The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dr. Unger: The task at hand is to prepare for the assembly of delegates. I have consulted with Dr. Kolisko and prepared yesterday's discussions for the central theme: the society must be consolidated.

Dr. Kolisko: The Representatives' Meeting should take place soon.

Dr. Unger: How should this circle work until the meeting? The question must be asked whether it will still work with me.

A conversation takes place between Dr. Schwebsch and Dr. Unger.

Dr. Schwebsch: Yesterday one could have had the impression that it was the Unger-Arenson family that was concerned and not the Society.

Dr. Kolisko: First of all, a provisional arrangement must be made, also in the branch matters.

Dr. Unger: The mistrust against me continues.

Marie Steiner: At the time when the question of the merger of the two branches arose, Mr. Hahn, Mr. Baumann and Mr. Palmer worked against Mr. Arenson and Mr. Unger. If requests such as the one made by Miss Hauck arise, it shows that these things can be dealt with. Why shouldn't it be possible?

Dr. Schwebsch: These are imponderable things.

Dr. Unger: The opinion here is that it won't work with me.

Dr. Steiner: We won't get anywhere if we discuss this question. It is an absolutely unnecessary question that has no place in this evening's discussion. What is at issue is not what the Stuttgart branch finds desirable or not desirable for itself, or how the work of Mr. Arenson and Dr. Unger is evaluated, but the question is that the central committee has not achieved anything in these years. The second thing is that something must arise that makes it clear that something can arise. All other questions must be considered from these two points of view. The question of mistrust or trust must also be considered from this point of view. We cannot talk about it for another fortnight. That is it. It is about the Anthroposophical Society in Germany and Austria, and that was mentioned in Mr. Uehli's mandate. What will become of the Stuttgart branch is a completely different matter. I have always meant by the “Stuttgart system” that which has had a subversive effect on the Society from here, because the Central Council had no ideas. That must be the direction of the conversations.

Marie Steiner: I think that Dr. Schwebsch has turned in a very one-sided way and does not see the essential.

Dr. Steiner: The essential thing is that the second positive element does not emerge anywhere and that what the ladies and gentlemen intend to do does not emerge. Consider the sterile situation in which we find ourselves! The previous board of directors thought it was compatible for one of its members to make his functions available and for Dr. Unger to resign provisionally. Then we had a sad night session, and then there was another session in which we tried to sketch out where the journey should go. Now I expected that the deliberations would be along these lines: where the journey should go.

The first session was a tumultuous critique. Then a general silence fell; we sat down around the table, and those who had talked the most in the critique talked the least when it came to sketching out a positive structure.

Dr. Unger: I was anxious to present something new. Dr. Steiner: The two appeals are merely bureaucratic documents: convening meetings! If you think that this will be wiser than what has been done so far, then you are mistaken. The point is that the Anthroposophical Society must be led, and so the person who is already convening meetings must have ideas about how the journey should continue. These calls have created bureaucratic documents.

Several speakers speak, often with reference to “yesterday”. Marie Steiner: It is not usual for those who have something to say to speak.

Emil Leinhas speaks.

Marie Steiner: – – but those who are possessed seem strong. Unless you have years of experience, you do not notice the effect at the first glance. One is not always equal to it, and “eternal youth” falls for it after all. What Dr. Unger says: “to illuminate Dr. Steiner's life's work from all sides,” is perhaps not new, but – –

Miss Dr. Maria Röschl speaks.

Dr. Steiner: Take the things as they have been in these days. Basically, much of what should have been said has always been said in the Thirty Committee. On December 10 [1922], I spoke [with Mr. Uehli] and said that I expected the Central Committee to approach me with some other people, otherwise I would have to address the Society myself in a circular letter; this Society is disintegrating. — I do not want to repeat everything that has happened in the meantime. I came here again. You all gathered independently of the assignment that you expressed by criticizing the central committee so harshly because nothing is happening. – Please, what is it that needs to be done? The district must point to the personalities whom it believes know.

Dr. Maria Röschl [to Dr. Unger]: How do you envision the branch work?

Dr. Unger: The book “Theosophy” should be studied. It should be expanded to include the entire movement. Archives should be opened in the right way. A “leader” should be developed through the works of Dr. Steiner.

Several others speak, then Mr. Uehli and Dr. Unger.

Dr. Steiner: There has been no leadership since 1919. The establishment of this and that has created the necessity for the Society to be led by personalities. It needs leadership, but it is not being led because the personalities who should lead are not aware that they should lead. How are things going in the Society? What is happening? And what is not happening?

The “Movement for Religious Renewal” has emerged. A lady went into it with all her passion; she felt nothing but that she was supposed to go into it. No plausible directive emerged for her. She heard about my lecture on December 30 [in GA 219]; she was told all kinds of things that led her astray. Now, I gave a lecture here last Tuesday.¹ From the lecture she had the impression that she would find her earlier opinion again. Afterwards she was told that it was clear from my lecture that no anthroposophist should take part in the religious renewal movement. Well, now she has completely lost her temper. This “should” and “should not”! You should always do this or you should not do that — but that does not appear at all in what I said.

It is not actually working. What is a classic example of this movement: it is not working to spread anthroposophy, but to prevent the right way of looking at anthroposophy. This is the case of working to prevent the right way of looking at anthroposophy. No work was done on it until the end of December. So it happened that this whole complex of questions, which has arisen in relation to the religious renewal movement, is a misjudgment. No position was taken on it until the end of December, when the Central Council came and wanted to make a mere defensive move, which came much too late. And this was not accompanied by the real awareness: What should the Anthroposophical Movement do? It was a struggle with something else.

Let us add to this that the Anthroposophical Movement was founded in 1901 and continued positively until 1918. And that from then on, foundations began that have become part of the finished Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy was made into threefolding, it was made into everything possible. Everywhere, the stubborn or the comfortable ways were sought, while everything I emphasized was blown through the fingers, with the exception of the only thing that Mr. Leinhas took the reorganization of “Futurum” into his hands. There is a complete lack of real leadership. And that is why there was talk of the “Stuttgart system”, which consists of grafting everything possible onto the Anthroposophical Society, but not making the effort to work for anthroposophy. On the other hand, there is the system of starting everything and not continuing it, such as the “Bund für freies Geistesleben” (Federation for a Free Spiritual Life), which has remained only on paper. And then, isn't it true, everywhere the easiest way is chosen and then abandoned, no further attention paid to it. Sitting on curule chairs without any activity! All this is typical of the “Stuttgart system”.

These are the absolute “unmethods”: to carry out one's office, but to avoid any real activity. Activity has been avoided since 1919. Nothing has been pursued, while all the same promises have been made to pursue things. These are the things that come into question above all. It seems to me that it would be easy to move on to the positive. For example, when I look at Dr. Stein's activity, it seems to me historically like this: at first he ranted and raved so that he rose to the point of saying that the board of directors had become a laughing stock for children. Then he lapsed into lethargy. It would be hard to highlight anything positive. It's no use for you to tell me to guess. Then it leads to something that I say being passed on. I am not criticizing you for saying it; it is just that it is not helpful. Only what grows on one's own soil helps, but in such a way that it becomes concrete and permeates the will. As long as we remain in the stage of not getting beyond generalities, we act as if society were not there at all. But since it is there, we have to speak differently. We have to talk about real things. We are not faced with the question of founding the Anthroposophical Society now. “Finding the other human being”: these are expressions used in every humanitarian society.

Now this committee of seven was formed. It could only come together by saying: We want this or that, and therefore we are dissatisfied with this or that.

Wherever there was an opportunity to achieve something in a positive and humane way during this time, it was not seized. This is what I have explained as the system of inner opposition.

In this way, we are constantly practicing inbreeding by continuing the system of the last four years in society. In the last four years, inbreeding has been practiced constantly, with the exception of those people whom I myself appointed. The path of convenience has always been chosen. How much has been ruined here because people did not understand how to cultivate talent. Those who are there are not even cared for. They are scolded. The task is to cultivate them, to use them in such a way that they put their talents and knowledge at the service of society.

The “circle” does not even have the opportunity to get beyond its own clique. They never think of bringing in others to make use of their talents or good will when they themselves get stuck. So they keep on inbreeding. It is not becoming for a couple of Waldorf teachers to sit down and reform society if they can't do it. If they can, then they should just go for it.

Nobody knows about this appeal by Dr. Unger. Nor about the other one, which is almost identical. People don't know why they should come. Of course, it is only of value if those who want to take the matter into their own hands say what needs to be done. There is nothing in it for society to do, and it is not being done because society is not functioning.

We have researchers and institutes! There are: Dr. Theberath, Maier - Strakosch is the head of them -, Smits, Lehofer, Dechend, Pelikan, Streicher, Spiess. Nine researchers have emerged from the Anthroposophical Society. It is an urgent question that the “Kommende Tag” does not go bankrupt on these nine researchers. That is one of the most burning questions of the Anthroposophical Society. All of this has emerged from the bosom of the Anthroposophical Society. Have you taken care of the things that are not being done?

Dr. Kolisko: We are well aware of these questions.

Dr. Steiner: Otherwise everything will spiral out of control if the Society does not take care of the things that have grown out of it and does not think about maintaining them. The Anthroposophical Society can be administered in the same way as you are discussing it today, in the same way as it was administered in 1910. People have demanded the Waldorf school. There is no longer any possibility of continuing with things as they were in the past. People have demanded activities that need to be carried out. The responsibility to take care of them is growing on the people who demanded them. Instead, we hold meetings that prevent us from taking care of them.

I would like to continually point out specific issues. I would like to point out the researchers you let go for a walk. The central board has not even considered that it has an obligation to ensure that they do something. There is nothing in the magazine Anthroposophie. But nine researchers and four doctors go for a walk. Of course, the “Kommende Tag” will go bankrupt because of these nine researchers, who are joined by four doctors. And that is how we get the opposition. The result is that people say we promise the world all sorts of things and none of them come true.

Emil Leinbas speaks.

Dr. Steiner: The moment people hear that there are people sitting around doing nothing, we get opposition.

Marie Steiner: At the last meeting I expected these things to be mentioned.

Dr. Steiner: It didn't occur to anyone to speak of these real things, although I said other things. Since 1919 they wanted to have something other than the Anthroposophical Society.

Some members comment on this.

Dr. Steiner: There is not enough time for that. This means that the responsibility has fallen to the others to take care of the Anthroposophical Society. That is what needs to be done. We could have arranged to take care of the archives and arrange lectures from the archives anyway. What was needed in 1919 requires the help of others, not just from the inner circle. If nine researchers are employed, it is the responsibility of everyone who wants science to be done.

Marie Steiner: No one thought of eurythmy.

Dr. Steiner: Our friends first had to be persuaded to find something in eurythmy, while other things are taking hold here parasitically. The actual things are being thrown to the wind. This must be stated in the appeals, even if not in the words I am using to express it.

If we just keep talking about “finding the human being,” we won't get anywhere. I feel there is an injustice here. Is it heard that I have been directing research goals in a very specific direction for some time now, saying that the things are in the air? Mr. Strakosch recently told me that the things are already being done. The deeds of our researchers must be included in “Anthroposophy”, and the Central Board is responsible for this. |

The point is that our doctors are doing something. They have enough to do; there are specific tasks.

Opinions are being expressed loudly about some of the events of the last year.

Dr. Steiner: We cannot afford to become complacent in the face of such blatant injustice, nor refuse to feel it in all its depth. The matter has not been discussed in such a way that it is “a scandal” when something like this can happen.

Dr. Kolisko speaks.

Dr. Steiner: It is not the same thing to take something by the horns as it is to merely discuss it. I mention this only as an example. I have always said that one speaks in generalities. At the Waldorf School, you should use this intellect, which has come about through a very special selection from Central Europe. The inbreeding within this circle leads to nothing. This also ruins all branch foundations. We will not attract new people.

Marie Steiner: Everything should be imbued with a different attitude. In addition to Waldorf teachers, other people should also be considered.

Some people present speak.

Dr. Steiner: I am only talking about the things that can be done as a matter of course. You can travel to Dornach and you can give a lecture. When the brochure on the spleen appears, you can claim that it should have provoked a continuous discussion. An investigation takes time. Of course, that should also arouse some interest. I am not saying that there are many people who are interested in such things; but what everyone can and must do is to bring something before the public that is a positive treatment of the anthroposophical material. That can be done. All you need to do is get down to it. I am not talking about genius at all; there is no lack of that. I don't know about Spiess. The others have the capacity, but they are not hardworking. They can do something, but they are not encouraged to do it. What has come out of the researchers, except for the pendulum story by Rudolf Maier? That is the only really positive result.

Schmiedel did not talk to me about Maier's lecture. That's the way it is with all these things. And even if he had, it would only prompt Schmiedel to write a refutation. That's what would follow. It could lead to a very interesting debate.

There is talk about the mood of opposition among young people.

Dr. Steiner: Miss Mellinger wanted to express the mood of young people. These ideas, which come from this corner, all assume that people say that no leadership is needed. You know, if the community is there, the appropriate leader can be found. It won't work without leadership. Purpose must be brought into the assembly. She can perhaps make her objections if the people do not suit her. There are Polzer, Miss Mellinger, Lauer – Maikowski is only the voting leader. It is all more decrepit than one would imagine. Those who are accustomed to using their tongues must express their point of view. It is sad that Dr. Stein has suddenly become mute.

Marie Steiner: I thought that these shortcomings would be discussed. I lived under this assumption, but I hear nothing about it.

Various voices are raised.

Dr. Steiner: Polzer represents the current Austrian faction, which is still active. Miss Mellinger can say anything negative. – Lauer is, of course, a representative of the youth; Maikowski is the youth's theorist. – They can be obliged not to speak for the beginning. – Little by little, the position becomes impossible if Miss Mellinger is included and

Maikowski is not. Just take Polzer and Lauer.

[Dr. Steiner?]: Wednesday at 8:30 pm,

• 1. Lecture Stuttgart, January 23, 1923, in GA 257.

It gives me profound pleasure to be among our Breslau friends. We have been through grave times which have made it all too obvious that mankind today is in need of something which can enable further development to take place. These catastrophic times are the consequence of a loss of upward momentum in human evolution. But in the soil of Anthroposophy we are tilling forces which can serve us in building up a spiritual life. Therefore I shall not speak too much today about contemporary events, but rather about the knowledge which human beings need, knowledge which they must absorb into their moral impulses. A great deal lives in our soul of which we are hardly aware. But because it is there, and because our soul element is linked to our existence on the earth, it is very important for our life.

What weighs on human beings today is the discordance between what the soul really needs and what present-day science can supply. Scientific knowledge is very demanding, and we ought to ask ourselves what it is that it demands of human beings. One thing it demands, for instance, is that we should accept its view of the beginning and end of the earth. Take the Kant-Laplace explanation of how the world began. A glowing ball of gas was formed by chemical and mechanical forces; it cooled, and when it was cool enough the same mechanical forces brought about the further solidification of everything that later became the kingdoms of plant, animal and man. And as for the future of earthly life and existence, we are told of an end to all life brought about by a gradual re-warming of the earth. Scientists say that physical laws will lead to the death of the earth through overheating. The end of the earth stretches before us like a gigantic churchyard. Between the two extremes, of the chemical and mechanical beginning of the world and its death by warmth at the end, lie all our human aspirations and ideals, all the moral purposes we have ever had or are going to have. The question is, why do such ideals and aspirations arise by chemical and physical means in the first place, if all they are destined for is to perish in the general death by overheating? Of course we can retort that these are theoretical considerations which have little influence on ordinary life. But even if we prefer to evade such questions, they still remain as disharmonies which work right into the depths of our unconscious soul life. They lead to the anxious question: What is the point of our moral impulses, what is the point of our religious ideals, if the whole of earth evolution is doomed to destruction?

The way this question is put shows what I am getting at. For all our moral impulses and all our religious ideals would benothing but an immense fraud perpetrated on mankind, they would be a terrible illusion, if they were destined to be buried in the cemetery of the earth. Eloquent examples already exist of the terrible effect of such soul moods brought about by purely scientific knowledge, but we are often not properly conscious of them. So the anxious question lives on in human hearts. Asking it from the point of view of natural science we have to say: We human beings grew out of nature and our moral ideals rose up in us; but they will perish with the earth. These moral ideals will perish in natural science. Natural science does not allow us to concede that our ideals have an independent, actual, reality. And even though this is no more than a theory, it nevertheless weighs heavily on the human soul.

This fatalistic world view is based, in the final analysis, on faith in the imperishability of material forces. But anyone trying to topple this dogma is considered mad. If this dogma were true, there would be no escape for moral ideals; they would simply be a picture of something that human beings have thought up and figured out. There would be no escape for these ideals if spiritual research could not find the means to give back to people a super-sensible content for their consciousness. This is relevant today. And in this relevant matter we are living at an important turning-point of evolution. Those of you who know me are aware that I do not like saying such a thing, because any moment in time can be called a turning-point. We have to consider in what respect a certain moment is a turning-point.

Let us consider where the knowledge given by natural science can lead us. Look first at the human being in his external manifestation living in the physical, sense-perceptible world. If we do this in an absolute sense, we see no more than a corpse. If we leave everything aside except the physical, sense-perceptible being and if we allow only chemical and physical laws to work on this being, then, by following only the external laws of nature, the human being begins to disintegrate, to dissolve. The forces we recognize with ordinary knowledge destroy the human being.

This alone is enough to refute the materialistic world view. If we say that the external forces destroy the human being, this must mean that from birth onwards people have been gathering forces which resist this destruction. As it dissolves, the corpse is absorbed into the world which we perceive with our senses. It is amalgamated into the sense-perceptible world by the death forces of chemical and physical laws. But what takes place at death inwardly at the level of the soul cannot be perceived by external sense-perception. These inward processes of soul can only be experienced by direct vision in the realm where higher knowledge has its source. This vision shows that outside the body the inward soul element is united with the spirit, with all the spiritual forces that stream through the world, giving it strength. The soul which unites with the spirit after death is then bound up in the spirit in the super-sensible world.

This is a fact which takes its place beside the fact of the corpse. In life the physical body was filled by the soul; in death it unites with the forces of nature. Anthroposophy leads us to a fact of life which is diametrically opposed to the fact of death. The merely theoretical statement of the eternal life of man can never be satisfying. But Anthroposophy introduces the fact that the soul unites with the spirit. The knowledge of natural science, on the other hand, leads only to the fact of death.

The higher sources of knowledge given by spiritual science lead us to what is revealed to the spiritual seeker in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. These stages of knowledge are described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds¹ and also in Occult Science. In the first instance you will find that here are descriptions of stages of knowledge. However, more is given to the spiritual seeker than mere stages of knowledge. Just as natural-scientific knowledge is not just knowledge but also possesses other sides and aspects, so it is with higher knowledge.

Today I shall consider with you something that goes beyond Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as stages of knowledge, something that I discussed, for instance, in the Vienna lecture cycle of 1914² about life after death, but now from a somewhat different point of view. The part of the human being that lives here on earth is a corpse which is united with external physical nature. And just as he is united with the mineral forces below, so is he also united with the higher hierarchies above. Just as in the corpse he grows together with the mineral forces, so above he slowly grows together with, and enters into, the hierarchies. Sometimes people say that they might as well wait until they die to find out what happens then. And they might as well wait to grow together with the hierarchies. This is all very well, but it is not actually the point. It is very important for the human being to grow into the hierarchies in the right way, for we have to admit that to start with he stands in the world in a manner which allows him no inkling of his relationships with the higher hierarchies. Much depends on our becoming aware of these relationships.

The first hierarchy with whom human beings have a relationship we may call the world of the angels. But those who do not recognize the spiritual world—for whatever reason—cannot establish a relationship with the world of the angels, any more than someone who lacks physical sense organs can establish a relationship with the physical world. Angels are the beings next above man, closest to man, yet under certain circumstances we cannot approach them. Only by endeavouring to make a picture of the angel world while we are here on earth can we prepare to form relationships with it. The portal of death leads to the world of the angels if human beings can become conscious after death of what is confronting them.

The second group of higher beings is that of the folk spirits, or archangels. Angels are not folk spirits. Real folk spirits have no individual links with human beings, as is the case with angels. Folk spirits are related to communities and groups of human beings. Even natural science sometimes speaks of the national spirit, but this does not denote an actual being, let alone a spiritual one. From higher knowledge the spiritual seeker knows that folk spirits are real spiritual beings whose position is one step above that of the angels. The human being can grow into this hierarchy, too. But if our inner spiritual experience is not intense enough, our angel cannot lead us with our consciousness to the folk spirit. But since we have to be led to the folk spirit, this happens unconsciously by means of the laws of karma. Either we grow into the folk spirit consciously and with love, or we are forcibly led into the sphere of the folk spirits. When, after death, the moment is reached at which we turn to descend once more to the sense-perceptible world for a new incarnation, then it makes a great difference, as our soul is led down, whether we have consciously united in love with the folk spirit, or whether, unaware of what is going on, this takes place forcibly, under coercion.

This finds expression in a spiritual, a soul, fact. We can be born into a nation because we are related by coercion to that folk spirit, or because we are related by inner love. Those who are able to perceive such things find it outstandingly characteristic of our time that a great many people today lack a sufficiently loving relationship to their folk spirit. This statement hints at the cause for what today brings about disorder among nations. The conflict prevailing among nations today stems from the fact that many people are born with little love for their folk spirit and therefore find themselves in a forced relationship to it. The love which leads us to a particular folk spirit can never bring about a conflict with other nations. We must do everything we can to help people regain a love-filled relationship with their folk spirits. This is most urgent.

As we stand here in life, we have Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as stages of knowledge which can lead to real vision in the spiritual and soul realm. But in the realm of spirit and soul, when our soul is to return once more to the physical world, Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are facts governing events, they are facts of action. There our soul stands in a relationship with whatever it is that it has to achieve out of the cosmos. If we are to manage our life properly it must grant us conditions which make the achievement of its aims as nearly feasible as possible. Thus the discarnate, spiritual human being works through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition towards his reincarnation in the physical world, while the incarnated, sense-bound human being can gain through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition a vision of the world of soul and spirit.

Natural-scientific knowledge is not in a position to recognize the profoundest secrets of life. Such knowledge starts, for instance, with the consideration of a chemical compound. Proceeding to the consideration of a more complicated chemical compound, and so on, it arrives in the end at the living cell, which it regards as nothing more than a particularly elaborate chemical compound. Spiritual science shows that externally the cell is indeed a particularly elaborate chemical structure; but when the living cell, the germ of a new life, arises in the mother's womb in such an elaborate fashion, the chemical laws are reversed and become chaotic. In the germ of the embryo in the mother's womb, in the germ of life, the chemical laws are suspended, reversed, and in the realm of nature this means chaos. Because the germ is chaos, the cosmos can work into it.

Between death and a new birth the human being has an inkling of this. In the first step on the way to a new incarnation Imagination is realized and leads towards reincarnation. In the second stage Inspiration is realized, and this is a far clearer consciousness than our brain consciousness, for Inspiration is a cosmic force. A part of this cosmic force is breathed in, as it were, and streams towards the bodily nature without coming fully to consciousness, rather as is the case with the will. We are unaware of how our will moves our hand, yet our hand moves in the manner required. The spiritual human being approaching incarnation through realized Inspiration stands in relation to this realized Inspiration as does the incarnated human being to the air. When we think about our physical body in the ordinary way, we imagine it to consist of muscles, nerves, vessels, bones. We imagine the same of a corpse. The airy part of our organism we assume to be outside it rather than within. Although we know that we cannot live without air, we still do not consider it as so intimately a part of ourselves as, say, our skeleton. Yet it is a part of our organism. The air as it is outside us, and at the next moment within, only to be outside again at the next, is a part of our organism. It lives rhythmically in us. In a far more extended rhythm we live with the element of soul and spirit. Just as we breathe air in and out, so we also breathe the element of soul and spirit in and out, though for the most part this takes place unconsciously. Physically, too, part of what happens through breathing takes place unconsciously. When the human being consisting of soul and spirit breathes in realized Inspiration, he takes a picture into his soul. He takes it into the dampened down part of his consciousness. And what he takes in is the world of moral and religious impulses. He takes this in as his conscience.

The third stage in the descent to a new incarnation is when the human being makes the transition to what his parents give him. In doing this he is enacting a realized Intuition. So you see that what can be achieved, while incarnated, by way of three higher stages of knowledge, is something that is accomplished as a real occurrence in the realm of soul and spirit on the way to incarnation. Here on earth we ascend to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. And on our return from the spiritual world to incarnation we descend from the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. This is the counter-image, in the spiritual world, of the three higher stages of knowledge.

What does this show us? It shows us that Anthroposophy is not merely knowledge but something which is alive. Through Anthroposophy we strive for higher knowledge in order to grasp the reality of the higher realms of life and in order to fill our souls with the content of what lives in the spiritual worlds. Those whose common sense has helped them to understand what the spiritual seeker has to say, experience something else as well. They can say to themselves that human beings in the state of incarnation between birth and death are constantly counteracting the death forces at work in their body. The forces of death are forever present in the human body, but so are those forces which counteract the forces of death. They are there. If we did not bear the forces of death within us we should never have developed our understanding for our physical environment.

One of the most important facts given to us by higher knowledge is that our forces of intellect are bound up with our forces of dying. Death is in a way nothing but a summary of all the forces of dying which are forever at work in us. But a moral ideal, which can intensify until it becomes a religious ideal, lives in us in quite a different way. It is said that certain natural forces exist which bring it about that plants grow upwards; and these forces are taken to be quite real. But when, on looking into the human being, people find there the driving forces of moral and religious ideals, they are not inclined to accept these as having any reality. Yet there they are, working not only in every human being but also in the cultures of all mankind. Higher knowledge teaches us that moral ideals live in man through the burning up of matter. Matter is destroyed when a person makes moral resolves. The breaking down of matter is the precondition for the building up of moral ideals. What is crucial is the manner in which a human being breaks down matter and the manner in which he can build it up again. External research is still caught up in the prejudice about the indestructibility of matter. But spiritual science shows that man can break through external natural forces. Once we are in possession of an anthroposophical world view we can comfort ourselves in face of the idea of the death of the earth through overheating. For it is this very destruction of matter which ensures for the human being the possibility of building up his moral personality.

If you look deeply into your soul you will find something which consumes and gnaws at the soul of modern man. This something, which consumes and gnaws at the soul, is the fact that modern natural science excludes the moral element from the realm of what is real. Anthroposophy shows how human beings break through natural laws; how the moral element destroys matter, which is then built up again as matter which can be the bearer of a moral world order. All that is contained within the confines of our skin is connected with the dying forces of matter. But what the world builds up again—this has been forgotten by the natural sciences.

In order to discover new moral worlds we must proceed to the question of where matter can be built up. Death is in us at every moment, but so is resurrection. This is where we should look. This, out of the anthroposophical world view, is the perspective we must place before human souls, since the natural sciences have turned their attention for far too long and far too one-sidedly to the forces of dying. It is important to develop the courage to attend to what must be done in order to build up new worlds.

I am assuming that these suggestions will give encouragement and lead to meditations on how to see more clearly what is felt and talked about a great deal, but what ought also to be strongly willed.

• 1 . Rudolf Steiner Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved?
• 2 . Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and New birth, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London 1959.

A teacher asks Dr. Steiner to begin the meeting with a short speech.

Dr. Steiner asks about gymnastics class.

A gymnastics teacher: We tried teaching at the same time in the same room. We could just do it with the third grade, but it was completely impossible with the sixth grade. Because of the size of the gymnasium, we were unable to keep the two classes under control. We do not think there is any advantage in continuing in this way. In addition, we also need the gymnasium for teaching eurythmy some of the time.

A teacher: We do not yet have an instrument for the new small eurythmy room.

Dr. Steiner: That is only temporary.

A eurythmy teacher: The new eurythmy room is too small for some of the classes, which is why we have to use the gymnasium.

Dr. Steiner: The so-called “little eurythmy room” is large enough. It is not a little room, it is a large hall. Anything larger would be too large for eurythmy. It is not very fruitful to teach eurythmy in an enormous room. That would certainly not be fruitful.

The fact is that you need the gymnasium so much that eurythmy cannot be taught there. It was conceived as a gymnasium and thus should be used to hold gymnastics class. Where else could you teach it?

Concerning the first two grades, there is not much we can do for now. In the future, though, gymnastics is actually too much for the first two grades. Instead, they should have some supervised play. We should begin with such supervised games as soon as we have a little breathing room, so that in the third grade a transition can be made from games to actual gymnastics. The children need real movement.

The gymnastics teacher: Without increasing the number of hours, we could include the first and second grades by giving them only one hour of instruction.

Dr. Steiner: The third grade has two hours.

How are things with eurythmy in the various grades?

A eurythmy teacher: The first through fifth grades have one hour each; the sixth through eleventh grades, two.

The gymnastics teacher: Due to the large number of classes in the tenth and eleventh grades, we had to move one of the gymnastics classes into the time allocated for shop.

Dr. Steiner: Gymnastics loses less than shop if one hour is dropped. We could talk about it if the question was how to give a complete education without any manual training. That seems preferable to me since the children have a quiet form of gymnastics in their shop class. We have arranged the schedule so that the gymnastics does not adversely affect the periods following, haven’t we?

A teacher: We could arrange to have a games period.

Dr. Steiner: We have no one to teach it, so we can hardly consider that now. It will not be possible to decrease the teaching load until the end of this school year.

The gymnastics teacher: We are certainly not concerned with an overburdening.

Dr. Steiner: Fifteen hours are enough. If you teach fifteen hours, then you need to give two or three hours per day, and that is a lot for gymnastics.

The gymnastics teacher: We want to find a way.

Dr. Steiner: That is true. Nevertheless, you must take the following into consideration. In a school such as ours, we need to develop gymnastics class in a certain way, but that can happen only over time. Next year we may well be able to focus on developing gymnastics for the twelfth grade. At present, we treat it as only a stepchild. We will need to work together on that.

I think teaching gymnastics will present a number of difficulties for you as our Waldorf School develops. The main thing is that, beginning with a particular grade, the purpose of gymnastics will be conscious exercise for strengthening the human organism, a kind of hygienic whole-body massage of the human organism. I think you need to orient yourself more toward the upper grades.

In the lower grades, I am considering having the women work on the games. The authority of the gymnastics teachers should not suffer by first having them play with the children. They should represent what actually occurs in gymnastics. The children should not feel that their games teacher is now teaching gymnastics to them. I am, of course, not belittling games. A female games teacher in the first and second grades would not go on to gymnastics. The children would get a distorted feeling if we don’t make such a change. What I mean with games is movement.

What is important now is to find a replacement for Mrs. Baumann during her illness. Mrs. Fels should take over half the eurythmy classes and Mrs. Husemann, the other half. Mrs. X. would have the more mature students because she is older and more mature herself.

Marie Steiner: Mrs. X. first had quite a shock.

Dr. Steiner: I do not want Mrs. Y. to give the entire instruction, because I want the older children to have a more mature person.

A teacher: Tittmann will be free only after the first of April.

Dr. Steiner: Then there is nothing we can do other than wait. I am really sorry that this situation must continue. I thought it was very difficult that you had to do the French class immediately after art.

A teacher: There is nothing we can do about that.

Dr. Steiner: It is difficult, but there is nothing we can do. Twentyfive hours is too much, but we have to wait.

A teacher: We will lose eight teaching days due to the earlier close of school.

Dr. Steiner: We don’t need to cling to our schedule as though it were a great treasure. The exact amount of material per week is not so important.

A teacher: Should we do a longer book in tenth-grade French?

Dr. Steiner: You could use a different book. They should complete at least one book, even if they do not read a lot. Have you thought of something? I think you could choose something shorter that could be completed in the remaining two and a half months. In a class like that, it might be best to read a biography. There is a nice little book called La Vie de Molière.

Marie Steiner: Enfant célèbre.

Dr. Steiner: I would particularly recommend a biography.

A teacher: We read Livius in Latin. Next we will do Somnium Scipionis. I also included Horace, and we will read two or three odes and learn them from memory.

Dr. Steiner: You will certainly take up Cicero?

A teacher: In tenth-grade English, we completed The Tempest, and now we are doing excerpts from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Dr. Steiner: I would prefer that, instead of excerpts, you read the whole book. Making a selection for English is not easy. As soon as you move past Shakespeare, things become difficult.

It may be good to read Macaulay in the tenth grade, but that depends upon how you treat it. This is the age of life where children should learn to characterize in a broad and comfortable way. Biographies, for example Luther’s, are very useful for children at the age of fifteen. They are not very appropriate later, as the children will find them boring. In contrast, I think it would be good to read Carlyle and Emerson in the eleventh and twelfth grades. You might recommend Walter Scott for reading by themselves, but Emerson and Carlyle would be books for the class. Emerson has such short sentences.

A teacher asks about a newly enrolled child.

Dr. Steiner: She could go into the ninth grade. In foreign languages, she would be at the very bottom, but that is not so bad. You should, however, make her acceptance dependent upon her having some place to live, but you will need to do that with some tact. You might even consider trying to find good living quarters for her yourself.

We now have two children of workers at Dornach in the eighth grade, and the tuition has to be paid out of the funds for the building. They will have to find their own living quarters, but they will have to be places where we know that the adults pay some attention to such children. The workers at the building are quite connected to these things.

A teacher: If I were a man and had an apartment I would take some children myself.

Dr. Steiner: Now you tell me you are almost a man.

A class teacher: T.M. and O.Nr. need to be separated in the fourth grade.

Dr. Steiner: With such children, much depends upon what they are accustomed to. It will not make much difference in the first half-year, but afterward for sure. They should be separated. (Speaking to the teacher of the parallel class) T.M. would go to you. He is easier to handle. I think it would be best if you took him.

A religion teacher asks if it would be all right if he were to go on a lecture tour.

Dr. Steiner: If you arrange it with the others, there should be no difficulty.

A teacher: We are striving to awaken a religious mood, but there are some problems with many of the children. X. often ruins the class. He does not like such moods.

Dr. Steiner: He certainly does not like moods, but there is nothing to be done. Even worse could occur. You could use his lack of participation to highlight the seriousness of the material.

A teacher asks about a service for the older children.

Dr. Steiner: I will soon arrange for an offering at the Sunday service.

A religion teacher asks another question.

Dr. Steiner: In connection with this question, we need to return to something we have already discussed. It is important that the youth of our Waldorf School talk less about questions of world perspective. The situation is that we need to create a mood, namely, that the teacher has something to say that the children should neither judge nor discuss. That is necessary, otherwise it will become trivial. An actual discussion lowers the content. Things should remain with simply asking questions. The children even in the tenth and eleventh grades should know that they can ask everything and receive an answer. For questions of religion and worldview, we need to maintain that longer. The religion teacher needs to retain a position of authority even after puberty. That is something I mentioned before in connection with the “discussion meetings.” They need to be avoided. If the children put forth questions of conscience, and you answer them, then there is nothing to say against that.

We also need a second thing. The older students often mentioned that we emphasize that the Waldorf School is not to be an anthroposophical school. That is one of the questions we need to handle very seriously. You need to make the children aware that they are receiving the objective truth, and if this occasionally appears anthroposophical, it is not anthroposophy that is at fault. Things are that way because anthroposophy has something to say about objective truth. It is the material that causes what is said to be anthroposophical. We certainly may not go to the other extreme, where people would say that anthroposophy may not be brought into the school. Anthroposophy will be in the school when it is objectively justified, that is, when it is called for by the material itself.

In things such as Parzival, it is already there, so that you will need to direct attention away from symbols rather than toward them. Wagner’s followers in Bayreuth have gone into much more nonsense about symbols than occurs here. We do not do that here. Parzival has to be taught as a man of the world, not a monk. I think this is something I needed to say today. For the children, of course, much is quite difficult.

It would be best if you discussed symbolism as little as possible. Stay with the facts, the historical background, without becoming trivial. Remain with the facts, not symbols.

A teacher asks about the English teachers who had visited the Waldorf School.

Dr. Steiner: Only women came, and they were quite satisfied. I certainly thought we would have to deal with much harsher judgments.

Discipline is much easier in England. When you go into a boys’ school there, you find only well-behaved boys. You might not find that so nice, but if you love discipline, you will find it wonderful. Modern Englishmen, at least in regard to their external behavior, are close to being insolent. Everybody assures you that they get better by the age of fourteen. That is certainly true in Gladstone’s school. I have observed how they go into the dining hall. It’s something that lies in the temperament of the people. The children are quieter there than here.

A teacher: N.G. is here.

Dr. Steiner: I do not want to have anything to do with that family, even indirectly. Besides N.G., I feel sorry for the children.

I am very sorry to have disturbed the harmonious mood. So much occurred that I referred to as the “Stuttgart attitude” following that terrible misfortune. I could not let things pass by without naming names, because things were really catastrophic. I have to say that was the way things had to be. Due to the nature of the problem, I repeatedly needed to put these things in the proper light. I also would have thought, considering the situation, that no one would have thought of doing something like this. It is quite strange how things that outside, in normal life, would not occur at all, blossom so well in this anthroposophical foundation, the foundation of the Waldorf School that should be kept pure. It would be hard to imagine a normal faculty meeting where someone asks the school principal to say something nice. If we have no self-discipline, we cannot move forward. It is very painful for me that things are as they are. Aside from the fact that I have been unable to determine the actual content of the problem, everything is simply swimming around. If only something would move in a particular direction, but everything is simply floating about. I do not know what people are thinking. The mood here is so tense. We need to give some thought to all this. Certainly one task of the Waldorf School faculty is to cease all of this inner comfort. The fact that things are done in the way they are is a part of these nonmethods. It is really too bad for today’s meeting, since a disharmony has now come into it.

In the interest of the Anthroposophical Society, I had to see that the methods that have arisen here since 1919 do not go any further. Something must happen in the near future in the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society. This is an important question, but people will have to think about it. It would be best not to do things in that way, and better if you helped to improve the situation. You can certainly not say that working together does not make sense, and that everyone should work individually. If that principle had been in effect in 1901, there would be no room for us. People worked together until the end of the war. This kind of separation from one another arose only since 1919 when individuals went off to the great tasks that were begun then. That is the reason for what has unfortunately occurred in the Anthroposophical Society, namely, that the Society has divided into a number of cliques. Before, there was some balance that inhibited the formation of such cliques. Now, there are big and little cliques everywhere, and everything is falling apart.

We cannot say everyone should live like a hermit. A harmonious cooperation should arise from the admonitions of our opponents that became so clear through the catastrophe at Dornach. Learn from our opponents! Our opponents know things very exactly, and they know, at least from their perspective, how to take them seriously, more seriously than is done by the Anthroposophical Society. There is a continual demand for something new, as has happened in Dornach. The Society as such needs to become a genuine reality, not simply a bureaucratic list of so-and-so-manythousand people who barely want to know anything about one another. The Society must become a reality, and there is much we can achieve through the Waldorf School if the faculty would stand as an example of harmonious cooperation. Everyone needs to really give something of themselves, and that is where individual activity comes in, namely, that everyone takes interest in each other’s work. It is simply narrow-minded to always seek the error in someone else. If we fall prey to that error, we will cease to be an anthroposophical society. There is certainly no other real example of anthroposophical activity if it is not here in the faculty. If you do not want to become enthusiastic about anthroposophy, then I do not know how it will be possible to save anthroposophy itself. That is really necessary. The catastrophe in Dornach is the culmination of our opponents’ activity. The Waldorf School faculty needs to take on the leadership of anthroposophical behavior. That is what is necessary.

A teacher asks a question.

Dr. Steiner: I would be happy to give you information. What I said recently about the incorrect methods relates to how anthroposophical matters are treated, not to the teaching methods here. What I have to say about that, I have already said. As of this morning, I cannot say that anything special has resulted. I was satisfied with the little I saw this morning. I thought things would come to a good conclusion. It was clearly noticeable, for example, that there is a greater level of seriousness in the higher grades. There is a much better tone in the higher grades. I see nothing to talk about there. I spoke about incorrect methods in connection with the extent of faculty participation in the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society.

(Speaking to a teacher) It would be good if you were careful to leave out the inner school methodology in your considerations until tomorrow.

We will overcome the problems in the school methodology. The Waldorf School has proven what lies in its basic impulse. Individual problems have arisen, but as a whole, the Waldorf School has proven what lies at its basis. We will overcome the problems. Most certainly, we will move forward with the inner methodology. There is something else that comes into question aside from the general anthroposophical aspect. In connection with methodology, we could try to lift everything from the Earth and move it to the moon where we could perfect it. But, that is something we cannot do with anthroposophical activity. We will overcome the problems at the school because that is an isolated area and can remain so.

Everything was present in the discussions with the leaders of the Movement for Religious Renewal. In the lecture I had to give in Dornach on December 30, I directed everything toward anthroposophists, not toward those working for a renewal of religion. 4 That was clear from ten paces away, but it lead to an argument between the anthroposophists and those of the Religious Renewal. There is now a tense mood and a heavy atmosphere. If we leave these things the way they are, the Anthroposophical Society will be destroyed, and other institutions along with it. It is sad that this all occurred directly following the events in Dornach. We should have guarded against that. We need to do something to relieve it. Those anthroposophists who are not involved with the renewal of religion said nothing, but the anthroposophical perspective should have been maintained, but without rancor. You cannot expect the Movement for Religious Renewal to make things easy for anthroposophists. They are taking the cream and leaving the rest, but the Anthroposophical Society needs to stand firm. That is something of concern to everyone. The school should not shine because the faculty has no concern about the Anthroposophical Society. You need to have a strong interest in it.

Question: The principle of direct observation in teaching has been rediscovered in recent times. Now it turns out that when children leave school, they are helpless in the face of life when they are supposed to think. They have become stuck on the image as a result of direct observation.

Rudolf Steiner: This is an extraordinarily important pedagogical question of the present day, the question of the concreteness or the exclusive concreteness of teaching. Now this question is perhaps not so specialized, but can only be treated exhaustively by looking at the whole of pedagogical thinking. I would like to mention first of all that teaching in the Waldorf school is based on our knowledge of human development. The Waldorf school is certainly not a school of world view, but all the educational skill, all the educational methodology, all the educational handling of things that can be achieved from an anthroposophical state of mind should be put into practice to benefit the Waldorf school. In this practical respect, the insight that children up to about the age of six or seven imitate everything plays a major role. Children continue to imitate up to this age. This means that at this age, at kindergarten age, one should not actually teach in the usual sense, but should rely on the child's ability to imitate. You see, when you have been dealing with such things for decades, as I had to, you gain all kinds of experience. People come to you and ask about all sorts of things. Once a father came to me, very unhappy, and said: What should we do, our boy, who has always been a good boy, has stolen. - I asked the father: How old is the boy? - Four to five years. - Then, I said, we must first examine whether he really stole. - The examination showed that he had not stolen at all, the little boy, even though he had taken money from a drawer. He had only seen every day that his mother gave money to the delivery people from her drawer. He thought: if that's how mom does it, then it's okay - and he just took money from the drawer too. He bought sweets, but did not eat them himself, but gave them away. The child was simply an imitator, according to his age. What he did was simply an act of imitation. The point is that you don't actually lead children of this age to do anything that they are not allowed to imitate. Then begins the age of life that starts with the change of teeth and ends with sexual maturity, which is the actual elementary school age. This elementary school age simply demands – what is demanded today from some party lines must be set aside, the factual must be brought to the fore – this age demands that the child learn to understand and act on the basis of authority. It is of very special significance for the whole of later life, especially for the education during the early years for later difficult times and for everything that can happen in life, that the child during this phase of life, from about seven to fourteen years of age, accepts something in terms of authority. This relationship of a self-evident authority of the teacher and educator to the child is something that cannot be replaced by anything else for the human being in his whole later life. It would be easy to find proof of something that cannot be acquired later in life if one has not had the good fortune to have a natural authority in one's life.

And so it is at this age that the question of object lessons arises. The extreme form of this teaching method, as it is practised today, has grown out of materialism. They want to put everything right in front of the eye. They believe in nothing but what is before the eye; so everything should be put before the child. But not only the difficulties you have emphasized arise, but also others that arise on the part of the teachers. Take the auxiliary books written for teachers, in which instructions are given for visual instruction. The banalities and trivialities that are dished up there are nothing short of outrageous. The instinctive tendency is always to push everything to the lowest possible level. This is the kind of object lesson in which the child is taught nothing more than what he already knows. This is the worst kind of teaching imaginable, which provides insight in this way. The best teaching is that which not only caters for childhood but for the whole of human life. If life is not such that one still has something to gain from one's school days in one's forties or fifties, then the teaching was bad. One must be able to look back on one's school days in such a way that there are living forces in this reminiscence. We also grow as our limbs grow and many other things within us are transformed; everything about us grows. When we teach children concepts, ideas and views that do not grow, that remain, and on which we place great emphasis, then we sin against the principle of growth. We must present things to the child in such a way that they are placed in the context of living growth. Again, we cannot do this with flat, banal object lessons, but rather when we as educators face the child, imponderables then come into play.

I often use an example like this: let us assume we want to teach a child a concept – one that can be derived purely from an understanding of child psychology at a certain age – the concept of immortality. One can make this concrete in natural processes, for example, in the butterfly in the chrysalis. One can say: the immortal soul in man is contained in it, like the butterfly in the chrysalis, only that it develops in a spiritual world, just as the butterfly develops out of the chrysalis. That is an image. One can teach this image to the child in two different ways. The first is this: one thinks, “I am the teacher, I am tremendously clever; the child is young and terribly stupid.” So I will set up this symbol for the child to represent this concept. I am, of course, long since beyond it, but in this way the child is to grasp the immortality of the soul. Now I am explaining this in an intellectualistic way. This is not the way to teach a child; not because what has been said is wrong, but because one is not attuned to the child in the right way. When I immerse myself in anthroposophical spiritual science, it is not an image that makes me feel smarter than the child, but a truth. Nature itself has created the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis at a lower level, and the process of passing through the gate of death at a higher level. If I bring what lives so vividly in me to the child, then the child benefits.

You can't just say that you should do it this way or that, but rather it depends on imponderables, on a certain state of mind that you yourself have as a teacher - that is the important thing. Difficulties arise when one stops at the flat illustrative teaching, which is becoming more and more impersonal; at the age when the teacher should play the important role as a self-evident authority, he withdraws. There are, for example, certain things that should simply be handed down to the child on the authority of an adult. You cannot teach everything to the child on the basis of direct instruction. Moral concepts, for example, cannot be based on direct instruction; nor on mere commandments. They can only be conveyed to the child through unquestioning authority. And it is one of the most significant experiences that one can have in later life, when one has absorbed something in the eighth, ninth, twelfth year, because a revered personality regards it as correct – this relationship to the revered personality belongs to the imponderables of . You reach the age of thirty, and with a certain experience it comes up from the depths of human consciousness; now you understand something that you actually took in twenty or thirty years ago, at that time on authority. This means something tremendous in life. This is in fact a living growth of what one has taken in during childhood. Therefore, all this discussion about more or less intuition is not so important. These things must arise out of the object itself. Also, the discussion about more or less thinking and so on, is not very important. The important thing is that teachers are placed in their proper place, that the human element is brought together in the right way in a school organization. That is the main goal. In real life – and the life of teaching and education is a real life – you can't do anything with curricula or anything that can be formulated in paragraphs. Because if three or six or twelve people sit down together, no matter what their antecedents are, what circle they come from, what education they have, they will be able to work out an ideally beautiful curriculum. If you somehow put something together in paragraphs from your own reflections, it can become ideally beautiful, the most wonderful things can be included. I am not mocking; it does not have to be bad, it can be extraordinarily beautiful and magnificent, but that is not the point. What matters is that in the school, which has a number of teachers, real life takes place; each of these teachers has his or her special abilities, and that is the real thing that has to be worked with. What use is it if the teacher can point out: this and this is the teaching goal? That is only an abstraction. What he can be for the children as a personality, in that he stands in the world in a certain way, that is what matters. The school question in our time is essentially a teacher question, and from this point of view all the more detailed questions, such as the question of teaching by demonstration and the like, should be treated. So can you, for example, teach children in an extremely effective way through teaching by demonstration? I must say that I feel a slight horror when I see these tortures with the calculating machines in a class, where they even want to transform things that should be cultivated in a completely different way into visual instruction. If you just want to go further with pure visual instruction, you will end up with clumsy children. This has nothing to do with phenomenology or phenomenalism: to develop proper phenomenalism, one must first be able to think properly. In school, we are dealing with pedagogical methodology, not scientific methodology. But we must know how closely proper thinking is connected not only with the brain and the head of the person, but with the whole person. It depends on the way in which someone has learned to think, on the skill in his fingers. For in reality, man thinks with his whole body. It is only believed today that he thinks with his nervous system, when in reality he thinks with his whole organism. And the reverse is also true: if one can teach a child quick thinking in the right way, and even presence of mind to a certain extent in a natural way, one is working for physical dexterity; and if one carries this quickness of thinking to the point of physicality, then the children's dexterity also comes to one's aid. What we have now established in the Waldorf school is much more important: instead of the usual visual instruction in manual skills, the children move on to self-forming, through which they get a sense of the artistic design of the surface. This then leads in turn to the mathematical conception of the surface in later years. This living into the subject matter, not through mere visual instruction for the senses, but through a living together with the whole environment, which is achieved for the whole person, is what we must work towards.

I just wanted to point out that such questions should be placed in the context of pedagogical thinking as a whole and that today we spend far too much time discussing the specifics.

Rudolf Steiner in response to other questions: What has been said and often emphasized before must be firmly held: the Waldorf School does not want to be a school of world view as such. The fact that it is based on anthroposophical soul-condition is only the case insofar as it is implemented in educational practice. Thus, what is at issue in the Waldorf School is the development of what can be achieved by purely pedagogical means from the anthroposophical movement. The Waldorf School does not want to be, and cannot be, a school of any kind that teaches a particular worldview. That is why the Waldorf School has never claimed – until now – to take responsibility for the religious education of the children in its care. What the one or other anthroposophist may think about questions of world view is not important. The point is that anthroposophy in the school and all that goes with it is intended to have an effect only in pedagogical practice. For this reason, the religious education of the Catholic children was handed over to the Catholic priest and that of the Protestant children to the Protestant pastor. Now it happened – this simply arose from the contemporary circumstances – that there were quite a number of dissident children who would actually have grown up without religion. For these children, religious education is now provided, but it is not considered part of the school, but rather it presents itself as free religious education alongside Protestant and Catholic religious education. We have at least had the success that children who would otherwise not have been admitted to any religious education at all now grow up with a religious life as a result. This is a free religious education that is taught by someone who understands it and is called to do so, like the others who teach Catholic and Protestant religion. However, it must be strictly maintained that the intentions of the Waldorf School are not to promote any particular world view. The aim is not to indoctrinate children with anthroposophy but to apply anthroposophy in practice. So questions on this topic are irrelevant. At the beginning we had to find an appropriate approach to what follows from practice. We have our views about how a seven-, eight- or nine-year-old child should be taught, and these are appropriate. We believed that we had to decide these things on the basis of purely objective principles. Now, of course, the Waldorf school is not an institution for hermits or sects, but an institution that wants to fully engage with life, that wants to make capable people out of children for the sake of contemporary, very practical life. Therefore, it is important to organize the lessons in such a way that, on the one hand, the strict pedagogical requirements are met, and on the other hand, it is important that the Waldorf school is not just any institution for eccentrics. I then worked out the matter in such a way that from the time of entering school until the completion of the third class, you have an absolutely free hand in the individual years, but by the time they have completed the third class, the children are ready to transfer to any school. From the ninth to the twelfth year, you again have a free hand, and then the child must be ready to transfer to any other school, and the same applies when they have completed primary school. We are currently setting up one class each year; what happens next remains to be seen.

As you can see, it is not a matter of working from party-political or ideological considerations, or anything like that, but purely of putting Anthroposophy into educational practice. The ideal would be that the children initially – because anthroposophy is only developed for adults, we have no children's teaching, and have not yet been in a position to want to have one – would not know that there is an anthroposophy, but that they would be kept objective and thus placed in life. These things cannot be achieved in the ideal; no matter how hard the teacher tries to remain objective, one child will live in a circle of parents and the other in a circle of parents; there are also anthroposophical fanatics, and their children bring anthroposophical mischief into the school, as well as all kinds of other things. It must be made absolutely clear that it can never be a question of the Waldorf School in any way being a school of world view or anything of the sort. It is not that at all, but it wants to make children into capable people in the immediate present, that is, in the life in which we are placed within the state and everything else, so that they are capable within it. It is self-evident that the Waldorf school does not bring the ideas of threefolding into the school. This cannot happen through the efforts of Waldorf education. No party politics are brought into the Waldorf school from the anthroposophical side.

Question: Isn't the methodology that the pastor uses somewhat opposed to the rest of the teaching? Isn't there a conflict here?

Rudolf Steiner: You can't achieve anything completely in life. It would be very nice if we could find not only a Protestant pastor but also a Catholic one who would teach according to our methodology. As I said, our school only wants to put pedagogical practice into practice, not a worldview. The other can go hand in hand with this. Now it is self-evident that in free religious education – because the question was asked about such education to be taught only by anthroposophists – our methodology is also used. We would very much like the Protestant and Catholic education to be taught in the same way, but we have not yet achieved that.

Question: What is the content of the material taught to anthroposophical children?

Rudolf Steiner: The material is determined in such a way that an attempt is made to take the child's age into account. This is what is always at the psychological basis. That is why it is important in all things that they are most effectively brought to the child when they are introduced at the exact age at which the child's inner being resonates most strongly with them. It is a fact that in the seventh or eighth year of life, little is achieved with objective gospel or Bible knowledge, and nothing at all with catechism knowledge. It is not absorbed by the child. This is an anthropological law. On the other hand, everything religious that can be directly formed from a certain shaping of natural processes is very well absorbed by the child at this age, all ethical and genuinely religious concepts that can be formed from natural processes. Above all, one can lead the child to religious feeling indirectly through images of nature.

It is only from the age of eight, or even closer to nine, that one can lead the child to the actual Christian feeling. Only then does he begin to grasp, for example, what lies behind the figure of Christ Jesus. The concepts that the child must be taught if it is to grasp the content of the Gospels are only really assimilated by the child in the course of time. It is good if it has a foundation and is only properly introduced to the content of the Gospels around the age of nine, and then gradually led up to the deeper mysteries of Christianity. It must be emphasized that this free religious education is, in the most eminent sense, a thoroughly Christian one, that is, the various denominations that take part in it are introduced to true Christianity. It is the case that if you are a teacher at the Waldorf School, you have come to this [Christian] conviction yourself, precisely from the anthroposophical point of view. You have come to Christianity from this side. You may put it differently, but children are introduced to real Christianity. Just as we leave Protestant and Catholic religious education to themselves, we also leave religious education from an anthroposophical perspective to them entirely. It has never been my aim to ensure that children attend these free religious education classes. They came in large numbers, but it is really not the aim to damage the external reputation of the school by making it happen in such a way that it could be said to be a school of world view. One does not want to be that at first. That is why we are careful about free religious education and only give it because it is requested.

Many souls are sleeping their lives away without a glance toward the spiritual world, without any connection, through prayer or otherwise, with the spiritual world. Think of a sleeping city where the souls have all gone out of their bodies. Whatever these souls took in of a spiritual nature during the day now lives on in them. If they took in nothing, nothing can live on in them during the time between falling asleep and waking up. But if something spiritual is experienced while awake, or if something is raised to the spiritual through prayer or meditation, then this will be for the dead, when it has been carried over into sleep, just what the cornfields are for living persons. If nothing thrives in the cornfields, people starve. What people take with them into sleep is like seeds for the fields where the dead sojourn. What we bring with us in the way of spiritual thoughts, of devotion to the world of soul and spirit, is what the dead live on, nourish themselves with, consume. And as famine ensues here on earth if the fruits do not thrive, so a sort of famine ensues when souls live materialistically and carry nothing with them into sleep. This is the connection between life in the spiritual world and life on earth.

Now someone might say: Maybe there will be a great number of deaths over there. That cannot happen. The dead souls can experience hunger and the pangs of hunger, but the dead cannot die. This brings us to an important question.

You see, death is something known only in the physical world. It is present only in the physical world, and not at all in the supersensible world.

Let me point out something to you. If you go through all the sciences here, you will find that they have worked out all sorts of laws. But science has one ideal, an ideal that one would have to say was fantastic, even if it could be attained; and that is to know life directly. Chemical and physical laws can be investigated any time, but to investigate life is an ideal. Life can never be understood by means of physical laws, because it flows into the physical world from the higher worlds.

Thus, life is something that is not known here, while death is something that is not known in the higher worlds. It is senseless to think that death could occur in the higher world. Pain and suffering have a meaning in the supersensible world, but not death. The beings of the higher hierarchies know nothing about dying.

The angels veil their faces before the mystery of man's creation, they know nothing of it ... They can learn about it only through what they are told by beings who enter the physical plane; they cannot know it directly. This is true of all the beings of the higher hierarchies. Only one of them learned to know death, the Christ. This is the profound significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, that a being became acquainted with death through terrible suffering.

If one thinks this over, meditates on it, one may come to understand the Mystery of Golgotha and to see Christ as the only being that learned to know death.

So, what happens to the souls who are starving over there for the reasons we have described? They feel their connection with the earth fading away. They are living in a world where they must say to themselves: The earth is being withdrawn from us, it no longer enters into our existence. And for the disembodied persons this means great pain, terrible suffering. It means that these souls begin to long for death. But since there is no death there, their hunger causes endless pain as they long for death.

Thus, we see how spiritual science works as seed for the dead, filling them with the proper nourishment. Only if we know things like this can we form a right opinion of spiritual science and see that it is not a theory but an elixir of life, and that it bridges the gulf between the living and the dead. We must see that: through it our souls can build a living bridge to the dead. And because this is so, we must shape the anthroposophical work in the branches in such a way that we learn what a living person can do for one who has died before him. The simplest thing he can do for him is to read to him, read ideas, concepts, notions that are related to the supersensible world. Spiritual science is a language that can be understood by the dead as well as the living. And it can be of service not only to those who occupied themselves with anthroposophy while they were alive, but also to those who would have nothing to do with it. Those who were already anthroposophists here will feel it as an especially good deed if we read to them.

It is often objected that the dead, being already in the supersensible world, must know all about it and thus have no need of what we read to them on the subject.

My dear friends, the earth is not only a vale of tears, it is something that has a real efficacy. The dead can look at the supersensible world, but they cannot form ideas and concepts from merely looking. After all, there are animals on earth. They can look at things, but they cannot form concepts as men do. If the earth had never come to be, the human soul would live in higher worlds but it would never attain concepts about the higher worlds. Men have to go through life on earth if they are to form concepts and ideas. So, a soul that goes through death without an inkling of the spiritual world will live there without experiencing any of the concepts and ideas that we are able to study here through spiritual science. It would have to return to earth to do this.

Thus, a soul can be helpful on earth by reading to the dead, because it can be understood by the dead. And even if the dead persons took in nothing of spiritual science while on earth, we need not assume that they will reject it after death. On the contrary, many who raged against anthroposophy and wanted to know nothing of it are now yearning to hear about it. Not only the things around us are entangled in Maya. There can be a Maya that overcomes a person who rages against spiritual science. What happens in the depths of the soul is often very different from what is on the surface. A person may work up a rage in his daily consciousness, yet have a great longing in him. It is quite hopeless to try to bring such a person to anthroposophy, but in his soul, he may be a better anthroposophist than others. After he dies, however, the Maya is lifted. Then we see what was in the depths of the soul. Here the soul raged, but now the longing comes to the fore. It may be that our reading is in vain, but this we must risk ...

...

We come into closer connection with the dead if we devote ourselves to anthroposophy in the right way. We must fill ourselves with understanding for the necessity that spiritual science should make an impression at the present time.

The more we work with spiritual science, the more we notice that the dead also work back upon the living. For example, in educating children who have lost their fathers at a very early age, we must take this into account. Often one can feel the father sending an influence from the spiritual world. I once had to tutor children whose father had died early. I tried to train them in my own way, but it would not work, simply would not work. But when it occurred to me to allow for the influence of the father from the spiritual world, then it went very well ...

...

If you work out something about incarnations in a clever theoretical way, it will usually be wrong. It must seem strange that Raphael was the same person as a thorny character like John the Baptist.

How could it happen that this thorny man, who had to pave the way for the Mystery of Golgotha in such a violent way, reappeared as the gentle, pliable, charming Raphael? But look at this. Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, died when Raphael was eleven. He was a painter. He was not a great painter so far as external achievements go, but he had great ideas in his head, although he could not put them on camas because he had no technical skill. He was also a poet. There was a great deal of fantasy in him, but the physical capacities simply were not there. He went early through the portal of death, and then his forces worked into his son. In Raphael's hands and imagination worked all that his father could send into the physical world. One can say that the old Giovanni Santi was a painter without hands in the supersensible world, for in a wonderful karmic relationship he supplied, in combination with the Christ-filled individuality of the Baptist, what came to expression in Raphael. The supersensible world had to work with the physical world to achieve this result. It shows how the so-called dead are able to influence those who have been left behind ...

...

Life on earth has another important mission. When we have gone through the portal of death, if we are not to be lonely, if we are to know something of other souls, we must meet these other souls. We could be together with them there, yet know nothing about them. We must make some connection with the souls here in order to be acquainted with them over there. In the spiritual world souls can walk through each other and know nothing about each other. It is important for those over there that they be read to by persons whom they have known here. The connections we make here are also connections over there. We found societies and build up friendships on a spiritual basis in order to establish connections that will endure beyond death. Not as a mere whim, but as a need that extends beyond death, we are trying to bring our spiritual life into a sort of societal form. Thus we see that, by building up connections with other souls here on earth, we make sure that we will not be hermits in the world between death and a new birth, that we will have a sociable life there as well as here. We will have understanding for the other souls after death only if we try to see into them now.

Therefore, in order not to be shut off from more remote souls, we interest ourselves in their life. For instance, we study religions because we cannot know much about other souls if we are not familiar with their beliefs. We build a close tie with the souls that are near to us. But we can also have some connection with the people whose religious beliefs we study. We must learn to understand seers and to perceive that they cannot do otherwise than bring to other men what they themselves see, in order that what is needed may come to pass in the world and the mission of the earth may be fulfilled.

It must be conceded that over there only those souls who have taken in something spiritual here can have a full consciousness of their influence on the physical world. And since we should learn more and more about these matters, I will mention a fact that is important even if it is not easy to understand. Let us take a soul that never bothered about the supersensible world while it was here. This soul can work on the physical world with its intentions. But although this soul can see the souls that have remained behind—at least, if they know something about the spirit—it is not aware that its intentions are working on the physical world. This knowledge is lacking. There is after all a certain difference between living in immediate communion with your fellow men and being hindered from having such communion so that your intentions reach them only invisibly. You would see everything as in a mirror. The dead person who entered the spiritual world without spiritual knowledge sends down his intentions, but he is not conscious of doing so. This is far less satisfying for him than if he knew: Now you have this intention and you are sending it down.

This direct knowledge of the connection with the living is available only to those who had some kind of spiritual life here or to those who are instructed by the reading of spiritual ideas after death. The reading can replace the knowledge. And it will more and more be the case that men here on earth will achieve consciousness of the influences of the dead, so that there will not be a one-way influence by persons here working on the spiritual world, but persons here, as they learn more about the supersensible world, will be aware of what is coming from over yonder.

We are only at the beginning of anthroposophical development. Therefore, what is being said now will be little heeded. But it will be heeded more in the future. One will have moments when one sees quite clearly how the dead are working. Not every moment of our lives is favorable, but people who fill themselves with spiritual science will base such moments. We really experience very little of what is going on around us. We experience only what happens near us from hour to hour. But that is the least of what is really there, or could be there. Take the following example. Someone goes to work at eight o'clock every morning. His way leads through an old garage. One day he is delayed in starting, and when he comes to the garage he sees that it has collapsed. This happened just at the moment when he would normally be passing through.

Such a case shows how much does not happen that really could happen in our lives. How do you know what would have happened to you if you had crossed the street three minutes earlier than you did? Admittedly there are karmic necessities here, but there are also thousands of possibilities that do not become facts. What actually occurs is one of innumerable possibilities. Just these moments when something could have happened but did not do so because we, so to speak, missed the opportunity. Just these are the right moments for glimpsing the spiritual world. Take another example: You miss a train through being delayed. You should accept this calmly because there may be karma behind it. You should cultivate calmness, and if you do, you will notice a shadowy thought arising in such moments when some accident could have occurred but did not. This thought will be something that a dead person is saying to you, something that may be an important communication from over yonder.

In order to receive a direct communication from the spiritual world, we need a certain soul-training. Spiritual science can furnish such a training. This can go so far that through someone who has died before us we experience, for example, that he is continually concerned about us. If he died very young, he has conserved certain forces that he had in his life. These forces are still available to him and, if the conditions are favorable, he can project them into earth-life. Perhaps the dead person loved us and wants to send us his forces. And we use these forces, although we are not conscious of this. Then it happens that we avoid an accident, by missing a train or something of the sort. Then we see, like a living dream-picture, the imagination of the person who loved us and is sending us his forces. We have an inkling of him, and he shows us that he is concerned about us. We will know how to understand this.

Think how the love that souls have for one another can be increased if one knows that one is not torn away from those whom one leaves here, but can still work for them. And this working will gradually reach the point where a bridge can be built to the souls. If one thinks in this way of the souls that feel themselves close to the dead and strengthen their love through the possibility of further active loving, then the love between soul and soul will be kindled through what spiritual science can give, and this can really be something very substantial when compared with what usually exists as love today. Souls will be brought together in the right way for the first time when people realize that the dead and the living belong to one world.

To bring people to understand that life here and life yonder are only changes of form, this is part of the mission of anthroposophy in our time. And we understand this mission only if we see that through spiritual science we tear away the wall that now seems so threatening because materialistic attitudes are spreading so widely over the earth ...

...

In the life between death and a new birth the soul is no less occupied than here. The circumstances over yonder are not the same as here, but they are prepared here in earth-life ... Continually flowing into the physical causes are forces that come from the powers of the higher worlds. If one has had no conscience here, he will have to go through something terrible. He will become the slave, the servant, of the beings who have to bring illness and early death into the world.

There are persons who generate enthusiasm and love, zeal for their work; who do gladly what they must do in accordance with their capacities and their karma. There are also many vocations in which people really cannot work with any enthusiasm, and this will be the case more and more. Therefore, it is necessary that souls who, in spite of it all, punctually discharge their duties, should have something else to which they can turn with enthusiasm. Through spiritual science one can have something that he can do with love and enthusiasm, and through which forces will develop in one's soul. Thus, we can become the servants over yonder of those beings of the higher hierarchies who pour freshness, growth, and health into earth-life.

All these connections enable us to look beyond death and know that we belong to the macrocosm, that we are not living for physical existence alone while on earth but are developing important forces that will come into their own between death and a new birth. We become able to live in such a way that we do not hinder the fruitful development of mankind, but rather generate forces that can further it. We can regard this as the mission of anthroposophy.

Answers to Questions

It should be a selfless service that one does with the reading. The dead understand our speech for 4 or 5 years after dying. Our thoughts for a longer time.

Photographs are of no use in finding the dead. Handwriting is better. You will not succeed in finding them with photographs. The connection is achieved much better by quietly concentrating on their handwriting.

by Hella Wiesberger

In order to properly determine the relationship between Rudolf Steiner's epistemological approach to work, as discussed in the documents presented in this volume, and his overall impact, it is necessary to consider not only the external history of this branch of his work, but also, first of all, his conception of the meaning and significance of the cultic as such.

According to the insights of anthroposophy, in ancient times humanity lived in the instinctive, clairvoyant awareness that all life in the world and in humanity is brought about, shaped and sustained by the creative forces of a divine spiritual world. This awareness grew weaker and weaker over time until it was completely lost in modern times as a result of intellectual thinking that was focused solely on the physical laws of the world. This was necessary because only in this way could the human being become independent of the creative spirituality of the universe in terms of consciousness and thus acquire a sense of freedom. The task of human development now consists in using the free intellect, which is not determined by world spirituality, to gain a new awareness of the connection with world spirituality.

This realization was what led to one of Rudolf Steiner's fundamental concerns: to pave a path for modern intellectual thinking to spiritual knowledge that was appropriate for it. This is how the first anthroposophical guiding principle begins: “Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge that seeks to lead the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the universe.”¹ The concrete means for walking this path are to be found in the complete works, paradigmatically in the fundamental works «The Philosophy of Freedom» and «How to Know Higher Worlds >».

While it was natural for ancient cultures to cultivate in their external life, through symbols and cultic acts, that which could be inwardly experienced from cosmic spirituality, and thereby to shape their social life, the fading of the consciousness of being existentially connected to the divine-spiritual world also meant that the sense of the cultic had to be lost. And so, for modern abstract thinking, which has become the dominant intellectual force in the course of the 20th century, the traditional cultic forms can only be regarded as incomprehensible relics of past times. Existing cultic needs do not come from the intellect, but from other layers of the human soul.

This raises the question of what reasons could have moved Rudolf Steiner, as a thoroughly modern thinker, to cultivate cultic forms in his Esoteric School and later to convey them to other contexts as well. To answer this question fully, the whole wide and deep range of his spiritual scientific representations of the nature and task of the cultic for the development of the human being, humanity and the earth would have to be shown. Since this is not possible here, only a few aspects essential to the present publication can be pointed out.

Understanding cults arises from spiritual vision.

We need harmony between knowledge, art, religion and morality for our complicated social life, which threatens to spread chaos across the earth.²

Rudolf Steiner's fundamental concept of the cultic is rooted in his spiritual vision, trained with modern means of knowledge, to which the spiritual world content reveals itself as “the source and principle of all being” ³ and whose nature evokes an equally cognitive, artistic-feeling and religious-worshipping experience. As long as humanity lived in an instinctive clairvoyance, cultures were sustained by such a unified scientific, artistic and religiously attuned spiritual vision: “What man recognized, he formed into matter; he made his wisdom into creative art. And in that the mystery student, in his liveliness, perceived what he learned as the Divine-Spiritual that permeates the world, he offered his act of worship to it, so to speak, the sacred art re-created for cult.“ ⁴

Human progress demanded that this unified experience be broken down into the three independent currents of religion, art and science. In the further course of development, the three have become more and more distant from each other and lost all connection to their common origin. This has led to cultural and social life becoming increasingly chaotic. In order for orienting, rising forces to become effective again, the three “age-old sacred ideals” – the religious, the artistic and the cognitive ideal – must be reshaped from a modern spiritual-cognitive perspective. Rudolf Steiner regarded this as the most important concern of anthroposophy, and he emphasized it in particular on important occasions in the anthroposophical movement, for example at the opening of the first event at the Goetheanum building.⁵

In the spirit of the words spoken on this occasion: “When nature begins to reveal her manifest secrets to him through spiritual vision, so that he must express them in ideas and shape them artistically, the innermost part of his soul is moved to worship what he has seen and captured in form with a religious sense. For him, religion becomes the consequence of science and art,” ⁶From the very beginning, he had been driven to shape the results of his spiritual vision not only according to science but also according to art: towards a pictorial quality that contains spiritual realities. For “images underlie everything around us; those who have spoken of spiritual sources have meant these images” (Berlin, July 6, 1915). Because it seemed necessary to him, especially with regard to social life, to shape the essence of the spiritual not only scientifically but also visually, everything that characterizes anthroposophy as a worldview should also be present in the image through its representative, the Goetheanum building (Dornach, January 23, 1920). After the fire on New Year's Eve 1922 destroyed this pictorial expression of the view, he expressed what he had wanted to present to the world with the Goetheanum in a somewhat succinct formula:

“The Goetheanum was felt to be a physical sign of the formation that the three main interests of humanity are striving for in the depths of the human soul. These main interests are the religious-moral, the artistic and the cognitive interest.” ⁷

The formulation of the cognitive and artistic interest is clear. But what about its religious interest? If this is not as clearly perceptible, this is partly due to the characterization of religion as the “mood” of the human soul for the spiritual that lies beyond the sensual (Mannheim, January 5, 1911), and partly due to the often-stated belief that the religious and moral essence of anthroposophy cannot could not be confessional in the sense of forming a religion, that spiritual scientific endeavors should not be a “substitute” for religious practice and religious life, that one should not make spiritual science “into a religion”, although it could be “to the highest degree” a “support” and “underpinning” of religious life (Berlin, February 20, 1917). Anthroposophy as a science of the supersensible and the Anthroposophical Society as its community carrier should not be tied to a particular religious confession, since Anthroposophy is by nature interreligious. Even its most central insight, the realization of the importance of the Christ-spirit for the development of humanity and the Earth, is not based on that of the Christian denominations, but on the science of initiation from which all religions once emerged. In this sense, he once characterized it as a “fundamental nerve” of spiritual scientific research tasks to work out the supersensible truth content common to all religions and thereby “bring mutual understanding to the individual religious currents emerging from the initiations religious movements over the earth“ (Berlin, April 23, 1912).⁸ From this it follows logically that, from the point of view of anthroposophy, practical religious observance within a confession must be a private matter for the individual. This has been expressed in the statutes of the Society from the very beginning.⁹

The ideal of the sacralization of one's whole life

Sacramentality is an expression of the fact that human action is aglow with holiness.⁹

What was done only on the church altar must take hold of the whole world.¹⁰

The ability to experience how spiritual beings are manifested in a cultic, sensory way had to fade away because it is a law of development that forces must be lost in order to be conquered anew at a different level. To this end, every development must proceed in a seven-fold rhythm: from the first to the fourth stage it is evolutionary, but from the fifth to the seventh stage it is involutionary, that is, retrogressive. This means that the third, second and first stages must be relived as the fifth, sixth and seventh, but now with what has been gained as new up to the fourth stage. For humanity on earth, the new thing to be attained consists in the special or 'I-ness', which in the phase of evolution develops physically out of birth and death and in the phase of involution is to spiritualize into freedom and love. The latter, however, requires sacrificing the egoism that was necessary for the development of specialness and the sense of freedom.

This fundamental law of micro-macrocosmic development is referred to many times in the complete works. It is expressed particularly vividly, because it is presented in diagrams and meditation, in the following notes:

Handwritten entry in a notebook from 1903 (archive number 427)

Stepping, you move through the power of thought on the floods of specialness and follow seven guiding forces under the truth: desire pulls you down, the guiding forces placing you in the power of disbelief; spirit pulls you up, raising the seven to the sounding sun.

1. In the special being, discover the law: for the law wove the first of the seven into the material.
2. In movement, discover life: for the second of the seven poured life into matter.
3. In desire, discover the person: for the person was imprinted by the third of the seven in the material.
4. In the thought, recognize yourself: for the I gave the fourth of the seven its self.
5. In your desire, discover renunciation: for through renunciation, the fifth of the seven sacrificed itself so that you may be yourself.
6. In your movement, discover blessed calm: for the sixth of the seven sacrificed blessed calm so that you may live moving as yourself.
7. In thy particularity discover thy eternal law: for as eternal law the seventh of the Seven has created thy self in particularity, and as eternal law will lead it out of particularity.

The power of regression was born in humanity when the Christ, the world spirit effecting the cosmic-human evolutionary-involutional process, historically appeared and through the great sacrifice at Golgotha became the leading spirit of the earth:

“... That man can develop back again to an awareness of his spiritual relationship [to the cosmos] is due to the Mystery of Golgotha. But that which one owes to the Mystery of Golgotha must be sought out of one's own free inner motivation. Christianity presupposes freedom.” (Dornach, February 11, 1920)

Now that this retrogression of consciousness has set in from our age, it is necessary that the Christian element of freedom should also be incorporated into the nature of the cult, into sacramentalism. This means that, increasingly, it is no longer the case that one person must make the sacrifice for all others, but that each person must experience, together with all others, becoming equal to the Christ, who descended to earth as a being of the sun (Dornach, December 23, 1922). For spiritual science, freedom and individualism in religion and in sacramentalism do not mean that every person should have their own religion. This would only lead to the complete fragmentation of humanity into separate individuals but that through the assimilation of spiritual-scientific knowledge, a time will come, “however far off it may be,” in which humanity will be increasingly seized by the realization of the inner world of truth. And through this, “in spite of all individuality, in spite of everyone finding the truth individually within themselves, there will be agreement”; while maintaining complete freedom and individuality, people will then join together in free connections (Berlin, June 1, 1908).

In this sense, it was repeatedly pointed out that what had previously been performed only on the church altar must take hold of the whole world, that all human activities should become an expression of the supersensible. Especially since the First World War, it has been emphasized more and more strongly how important it is for the whole of social life to find its way back into harmonious coexistence with the universe, since otherwise humanity is doomed to “develop more and more disharmony in social coexistence and to sow more and more war material across the world”. One will not come back to ascending cultural forces as long as one serves only human egoism, especially in science and technology, alongside a separate religion, as long as one does research and experiments at the laboratory and experimental table without the reverent awareness of the “great law of the world”. “The laboratory table must become an altar“ is a formula that one encounters again and again.¹¹

The fact that there is still a long way to go and that tolerance should therefore be exercised, both by those who have to continue to maintain the old forms and by those who should strive for the future, is clear from the following statements:

"Of course, just as it is true that a completely new era is dawning in relation to the spiritual life, it is also true that the path to the Christ, which was the right one for many centuries, will remain so for many centuries to come. Things are gradually merging. But what was right before will gradually change into something else as people mature for it.” (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911)

"Just as the one who, because he believes that he has so deeply grasped the spirit of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ, within himself that he can immediately, one might say, ‘dialogue’ with this Christ, must look with understanding at those who need the positive statutes of a confession, who need the Christ-servant who again and again gives them consolation with the words: Your sins are forgiven. On the other hand, those who can see that there are people who are already dealing with themselves should be tolerant. This may all be an ideal in earthly existence, but at least the anthroposophist may look up to such an ideal.” (Norrköping, July 16, 1914)

But the importance of cults was not only emphasized for the individual, but also for the development of the whole of humanity and the Earth. In lectures given at the time when the religious renewal movement “The Christian Community” was founded and in which it was said that the mysteries are contained in the cults and that they will only reveal themselves in their full significance in the future , “the mysteries of the coming age,” it was explained that a time would come when the earth would no longer be; everything that today fills the material of the natural kingdoms and human bodies will have been atomized in the universe. All processes brought about by mechanical technology will also be a thing of the past. But through the fact that, through “right” acts of worship that arise out of a “right grasp of the spiritual world,” elemental spiritual beings that have to do with the further development of the earth can be called into these declining natural and cultural processes, the earth will arise anew out of its destruction (Dornach, September 29, 1922).

Another reason for the saying that the mysteries of the future lie in the cultic, which shines deeply into the overall development of humanity and the cosmos, arises from the spiritual-scientific research result that the divine-spiritual of the cosmos will reveal a different nature in the future than it has done so far through free humanity, which has become self-responsible out of I-consciousness: “Not the same entity that was once there as Cosmos will shine through humanity. In passing through humanity, the spiritual-divine will experience a being that it did not reveal before.“ ¹² For this new mode of revelation of the cosmic spiritual being will only be able to emerge in the future, since the essence of a genuine cult is that “it is the image of what is taking place in the spiritual world” (Dornach, June 27, 1924).

The prerequisite for all this is the spiritualization of thinking. Only on this basis will it be possible to gradually sacralize all life activities. Then, out of the knowledge of spiritual realities, the old ceremonies will also change, because where there are realities, symbols are no longer needed (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911, and Workers' Lecture Dornach, September 11, 1923).

The change of ceremonies here refers to the Christian sacraments, which, in the traditional Christian view, contain the meaning of Christianity, but whose origin is to be found in the ancient mysteries. It was only in the 16th century, with the translation of the Bible as declared to be the only authentic one by the Council of Trent in 1546, the Vulgate, that the Latin “sacramentum” replaced the Greek “mysterion”. However, the term “sacrament” has been used in ecclesiastical language since the time of the church father Tertullian in the 2nd century. With regard to the number, meaning and effect, the view was, however, fluctuating until the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439 set the number at seven (baptism, communion, penance, confirmation, marriage , ordination, extreme unction) and proclaimed as dogma that the sacraments are acts instituted by Christ, consisting of a visible element (materia) and ritual words (forma), through which the sanctifying grace is conferred.

If, on the other hand, the Protestant Church recognizes only two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, this, according to Rudolf Steiner's presentation in the lecture Stuttgart, October 2, 1921, is due to the fact that at the time of the Reformation there was already no sense of the inner numerical constitution of the world. For the concept of the seven sacraments originally arose from the ancient insight that the overall development of the human being is brought about by processes of evolution and involution. The seven sacraments were therefore intended to add the corresponding counter-values to the seven stages through which the human being passes in life, including the social, and in which he or she develops values that are partly evolutionary and partly involutionary. The seven stages in human life are: birth, strength (maturity), nourishment, procreation, recovery, speech, transformation. They are characterized as follows. The involution inherent in the birth forces is the dying process that begins with the birth process; it should be sanctified by the sacrament of baptism. The entire maturation process, including sexual maturation, should be sanctified by the sacrament of confirmation. The process referred to as “nourishment” refers to the embodiment of the spiritual-soul in the physical-bodily, that is to say, the right rhythm must be established between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily so that the soul-spiritual does not sink down into the animalistic, but also does not lose itself in a spirituality foreign to the world. The involution inherent in this process of evolution should be hallowed by the sacrament of Holy Communion. Linked with this rhythmic process of vibration between the soul-spiritual and the physical-corporal is the possibility, through the faculty of memory, of being able to swing back again and again in time. For complete development, it is necessary to remember previous experiences on earth. The involution inherent in the memory capacity evolving from the human being should be sanctified by the sacrament of penance, which includes examination of conscience, repentance and the resolution to correct the mistakes made and to accept appropriate retribution imposed by oneself or by the priest, so that the process of remembrance is Christianized and at the same time elevated to the moral level. These four processes exhaust the evolutionary processes that have taken place since the birth of man. The act of remembering already represents a strong internalization; evolution is already approaching involution. A natural involutionary process is death. The corresponding sacrament is extreme unction. Just as the physical body was stimulated by the corresponding natural processes of life, so now the soul-spiritual life is to be stimulated by the sacrament of extreme unction, which in the old knowledge of nature was seen as a process of ensoulment. “Expressed in rhythm, at death the physical body is to disappear again, while the soul-spiritual life is to take form.” This is what is called “transubstantiation”.

Since the individual life of a human being comes to an end with death, the two remaining stages and sacraments relate to something that is no longer individual in nature. On the one hand, there is the interrelationship between the human being and the heavenly-spiritual, which unconsciously exists in every human being. If this were not the case, one could never find one's way back. But there is an involutionary process hidden deep within the human being, “even more hidden than that which takes place within the human being when he passes through death with his organism,” a process that does not come to consciousness at all in the course of the individual's life. The evolutionary process corresponding to this involutionary process would have been seen in the sacrament of priestly ordination, which corresponds to what is called “speech”.

The seventh, he said, was the image of the spiritual and mental in the physical and bodily, as expressed in man and woman: “One should say that a certain boundary marks the descent into earthly life. Woman does not reach this boundary completely, but man crosses it. This is actually the physical-bodily contrast.” Because both carry a certain imperfection within them, there is a natural state of tension between them. ‘If the sacramental evolutionary value is sought, we have it in the sacrament of marriage.’

This fundamental idea of Christian esotericism in relation to sacramentalism – that man enters life as an imperfect being, develops partly evolutive and partly involutive values, and that in order to make him a fully developing being, the countervalues are to be added to them in a sacramental way – has no longer been understood since one began – “of course, again rightly” – to discuss the sacramental. Today, however, we urgently need to arrive at involutional values.

Spiritual thinking as spiritual communion, as the beginning of a cosmic cult appropriate for humanity in the present day.

That all that is our relationship to the world first recognizes itself as cosmic cultus in the human being is the first beginning of what must happen if anthroposophy is to fulfill its mission in the world.¹³

When Rudolf Steiner speaks of the spiritualization of the forms of the sacraments, this is in turn conditioned by the law of development in that the sacrament of communion contains the involutionary counterpart to the incorporation of the soul and spirit into the physical body. Since the last stage of the process of incarnation was the binding of thinking to the physical brain, the reverse development, the re-spiritualization, must also begin with this physical thinking, this intellectuality.

Already in his first book publication, in the writing “Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (1886), he started at this point by explained how pure, that is, unadulterated thinking unites with world spirituality. This is also referred to a year later with the sacramental term “communion”, when it is stated:

"He who grants thought its ability to perceive beyond the sense perception must also, of necessity, grant it objects that lie beyond mere sensory reality. But the objects of thought are those. By seizing the idea, thought fuses with the source of the world's existence; that which operates externally enters into the mind of man; he becomes one with objective reality at its highest potency. The realization of the idea in reality is man's true communion. Thinking has the same significance for ideas as the eye has for light and the ear for sound. It is an organ of perception.“ ¹⁴

Since the content of anthroposophy is nothing other than what can be researched in this way from the world of ideal, spiritual reality and what is, by its very nature, of a moral and religious character, it goes without saying that even in its early days was proclaimed that through their teachings it should be effected to sanctify and sacralize all of life, even into its most mundane activities, and that therein even lies one of the deeper reasons for their appearance (Berlin, July 8, 1904). It also becomes clear why it is said in the lectures on 'The Spiritual Communion of Humanity', which are so important for the context under consideration here, that the spiritual communion to be experienced in spiritual thinking is the 'first beginning' of what must happen if anthroposophy is to fulfil 'its mission in the world' (Dornach, December 31, 1922).

How this can become a reality through the spiritual communion performed in the symbol of the Lord's Supper is characterized in the lecture Kassel, 7 July 1909: Humanity is only at the beginning of Christian development. Its future lies in the fact that the earth is recognized as the body of Christ. For through the Mystery of Golgotha, a new center of light was created in the Earth; it was filled with new life down to its atoms. That is why Christ, at the Last Supper, when He broke the bread that comes from the grain of the Earth, could say, “This is my body,” and by giving the juice of the vine, which comes from the sap of plants, He could say, “This is my blood!” The literal translation continues: “Because he has become the soul of the earth, he was able to say to that which is solid: This is my flesh - and to the sap: This is my blood! Just as you say of your flesh: This is my flesh - and of your blood: This is my blood! And those people who are able to grasp the true meaning of these words of Christ, they visualize and attract the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine, and the Christ-Spirit within them. And they unite with the Christ-Spirit. Thus the symbol of the Lord's Supper becomes a reality.

However, it continues: “Without the thought of the Christ in the human heart, no power of attraction can be developed to the Christ-Spirit at the Lord's Supper. But through this form of thought such attraction is developed. And so for all those who need the outer symbol to perform a spiritual act, namely the union with Christ, Holy Communion will be the way, the way to the point where their inner strength is so strong, where they are so filled with Christ that they can unite with Christ without the outer physical mediation. The preliminary school for mystical union with Christ is the sacrament – the preliminary school. We must understand these things in this way. And just as everything develops from the physical to the spiritual under the Christian influence, so under the influence of Christ, those things that were there first as a bridge must first develop: the sacrament must develop from the physical to the spiritual in order to lead to real union with Christ. One can only speak of these things in the most general terms, for only when they are taken up in their full sacred dignity will they be understood in the right sense."

In the same sense, it is said in the lecture Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911, that when man, through becoming acquainted with the knowledge of the higher worlds, through concentration and meditation exercises in scinem, is able to penetrate completely with the element of spirit, the meditative thoughts living in him 'will be exactly the same, only from within, as the sign of the Lord's Supper - the consecrated bread - was from without'. In his memoir, 'My Life-long Encounter with Rudolf Steiner', Friedrich Rittelmeyer reports that when he asked, 'Is it not also possible to receive the body and blood of Christ without bread and wine, just in meditation?' he received the answer, 'That is possible. From the back of the tongue, it is the same.

In the lecture Dornach, December 31, 1922, it is indicated that spiritual knowledge can be further deepened by uniting with the world spirit, with the words that spiritual knowledge is “the beginning of a cosmic cultus appropriate for humanity today,” which “can then grow.” In other contexts, it is pointed out that this requires a certain sacrifice, through which one can go beyond the general experience of spiritual communion to truly concrete cosmic knowledge. What has to be sacrificed in this process is referred to by the technical term “sacrifice of the intellect”. This is not to be understood as renouncing thinking as such, but rather as renouncing egoism, the will of one's own mind in thinking, which consists in arbitrarily connecting thoughts. Two lectures from 1904 and two lectures from 1923 and 1924 contain explanations of this.

The two lectures from 1904 have only survived in an inadequate transcript and therefore remain unpublished to this day. Therefore, the relevant text is quoted here verbatim. The lecture of June 1, 1904 states that certain prerequisites are needed to be able to read the Akasha Chronicle, to explore cosmic evolution, one of which consists in

“that one makes one's own thoughts available to that principle, that power and those entities which, in the theosophical language, we call the Masters.”¹⁶ Ultimately, the Master must give us the necessary instructions to be able to read the Akashic Records. It is written in symbols and signs, not in words of any language that exists or has existed. As long as one only uses the power that man habitually uses when thinking – and every man, who has not expressly learned to do so, uses this power – one cannot read in the Akasha Chronicle.

If you ask yourself, “Who is thinking?” you will have to say to yourself, “I am thinking.” You connect object and predicate when you form a sentence. As long as it is you yourself who connects the individual concepts, you are not able to read in the Akasha Chronicle. You are unable to read because you connect your thoughts with your own ego. But you have to eliminate your ego. You must renounce all your own sense. You must merely present the ideas in order to have the connection of the individual ideas established by forces outside of you, by the spirit.

So to read in the Akasha Chronicle, it is necessary to renounce not thinking, but to renounce connecting the individual thoughts on your own initiative. Then the Master can come and teach you to let the spirit from outside join your thoughts into what the universal world spirit is able to show you about what has taken place in history. Then you no longer judge the facts, but the universal world spirit itself speaks to you. And you provide it with your thought material.

Now I must say something that may perhaps give rise to some prejudice. I must say what is necessary today in preparation for eliminating the ego in order to be able to read in the Akasha Chronicle. You know how it is today a thing held in contempt, what the monks in the Middle Ages cultivated. They cultivated the “sacrifice of the intellect.” The monk did not think as today's researcher thinks. The monk had a certain sacred science, sacred theology. One did not have to decide on the content. Therefore, it was said that in the Middle Ages the theologian had to use his reason to explain and defend the given revelations.¹⁷ That was, however one may judge it today, a strict schooling in the sacrifice of the intellect to a given content. Whether this is something admirable or reprehensible in modern terms is not our concern.

This sacrifice of the intellect, which the medieval monk made, led to the elimination of judgment based on the personal ego; it led him to learn how to place the intellect at the service of something higher. In the process of reincarnation, the fruits of that sacrifice come to fruition and make him a genius of insight. When higher insight comes, he can apply his abilities to the facts that can be read in the Akashic Records.” (Berlin, June 1, 1904)

In the lecture held a few weeks later, it says:

”... The further one advances on the path of knowledge, the more one must cultivate devotion; one becomes ever more and more devoted. From this devotion flows the strength for the highest realizations. He who can refrain from connecting his thoughts attains to the reading of the writing in the Akasha-Chronicle. But one thing is necessary: the personal ego must be eliminated to such an extent that it makes no claim to connecting the thoughts itself.

It is not at all easy to understand this, because man claims the right to connect the predicate with the subject. But as long as he does this, it is impossible for him to really study occult history. When he allows thoughts to arise in selflessness, but also in awareness and clarity, an event occurs which, from a certain point of view, every occultist knows, namely the event that the ideas, the thoughts, which he previously formed into sentences and insights from his personal point of view, are now formed by the spiritual world itself, so that it is not he who judges, but is judged in him. It is then the case that he has sacrificed himself so that a higher self speaks spiritually through his ideas. This is - understood occultly - what was called in the Middle Ages the “sacrifice of the intellect”. It means giving up my own opinion, my own conviction. As long as I myself associate my thoughts, and do not make my thoughts available to higher powers, which then, as it were, write on the tablet of the intellect, I cannot study occult history.” (Berlin, July 25, 1904)

In the two lectures Penmaenmawr, August 31, 1923, and Prague, April 5, 1924, the term “victim of the intellect” occurs again, in connection with the research result of a lost epic-dramatic poetry from the first four Christian centuries. This poetry was created by the mystery teachers of that time because they foresaw that in the future people would develop their intellect more and more, which would indeed bring them freedom but also take away their clairvoyance, a grave crisis must overtake them because they will no longer be able to comprehend the regions from which the actual deeper foundations of the development of the earth and of humanity and the cosmic significance of Christianity can be understood. This foresight had caused the mystery teachers great concern as to whether humanity would really be able to mature for that which came into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. And so they clothed the teaching that the sacrifice of the intellect is needed to understand the Christ in his cosmic significance cosmic significance in a “mystery drama”.¹⁸ In this lost epic drama, In a moving way, it is said to have depicted how a young hero acquired the clairvoyance for the cosmic significance of Christianity through his willingness to make the sacrifice of the intellect. And with this poetry - it is said to have been the greatest that the New Testament produced - those mystery teachers wanted to put before humanity, like a kind of testament, the challenge to make the “Sacrificium intellectus”. For if the connection with that which has entered into humanity through the mystery of Golgotha is to be found, then this Sacrificium should basically be practiced by all who strive for spiritual life, for erudition: “Every man who is taught and wants to become wise should have a cultic attitude, an attitude of sacrifice.” (Penmaenmawr, August 31, 1923, and Prague, April 5, 1924). For “sacrifice is the law of the spiritual world” (Berlin, February 16, 1905); “Sacrifice must be, without sacrifice there is no becoming, no progress,” it says in notes from an instruction session in Basel on June 1, 1914.

Artistically formulated, the “sacrifice of the intellect” is found in the third mystery drama, “The Guardian of the Threshold”. In a moment of spiritual drama, the spiritual student Maria, supported by her spiritual teacher Benediktus, who characteristically appears in this picture, set in the spiritual realm, makes a vow before Lucifer, the representative of the egoistic forces, to always keep her love for self away from all knowledge in the future:

Never again will I
let myself be found by that bliss
Which people feel when thoughts mature.
I will prepare my heart for the service of sacrifice,
That my spirit may always think, and, thinking,
to offer the fruits of knowledge to the gods.
Then knowledge becomes my sacred duty.

From the lectures from 1904, it is clear that the sacrifice that the spiritual disciple Maria vows to make is equivalent to what is characterized there as the “sacrifice of the intellect”.

In addition to the references to the spiritualization of the sacrament of communion in spiritualized thinking, there are also references to the spiritualization of the sacrament of baptism. In contrast to spiritual communion as an individual event within the human being, this points to the spiritualization of external work. The beginnings of this could already be made today in education and teaching, if each human child is seen from the point of view that it brings the power of the Christ-spirit into the world in its own personal way.¹⁹ In another context, we find the remark: “That which was formerly performed in the mysteries as the symbolum of the sacrament of baptism should today be introduced into external events, into external deeds. Spiritualization of human work, sacralization in external action, that is the true baptism.^{20In notes from an esoteric lecture, Hamburg, November 28, 1910.}

The Forms of Worship Created for Various Communities

Cult unites the people who come together in it.²¹

The question of how ritual can build community was discussed in detail in 1923, when a fundamental reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society had become necessary due to various subsidiary movements that had emerged since the end of the First World War and the fire at the Goetheanum. The problem of “community building” had become particularly pressing at that time, on the one hand due to the youth streaming into the Society, most of whom came from the youth movement (the “Wandervogel” movement) that was struggling with the ideal of community at the time, and on the other hand due to the religious renewal movement “The Community of Christ”, which was founded in the fall of 1922, shortly before the building burnt down. This movement had formed after young theologians, mostly still students, approached Rudolf Steiner around 1920/21 with the question of whether he could advise and help them in their need for a spiritual renewal of the religious profession. His answer was that he himself had spiritual science to offer and could not in any way found a religion; however, if they, together with a group of 30 to 40 like-minded people, carried out their plans, it would mean something very great for humanity.²² For he was convinced that for those people who want to seek the path to the spiritual through religious practice, the renewal of Christian religious life is a deep necessity. And so he provided the most energetic support for this young movement, admittedly not as its founder, but, as he said, as a “private individual”. He gave lectures on the foundations of “what a future theology needs” and, above all, he gave “a valid and spiritually powerful, spiritually fulfilling cultus”, because a recovery of religious life must come about through healthy community building, which in turn is only possible through a cultus (Dornach, December 31, 1922, and March 3, 1923).

After the establishment of the “Christian Community” in the Anthroposophical Society had created a certain uncertainty regarding the relationship between the two movements, he felt compelled to address the issue of community building and worship. Starting from the question of whether the community formed by the “Christian Community” is the only one possible in the present, or whether another possibility could be found within the Anthroposophical Society, he presented the two poles of community formation made possible by worship. While the well-known pole in religious worship lies in the fact that through word and action, entities of the supersensible worlds are brought down to the physical plane, the other pole is a “reverse” cultus, which can arise when one rises up to the supersensible worlds in anthroposophical working groups through a common effort of knowledge. When a group of people come together to experience what can be revealed from the supersensible world through anthroposophy, “then this experience in a group of people is something different from the lonely experience”. If this is experienced in the right spirit, it means a process of awakening in the other person's soul and a rising to spiritual community: “If this consciousness is present and such groups arise in the Anthroposophical Society, then in this, if I may may say, at the other pole of the cultus, there is something community-building in the most eminent sense present” and from this, this ‘specifically anthroposophical community-building’ could arise (Dornach, March 3, 1923).

This form of cultic experience, which is possible without external ceremony, obviously lies in the line of the cosmic cult that can be experienced through spiritual knowledge. Nevertheless, if he had been able to work for a longer period of time, Rudolf Steiner would also have created a cult that could be performed externally, so to speak, as an effective aid on the difficult path to the cosmic cult to be sought in the purely spiritual. For the experience of cosmic cult as a spiritual-mystical union of the human spirit with world spirituality should always be striven for, but, at least today, it can certainly only rarely be truly experienced. Rudolf Steiner once hinted at this when he said: “I recall that a great mystic of the Alexandrian school confessed in his old age that he had only experienced that great moment a few times in his life, when the soul feels ripe to immerse itself so that the spirit of the infinite awakens and that mystical moment occurs when the God in the breast is experienced by the human being himself. These are moments at midday, when the sun of life is at its highest, when something like this can be experienced, and for those who always want to be ready with their abstract ideas, who say: once you have the right thoughts, they must lead you to the highest - for them such midday hours of life, which must be seen as a grace of earthly life, are not time when they would willingly travel. ²⁴ For such abstract minds, the moment must always be there to solve the riddles of the world. (Heidelberg, January 21, 1909).

That Rudolf Steiner considered the possibility of creating a new form of anthroposophical worship in 1923, the year of the reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society, is clear from two of his statements in the spring of 1923. One of these was made in the context of describing the “reverse” cult as a specifically anthroposophical form of community building. In this context, he added the following remark to the statement that many people come to the Anthroposophical Society and not only seek anthroposophical knowledge in abstracto, but also, out of the urge of our consciousness soul age, corresponding community formations: “One could now say: the Anthroposophical Society could also cultivate a cult. Of course it could; but that belongs to a different sphere now” (Dornach, March 3, 1923). The other statement was the answer to a question posed in a personal conversation about a cult for the anthroposophical movement. The questioner, Rene Maikowski, recorded this conversation as follows and made it available for reproduction:

However, this new form of the anthroposophical cult of knowledge was never realized. After Steiner's death, Marie Steiner tried to create a kind of substitute by giving the celebrations held at the Goetheanum, especially the annual festivals, an artistic-cultic character.

In retrospect, it is clear that the needs of various walks of life, as expressed to Rudolf Steiner, have given rise to a wealth of ritual texts.

The first to be written were the texts for the rituals of the interreligious cult of knowledge, as it had been practised within the Esoteric School from 1906 until the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914.

Shortly before or immediately after the end of the war (end of 1918), he had been asked to redesign church rituals. This request came from a Swiss anthroposophical friend, Hugo Schuster, who had been so deeply moved by Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of Christ that it had led him to become a priest. And after he had been ordained within the Old Catholic Church in the summer of 1918 – in which the rituals were already being read in German – he received a ritual for burials and, in the spring of 1919, a new translation of the “Mass”.²⁵

Other friends of anthroposophy who were or had been priests also received ritual texts upon request. Pastor Wilhelm Ruhtenberg, who had become a teacher at the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded in 1919, received a baptismal and a marriage ritual in 1921. The following account of how this came about was handed down:

"As early as 1921, Pastor Ruhtenberg was often asked by anthroposophical friends to marry them and baptize their children. He then asked Rudolf Steiner for a baptismal ritual. After he had received it, he no longer felt that the black robe with the white bib was appropriate and asked for a new robe. Rudolf Steiner drew what he wanted and indicated the colors. According to Ruhtenberg's report, the marriage ritual was as follows: “Once a bridegroom came to me and said that Dr. Steiner, whom he had asked to perform the wedding, had sent him to me. I didn't want to let the man go away empty-handed, so I married him. But after that I went to Dr. Steiner and said to him: “Doctor, if you send me someone to marry, then please give me a ritual for it.” A few weeks later, as I was sitting with my class in the eurythmy lesson, the door opened; Dr. Steiner came up to me, handed me some sheets of paper and said: “Here is the marriage ritual for you.” I sat down immediately to immerse myself in the ritual with burning curiosity. After the lesson, in the office, I asked about the garment for this act. I still had the sketch of the baptismal garment with me, and Dr. Steiner wrote the colors for the marriage ceremony next to it; the shape of the garment remained the same.” ²⁶

Before that, another teacher, Johannes Geyer, who had also been a pastor, had received a baptismal ritual for the baptism of a child for whom he had been asked by an anthroposophical friend.

Rituals were also designed for the free Christian religious education at the Waldorf School after Rudolf Steiner was asked whether a religious celebration could be arranged for the students of the free religious education on Sundays. The answer was that this would have to be a cult. So the first ritual, the “Sunday Act,” was created before New Year's Day 1920. In response to further questions, he developed the three other rituals: the “Christmas Ritual” during the Christmas season of 1920; the “Youth Ritual” in 1921, standing for church confirmation; and the “Sacrifice Ritual” in spring 1923 for the two upper classes, standing for the sacrifice of the Mass.

The “sacrifice ceremony” came about after Rudolf Steiner was told in a meeting with the religion teachers on December 9, 1922 that a student in the upper classes had asked if they could receive a Sunday act that would take them further than the youth celebration. He had taken this suggestion particularly thoughtfully and described it as having far-reaching significance; he wanted to consider it further. He did not want to include a mass in the activities associated with free religious education, but “something similar to a mass” could be done. A few months later, in March 1923, the text of the ceremony was handed over and on Palm Sunday, March 25, 1923, the “sacrificial ceremony” could be held for the first time for the teachers and the students of the eleventh grade.²⁷

However, he never returned to the request expressed at the teachers' conference on November 16, 1921 for a special Sunday event just for the teachers.

When the work of the “Christian Community”, founded in the fall of 1922, raised the question of whether free religious education and the “acts” were still justified, Rudolf Steiner spoke unequivocally to the effect that both types of religious education, the free Christian and the “Christian Community”, had their own character, their own goals and full justification for the future. If some parents wished their children to participate in both types of instruction, he also allowed this, provided it did not become a health burden. (At that time, religious education for the Christian Community was not taught in schools, but in their own rooms). The unchanging basic attitude of the greatest possible tolerance in religious matters is also evident from the way he characterized the difference in the objectives of the two types of religious education: “The inner meaning of our youth celebration is that the human being is placed in humanity in a very general way, not in a particular religious community; but the ‘Christengemeinschaft’ places him in a particular religious community.” But - and he emphasized this several times - “there can't really be a discrepancy between the two in terms of content”.²⁸ And when the “Christian Community”, to which the “Youth Celebration” ritual had also been made available for their area of responsibility (confirmation), asked him whether this ritual might not require some changes for their sacramental context he developed in a “spirited” way that it was precisely “instructive” to know that the same ritual was used “as the expression of different life contexts”.²⁹

He expressed similar views regarding the “sacrifice ceremony”. Maria Lehrs-Röschl reports, as quoted above, how, after the first performance of this act, teacher colleagues requested that the ceremony be repeated for the teachers alone. Since the people performing the act were inclined to the opinion that the act should only take place for students with the participation of teachers and parents, she was asked to ask Rudolf Steiner about it: “I asked him in a way that already showed that I thought it was unacceptable to consider the sacrifice ceremony differently than for students. But Rudolf Steiner looked at me with wide-open eyes (I knew this gesture as his expression of surprised, slightly disapproving astonishment) and said: “Why not? This act can be performed anywhere there are people who desire it!”

For the purposes of the “Christian Community”, the missing rituals were gradually created, in addition to the completely redesigned “Human Consecration” Mass and the rituals handed over to it that had been created earlier. The last ritual to be created was that for the appointment of the Chief Executive. It was created shortly before Rudolf Steiner's death.

The abundance of rituals that came into being in this way is all the more astonishing given that Rudolf Steiner himself once said that it is difficult to design a ritual: “You can see from the fact that for a long time everything ritual-like has been limited to taking over the traditional that it is difficult to design a ritual. ... All cultic forms that exist today are actually very old, only slightly transformed in one way or another.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921).

It follows that anyone who undertakes to shape cults, if they are to become a true reflection of processes in the spiritual world, must have a sovereign relationship with the spiritual world. However, they must also have artistic creativity at their disposal. For cult forms as reflections of spiritual processes are by no means to be equated with photographs, but are independent creations based on physical means. A supplementary explanation for this seems to be given in the following statement: “As man rises to the next level of existence, images arise for him, but we no longer apply them in the same way as our thoughts, so that we ask: how do these images correspond to reality? but things show themselves in images consisting of colors and shapes; and through imagination, man himself must unravel the entities that show themselves to him in such symbolic form.” (Berlin, October 26, 1908). This is illustrated in concrete terms by the example of the cult of the dead, and the comment concludes: “It could be even more complicated, but in its simplicity, as it is now, what is to be conquered through it can already be conquered for humanity.” (Dornach, June 27, 1924). The term “conquer” again suggests how difficult it must be to shape ritual.

He once justified simplicity – a striking feature of all his rituals – by saying that a complicated cult would not satisfy people today and that it would therefore have to be made “extremely simple” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921). But it is precisely this simplicity that in turn testifies to a strong artistic ability to create. Now art and cultus are also closely related in their origin, since they both originated in the same spiritual region: “With the evolution of humanity, the rite, a living image of the spiritual world, develops into the spheres of artistic production. For art likewise emerges from the astral world - and the rite becomes beauty.” (Paris, June 6, 1906). An incident related by Emil Bock is of interest in this context: “When I received the Children's Burial Ritual from him in the spring of 1923, he himself beamed with delight at this special kind of creativity, which was at the same time the highest art of receiving. On that day, during a conference, he approached me twice with the words, “Isn't the text beautiful!” ²⁹

Another characteristic arises from the esoteric principle of continuity, one of his most important leitmotifs:

“The future rests on the past / the past endures the future / to the vigorous presence”.³⁰

Wherever possible, he linked the newly explored to the traditional old for the sake of the continuous progress of development. This was also the case with his ritual designs. The necessity of taking into account the stream of the past is formulated as follows: “In order to maintain the continuity of human development, it is still necessary today to take up ritual and symbolism, as it were” (Dornach, December 20, 1918). In this, something is something is preserved that can and will be resurrected once we have found the way to bring the power that emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha into all human activity (Dornach, September 29, 1922). And the words point to the future trend that is only now beginning to reveal itself in the present: “In our time it is only possible to arrive at symbols if one delves lovingly into the secrets of the world; and only out of anthroposophy can a cult or a symbolism arise today.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921). In the same sense, it is said in a lecture on various cults that today, in a cult, what can be perceived through modern spiritual scientific schooling in the laws of world spirituality must be brought in, and that one can “at most stand at the beginning again” with the construction of such a cult (Dornach, September 11, 1923, lecture for the workers on the Goetheanumbau).

The connection between elements of the past and the future in the formation of the “Human Consecration Ritual” for the “Christian Community” was once pointed out as follows: “This cult takes full account of the historical development of humanity, and therefore carries in many its details and also in much of what occurs in its totality, a continuation of the historical; but it also bears everywhere the impact of that which can only now reveal itself to the supersensible consciousness from the spiritual world. (Dornach, March 3, 1923).³² He expressed himself similarly regarding the translation of the mass text for Pastor Schuster, who had had asked him to “bring some of the viable Catholic rituals not in the strange translation in which one often enjoys it today, but to bring it into a form that was actually originally in it”; and then, although it was only a translation, it actually became “something new” from it. In the same context, he also said of the funeral ritual: “Of course one had to tie in with the usual funeral rituals. But by not translating the usual ritual lexicographically, but rather correctly, something different emerged.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921)

The following saying also points to a characteristic of rituals: “Only one cult at a time can be legitimately brought down from the spiritual world.” ³³ The question of how the various cult forms correspond to this one possible cult can be answered to the effect that the cults given for different walks of life – the cult of knowledge of the esoteric school, acts for the free religious education of the Waldorf school, ecclesiastical cult for the “Christian Community” – must be essentially the same in the depths with this “one” cult for the various walks of life. This seems to be confirmed by another statement handed down by Emil Bock, according to which the “sacrifice ceremony” was an attempt to give the “Act of Consecration of Man” of the “Christian Community” something corresponding to it, insofar as it could be performed by lay people, that is, by those not ordained as priests. Maria Lehrs-Röschl comments on this: “What arose again and again in the development of Christianity as a longing and striving for lay priesthood - albeit also repeatedly persecuted and ultimately made to disappear - has here [with the sacrifice celebration] experienced a new germination through Rudolf Steiner.” From all this it can be seen that for Rudolf Steiner there was no contradiction between esoteric cult of knowledge, free religious cult and church cult. On the one hand, because, as everywhere, the freedom of the individual was his highest commandment in religious matters and only that which makes “absolute religious freedom” possible (Zurich, October 9, 1918) is considered true Christianity. On the other hand, because only by extending the cultic into all branches of life can the path to the high ideal of sacralizing the whole of life be followed. The necessary prerequisite for this, however, is that spiritual thoughts and feelings “equally permeate and spiritualize the inner being with just as much consecration as in the best sense of inner Christian development, the sacrament spiritualizes and Christifies the human soul.” If this becomes possible, and according to Rudolf Steiner it will become possible, then we will have advanced another step in our development and “real proof will be provided” that Christianity is greater than its outer form (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911).

• 1. See “Anthroposophical ic Leading Thoughts», GA 26
• 2. Ilkley, August 5, 1923
• 3. “The world of ideas is the source and principle of all being,” beginning of “Credo. The Individual and the Universe», printed in «Words of Truth», CW 40.
• 4. Berlin, 5 March 1922
• 5. Dornach, September 26, 1920
• 6. Autoreferat der Ansprache vom 26. September 1920 zur Eröffnung des ersten Hochschulkurses am Goetheanum, geschrieben für die «Waldorf-Nachrichten», IH. Vol. March 1921.
• 7. In a draft for an article about the burnt-down Goetheanum.
• 8. This was already one of the goals of the Theosophical Society. (Point 2 of the three principles reads: “to lead man to a higher knowledge by research into the kernel of truth of religions, sciences and world-views of all times and peoples.”)
• 9. Right from the start, the statutes of the Theosophical and then also of the Anthroposophical Society state that membership is not tied to a religious confession.
• 9. Cologne, December 27, 1907
• 10. Dornach, November 27, 1916
• 11. Heidenheim, April 29, 1918. See also ”The Spiritual Leadership of the Human Being and Mankind” (1911) GA 15; Dornach, November 27, 1916; Zurich, October 9, 1918; Dornach, December 30, 1922.
• 12. See ‘Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts’ (essay ”The Future of Humanity and the Activity of Michael), GA 26.
• 13. Dornach, December 31, 1922
• 14. See ‘Goethes naturwissenschaftliche Schriften’, edited and commented by Rudolf Steiner, preface to volume II, S.IV (1887), GA 1.
• 16. About the Masters, see the volume ” History and the Content of the First Section of the Esoteric School 1904 to 1914», GA 264.
• 17. On the two types of truth - the truths of knowledge and the truths of revelation - in modern spiritual science, see the lecture Liestal, October 16, 1 916 in “Philosophy and Anthroposophy”, GA 35, as well as the study by Hans Erhard Lauer “Erkenntnis und Offenbarung in der Anthroposophie”, Basel 1958.
• 18. The term “mystery drama” was noted by Rudolf Steiner in his notebook for the lecture Prague, April 5, 1924. Notebook archive number 336.
• 19. Dornach, November 27, 1916.
• 21. Dornach, 3 March 1923.
• 22. Emil Bock in «Wir erlebten Rudolf Steiner. Erinnerungen seiner Schüler», herausgegeben von M.]. Krück von Porturzyn, 1. Auflage Stuttgart 1956.
• 24. Refers to a saying of the will-o'-the-wisps in Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” which was the subject of this lecture.
• 25. Schuster, Hugo (1876-1925)
  Swiss. As a young merchant in St. Gallen in 1903/04, he took an active part in the development of anthroposophical work in Switzerland, e.g. in the founding of branches in St. Gallen, Bern and Basel. He felt drawn to the priesthood by Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of Christ. He was ordained as a priest of the Old Catholic Church in 1918 and took up his first post in Basel. At the beginning of 1919, he received the burial ritual from Rudolf Steiner. Although Rudolf Steiner had often spoken words of remembrance at the funerals of members of the Anthroposophical Society, he had never performed a ritual, because, as Marie Steiner once put it, he wanted to practice the profession of priest no more than he wanted to practice that of a doctor. But when a member of the Society took on the role of a priest, a collaboration arose. On the occasion of such a death, Pastor Schuster performed the funeral ritual given by Rudolf Steiner for the first time on January 14, 1919 in Arlesheim, and Rudolf Steiner spoke the words of remembrance afterwards. From a handwritten telegram transcript of Rudolf Steiner in the archive of the Rudolf Steiner estate administration, it can be seen that when a member died in May 1920, he asked Pastor Schuster himself if he could perform the funeral ceremony. There is also evidence of such a jointly conducted ceremony in October 1920. According to a letter written by Marie Steiner, Rudolf Steiner spoke at the funerals and cremations of members “when the relatives asked him to. In the beginning, there were only a few isolated cases. Since they gradually became more numerous and the cult was given to the priests who had turned to him (the Christian Community), he wished the matter to be handled in this way, since he did not want to practice the profession of a priest any more than he did that of a doctor.” Since Schuster had to give up his job as a result of illness as early as 1921, the funeral ritual passed to the Christian Community. Rudolf Steiner had conferred the ritual of the Mass upon him in 1919. On April 20, 1919, immediately before leaving for Stuttgart, where the next day a meeting of the signatories of the Appeal to the German People and the Cultural World marked the beginning of the people's movement for a threefold social organism, Rudolf Steiner sent Schuster the first parts - the gospel and offertory of the mass. The accompanying letter reads: “Dornach, April 20, 1919. My dear Reverend Schuster! Please find enclosed everything from the Mass that is ready to be handed over. But I also want to take the matter with me on the journey, and it is my opinion that now that my book (“The Key Points of the Social Question...”) is finished, everything will soon be in your hands. Please do not be angry that you are receiving so little for the time being; the matter is progressing. Sincerely, Rudolf Steiner.” The other parts followed a little later. The exact date is not known.
• 26. From the biographical sketch “Wilhelm Ruhtenberg” in “Der Lehrerkreis um Rudolf Steiner in der ersten Waldorfschule”, Stuttgart 1977, p. 210f.
• 27. Maria Lehrs-Röschl in “On religious education. Rudolf Steiner's words for Waldorf teachers, Stuttgart 1985.
• 28. See “Conferences with the teachers of the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart 1919 to 1924”, Volume 1 (Introduction by Erich Gabert), GA 300, 5. 41.
• 29. In response to the question that was asked again later, he then made the desired changes. Emil Bock handed them down to the priests of the “Christian Community.
• 29. Emil Bock in “We experienced Rudolf Steiner. Memories of his students”, edited by M.J.Krück von Porturzyn, 1st edition Stuttgart 1956.
• 30. From “Twelve Moods” in “Truth Sayings”, GA 40.
• 32. This reference to historical development obviously refers to the four parts of the Christian mass sacrifice - gospel, sacrifice, consecration, communion - which “represent the path of the initiate from the old pagan mysteries” (Dornach, January 11, 1919; Munich, November 4, 1906).
• 33. Carl Unger, “On the Question of the Relationship between the Christian Community and the Anthroposophical Society” in “Schriften II”, Stuttgart 1964.

Notebook archive number NB 570

December 24, 1923

Connection to 1913 = guidance to a heap of ruins. Initially, there was

a spiritual heritage – this was

cultivated in a certain way.

The war broke into society =

It had found it unprepared –

1.) There was a revelation of the spirit to humanity/it must be sought -/Theosophy, Anthroposophy 1.) The difficulty of the public or closed 2.) The difficulty of internal consolidation = do not split on the outside - 1.) Anthroposophy itself - 2.) Artistic 3.) Eurythmy - Recit.[ation] etc.

24 Dec. 1923

1) Reduced to a heap of ruins = 1922-23 publishing house - etc.

2) This is only an appearance. The seeds are everywhere.

3) What has come into being does not fit into the forms that were there.

Berlin lecture / newspaper note

Executive council: what should it be? It should be taken in such a way that one can join it independently.

Books like “Theosophy” become fuller and fuller the older they get – books like “Key Points” lose more and more of their content.

2 Puncte = Publicity / Consolidation

Stuttgart = Christmas games / with the teachers pyright Rudoff Steiner

[ 1 ] While anthroposophic knowledge was brought into the Society in the way that results in part from the privately printed matter, Marie von Sievers and I through our united efforts fostered the artistic element especially, which was indeed destined by fate to become a life-giving part of the Anthroposophical Movement.

[ 2 ] On one side there was the element of recitation, looking toward dramatic art, and constituting the objective of the work that must be done if the Anthroposophical Movement was to receive the right content.

[ 3 ] On the other hand, I had the opportunity, during the journeys that had to be made on behalf of anthroposophy, to go more deeply into the evolution of architecture, the plastic arts, and painting.

[ 4 ] In various passages of this life-story I have spoken of the importance of art to a person who enters in experience into the spiritual world.

[ 5 ] But up to the time of my anthroposophic work I had been able to study most of the works of human art only in copies. Of the originals only those in Vienna, Berlin, and a few other places in Germany had been accessible to me.

[ 6 ] When the journeys on behalf of anthroposophy were made, together with Marie von Sievers, I came face to face with the treasures of the museums throughout the whole of Europe. In this way I pursued an advanced course in the study of art from the beginning of the century and therefore during the fifth decade of my life, and together with this I had a perception of the spiritual evolution of humanity. Everywhere by my side was Marie von Sievers, who, while entering with her fine and full appreciation into all that I was privileged to experience of perception in art and culture, also shared and supplemented all this experience in a beautiful way. She understood how these experiences flowed into all that gave movement to the ideas of anthroposophy; for all the impressions of art which became an experience of my soul penetrated into what I had to make effective in lectures.

[ 7 ] In the actual seeing of the masterpieces of art there came before our minds the world out of which another configuration of soul speaks from the ancient times to the new age. We were able to submerge our souls in the spirituality of art which still speaks from Cimabue. But we could also plunge through the perception of art into the spiritual battle which Thomas Aquinas waged against Arabianism.

[ 8 ] Of special importance for me was the observation of the evolution of architecture. In the silent vision of the shaping of styles there grew in my soul that which I was able to stamp upon the forms of the Goetheanum.

[ 9 ] Standing before Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan and before the creations of Raphael and Michelangelo in Rome, and the subsequent conversations with Marie von Sievers, must, I think, be felt with gratitude to have been the dispensation of destiny just then when these came before my soul for the first time at a mature age.

[ 10 ] But I should have to write a volume of considerable size if I should wish to describe even briefly what I experienced in the manner indicated.

[ 11 ] Even when the spiritual perception remains in abeyance, one sees very far into the evolution of humanity through the gaze which loses itself in reflection in the School of Athens or the Disputa.

[ 12 ] And if one advances from the observation of Cimabue to Giotto and to Raphael, one is in the presence of the gradual dimming of an ancient spiritual perception of humanity down to the modern, more naturalistic. That which came to me through spiritual perception as the law of human evolution appeared in clear revelation before my mind in the process of art.

[ 13 ] I had always the deepest satisfaction when I could see how the anthroposophical movement received ever renewed life through this prolonged submergence in the artistic. In order to comprehend the elements of being in the spiritual world and to shape these as ideas, one requires mobility in ideal activity. Filling the mind with the artistic gives this mobility.

[ 14 ] And it was necessary constantly to guard the Society against the entrance of all those inner untruths associated with false sentimentality. A spiritual movement is always exposed to these perils. If one gives life to the informative lectures by means of those mobile ideas which one derives from living in the artistic, then the inner untruths derived from sentimentality which remain fixed in the hearers will be expelled. The artistic which is truly charged with experience and emotion, but which strives toward luminous clarity in shaping and in perception, can afford the most effective counterpoise against false sentimentality.

[ 15 ] And here I feel that it has been a peculiarly fortunate destiny for the Anthroposophical Society that I received in Marie von Sievers a fellow-worker assigned by destiny who understood fully how to nourish from the depths of her nature this artistic, emotionally charged, but unsentimental element.

[ 16 ] A lasting activity was needed against this inwardly untrue sentimental element; for it penetrates again and again into a spiritual movement. It can by no means be simply repulsed or ignored. For persons who at first yield themselves to this element are in many cases none the less seekers in the utmost depths of their souls. But it is at first hard for them to gain a firm relation to the information imparted from the spiritual world. They seek unconsciously in sentimentality a form of deafness. They wish to experience quite special truths, esoteric truths. They develop an impulse to separate themselves on the basis of these truths into sectarian groups.

[ 17 ] The important thing is to make the right the sole directive force of the Society, so that those erring on one side or the other may always see again and again how those work who may call themselves the central representatives of the Society because they are its founders. Positive work for the content of anthroposophy, not opposition against outgrowths which appeared – this was what Marie von Sievers and I accepted as the essential thing. Naturally there were exceptional cases when opposition was also necessary.

[ 18 ] At first the time up to my Paris cycle of lectures was to me something in the form of a closed evolutionary process within the soul. I delivered these lectures in 1906 during the theosophical congress. Individual participants in the congress had expressed the wish to hear these lectures in connection with the exercises of the congress. I had at that time in Paris made the personal acquaintance of Edouard Schuré, together with Marie von Sievers, who had already corresponded with him for a long time, and who had been engaged in translating his works. He was among my listeners. I had also the joy of having frequently in the audience Mereschkowski and Minsky and other Russian poets.

[ 19 ] In this cycle of lectures I gave what I felt to be ripe within me in regard to the leading forms of spiritual knowledge for the human being.

[ 20 ] This “feeling for the ripeness” of forms of knowledge is an essential thing in investigating the spiritual world. In order to have this feeling one must have experienced a perception as it rises at first in the mind. At first one feels it as something non-luminous, as lacking sharpness of contour. One must let it sink again into the depths of the soul to “ripen.” Consciousness has not yet gone far enough to grasp the spiritual content of the perception. The soul in its spiritual depths must remain together with this content, undisturbed by consciousness.

[ 21 ] In external natural science one does not assert knowledge until one has completed all necessary experiments and observations, and until the requisite calculations are free from bias. In spiritual science is needed no less methodical conscientiousness and disciplined knowledge. Only one goes by somewhat different roads. One must test one's consciousness in its relationship to the truth that is coming to be known. One must be able to “wait” in patience, endurance, and conscientiousness until the consciousness has undergone this testing. It must have grown to be strong enough in its capacity for ideas in a certain sphere for this capacity for concepts to take over the perception with which it has to deal.

[ 22 ] In the Paris cycle of lectures I brought forward a perception which had required a long process of “ripening” in my mind. After I had explained how the members of the human being – physical body; etheric body, as mediator of the phenomena of life; and the “bearer of the ego” – are in general related to one another, I imparted the fact that the etheric body of a man is female, and the etheric body of a woman is male. Through this a light was cast within the Anthroposophical Society upon one of the basic questions of existence which just at that time had been much discussed. One need only remember the book of the unfortunate Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter¹ and the contemporary poetry.

But the question was carried into the depths of the being of man. In his physical body man is bound up with the cosmos quite otherwise than in his etheric body. Through his physical body man stands within the forces of the earth; through his etheric body within the forces of the outer cosmos. The male and female elements were carried into connection with the mysteries of the cosmos.

[ 23 ] This knowledge was something belonging to the most profoundly moving inner experiences of my soul; for I felt ever anew how one must approach a spiritual perception by patient waiting and how, when one has experienced the “ripeness of consciousness,” one must lay hold by means of ideas in order to place the perception within the sphere of human knowledge.

• 1. Sex and Character.

I have been asked to lecture this evening on The Necessity for a Renewal of Culture. During the past few days I have been speaking to you on the spiritual science of Anthroposophy. This is a field which may be dealt with generally by any individual, if he thinks that he can communicate to others this or that result of special investigations or impulses. For this is the expression of an individual impulse—although one must of course bear in mind that it is something which, from certain standpoints, may be of interest to all.

But I have quite a different feeling in regard to this evening's subject. In the present time, when one has to speak of the necessity for a renewal of culture, one only has the right to do so if one can perceive that this subject really corresponds to a general demand, that people are filled by the desire for a renewal of culture, and believe in what may be called a renewal of culture. An individual must therefore more or less interpret a generally ruling view. For in regard to such a subject, arbitrary individual opinions would only be an expression of lack of modesty and conceit.

The following question therefore arises: Does this subject correspond to-day to a generally ruling feeling, to a sum of feelings which exists in wide circles? If we look in an unprejudiced way into the hearts and souls of our contemporaries, if we study their soul-moods and their general frame of mind, we may indeed believe that this subject of the necessity for a renewal of culture is in many respects justified.

Do we not see that in the most varied spheres of life many of our contemporaries feel that something must penetrate into our spiritual life and into the other branches of human life, something which in some way corresponds to the longing which manifests itself so clearly?

To-day we come across searching souls in many fields of artistic life. Who has not noticed these searching souls? We find them above all among modern youth. Particularly there we find that youth expects something which it cannot obtain from the things offered by the generally prevailing spirit of the times. Especially in the sphere of ethical-religious life we come across such seeking souls. Innumerable questions, expressed and above all unexpressed, questions which live only in the depths of feeling, are now reposing in human hearts. If we consider social life, then the course of the world's events and all that takes place, as it were, within this domain, takes on the aspect of one great question: Where must we look for some kind of cultural renewal of our social life?

The individual, however, who considers these different questions, may nevertheless not go further than the belief that he can but offer a small contribution towards these problems, arising out of a generally felt need in this domain. But perhaps the explanations resulting from anthroposophical spiritual research contained in the last lectures which I gave to you here, entitle me to set forth a few facts on the subject chosen for to-day, even though the spiritual science of Anthroposophy knows that in regard to many things which people are now seeking, it can at the most offer a few impulses which can bear fruit; yet it is the very aim of anthroposophical research to offer such impulses, such germinating forces.

At Dornach, in Switzerland, we have tried to establish the School for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum. Here we can say that at least the attempt has been made to fructify the single scientific spheres by adding to the results obtained in medicine, natural science, sociology, history, and many other fields by the highly significant methods of recent times, the results which can be obtained through direct investigation of the spiritual world itself.

In the pedagogical-didactical field, the effort has been made to obtain some practical results through the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Attempts have even been made to achieve results in the economic field. But there we must say that present conditions are so difficult, that these newly founded economic undertakings must first pass the test showing whether they are able to—I will not say attain—but at least encourage what so many modern people are seeking to find.

Let me therefore begin with this quest. I cannot speak of course from the standpoint of your nation, where I have the great pleasure of being your guest; I can only speak to you from an international standpoint. Those who have open hearts, minds and souls for the longings of that section of mankind which counts most for the future, those who observe this in an unprejudiced way, cannot help turning their gaze to the young people and their quest!

Everywhere we find that our young people are filled with the longing, arising out of an altogether indefinite feeling, for something quite new. The earnest, significant question must therefore rise up: Why do our young people not have full satisfaction in the things which we as older people could offer to them? And I believe that this very quest of youth is connected with the most intimate and deepest soul-impulses, which give rise in men's hearts in the present time to this general sense of seeking.

I believe that in this respect we must penetrate deeply into human souls, if the call for a renewal of culture, which can now be heard plainly, is to be judged according to its true foundation. We shall have to look into many depths of human soul-life; above all we cannot deal only with the characteristics of modern culture, but we shall have to survey a longer stretch of time.

If we do this in an unprejudiced way, we find that in an international respect the special soul-configuration of modern humanity has been prepared during the past three, four or five centuries, and we also find that these last three, four and five centuries reveal something completely new, compared with the spiritual constitution which still existed in the Occident during the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, derived from a still earlier epoch. Whenever we survey these earlier times of spiritual life in the Occident, we find that man's soul-spiritual conception was not so strictly separated from his physical or sensory conception, as was the case later on and during the present time.

In earlier centuries, when the human being turned his senses towards the physical world which constituted his environment, he always knew that a spiritual element also lived in the objects which he perceived though his senses. He no longer had such a highly spiritual conception of the world as, for instance, the ancient Egyptian, or even the ancient Greek, who saw the external embodiment of soul-spiritual beings in the world of the stars, but he still had some inkling of the fact that a spiritual essence permeated everything in his physical environment.

Again, when the human being of earlier centuries looked back upon his own self, he did not strictly separate his physical-bodily part from his soul, i.e. from thought, feeling and will. I might say that by being conscious of his soul, he was at the same time conscious of the members of his body, of the organs of his body, and he also perceived a soul-spiritual essence in these bodily organs, he felt a soul-spiritual essence in his own organism. In the world outside he experienced this soul-spiritual essence, and within his own self he also experienced a soul-spiritual essence.

He thus felt a certain relationship, a certain intimacy with the world around him. He could say to himself: What lives within me, also lives in a certain respect within the universe, and Divine-spiritual beings, who lead and guide the world, placed me into this universe. He felt connected with the universe and had a feeling of intimacy with it. He experienced, as it were, that he formed part of the great soul-spiritual-physical organism of the universe.

This is a feeling which we do not fully understand to-day, because during the past centuries the times have undergone a complete change. This change appears not only among theoreticians and scientists, but it reveals itself in every human heart, in every human soul. It does not merely reveal itself in the way in which modern people contemplate the world, but also in the way in which spirit is embodied in matter in artistic creation and in the enjoyment of art. It reveals itself in our social life, in the way in which we face our fellowman, in the understanding which we have for him, and in what we demand from him. Finally, it reveals itself in the feelings which we have concerning our own ethical-religious impulses, in the way in which we experience the Divine within our own heart and soul, in our attitude towards the impulse which gave to the earth in the deepest way the key to the spirit underlying earthly existence in our attitude towards the deeper inner meaning of Christianity.

We can therefore say: What people thus search for in widest circles must in some way be related with this change. What is the nature of this change?

Now the last centuries have seen the dawn of an age which is frequently described as the age of intellectualism. But it was not intellectualism, an abstract use of the understanding which in the past made people feel so closely connected and acquainted with the surrounding world—as I briefly explained to you just now. Only in the course of human evolution has modern man thoroughly learned to have full confidence in the intellect and in the understanding, when contemplating the world, and even when experiencing it.

Now, however, there are two conditions of human life which are interrelated: inwardly, intellectualism and confidence in the authority of reason, of the understanding, and outwardly, faith in the phenomena of Nature and a sense for the observation of Nature's phenomena.

Inwardly, modern man developed an inclination to set everything under the rule of an intellectualistic observation based on reason. As a natural consequence, this inner capacity above all, could only be applied to the phenomena of Nature, to everything which can be observed through the senses, to everything which can be analyzed or combined in the form of thoughts. These two things, I might say, the indisputable observation of Nature and the development of the intellect, were the two great, important means of education used during recent centuries: they exercised their strongest influence upon civilised humanity during the 19th century and have also carried their fruits into the 20th century.

One of the characteristics connected with the use of the intellect is that in a certain way our inner experience becomes isolated. The use of the intellect (it clearly reveals itself in its picture-character) in a certain way estranges feeling; it takes on a cold, prosaic life-nuance, and in reality it can only develop in the right way through external Nature, through everything which constitutes the surrounding world.

Through this connection, through this relationship of man with the world, deeply satisfying explanations can be found in regard to Nature, but it does not supply in the same measure as in the past the possibility to discover oneself, as it were, within external Nature. The soul-spiritual element which shone out to the men of olden times from a world filled with colour, sound, warmth and coldness, and from the year's seasons, could be experienced as something which was related to what lived in their inner being.

Through our feeling, we can no longer directly bring into our own inner being the whole external life of Nature, which we learn to know through the intellect—all that we discover through intellectual research in physics, chemistry and biology. We can certainly strive to investigate biologically man's inner organic structure; we can even go as far as seeking to investigate the chemical processes of the human organism. But if we apply the investigation of external Nature to the human organism in order to understand it, we shall never find that this manner of investigation also takes hold of our feeling, that it can be summed up in a religious-ethical feeling towards the universe, and that finally it can be expressed in the feeling: "I am a member of the universe: Soul-spiritual is the universe, and I too am soul-spiritual."

This feeling does not shine out of the things which could be learnt during recent centuries through the magnificent impulses of natural science. Consequently, the very forces which brought the best and most significant fruit and which transformed the whole existence of modern man, at the same time estranged him from his own self.

The fact that he stands within the universe and admiringly looks upon his mathematical conception of the spatial world, of the stars and their movements, the fact that he can unfathom with a certain scientific reverence what plants, animals, etc., contain, is accompanied (in spite of all the problems which are still unsolved) by a certain feeling of satisfaction; people are filled with satisfaction that on the one hand it is possible for them to solve the riddles of Nature by using their intellect and their reason; but there is one thing which cannot be reached along this path, namely a Knowledge of Man's True Being.

The science dealing with the stars, the science which exists in the form of physics and chemistry, the science of biology, and in more recent times even the science of history, do not reveal anything in reply to man's deepest longing concerning his own being. And hence arose more and more the need to seek for something else.

Their quest is none other than the quest of modern man for the human being. Though we may do our utmost to summarize the true nature of this quest in different spheres everywhere, we find that men now really wish to solve the riddle of their own being, the riddle of man.

This is not merely something which may interest theoreticians, but something which deeply penetrates into the constitution of every human soul. To all who are interested in such things it is undoubtedly a source of deepest longing when the investigation of Nature leads to the desire to discover also what lies concealed behind the great expanse of Nature's life: namely, man's being, which greatly transcends all that can be gathered from the external kingdoms of Nature.

But I might say: At this point, the great riddle, the search for the nature of man, really begins. At this point we also understand the fact that we have allowed our feelings and our whole education to be influenced by forces which thus came to the fore during recent centuries. External life reflects this in every way. Far more than we think, external life reflects the forces which came to the fore in the spiritual life of humanity during its more recent course of development, as described just now.

We not only enquire in vain after man's true being from a theoretical standpoint—oh no!—but to-day we pass each other by, and under the influence of our modern education we have not the capacity to understand our fellow-men inwardly, we lack the capacity to look with a kind of clairvoyant sympathy into the human soul and into what lives in it, a capacity which still existed in many civilisations of the past. Not only theoretically have we lost the understanding for the human being, but in every moment of the day we lack a sympathetic comprehension, a sympathetic, feeling contact with our fellow-men. Perhaps this appears most clearly of all in the social question; in its present form it shows us that we have indeed lost this understanding for our fellow-men.

For why does the call for social reforms, for a social renewal, resound so loudly? Because in reality we have grown utterly unsocial. As a rule, we demand most loudly of all the very things which we most sorely lack, and in the loud call for socialism, a truly unprejudiced person can hear the truth, that we no longer understand each other and are unable to build up a social organism, because we have grown so unsocial. Consequently, we cling to the hope that our understanding, which has reached such a high stage of development through intellectualism, may after all lead us back to an organic social structure.

The social question itself shows us above all how estranged we have become from each other as human beings. In quite recent times the religious question confronts us, because we have lost the immediate inner experience of being directly connected with the divine essence of the universe; we no longer feel the voice speaking within our own self as an expression of the Divine-spiritual. The call for a religious renewal also arises through a really felt need.

If we now look more deeply into the seeking life of modern times, by setting out from such aspects, we find that the intellectual culture, the intellectual contemplation which gradually made even human feeling grow pale, is after all something which is connected with a definite age of human life.

We should not fall a prey to any illusion: for in regard to his intellect, the human being really awakes only when he reaches the age of puberty; his intellectual powers awake at that time of his life when he is ready to work in the external world. But intellectualism is never our own personal property, a force which can move our soul during childhood, or soon after when we go to school. In this early life the soul's configuration must differ from its later configuration. The intellectual element in modern life cannot and must not develop during childhood and in early youth, for it would have a chilling, deadening, paralyzing effect upon the forces of youth.

Thus it came about (in order to understand the present time and its longings we must penetrate into more intimate details of life) that we now grow into a culture which deprives us—though this may sound paradoxical—in our mature age of the most beautiful memories of our childhood.

If we look back in memory upon our experiences of childhood, we cannot draw up with sufficient intensity and warmth the undefined feelings and memories which frequently live in unconscious depths and which sometimes can only rise up in nuances of thoughts and memories. We reach the point of being unable to understand ourselves completely. We look back upon the life of our childhood as if it were a riddle. We no longer know how to speak out of our full human being, and into the language which we speak as grown-ups we can no longer bring that shading which re-echoes what the child experiences in its living wisdom, when it turns its innocent eyes to the surrounding world, when it unfolds its will during the early years of its existence.

We do not study history in a true way if it does not show us that among the people of olden times, the speech of men who had reached a mature age always re-echoed the development of childhood. We live through our childhood unconsciously, but in such a way, that this unconscious life of the soul still contains in an intensive form what we brought with us through birth, through the union with the physical body, what we brought with us from the soul-spiritual life of our pre-existence.

Those who can observe a child, those who have an open soul and mind for this kind of observation, will discover the greatest mystery when they see how week by week the child unfolds what the human being brings with him into the earthly-physical world from a soul-spiritual existence. What man's eternal being unconsciously brings into the human members, into the whole human organisation, so that it lives and pulses through the body, brings about an inner permeation with soul-spiritual forces, which however encounter a kind of chilling substance, when later on the intellect which really exists only for earthly concerns comes to the fore.

Those who to-day have enough self-observation for such intimate things, know that a kind of thin fog spreads over that which seeks to enter our mature consciousness from our childhood; they know that it is impossible to bring into words which have grown old the living experiences of childhood, because these exercise a soul-spiritual influence, and live within the child in a far more intensive soul-spiritual form than they can later on live in an intellectualistic state.

A witty writer of the 18th and 19th century once wrote: During his first three years of life, man learns far more than during his three years at the university. I do not mean to hurt the feelings of university students, for I can appreciate them, but I also believe that in regard to our whole, full manhood, we learn more during the first three years of life, when we form our organism out of our still unconscious wisdom, than we can ever learn later on. Yet our modern culture strongly develops the tendency to forget these most important three years of life, at least it has the tendency to prevent their coming to expression in a corresponding living way in that which manifests itself later on as the expression of our mature culture. But this fact exercises a great influence upon our whole civilised life. If we are unable to colour, animate, and spiritualize our mature speech and the thoughts of mature life with the forces which well up from our own childhood—because the intellect gives us pictures, a spiritual world in pictures, but is unable to absorb spiritual life, the life of the spirit itself—if we are unable to do this, we cannot speak to youth in a living and intensive way. We then speak out of a lost youth to a living youth round about us.

This is the feeling which we discover in modern youth, this is the feeling expressed in their search and which may be characterised as follows: "You old people speak a language which we cannot understand; you speak words which find no echo in our hearts and souls."—This is why the call for a renewal of culture is to be heard above all in the longings of our young people, and we must realize that by going back to a comprehension of the spiritual we must again learn to speak to youth in the right way, and even to speak in the right way to children.

My dear friends, those who permeate their inner being with the truths which anthroposophical spiritual research seeks to grasp through the soul's living being and not through abstract thoughts, take hold of something which does not grow old, which even in mature years does not deprive them of the forces of childhood; they feel, in a certain way, the more spiritual forces of childhood and of youth entering their maturer life. They will then find the words and the deeds which appeal to youth, the words and deeds which unite them with the young.

It was this observation of youth's mood of seeking which led to the endeavor to create at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart above all a body of teachers able to speak to children out of a spiritual rejuvenation reached in maturer years, to speak to children once more as if they were real friends. To those people who acquire something of genuine spirituality in their life, every child is a revelation, they know that the child, the small child and the older child, can—if they have an open heart for this—give them more than they can give to the child. Though this may sound paradoxical, it is nevertheless the note which may lead to a kind of renewal of culture in this sphere.

If we let this shed light on the other things which confront us in life, we must say to ourselves if we clearly perceive that man is in search of man and that he must seek him; that is to say, if we can see that the human being who has become one-sided through intellectualism goes in search of the full whole human being, we shall come across this same fact very definitely in many other spheres of life to-day.

If we survey the times which have given rise to the great achievements of modern culture, achievements which cannot be prized highly enough, we find that modern civilisation could only be gained by forfeiting something of man's whole being. Man looked out into the world's spaces. He could build instruments enabling him to discover the nature and the movements of the stars. It is only since a few centuries, however, that results which thus confront us have developed in such a way as to supply a mathematical physical picture of the universe. To-day we no longer feel how in the past men looked out into the universe and perceived in the stars' courses a revelation of the spirit in the cosmos, in the same way in which we now perceive in the physiognomy of a human being the revelation of his soul and spirit. An abstract, dried-up mathematical-mechanical element now appears to us in the cosmos, although in itself it is one which cannot be prized highly enough. We look up to the sky and perceive nothing but an immense world-mechanism. The ideal has more and more gained ground to perceive this world-mechanism everywhere. And what has grown out of it to-day

Though to many contemporaries this may still seem contradictory, I think that to an unprejudiced observation it is everywhere clearly evident that the social sphere of humanity which surrounds us everywhere and which constitutes our modern civilisation, now sends out its answers to the concept of world-mechanism.

For to-day our social and also our ethical and juridical life, and in a certain way—as I will immediately show you—even our religious life, have taken on a mechanistic character.

We can see that in millions and millions of men there lives the view that the historical evolution of mankind does not contain spiritual forces, but only economic forces, and that everything which lives in art, religion, ethics, science, law, etc., is a kind of fog rising out of the only historical reality, out of economic life. Economic forms are realities and their influence upon men—this is what many people say to-day and one's heart should feel the great tragedy of such statements—gives rise to what develops in the form of law, ethics, religion, art, etc. This is their view: they think that all this is an ideology.

This has driven us in a direction which has, to be sure, produced great results in the spiritual life of the Occident, but to-day it has reached the opposite pole of what once existed in ancient better times of the past in the civilisation of the Orient—though even the Oriental culture has now become decadent. It was a one-sided culture, but our modern culture is also one-sided.

Let us bear in mind that once upon a time—in the East above all—there lived a race which described the external physical world as Maya, as the great illusion, for it only looked upon man's inner life as the true reality, man's thoughts, sensations, feelings and impulses of the will were the only reality. Once upon a time there was this other one-sided conception of perceiving the true essence and reality only in man's inner being, in the world of his thoughts, feelings and sensations, and of seeing in the external world nothing but Maya or the great illusion.

To-day we have reached the opposite conception, which is also one-sided. From the standpoint of modern culture we see the physical world everywhere round about us, and we call it the true reality. Millions of people see reality only in the physical course of economic processes and consider man's inner life an ideology, with the inclusion of everything which has proceeded from it in the development of culture. What millions and millions of people now designate an ideology is after all the same thing which the Orientals once called Maya, illusion—it is simply a different word, and used to be sure, in the opposite sense. The Oriental could have applied the word “ideology” to the external world, and “reality” to his inner being. Modern culture has reached the stage that countless people now apply these words in an opposite one-sidedness.

Our social life reveals something of which we can say: It has resulted in great and significant triumphs for science, but it has brought difficulties into human life itself, into the ethical and social life of men. But this mechanisation of life which now faces us does not only live in the ideas of millions of men, it really also exists. Our external life has become mechanised, and with our modern culture we are now living in a time which supplies man's answer in the social, ethical and religious spheres of life.

What first arose as a conception of the world in the great age of Galileo, Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, the conception which was then born, demands to be sure that it should be permeated with humanity in a different way from what has been the case so far. For the mechanisation of our human life is, as it were, the answer of civilisation to the mechanical character of our intellectual, scientific life.

We can see this in every detail. To-day we study natural science. We study the development of animal species from the lowest, simplest, most imperfect forms right up to man. Guided by highly praiseworthy scientific thought, we then place man at the end of this line of organic beings. What does this teach us in regard to him? That he is the highest animal. This is, of course, significant in a certain way, but we thus only learn to know man in his relationship to the other beings, not as he experiences himself as man. We learn to know what man develops in regard to the other beings, but not what constitutes his own self. Man loses himself in as much as he contemplates the external world in accordance with the admirable principles of modern natural science.

And hence the search for the human being, since through the great achievements of modern time, man has in a certain way, lost himself. And if we then look at the communal life in the social organism, we find that their reciprocal actions compel men to live as they do. In regard to this necessity we have gone very far in modern times. Into every sphere of social life there has entered a division of work. As regards the external mechanised life of modern times we must work so as to realize the truth of the words: All for one and one for all! In regard to external life we have had to learn to work one for the other.

But also, here we can see that for those who have not preserved old traditions but who have grown into the most modern form of life, human labour has become completely separated from the human being and that our modern understanding only enables us to grasp the external nature of man. Our conception and feeling in regard to human labour, through which we help our fellow men and work together with them, has therefore become a purely external one. We no longer observe the man and how he develops his work out of his soul-spiritual existence on earth, we do not see how human labour is the outcome of a man with whom we are closely bound up through feeling, who is a being like us. We see him and we do not feel that he is working for us. No, in the social life of to-day we look at the product, we see how much human labour has flowed into it and we judge human work in so far as we find it in the product.

This is so deeply rooted in people's minds, that by enhancing this great error of modern times Karl Marx reached the point of designating everything circulating as human labour in the form of goods produced for human consumption, as a crystallised condensed labour. We now judge labour separated from the human being, in the same way in which we have acquired the power of observing Nature apart from man. Our judgement of human labour is really infected by what we have learned to know concerning man and by the way in which we look upon him through natural science. This only leads us as far as the Nature-side of man, only as far as the fact that man is the highest animal: we do not penetrate as far as man's innermost being.

Even when we observe man in his work, we do not see how this work comes from him, but we wait instead until the product is there and only seek the work in something which has become emancipated from the man. And there stands man among us as a social being who knows that he must put into labour his human nature and frequently his human dignity, and he sees that this human dignity and the way in which labour comes out of his inner self, is not valued human work is only valued when it has streamed into the external product which is then brought on to the market; labour is there something which has been submerged in the wares, something which can, as it were, be bought and sold.

So in this connection, too, we see how man has lost himself. He has forfeited, as it were, a piece of his own self—his work—to the mechanism of modern civilisation.

We see this above all in the juridical part of the social organism. If we observe how the spiritual, mental, life prevails among us in modern times we find that the spirit only exists in abstract thoughts; that we can only have confidence in abstract thoughts and forget that the spirit lives within us in a direct way, that the spirit enters into us whenever we occupy ourselves with it, that our soul is not only filled by thoughts, but that our soul is really penetrated by the spirit whenever we are spiritually active. Mankind has lost this connection with the spirit, while its conception of Nature has become great. This in regard to the spiritual life.

In regard to our juridical, social and political life, the example of human labour has shown us that something which is connected with the human being has been torn away from him. When we observe the human soul in its intercourse as man with man, we do not see feeling flashing up and growing warm when one person looks at another's work. There is no warm feeling for the man at his work. We do not see the work developing in connection with man, but we only see something which can no longer kindle the other man's warm sympathy; we see the labour after it has left the man, and has flowed into the product.

So in this sphere, too, in the sphere of human intercourse and juridical life, we have lost man.

And if we look at the sphere of economics: in the economic life man must procure for himself what he needs for his consumption. The things which he needs for his own consumption are those for which he develops his capacities. Man will work all the better for others, for himself and for the whole human community, the more he develops his capacities. The essential point in economic life is the development of human faculties. When it is a question of people, an employee will find it advantageous to work for a capable employer. This is quite possible, for those whose work is guided by others physically or spiritually, soon recognize that they fare better with a capable leader than with an incapable one.

But does our modern economic striving tend above all to bear in mind the economic life and activity of mankind and to ask everywhere: Where are the more capable people? If we were to look upon this living element in man, upon this purely human element, if people were placed into economic life in accordance with their capacities, so that they might achieve their best for their fellows: that could achieve a conception, a culture, able to discover the human being in man.

But the characteristic of our modern culture is just this, that it cannot discover the human being in man, and to an unprejudiced observation it is evident that we have gradually lost the power of judging people rightly, in accordance with their capacities and gifts.

To be sure that testing entity, the examination, through which men's capacities are supposed to be shown, has acquired a great importance in our modern civilisation. But its chief aim is not to discover how a person can most capably work in life, for the mechanised way of living requires something else. In many respects indeed, there is the call to-day to let the best man fill the best place according to requirement, but this generally remains a pious wish, and we see that economic life above all—as well as other spheres, such as spiritual and juridical life—becomes severed from the human being. We do not consider the human being above all and his living connection with economic life, but we consider instead the best way in which he can become connected with something which is not really related to man. We see that economic life as well is separating itself from man. It is therefore no wonder that the call for a renewal of our present culture should arise in every sphere of life under the aspect of a search for the human being.

Things are not much better in the sphere of art. If we look back into the times of ancient Greece, we think that the Greek tragedians wrote their dramas in the same way in which we write them now. Yet the Greek conception of life in no way resembles the present one. The Greek spoke of Catharsis, the purification which must take place through the drama. What did he understand by catharsis or purification? He meant that a person participating in the action of such a tragedy or of some other piece, experienced something in his soul which made him pass through certain feigned emotions. But this had a purifying effect, and thereby a healing effect upon him, reaching as far as the physical organism; it had above all a purifying and healing effect upon the soul. And the most important thing in Greek drama consisted both in a higher spiritual impulse and, I might say, in a medical impulse; the Greek saw a kind of healing process in what he wished to impart to his fellow-men through his highly perfected art.

We cannot of course, become Greeks again; I am merely telling you this as an elucidation of the fact that we have actually entered into a mechanised way of living which is, as it were, a denial of the human being, and that this explains the deep longing which passes through the modern world as a search for man.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy in order to support this search for the human being, strives for what may be called the threefold division of the social organism. This is subjected to many misunderstandings. It only seeks ways, however, which will lead, in the life of the spirit, to the rediscovery of no mere abstract spirit, a pallid thought world, at most a reflecting upon the spirit; which will lead, in the juridical-political life, to the rediscovery of not merely the work that flows into the product, but the valuing of man's work, that human valuing of work which arises in the communal life when man as man confronts his fellows in pure humanity.

And in the economic sphere, the threefold division of the social organism aims at the forming of Associations in which people unite as consumers and producers, so that they can guide economic life in an associative way, out of the most varied human spheres of interest.

We judge economic requirements purely through the mechanism of the market. The Associations are meant to unite people as living human beings who recognize the requirements in economic life; they are to form an organism that can regulate the conditions of production determined by the common life of men and by a knowledge of these requirements arising from such a joint life.

The threefold division of the social organism thus seeks to connect these three members-spiritual life, juridical life and economic life—in such a way within the social organism that the human element may everywhere be found again in the free life of the spirit, that does not serve economic interests nor proceed from these, that does not serve political interests nor proceed from these, but that stands freely upon its own foundation and seeks to develop human capacities in the best way. This free life of the spirit seeks to show man the human being—it shows the human being to man.

In the free Life of the Spirit the human being can be found by experiencing the spirit, thus unfolding in a harmonious way the human capacities; from such a relatively independent spiritual life, it will then be possible to send into the political-juridical life and into the economic life the men with the best capacities, thus fructifying these spheres. If the economic life or political life dictate what capacities are to be developed, they themselves cannot prosper. But if they leave the life of the spirit completely free, so that it can give to the world out of its own foundations what every individual brings into existence out of divine-spiritual worlds, then the other spheres of life can become fruitful in the widest sense of the word.

The States-life should cultivate what men can develop as the feeling of legal rights, as moral disposition inasmuch as they face each other as equals. The Economic Life should discover man through the necessary Associations in keeping with his needs and capacities in the economic sphere. The threefold division of the social organism does not aim at a mechanical separation of these three spheres, but by establishing a relative independence of these three spheres it seeks to enable man once more to find through these three spheres of life the full humanity which he has lost and which he is seeking to discover again.

In such a sense we may indeed speak of the necessity for a renewal of culture. And this is particularly evident if we look still deeper into man's inner being, into that inner part where, if he seeks to be fully man, and experience fully his dignity and worth as a human being, he must connect himself with the divine-spiritual; where he must experience and feel his own eternal being, that is to say, when we look at men's common religious life.

My dear friends, I only desire of course to say that these are the convictions of anthroposophical spiritual science; I do not wish to press anyone to accept this particular solution of to-day's subject. Anthroposophy seeks above all to recognize once more the place of Christianity in the evolution of the earth. It points to the Mystery of Golgotha, as Anthroposophy can unravel it in the spiritual world. Historical evolution is then traced in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha.

A spiritual study of human history reveals that in primeval times humanity possessed a kind of primeval revelation, a kind of instinctive primeval wisdom, which gradually disappeared and grew fainter, and this would have increased as time went on. If nothing else had occurred, we should now be living within a pallid spiritual life deprived of wisdom, a spiritual life that could have nothing in common with the warmth of our soul-life had not earthly existence been fructified at a certain moment by something which came from outside the earth.

Spiritual science, in the sense of Anthroposophy, can once more draw attention to the man Jesus, who at the beginning of our era, wandered upon the earth in Palestine. We see that modern external Christianity more and more considers this man Jesus merely as a human being, whereas in older times people saw in Jesus a Being from spiritual worlds transcending the earth, Who had united Himself with the man Jesus and Who had become Christ Jesus.

By investigating the spheres outside the earth with the aid of spiritual observation, spiritual science does not only draw attention to the man Jesus, but also to the Christ Who descended from heavenly heights, as a Principle transcending the earth and penetrating through the Mystery of Golgotha into human life on earth. And since the Mystery of Golgotha, the evolution of humanity on earth has become different, for a fructifying process from the heavenly worlds took place.

Modern culture leads men to concentrate their attention more and more upon the man Jesus, thus losing that feeling of genuine religious devotion gained by looking upon Christ Jesus, a feeling which alone can give us satisfaction. By looking only upon the man Jesus, people really lose that part in Jesus which could be of special value to them. For the human being in man has been lost. Even through religion we do not know how to seek in the right way the man in Jesus of Nazareth.

Through a deepening of the spiritual-religious life, anthroposophical spiritual science once more discloses the source of religious devotion, in other words, it leads to the search of the divine in man within the human being himself, so that it can also rediscover in the man Jesus the super-earthly Christ, thus penetrating to the real essence of Christ Jesus. Anthroposophy does not in any way degrade the Mystery of Golgotha by saying that what formerly existed outside the earth afterwards came down to the earth.

And what does one experience in the present age of modern culture by pursuing such a goal?

The tendency of anthroposophical spiritual science to consider what transcends the earthly sphere has led people to retort that Anthroposophy is not Christian, that it cannot be Christianity because it sets a super-earthly, cosmic Being in Christ Jesus in place of the purely human being. They even think that it is an offence to say that Christ came down from cosmic spaces and penetrated into Jesus. Why do they think this? Because people only see the mathematical-mechanical cosmos, only the great machinery, as it were, when they look out into the heavenly spaces, and this attitude affects even religion, even man's religious feeling. Consequently, even religious people, and those who teach religion to-day, think that religion would be mechanised if Christ were to be sought in the cosmic spaces before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet spiritual science does not mechanize religion, nor does it deprive Christianity of its Christian element; instead it fills external life with Christianity by showing: out there in the cosmos is not mere mechanism, not merely phenomena and laws which can be grasped, through mathematics and natural science—there is spirituality.

Whereas modern theologians often believe that Anthroposophy speaks of a Christ coming down from the sun, from the lifeless cosmic space into Jesus, what is true is that Anthroposophy also sees the spiritual in the realms outside the earth, and considers it a blessing for the earth that the heavenly powers sent down their influence through this Being Who gave the earth its meaning by passing through the Mystery of Golgotha, by coming down from heavenly heights and uniting Himself with the evolution of humanity upon the earth.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy thus really seeks to render religious life fruitful again and to fill it with real warmth; it seeks to lead man back to the original source of the divine. And this is sought by listening to what lies in the call for a renewal of our culture.

We have watched the development of a magnificent science and are full of admiration for the achievements of this modern science which have brought about such great results in our civilisation. But in addition to this, we realize that there exists the call for a renewal of religious life, for a renewed religious deepening. On the one hand, we are to have a science which has nothing to do with religion, and at the same time we are to have a religious renewal. This is the dream of many people.

But it will be a vain dream. For the content of religion can never be drawn out of anything but what a definite epoch holds to be knowledge. If we look back into times when religious life was fully active, we find that religions were also filled with the content of knowledge of a definite epoch, though in a special form, with the breath of reverence and piety, with true devotion and (this is especially significant) with a feeling of veneration for the founder of the particular religion.

Our present time, our modern civilisation, will therefore be unable to draw any satisfaction out of a religious content which does not harmonize with the knowledge which is accessible to modern people. That is why anthroposophical spiritual science does not seek a religion in addition to science, but it endeavors instead to raise science itself to a stage where it can once more become religious. It does not seek an irreligious science, and beside it an unscientific religion, but a science which can cultivate a religious life out of its own sources. For the science which Anthroposophy seeks is not based in a one-sided way upon the intellect, but it embraces the whole human being and everything which lives in him. Such a form of science does not have a destructive influence upon religious life, and above all it has no destructive influence upon Christian life, but will shed light upon it, so that one can find in the Mystery of Golgotha which entered the evolution of the earth the eternal, supersensible significance which was bestowed upon humanity through this event. If we look upon the Mystery of Golgotha, religious enthusiasm and inner religious happiness will enter our feelings and in a moral way also our will, and this religious life cannot be destroyed, but can be illumined in the right way by the truths which we can see and comprehend in regard to Christ Jesus, and His entrance into the earthly development of humanity.

Spiritual science therefore tries to meet the search for the human being. As I already explained to you, this lecture is only meant to be a small contribution to the hoped-for and longed-for renewal of our modern culture. It only seeks to explain the way in which it is possible to view the significance, the deep, inner, human significance of the longings which can find expression in a problem such as the renewal of modern culture.

In my lecture I also wished to show you that this call for a renewal of culture is really at the same time a call for knowledge for the development of a new feeling of the true human nature. The problem dealing with the nature of this search which strives after a renewal of modern culture is one which really exists, and we must seek to gain a real feeling of the true being of man, a full experience of the human being. Perhaps it is justified to believe that we may interpret this call for a renewal of culture, a call which is in many ways not at all clear and distinct, by saying to ourselves: The striving human being is now confronted in a really significant way by the renewal of a problem which resounded in ancient Greece and which now re-echoes from there in the call: "O man, know thyself!"

Assuredly the noblest endeavors of hundreds and thousands of years have been spent in the attempt to solve this problem. To-day it is more than ever the greatest problem of destiny. No matter how individual persons may reply to the question, how are we to reach a renewal of culture (I think I indicated this to some extent) the answer will somehow have to lie in the following direction: How can we rediscover by a fully human striving man himself, so that in contact with his fellow-man (who in his turn should devote himself fully to the world and his fellows) man may once more find satisfaction in his ethical, social and intellectual life? This constitutes, I think, the problem dealing with a renewal of our modern culture.

I have briefly indicated what were the directing forces during the two first periods of the anthroposophic movement; and before going on to describe the third period and what took place in it, I should like, as a basis, to enter more closely into certain features of the first and second periods. For as a matter of fact, in spite of all that has been said by way of explanation, it is still possible to raise the question: What grounds were there for the anthroposophic movement finding itself involved in a connection,—a tolerably external connection it is true—with the theosophic movement?

This question in particular, being a very intricate one, can only find its answer if we examine certain distinctive features in the evolution of the anthroposophic movement.

Taking, to begin with, the first period, which lasted down to about 1907, I might characterize as more or less its distinctive feature, that it was engaged in gradually laying the fundament' for a substantive science of the spirit.

Anyone who tries to look back into those days with the aid of the actual documents, will see, that during that time, bit by bit, in lectures, or lecture-cycles,—and also in what those who assisted worked out further for themselves,—the material was gradually brought to light,—the substantive basic material of spiritual science, and the lines on which it must anthroposophically be conceived.—This period ends, (such things are, of course, only approximate; but that is the case with the historic evolution of everything)—it ends approximately, I might say, with the publication of my Occult Science. — The book Occult Science actually appeared in print some year and a half later; but the essential sub-stance of it, the delivery of the essential substance contained in it, belongs altogether to this first period of anthroposophic effort.

Throughout this period, down to the year 1905 or 1906, there was every justification for a quite definite hope: the hope, namely, that the anthroposophic substance might gradually come to form altogether the life-substance of the Theosophical Society. Down to the years 1905, 1906, it was impossible to say that, gradually, in the course of a quite natural evolution, the theosophic society might not develop into an anthroposophic one.—It was possible to hope so, for the reason, that during these years, in all matters of outward activity, one of the most influential personages in the Theosophical Society, Mrs. Annie Besant, exhibited a certain tolerance, and unmistakably aimed at allowing tendencies of various directions to work alongside one another. That was unmistakably the case, down to about 1905 or 1906.

Now, during this period, one certainly—if one indulged in no illusions—could not fail to see, that such a very leading personage in the Theosophical Society, as Mrs. Annie Besant, had very primitive notions of modern scientific method. Her notions were primitive. But, nevertheless, despite all the marks of amateurishness that were thus introduced into her books, yet, all the same, from the fact that in course of time the theosophic society came, as Theosophical Society, to have its centre in London, and that this Theosophical Society had in course of time become nurtured, one might say, with the wisdom of the East, there was, from all this, a whole assortment of wisdom piled. up in the people who belonged to the society,—undigested wisdom for the most part, and which very often, indeed, existed in the form of most curious notions. But,—putting aside the fact that these notions often went so far as to bear no vestige of re-semblance to their origin and true meaning,—nevertheless, through books such as Mrs. Besant's Ancient Wisdom, or more particularly The Perfecting of Man, or even her Esoteric Christianity, there did flow something which,—traditional as the manner of conveying it was,—yet had its source in ancient fountainhead of wisdom,—even though the channels were not always unexceptionable, through which this stream of ancient wisdom had descended until it came into these books and lectures. Such, then, was the state of things at that time.

And, on the other hand, one must always keep in sight the fact that, outside these particular circles, there was no interest what ever to be found in the world of the day for real spiritual research. There remained simply the one fact: that amongst those who had, so to speak, strayed into this particular group of people, a possibility might be awarded for awakening an interest in genuine, modern spiritual science

In this first period especially, however, there were all sorts of things to contend with. I won't weary you with all the numerous societies which simply borrowed the name of theosophy,—societies which at bottom had uncommonly little to do with any serious spiritual strivings. Striving the people were certainly, many of them; but it was a striving that in part was a very egoistic, in part, an un-commonly trifling one. Trifling side-streams of this sort, however, frequently assumed the name of ‘theosophical societies’. I need only remind you of the so-called theosophic groups which were fairly widespread, namely, in Central Europe, in Germany and Austria, and also in Switzerland, and which gave themselves the name of ‘branches’, though all they really had in common with the Theosophical Society was in an extremely watered-down form, and. saturated again with every conceivable kind of often very foolish occultism.

A person who played a considerable part in the societies of this sort, and one who will be well known to you too still by name—or at least to many of you,—was Franz Hartmann. The depth of ‘spirit’, however, and the depth of ‘earnestness’, so-termed, which existed in these trifling societies, will be apparent merely from an illustration I may give you of the cynical character of the leading personage, whose name I have just mentioned. This gentleman was talking once in company with just a few people, but where I too was present, and said ... (these things have a real psychologic interest also, for one sees from them the kind of thing to which the human soul can come!):—‘Oh,’—said he,—‘there was that quarrel once in the Theosophical Society about that man, Judge, in America.’—(I won't go into the quarrel except to say that the dispute turned upon whether certain messages sent out by Judge had emanated from real initiate sources, namely, from higher personages called. ‘Masters’).—‘Well,’—said Franz Hartmann,’—that affair with Judge; I know all about that! He sent out those “Masters' Letters” in America; he came over to India at the time. We were in India, at headquarters; and he wanted to make himself an authority in America, and be able to say that he was commissioned by the Higher Initiates; and so he wanted to have Masters' Letters. Thereupon I said to him:—'(so Franz Hartmann told the story) ‘Oh, Masters' Letters,—I'll write some for you.—To which Judge answered: Well, but that won't do; for then I can't state that they are Letters from the Masters; for letters of that sort come flying down upon one out of the air; they take shape magically, and flutter down on one's head; and I must he able to say so.’—Whereupon Franz Hartmann said to Judge,—the story is of his own telling!—‘That's easy to manage!—Judge was quite a little fellow, and I said to him,’ (so he told us),—‘You stand on the floor, and I'll get up on a chair and let the letter drop down on your head.—And then he could say with a good conscience that the letters he sent out had come flying down on his head out of the air!’

Well, that is only an extreme instance of this kind of thing, which is by no means so very rare in the world. But, as I said, I won't weary you with an account of these trifling-societies; I merely want to point out that, during the first period especially, the fact that the anthroposophic movement ran alongside the theosophic one, made it in a way necessary to defend one's position before modern scientific thought.

I don't know whether those who joined the anthroposophic movement later on, and who studied Anthroposophy then as scientists from a scientific aspect in this, its more developed third period, ... I don't know whether these people have taken due note of the fact, that a struggle with the modern scientific way of thinking, and one of a quite peculiar kind, took place precisely during the first period of the anthroposophic movement. I will give you two or three instances. They are instances only of what went on in all kinds of matters, but they will show you that, at that time more particularly, the theosophic movement was strongly affected by what I described two or three days ago as a special feature of modern education,—namely, deference to so-called scientific authority.

This deference to scientific authority had made its way into the Theosophical Society above all. One could see, for instance, how Mrs. Besant, in particular, attempted in her books to bring in all sorts of references to the science of the day,—things which had no bearing whatever upon spiritual science; such, for instance, as Weissmann's Theory of Heredity;—they were brought into her books as being confirmations.

I can remember, too, how in Munich, when we had got so far as founding a sort of centre for the anthroposophic movement there, ... as you know, centres gradually came to be founded for the movement: the one in Berlin, and in Munich, Stuttgart, Cassel, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, in Hanover, in Leipzig, and in Austria, the Vienna centre, and in a way, too, the one at Prague. In short, various centres came to be formed; and at the time when the centre was being formed in Munich, there were a great number there of these homeless souls, who were already organized in a sort of way; they already belonged to some society or other. Well, putting quite aside now the trifling-societies of the Hartmann stamp, I was going to tell you that when we were founding the branch at . Munich, we had all the time to deal with these various big and little groups which existed there.

There was one group, the Ketterl. The Ketterl consisted of regular men of learning. The business of these people in the Ketterl was, when anything whatever was stated in the field of spiritual science, to supply natural science proofs of it. Their aim, so to speak, was to start with just the natural science views of the day, and thence simply mount up higher to the things, say, that Anthroposophy describes. If Anthroposophy talked of an ether-body, they would say to themselves: Natural science has succeeded in determining some particular form of structure for the atoms or molecules. And now one must set to work and find out how this structure might become partly more complex, but partly also thinner in its combinations; and so gradually proceed from the molecular structure of physical bodies to the molecular structure of the ether. And then one would be able to apply the same kind of calculations to the processes of the ether, as one applies to the pro-cesses of the physical world. And nothing was, strictly speaking, allowed to ‘go through’ in the Ketterl except what bore a natural science visum on its anthroposophic pass.

The treatises written by the members of the Ketterl, — for they wrote treatises as well,—did not really dier much from the scientific treatises of the theoretic physicists of that period; only that with them the formula and definitions, etc., did not stand for processes in the spectrum, or in the electro-magnetic field, but for processes in the etheric field, or the astral field.

There was nothing to be done: the whole connection dissolved in mutual satisfaction, or dissatisfaction; and in the end one lost all contact with these protagonists of the natural science standpoint.

Not so very different, however, from these Ketterl performances were the labours of a man who played a great part in the Theosophical Society and had been an intimate friend, too, of Blavatsky,—a man who was invariably present whenever such things came under discussion. This was Dr. Huebbe-Schleiden; the same who for a long while issued the Sphinx. He, too, was altogether ‘out’ to bring a natural science way of thinking to the proof of what his feelings recognized as theosophy.—I still remember how he fetched me from the station, the first time in Hanover, when I had to give a lecture there.—It was the first anthroposophic lecture that I gave in Hanover, and was an ex-position of Goethe's Story of the Green Serpent and the Lovely Lily. — Then he took me out with him; he lived a little way outside the town, and there was a ride of about half an hour in the tram. He began at once, with immense enthusiasm, to explain to me that anything like positive spiritual knowledge could not possibly maintain itself before the more intelligent spirits of mankind, unless the things were proved in the same way as one is accustomed to have them proved in text-books of physics or other sciences. Then he brought his two forefingers into play; and so it went on for the whole half-hour, he all the while describing movements with the tips of his forefingers, to represent the supposed motions of the atoms: ‘Look; that must go so, and then so; and then one can see: in the one incarnation the atoms are set in motion, and then the wave-current travels on through the spiritual worlds; and now then, one must calculate how the wave-current travels through the spiritual worlds; and then it all becomes changed, and you have the next incarnation.’—Till really one felt oneself back again in the lecture-halls, with the lecturer explaining to one the various wave-currents for red and yellow and blue and green; it was all of a piece with these wave-currents for the transit of the souls through their various incarnation'.

He had a friend,—who afterwards, however, became an exceedingly good, sensible, faithful member of the Anthroposophic Society,—to whom he used always to send his ex-positions, and who possessed, amongst other qualities, that of greatly valuing these expositions. But every now and then the humour of it tickled him, and he once told me that he had again just received half a cwt. of wisdom for-warded to Munich from Dr. Huebbe-Schleiden. They were always very bulky letters that were dispatched from Hanover to Munich!

Well, the peculiar stamp; I was going to say, of this way of thinking, might be seen in the discussions that for a long time were carried on in the Theosophical Society over the so-called Permanent Atom. This Permanent Atom was an appalling thing! But it was taken uncommonly seriously. For the people, you see, who felt the authoritativeness of modern science, could not in the least understand why something, at any rate, that in words at least sounds the same as modern science, shouldn't be introduced into spiritual science. So they said: Take a man who is living in one incarnation and then passes on to the next; his physical body certainly falls to pieces; one single atom only remains, and that goes on through the time between death and new birth; and this one atom then makes its appearance in the new incarnation. That is the Permanent Atom, and goes on through the whole of the incarnations.

Such a thing seems like a joke to you to-day; but you can have no idea with what solemn earnestness these things were carried on during the first period especially, when Anthroposophy was in its beginnings, and how exceedingly difficult it was to meet the argument:—Why, what's the use of all theosophy if it can't be scientifically proved! Not a human being will have anything to say to it unless one can prove it scientifically!—Indeed, during this conversation in the tram, it was laid down as a maxim, that one's expositions must be in such a style that an ordinary sixth form schoolboy can understand theosophy just in the same way as he understands logic. That was what my escort demanded.

Then I arrived at his house; and he took me up into the loft.—And now I will ask those who now, in the latest period of the anthroposophic movement, are endeavouring to combat the Atomic doctrine, to guess what I found at that time in the loft of Dr. Huebbe-Schleiden's house in Hanover?—We went up a narrow stairs and there, above, in the loft, ... But in telling the story one can't of course say often enough that he was a most kind and charming, and really quite sensible, altogether nice old gentleman! ... up there, lying in the loft, were monster models of Atoms! They were made of wire, however,—very complicated. One model in each case represented the atom of some physical substance: Hydrogen or Oxygen; and the next model, which was again more complicated, represented the atom as an etheric substance; and the third model, which was more complicated still, was the atom of the astral substance. And if you take up certain books by one of the leaders of the Theosophical Society,—Leadbeater's books,—you will find in them magnificent diagrams of models such as these. It is a fact which I wish just to mention, for the consideration more particularly of those amongst us who are making war on the Atomic doctrine, that this same Atomic doctrine was never anywhere in such high bloom as amongst those who, so to speak, came into our ranks out of the Theosophical Society. And when the younger members, such as Dr. Kolisko and the others in our Stuttgart laboratories, wage war to-day upon the Atom, one would like just to remind them that, in those days, there were people with whom one really wouldn't have known how possibly to get from one incarnation to the next, if one hadn't had at least one permanent atom.

This is just an illustration of the very strong authority exercised by so-called scientific thought in these particular circles. Scientific thought, of the natural science kind, these people were quite capable of! They simply couldn't think that anything could possibly have any value unless it were conceived on the lines of natural science thought.—And so on this side too, again, there was no real under-standing. It was only as the second period of the anthroposophic movement began to draw on, that there came to be, in the circles at least that had entered our ranks, a gradual decline in this pursuit of the Atom; and the people passed on, little by little, to those things that continued further to be cultivated in the anthroposophic movement.—On the other hand it must be said, that the people who did not trouble very much about this pursuit of the Atom, and to whom modern science was after all a matter of more or less indifference, who had only, as homeless souls, found a stimulus in the theosophic movement,—that these people were decidedly more open-minded. And every time, for instance, that I stayed in Munich, I was able to deliver a lecture of a more intimate character in a circle that gathered round Frau von Schewitsch, a lady who had formerly been a great friend of Blavatsky's, and was then living in Munich. There it was certainly easier; for there one found a real striving of the soul.

I don't wish to uphold the one circle nor to disparage the other; I only wish to instance the various things on one side and another with which the anthroposophic movement had to deal.

Only just consider, though! that, at that time, the first demand we met with, and amongst our own ranks too, was that everything taught in Anthroposophy should be justified by the aid and methods of the natural science thought of those days!—And yet that was mild, com-pared with what is demanded of one by the outside world nowadays! My dear friends, a good number of you have to-day heard a lecture from Dr. Bluemel; and I think you will have been well able to understand his clear expositions, and have carried away a certain impression. Rut suppose there had been someone sitting there who said: ‘Oh, those explanations of his! What do I care about all that! I don't believe in it; I don't accept any of it; I won't examine the proofs of it!’—And another person were to say: ‘Well, but just look and see whether the things are true; test them with your common sense and the faculties of your own soul!’—‘That, I am not prepared to do,’ answers the other. ‘I can't trouble for the moment about that! It may be right or it may be wrong: I won't go into that question; but I call upon Dr. Bluemel to betake him to a psychological laboratory; and there I will test him with my psychological apparatus and see whether he is a mathematician or not.’—That is, of course, rubbish, and very thin rubbish too; but it is exactly the same as the demand made by the outer world of to-day, that an investigator of anthroposophic truths should let himself be tested in a psychologic laboratory in order to determine whether he has a right to state the results of his research and to expound them. It is exactly the same.

To-day one may make the most nonsensical statements, one may talk sheer nonsense, and people don't see it. Even those people who are indignant don't see that it is sheer nonsense; they think it is just deliberate malice, or something of the kind. For they simply can't conceive that the state of society could possibly permit of one's being an official representative of science, and talking in reality utter nonsense. The people can't conceive such a thing. So chaotic, in fact, is the spiritual life of our day.

The things, therefore, which it will be necessary to take into consideration when discussing the life-conditions of the anthroposophic movement will be altogether examples drawn from the phenomena and from the actuating forces of civilized life at the present day. Things of the kind, such as I am here describing, must be understood by every person who wishes to be acquainted with the life-conditions of the anthroposophic movement.

Well, undeterred by all these conflicting things, the work of the first period, as I was saying, was to set forth the principal human truths, the principal cosmic truths. And my Occult Science represents a sort of compendium of all that had been taught in the anthroposophic movement down to that time. As to the way the work was accomplished, it went I might say as well as it went, simply for the reason that there was never an abstract, but always a concrete will behind it,—because one never aimed, so to speak, at more than just what the course of circumstances gave one to aim at.

For example, let me give you a case like this.—We started in those days, as you know, a paper, quite at the beginning of the anthroposophical movement: the Lucifer-Gnosis. It was called Lucifer to begin with, and then, after five or six numbers had appeared, a Vienna periodical called enosis wanted to amalgamate with it. As another little fact, I may mention that I wanted simply to express the external union of the two papers by entitling the sub-sequent paper Lucifer cum Gnosis. Well, that, for in-stance, was a 'thing to which Huebbe-Schleiden simply wouldn't consent. He thought it would imply a sort of unnatural marriage bond between Lucifer and Gnosis. Lucifer cum enosis: one couldn't possibly say such a thing! Well, I didn't care; and so we called it Lucifer-Gnosis, and hyphenated them.—They were sharp enough in those days when it came to keeping an eye on us!

Well, this paper, Lucifer-Gnosis was started. We began, of course, with quite a small number of subscribers; but the list grew with comparatively great rapidity; and we never had really a deficit, for we only printed as many copies as we were about able to sell; and as for distribution, the office-apparatus was as follows:—When one number of the paper had been written and printed, the printed copies were returned to me at my house in big packets, and ‘Frau Doctor’ and I ourselves stuck on the labels; I wrote the addresses myself; and then we each took a clothes-basket and. carried the things to the post. We found it worked very well. My business was to write the things and to give the lectures. ‘Frau Doctor’ did all the organization of the society, but without any secretary; for if she had had a secretary she would. only have had to work for him too. So we did it quite alone, and never aimed at more than could be aimed at,—quite concretely. One went just as many steps forward as the actual circumstances put before one. For instance, the clothes-baskets we carried were not bigger than so that we just didn't quite collapse under them ... only nearly; we simply had to make the journey oftener, as the subscribers' list got bigger.

Well, after we had performed this interesting occupation for a while, Lucifer-Gnosis then passed over to Altmann's publishing firm in Leipzig. And then, Lucifer-Gnosis ceased to appear; not for the reason that it couldn't carry on any longer, for it had at the time many more subscribers than it needed; only I had no more time to write it. In fact, by then, the applications for lectures, and the whole spiritual administration altogether of the society, took up a great deal of time,—the whole thing, you know, slowly and gradually grew and developed;—and the consequence was that Lucifer-Gnosis failed to make its appearance. First, there were great gaps,—the January number appeared in December; and then from a year it came to a year and a half; and the subscribers made an awful fuss. Altmann, the publisher, got nothing but letters of com-plaint. So that I saw no way out except to tell him: ‘We simply must shut up altogether, and tell the sub-scribers that, however long they wait, they won't get any more!’

Well, that of course, too, was inherent in the course of the movement; one never aimed at more than the concrete advance brought with it. And that is one of the life-conditions of a spiritual society. To post up far-reaching ideals in so many words is the very worst thing for a spiritual society. Programme-making is the very worst thing for a spiritual society.

In this first period, then, the work was simply so carried on that, to begin with, by 1907—8—9, the groundwork was laid for a spiritual society suited to this modern age.

Then came the second period, in which the relations with natural science were in the main settled.—The theologians had not yet come on the field in any way. They were everywhere so tight-seated in their saddles that they didn't concern themselves about the thing at all.

The discussions with natural science being over, one could now turn to the other task before one. This was the discussion of relations with the Gospels with Genesis and the Christian tradition generally: with Christianity, as such.

The line was already sketched out in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, which lies at the very start, for it had come out in 1902. But the elaboration, so to speak, of the anthroposophical understanding of Christianity, the building up of such an understanding was, in the main, the business of this second epoch, on to about the year 1914. It was the time when the lecture-cycles were held in Ham-burg, Cassel, Berlin, Basle, Berne, Munich, Stuttgart, on various portions of the Christian tradition.—For instance, at that time, too, there was worked out, amongst other things, what only exists so far on paper as a general sketch, in The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind.

It was the time, therefore, when in the main the Christian side of Anthroposophy was worked out with reference to the Christian tradition historically handed down.

And then, in this period, came what I might call the first extension of Anthroposophy towards the side of Art, with the performance of the Mystery-Dramas in Munich. All this, again, came strictly under the sign of not attempting more than arose out of actual circumstances.—And in this period there came then the incidents which led to what, for the Anthroposophists, was really a matter of indifference, namely, the exclusion from the Theosophical Society. For, as I said yesterday evening, to Anthroposophy it could be a matter of indifference whether she were included. or excluded; for she went her own road from the very first;—those who chose to go that same road could go with her. And Anthroposophy from the first had never troubled herself in any way internally, as regards her spiritual investigations, about what had been produced by the Theosophical Society. Only, even on the external road, it became ever more and more difficult to keep company.

At first there was undoubtedly a hope, from the circumstances, some of which I have indicated,—a hope namely, that the tide of theosophic movement as united in the Theosophical Society, might really become entirely anthroposophic. And amongst the other circumstances which seemed to justify such a hope, there was also this:—that, as a fact, the peculiar manner in which research was pursued in the Theosophical Society, led to severe disillusionments on the part, especially, of those persons whose judgmatic powers were at all of a higher order.

And here I am obliged to confess as my own experience, the first and second time when I went to London, that the behaviour of the leading personages was that of people who were extremely sceptical in their dealings with each other, who felt themselves on altogether insecure ground, but all the same wouldn't abandon this ground, because they did not know where else to look for security.—There were many disillusioned people, very plentifully filled with doubts, especially amongst the leaders of the Theosophical Society. And undoubtedly a momentous factor in the developments which took place in the Theosophical Society was the remarkable change which Mrs. Annie Besant underwent between the years 1900 and, say, 1907.

She had at first a certain tolerance. She never, I think, understood anything at all of this Anthroposophy which had come on the scenes.—I don't think she understood it at all. Rut she didn't interfere with it. She even, in the beginning, defended it against the hard-and-fast dogmatists,—that is to say, she defended its rights of existence. One can't say anything else: for that is the fact.

But now I have something to say, which I beg may be very carefully borne in mind in the Anthroposophical Society too. With any such spiritual society,—and such as the theosophical one was, too, at that time,—there is a certain sort of purely personal ambition, certain sympathies and antipathies of a purely personal tinge, which are absolutely incompatible with it. And yet there are such numbers of cases precisely of this kind, where someone really has his will set on some particular thing! He wills it from some ‘subter-ground’ of his being,—wills, for instance, to make an idol of a particular person. He wills it on some ground that lies in the under-regions of his being. What is impelling him, the emotional impulse,—it may be perhaps a brain-emotion,—is something that he won't admit to himself. But he begins now to weave an artificial astral aura round this person whom he is bent on idolizing: such a person is very ‘advanced’.¹ And if one wants to say something very special in addition: ‘Oh, he, or she, knows three, not to say four, of their former earth-lives! in fact, they have talked to me about my own former earth-life! Ah, that person knows a very great deal!’ And then comes a most spiritual interpretation of what—to use Nietzsche's words—is ‘humanly all too human’. Were one to give it a humanly-all-too-human designation, one would simply say, ... well, perhaps not downright, ‘I am quite silly about that person!’ but, without going so far, one might, at any rate, say, ‘I find him, or her, attractive. There's no denying it: I certainly find him, or her, very attractive!’ And then all would be well,—even in an occult society.—Of course Max Seiling, for instance, was in a way extremely entertaining, especially when he skipped about so excitingly on the piano; it was pleasant to go to tea with him, and so forth. Well and good; and if people had confessed this to themselves it would have been wiser; if only they had confessed to themselves: ‘I like that sort of thing.’—Wiser than extolling him to the skies, as they did in the Munich group.

All such things, you see, are in direct contradiction to the life-conditions of any society of this kind. Yet precisely a model example of how to fall into this sort of thing was Mrs. Annie Besant. For example, there turned up one day (I prefer to tell these things more through actual examples), there turned up one day a name.—I had never really troubled much about the literature of the ‘Theo-sophical Society’, in fact, I read next to nothing of this literature; and so my first acquaintance with the name,

¹ English in the original.

Bhagavan Dâs, was when I one day received a thick, type-written manuscript. The manuscript was arranged thus: in two columns, the left column type-written, the right one left blank. Enclosed with it was a letter from Bhagavan Dâs (it was about the year 1905, I think), in which he wrote that he would like to enter into correspondence with various people about the contents of this manuscript which he proposed to reveal to the world.—Well, really, at that time the anthroposophic movement had already grown so extensive that I didn't find time at once to read this manuscript. He said one was to write any comments one had to make on the right-hand side, and then send it track to him.—I used to go about a bit in those days, and I found that there were other people as well to whom the manuscript had been sent. And then it dawned ever more and more clearly upon me, that this Bhagavan Dâs was, in fact ... in fact, that he was ... an altogether occult personage, one who drew from the very depths of all that was spiritual! This was pretty much the opinion circulated about Bhagavan Dâs by the people round Mrs. Besant.—Well, since the thing came from India, and he was closely in touch with Indian headquarters, and enjoyed such fame,—at the Amsterdam Congress, for instance, one heard everywhere: ‘Bhagavan Dâs’, ‘Bhagavan Dâs’; it was really as though it were a fountain gushing a perpetual flow of wisdom! And so I decided to look at the thing. A most appalling amateurish hotch-potch! Fichte-Philosophy, Hegel-Philosophy, Schopenbauer-Philosophy, everything conceivable jumbled up together without rhyme or reason! And through the whole there ran, like the endless burden of a song, Self and Not-Self. And then, again, there would come a disquisition on something from Fichte, and then again, Self and Not-Self. It was, in short, something appalling! I never troubled about the thing again;—I didn't write anything on the blank side.—Things, however, like this showed, you see, how things were gradually drifting into personal currents. For it was simply on purely personal grounds that this particular Bhagavan Das was so lauded to the skies. You can read his books still to-day, and you will find they bear out the truth of what I have just said.—For, of course, you know, he manufactured books.—Things like this showed how the personal element became introduced into what were ostensibly objective impulses. And once that had come in,—and it began to come in strongly about 1905,—then the slide inevitably went on downhill. All the rest was, in the main, simply a consequence.

By this I don't mean to say that in every kind of society, if one happens to write nonsense, the whole society is bound to go to grief. But spiritual societies are ruled by different laws, by laws of internal necessity; and there things of this kind must not be practised, especially not by the persons who are leaders. Or else, you see, the downhill slide inevitably takes place. And it did take place.

And then came the ridiculous business at Olcott's death,—the ridiculous business that went on then, and was even then the beginning of the end of the ‘Theosophical Society’,—what they called the ‘appointment by the Masters’. But that at least could in so far be smoothed over that one could say: Well, yes! there are one or two people, certainly, who undoubtedly act on peculiar principles of their own, and so bring ridiculous things into the society.—Then, however, came the affair with Leadbeater, which I don't care to discuss now. And then it came to picking out that boy who was to be educated, you know, as the Christ, or to become the Christ, and all the rest of it. And when that couldn't be accepted by people who refused to take part in such nonsense, then these people were excluded.

Well, the anthroposophic movement kept on its own straight course throughout all these things, without practically troubling itself very much about these things as a movement. For say, you know, that in 1911, on the 24th of March, one was engaged in studying the Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind; and on the 25th of March there came the ridiculous reports from Adyar or somewhere, from the ‘Theosophical Society’, one didn't on that account need, on the 25th of March, to alter the continuation of what one had done on the 24th. The internal course of things remained, therefore, in reality unaffected;—that is a fact to keep firm hold of. And one really didn't need, even at that time, to be greatly thrilled by what proceeded from this or that quarter amongst the leading personages in the ‘Theosophical Society’; any more than I was at all specially overcome with astonishment when it was reported lately that Leadbeater,—of whom you have heard a good many other things—has now, in his old days, become a bishop of the Old Catholics, and that one of his associates, who in those early days was also at the Munich Congress, has become actually an Old Catholic Archbishop. There is—you'll agree—no cause to be astonished at such things. For the line, by now, was not a straight one; it was all going crooked and queer;—so why shouldn't this happen, too?

One didn't even need to make any special change in one's personal relations with the people,—I mean, in actual intercourse with them. I gave a lecture afterwards (two years ago it was, I think), in Amsterdam; and at the end of the lecture one of the same gentlemen came up to me, quite in the old friendly way, who had delivered a lecture in Munich at the Congress of 1907. He looked exactly the same as he did then; only in the meantime he had become an Archbishop of the Old Catholics. He wasn't wearing archbishop's robes; but he was one.

Such were the things, in short, that went on in a certain field of modern culture; in which, on the other hand, these homeless souls, from internal necessity, found a very real attraction. One must not forget that it was in this stream of movement, nevertheless,—although one can characterize it in no other way,—that those souls were to be found who were the most earnestly striving after a link between the human soul and the spiritual world. And one simply is not presenting an honest picture of the course taken by the life of modern culture, unless one for once puts these con-trasts really plainly.

And so, before going on tomorrow to describe our latest period, and with it the life-conditions inherent in the nature of the Anthroposophical Society, I was obliged to-day, my dear friends, to add these few remarks for your attention.