascinates us, gives the impression that it must, after all, have something to do with ourselves. The feeling we have of this imaginary thought-man accounts for this. If we steep ourselves in this picture it will most certainly not leave us free. A remarkable process then takes shape within our soul, an inner process that is enacted in human beings all the time. We may think of something, make a resolution; for this we need something we once knew, and we use all sorts of artificial means for recalling it. This effort to call up into memory something that has escaped us is, of course, a process in the life of soul—“recollection” as it is usually called. All the thoughts we summon up to help us to remember something are auxiliary thoughts. Just try for once to realise how many and how often such thoughts have to be used and dropped again, in order to get at what we want to know. The purpose of these auxiliary thoughts is to open the way to the recollection needed at the moment.

In exactly the same, but in a far more comprehensive sense, the ‘thought-man’ described represents an auxiliary process. He never leaves us alone; he is astir in us in such a way that we realise: he lives in us as a thought, as something that goes on working, that is actually transformed within us into the idea, the thought, which now flashes up suddenly into our soul in the ordinary process of recollection; it is something that overwhelms us. It is as though something says to us: this being cannot remain as he is, he transforms something within you, he becomes alive, he changes! This forces itself upon us in such a way that the imaginary man whispers to us: This is something that has to do with another earth-existence, not with the present one. A kind of recollection of another earth-existence—that is the thought which quite definitely arises. It is really more a feeling than a thought, a sentient experience, but of such a kind that we feel as though what arises in the soul is what we ourselves once were in an earlier incarnation on this earth.

Anthroposophy, regarded in its entirety, is by no means merely a sum-total of theories, of presentations of facts, but it gives us directives and indications for achieving our aspirations. Anthroposophy says: If you carry out certain exercises you will be led nearer to the point where recollection is easier for you. It can also be said—and this is drawn from the sphere of actual experience: If you adopt this procedure you get an inner impression, a sentient impression, of the person you were in an earlier life. We there achieve what may be called an extension of memory. What discloses itself to us is, to begin with, a thought-reality only, as long as we are building up the imaginary man described. But this imaginary man does not remain a thought-being. He transforms himself into sentient impressions, impressions in the life of soul, and while this is going on we realise that this experience has something to do with our earlier incarnation. Our memory extends to this earlier incarnation.

In this present incarnation we remember those things in which our thoughts participated. But in ordinary life, what has played into our life of feeling does not so easily remain vivid and alive. If you try to think back to something that caused you great pain ten or twenty years ago, you will be able to recall the mental picture of it without difficulty; you will be able to cast your thoughts back to what then took place; but you cannot recapture the actual, immediate experience of the pain felt at the time. The pain fades, the remembrance of it streams into the life of ideation. What has here been described is a memory in the soul, a memory belonging to the life of feeling. And as such we actually feel our earlier incarnation. There does, in fact, arise what may be called a remembrance of earlier incarnations. It is not possible immediately to perceive what is playing over into the present incarnation, what is actually the bearer of the remembrance of earlier incarnations. Consider how intimately our thoughts are united with what gives expression to them, with our speech and language. Language is the embodiment of the world of thoughts and ideas. In each life, every human being has to learn the language anew. A child of the very greatest philologist or linguist has to learn his mother-tongue by dint of effort. There has yet to be a case of a grammar-school boy learning Greek with ease because he rapidly remembered the Greek he had spoken in earlier incarnations!

The poet Hebbel jotted down one or two thoughts for the plan of a drama he intended to write. It is a pity that he did not actually carry out this project, for it would have been an extremely interesting drama. The theme was to have been that Plato, reincarnated as a school-boy, received the very lowest marks for his understanding of the Plato of old! We need not remind ourselves that some teachers are severe, or pedantic. We realise that what Hebbel jotted down is due to the fact that the element of thought, which is also in play in the mental pictures of immediate experiences, is limited more or less to the present incarnation. As we have now heard, the first impression of the earlier incarnation comes as a direct memory in the life of feeling, as a new kind of memory. The impression we get when this memory arises from the imaginary man we have created in thought, is more like a feeling, but of such a kind that we realise: the impression comes from some being who once existed and who you yourself were. Something that is like a feeling arising in an act of remembrance is what comes to us as a first impression of the earlier incarnation.

The creation of an imaginary man in thought is simply a means of proving to us that this means is something that transforms itself into an impression in the life of soul, or the life of feeling. Everyone who comes to Anthroposophy has the opportunity of carrying out what has now been described. And if he does so he will actually receive an inner impression of which—to use a different illustration—he might speak as follows. I once saw a landscape; I have forgotten what it actually looked like, but I know it delighted me! If this happened during the present life, the landscape will no longer make a very vivid impression of feeling; but if the impression of the landscape came from an earlier incarnation the impression will be particularly vivid. In the form of a feeling we can obtain a very vivid impression of our earlier incarnation. And if we then observe such impressions objectively, we may at times experience something like a feeling of bitterness, bitter-sweetness or acidity from what emerges as the transformation of the imaginary thought-man. This bitter-sweet or some such feeling is the impression made upon us by our earlier incarnation; it is an impression of feeling, an impression in the life of soul.

The endeavour has now been made to draw attention to something that can ultimately promote in every human being a kind of certainty of having existed in an earlier life—certainty through having engendered a feeling of inner impressions which he knows were most definitely not received in this present life. Such an impression, however, arises the same way as a recollection arises in ordinary life. We may now ask: How can one know that the impression is actually a recollection? There it can only be said that to ‘prove’ such a thing is not possible. But the process is the same as it is elsewhere in life, when we remember something and are in a sound state of mind. We know there that what arises within us in thought is actually related to something we have experienced. The experience itself gives the certainty. What we picture in the way indicated gives us the certainty that the impression which arises in the soul is not related to anything that had to do with us in the present life but to something in the earlier life.

We have there called forth in ourselves by artificial means, something that brings us into connection with our earlier life. We can also use many different kinds of experiences as tests, and eventually awaken in ourselves feelings of earlier lives.

Here again, from a different aspect, the experiences we have in life can be divided into groups. In the one group may be included the sufferings, sorrows and obstacles we have encountered; in a second group may be included the joys, happinesses and advantages in our life. Again as a test, we can take the following standpoint, and say: Yes, we have had these sorrows, these sufferings. Being what we are in this incarnation, with normal life running its course, our sorrows and sufferings are dire misfortunes, something that we would gladly avoid. By way of a test, let us not take this attitude but assume that for a certain reason we ourselves brought about these sorrows, sufferings and obstacles, realising that owing to our earlier lives—if there have actually been such lives—we have become in a sense more imperfect because of what we have done. After all, we do not only become more perfect through the successive incarnations but also, in a certain respect, more imperfect. When we have affronted or injured some human being, are we not more imperfect than we were before? We have not only affronted him, we have taken something away from ourself; as a personality taken as a whole, our worth would be greater if we had not done this thing. Many such actions are marked on our score and our imperfection remains because of them. If we have affronted some human being and desire to regain our previous worth, what must happen? We must make compensation for the affront, we must place into the world a counterbalancing deed, we must discover some means of compelling ourselves to overcome something. And if we think in this way about our sufferings and sorrows, we shall be able in many instances to say: These sufferings and sorrows, if we surmount them, give us strength to overcome our imperfections. Through suffering we can make progress.

In normal life we do not think in this way; we set our face against suffering. But we can also say the following: Every sorrow, every suffering, every obstacle in life should be an indication of the fact that we have within us a man who is cleverer than we ourselves are. Although the man we ourselves are is the one of whom we are conscious, we regard him for a time as being the less clever; within us we have a cleverer man who slumbers in the depths of our soul. With our ordinary consciousness we resist sorrows and sufferings but the cleverer man leads us towards these sufferings in defiance of our consciousness because by overcoming them we can strip off something. He guides us to the sorrows and sufferings, directs us to undergo them. This may, to begin with, be an oppressive thought but it carries with it no obligation; we can, if we so wish, use it once only, by way of trial. We can say: Within us there is a cleverer man who guides us to sufferings and sorrows, to something that in our conscious life we should like most of all to have avoided. We think of him as the cleverer man. In this way we are led to the realisation which many find disturbing, namely that this cleverer man guides us always towards what we do not like. This, then, we will take as an assumption: There is a cleverer man within us who guides us to what we do not like in order that we may make progress.

But let us still do something else. Let us take our joys, our advantages, our happinesses, and say to ourselves, again by way of trial: How would it be if you were to conceive the idea—irrespectively of how it tallies with the actual reality—that you have simply not deserved these happinesses, these advantages; they have come to you through the Grace of higher, spiritual Powers. It need not be so in every case, but we will assume, by way of test, that all our sorrows and sufferings were brought about because the cleverer man within us guided us to them, because we recognise that in consequence of our imperfections they were necessary for us and that we can overcome them only through such experiences. And then we assume the opposite: That our happinesses are not due to our own merit but have been vouchsafed to us by spiritual Powers.

Again this thought may be a bitter pill for the vain to swallow, but if, as a test, a man is capable of forming such a thought with all intensity, he will be led to the feeling—because again it undergoes a transformation and in so far as it lacks effectiveness, rectifies itself:—In you there lives something that has nothing to do with your ordinary consciousness, that lies deeper than anything you have experienced consciously in this life; there is a cleverer man within you who gladly turns to the eternal, divine-spiritual Powers pervading the world. Then it becomes an inner certainty that behind the outer there is an inner, higher individuality. Through such thought-exercises we grow to be conscious of the eternal, spiritual core of our being, and this is of extraordinary importance. So there again we have something which it lies in our power to carry out.

In every respect Anthroposophy can be a guide, not only towards knowledge of the existence of another world, but towards feeling oneself as a citizen of another world, as an individuality who passes through many incarnations.

There are experiences of still a third kind. Admittedly it will be more difficult to make use of these experiences for the purpose of gaining an inner knowledge of karma and reincarnation. But even if what will now be said is difficult, it can again be used again by way of trial. And if it is honestly applied to external life it will dawn upon us clearly—as a probability to begin with, but then as an ever-growing certainty—that our present life is connected with an earlier one.

Let us assume that in our present life between birth and death we have already reached or passed our thirtieth year. (Those below that age may also have corresponding experiences). We reflect about the fact that somewhere near our thirtieth year we were brought into contact with some person in the outside world, that between the ages of thirty and forty many different connections have been established with human beings in the outside world. These connections seem to have been made during the most mature stage of our life so that our whole being was involved in them. Reflection discloses that it is indeed so. But reflection based on the principles and knowledge of Spiritual Science can lead us to realise the truth of what will now be said—not as the outcome of mere reflection but of spiritual-scientific investigation. What I am saying has not been discovered merely through logical thinking; it has been established by spiritual-scientific research, but logical thinking can confirm the facts and find them reasonable. We know how the several members of man's constitution unfold in the course of life: in the seventh year, the ether-body; in the fourteenth year, the astral body; in the twenty-first year the sentient-soul, in the twenty-eighth year the intellectual or mind-soul and in the thirty-fifth year the consciousness-soul (spiritual soul). Reflecting on this, we can say: In the period from the thirtieth year to the fortieth year we are concerned with the unfolding of the mind-soul and the spiritual soul.

The mind-soul and the spiritual soul are those forces in our nature which bring us into the closest contact of all with the outer physical world, for they unfold at the very age in life when our intercourse with that world is more active than at any other time. In earliest childhood, the forces belonging to our physical body are directed, determined, activated, by what is still entirely enclosed within us. The causal element engendered in previous incarnations, whatever went with us through the Gate of Death, the spiritual forces we have garnered—everything we bring with us from the earlier life works and weaves in the upbuilding of our physical body. It is at work unceasingly and invisibly from within outwards; as the years go by, this influence diminishes and the period of life approaches when the old forces have produced the body and we confront the world with a finished organism; what we bear within us has come to expression in our external body. At about the thirtieth year—it may be somewhat earlier or somewhat later—we confront the world in the most strongly physical sense; in our intercourse with the world we are connected more closely with the physical plane than during any other period of life. We may think that the relationships in life into which we now enter are more physically intelligible than any others, but the fact is that such relationships are least of all connected with the forces which work and weave in us from birth onwards. Nevertheless we may take it for granted that at about the age of thirty we are not led by chance to people who are destined, precisely then, to appear in our environment. We must far rather assume that there too our karma is at work, that these people too have something to do with one of our earlier incarnations.

Facts of Spiritual Science investigated at various times show that very often the people with whom we come into contact somewhere around our thirtieth year are related to us in such a way that in most cases we were connected with them at the beginning of the immediately preceding incarnation—or it may have been earlier still—as parents, or brothers or sisters. At first this seems a strange and astonishing fact. Although it need not inevitably be so, many cases indicate to spiritual-scientific investigation that in very truth our parents, or those who were by our side at the beginning of our previous life, who gave us our place in the physical world but from whom in later life we grew away, are karmically connected with us in such a way that in our new life we are not again guided to them in early childhood but only when we have come most completely on to the physical plane. It need not always be exactly like this, for spiritual-scientific research shows very frequently that it is not until a subsequent incarnation that those who are then our parents, brothers or sisters, or blood-relations in general, are the people we found around us in the present incarnation at about the time of our thirtieth year. So the acquaintances we make somewhere about the age of thirty in any one incarnation may have been, or will be, persons related to us by blood in a previous or subsequent incarnation. It is therefore useful to say to oneself: The personalities with whom life brings you in contact in your thirties were once around you as parents or brothers and sisters or you can anticipate that in one of your next incarnations they will have this relationship with you.

The reverse also holds good. If we think of those personalities whom we choose least of all voluntarily through forces suitable for application on the physical plane—that is to say, our parents, our brothers and sisters who were around us at the beginning of life—if we think of these personalities we shall very often find that precisely those who accompany us into life from childhood onwards were deliberately chosen by us in another incarnation to be near us while we were in the thirties. In other words, in the middle of the preceding life we ourselves chose out those who in the present life have become our parents, brothers or sisters.

So the remarkable and very interesting fact emerges that our relationships with the personalities with whom we come to be associated are not the same in the successive incarnations; also that we do not encounter these people at the same age in life as previously. Neither can it be said that exactly the opposite holds good. Furthermore it is not the personalities who were with us at the end of an earlier life who are connected, in a different incarnation, with the beginning of our life, but those with whom we were associated in the middle period of life. So neither those personalities with whom we are together at the beginning of life, nor those with us at its end, but those with whom we come into contact in the middle of life, were around us as blood-relations at the beginning of an earlier incarnation. Those who were around us then, when our life was beginning, appear in the middle of our present life; and of those who were around us at the beginning of our present life we can anticipate that we shall find ourselves together with them in the middle of one of our subsequent incarnations, that they will then come into connection with us as freely chosen companions in life. Karmic relationships are indeed mysterious.

What I have now said is the outcome of spiritual-scientific investigation. But I repeat: if, in the way opened up by this investigation, we reflect about the inner connections between the beginning of life in one of our incarnations and the middle of life in another, we shall realise that this is not void of sense or usefulness. The other aspect is that when such things are brought to our notice and we adopt an intelligent attitude to them, they bring clarity and illumination. Life is clarified if we do not simply accept such things passively—not to say dull-wittedly; it is clarified if we try to grasp, to understand, what comes to us in life in such a way that the relationships which are bound to remain elusive as long as karma is only spoken of in the abstract, become concretely perceptible.

It is useful to reflect about the question: Why is it that in the middle of our life we are actually driven by karma, seemingly with complete mental awareness, to form some acquaintanceship which does not appear to have been made quite independently and objectively? The reason is that such persons were related to us by blood in the earlier life and our karma leads them to us now because we have some connection with them.

Whenever we reflect in this way about the course of our own life, we shall see that light is shed upon it. Although we may be mistaken in some particular instance, and even if we err in our conclusions ten times over, nevertheless we may well hit upon the truth in regard to someone who comes into our ken. And when such reflections lead us to say: Somewhere or other I have met this person—thus thought is like a signpost pointing the way to other things which in different circumstances would not have occurred to us and which, taken in their whole setting, give us ever-growing certainty of the correctness of particular facts.

Karmic connections are not of such a nature that they can be discerned in one sudden flash. The highest, most important facts of knowledge regarding life, those that really do shed light upon it, must be acquired slowly and by degrees. This is not a welcome thought. It is easier to believe that some flash of illumination might enable it to be said: “In an earlier life I was associated with this or that person,” or “I myself was this or that individual.” It may be tiresome to think that all this must be a matter of knowledge slowly acquired, but that is the case nevertheless. Even if we merely cherish the belief that it might possibly be so, investigation must be repeated time and time again before the belief will become certainty. Even in cases where probability grows constantly stronger, investigation leads us farther. We erect barricades against the spiritual world if we allow ourselves to form instantaneous judgments in these matters.

Try to ponder over what has been said to-day about the acquaintanceships made in the middle period of life and their connection with individuals who were near to us in a preceding incarnation. This will lead to very fruitful thoughts, especially if taken together with what is said in the book, The Education of the Child in the light of Anthroposophy. It will then be unambiguously clear that the outcome of your reflection tallies with what is set forth in that book.

But an earnest warning must be added to what has been said to-day. The genuine investigator guards against drawing conclusions; he lets the things come to him of themselves. Once they are there, he first puts them to the test of ordinary logic. Repetition will then be impossible of something that recently happened to me, not for the first time, and is very characteristic of the attitude adopted to Anthroposophy to-day. A very clever man—I say this without irony, fully recognising that he has a brilliant mind—said the following to me: “When I read what is contained in your book, An Outline of Occult Science, I am bound to admit that it seems so logical, to tally so completely with other manifest facts in the world, that I cannot help coming to the conclusion that these things could also be discovered through pure reflection; they need not necessarily be the outcome of super-sensible investigation. The things said in this book are in no way questionable or dubious; they tally with the reality.” I was able to assure this gentleman of my conviction that it would not have been possible for me to discover them through mere reflection, nor that with great respect for his cleverness, could I believe he would have discovered them by that means alone. It is absolutely true that whatever in the domain of Spiritual Science is capable of being logically comprehended simply cannot be discovered by mere reflection! The fact that some matter can be put to the test of logic and then grasped, should be no ground for doubting its spiritual-scientific origin. On the contrary, I am sure it must be reassuring to know that the communications made by Spiritual Science can be recognised through logical reflection as being unquestionably correct; it cannot possibly be the ambition of the spiritual investigator to make illogical statements for the sake of inspiring belief! As you see, the spiritual investigator himself cannot take the standpoint that he discovers such things through reflection. But if we reflect about things that have been discovered by the methods of Spiritual Science, they may seem so logical, even too logical to allow us to believe any longer that they actually come from spiritual-scientific sources. And this applies to everything said to have been the outcome of genuine spiritual-scientific investigation.

If, to begin with, the things that have been said to-day seem grotesque, try for once to apply logical thinking to them. Truly, if spiritual facts had not led me to these things, I should not have deduced them from ordinary, logical thinking; but once they have been discovered they can be put to the test of logic. And then it will be found that the more meticulously and conscientiously we set about testing them, the more clearly it will emerge that everything tallies. Even in the case of matters where accuracy cannot really be tested, from the very way in which the various factors fit into their settings, it will be found that they give the impression of being not only in the highest degree probable, but bordering on certainty—as in the case, for example, of what has been said about parents and brothers and sisters in one life and acquaintances made in the middle of another life. Moreover such certainty proves to be well-founded when things are put to the test of life itself. In many cases we shall view our own behaviour and that of others in a quite different light if we confront someone we meet in the middle period of life, as if, in the preceding life, the relationship between us had been that of parent, brother or sister. The whole relationship will thereby become much more fruitful than if we go through life with drowsy inattentiveness.

And so we can say: More and more, Anthroposophy becomes something that does not merely give us knowledge of life but directives as to how to conceive of life's relationships in such a way that light will be shed upon them not only for our own satisfaction, but also for our conduct and tasks in life. It is important to discard the thought that in this way we impair a spontaneous response to life. Only the timid, those who lack a really earnest purpose in life, can believe such a thing. We, however, must realise that by gaining closer knowledge of life we make it more fruitful, inwardly richer. What comes to us in life should be carried, through Anthroposophy, into horizons where all our forces become more fertile, more full of confidence, a greater stimulus to hope, than they were before.