The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Our last explorations have shown us the fundamental difference between man's whole view here, between birth and death, and in the spiritual world, between death and a new birth. We explained yesterday that in our present era, since the middle of the fifteenth century, man may gain freedom between birth and death; everything on earth that he fulfills out of the impulse of freedom gives his being in the life between death and a new birth weight, as it were, reality, existence. When we emancipate ourselves from the necessities of earthly existence, when we ascend to the point where our will is guided by free motives—that is, when our will is not founded on anything in earthly life—then we create the possibility of being an independent being also between death and a new birth. In our age this capacity to preserve our own independent existence after death is connected with something we may call the relationship to the Mystery of Golgotha. This Mystery of Golgotha may be studied from the most varied viewpoints. In the course of the past years, we have already studied a great number of these viewpoints; today we shall view the Mystery of Golgotha from the standpoint arising out of the study of the value of freedom for the human being.

Here on earth, between birth and death, the human being really does not have any view of himself in his ordinary consciousness. He cannot look into himself. It is an illusion, of course, to believe, as outer science does, that it is possible to obtain an inner knowledge of the human organization by studying what is dead in the human being, indeed sometimes by studying only the corpse. This is altogether an illusion, a deception. Here, between birth and death, the human being has only a view of the outer world. What kind of view is this, however? It is one that we have frequently called the view of “appearance” (Schein) and yesterday I again emphasized this strongly.

When our senses are directed toward our surroundings between birth and death, the world appears to us as appearance, as semblance. We can take this appearance into our I—being. We can, for example, preserve it in our memory, making it therefore in a certain sense our own. Insofar as it stands in front of us when we look out into the world, however, it is an appearance that manifests itself particularly—as I already explained to you yesterday—by disappearing with death and reappearing in another form; that is, it is no longer experienced in us but is experienced in front of or around us.

If, however, in the present age the human being between birth and death were not to perceive the world as appearance, if he could not perceive the appearance, he could not be free. The development of freedom is possible only in the world of appearance. I have mentioned this in my book, The Riddle of Man (vom Menschenratsel), pointing out that in reality the world that we experience may be compared with the images that look out at us from a mirror. These pictures that look out at us from a mirror cannot force us to do anything, for they are only pictures, they are appearance. Similarly man's world of perception is also appearance. The human being is not completely woven into the appearance of the world. He is woven into a world of appearance only with his perceiving, which fills his waking consciousness. If man views his impulses, instincts, passions, and temperament, and everything that surges up from the human being, without being able to bring them into clear mental images, at least into waking mental images, then all this is not appearance; it is reality, but a reality that does not rise up in man's present consciousness.

Between birth and death, the human being lives in a true world that he does not know, one that cannot ever really give him freedom. It may implant in him instincts that make him unfree; it may call forth inner necessities, but it can never enable the human being to experience freedom. Freedom can be experienced only within a world of pictures, of appearance. When we awaken we must enter a perceptive life of appearance, so that freedom can develop.

This life of appearance, which constitutes our waking life of perception, did not always exist in this way within humanity's historical evolution. If we go back into ancient times, to which we have so often looked back in our lectures, to times when there still existed a certain instinctive vision, or remnants of this instinctive vision (which lasted until the middle of the fifteenth century), we cannot say in the same sense that the human being in his waking condition was surrounded only by a world of appearance. Everything that the human being saw in his own way as the world's spiritual background spoke through the appearance. He also saw this appearance, but in a different way. For him this appearance was an expression, a manifestation, of a spiritual world. This spiritual world then vanished behind the appearance, and only the appearance remained. The essential thing in the progressive development of humanity is that in more ancient times the appearance was experienced as the manifestation of a divine-spiritual world, but the divine-spiritual vanished from this appearance, so that before man's eyes lies only appearance, in order that he might discover his freedom within this world of appearance. The human being therefore must find his freedom in a world of appearance; he does not find freedom in the true world, which completely withdrew to the dull experiences of his inner being; there, he can find only a necessity. We may therefore say that mans world of perception between birth and death—everything that I say applies only to our age—is a world of appearance. Man perceives the world, but he perceives it as appearance.

How, then, do matters stand between death and a new birth? In our last studies we suggested that after death the human being does not perceive this outer world that he sees here, between birth and death, but between death and a new birth man essentially perceives the human being himself, the inner being of man. The human being is then the world for man. What is concealed here on earth becomes manifest in the spiritual world. Between death and a new birth, man gains insight into the entire connection between the soul life and the organic life of the human being, between the activity of the single organs, and in short, everything that, symbolically speaking, lies enclosed within the human skin.

We find, however, that in the present age it is again the case that the human being cannot live in appearance after death. The life in appearance is actually valid for him only between birth and death. The human being has come to the point today that between death and a new birth he cannot live in appearance. When he passes through death, he is imprisoned, as it were, by necessity. The human being feels that he is free in his perceiving here on earth, where he may turn his eyes where he wishes; he may combine what he perceives into concepts so as to experience his freedom of action in these concepts; between death and a new birth, however, he feels unfree regarding the world of perceptions. He is overpowered, as it were, by the world. It is just as if the human being perceived in the same way as he would perceive here on earth if he were to be hypnotized by every single sense perception, if he were to be overpowered by every single sense perception so that he would be unable to liberate himself from them out of free will.

This has been the course of man's development since the middle of the fifteenth century. The divine-spiritual worlds vanished from the appearance of the earth, but between death and a new birth, these divine spiritual worlds imprison him, so that he cannot maintain his independence. I said that only if the human being really develops freedom on earth, that is, if he takes an interest with his entire being in the appearance in life, is it possible for him to carry his own being through the portal of death.

We can see what is necessary in order to develop freedom also by looking into yet another difference between the way of viewing things today and more ancient human views.

Whether we consider humanity in general or the initiates and the mysteries in ancient times, we find that the whole view of the world had another orientation from that of today. If the human being remains standing by what he has acquired since the middle of the fifteenth century, through the kind of cognition that has arisen since that time, one finds that the human being had mental images of the evolution of the earth, of the evolution of the human race; he lost track, however, of the mental images that might have given him satisfactory indications concerning the beginning and end of the earth. We might say that the human being was able to survey a certain line of evolution; he looked back historically, he looked back geologically. When he went back still further, however, he began to construct hypotheses. He imagined that the beginning of the world was a primordial mist, which appeared to be a physical formation. Out of it evolved—that is to say, not really, but people imagined that this was so—the higher beings of the realms of nature, plants, animals, and so on. In accordance with conceptions of modern physics, people thought that earthly existence disintegrates in the end (see drawing below) by heat—again a hypothesis. Man thus saw only a segment, as it were, between the beginning and end of the earth. Beginning and end became a hazy, unsatisfactory picture to present-day human beings.

This was not the case in more ancient times. In ancient times people had very precise notions of the beginning and end of the earth, because they still saw the self-revelation of the divine-spiritual in the appearance. We can call to mind the Old Testament, for example, or other religious teachings of the past. In the Old Testament we find conceptions that are connected with the beginning of the world, and they are described in a form accessible to the human being, enabling him to grasp his own existence upon the earth. The Kant-Laplace nebula or primordial mist does not enable anyone to grasp human life on earth.

If you take the wonderful cosmogonies of the various pagan peoples, you will again find something that enabled man to grasp his earthly existence. The human being thus directed his gaze toward the beginning of the earth and came to conceptions that encompassed man. Conceptions of the end of the earth remained for a longer time in human consciousness. In Michelangelo's “Last Judgment,” for example, and other “Last Judgments,” we come across conceptions about the end of the earth, which were handed down as far as our own era and which encompass the human being; and although the ideas of sin and atonement are difficult, these conceptions do not do away with the human being.

Take the modern hypothetical conception of the end of the earth, that everything will end in a uniform heat. The entire human essence dissolves. There is no place for man in the world. In addition to the disappearance of divine-spiritual existence from the appearance of perception, the human being therefore lost, in the course of time, his conceptions of the world's beginning and end. Within these ideas he could still find his own value and see himself within the cosmos as a being connected with the beginning and end of the earth.

How did the people of past eras view history? No matter in what form they saw it, history was something that moved from the beginning to the end of the earth, receiving its meaning through the conceptions of the beginning and end of the earth. Take any of the pagan cosmologies, and they will enable you to conceive of humanity's historical development. They reach back to ages in which earthly life arises in a divine-spiritual weaving. History has a meaning. If we turn to the beginning and also the end of the earth, history has a meaning. Whereas the conception of the end of the earth, as a pictorial view contained in religious feeling, continued to exist even in more recent eras, the conception of the end of the earth lived on in historical considerations, as a kind of straggler, even in more recent times. In enlightened historical works, such as Rotteck's history of the world,¹⁶ you may still find the influence of this conception of the earth's beginning, which gives a meaning to history. Even if only a shadow remains of this conception of the beginning of the earth in Rotteck's history, which was written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it still gives historical development a meaning. The significant, peculiar fact is that at the same time in which the human being entered a world of perception of appearance, perceiving outer nature, therefore, as appearance, history began to lose its meaning and became inaccessible to direct human knowledge, because he no longer had any notion of the earth's beginning and end.

You must take this matter quite seriously. Take the primordial mist at the beginning of the earth's evolution, from which indefinite forms first condensed themselves, and then all the beings, ascending as far as man; and consider the death by heat at the end of the earth's evolution, in which everything perishes. In between lies what we tell about Moses, abut the great individuals of ancient China, about the great individuals of ancient India, Persia, Egypt—and further on, of Greece and Rome, as far as our present time. In thought we may add all that is still to come. All this takes place on the earth, however, like an episode, with no beginning and no end. History thus appears to have no meaning. This must be realized.

Nature may be surveyed, even if we cannot survey its inner being. It rises up before the human being as appearance in that man experiences nature between birth and death. History becomes meaningless. Man simply lacks courage enough in our time to admit that history has no meaning; it is meaningless, because man has lost track of the beginning and end of the earth. Man should really sense that humanity's historical development is the greatest of riddles. He should say to himself that this historical development has no meaning.

Individuals have had inklings of this. Read what Schopenhauer wrote on the absence of meaning in history that emerges out of occidental beliefs. You will see, then, that Schopenhauer really sensed this absence of meaning in history. We should be filled with the longing to rediscover the meaning of history in another way. Out of the world of appearance we can develop a satisfactory knowledge of nature, particularly in Goethe's sense, if we give up hypotheses and remain in the phenomenology, that is, in the teachings of appearance, of semblance. Natural science can be satisfying if we eliminate all the disturbing hypotheses about the beginning and end of the earth. We are then as it were imprisoned, however, in our earthly cave, and we do not look out of it. The Kant-Laplace theory and the end of the world by heat block our view into the distant past and the distant future.

This is basically the situation of present-day humanity from the standpoint of general consciousness; consequently humanity is threatened by a certain danger. It cannot quite enter into the mere world of phenomena, into the world of appearance. Above all it is unable to enter with the inner life into this world of appearance. Humanity wishes to submit to the necessity, the inner necessity of the instincts, drives, and passions. Today we do not see much of everything that may be realized on the basis of free impulses born out of pure thinking. Just as much, however, as the human being lacks freedom here in his life between birth and death, so he is overcome, with the hypnotizing compulsion between death and a new birth, by lack of freedom, by the necessity in perception. Man is therefore threatened by the danger of passing through the portal of death without taking with him his own being and without entering into something free regarding the world of perception, but rather into something that submerges him into a state of compulsion, which makes him grow rigid, as it were, in the outer world.

The impulse that in the future must break into the life of humanity is the appearance of the divine-spiritual to the human being in a way different from the way in which it appeared to him in ancient times. In past ages the human being could imagine a spiritual element within the physical at the beginning and end of the earth, with which he knew he was united and that did not exclude him. The human being must take up this permeation with the spiritual more and more from the center, instead of from the beginning and end. Even as in the Old Testament the beginning of the earth was looked upon as a genesis of the human being, within which his existence was ensured, even as the pagan cosmogonies spoke of humanity's evolution out of divine-spiritual existence, even as the contemplation of the end of the earth, which—as was stated—was still contained in the views of the decline of the world, which do not deprive man of his own self, so modern times must find in a right view of the Mystery of Golgotha, at the center of the earth's evolution, that which again enables the human being to find divine life and earthly life interwoven.

Man must understand in the right way how God passed through the human being with the Mystery of Golgotha. This will replace what we lost regarding the beginning and end of the earth. There is an essential difference, however, between the way in which we should now look upon the Mystery of Golgotha and the earlier way of looking at the beginning and end of the earth.

Try to penetrate into the way in which a pagan cosmogony arose. Today we often come across conceptions stating that these pagan cosmogonies were fabrications of the people. This conception holds that just as today man freely joins thought to thought and disconnects them again, so at one time people devised their cosmogonies. This, however, is an erroneous university view, which has no reasonable foundation. We find instead that in the past the human being gave himself up entirely to the contemplation of the world; he could see the beginning of the world only in the way in which it appeared to him in the cosmogony, in the myths. There was no freedom in this; it was altogether something that yielded itself to man by necessity. The human being had to look into the beginning of the earth; he could not refrain from doing so, he could do nothing else. Today we no longer picture in the right way how in the past man's soul pictured the beginning of the earth and, in a certain respect, also the end of the earth, through an instinctive knowledge.

Today it is impossible for the human soul to picture the Mystery of Golgotha in this way. This constitutes the great difference between Christianity and the ancient teachings of the gods. If the human being wishes to fmd Christ, he must find Him in freedom. He must freely acknowledge the Mystery of Golgotha. The content of the ancient cosmogonies was forced upon man, whereas the Mystery of Golgotha does not force itself upon him. He must approach the Mystery of Golgotha in a certain resurrection of his being, in freedom.

The human being is led to such freedom by an activity that I have recently designated in anthroposophical spiritual science as the activity of knowing. If a theologian believes that he may gain knowledge of the Akashic Chronicle in a special illustrated edition, that is to say, without needing to exert any inner activity to grasp what must appear before his soul in concepts and must become images—such a theologian would simply show that he is predisposed to grasp the world only in a pagan way, not in a Christian way; for the human being must come to Christ in inner freedom. Particularly the way in which the human being must face the Mystery of Golgotha constitutes his most intimate means of an education toward freedom.

The human being is in a certain sense torn away from the world by the Mystery of Golgotha if it is experienced rightly. What arises in that case? In the first place, the human being now can live in a world of perception, of appearance, and in this world surges up something that leads him to the spiritual existence that is guaranteed in the Mystery of Golgotha. This is one thing. The other thing, however, is that history has ceased to have meaning, because beginning and end were lost; it receives meaning again because it is given this meaning from the center. We learn to recognize how everything before the Mystery of Golgotha leads toward the Mystery of Golgotha and how everything after the Mystery of Golgotha sets out from this mystery.

History thus once more acquires meaning, whereas otherwise it is an illusory episode without beginning and without end. The outer world of perception faces the human being as appearance for the sake of his freedom, changing history into something it should not be—an episode of appearance without any center of gravity. It dissolves into fog and mist which basically we already find theoretically in Schopenhauer's writings.

Through the inclination toward the Mystery of Golgotha, all that was once otherwise historical appearance receives inner life, historical soul, connected with everything that modern man requires through the fact that he must develop freedom in life. When he passes through the portal of death, he will have developed here the great teaching of freedom. Avowal of the Mystery of Golgotha cast into life the light that must fall on everything that is free in the human being. The human being has the possibility of saving himself from the danger that he has here by virtue of the predisposition for freedom that he has in appearance but does not develop, because he surrenders himself to instincts and drives and therefore falls prey to necessity after death. By accepting as his own a religious faith that is totally different from more ancient religious faith, in filling his entire soul only with a religious faith living in freedom, he transforms himself for the experience of freedom.

In today's civilization, basically only a small number of people have really grasped that only a knowledge gained in freedom, an active knowledge, is able to lead us to Christ, to the Mystery of Golgotha. The Bible gave man a historical account so that he might have a message of the Mystery of Golgotha for the time when he could not yet take in spiritual science.

To be sure, the Gospel will never lose its value. It will acquire an ever-greater value, but to the Gospel must be added the direct knowledge of the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ must be able to be sensed, felt, known through one's own human force, not only through the forces working out of the Gospel. This is what spiritual science strives for regarding Christianity Spiritual science seeks to explain the Gospels, but it is not based upon the Gospels. It is able to appreciate the Gospels so fully just because it discovered afterward, as it were, all that lies concealed in them, all that has already been lost in the course of humanity's outer evolution.

The whole modern evolution of humanity is thus connected on the one hand with freedom, the appearance of perception, and on the other with the Mystery of Golgotha and the meaning of historical development. This sequence of many episodes which constitutes history as it is generally described and accepted today acquires its true significance only if the Mystery of Golgotha can be inserted into historical evolution.

Many people experienced this in the right way and they used the right images for it. They said to themselves: once upon a time, man looked out into the heavenly expanses; he saw the sun, but not the sun as we see it today. Today there are physicists who believe that out there in the universe there floats a large sphere of gaseous matter. I have frequently said that physicists would be astonished if they could build a cosmic balloon and reach the sun, for where they suppose the existence of a gaseous sphere, they would find negative space, which would transport them in a moment not only into nothingness but beyond nothingness, far beyond the sphere of nothingness. The modern materialistic cosmologies developed today are pure fantasy. In more ancient times, people did not picture the sun as a gaseous sphere floating in heavenly space; .the sun in their view, was a spiritual being. Even today the sun is a spiritual being to those who contemplate the world in a real way; it is a spiritual being manifesting itself only outwardly in the way in which the eye is able to perceive the sun. This central spiritual being was experienced by a more ancient humanity as one with the Christ. When speaking of Christ, the ancients pointed to the sun. More recent humanity must now not point away from the earth but rather toward the earth when it speaks of the Christ. It must search for the sun in the Man of Golgotha.

By recognizing the sun as a spiritual being, it was possible to connect a conception worthy of the human being with the beginning and end of the earth. The conception of Jesus, in whom Christ dwelt, renders possible a conception worthy of the human being regarding the middle of the earth's evolution; from there will ray out toward beginning and end that which will once more make the whole cosmos appear in a light that gives man his place in the universe. We should therefore live toward a time in which hypotheses concerning the world's beginning and end will not be constructed on the basis of materialistic, natural scientific conceptions, but which will proceed from the knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. This will also enable us to survey all of cosmic evolution. In the outwardly luminous sun, the ancient human being sensed the Christ of the outer world. The true knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha enables man to see in the historical evolution of the earth the sun of this earthly evolution through Christ. The sun shines outside in the world and also in history—it shines physically outside and spiritually in history; sun here and sun there.

This indicates the path to the Mystery of Golgotha from the viewpoint of freedom. Modern humanity must find it, if it wishes to transcend the forces of decline and enter the forces of ascent. This should be realized deeply and thoroughly. This knowledge will not be abstract, not merely theoretical, but one that fills the whole human being. It will be a knowledge that must be felt, must be experienced in feeling. The Christianity about which anthroposophy must speak will not be a looking to Christ but a being filled with Christ.

People would always like to know the difference between anthroposophy and what lived as the older theosophy. Is this difference not evident? The older theosophy has warmed up the pagan cosmologies. In the theosophical literature you will discover everywhere warmed-up pagan cosmologies, which are no longer suited to modern human beings; although theosophy speaks of the earth's beginning and end, this no longer means what it meant in the past. What is missing in these writings? The center is missing, the Mystery of Golgotha is missing throughout. It is missing to an even greater extent than in outer natural science.

Anthroposophy has a continuing cosmology that does not extinguish the Mystery of Golgotha but accepts it, so that this Mystery is contained within it. The whole evolution, reaching back as far as Saturn and forward as far as Vulcan, is seen in such a way that this light enabling us to see will ray out from the knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. If we but recognize this principal contrast, we shall no longer have any doubt as to the difference between the older theosophy and anthroposophy.

Particularly when so-called Christian theologians again and again lump together anthroposophy and theosophy, this is due to the fact that they do not really understand much about Christianity. It is deeply significant that Nietzsche's friend, Overbeck,¹⁷ the truly significant theologian of Basel, wrote a book on the Christianity of modern theology, in which he tried to prove that modern theology—including Christian theology—is no longer Christian. One may therefore say that even here outer science has already drawn attention to the fact that modern Christian theology does not understand or know anything about Christianity.

One should thoroughly understand everything that is unchristian. Modern theology, in any case, is not truly Christian; it is unchristian. Yet people prefer to ignore these things due to their love of ease. They should not be ignored, however, for to the extent to which they are ignored, man will lose the possibility of inwardly experiencing Christianity. This must be experienced, for it is the opposite pole to the experience of freedom, which must emerge. Freedom must be experienced, but the experience of freedom alone would lead human beings into the abyss. Only the Mystery of Golgotha can lead humanity across this abyss.

We shall speak of this more next time.

• 16. Karl Wenzeslaus Rodecker von Rotteck, historian, 1775–1840, General History, 1813–1818, 6 volumes.
• 17. Franz Overbeck, Protestant theologian, 1837–1905.

My dear Friends! Formerly there were a number of different esoteric circles in the Anthroposophical Society. Within those circles the material of the general lectures, drawn as it is from the spiritual life of the world, was brought to the members in a manner that enabled spiritual striving, esoteric life to arise in them. As indicated yesterday in the meeting for members, since the Christmas Conference a basic esoteric impulse will flow through the entire Anthroposophical Society in the future. And so, in essence the esoteric in a deeper form will be nurtured further. And as you will find published in the next Goetheanum members newsletter, in order that what is discussed more exoterically can be developed more esoterically, for this reason the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum exists.

The School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum therefore will be an esoteric school in the best sense of the word, so that in the organization of its classes, in the whole way it is structured, it will increasingly strive to become what a modern Mystery Center ought to be. Hopefully circumstances will make this possible very soon.

The First Class, the only one established so far, is a beginning, which will develop as further classes are set up. Designating them classes was chosen for public use because people's state of soul is today no longer properly receptive to the kind of designation that used to be customary in earlier times. What matters, of course, is the content and not what it is called. That is why it is necessary for those who are accepted as members of the school to be properly aware of what it means to be a member.

The School of Spiritual Science has been through a period of trial and error. Before I myself became the leader of the Anthroposophical Society there were various initiatives to create at the Goetheanum a kind of free university that would endeavor to emulate ordinary universities in certain ways. It has to be said now that these initiatives failed and that indeed they could not have succeeded, but it was necessary for the attempts to have been made. Enough is enough, however, and from now on there will be no more such endeavors. The real purpose of the Goetheanum is that every individual shall be able to find there whatever it is his own soul intensely seeks in its spiritual striving and cannot find elsewhere. Someone whose soul is striving in a general way and not in connection with any specific subject must … be able to find there an entirely satisfactory outcome for his endeavors. Those, equally, who are involved in a particular art or science must be able to find esoteric guidance in the various Sections so that they can deepen their spiritual insights. That is why a number of Sections have been established, some of which have already begun their activities. In Dornach especially a beginning has been made with the General Anthroposophical Section, the Section that is there for any individual who is seeking to deepen the life of his or her soul.

It is important for our Anthroposophical Society to be able to encompass the larger circle of general membership. Anyone seeking Anthroposophy in any way must be able to become a member, especially now that we have recognized the Society to be an open and public one. No obligations are attached to becoming a member except those that arise as a matter of course out of Anthroposophy itself. For members of the school, however, because it must be an esoteric school in the real and true sense, certain obligations do arise. The esoteric undercurrent in the General Anthroposophical Society flows from the fact that the executive leadership¹ is an esoteric institution, as I explained yesterday. As a result of this, everything that flows from the Executive Council will carry an esoteric undercurrent through the Society.

But so far as the school is concerned, every member must be conscious of being a true representative of Anthroposophy before the world. It must be clear to every member of the school that he or she has to be a true representative of Anthroposophy before the world. This means more than is generally understood and must be taken fully and deeply seriously. For example, it is not right to say that the school deprives certain people of their freedom by not accepting them as members. The leadership of the school must be allowed to be as free as anyone else. It, too, must be granted freedom of action and thus be permitted to determine which individuals it can recognize as members. The freedom must be mutual. There is no point in making critical remarks about the curtailment of freedom if one has not been accepted as a member of the school.

Furthermore, if a member of the school embarks on undertakings with which the leadership of the school cannot agree, so that it cannot regard that member as a true representative of the anthroposophical movement, it must be permissible for the leadership to cancel that person's membership. All this goes to show how very seriously membership of the school will have to be taken...

These exoteric measures will give the school a character that will enable truly esoteric substance to flow through it. Those who become members of it will have to regard Anthroposophy itself as crucial to their lives in the strictest sense.

Today we have gathered for a single Lesson of the First Class since it is assumed that those of you who are present will be able to make it possible to come at least occasionally to the Lessons that will take place regularly at the Goetheanum, where the content of the school is to be continuously elaborated. The aim increasingly will be to develop what has already started in the Medical Section, where Frau Dr. Wegman has begun to send out circular letters informing members who live too far away about what is flowing through the school. Today's Lesson will stand on its own, since I assume that most of you will be able to come to the Goetheanum, but I did want there to be something also for those who find it impossible to get to Dornach.

My dear friends, my brothers and sisters, ever since esoteric striving became a part of human evolution there has existed within this esoteric striving a call, a challenge, a summons.² This call, which became more exoteric during Grecian times, can be heard properly by a human being when he becomes still in his heart and soul, and then allows the influence of the stars above to work on him, the stars that resting there in the world-all, that take on forms there in their grouping-together, and through the peacefulness of their forms bring the words of heaven into a sort of script, that the person gradually will decipher. When he gives himself up in quietness of soul and in stillness of heart to the impressions of the fixed stars, when he similarly gives himself up to the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the other not resting but wandering stars, when he so deepens himself in the movements of the circumference, where certainly what wields authority in the stars, which are only markers for spiritual authorities, for reigning powers of earth-existence, when he allows all this to work on his mind and heart, all that happens in the wandering movement of the planets, and when a person deepens himself in what lives around him entering his own organism as earth, water, air, and fire, when the person really deepens himself in the world-all and gazes upon the spirit in the world-all, and when he infuses himself with all that can whisper to him, the resting-star spirits, the wandering-star spirits, the elementary spirits, in this way he deepens himself in the call, the challenge, the summons which through eons has gone out to people striving esoterically.

Let’s bring this to our souls today, as it resounds there from the heights, from the circling, from immediate surrounding area:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.
Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?
Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?
Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

So it sounds forth from the threefold world-all. O Man, know yourself! Above all it sounds when the person comes to that situation in his conscious existence which is called the threshold to the spiritual world. At this threshold to the spiritual world a person notices how everything that surrounds him in the external, sense-perceptible world has greatness, beauty, and majesty, as well as much that is hideous, how he cannot live as an earthly person if he does not have a sense for all that color upon color lives in nature, for all that radiance on radiance unfurls in star-existence, for what arises and maintains itself living in all that surrounds him on earth. When he immerses himself in all this, and he ought to want to immerse himself in it, he begins to notice that however beautiful and great and majestic all this may be, the root, the source of his own existence is not in any of it. He must take note that he must look elsewhere for the connection with the source and root of his own existence. For this purpose, the threshold is there.

On this side there is color upon color, effect on effect, force on force, life on life. this is the world merely of a person’s externality, not the world of his roots, the source of his existence. Over here initially is the light bright world, but over there, when a person looks across, there is darkness. But the person gets a feeling over there, where darkness still reigns, that actually there is true light there, there I must cross over into this true light. And this true light can only be attained when the person is prepared to attain it, when the person takes on the specific attitude and disposition in his soul, that thereby prepares himself to receive properly what as light streams out of the darkness and specifically what first gives him an image of himself.

Then the person becomes aware that a spiritual being is standing at this threshold, a being known to a person as the Guardian of the Threshold, which he has to approach. One must feel and sense everything that the Guardian wants us to feel and sense, for without having come up to and passed by this Guardian, it is not possible to attain any genuine inner knowing. And all actual inner knowing that appears to have been attained without a sense of the Guardian of the Threshold is not genuine inner knowing. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, take into your hearts something that can give you a preliminary sense of this earnest figure who stands there between not knowing and knowing:

First come to know the earnest Guardian,
Who stands before the gates of spirit-land,
Denying entry to your sensory force
And to your intellect’s might,
For in weaving of sense
And in forming of thought
Out of space’s absence of being,
Out of time’s illusory powers,
The truth of your own self
You must first forcefully master.

More than anything else it is important to be able to say to oneself to the greatest extent, “I am not yet a human being. I must become a human being through what I shall develop and unfold within myself.” Clothed in pictures initially, is what in a person initially must remain hidden from himself. For as a person descends into the earthly world, he is tucked into all the forces of heredity. The forces of heredity hold what draws us downward. There is willing, taken over almost completely by the forces of heredity, enmeshed in the physical forces of heredity, when a person follows his trials and tribulations. There is feeling, that will drive a person into every misgiving and all kinds of indolence, into all sorts of doubts about the spiritual world. And there is thinking, that specifically is dead, is the corpse of real true thinking, that was our own before we descended from pre-earthly existence into earthly life. These three appear to a person in the form of three beasts that rise up out of the abyss, standing behind the Guardian of the Threshold in front of the light-bearing darkness. Three beasts rise up, making the person aware of what he certainly is, if he fails to activate the spiritual in himself.

We see them there formed up. One as a bony shell, a bony ghost, is certainly an elementary embodiment, an incarnation of insubstantial, dead thinking, that lives however in the elemental realm. We learn to know that thinking is dead in us. Before birth it was alive, and it will be alive after death. The person’s physical body is a sort of grave, in which thinking is entombed as a mummy. The person takes this thinking, that for him as a physical person is his own, as a reality. It was indeed real before it became a corpse. … But there, the person was in pre-earthly existence. The more a person is aware that thinking in true reality is a bony ghost, the more he acquaints himself with the earthly human being.

The more a person learns to know that feeling, that becomes milder and more harmonious through spirituality, in which the person carries it up, the more he becomes aware that feeling dependent on the forces of heredity is a hate-filled beast with split mouth, sarcastic appearance, the more a person learns to know that willing is like a terrible consuming beast, then the more he will be called inwardly to say, “I am not yet a human being; I must become one by attending to the spiritual powers. I must seek to bring my thinking to life, to internalize my feelings, to spiritualize my willing.

At the same time, that truly gives great difficulties, for as we stand in physical life thinking, feeling, and willing weave themselves into the whole of our humanity. They flow into one another. In a diagram we could depict them like this: [left side of diagram] Thinking would be here [blue], not entirely separate but partly mingled with feeling [green], which in turn is partly mingled, not entirely separate from willing [red]. And thereby can a person maintain himself in physical life, by interweaving thinking, feeling, and willing with one another in his being. When the person comes over into the spiritual world, thinking, feeling, and willing split apart, and it is as though the person separates into three beings. And he pointedly has separated thinking, feeling, and willing from one another. [see right side of drawing]

The person becomes one with the world, overflowing into the world. While at one with his body, feeling unified in physical-earthly existence, because he is in a finite organic individual body, he gets the impression that he is a unity within his ego, his “I”. But through the earnest impulse that goes out from the Guardian of the Threshold, the person feels himself as a trinity. In going out into the world he feels himself in a certain manner divided up, divided up so that between thinking and feeling a space open up in between, not outwardly sensed but qualitatively there. A person observes, or rather feels, when he is at one with the world, that between the thinking-being and the feeling-being there is a sort of gap, a space.

In a remarkable way we have thus come to realize that knowing, in the true sense of the word, is to live out into the world. Just as here on earth we are one with our heart or our stomach, just so are we one with sun and moon once we have stepped across the threshold. They are our organs. We become one with the sun and the moon, and the person as he is here on earth becomes the external world. What is now inside becomes foreign, as now stones, plants, and animals are foreign. Here on earth, you do not say, “I am a mountain, I am a river.” You say, “There is a mountain, there is a river.” And when you have crossed the threshold, you don't say, “I have a heart and lungs within me.” In the same way that you speak about mountains and rivers here you speak about heart and lungs once you have crossed the threshold. You point to them as they stand outside you, but you feel the sun and moon to be part of your inner being. You feel the sun to be part of your inner being between thinking and feeling, and you feel the moon to be part of your inner being between feeling and willing. [see right side of diagram]

This is a fact of life, that in a certain manner a person can rise to, even if he is not yet clairvoyant, but rather inwardly deepens sound human understanding, and actualizes standing at the threshold alongside the earnest Guardian. It is a meditation, and is extraordinarily effective, this feeling that somehow can place the person outside himself into world existence-awareness, not in a generalized, blurred way but quite concretely, as if poured out into the cosmos, bearing the sun and moon within himself.

But over the sun there is thinking, over the moon we have feeling, and under the moon we have willing. Another way of saying this is: Over beyond the sun thinking spreads out into the starry heavens, into the zodiac [drawing on the blackboard] of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and so on. Feeling overlies the circling orbits of the sun and the planets. Willing overlies the earth, for willing is totally bound to the earth, to the gravity of the earth, to the elements earth, water, air, and fire, over which we have the moon. This is how one can put oneself out into the world.

A person’s way of comprehending the world today, when he speaks of many elements, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and so forth, would have been regarded by a person still under the influence of the Mysteries as the corpse of the world. Even a Greek in ancient times would have said to a modern person, “Not only do you pick the human organism to pieces by dissecting it in the clinical laboratory, you also dismember the world as a whole with your science because you conduct science only from the earthly point of view.

Then see, my dear brothers and sisters, that still in the ancient Egyptian Mysteries it was still clearly known that one cannot learn anything of natural science by simply observing what is outside in nature. It was rather done only by one taking each thing, this was unequivocally made clear to each person in the First Degree of Initiation in the Mysteries, only by the person taking each thing inside himself, so to speak remembering each thing, just as it had appeared in pre-earthly existence-awareness. The science of nature is truly what simultaneously incorporates the earthly and the pre-earthly.

And in the Second Degree one was told that in the earthly world one can of course learn geometry, the science of measuring, and arithmetic. For these human soul-activities are drawn from the physical. They present the super-sensible in the physical. This was not unveiled in the First Degree for it was considered dangerous. In the First Degree it was considered appropriate to describe the spiritual world to the pupil. Therefore, the science of nature was taught in the First degree, but in such a way that the pupil was reminded of the living thinking that existed within him before he came down into earthly life.

In the Third Degree the person learned, solely by approaching the portal of death, that he may not thirst after blood, that he could find human existence outside physical existence, as in the physical body with blood. Naturally when you open modern books, you will find this interpreted that one may not thirst after killing or stabbing another person, not that a person may not thirst after blood. But truly there is no need to reach the teachings of the Third Degree of Initiation in order to understand this.

Then comes a further degree in which the adept will be given the name Christ-Bearer.³ For the spirit of Christ was known by man in all the mysteries of the ages. There he was brought out first in what at that time was called chemistry. The spiritual nature of stuff is grasped when a person has gone through the portal of death. And chemistry instruction from the earthly point of view, before the pupil absorbed what he is outside his physical body, and also our present method of teaching chemistry, would have been regarded as the work of the devil in ancient Egypt. To the ancient Egyptian all chemists, all modern chemists, would have been sons of the devil, for it was known that things in nature were linked together with spirit. And it was well and completely known, even in those olden times, where instinctive clairvoyance pulsed through initiation science, that a person undoubtably is linked to the supersensible world.

For those who belong to the School of Spiritual Science and the Anthroposophical Society, the way they learn ought to resemble the way people learned from an initiate in the ancient Mysteries. If initiated in this way, as well as for those who learn from an initiate, a gathering like the one we are now having is given its wholly spiritual, esoteric character. People must partake of this spiritual atmosphere with all their consciousness. To this end it is yet necessary that direct participation in the fullest sense of the word ever and again include bringing meditative content in various forms before the members of the school.

One such set phrase should now be given to us, one of those formulas through which we can gradually prepare ourselves to press forward across the threshold, whether with our ordinary healthy common sense or with initiation awareness.

What should be trotted forth to the person, what he himself should place inwardly with mantric rhythm before the soul, out of the speech of the spirit translated into speech that is useful on earth, can be given in the following words. [The first two lines were written on the blackboard.]

O Man, touch inwardly in your body’s whole existence,
How earth forces for you in existence-awareness are pillars.

We feel an object with our fingers and call this touching. Imagine, my brothers and sisters, that you were to touch with your whole body instead of only with hand and arm. But you are not touching anything specific in your surroundings, you are touching with the whole of yourself, you are touching the earth with your whole body in such a way that the sole of your foot is the surface with which you touch and you are feeling-out and touching the way you are being supported by the forces of the earth by using the whole of yourself as the organ of touch. Unconsciously this is what we are doing all the time as we walk about or stand still, but we don't notice it. But when a person calls, summons these things in human life into consciousness, when you actually delve into your earthly experience, as it actually lets you experience it, when you touch and taste it somewhat, then you have the first feeling that must be meditated. [Writing continued.]

O Man, live inwardly in your touching’s whole sphere,
How water ways for you in existence-awareness are sculptors.

Now imagine, as you continue on in this mantric formulation, how what was at first an organ of touching and tasting is now something that is felt. This is a further step inwards. Previously you merely used your body as an organ of touching, now you experience it, live into it as an organ of touching. Just as when a person first touched and then felt, as a person forms a fist out of his hand he gets an inner feeling, touched and then felt, as you curl your hand into a fist, you have an inner feeling. Similarly, you feel and experience the touching and become aware, as you experience this touching, how something begins to move within you, something that the fluids and liquids within you constantly do as sculptors as they circulate. There the sculpting forces of a human being are inwardly experienced, the sculpting forces sent out by the etheric body.

Such things are attained while the meditation is carried out in the corresponding manner. In the first line we have touch within. Here feeling, touching, is an activity. [touch within was underlined.] In the third line touching has become a noun. [Touching's was underlined.] This repetition of that feeling, now metamorphosed, is what gives the mantra its mantric character.

Now a person steps up further, not merely to grasping the touching experience by living into it, but rather to inner grasping of life itself, to inner grasping in water of the etheric itself working. A person goes yet another degree inwardly and feels inwardly, as he touched inwardly earlier, he feels inwardly now life itself within him. A person envisions it, realizes it in this way. [Writing continued.]

O Man, feel inwardly in your living’s whole weave,

Again, we have the experience as an activity [In the third line live was underlined.], and now life is a noun. [In the fifth line living’s was underlined.] We have ascended with constantly changing activity from the physical body, which is at work entirely in the earthly realm. Here [in the first line] the objective is touching. In the next line [the third] it is experiencing activity, and here it is inwardly feeling the activity. [The word feel in the fifth line was underlined] It is placed in the fullness of life like a noun.

How air powers

—in breathing—

for you in existence-awareness are nurturers.

We have ascended as far as the air and shall now rise even further to where we enter into our fire nature, our warmth nature. [Writing continued.]

O Man, think inwardly in your feeling’s whole stream,

Again, we have the verb feeling becoming a noun. [In the seventh line feeling's was underlined.]

How fire-mights⁴ for you in existence-awareness are helpers.

All of this can now be summarized in the single sentence we come to next.

O Man, look within yourself into the elemental realm.

The elements are earth, water, air, and fire.

Let us now ascend further from all that surrounds us in the elemental world and proceed to the powerful activity that comes towards us from the circling round about, from the sun, the moon and the circling planets. In later Lessons we shall look in more detail at the way we participate in the movements of the circling planets and the connection this has with the being of man. Today the mantric formulation is more general. We are to ascend in meditation from an experience of the elemental world to an experience of the circling with these words: [writing continues]

O Man, just so let rule in the depths of your soul

The wandering stars' world-guiding might.

And this is summarized in the words:

O Man, bring yourself into being, into motion⁵ through world’s circling.

Bring yourself into being means to fashion yourself, to make yourself into a being.

Then we ascend to what we can feel especially in the existence of our head when we turn our attention to the fixed stars, those stars that depict the shapes, for example, of the zodiac and that regulate the existence of the world. Here we feel how all that quietly lives and weaves in our head is an after-effect of what we see up there among the fixed stars heralding heaven. We can ascend to this if we continue our mantra as follows: [writing continued]

O Man, inwardly hold in the work of your spirit

The resting stars’ heaven-heralding words.

In summary:

O Man, fashion yourself through heaven's guardians.⁶

Fashion yourself through heaven's guardians, through those beings you discern through the words and the script of the fixed stars to be the ones who heed, herd, and help guard the world.

My dear brothers and sisters, such things are there in order that they may work on in the soul, work on in such a way that the inner structure of such mantras comes to be felt as inner harmony, and that such mantras, as they are repeated over and over again in the soul, so that the soul in this finally strives and weaves and continues and thereby finds the way across to the serious Guardian in the proper manner. Finding him improperly and being swept back into the physical world, a person can easily be disconcerted in the physical world, by confusing what applies to the spiritual world with what applies to the physical world. [At this point the shorthand report has a long sentence which cannot be deciphered.]

We will let work on our souls that which makes us appreciate how true, genuine, honest awareness is gained at the threshold to the spiritual world where we, as we approach this threshold, become aware of such earnestness. We will let work on us what has already been spoken here today.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.
Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?
Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?
Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

Then, however, comes the inner courage that arises and persists in the words:

O Man, touch inwardly in your body’s whole existence,
How earth forces for you in existence-awareness are pillars.
O Man, live inwardly in your touching’s whole sphere,
How water ways for you in existence-awareness are sculptors.
O Man, feel inwardly in your living’s whole weave,
How air powers for you in existence-awareness are nurturers.
O Man, think inwardly in your feeling’s whole stream,
How fire-mights for you in existence-awareness are helpers.
O Man, look within yourself into the elemental realm.

O Man, just so let rule in the depths of your soul
The wandering stars' world-guiding might.
O Man, bring yourself into being, into motion, through world’s circling.

O Man, hold inwardly in the work of your spirit
The resting stars’ heaven-heralding words.
O Man, fashion yourself through heavens’ guardians.

• 1. Vorstand
• 2. Aufforderung
• 3. Christophoros in Greek
• 4. Feuermächte
• 5. erwese dich
• 6. Hüter

The considerations we are currently undertaking concern matters that are treated as mysteries by many people who know something about them in one form or another. And for certain reasons, knowledge of these things is kept away from the world from many sides, because it is believed that the things in question are parts of a comprehensive knowledge of supersensible matters that should not yet be communicated to mankind. I do not consider this view to be correct with regard to certain things that are being discussed here. On the contrary, it seems to me necessary for humanity to make the courageous decision to enter into a real consideration of the supersensible worlds. And one cannot do that otherwise than by directly grasping what is specifically considered in relation to the question in question.

Today, I would like to deal with a preliminary question first. Yesterday we spoke about the stages a person goes through between death and a new birth. A very common objection to discussing these things, not on the part of the initiated, but on the part of the uninitiated, is that one simply says: Yes, why is it necessary to know something about these things? One could indeed wait until one passes through the gate of death, and then one will see what it is actually like in the spiritual world. It is something that is said very often. Now, the thing is that we can never answer such questions from a so-called absolute point of view when we talk about reality, but that we, from a spiritual-scientific point of view, must always answer them from the point of view of the time in which we live. We live in the fifth post-Atlantic period, which began in the 15th century of our calendar. It concluded the fourth post-Atlantic period, which, as we know, began in the 8th century BC and came to an end in the 15th century AD. There are seven such cultural periods. From this, however, it can be seen that we have passed the midpoint of the cultural development of the earth, which was in the fourth post-Atlantic period, and that we are simply entering – we are, after all, also in the fifth great earth period – the time when the earth is in a descending development.

The considerations we have been making in these days can already draw your attention to the fact that it is important to look at the descending development, at that which is, so to speak, not in evolution but in devolution, which is in retrogression. Our whole evolution on earth is in retrogression. Certain abilities and powers that were present in the previous period of ascending development cease to exist, and others have to take the place of these ceasing powers and abilities. This is particularly the case with certain inner psychic abilities of the human being. It can be said that until the fourth post-Atlantic period, until around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, people still had the ability to have a certain connection with the supersensible world. We know that these abilities have disappeared in the most diverse ways. They no longer exist as elementary abilities; they have, so to speak, dwindled away. Not only has the life of man on earth changed between birth and death with regard to such abilities, but actually, and even more radically, has the life of man changed between death and a new birth. And it must be said that for this period of time, from death to a new birth, in the present cycle of mankind, which thus already belongs to the descending ones, it is so that men, when they go through the gate of death , they must have certain memories of what they have acquired here in the physical body if they want to find the right attitude and the right relationship to the events to which they are exposed between death and a new birth. It is one of the necessary prerequisites for a right life after death that people here before death acquire more and more certain ideas about life after death, because only when they remember these ideas, which they have acquired here, can they orient themselves in the time between death and a new birth. It is factually incorrect to claim that one can wait until death to have such ideas about the life between death and a new birth. If people continued to live in these prejudices, if they persistently refused to want to gain insights here already about life between death and a new birth, then this life, this life free of the body, would become a dark one for them, one in which they would be disoriented; they would not be able to penetrate their spiritual surroundings in the right way through everything that I described to you yesterday. Until almost the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that people brought abilities into their physical life here that originated in the spiritual world. That is why they had atavistic clairvoyance. This atavistic clairvoyance came from the fact that certain spiritual abilities extended from the pre-birth state into this life. That stopped. People no longer have abilities here in physical life that extend from the prenatal life. You know that. But the other thing must be done instead: people must acquire more and more ideas here on earth about the post-mortem life, the life after death, so that they can remember after death, so that they can carry something through the gates of death.

That is what I want to comment on in particular regarding this preliminary question. So the comfortable notion that one can wait until death to form such ideas does not apply if one considers in concrete terms at what point in time of the development of the earth we actually are. And this must always be borne in mind. For views that are absolutely valid, that apply at all times, do not exist; there are only views that can guide people for a certain period of time. This is what one must acquire in such an eminent sense through spiritual science.

And now I would like to discuss a few things that can bring our considerations to a preliminary conclusion. We started from the assumption that the present human being feels a gulf between what he calls ideals, be they moral or other ideals, which he also calls ideas, and what he feels to be his views on the purely natural order of the world. The concepts and views that man forms about the natural order of the world do not enable him to assume that what he carries in his heart as ideals has real power and can actually be realized like a natural force.

The essential thing to consider in this question is now the following: We now know how it is with the structure of the human being here on the physical earth. We also know how it is with the structure of the human being in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Some time ago I raised a question which actually already comes before the human soul as a concrete question when the human being looks at life, but which is precisely a question to which one cannot say anything when one is faced with the gap just characterized between idealism and realism between idealism and realism, that is the question: How is it that in our world order some people die very young, as children or young people or in middle age, while others only die when they have grown old? What is the connection with the order of the world? Neither idealism on the one hand nor realism on the other, which cannot regard ideals as real powers, can shed any light on such questions, which are, however, questions of life. These questions can only be approached if one has something very definite in mind. And that is to realize that the present human being, as he will one day stand before us as an earthly human being, can cope relatively easily with space, but he does not cope in the same way with time. In this respect, the sum of all existing philosophical views does not really offer any significant insight, and the question of the nature of time has so far only been treated in the narrowest human circles. It is not that easy to speak about time and its essence in a way that is accessible to the general public, but perhaps I can succeed in giving you an idea of what I mean by bringing time into discussion in analogy to space. I will have to tax your patience a little, because the brief consideration I want to give to this subject seems to have a somewhat abstract character.

If you simply overlook a piece of the room, you know that what you overlook reveals itself to you in a perspective character. You have to take into account the perspective of the room when you overlook a piece of it. If you now bring the piece of room that you overlook and to which you instinctively ascribe a perspective character onto a surface, then you take the perspective into account. If you look down an avenue, you see the distant trees of the avenue as smaller and closer together. You can express this in perspective, and you can, in a sense, express in perspective on a surface what you see in space.

Now it is clear that what you see in space is juxtaposed in a flat surface. In space, it is not juxtaposed; there are two trees in front (see drawing on p. 164), and two trees are far away. But by bringing the visible space into the flat surface, you place what is behind one another next to one another. You have the instinctive ability to transpose what you have painted or drawn on a surface into three dimensions. That you have this ability is due to the fact that man, as he is now as an earthly man, has become relatively detached from space as such.

Man has not detached himself from time in the same way. And that is something tremendously important and significant, but something that unfortunately is hardly noticed, hardly noticed by science. Man believes that when he develops in time, he has time. But in reality he does not have real time. He does not have real time at all, but what you experience as time is actually, in relation to real time, something that can be called an image. Just as this image (see drawing) in the plane relates to space, so what the ordinary person calls time relates to real time. The ordinary person does not experience real time, but rather experiences an image of time. And that is very difficult to imagine.

For example, it is extremely difficult for you to imagine that something that is effective today does not need to be present at the present moment in time, but is real at a much earlier point in time and is not real at the present moment in time. You can, so to speak, project that which is present in a very early period of time into your own time.

What I have just said has a very significant consequence. It has the consequence that everything we call nature has a completely different character than everything we have to regard as a certain part of the human being itself. For example, Ahriman also works in nature outside, or rather the Ahrimanic powers work; but the Ahrimanic powers never work in nature outside at the present time. If you look at nature as a whole, Ahriman is at work in nature, but he is working from a distant time. Ahriman works from the past. And whether you look at the mineral, the vegetable or the animal kingdom, you must never say that there is something in what is currently unfolding before your eyes in which Ahriman is active. And yet Ahriman is active in it; but from the past. If I were to describe the matter, I would have to say: Here is the line of development from the past into the future, and here you survey nature.

Yes, now you have to imagine looking into it. What you see before you in the present contains no ahrimanic powers, but Ahriman works through nature from the past, from a particular past.

And to you, Ahriman appears in nature, when you become aware of him there, in perspective. If you were to say: Ahriman is at work in the present — then you would be making the same mistake in relation to nature as if you were to say: When I survey a room, the distant trees stand beside the near trees (see drawing on page 164) because they can be placed in perspective within the space.

A fundamental requirement for a real view into the spiritual world is this: that one learns to see in perspective in time, that one learns to place every being at its correct point in time.

If I said yesterday that after death the I is, as it were, transferred from a fluid state into a kind of solid state, that is not all there is to it. Suppose you lived here on earth with your I from 1850 to 1920, and in 1920 you became aware of your I. I mean: you will become aware of it earlier, but now you look back, with the spirit self through the hierarchies you look back at your ego; there you see your ego always as it was from 1850 to 1920. The ego stays there, stays put. This means that your experiences do not go with you soon after your death, but you look back on them. You now look back from a temporally distant perspective and you see into the length of time, just as you see into the length of space here in the physical world. I can also express it this way: when you die, say, in 1920, you live with all that I described to you yesterday as the members of your being, but then you look back on the stretch of time in which you lived here on earth with your ego. And that stretch of time remains there, and you always see it as you continue to live in perspective, at the point in time where it was. And so you have to imagine that Ahriman is active outside in nature, but from an earlier point in time.

This is very important. It is something that is given very little consideration. If one wants to understand the world, if one wants to speak spiritually of time, then one must absolutely imagine time in a spatial way and must consider this connection of the spiritual substance with time. This is very important.

Now, what I said to you about the Ahrimanic powers, that they work from the past, is true for nature. But with human beings it is different. For the human being, while he lives here between birth and death, it is different precisely because everything that comes to an end in time becomes maya, deception, for him. While he lives here, the human being lives within the course of time itself, and by living through a certain number of years, he lives through the course of time. As time passes, he himself passes with time. That is not the case with space. When you walk down an avenue, the trees remain behind and you move forward, and you do not take the trees, which are left behind, and your impressions with you in such a way that you would have the impression that the tree image is moving with you when you take a step. You do that with the image of time. Here in the physical body you actually do this – because you yourself continue to develop in time – by allowing yourself to be deceived about time in relation to its perspective. You do not notice the perspective of time. And in particular, the subconscious mind does not notice it. The subconscious mind does not notice this living with time at all, and gives itself over to a complete deception with regard to the perspective of time. But this has a very definite consequence. It has the consequence that Ahrimanic powers can now work as present powers in what happens in man. Ahrimanic powers work in the life of the human soul as present powers. So that man stands in relation to nature in this way: when he looks out into nature, there is nothing Ahrimanic in the present. The Ahrimanic works in him as a presence, precisely as Maja, as deception. But the human being is given over to this deception about the things that I have explained to you, so that through the human being the Ahrimanic powers gain the possibility of creeping into the present, of walking into the present. We can say that the Ahrimanic forces – and the same applies to the Luciferic forces, albeit from a somewhat different point of view, which we will discuss in a moment – work in nature in such a way that they actually have nothing to do with the present, but extend their effects from prehistoric times. These Ahrimanic forces are currently at work in the human being.

What are the consequences? The consequence is that, in his deepest soul, man cannot feel related to nature in relation to the point just discussed. He looks at his being, or rather feels himself in his being, senses the nature-based being. Because ahrimanic powers are countervailing powers in him, and ahrimanic powers are past powers in nature, everything that is natural appears to him differently from that which develops within himself. Man does not unravel the difference he perceives between himself and nature in the right way. If he unraveled it in the right way, it would be as I have just explained. He would say: Outside in nature, Ahriman works from the past; in me, Ahriman works as a present power. But because of this, even if he does not know the difference, he behaves in the sense of this difference and perceives nature as spiritless. He does perceive that in the present the Ahrimanic powers are not directly active in nature, but he perceives nature as spiritless because he does not say to himself: Ahriman works from the past – instead, he only looks at present-day nature. Ahriman does not work in it.

But Ahriman, however strange it may sound, is the power that the general creation of the world uses to bring forth nature. When one speaks of the spirit of nature, when one speaks of the pure spirit of nature, one should actually speak of the ahrimanic spirit. There it is fully justified, the ahrimanic spirit. The beings of the normal hierarchies make use of the ahrimanic spirit to bring forth what extends around us as nature. The fact that we do not perceive nature in a spiritualized way is precisely because in the present life of nature the spirit is not contained, but works from the past. And that is the secret, I would say, of the world-creative powers, that they make use of a spirit that they have left at an earlier stage to work at a later stage, but let it work from the past.

When we speak of nature, we should not speak of matter, nor of forces; we should speak of ahrimanic entities. But then we would have to place these ahrimanic entities in the past. The result is a strange one: suppose some natural philosopher ponders, ponders what is behind the phenomena of nature. Well, he comes up with all sorts of theories and hypotheses about atomic connections and the like. But that is not the case. Behind what is spread out around us in a way that appeals to the senses, there is not actually what the natural philosophers usually assume, but behind all of this there is the sum of the Ahrimanic powers, but not as a presence. So if the natural philosopher is compelled to assume, let us say, that there are some atomic structures behind the chemical elements, then that is wrong; behind the chemical elements there are Ahrimanic powers. But if you could detach what you see from the chemical elements and look beyond, you would see nothing behind them in the present: it would be hollow where you look for atoms, and what is at work there comes from the past and works in this hollow space. That is how it is in reality. Hence the many unsuccessful theories about what the “thing in itself” is; for this “thing in itself” is not there at all in the present. Rather, where the “thing in itself” is sought, there is nothing; but the effect is there from the past. So that one could say that if Kart had sought his “thing in itself,” he would have had to say: Where I want to approach the 'thing in itself', there I cannot approach. — That is what he said. But he did not realize that in the beginning he would have found nothing there at all, and that if he had gone behind the veil of things, he would have had to go far back; then he would have found Ahrimanic powers.

In man himself it is different. It is precisely because man is vividly placed in time that it has been possible for the Ahrimanic powers to enter our world through the gateway of humanity and to work within man as such. And the consequence of the Ahrimanic powers working in man is that man detaches what he sees in the present from the spiritual, that man detaches his present existence from the spiritual. This is the consequence of our carrying the Ahrimanic powers within the Maja in us. So that one can say: Just as we view the world materially, detached from the spirit, as a mere natural order that believes it has reached its peak in the law of the conservation of energy and matter — which is an illusion — what we see as a natural order is merely brought about by the fact that we carry the Ahrimanic powers within us, and that they are not present as powers in nature outside us. Therefore, what we think about nature, in that we think of it merely materially, does not correspond to nature, but only to present nature. But this present nature is precisely an abstraction, because the past Ahriman always works in it.

Now, not only the Ahrimanic but also the Luciferic is at work in people. This Luciferic, however, has, so to speak, a different tendency in the universe than the Ahrimanic. Let us visualize the tendency of the Ahrimanic as we have now expressed it. The tendency of the Ahrimanic in us is to present the world in materialistic terms. That we conceive the world materialistically, that we think of a mere natural order, is the consequence of the fact that we carry Ahrimanic in us. That we carry ideals within us, which detach themselves from the general nature, according to which we want to orient ourselves in our mutual behavior, but which must appear to us only like dreams within the present world view, which are dreamed out when, according to the natural order, the earth has arrived at its final state , that is the consequence of the fact that the luciferic powers, which, like the ahrimanic ones, live in us, are constantly striving to tear the part of us that is accessible to them completely out of the natural order and to spiritualize it completely. The main tendency of the luciferic powers, insofar as they live in us, is to make us as spiritual as possible, to tear us away from all material life if possible. That is why they present us with ideals that are not natural powers, but that are powerless in the present natural order. And if, in the course of the future period of the earth, man were to fall entirely prey to the influence of Lucifer, so that he would believe that ideals are just imagined things towards which the mind can be directed, then this man would follow the luciferic powers. The material earth, to which we belong, would decay, scatter in the universe, would not fulfill its purpose, and the luciferic powers would lead man into another spiritual world to which he does not belong. To do this, they need the trick of making us believe in ideals that are actually mere dreams. Just as Ahriman, on the one hand, presents us with a world that is a mere natural order, so Lucifer, on the other hand, presents us with a world that consists purely of imagined ideals.

This is something very significant. And at present, I would say, a balance is only being struck in those areas that still lie in the human unconscious. But people must become more and more aware of this, otherwise they will not get out of this dilemma, they will not be able to build a bridge between idealism and realism, but this bridge is necessary.

What currently still creates a kind of balance is the following. When very young people die, for example children, these children – and the same applies to young people – have just looked into the world; they have not fully lived out their existence here on the physical plane. With a life unlived on the physical plane, they pass over into the other world, which is lived between death and a new birth, as I described yesterday. Because they have only lived part of their earthly life, they bring something of earthly life with them into the spiritual world that cannot be brought across when one has grown old. You arrive differently in the spiritual world if you have grown old than if you die young. If you die young, you have lived your life in such a way that you still have a lot of strength in you from your prenatal life. As a child and as a young person, you have lived your physical life in such a way that you still have a lot of the strength in you that you had in the spiritual world before you were born. In this way, a close connection has been created between the spiritual part that one has brought with one and the physical part that one has experienced here. And through this close connection, one can take something that one acquires on earth with one into the spiritual world. Children or people who have died young take something from earthly life with them into the spiritual world that cannot be taken at all if one dies as an older person. That which is taken along is then over there in the spiritual world, and what is carried over by children and young people gives the spiritual world a certain heaviness that it would not otherwise have, the spiritual world in which people then live together, gives a certain heaviness to the spiritual world and prevents the luciferic powers from completely separating the spiritual world from the physical one.

So you see, we are looking at an enormous secret! When children and young people die, they take something with them from here, which the luciferic powers use to prevent us from completely detaching ourselves from earthly life. It is extremely important to realize this.

If you get older here on earth, you cannot thwart the luciferic powers in the way described, because after a certain age you no longer have that intimate connection between what you brought with you at birth and physical life on earth. When one has grown old, this inner connection is dissolved and just the opposite occurs. From a certain age onwards we instill our own nature in a certain way into the spiritual substance within the physical earth. We make the physical earth more spiritual than it would otherwise be. So from a certain age onwards we spiritualize the physical earth in a certain way, which cannot be perceived by the outer senses. We carry spiritual into the physical earth, as we carry physical up into the spiritual world when we die young; we squeeze out, so to speak, spiritual when we grow old, I cannot say it any other way. Growing old consists in the spiritual sense from a certain aspect of squeezing out spiritual here on earth. This in turn prevents the reckoning of Ahriman. As a result, Ahriman cannot, in the long run, have such an intense effect on people that the opinion that ideals do have a certain meaning could completely die out. But in today's time frame, we are already very, very close to people falling into the most terrible errors precisely with regard to what has been said. Even well-meaning people easily fall into such errors with regard to what has been said. And these errors will become ever greater and greater and, with increasing earth development, can become enormous.

To give you an example: a very ingenious philosopher, Robert Zimmermann, wrote an “Anthroposophy” in 1882. I have already mentioned this in a context. This “Anthroposophy” is not what we now call Anthroposophy, it is more or less a concept jungle. But that is because Robert Zimmermann was not able to see into the spiritual world, he was only a Herbartian philosopher. Now he has written this “Anthroposophy”. But it is precisely in this “Anthroposophy” that Robert Zimmermann deals with the question that I have placed at the top of our considerations these days from his point of view. On the one hand, he sees ideas: logical ideas, aesthetic ideas, ethical ideas; on the other hand, he sees the order of nature. And he cannot somehow find a bridge between the logical, the aesthetic, the ethical ideas and the order of nature, but he does stop at it: on the one hand, there is the order of nature, and on the other hand, there are the ideas. And the conclusion he comes to is extremely interesting, because it is actually typical of a person in the present day. He comes to the conclusion that it is forbidden to man once and for all to populate nature with ideas and to ascribe to ideas the power of nature. The two worlds can actually only be connected in the mind of man. So he says. And so he means at one point, where he summarizes almost everything he says and thinks: “The realization of ideas is neither a fact of the past nor a fact of the present, but a task whose fulfillment lies in the future and in the hands of man. The dream of a “golden age”, of which a sober rationalist like Kant as of that of “eternal peace, as an extreme positivist like Comte as the ‘état positif’, raved about, will be fulfilled when the entire world of ideas has become real and the entire reality is permeated by the ideas, that is to say, when that which Schiller called “the secret of the master's art,” the “consumption” of matter by form, becomes manifest, or, as Schleiermacher put it, “when ethics become physics and physics become ethics.”

Yes, but that can never be! It can only be that people realize ideas in their social order. But when the earth has reached its end, the whole dream of ideas will have been dreamt. Nothing else is possible according to such a philosophy. Therefore such a philosophy always remains abstract and must finally confess: “A philosophy which, like the one above, neither takes the theocentric point of view, inaccessible to human knowledge, as in theosophy, and regards the ‘dream of reason’ as a reality that has long since been created, nor, like anthropology, takes the anthropocentric but uncritical standpoint of common experience, in order to view from there a reality filled with ideas as a 'dream of reason', which thus simultaneously wants to be anthropocentric, that is, starting from human experience, and yet philosophical, that is, going beyond it, at the hand of logical thinking, is Arihroposophie.” “Anthroposophy” is therefore here the admission that one can never cross this chasm between unreal ideas and idea-less reality.

But in man himself there is a natural being, which thus belongs to the natural order, connected with a spiritual being that can absorb the spiritual. This is not denied by an anthroposophist like Robert Zimmermann. But man cannot be regarded by contemporary science either in such a way that the riddle would be solved through man, through this microcosm.

Let us now look back at something we have already mentioned during this stay. We have said that we actually have to divide the human being into three parts, not as conveniently as the skeleton, of course, as I have already explained. But I have also spoken about this in the final notes to my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul). We can divide the human being into three parts: the head, the trunk and the extremities, with everything that belongs to the extremities belonging to the extremities, including everything sexual. If we divide the human being in this way and now apply what we already know: that the formation of the head, the shape of the head points to forces of the previous incarnation, the limb man points to the future incarnation and actually only the trunk belongs to the present. So, after what I have explained today, you will no longer find it very incomprehensible when I tell you: insofar as the human being carries his head, this head points back to the earlier incarnation, into the past. The forces of the past, Ahrimanic forces, are at work in the head, and what applies to Ahrimanic forces in general applies to the human head in particular. Everything that is actually formed in the human head does not actually belong to the present, but the forces of the previous incarnation have an effect on the head; and the creative powers make use of the ahrimanic powers to shape our head, to give our head its actual form. If the creative powers did not make use of the ahrimanic spirits to shape our heads, then we would all – forgive me, but it is so – wear a much softer head, but we would all have an animal head: one who is bullish in character would have a bull's head, another who is lamb-like in character would have a lamb's head, and so on. It is due to the influence of the Ahrimanic powers, which the creative forces use to shape us, that this animal head, which we would otherwise wear, does not really sit on us, as the Egyptians drew it on some of their figures; that we do not go around like these Egyptian figures, who have good reasons for this, because in the Egyptian mysteries, too, though from an atavistic point of view, things were taught that can be taught again now. We also do not go around like that, as in the Rosicrucian pictures, where every woman is painted with a lion's head and every man with an ox's head. That is the Rosicrucian painting of man. The Rosicrucians chose a more average animal and therefore gave the women the head of the animal that most resembles them, the lion, and the man the head of the animal that most resembles him, the ox, the bull. That is why in Rosicrucian figures you see man and woman placed side by side: the woman with the most beautiful lion's head, the man with a bull's head. But this is absolutely correct. That metamorphosis – to use a Goethean term – can take place, that our head, which tends towards the animalistic in its form, can be shaped so that it is a human head, comes from the influence of the Ahrimanic powers. If the deities did not make use of Ahriman to shape our bony heads, then we would walk around with animal heads.

But the divine powers also make use of the luciferic spirits. If they did not make use of these luciferic spirits, our limbless man would not be able to transform from the present to the next incarnation. The luciferic beings are necessary for this. And it is to the luciferic entities that we again owe the fact that, by dying, the form that the man of the extremities still has now is gradually transformed into the broader form that he is to have in the next incarnation. Then, in the middle of the path between death and a new birth, Ahriman must intervene to take on the other task: to reshape the head in the appropriate way. Just as we would go around with animal heads if we did not owe it to Ahriman that we get a human head, so our nature of the extremities would not metamorphose into the human until the next incarnation, but would pass over into the demonic. We lose our head, as we now have it, under all circumstances through death, not only as matter that unites with the earth, but also as form; in the next incarnation we carry over what will become the head from the extremity of man. But this would become a demonic being if we did not have the luciferic powers, who are connected with us, to thank for the fact that the transformation can take place from a demon, which is merely a spiritual soul, into the human form of the next incarnation.

Thus, Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers must participate in our becoming human, and the human cannot be understood without calling upon the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic for help. Humanity cannot be spared the task of truly understanding the activity of Ahriman and Lucifer in the future. The Bible quite rightly says that the Deity of whom it speaks at the beginning breathed the living spirit into man. But the living spirit works in the trunk of the human being. Insofar as we are dealing with the normally functioning divine entities, we are dealing only with the trunk of the human being. Insofar as we are dealing with the head man, we are dealing with an opponent of the powers of Yahweh, and thus also with an opponent of the Christ. And insofar as we are dealing with the man of the extremities, we are dealing with the Luciferic opponent.

Therefore, one will only understand the human being if one presents him under these three aspects. In our central group for our building, we therefore have this trinity: the representative of humanity, who is trained in such a way that the forces of breathing, of the trunk, of heart activity and so on are primarily active in him – this is the middle figure; then the figure in which everything main, head-related is active: Ahriman; and the figure in which everything extremity-related is active: Lucifer.

We must dissect the human being in this way if we want to understand the human being, because in the human being, the human being as such is united with Ahriman and Lucifer. At the same time, this is an indication that everything that is more or less connected with human thinking, which, after all, is bound to the head in relation to

its physical connection to the head — human thinking flows on the basis of perceptions as something external and obvious — that all this has an Ahrimanic character. Through the senses of the head we perceive nature primarily, and we build up an image of nature with the ahrimanic character just described, because we ourselves carry the ahrimanic in the formation, in the shaping of our head.

Ideals, on the other hand, have a great deal to do with love, with everything that belongs to the man of the extremities, inwardly, psychologically. I shall come back to this in the near future. That is why the Luciferic power has special access to ideals. Ahriman takes hold of us through our head, Lucifer through our extremities. Through our head Ahriman tempts us to conceive of nature without spirit; through our extremity man Lucifer tempts us to conceive of ideals without the power of nature.

But it is the task of the present human being, by surveying such things, to arrive at a correct overview. For you see, there is a certain boundary within us, precisely in our chest-humanity, in our trunk-humanity, whereby the forces of the head, which are Ahrimanic forces, are separated from the luciferic forces that belong to the extremity-humanity. If we were able to see ourselves completely by looking mystically into ourselves, then we would indeed comprehend the natural order through the head, but we would also see into ourselves through the natural order. And if the luciferic powers were to decide in us, then the luciferic powers would also enlighten us about the ahrimanic powers, and in this way we would come to a connection between the natural order and the spiritual order. But for a certain reason we cannot do this, and that is because we have a memory. What we absorb from nature in the way of ideas and concepts, of impressions, we store in our memory. And if here (see diagram on page 179) we have only schematically drawn the head human being, the trunk and torso human being, and the extremities human being, then in the trunk human being there is the septum, which leads to that which we take in through the head, in the natural order, coming back to us as memory material. As a result, we do not see down to the Luciferic, and thus we do not notice the Ahrimanic, as we do not see what is behind a mirror, but rather what is reflected. Here the natural order is reflected in what at the same time separates our Ahrimanic from our Luciferic, and what is the basis for the forming memory, for the forming power of recollection. If we could not remember the things we have experienced, if this partition were not there, if, looking into ourselves, we could see through ourselves, we would look down into ourselves as far as the Luciferic. Then we would also perceive the Ahrimanic.

But now consider: what appears to us in this mirror is what we live through in the course of our lives, what we look back on after death, what becomes a solid ego from a fluid ego. This is what we look back on. That is what we live with. And Ahriman and Lucifer work with us, working with us in such a way that Ahriman brings us to wearing a human head, and Lucifer brings us to not becoming a demon, but to having the possibility of coming to a next incarnation.

I have perhaps tried your patience a little with things that are perhaps a little more difficult to understand, but I wanted to at least evoke a feeling for what actually creates the gap between idealism and realism. It arises from the fact that the Luciferic in us arouses idealism, which is powerless in nature, that the Ahrimanic in us evokes the mere natural order, which appears spiritless to us. Thus idealists, abstract idealists, are actually under the influence of Lucifer, while materialists are under the influence of Ahriman. It is necessary to engage with these things, not just to engage in so-called theosophy in a schematic way, but to engage with these more precise things. For it is necessary that man should become conscious of the fact that he must do something to remain united with the spirit for the rest of his development on earth. It is an uncomfortable truth, one might say, even a hated truth, truly a hated truth, for it contradicts so much that is pleasant to man, that is pleasant to him out of laziness. Nothing is more difficult for people today than when they are told: If you want to maintain your connection with the spirit in the future, you have to do something about it. Most people would like the Mystery of Golgotha to have dissolved into the ground, so that they have nothing to do with their own affairs, so that they can be redeemed from their sins through Christ and go to heaven without having to do anything. And that is why most theologians get so angry about anthroposophy, because the anthroposophical side can never admit that man has nothing to do to maintain his connection with the spirit, that this can also happen in the future of the development of the earth without any action on his part. The connection between the physical and the spiritual, between what the members of man are between birth and death, and what the members of man are between death and new birth, this connection is called into question by the future development of the earth, and it will only not come into disorder if men will really occupy themselves with the spiritual towards the future. Spiritual scientific evidence for this already exists today. This spiritual scientific evidence is highly, highly inconvenient truth, but it sheds light on important and significant matters.

I would like to say that the connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical-etheric in the human being of the counterweight has already become very loose, and it is necessary for the human being to be more and more alert to himself, so that nothing happens in the connection between his physical-etheric and soul-spiritual that could, so to speak, suck him dry, that could suck him dry soul-spiritually. For when such prejudices become more and more active, when one does not need to know anything about what happens after death in life, or when the gulf between so-called idealism and pure natural order becomes ever greater, then people are in danger of losing their soul more and more. Today, I might say, this loss is still held in check by the fact that when young people die, a certain heaviness is given to the spiritual world and Lucifer is thwarted, and when old people die, so much spirituality is poured into the physical world that Ahriman is thwarted. But one must not forget that as a result of people turning away from the spiritual realm, the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers become more and more powerful, and that little by little, as the devolution of the earth goes on and on, this dam could no longer be fully effective.

That is what I would like to see emerging from our deliberations as a kind of bottom line, a feeling – and feelings are always the most important thing that can arise from spiritual scientific life – of the necessity of dealing with the spiritual from the present earth cycle onwards. I have emphasized this from the most diverse points of view, that it is necessary from the present point of view that people occupy themselves with the spiritual. And there will be no other way of dealing with spiritual matters in the future than by acquiring understanding and not resisting the process of really absorbing even the more difficult considerations such as we have been discussing in recent days and particularly today. People must come to understand the perspectivity of time. When this understanding of the perspectivity of time comes among people, then they will no longer say: Here is idealism, but it is only a mere dream that has no force of nature, and on the other side lies the natural order. Instead, people will come to recognize that what lives in us as ideals is the germ for the future, and that what is the natural order is the fruit of the past.

This sentence is a golden rule: every ideal is the germ of a future natural event; every natural event is the fruit of a past spiritual event. Only by this rule can one find the bridge between idealism and realism. But for this one thing is necessary: any ideal could never become the germ of a future natural event if this future natural event were prevented by the present natural event. We can put any hypothesis before our eyes. Let us assume the possibility that applies today, that through the so-called law of entropy, the evolution of the earth will one day pass into a kind of general warming, and that all other natural forces will cease, then within this final state, of course, all ideals would have died out. This final state follows quite well if one assumes that, according to pure causality, the present physical states will simply continue. If one thinks as present-day physics does, that such a final state will one day exist according to the law of conservation of energy and matter, then there is no room in this final state for an ideal to arise in it as a future natural event, because the future will simply be the consequence of the present natural event. But that is not how it is, that is not how it presents itself to the present study of nature, but it presents itself differently. All the substances and forces that exist today will no longer be there in the future. The law of conservation of matter and energy does not exist. Where we look for substance, we find nothing but the influence of something Ahrimanic that has passed away. And what surrounds us in the world of the senses will no longer be there in the future. And then, when nothing of what is physical now remains, when all this has been completely dissolved, the time will have come when the present ideals will join the natural process of what is now perishing.

This is how it is in the great universe. And for the individual human being, it is the case that he will be incarnated again in the next world incarnation when everything that he has grown into with the present incarnation has been partially overcome, when, that is, an environment can be created for him that is different from the present environment, when everything that is keeping him here on earth can be removed from the present environment. If all this has changed so that he can experience new things, then he will be incarnated again. The present ideals that can form in man will be nature, when all that is now nature will no longer be there, but something new will have emerged. But the new that arises is nothing other than the spiritual that has become nature.

Behind appearances and ideals we must seek that which forms the bridge over the abyss. But one must discover it. Today one can only discover it if one is not afraid to develop the concepts so powerfully that they themselves can penetrate reality. Therefore, the present time really has the necessity to engage very much in everything that can be experienced spiritually. But — let me add this as a postscript — it will be necessary for people to be able to develop ever greater and greater impartiality towards spiritual considerations. The day before yesterday, I ended by pointing out, as it might seem unnecessary to do for some people, but I do not like to do it, it is never unnecessary, a number of things that stand in the way of fruitful spiritual scientific work, including on the part of the Anthroposophical Society. Above all, what is needed here is real impartiality. Time and again, we see that the dissolving power that actually brought about materialism and destroyed the old spirituality is penetrating into human thinking, especially into the spiritual, into the willed spiritual. I have pointed out how materialistic some theosophical views are. Of course, it is not easy to find the right words when discussing spiritual-scientific matters, because our language today is no longer suitable for the spiritual, because we first have to search again for such a connection between language and the subject that is suitable for the spiritual. But it is necessary that the spiritual-scientific movement is not always corrupted by what is most harmful. One must characterize impartially what takes place in the spirit. Again and again I experience that I am asked: There is someone, there is someone who has spiritual experiences. — The meaning of the questions, which are often asked in this way, is that the actual question is: Is it now possible to surrender to what this or that person sees with blind faith in the truth? And if the answer is in the affirmative, then blind devotion arises; if it is in the negative, then the person in question is immediately denounced as a heretic and it is said: Well, that is atavistic clairvoyance, you don't give anything to that. — Yes, this either-or must be taken quite differently in this field. We must really face up to the statements about the spiritual with all our healthy reason. But if we want to become dogmatists, we cannot become spiritual scientists. If we want to either idolize or condemn, we cannot become spiritual scientists. There will also be infinitely valuable contributions to the characterization of the spiritual world from sides that one does not necessarily want to swear by.

On the other hand, there are times when people swear by some esoteric personality. Then it can be shown that this seer personality has at some point – well, maybe even once – retouched a little, or retouched a lot; then that personality is finished. Before, the same people swore by them, and now they have been undone.

Yes, you don't get ahead within humanity in this way. You don't get ahead within humanity with the either/or of deification or demonization, but only by facing things with your common sense. For example, it may also be the case that someone, of whom one even knows: Well, he does not disdain to tell a tall tale now and then – something quite true, important, essential comes out of the spiritual world.

We would not have the either/or that I am talking about if we wanted to introduce dogmatics, but if we wanted to place ourselves with common sense, precisely within this anthroposophical movement. That is one thing. The other is this: it is extremely difficult, because of the way things are often handled within our circle, to place the Anthroposophical Society in the cultural movement of the present day. This requires discernment on the part of those who are already members of this society. Once you are a member, you have a certain obligation to exercise this discernment. For we will go completely wrong with this Anthroposophical Society if we do not seek to connect with the general spiritual culture of the present, if we repeatedly and repeatedly fall back into the error of being sectarian. That will be the death of our movement if we become sectarian. Just consider that things like the ones we have discussed these days will not seem particularly strange to someone who is currently involved in science and cultural life, if he or she only acquires the necessary lack of prejudice. But in order to achieve something in this way, it is necessary to have the will to distinguish. With us it can easily happen that a question is asked in a stereotyped way when it is a matter of: should someone listen to anthroposophical lectures or should he be given a cycle? So the question is asked in a stereotyped way, without taking into account the level of education, the whole world position of the person concerned. But the stereotyped way is what is absolutely harmful to us. It is the schematic that makes it possible for a person like the one in Holland, around whom a whole bunch of nonsense has crystallized, to swim into the Anthroposophical Society and find protectors there, while people who are capable of judgment are often repelled by it.

To mention a specific example: some time ago, Mr. von Bernus appeared within the Anthroposophical Society with the clear aim — which one may find a little better, a little worse, as common sense may speak — of building a bridge between the general cultural life, the literary and scientific life of the present, and our anthroposophical life. Now, Mr. von Bernus, in his own way, has poetically reworked and brought out into the world a number of things, some of which are in my books and some of which are in cycles. He showed me himself: he has received a pile of letters, letters of criticism, because a truly contemporary attempt has been made here! One would not be surprised if someone who perhaps has a lot at stake could be repelled by such behavior as was perpetrated against him by the Anthroposophical Society in the past. Nevertheless, the journal he founded will be of tremendous service to the Anthroposophical Movement. He had, after all, managed to get the Anthroposophical Society represented in Munich in his art gallery. But everywhere one could see certain resistances to something that was as justified as possible! And if one looks at Bernus' experiences, they give a good picture of how the Anthroposophical Society should learn to be a real society.

In so far as the Dornach structure came into being, it is a society. But much else, in particular, is left undone, clearly showing that the Anthroposophical Society does not see itself as a society at all, but as a sum of individual sectarian little circles. But we must get beyond this stage of sectarianism. And we will not get beyond it unless some thought is given to the matter.

It is so difficult, and it is true that one does not like to say such things, but after all, many things are necessarily said to me because I am personally so closely involved with this anthroposophical movement. If the Anthroposophical Society should gradually develop more and more into a society with an expressed tendency to keep me completely quiet — which is what it is actually developing into and what it has always had as a tendency — then it is not a matter of personal vanity when I emphasize this. It makes me very uncomfortable that I have to emphasize it, but in the Anthroposophical Society there is a tendency to keep quiet about me, and there the personal is linked to the factual. Because of this – because everything that a society otherwise does is not being done – only the venomous words that the apostate members have created bubble to the surface.

Yes, these are things that I sometimes have to point out and that must not remain unspoken. I have raised them in the places where I have been able to speak recently, because I really believe that in these catastrophic times it is very important that anthroposophy is represented in the world in the right way. But it is so difficult to get people to reflect more deeply on how one should actually proceed in the anthroposophical field in order to make this Anthroposophical Society a real society. — Individuals have indeed made a start, but as a rule everything gets stuck in the starting blocks. Now, I think that perhaps, by drawing attention to the matter a second time, it will be given a little thought. I am not saying this for personal reasons, but because of certain necessities of the time, as you will indeed gather from what I have just said, from which you will be able to discern many seeds that can serve to help you understand our catastrophic times.

[Blackboard writing] September 2, 1918

Every ideal is a germ for a future natural event.

Every natural event is the fruit of past spiritual events.

I will try to answer your prepared questions during the course of this lecture. Except that I would like to answer some of them in a special session with the arch-rulers even if they were asked by others. This could be done in the next few days, and the answers could then be passed on.

I would especially like to draw your attention to a seal in the Apocalypse which is an Imagination of the Apocalypticer and which has often been depicted by artists in connection with the Apocalypse. One cannot always say that these pictorial renderings of what is in the Apocalypse are very felicitous. However, one can hardly fail to recognize the individual parts of the seal that is involved here and which will be realized in our time, as we saw yesterday, for they come to meet one in the Apocalypse in a quite characteristic way. However, in order to understand this seal, we will have to discuss something which goes parallel with it, which is very important for our time, and has already been touched upon in an Anthroposophical connection and which we find illuminated in a particular way at this point in the Apocalyptic discussion.

If one looks at the development of man and notices how he becomes a being who is split into three parts, as his consciousness makes the transition from the physical, sensory world to a perception of the spiritual world, as I described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?,—if one looks at this one will say to oneself, a triad and a monad are united in men through the integration of these into the form of a physical being. This union is really quite obvious. One can see it if one studies the opinion about the division of the human being that is expressed in Anthroposophy.

Let's look at man and his spirit, soul and body. The way this division is related to the others that are given in Anthroposophy should be clear without further ado. Now, thoughts live in the spirit which man has today. These thoughts are like I the ones which I refer to in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for instance, where one has pure thoughts that are freely created in man's consciousness, and not the kind that are permeated by sense perceptions. Here, thoughts are almost completely illusory from a qualitative viewpoint; they are a full reality to such a small extent that we don't have quite enough inner force because we don't have a mirror image, and so we can't quite, compare them with mirror images, and yet in a certain sense we can. The image that appears in a mirror doesn't unfold any forces along the directions of its lines, it is completely passive. Human thoughts have some force when they are developed, so that we can catch this force and we can permeate it with will—as I said yesterday in the esoteric class. But the ordinary thoughts that man has during his lifetime are really like mirror images in comparison with the universe's existence and its full content. So that although we hear spirit in our human being, it's a mirror image of the spirit.

What we bear within us there comes from a world which I called spiritland in my Theosophy. So when we think on earth we're really bringing the ingredients of the spiritland down to the earth as an illusory reflection. When we think we carry what Theosophy calls devachan down into the earth sphere, even though this is only a faint reflection of it. We bear these contents in us on earth; we bear a faint reflection of heavenly splendors in us.

If we pass on to the soul element we mainly find feeling there. It exists as feeling during the waking state, and as pictorial dreams while we're asleep. The only difference between dreams and feelings is that one is the content of the soul during the waking state and the other is its content during sleep. What we experience in our feelings as men on earth between birth and death comes from another world that I described from a certain viewpoint in my Theosophy. It comes from the soul world which we experience in its real form after death. Our feeling life is not a mirror image of this real form but an image of it which is maintained in our soul by creative elemental powers. We only dream of this soul world in our feelings and there is no reality in our image of it.

What constitutes men's bodies on earth today does not develop any consciousness of archetypes, but it contains the strongest realities of existence. We are real in our body, but we are only active in the physical, terrestrial world in it. Thus the three members of man's being belong to different worlds.

You must develop a correct view about these things, since you want to work upon the being of man, and therefore you must have something in your feelings that points to what exists in man's being. Quite good philosophers have failed to understand my division of man's being altogether. They have expressed one misunderstanding after another about it, which shows how difficult it is even for good thinkers of the present time to really get into Anthroposophy.

One philosopher spoke about this division of man as if it were an arbitrary one that had been made with the intellect and which amounted to a formal schematism. Of course one can also divide a table into legs, top, etc., even though the whole thing is made of wood. One could also divide it from left to right, but the division of the human being has nothing to do with such an arbitrary classification. One could put it like this: if one has real hydrogen and real oxygen and one combines them one gets water. They are realities and not just artificial schemata. Likewise, man's members are not separated in an arbitrary way; they are integrated into the reality of human nature, so that one can say that the spirit comes from spirit land, the soul from the soul world and the physical body from the physical world. These members of the human being come from three different worlds and they are integrated in man. And when man leaves the physical world with his consciousness, his inner elements split up, and the one becomes three. However, what happens in individual men in this way takes place in the whole of humanity throughout its various racial and national evolutions, although not everyone has to participate in it. One can say that the evolving humanity which is present in the sub-consciousness of every single human being and which doesn't become noticeable to ordinary consciousness, goes through stages of development that are similar to the ones individual men go through.

Something like a splitting into three and a crossing of the threshold by mankind is taking place in our time. In our consciousness age individual men have to acquire something which constitutes a going past' the Guardian of the Threshold, if they want to do it. However, mankind is going past the Guardian of the Threshold in our time, although, individual men are unaware of this. The whole of humanity is crossing the threshold. Whereas the physical body still gave something to men on earth up to the end of the 18th century because of the elemental beings which are living in it, men must now get their virtues and everything productive that they will find inwardly from the spiritual world; this is mankind as a whole, not individual human beings. So that a crossing of the threshold is occurring in the evolution of mankind as a whole, which appears to the Apocalypticer before he has his vision of the sun-illuminated woman with the dragon under her feet, because it actually precedes it in time. Here the Apocalypticer has another vision that clearly reflects what he wants to say: The time is coming when the whole of humanity, or at least its civilized parts will have to cross the threshold. And a triad appears which is the cosmic Imagination of what mankind is going through. There will be ever more men who will have the feeling: My thoughts want to run away from me, and my feet are being pulled down by the earth's gravity; this is in addition to other feelings that men can develop when these things become more pathological. Many people today have the strong feeling that their thoughts are running away from them and that their feet are being pulled down to the earth too much. Except that our present-day civilization talks people out of something like this, just as children are talked out of visions they have which are nevertheless based on a real foundation.

However, what lives strongly in our time appears before the clairvoyant eye of the Apocalypticer as a figure that forms out of the clouds, has a face like a sun, goes over into a rainbow, and has fiery feet, of which one is planted on the ocean and the other on the earth. One could say that this is really the most significant vision that the present-day human soul should look at. For the thoughts that belong to spirit land are in the face which is born out of the clouds above. The rainbow is the feeling world in man's soul which belongs to the soul world. What is contained in the bodies of men who belong to the physical world is in the fiery feet that get their strength from the power of the earth Which is covered by the ocean.

One could say that this points to a real cultural secret of the present, which is that there are three kinds of men, and not that each man is split into three parts. One can see this very clearly today. We have cloud men who can only think, whereas the two other parts—rainbow and fiery feet—remain stunted. We have rainbow men where the main development is in the feelings. They can only grasp Anthroposophy with their feelings and not with their minds. However, this type is also present in the outside world and not just in the Anthroposophical Society. They can only grasp the world with their feelings. These people's feelings are well developed but their thinking and will are stunted. Then there are people today who act as if they only had a hypertrophically developed will; their thinking and feeling are stunted; they charge like bulls and act in accordance with direct, outer impulses,—they're the fiery footed men.

The vision of John the Apocalypticer depicts these three kinds of men which we meet in life. We should become aware of this secret of our present-day civilization so that we can look at human beings in the right way. One can also discover them if one looks at larger world events.

Just look at what is, happening in Russia. We have the influence of the cloud man, of the man who mainly thinks, in whom feeling and will are neglected. They would like to surrender their will to a social mechanism, and their feelings are used by Ahrimanic powers because they don't have any control over them. They are thinkers, but since man on earth is organized in an Ahrimanic and Luciferic way, their thinking is like - - I will use an analogy that will seem like a perfectly natural one to anyone who knows spiritual science; it will only scare such people away who haven't worked their way into this kind of thing yet. If one takes the thoughts of Lenin and the others and one looks at these thoughts, that is, if one tries to imagine what the combined thoughts of Lenin, Trotsky, Lunacharski, etc., looks like, if one imagines what is growling and raging in the heads of leading Russians today, one gets what one calls a system of forces in physics. If one was a gigantic elemental spirit one could form clouds and arouse thunder and lightning up in the sky over a large territory with these forces. But they don't belong on earth. This image might surprise you, but anyone who can look into the occult depths of existence must say that the same forces that weave and live in the heads of leading Russians are also in the lightning that is formed in the clouds over our heads and that they flash the lightning down to the earth and roll the thunders. This is where these forces belong. Their action in leading Bolsheviks is out of place.

So you see that the Apocalypticer clearly foresaw many things that are present in our time. And he knew that such an epochal period of time can be indicated with a number. I myself have indicated the approximate number of years which the development of the consciousness soul, intellectual or mind soul, etc., covers. I said that such a period lasts one twelfth of 25.920 years.

Now the place in the Apocalypse to which I'm referring gave me quite a bit of trouble for a while. For the Apocalypticer supposedly prophesies about things that will take one thousand two hundred and threescore days. They used to speak of days when they meant years. Anyway, the Apocalypticer mentions the number 1260. It took a lot of intensive research to discover that the 1260 days is really a printing error, as it were, in the Apocalypse that was handed down. It should say 2160 days. Then it agrees with what one can see today. It's quite possible that an un-clarity arose in some school where the things were handed down, because many numbers look like their mirror images to seers. However, this is something that is not too important when one feels one's way into the Apocalypse.

Now the people who stand within their race in such a way that they're really cloud men are confronted by others who are rainbow men. Their thinking is relatively inactive, they mainly like to use traditional thoughts and they are rather timid about approaching the spiritual world with their thoughts. One meets a large number of such rainbow men in central European regions.

Thinking and feeling get increasingly stunted the further we go west, where we find a pathological development of fiery footed men. One finds large numbers of such fiery footed human beings in the western part of Europe and presumably in America. So that we can divide the earth along these lines: In the east there are many cloud men, in the center many rainbow men, and in the west many fiery footed men.

If we take racial developments into account, one could say that something like a picture of the figure which we encounter here in the Apocalypticer is spread out over the earth, if one looks at it, spiritually from outside. One can't do this in a balloon or airplane, but if one would raise oneself up spiritually into the heights from a point in Westphalen and would look down at the earth, Asia would have a kind of a cloud form face with solar shapes, and one would see rainbow colors spread out over Europe, and further over would be the fiery feet, with one planted on the Andes in South America and the other in the Pacific Ocean. And then one has the earth underneath this image.

This is one of the most incisive prophecies that the Apocalypticer has for our time. This is something that is very important for priestly activities, for the great riddle of our time that developed with Napoleon consists of this. This striving of men into races and nations that has come to expression so incomprehensibly throúgh Wilsonianism today really only arose in a distinct way under the influence of Napoleonism, of the first Napoleon. The way that men are striving towards races and nations and the way that they basically want to bury all cosmopolitanism today is really quite terrible. But the reason for this is that this passage through the threshold, place is occurring.

Just as a human being splits up in the spiritual world when he develops further, so men on earth split up into regions that individual human beings remain unaware of, namely, into cloud men, rainbow men and fiery footed men. This splitting of men into three parts—which I described for individuals in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, has occurred for humanity on earth; it's here. The powerful sign which the Apocalypticer sketches is there in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. People cannot find the harmony between the three parts at first, and so they look for things in the split rather than in the union; which sometimes leads to rather strange results.

For instance, through this whole external way of thinking that takes hold of people, one can see that people don't find their way together with inner understanding, that is, they often unite for superficial reasons. For instance, we can see that the Czechs whose land is between the Krusnehory and Fichtel mountains, the Bohemian Forest and down to the Morave River and over to Bratislava (formerly Pressburg), and up to the Ceskyles and Sumava Mountains as the southern boundary,—that these Czechs are cloud people in the most eminent sense of the word, who have only developed their thinking. They were welded together with the Slovaks in a way that shows a lack of inner understanding, for the Slovaks are definitely a rainbow people who are not the thinking type at all. On the other hand, we see that another quite external relationship which had been formed shortly before is dissolved. All of these human, earthly activities are not very sensible, because they want to exclude the spirit.

We see that the whole of Slovakia was recently separated from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, which is the territory which I just indicated. We see that all of this Slovakia was previously united with Magyar country and with real Magyars. You must distinguish the real Magyars from the immigrated ones, and you can do this just by looking at their names. A real Magyar has a name one can't even pronounce in the west, especially if he's an older type. But he's called Hirschfeld, if he's one of those agitative and screaming Magyars of today. One has to go back to the genuine Magyars who are all fiery-footed men, and they were briefly welded together with the rainbow Slovaks. The non-spirit in the world today throws the dice in such a way that the Slovaks are first thrown together with the Magyars and then with the Czechs.

That is the way the dice are being thrown in general today. This comes to expression in deeper symptoms, such as the fact that a really significant person like Masaryk who is standing at the helm in the Czechoslovakian Republic, is a Slovak, and not a Czech. Anyone who knows Masaryk knows that he is a rainbow man who can't think at all. If you read his books you will see that our age is speaking in them. He is a rainbow man, a real Slovak.

One has to be able to look at contemporary human beings in accordance with these categories in order to see the kind of crap game that is being played, although of course this is based on world karma. Here we must look at the age—which is really ours—which can say of itself that it is entering ever more into men's consciousness and into the consciousness soul. People previously saw the starry script written outside; they saw the contents of old traditions and old wisdom written outside. There is a kind of a memory of this man who is split into three in ancient books. Everything which the wise men proclaimed about the world in the mystery centers in Macedonia, Greece, Ephesus, Samothrace, Delphi and in other places in Asia Minor and elsewhere is the book which is preserved from ancient times, which is in the hand of the angel whose face is fashioned out of clouds, his chest out of a rainbow, and his feet out of fire, and he stands firmly in America with the rest of his body spread out over Europe and Asia. However, as consciousness men we can only keep this active and alive for ourselves if we have to look within ourselves for the source which enables us to learn how to see spiritual things. We must devour the book, which could previously only be brought from outside, and bring it into ourselves. This book which contains the world's secrets is sweet in the mouths of some people at first. People like to come to things which can give them spiritual views; so that they taste like honey to them. But as soon as one has to fulfill the exacting conditions in life which are connected with a spiritual comprehension of the world then what the Apocalypticer says is sweet as honey becomes a stomach ache, especially to the people who have become so materialistic today. These people find that the digestion of the spiritual nourishment that is so necessary for them is painful.

If we look at this, we have to admit that all of this dice throwing and confusion indicates that a force which can measure everything in a new way must come from the spiritual power that can be seen in threefold man. A reed, or really a measuring rod, is sent down from heaven, with which everything is to be measured in a new way. Just look at our time. Doesn't everything have to be measured anew? Shouldn't we add something like a cloud shape to that abstract Asian shape that we find on our maps, rainbow colors to Europe and fiery feet to the Americas? Don't we have to measure everything anew from the viewpoint of the spiritual life? After all, we're right m the midst of what the Apocalypse is showing us here.

If we grasp what we must stand in in a fully conscious way, we will get away from the layman's attitude that is often present in the depths of our sub-consciousness today and we will acquire a non-rationalistic grasp of the tasks of our time through what is to be a new priesthood. This is something that should be said in connection with this particular chapter of the Apocalypse. The things agree in every detail. Vie will have more to say about racial and individual evolution tomorrow.

In the month of May, 1906, Rudolf Steiner came to Paris with a number of students to give a series of private lectures to a small circle of friends. I myself had never seen him and did not then even know of his existence, but I had entered into correspondence on the subject of one of my dramas (Les Enfants de Lucifer) with his friend Mademoiselle von Sivers, who later on became his wife and his most understanding colleague. It was she who brought her teacher to my house one happy morning.

I shall never forget the extraordinary impression made upon me by this man when he entered the room. As I looked at that thin, powerful face, at the black mysterious eyes flashing light as if from unfathomable depths, it was borne in upon me that for the first time in my life I was face to face with one of those supreme seers who have direct vision of the great Beyond. Intuitively and poetically, I had described such seers in The Great Initiates, but I had never hoped to meet one in this world. The impression was instantaneous, irresistible—of the unexpected as well as of the already known. Even before he opened his lips, an inner voice said to me: Here is a true master, one who will play an all-important part in your life.

Our subsequent relations were to prove that this first impression was not an illusion. The programme of the daily lectures, which was told me in advance by the speaker, aroused my keenest interest. The lectures were to cover the whole field of his philosophy although it was only possible to develop certain outstanding points. One would have said that the teacher's aim was to give a vista of the general plan from its own heights. His fervent, convincing eloquence, irradiated by invariable clarity of thought, struck me at once as possessing two outstanding and unusual qualities. First, its artistic power,—When Rudolf Steiner spoke of the phenomena and beings of the invisible world he seemed to be living in his own home. With striking details and in familiar terms he told of events in these unknown realms just as if he were speaking of the most ordinary things. He did not describe, he actually saw and made others see the objects, scenes and cosmic vistas in clear-cut reality. Listening to him, one could not doubt the power of his astral vision; it was as limpid as physical vision, only much more penetrating. Again, another characteristic, no less remarkable,—This philosopher-mystic, this thinker-seer related all experiences of soul to the immutable laws of physical Nature. These laws were used to explain and classify the super-physical phenomena which, to begin with, appear before the seer in overwhelming variety and almost bewildering abundance. Then, by a wonderful counterstroke, these subtle, fluidic phenomena, proceeding from cosmic Powers grouped in a mighty hierarchy, began to illumine the edifice of material Nature. The diverse parts of Nature were linked together, related to these cosmic Powers from the heights to the depths, from the depths to the heights, and a vista of the mighty architecture of the universe opened up from the inner world where the visible is ever coming to birth from the womb of the invisible.

I took no notes of the first lecture, but it made such a vivid impression upon me that when I reached home I felt impelled to write it down without forgetting a single link in the chain of these illuminating thoughts. I had absorbed the lecture so completely that I found no difficulty at all. By a process of involuntary and instantaneous transmutation, the German words, which had ingrained themselves in my memory, changed into French. The same thing, repeated after each of the eighteen lectures, gradually grew into a dossier which I keep as a rich and rare store of treasure. These lectures, never having been steno-graphed or revised by Rudolf Steiner, do not exist in the archives of his public lectures or in the collection of lectures duplicated for members of the Anthroposophical Society. They are, therefore, entirely unedited. A number of members of the French Group of the Society have expressed the desire to publish them in book form and Mademoiselle Rihouet, the editor of La Science Spirituelle, has kindly offered the pages of this magazine. I respond all the more readily to this desire because these priceless lectures mark a significant phase of Rudolf Steiner's thought—that of the spontaneous burst of his genius and its first crystallisation. And, furthermore, it gives me joy to pay this new tribute to the teacher to whom I owe one of the great revelations of my life.

1. The Origin of Esoteric Christianity

These lectures give a kind of summary of what Rudolf Steiner calls Anthroposophy. In this Foreword I do not pretend to give anything like a resume of this vast and all-embracing philosophy. Its principles are contained in a theogony, cosmogony and psychology complete in themselves. It lays down the basis of a moral philosophy, an art of education, a science of aesthetics. The teaching of this thinker-seer extends into all and every domain of life. His sweeping vision embraces the whole history of mankind and imbues modern science with spiritual conceptions without by one hair's breadth distorting it from its exactitude and pristine clarity. My only aim here is to draw my reader's attention to the most strikingly new chapters, for they lead us again to the very roots of this sublime thought.

At the time when he was delivering these lectures, Rudolf Steiner was still the General Secretary for Germany of the Theosophical Society, which has its Headquarters at Madras. The Theosophical Society, originally founded by H. P. Blavatsky, has as its present President, Mrs. Annie Besant. In spite of many gaps and ultimate digressions, this theoretical system of oriental thought which originated in India and derived its name Theosophy from Alexandrian tradition, served to recall to the uninitiated West, the two fundamental tenets of all esoteric tradition: (1) The plurality of the progressive lives of the human soul under the law of karma, and (2) The ascending evolution of man under the influence of spiritual Powers.

At the time when Rudolf Steiner entered the Theosophical Society—which he had chosen as his first field of action—he was already fully master of the doctrine he owed to his own Initiation. These lectures, given in the year 1906, are proof of this.

The essential difference between Indian Theosophy and Anthroposophy lies in the supreme rôle attributed by Anthroposophy to the Christ in human evolution and also in its connection with Rosicrucian tradition. This appears clearly in the first two lectures, entitled: The Birth of the Human Intellect and The Mission of Manicheism. More clearly than any other occultist, Rudolf Steiner has seen the profound change which has come about in the course of ages in man's constitution of body and soul and in his way of perceiving truth. In ancient, pre-Christian times, man was universally endowed with a faculty of atavistic clairvoyance. In the Atlantean period, he lived more in the ‘world beyond’ than in this world. Clairvoyance was his outstanding faculty and his chief mode of cognition, but his perception of higher worlds was confused and chaotic. This faculty weakened and gradually faded away in the course of subsequent evolution; reason and the mere observation of Nature came to the fore. The Yoga of the Indian Rishis—the source of Aryan mythology and religion—represents an effective endeavour to regain the lost power of clairvoyance and at the same time to regulate it according to cosmic laws. But shortly before the coming of Christ, humanity had reached the last stage of descent into matter and passed through a perilous crisis. The passions emanating from the animal stage, beyond which he had now passed, threatened to engulf man. Civilisation itself was in peril. The human Psyche—having freed herself from primitive darkness by dint of long struggle—threatened to be lost in the decadence of Greece and the orgies of Rome.

2. Jesus the Christ as the Axis of Human Evolution.
The Rosicrucian Initiation

This lecture deals with the dangers which necessitated the Incarnation of the “Word which was in the Beginning,” the Divine Logos Who became man. The mission of Jesus the Christ had long been foretold in the sanctuaries of India, Persia and Chaldea, proclaimed in the vision of the Risen Osiris and of the “Sun at Midnight” in the crypts of ancient Egypt. The human race had reached such a point of materialisation that salvation was only made possible by a manifestation of the Divine Spirit on the physical plane. And so the Light which up till then had not descended further than the Moon, this “Light of grace and truth” came down into the darkness of the lower earthly realms, to incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth and become the axis of human evolution.

A mighty revolution, a change of incalculable significance took place in the inner planes—one which was destined to transform the whole world. The result was a complete change in the mentality of man, the two poles of which were in a manner reversed. A separation took place between these two outstanding faculties: sensibility and intelligence, intuition and reason. Up to this time, intuitive seership had predominated and reason had played a secondary part; science had remained the docile hand-maiden of religion. Primordial wisdom had been a combination of the two. The conquest and mastery of the material world had now become the goal of humanity. Reason gained the upper hand and instinctive feeling was henceforward to live its life apart. On the one side there was the triumph of reason in Aristotelian thought; on the other, religious feeling reached its climax in contemplation of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Science and religion became two separate powers and then—shortly afterwards—rivals and mortal enemies. In religion, the Cross of Christ was sufficient for salvation. By contrast, science was not long in proclaiming: that alone has reality which has passed through the sieve of physical observation and of syllogism. Hence the dualism which for two thousand years has divided and rent in twain the consciousness of man. The advantage has been the development—to their extreme points—of the two poles of the soul, the two dominating faculties of intelligence. But in our day, when pure reason has hunted intuition from science and insight from education, our materialistic civilisation has reached such a condition of anarchy that its very existence is threatened.

From the outset, the aim of Christian Esotericism was to heal this dualism, to cultivate ideas capable of reconciling the two enemy-powers of religion and science, of intuition and reason, the combined knowledge and operation of which can alone arrive at truth and ensure the healthy development of mankind.

Esoteric tradition has at all times been characterised by two fundamental principles. First, that of the plurality of progressive existences of the soul and, secondly, a knowledge of the origin of evil and the means whereby man may become its victor. All great teachers of esoteric doctrine have enjoined their pupils to tread two paths of Initiation simultaneously in order the more surely to arrive at truth: the path of mysticism or ecstatic contemplation of the spiritual world, and the path of rationalism, or the synthetic contemplation of the visible universe in the light of archetypal ideas which proceed from the spiritual hierarchies but are attainable by human intelligence through intuition, even when direct seership is not there. I think that everyone will be deeply interested to read the notes of Rudolf Steiner's eighth lecture where he describes how the Rosicrucians strove to unite themselves with the Christ by meditation upon the first fourteen verses of the Gospel according to St. John. In successive visions the Rosicrucians lived once again through the seven stages of Calvary from the scourging and crowning with thorns, the bearing of the Cross to the mystic Death and ineffable Resurrection. Bathed in an ocean of love, they heard the resounding Logos, the “Word which was in the Beginning,” radiating the spiritual Light which pervades the whole universe and is the Creator of souls. The cosmic meaning attached to these stations of the Cross is deeply moving and provocative of thought.

3. The Interior of the Earth and the Problem of Evil

Instead of lingering upon the Rosicrucian Initiation which reveals the axis of Christianity and carries us into the realms of the world invisible, let me specially call readers' attention to the 16th lecture, the novelty of which is no less striking. Rudolf Steiner there gives us a striking example of his mode of contemplating visible Nature in order to penetrate to her essential being. It is as though matter became translucent and the hidden Spirit suddenly revealed.

The highly suggestive title of this lecture is Earthquakes, Volcanoes and the Will of Man. The special significance is that the main theme is related to the very roots of the nature of man.

The mystery of the interior of the Earth, the basis and stage of human evolution, is one of the numerous problems which materialistic science has never been able to solve. Unceasing research has been of no avail. Many scholars think of the interior of the Earth as an igneous mass (which would be capable of bursting the crust of the Earth); others imagine that it is a compact mass of mineral substance (which explains neither the volcano nor the earthquake). Now the Earth is a living being like the planets and suns, endowed with an interior organism indispensable to its functions and its rôle in the Cosmos. Rudolf Steiner sees the constitution of the Earth in the form of nine layers—or rather nine layers embedded one within the other. The eight interior layers under the crust of the Earth represent, as it were, the physiological organs of our planet from which its life emanates and upon which this life depends. The substance of these eight inner spheres does not resemble the mineral matter of which the outer crust and—in a sense—the skin of the Earth is formed. The elements composing these layers are half-liquid and half-gaseous. The Fire principle, the air-fire, mobile and pregnant with life, reservoir alike of impulses of will and the cause of volcanic eruptions, is only one of the spheres which are embedded one within the other. It is the fourth, counting from the centre, the fifth, counting from the outer mineral crust. The interior fire communicates with the crust along paths which are veritably ‘ventilating tracts’—hence the volcanic eruptions on the surface of the Earth.

If we cast a momentary glance at this interior constitution of the Earth, one fact immediately strikes us. It comprises the forces which are concentrated in the planet and worked at its upbuilding, through successive metamorphoses from the nebula of Saturn, through the Old Sun and Old Moon periods on to its present state. These same forces have worked at the structure of man and are more active than ever in the present age. (1) Egoism and Black Magic constitute the opaque centre of the Earth, for the reason that egoism, love of self for its own sake—of which black magic is the exaggeration and excess—is indispensable to the development of human individuality. The fatal products of egoism are the hatred and strife represented by the two next layers of (2) division, and (3) the prism, where individualities multiply and differentiate in order to battle with each other.

This ternary may be said to represent the kernel of the Earth as it existed in the nebula of the Saturn period. This basis is indispensable to the whole of the Earth's subsequent evolution. It is the ‘spring-board’ from which the individuality can rise to higher worlds, if egoism (the principle of evil) is conquered and transformed by the higher forces proceeding from the Sun and the Firmament—forces of which Divinity is the wellspring and true human freedom the fashioner. The period when the Earth was still united with the Moon is indicated in the Earth's interior by the existence of three other elementary spheres. (4) The Fire principle which lies at the root of impulses of will and is the cause of volcanic eruptions when a path is forged to the mineral crust of the Earth. (5) Above this lies the level of organic plant-life and again (6) there is the still higher level of the vortex of animal forces, where the ethereal embryos of the living beings destined to crawl, to walk and to fly, germinate and quicken in a laboratory of ceaseless activity.

In this second ternary of forces constituting the interior of the Earth, we have the remains of the period when the Earth was still united with the Moon. In those times, the Earth's surface was a kind of porous substance, the home of hybrid beings, half-vegetable, half-mollusc, with gigantic tentacles, while the germs of terrestrial flora and fauna floated in the semi-liquid, semi-vaporous atmosphere. Wonderful words in the book of Genesis refer to this period: “Darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters.”

The third ternary of the inner organs of the Earth represents its actual form. The last metamorphosis occurs at the time of the separation of the Moon from the Earth and is indicated by the addition of two new elements which are, as it were, the ‘humanised’ replica of the centre of the Earth: (7) Consciousness inversed, where everything changes into its opposite; (8) Negative life, or death. Every living being descending into this realm must instantly perish. It is the Styx of the Greeks, cursed by the Gods of life and of beauty. (9) Above the sphere of death stretches the solid mineral envelope of the Earth, the theatre of humanity.

It must be admitted that this extraordinary description of the interior constitution of our planet cannot be verified by any means of observation adopted by natural science. None but a seer possessed of equal power could contradict or confirm. On the other hand, it is surely impossible to deny that this scheme of the Earth's constitution opens up amazing vistas of man's whole evolution. The seership itself bears a unique power of persuasion and its truth may in a measure be demonstrated by effects which reveal themselves in man. The parallelism between the cosmic fire and human passions, their close relationship, mutual action and reaction, throw a flood of light on the origin of evil. Many historians have stated that the great crises in history (wars, revolutions, social upheavals) are nearly always accompanied and followed by earthly cataclysms (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions). The passions of men have a magnetic action on the interior fire of the Earth, and this fire, when released from its chains, feeds human passions. Thus fire—which is destined to generate life—begets evil by means of the human will.

And yet the Earth, having as its kernel the egoism that is indispensable to the development of individuality, is nevertheless the solid, immutable base on which the soul can find support in order then to soar to the spiritual worlds which shelter and fashion her by the power of the solar Logos. Evil becomes a leaven of evolution, finally, however, to be conquered by Good. The man who has won through to freedom holds the balance between destiny and Providence from the moment he can chose between good and evil. His yearning for the Divine begets enthusiasm. By his own efforts he can draw near to the sublime truth reigning in the universe. Thus Satan-Ahriman—the demon of negation and hatred—is laid low by the genius of infinite Love radiating in the Logos, the Christ. And Lucifer, the Spirit of intelligence and of beauty, released from his sojourn in the lower world of matter, is on the point of taking flight to his star. Yet Ahriman, his dire companion, who is held in check by the Christ, strives to break his chains in order that Lucifer's flight may be stayed.

Anthroposophy is the most potent means in our present epoch to restore the severed harmony between the worlds of matter and of spirit, between science and religion. It is also the agent whereby peace may be established in social affairs.

In very truth the hour is grave. Mankind has never faced so great a danger. The forces of evil are mobilised; not so those of good. That is proved by the unprecedented ravages of Bolshevism which is the. relentless application of destructive materialism. A mustering of all the spiritual forces at the disposal of humanity will be required to combat this scourge. But a wide and high ideal is necessary. Man would fain know whither his feet are wending in this world and in the world beyond. He needs a sublime goal in the one and the beginnings of actual realisation of the other. “Evil can only be conquered by a high ideal” says Rudolf Steiner. “A man without an ideal is weak and powerless. In the life of man ideals play the part of steam in an engine—they are the driving force.”

The knowledge gained by Rudolf Steiner in the course of his life and during his apostolate of a quarter of a century, is scattered through his writings and numerous lecture-courses, most of which have been reported. The peculiar interest attaching to the lectures of 1906 is that they reveal the genius of this thinker-seer at the beginning of his career and the zenith of his inspiration, at the very moment when his all-embracing thought was coming, fully armed, into its own. Those who read these notes may catch, here and there, an echo of the power of the master's living words. A striking example of this impressed itself upon me during a lecture he once gave on Planetary Evolution and the Spiritual Hierarchies: “The thoughts of the Gods are not as the thoughts of men. The thoughts of men are images the thoughts of the gods are living beings.”

Revelations like this flash out into the Infinite. They are an echo from far away of the Word creative invoked by St. John at the beginning of his Gospel. Their vibrations thrill through us like the Sound Primordial whence shines the light—the Sound whose harmonies bring worlds to birth.

EDOUARD SCHURÉ

The theme I intend to speak about during these [next] 4 days seems to me to be especially important in view of the times and conditions in which we live. I would like to emphasize from the start that it is not due to a wish for sensationalism or similar things that the theme is The Fifth Gospel. For I hope to show that in fact, given our present circumstances, it is especially important, in the sense that is meant, that no other name is more appropriate than “The Fifth Gospel”. This Fifth Gospel, as you will hear it, does not yet exist in a recorded document, although in the future of humanity it will certainly exist in a specific record. But in a certain sense this Fifth Gospel is as old as the other four Gospels.

In order that I may speak about this Fifth Gospel, however, an introduction is necessary in order to clarify certain important points for a complete understanding of what we will now call the Fifth Gospel. And I want to start by saying that the time is not too far distant in which in the lowest school levels, in the most primitive instruction, the content of the subject usually called History will be taught in a quite different way than is the case today. Namely the concept of Christ will play a different and a much more important role in the future of historical considerations – even in the most elementary historical considerations—than has been the case until now. I realize that in saying this I am describing an enormous paradox. But let's just consider that we can go back to a not so far distant time when countless hearts directed their feelings to Christ in a much more intensive way than is the case today by the most learned faithful in western countries. That was the case to a huge extent in the past.

If we study today's books and observe what interests contemporary people, where their hearts are, we have the impression that the enthusiasm, the emotion and feelings for the Christ idea is in abatement, especially where claims to contemporary learning are involved. Nevertheless, as I have already emphasized, the Christ idea will play a much more important role in future historical considerations than has been the case until now. Does this seem to be a contradiction?

Let's then approach the other side of these thoughts. I have often spoken here in this city about the meaning of the Christ idea. And in books and lecture cycles we find diverse elaborations from spiritual science about the secrets of the Christ Being and the Christ concept. Each must come to the conclusion that when he absorbs what is contained in our books and lecture cycles a large amount of knowledge is required for a full understanding of the Christ Being; that one must depend on the profoundest concepts and ideas for a full understanding of what Christ is and what the impulse is which has traversed the centuries as the Christ-Impulse. One could even come to the conclusion – were it not otherwise contradicted – that it is necessary to know all of Theosophy or Anthroposophy in order to work one's way up to a correct concept of Christ.

If we put that aside though, and look at spiritual development during the past centuries, we see from century to century a detailed, well-grounded science with the goal of understanding Christ and his appearance on earth. For centuries men have utilized their highest, most meaningful ideas in order to understand Christ. Here also it would seem that only the most significant intellectual activity would be sufficient to understand Christ. Has it been the case though? A very simple consideration can prove that it has not.

Let us place on a spiritual balance all that has contributed until now to the understanding of Christ by scholarship, science, also Anthroposophy. Let us place all that on one scale of the spiritual balance and let us place on the other scale in our thoughts all the deep feeling, all the impulses in people's souls which have aimed at what we call Christ, and we will find that all the science, all the scholarship, even all the Anthroposophy which we can muster to explain Christ, surprisingly springs up, and all the deep feelings and impulses which have directed people to the Christ Being push the other scale far down. It is no exaggeration to say that a tremendous impact has come from Christ and that the knowledge of Christ has contributed least to this impact.

It would have gone most badly for Christianity if people had to depend on all the learned disputes of the Middle Ages, the Scholastics, the Church fathers; or if people were only to depend on what we are able to muster through Anthroposophy for an understanding of the Christ idea. If that were all, it would be very little indeed. I don't think that anyone who has objectively followed the path of Christianity through the centuries could seriously contest these thoughts.

Let us direct our attention to the times when Christianity did not yet exist. I need only remind you of what most of you are familiar with. I need only remind you of the Greek tragedies in ancient Greece, especially in their older forms, when they presented the battling gods, or the men in whose souls the battling gods acted; also how the divine forces were directly visible on the stage. I need only to indicate how Homer thoroughly weaved his significant poetry with the working of the spirit; I have only to point to the great figures of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. With these names a spiritual life of the highest order appears before our souls. If we put all else aside and look only at the great figure of Aristotle, who lived centuries before the founding of Christianity, we realize that in a certain sense no increase, no advancement has taken place up to our time. Aristotle's thinking, his scholarliness is so awesome that it is possible to say that he reached a peak in human thinking which has not been improved upon until now.

And now for a moment we would like to consider a curious hypothesis, one which is necessary for the following days. Let us imagine that there are no Gospels from which we can learn something about Christ. We want to imagine that the documents known as the New Testament do not exist, that there are no Gospels. We will ignore what has been said about the founding of Christianity and will only consider the facts about Christianity's historical process in order to see what occurred during the following centuries. This means that without the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline Letters and so forth, we only want to consider what has really happened. This is of course only a hypothesis. What has happened?

If we look first at Southern Europe, we find a profound spiritual development at a certain point in time, as we have just seen in its representative Aristotle – a highly developed spiritual life, which in the subsequent centuries went through a special schooling. Yes, at the time Christianity began to make its way through the world there were many people educated in the Greek way, people who had absorbed Greek culture. Even including a certain unusual man who was an energetic opponent of Christianity, Celsus, and who later persecuted the Christians. We find in the Italian sub-continent up to the second, third Christian century, highly educated men who adopted the profound ideas which we find in Plato, whose brilliance really appears as a continuation of Aristotle's brilliance – refined, strong figures with Greek culture – Romans with Greek culture, which added Greek cultural delicacy to Roman aggressiveness.

The Christian impulse pushed itself into this world. At that time the representatives of the Christian impulse were truly uneducated people in respect to intellectuality, to knowledge of the world, compared to the many Greek-Roman educated people. People without education pushed into the middle of a world of mature intellectuality. And now we can observe a strange scene: those simple, primitive natures who were the bearers of early Christianity were able to propagate it in a relatively short time in Southern Europe. And when we approach these simple, primitive souls who at that time spread Christianity, we may say: Those primitive natures understood the Being of Christ. (We don't have to consider the great cosmic Christ thoughts, but only much simpler Christ thoughts.) The bearers of the Christ impulse who entered into the arena of highly developed Greek culture didn't understand it at all. They had nothing to bring to the market of Greek-Roman life except their personal inwardness, which they had developed as their personal relationship to their beloved Christ; for they loved as a member of a beloved family just through this relationship. Those who brought Christianity to Greece and Rome were not educated theosophists; they were unlettered. The educated theosophists of that time, the Gnostics, had elevated ideas about Christ, but they could only give what we would have to place on the rising scale of the weighing balance. If it had depended on the Gnostics, Christianity would surely not have made its way through the world. It was no particularly educated intellectuality which came from the east and in a relatively short time brought ancient Greece and Rome to their knees. That's one side of the story.

From the other side we see intellectually superior people such as Celsus, Christianity's enemy, and even the philosopher on the throne, Marcus Aurelius, who used every contrary argument imaginable. Look at the immensely learned Neo-Platonists, who formulated ideas compared to which contemporary philosophy is child's play, and which surpasses our current ideas in profundity and horizon. And look at how these highly cultured people argued against Christianity, how they argued from the standpoint of Greek philosophy, and we have the impression that none of them understood the Christ-impulse. We see that Christianity was spread by bearers who understood nothing of the essence of Christianity; it was fought against by a high culture which could not understand what the Christ-impulse meant. It is noteworthy that Christianity entered the world in such a way that neither its adherents not its enemies understood its underlying spirit. Nevertheless those people had the strength in their souls to spread the Christ-impulse triumphantly throughout the world.

And such as Tertullian, who represented Christianity with a certain greatness. We see in him a Roman who was in fact, when we look at his language, almost a re-creator of the Roman language, who with an unerring accuracy enlivened words to the extent that we recognize him as an important personality. When we ask ourselves, however, about Tertullian's ideas, it's something else. We find that he showed very little intellectuality or high culture. Even Christianity's defenders didn't accomplish much. Nevertheless, such as Tertullian were effective, effective as personalities, for which reason educated Greeks could not really do much. He was awe-inspiringly effective through something. But what? That is the important thing. We feel that this is really all important. Through what did the bearers of the Christ-impulse work when they themselves didn't understand much about what the Christ-impulse is? Through what did the Christian Church Fathers work, even Origenes, who is considered unskillful. What is it that even Greek-Roman culture could not understand about the essence of the Christ-impulse? What is it all about?

But let's go farther. The phenomenon becomes more pronounced as we consider subsequent history. We see how over the centuries Christianity spread within Europe to peoples who, like the Germanic, derived from completely different religious traditions and who were united as a people, or at least seem to be united in their religious traditions. Nevertheless they accepted the Christ-impulse with all their strength, as though it were their own life. And when we consider the most effective messengers of faith in the Germanic peoples – were they the scholastic theologically educated ones? By no means! They were relatively primitive souls who went about among the people and in a primitive way, using ordinary ideas, speaking to the people, and captured their hearts completely. They knew how to use words in such a way that they touched the deepest heart strings of their listeners. Simple people went out to all regions, and it was they who worked most effectively.

So we see the spread of Christianity over the centuries. But then we wonder at how this same Christianity is the grounds for so much significant scholarship, science and philosophy. We don't underestimate this philosophy, but today we want to direct our attention to an extraordinary phenomenon—that up until the Middle Ages Christianity spread among peoples who had quite other ideas in their minds, until it belonged to their souls. And in the not too distant future still other things will be emphasized about the spread of Christianity. When we consider the effect of the Christian impulse, it is easy to understand that in a certain time enthusiasm arose through the spreading of Christianity. But when we come to modern times this enthusiasm seems to be muted.

Let us consider Copernicus and natural science up to the nineteenth century. It could seem that this natural science, which since Copernicus has penetrated western culture, was opposed to Christianity. Certain facts can substantiate this. The Catholic Church, for example, placed Copernicus on the so-called Index until the twenties of the nineteenth century. But that didn't change the fact that Copernicus had been a canon. And when the Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake, it didn't change the fact that he was a Dominican. Both of them came to their ideas through Christianity. They acted from the Christian impulse. Those who held to the Catholic Church and thought that these things weren't the fruits of Christianity, understood wrong. It only proves that the Catholic Church did not understand the fruits of Christianity.

Whoever looks more deeply will recognize that everything the peoples did, also in later centuries, is a result of Christianity; that through Christianity humanity looked up from the earth to the vastness of the heavens, as a result of the Copernican Laws. That was only possible within Christian culture and the Christian impulse. And he who does not consider only the surface, but delves into the profundities of spiritual life, will find something which seems paradoxical, but is nevertheless true. For such a deeper consideration, it would seem impossible that a Haeckel could appear in all his animosity towards Christianity without his having appeared from out of Christianity. Ernst Haeckel is not even possible without the prerequisite of Christian culture. And modern natural scientific development, despite being so occupied with animosity towards Christianity, is a child of Christianity, a direct continuation of the Christian impulse.

Once the teething problems of natural science have been overcome, humanity will realize what it means that the starting point of modern natural science, logically followed, leads directly to spiritual science, that there is a logical path from Haeckel to spiritual science. When that is understood, it will be accepted that Haeckel has a Christian mentality, even though he doesn't realize it. Not only what is called and has been called Christian has been brought forth by the Christian impulse, but also what has agitated against Christianity has been brought forth from the Christian impulse. One must not only investigate things according to their concepts, but also according to their reality in order to arrive at this knowledge. Darwin's Theory of Evolution leads directly to the teaching of repeated earth lives, as you can read in my book “Reincarnation and Karma”.

In order to stand on solid ground in relation to these things, one must in a certain sense observe the force of the Christian impulse impartially. Whoever understands Darwinism and Haeckelism and is familiar with what Haeckel does not know (Darwin knew quite a bit), knows that the Darwinist movement is only possible as a Christian movement. Understanding that, one comes quite logically to the reincarnation idea. And if he has the help of a certain clairvoyant power, he will arrive on this path quite logically to the spiritual origin of the human race. It is of course a detour, but when clairvoyance is added, it is a true path from Haeckelism to the spiritual origin of the earth.

But it is also possible that one takes Darwinism as it is presented today, but without being conversant with the principles of life in Darwinism itself; in other words, if you accept Darwinism as an impulse and don't realize the profound understanding of Christianity which lies in Darwinism, something very peculiar happens. What can happen is that you have as little understanding of Christianity as you have of Darwinism. One may then be abandoned by the good spirit of Christianity as well as by the good spirit of Darwinism. If one is imbued with the good spirit of Darwinism, however, then one can be ever so materialistic, and still be led back to a point in the history of the earth where it becomes clear that man never evolved from lower animal forms, that he must have had a spiritual origin. One goes back to a point in time and sees man as a spiritual being hovering over the earth. A logical Darwinism will lead to that.

If on the other hand one is abandoned by the good spirit and goes back in time as a believer in reincarnation, one can think that he once lived as an ape during an incarnation. If one can believe that, it means that he has been abandoned by the good spirits of both Darwinism and Christianity and understands nothing of either. For logical Darwinism could never lead one to believe that. This means that the reincarnation idea must be quite openly transmitted to this materialistic culture. It is certainly possible to divest Darwinism of its Christianity. If not, however, one will find that the Darwinist impulses were born of Christianity, and that the Christian impulses also work where they are denied.

So we have not only the phenomenon that Christianity spread during the first centuries irrespective of scholarship and the knowledge of its followers and believers; that it spread during the Middle Ages with very little help from the scholastics; then we have the paradoxical phenomenon that Christianity appeared as a kind of counterpart in Darwinism. And the greatness of the idea in Darwinism derives its force from Christian impulses. The Christian impulses which underlie it will lead this science away from materialism.

There is something curious about the Christian impulses! Intellectuality, knowledge, learning appear not to have been present during the spreading of these impulses. One could say that Christianity spread regardless of what people think for or against it, so much so that it seems to have found its antithesis in modern materialism. What is it then which spreads? Not Christian ideas, not the science of Christianity. One could still say that the moral feelings which are planted through Christianity are spread. One has only to observe the rule of morality in these times and one will find much justification for the anger of the representatives of Christianity against real or alleged enemies of Christianity. Also the morals which could reign in the souls of the less educated do not impress us much when we observe to what extent they are Christian. What is it then which spreads? What is so curious? What is it which marches through the world like a victorious procession? What worked in the people who brought Christianity to the Germanic, to the foreign world? What works in modern natural science, where the teaching is still veiled? What works in all those souls, if it isn't intellectual, not even moral impulses? What is it? It is Christ himself, who goes from heart to heart, soul to soul, who traverses the world over the centuries, whether or not people understand him!

We are obliged to put aside our ideas and our science and point to the reality, in order to show how mysteriously Christ himself changes into many thousands of impulses, immersing in thousands and thousands of souls and suffusing humanity. It is Christ himself who strode in the simple men through the Greek and Italian world; it is Christ himself who stood at the side of the later teachers who brought Christianity to the Germanic peoples. It is He, the real, true Christ, who goes from place to place, from soul to soul, regardless of what the people think of Christ, and immerses in their souls. I would like to use a trivial comparison. How many people are there who know nothing about the composition of food, yet eat according to all the rules of the art. They would starve if they had to know about nutrients before they could eat. Eating has nothing to do with the knowledge of foodstuffs. The spread of Christianity over the earth had nothing to do with the knowledge brought to bear on it. That is what is curious. This is a mystery, which can only be clarified if the answer is given to the question: How does Christ work in human minds and feelings? And if spiritual science, clairvoyant observation, poses this question, it will be guided to an event which in reality can only be revealed through clairvoyant observation, which is in complete agreement with all I have said today. Firstly, the time is over in which Christ worked as I have characterized, and the time has come when people must understand and recognize him.

Therefore it is necessary to answer the question: Why during the time which preceded ours, could the Christ-impulse spread without an understanding of it? And the event to which clairvoyant consciousness points is the so-called Pentecost event, the sending out of the Holy Spirit. Therefore the clairvoyant gaze, inspired by the true Christ-Impulse in an anthroposophical sense, is directed to the Pentecost event, the sending out of the Holy Spirit.

What occurred at that moment in the evolution of the world on earth, which is presented as the Holy Spirit descending upon the apostles, which at first seems quite unintelligible to us? When one views this clairvoyantly, investigates [it], one arrives at a spiritual scientific answer as to what is meant with: Simple people, which the apostles were, suddenly began to speak in various tongues about what they had to say from the depths of spiritual life, and which was not expected of them. Yes, then Christianity, the Christian impulses, began to spread independently of the people's understanding of them.

The stream which has been described flowed out from the Pentecost event. What was then the Pentecost event? The question was asked of spiritual science, and with the answer to this question, the spiritual scientific answer to the question: What was the Pentecost event? the Fifth Gospel begins.

DR STEINER:

My dear friends!

The first point on the agenda today is the pleasure of a lecture by Dr Schubert on Christ and the spiritual world: ‘Anthroposophy, a Leader to Christ.’

Dr Schubert gives his lecture. After an interval of fifteen minutes, Dr Steiner speaks:

My dear friends! Let us begin again today with the words of the self-knowledge of man coming from the spirit of our time:

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of space
In the spirit's ocean-being.
Practise spirit-recalling
In depths of soul,
Where in the wielding will
Of world-creating
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I.
And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which leads thee through the rhythm of time
Into the realm of thine own soul's feeling.
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of the world's becoming
Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.
And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the grounds of eternity
Opens to thee the world-thoughts.
Practise spirit-beholding
In stillness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.
And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

Today, my dear friends, let us bring together what can speak in man in three ways:

[Rudolf Steiner writes on the blackboard as he speaks. See Facsimile 4, Page XVI top.]

This will properly be brought together in the heart of man only by that which actually made its appearance at the turning of the time and in whose spirit we now work here and intend to work on in the future.

At the turning of the time
The Spirit-Light of the world
Entered the stream of earthly being.
Darkness of night
Had held its sway,
Day-radiant light
Streamed into souls of men.
Light that gives warmth
To simple shepherds' hearts,
Light that enlightens
The wise heads of kings.

Light Divine
Christ-Sun
Warm thou our hearts,
Enlighten thou our heads,
That good may become
What we from our hearts would found
What we from our heads would direct
In conscious
Willing.

[Rudolf Steiner writes on the blackboard as he speaks]

That good may become
What we from our hearts would found,
What we from our heads would direct
In conscious
Willing.

[As shown on the blackboard]

DR STEINER: My dear friends! Yesterday's speaker, Herr Hans Ludwig Pusch, does not wish to continue. Instead, Dr Lehrs will say a few words on the theme. Please may I now ask him to speak.

Dr Lehrs completes what Herr Pusch had wanted to say the day before on the question of the Youth Movement.

DR STEINER: May I now ask Mrs Merry to speak.

Mrs Merry speaks about the work in England and brings the apologies of Mr Dunlop who has been unable to attend.

DR STEINER: My dear friends! I have spoken often and in different places about the extraordinarily satisfactory summer school in Penmaenmawr. [Note 63] Perhaps I may be permitted to add to what I have said so often. I truly believe that an exceedingly significant step forward will have come about for the Anthroposophical Movement if everything Mrs Merry has just sketched can come into being over the next few years as fruits of the seeds of Penmaenmawr. We may believe that the very best forces are at work promoting the endeavours of the Anthroposophical Movement in this direction, for Mr Dunlop took this summer school at Penmaenmawr in hand in an extremely active manner, an inward, sensitive and indeed esoteric manner. In Penmaenmawr conditions were fulfilled from the start which we have never found to be fulfilled anywhere else, conditions that were necessary for the success of Penmaenmawr.

You see, my dear friends, we expected Mr Dunlop in Stratford, in Oxford, and even once in London, and now here in Dornach. So my picture of Mr Dunlop is that of the man about whom it is always said that he is coming and then he doesn't come. But he did come to Penmaenmawr! And it went so exceptionally well, so well that I only wish he were here today so that we might once more thank him most heartily. I really did believe that Mr Dunlop would be here. In London he said to me that he would do it differently next time; he would not say he was coming but instead he would simply come. So in London he did not say he was coming. And yet he still has not come! So after all I shall have to ask Mrs Merry most warmly to take our thanks back to him, the cordial thanks of this whole gathering for that extremely significant inauguration of a movement within the Anthroposophical Movement which has such good prospects because of the summer school at Penmaenmawr. Out of the spirit of the descriptions I have given of Penmaenmawr I am sure that you will agree to my asking Mrs Merry in your name to take to Mr Dunlop out hearty thanks for the inauguration of the summer school at Penmaenmawr, and also to my requesting him to continue to take such work firmly in hand, for in his hands it will succeed well.

May I now ask Herr van Bemmelen, the representative of the Dutch school, to speak.

Herr van Bemmelen reports on the work of the school in The Hague.

DR STEINER: Now may I ask Dr Unger to speak. He wishes to refer to the problems of the Society.

Dr Unger gives his lecture about the problems of the Society and concludes with the following:

Dear friends. The way in which responsibility devolves for instance on the individual Societies and the larger groups, as a result of the new Statutes, means that it will be necessary to pass this trust and this responsibility on further. Ways and means will have to come about which must not be allowed to remain fixed in the old structure that has come to be adopted. Instead situations must be livingly transformed so that people can be found who are capable through their very nature of carrying the central impulses further. Thus a matter that appears to be merely organizational immediately leads to a further question: How shall we be able to bring this impulse into the public eye? Once again we shall have to let experience play its part. The other day I ventured to make some suggestions about working in public. What Herr van Bemmelen has just said shows us that Holland is no exception to the way in which everywhere people are waiting to hear about Anthroposophy in a suitable form and in the right way. People are asking about the soul of man and about cultivating the soul in its true nature. Beyond this it will fall to us to find people among the general public who want to work further in this realm. Everywhere it must be made possible to open our doors and welcome people to the Society. Necessary for this above all is an understanding of the human being which can arise out of the warmth of love for our fellows combined with serious work in the anthroposophical sense. So the question of the next generation coming to the Society will be a far-reaching one. It has always been difficult to find people who want to continue with the work because for this it is necessary to create a situation within the Society which enables younger people to make a connection in the first place.

Today, especially, if I may say so, in Germany, many of the supports and conditions of the past, and of life as it has been for so long, are in general breaking down. In this situation younger people in particular—perhaps students who are finishing their university courses or maybe people who would like to work out of the artistic impulses of Anthroposophy—are forced instead to creep into some corner of ordinary economic life, collapsing as it is, in order merely to make a living. It ought to be a task of the Society, and especially the individual groups, to find ways of creating a foundation within Anthroposophy on which young people can live out what they have learnt in their studies. And out of this arises the most important question of all: How can that which is coming towards us by way of young, striving, life-filled strength be taken up into the School of Spiritual Science? What form will make it possible, whether here in Dornach or elsewhere, to make studies possible that can lead to the future collaboration of these people? It is a problem which is already coming to the fore here and there but especially in Germany where there is a strong need for new colleagues but where those who ought to be working in the Society are often in such dire straits. We must find these people amongst the general public through our public work.

So the establishment of the School on the generous scale described to us so far can give us the hope that we need so badly. In the School as well as in the Society and in the groups there is a platform for tackling the problems which are arising.

The same applies to the scientific work in the institutions. Herr van Bemmelen has touched on the field of education, but similar questions could be asked with regard to scientific work. The influence of this Conference will lead to a flaring up of the will to work and to find ways. Other friends are sure to have questions about this too. Let us hope, when we return home and are asked about everything, that out of the experience of these discussions we shall be capable of giving genuinely concrete answers. So that we can come to this, problems that have arisen really must be brought forward, just as I have presumed to suggest certain things now. If other friends from the various countries bring forward these problems from different angles, let us hope that the new impulse in the General Society will be able to penetrate to every furthest corner, to all the groups and to all the individuals who are and who want to be members of this Society.

DR STEINER: May I now ask Herr van Leer to speak.

Herr van Leer speaks about the intention of sending in reports to Herr Steffen. He makes suggestions about how to divide up what is sent into different categories.

DR STEINER: I rather think that the purpose of this correspondence will best be served by taking the following into account. Without having discussed this with Herr Steffen I believe I can say more or less what he thinks, though perhaps he will have to correct me afterwards. The best reports will be those that come out of the individuality of the different correspondents. I think that all those friends I mentioned the other day, and also a number of others, are interested in what I meant by the life of the Society and cultural life in general. And I believe that most of these friends think about what comes to their attention with regard to either one or the other at least once a week, or even every day. Things go through one's mind; so one day they sit down and simply write down what has gone through their mind. As a result fifteen, or perhaps twenty, four-page letters will arrive here. It will be quite a task to read them all. Well, if twenty letters arrive, Herr Steffen will be kind enough to keep ten of them and give me the other ten. We shall manage. But we shall manage best of all if you spare us any categories. We need to hear how each individual feels in his heart of hearts, for we want to deal with human beings and not with schedules. Let everything remain a motley mixture; this will bring us the individuality of the writer in question and that is what interests us. We hope in this way to obtain the material we need, human material with which to fill our Supplements so that they in turn give a human impression with their all too human weaknesses.

Just write down on four pages, or sometimes even eight pages, what is in your heart of hearts. For us here the most interesting thing will always be the people themselves. We want to cultivate a human relationship with human beings and out of these human relationships we want to create something that will shine out even after it has gone through the process of being dipped in dreadful printer's ink. This is what I am talking about. It will be best of all if everyone can present himself in a human way to other human beings. Now, Herr Steffen, please correct me.

HERR STEFFEN: Certainly not. You have expressed exactly what is in my soul too. I only want to say that there is no question of this becoming too much work for me; it is part and parcel of my gifts as a writer that I enjoy reading reports of this kind. I always have to strive to see what is going on inside people's souls, so truly no letter can be too long. I don't believe it will be too much for me. I anyway enjoy reading several newspapers every day, but if interesting things come from our friends, then I greatly prefer to read them. As regards categories, an editor or a writer has only one, or rather two: the first is what he can use and the second is what he cannot use. That is all I wanted to say.

DR STEINER: Just imagine, after these discussions, what it would mean if these reports were to inspire Herr Steffen to write a novel or even a play! That would be the most wonderful thing I could think of.

MR COLLISON: I would like to know whether we might ‘sometimes’ receive a reply.

DR STEINER: I hope that the reply will be there every week in the Supplement. But if a special reply were to be necessary, then I would hope that one would be sent.

Now may I ask Herr Stibbe to speak.

Herr Stibbe reports on the opposition experienced in Holland, [Note 64] referring particularly to Professor de Jong.

DR STEINER (referring to Herr Stibbe's report with regard to Professor de Jong): Yes indeed. He has tried to form a methodical concept of mystery wisdom by bringing it down to all kinds of spiritualist phenomena, as he describes in his book.

Now, dear friends. It will still be possible in the next day or two to speak further on the questions that have arisen out of this discussion. So far as I can see, the questions that have arisen are: reporting, and then the opposition. These are the tangible questions that have arisen so far. I cannot see any others taking shape yet.

Tomorrow we shall start our meeting at 10 o'clock and I shall begin by asking those friends to speak who have reports to give about the results of their research. Frau Dr Kolisko and Dr Maier, Stuttgart. Now may I ask Dr Schwebsch to speak. When he has finished I shall ask for a report on eurythmy in America to be read out.

Dr Schwebsch expresses the gratitude of the Waldorf School for the manifold assistance it has received.

DR STEINER: Following on from this, please allow me to touch on a few things. The first is that once the grave financial position of the Waldorf School had become known, interest in it was awakened really everywhere. We have seen particularly in Switzerland how the efforts of the members of the school associations led to the creation of numerous sponsorships. Mrs Mackenzie has endeavoured to form a committee in England to carry out collections in aid of the Waldorf School. The first donation has already been sent to me and I shall ask the leaders of the Waldorf School to accept this small beginning.

Now I have something else to say: So many thanks are owed to the world on behalf of the Waldorf School—Dr Schwebsch has already mentioned a number of things—that it is impossible to encompass everything in a moment. We ought to make a long list of all those to whom we owe thanks in one way or another on behalf of the Waldorf School. The interest in it is indeed great. Yet we shall ever and again have to continue to ask for an even greater interest. The support given so far has in the main been for the school itself. Less thought has hitherto been given to the pupils or those who might become pupils of the Waldorf School. There is one case, or rather two, which really touch us deeply. At a time when those living in Switzerland were in a position to purchase a great deal in Germany with very few Swiss Francs, two workers here at the Goetheanum felt they could put into practice a very praiseworthy idea, namely to send their sons to the Waldorf School. Considerable sacrifices were made by our friend, Pastor Geyer, when he undertook to care for these two schoolboys. We at the Goetheanum take the view that we should finance the actual school fees and whatever is needed for the school in the same way as other firms such as Der Kommende Tag and Waldorf Astoria pay for the children of their workers. But now that life for the children has suddenly become so expensive in Germany, more expensive than it would be here in Switzerland, it is no longer possible for the families of the boys to pay for their keep. Now both families and boys are faced with the sad prospect of their being unable to return to the Waldorf School after the Christmas holidays. So I should like to ask whether it would be possible to make a collection here in order, at least for the near future, to pay for the keep of the two boys in Stuttgart so that they can continue to go to the Waldorf School. What we need is 140 Francs a month for both boys together. We shall try to set up a money box for this. Perhaps Mr Pyle will be prepared to lend us one for donations specifically for this purpose. Maybe this is how we can do it.

Now would Dr Wachsmuth please read the resume of the report on eurythmy in America.

Dr Wachsmuth reads a report from Frau Neuscheller on the progress made by eurythmy in North America.

DR STEINER: Dear friends, first I would like to ask those from further afield who wish to attend tomorrow's performance of the Three Kings Play to get their tickets today so that what remains can be available for Dornach friends tomorrow.

Secondly would you please note that my three last evening lectures will lead in various ways to a discussion of medical matters for the general audience. Then after the lectures there will be discussions about medical matters with the doctors who are here. Would therefore any practising doctors please come to the Glass House tomorrow morning at 8.30 for an initial meeting. [Note 65] I am referring only to practising doctors. After 1 January there will be opportunity for others interested in medical questions to participate in other sessions.

Tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock we shall start with the continuation of today's meeting. I would ask you to let us begin with the two reports already mentioned. Then, both tomorrow and the next day, I shall take the liberty of speaking briefly on the idea of the future building in Dornach and I shall ask you to let me bring up for discussion some points on how this idea of the building in Dornach might be carried into reality. It would not be right to recommend that this meeting should be allowed to pass without any reference at all to the financial side of the idea of the building in Dornach. I shall leave it to you to say something after what I shall be obliged to bring forward very briefly tomorrow and the next day about the artistic aspect of the idea of the building in Dornach.

Then I would ask for time to be set aside in the afternoon at 2.30 for a meeting of Swiss members or their delegates. Herr Aeppli has asked for this meeting and has requested that I attend, or indeed take the chair. So I would ask the Swiss members to hold this meeting tomorrow afternoon at 2.30. This refers only to Swiss members since the matters to be discussed apply solely to the Swiss Anthroposophical Society.

This afternoon at 4.30 we shall see a performance of eurythmy, and my lecture will take place this evening at 8.30.

Since Rudolf Steiner had given so many new impulses brought forth by his Spiritual Science (Anthroposophy) and bearing upon every field of knowledge and practical activity of life, he was also approached by farmers who asked him for, help with spiritual insight and practical advice concerning the difficulties, unsolved questions and problems of agriculture.

So, for instance, it was many years ago when Herr Ernst Stegemann and Count Lerchenfeld as practical farmers had received new points of view for an agriculture founded on spiritual knowledge; and afterwards in Dornach at the Goetheanum I had the privilege, together with Herr E. Pfeiffer, to carry out several experiments under the personal guidance of Dr. Steiner. We were the first to produce some of the preparations later on mentioned in this, lecture course, we exposed them to the influence of the rhythms of the seasons; and R. Steiner in spite of his tremendous overburdening did, not refuse to come to the piece of land lying far off and to test the first preparations which had become ready; he then gave help and advice for the further development of the preparing methods and their application and took things in hand himself.

An increasing number of agriculturists longed for a systematic laying down of the new principles and eventually in Spring 1924 Count Alexander Keyserlingk who had been sent by his father Count Karl Keyserlingk to Dornach succeeded in securing Dr. Steiner's promise to give a lecture course on agriculture at Koberwitz Castle (Silesia, Germany).

Dr. Steiner wrote in the Members News Sheet of 22nd June, 1927, “It has been a long cherished wish of a number of Anthroposophists working in the agricultural field to have from me a lecture course which should contain all that can be said about agriculture from the point of view of Anthroposophy. Between the 7th and 16th of June I was able to find the time to fulfil this wish. Koberwitz near Dresden, where Count Keyserlingk is running a big farming estate in an exemplary manner, was a good place for such a course. It was natural to speak of agriculture in surroundings where the audience could have around them the things and processes to which the lectures referred. It is thus that meetings of this sort receive their mood and colouring. As my subject I took the nature of the produce of agriculture and the conditions under which this can arise. The considerations aimed at practical points of view for agriculture, which should add to the results of modern practical and scientific experience the results of a study along spiritual scientific lines. Our friend, Herr Hegemann, began right from the start of the meeting to speak of the things which he connected with conversations on agriculture which I had had with him some time ago. He had as a matter of fact carried out on his farm practical experiments on that basis. He put before the audience his results and wishes. His speech was followed by a proposal of Count Keyserlingk to begin with immediate experiment according to what was to be given in the course. This aim he proposed to be to a group of professional agriculturists. Such a group was actually formed at a subsequent meeting of the farmers present. It was agreed to fake the contents of the course for the time being as hints which will not be discussed outside the circle of those attending the course; but to use these hints as the basis of experiments which are to bring the material into a form in which it can be published. This circle (community) ... was declared to be a group of members which form part of the Natural Science Section at the Goetheanum. This Section will continually indicate the direction and aims of the experimental work.”

With the impulses of this course which open unbounded prospects for the future the attending members returned to their work, strengthened with new insight, with new hopes and forces. And many a practical farmer who—through the de-spiritualising materialistic tendencies in industry had felt his profession to be a burden, could see again the deep spiritual background of just this profession and with wholly transformed view and with new love resumed his work upon animal, plant and soil.

The problems of agriculture through the influence of nourishment upon the life of each individual and that of the community have become the most central problems of our time, much more so since numerous farmers in the civilized countries have come to the conviction that the methods hitherto applied materialistically and only based upon observation of mere matter have led into a blind alley and have brought all civilized material into decay. A new foundation for agriculture is certainly a turning point important for all human history. This is what Rudolf Steiner himself felt. I shall never forget how he in his modest manner said to me on the journey back from this course; “Now we have gone another great step forward.”

Whoever expects this course to give a list of easily manufactured preparations whose application will pay in very short time, will not have any understanding of what this course means and will better put it aside without reading it. But whoever grasps that to begin with, our whole attitude to the natural kingdom needs a new orientation, since science hitherto with its materialistic-mechanistic methods had to stop short before the life phen and whoever is prepared to adopt this new attitude, will feel compelled to make a change in many important points of his farming, but he will find also that the new orientation is indispensable and—if properly carried out—yields practical success. No doubt that the changeover of the estates to the new methods must be done slowly, systematically and in organic connection, and many primary indications given in this course need practical elaborations and modifications according to the individual farm and its geographical and cultural peculiarities—but this is the case with every method. Rudolf Steiner emphasised this point often very seriously. Whoever enters into the living experience of the whole teaching will find soon what those who began as the first have already seen in all details that in reasonable and careful carrying out the most valuable practical result will be achieved.

Rudolf Steiner's wish to see Experimental Circles arise could already be fulfilled in several European countries? and in many non-European countries and continents centres have been formed where the principles of this renewed agriculture are practically applied.

In order to transmit to beginners in these methods the experiences of those who have worked for years with them and in order to secure a final success through exchange of views and ideas, to avoid unnecessary mistake and to broadcast supplementary discoveries and improvements of the “Bio-Dynamic methods of Agriculture,” the Natural Science Section at the Goetheanum and the Experimental Circles in the different countries holds meetings and informative courses*).

I have to thank those who have helped to produce this second (German) editions Herr E. Pfeiffer for his essential help in revision and correction, Frau L. Kolisko for lending her shorthand report which gave important corrections of the text and supplements of the first edition, Herr E. Vojeh for working out the index, and Fräulein E. Riese for copying the diagrams. This new edition has been supplemented by an Appendix with the summary of some agricultural conversations which Dr. Steiner had with several personalities.

Dornach, Switzerland. November, 1929.

On behalf of the Natural Science
Section at the Goetheanum.
Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth.

The six lectures, translated from the German, which appear in this volume, formed part of a series of discourses delivered by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin, during the years 1911 and 1912. Their object was to draw special attention to certain outstanding periods in Spiritual History, epochs which have been of profound significance in the progress and development of mankind, and to throw the light of Spiritual Science upon various questions associated with these so-called 'Turning-Points'. Further, to contrast and compare the results of external investigation with the knowledge born of the spiritual scientific method. The reader will find that this most interesting series of lectures opens up new avenues of thought, and brings a great illumination to bear upon many obscure points occurring in the Bible, and in connection with certain religious concepts.

It is essential, in order to realize the significance and import of the text, to have an understanding of what is implied by the term Spiritual Science, and to know that its methods are true and have been proved of actual positive value, sometimes leading to results which have been found to harmonize with those of subsequent external scientific research. Spiritual Science is not some new fantastic concept, but a logical mode of probing and penetrating the deep secrets of the cosmos and the Spirit-World, and Rudolf Steiner has shown how its methods may be employed to obtain inner illumination and guidance in the conduct of life.

At the commencement of a volume entitled Investigations in Occultism, by Rudolf Steiner, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, will be found an introduction by H. Collison, the editor of the English translations of Steiner's works. In this introduction the editor sets forth clearly and concisely the main features of Steiner's philosophy and the principles underlying Spiritual Science. Upon this source of information the following brief statement concerning the latter is based.

Rudolf Steiner defined 'Anthroposophy' or 'Spiritual Science' (the terms are synonymous) as 'Knowledge produced by the higher self in man'. The word Anthroposophy is derived from the Greek -- ànthrôpos, man, and sophia, wisdom. In virtue of his great spiritual gifts and profound understanding of the ancient occult teachings, Steiner was enabled to devise and evolve certain methods, whereby it is possible for man, if he will but of his own effort raise the latent powers of his soul and overcome all earthly passions and desires, to enter upon a state in which he experiences simultaneous association with two planes of existence, the material and the spiritual, and while still retaining complete consciousness of all things pertaining to the external world, his eyes are opened and his inner vision reveals to him the presence and the activities of the spirit realms. During this clairvoyant condition, which is unlike that of the customary mediumistic trance familiar to spiritualists, man finds himself in actual contact with things divine; the finer vehicles of his being, namely, the Soul or Astral Body, and the Ego or Body of Consciousness, leave for a time the Etheric and Physical Bodies (see footnote, page 190). The two former, however, still maintain, what might be termed, conscious union with the latter and it is the quality and power of the conscious union which determines the difference between this truly clairvoyant state, and that of mere sleep or ordinary trance. Throughout the whole period of such limited separation, although the soul and Ego have entered and become associated with the Spirit-World, nevertheless actual individual consciousness prevails, the personality remaining in touch with the etheric and physical bodily elements, while conscious of that life which lies beyond man's normal awareness and material vision.

When through the exaltation of the soul's powers this condition has been attained, man finds himself in a new world, the World of Spirit, and he can apprehend its reality and penetrate its secrets; that knowledge and wisdom which comes to him endures, and through it he may bring back comfort and enlightenment to aid and to benefit humanity. During such time as the Ego is directly associated with the spirit realms, man acquires a veritable understanding of truth and illusion, of good and of evil; and by having thus raised himself to the level of the departed, he is enabled to commune with them, not as does the spiritualist by bidding them descend to him, but through exalting himself to that higher sphere of life in which they abide.

Thus Steiner has shown that it is possible for mankind, even in these modern times, to have more than a mere fleeting contact with the Spirit-World, and thereby to gain knowledge and understanding, not alone of spiritual things, but also of matters of moment connected with the proper conduct of man's life in the material world. But the power and the quality necessary to this end, come alone through earnest and unceasing endeavour, so that all feeling, thinking, and willing, may be directed toward spiritual unfoldment, and an ethical development of man's inner being through the uplifting of the soul -- this discipline is essential.

The methods of Spiritual Science, by which the soul may be raised, and man's Ego truly enter upon and apprehend the reality and the activities of the spiritual realms, are known as meditation or concentration exercises. These are described in great detail by Rudolf Steiner in certain of his books, entitled: The Threshold of the Spiritual World, A Road to Self-Knowledge and The Way of Initiation -- the latter is now known as Knowledge of Higher Worlds; all are published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. Further information is obtainable from the various Anthroposophical Centres. The chief object of the exercises is to strengthen and harmonize the three principal components of man's being, namely, body, soul and spirit, in order to bring about close touch and sympathy with those glorious regions wherein lies the source of Divine power, and through the enlightenment thus gained, a clearer understanding of the material world.

The above is a brief outline of the Methods of Spiritual Science, through which Rudolf Steiner acquired his great spiritual discernment and his outstanding intellectual power. Steiner felt that it was his mission and his duty, to expound and develop a Christian interpretation of the Gospels and of the Trinity, and to bring forward a proper and reasonable means of communication between the living and the dead. Further, he was ever ready to utilize the knowledge born of his spiritual experiences for the benefit of humanity, by giving a new impulse in any direction which he deemed worthy, and of real import in the development of mankind.

The inspiring introduction to this volume, by Marie Steiner, is indeed a fitting foreword to the beauty and the spirituality of the remarkable and impressive lectures which follow.

The works of Rudolf Steiner will live on, and as time passes, he will ever be regarded as one of those who has accomplished a great and glorious mission.

The Translator

[ 1 ] In this essay, I speak about the "laming" of our mental pictures when they merely copy sense-perceptible reality.

The real facts behind the working of abstraction in our cognitive process are to be sought in this laming. The human being forms concepts about sense-perceptible reality. For epistemology [the science that investigates our knowing activity] the question arises: How does what man retains in his soul as a concept of a real being or process relate to this real being or process? Is what I carry around in me as concept of a wolf equivalent to any reality, or is it merely a schema, formed by my soul, which I have made for myself by noting (abstracting) the characteristics of one or another wolf, but which does not correspond to anything in the real world? This question received extensive consideration in the medieval dispute between the Nominalists and the Realists. For the Nominalists, the only thing real about a wolf is the visible substance, flesh, blood, bones, etc., present in this one particular wolf. The concept “wolf” is “merely” a mental summation of characteristics common to the various wolves. The Realist replies to this: Any substance you find in a particular wolf is also present in other animals. There must be something else in addition that orders substance into the living coherency found in a wolf. This ordering real element is given through the concept.

One must admit that Vincenz Knauer, the outstanding expert on Aristotle and medieval philosophy, said something exceptional in his book The Main Problems of Philosophy (Vienna, 1892) when discussing Aristotelian epistemology:

A wolf, for example, does not consist of any material components different from those of a lamb; its material corporeality is built up out of the lamb flesh it has assimilated; but the wolf does not become a lamb, even if it eats nothing but lamb its whole life long. What makes it into a wolf, therefore, must obviously be something other than hyle, sense-perceptible matter; and indeed it must not and cannot be any mere thing of thought, although it is accessible only to thinking and not to the senses; it must be something working [productive] and therefore actual—something very real.

But how, in the sense of a merely anthropological investigation, could one wish to attain the reality indicated here? What is communicated to the soul by the senses does not produce the concept “wolf.” But what is present in ordinary consciousness as this concept is definitely not something “working” [productive]. Through the power of this concept, the assembling of the sense-perceptible materials united in a wolf could certainly not occur. The truth is that this question takes anthropology beyond the limits of its ability to know. Anthroposophy shows that along with the relation of man to wolf in the sense-perceptible realm, there exists another one as well. This other relation, in its own particular, direct nature, does not enter our ordinary consciousness. But this relation does exist as a living supersensible connection between man and the object he perceives with his senses. The living element that exists in man through this connection is lamed, reduced to a “concept” by his intellectual organization. The abstract mental picture is this real element—which has died in order to present itself to ordinary consciousness—in which man does live during sense perception, but whose living quality does not become conscious. The abstractness of our mental pictures is caused by an inner necessity of the soul. Reality gives man something living. He deadens that part of this living element which enters his ordinary consciousness. He does so because he could not achieve self-consciousness in his encounter with the outer world if he had to experience his actual connection to this outer world in its full vitality. Without the laming of this full vitality, man would have to recognize himself as one part within a unity extending beyond his human limits; he would be an organ of a greater organism.

The way man lets his cognitive process turn, inwardly, into the abstractness of concepts is not caused by something real lying outside of him, but rather by the developmental requirements of his own being, which demand that, in his process of perception, he dampen down his living connection with the outer world into these abstract concepts that provide the foundation upon which self-consciousness arises. The fact that this is so reveals itself to the soul after the development of its spiritual organs. Through this development, the living connection with a spiritual reality lying outside man is reestablished; but if self-consciousness were not already something acquired by ordinary consciousness, self-consciousness could not be developed within a seeing consciousness.¹ One can understand from this that a healthy ordinary consciousness is the necessary prerequisite for a seeing consciousness. Someone who believes himself able to develop a seeing consciousness without an active and healthy ordinary consciousness is very much in error. In fact, ordinary normal consciousness must accompany seeing consciousness at every moment; otherwise the latter would bring disorder into human self-consciousness and therefore into man's relation to reality. Anthroposophy, with its seeing knowledge, can have to do only with this kind of consciousness, but not with any dimming down of ordinary consciousness.^e1

• 1. Das schauende Bewusstsein: i.e., a consciousness that not only thinks the spirit but sees it with spiritual organs as well. Translator.
• e1. Editor's addendum: On January 27, 1923, in Dornach, Rudolf Steiner had the following to say about "concepts" and the Scholastic “Realists”:
  The Realists said: The ideas, concepts, and forms in which sense-perceptible matter is ordered are realities. To be sure, for the Schoolmen, these ideas and concepts had already become abstractions. But they considered these abstractions to be something real because their abstractions were descendants of earlier, much more concrete and substantial views. In an earlier age, human beings did not look merely upon the concept “wolf.” They looked upon the real group soul “wolf” present in the spiritual world. This was a real being. For the Schoolmen, this real being had grown insubstantial and become an abstract concept. But in spite of this, the Realistic Schoolmen still had the feeling that the concept was not empty of content, but rather contained something real.
  This real element, to be sure, was descended from earlier beings who were totally real. But one still sensed the kinship, in exactly the same way that Plato experienced his ideas—which also were much more alive and substantial than the medieval Scholastic ideas—as descended from the old Persian archangelic beings who, as Amshaspands, lived and worked in the universe. Those were very real beings. For Plato, they were already hazy, and for the medieval Schoolmen they were abstractions. That was the last stage at which the ancient clairvoyance had arrived. Certainly, medieval Realistic Scholasticism was no longer based on clairvoyance; but what it had preserved in its traditions as real concepts and ideas—living everywhere in stones, plants, animals, and physical human beings—was still regarded, in fact, as something spiritual, no matter how diluted that spiritual element had become. The Nominalists—because in fact the age of abstraction, of intellectualism, was approaching—had already become aware that they were no longer able to connect something real to ideas or concepts. For them, concepts and ideas were mere names to make categorization easier.