The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have raised the question: How can we find in earlier earthly lives the explanation of a later incarnation, in the case not only of historical personages but also in that of many a personality unnoticed by history whose influence nevertheless arouses our interest? And to-day, as a foundation for further studies, I shall indicate connections in the incarnations of certain individuals. What I shall put before you is the outcome of a particular kind of spiritual investigation, and with this foundation—which will be given in narrative form to-day—we shall begin to understand how the successive earthly lives of individuals can be discovered.

We will take characteristic personalities whose names I gave as examples in the last lecture. Such personalities make us alive to the fact that spiritual impulses of very different kinds are working in our present civilisation. For well nigh two thousand years Christianity has been spreading in the West and in many colonial territories, influencing civilisation to a greater extent than is imagined. It is true, of course, that really close study may reveal the working of the Christ Impulse in many things where there is at first no evidence of it. But for all that, it cannot be denied that there are elements in our civilisation which seem to have no connection whatever with Christianity. Certain views and customs of life which seem to be utterly at variance with Christianity take root in our civilisation.

The attention of one who calls super-sensible research to his aid in order to discover the deeper reasons for the course taken by the spiritual life of mankind, is drawn to a phenomenon insufficiently studied in connection with the growth of Western civilisation. His attention is drawn to the work of an institution which flourished in the East in the days of Charlemagne in the West. I am referring to that Court in the East whose ruler, surrounded by oriental splendour and magnificence, was Haroun al Raschid, the contemporary of Charlemagne whose achievements in the West fade into insignificance as compared with the brilliance of what was going forth, at the very same time, from the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

All branches of spiritual life had been brought together at this Court in Western Asia. It must be remembered that through the expeditions of Alexander, Greek culture had been carried over to Asia in a form of which only a faint inkling remains to-day. The finest fruits of Greek culture had found their way to Asia, brought thither by the genius of Alexander the Great. And as a result, many centres of learning in the East had adopted conceptions of the world which faithfully preserved the old, while rejecting many elements that in the West were threatening to submerge the old.

Through the expeditions of Alexander the Great, a certain rational and healthy form of mysticism had been carried over to Asia, with the result that men who were more adapted for the kind of philosophical thinking thus introduced, regarded the world as pervaded by the Cosmic Intelligence. Over in Asia in those times a man did not say: “I think this or that out for myself, I have my own, personal intelligence”—but he said: “Everything that is thought is thought by Gods, primarily by the supreme Godhead—the Godhead as conceived by Aristotelianism.” The intelligence in a human being was a drop of the Universal Intelligence manifesting in the individual, so that in head and heart man felt himself to be an integral part of the Universal Intelligence.

Such was the mood-of-soul in those times and it prevailed, still, at the Court of Haroun al Raschid in the 8th and 9th centuries after the founding of Christianity. Nor must it be forgotten that many learned sages had taken refuge in Asia when the Schools of Greek philosophy were exterminated in Europe. Astronomy with a strongly mystical trend, architecture and other forms of art revealing truly creative power, poetry, sciences, directives for practical life—all these things flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. He was a splendour-loving but at the same time a highly gifted organiser and he gathered at his Court the most learned men of his day, men who although they were no longer working as Initiates, still preserved and cultivated in a living way much of the ancient wisdom of the Mysteries.

We will consider more closely one such personality. He was a very wise Counsellor of Haroun al Raschid. His name is of no consequence and has not come down to posterity, but he was a man of great wisdom and in order to understand him we must pay attention to something that may surprise even those who are to some extent conversant with Spiritual Science.

There is a question which may occur to all of you. You may say: Anthroposophy tells us that there were once Initiates, living here or there, possessing far-reaching knowledge and profound wisdom. But since men live again in new earthly lives, why is it that to-day, for example, we do not recognise reincarnated sages of old? This would be an entirely reasonable question.

But one who is aware of the conditions by which earthly life is determined, knows that an individuality whose karma leads him from pre-earthly existence to birth in a particular epoch, must accept the educational facilities which that epoch affords. And so it may well be that although some individual was an Initiate in bygone times, the knowledge he possessed as an Initiate remains in the subconscious realm of the soul; his day-consciousness gives indications of powers of some significance but does not directly reveal what was once in his soul in an earlier incarnation as an Initiate.

This is true of that wise Counsellor of Haroun al Raschid. In very ancient Mysteries he had been an Initiate. He had reincarnated and he lived as a reincarnated Initiate at the Court of Haroun al Raschid; the fruits of his earlier Initiation revealed themselves in a genius for organisation and he was able to administer in a truly masterly way the work of the other learned men at that Court. But he did not make the direct impression of an Initiate. Through his own being and qualities, not merely through the fact of earlier Initiation, he preserved the ancient Initiation-Science—but as I said, he did not actually give the impression of having attained Initiation.

Haroun al Raschid held this wise man in high esteem, entrusting him with the organisation of all the sciences and arts flourishing at the Court. Haroun al Raschid was happy to have this man at his side, feeling tied to him by a deep and sincere friendship.

We will now turn our attention to these two individuals, Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor—remembering that in the 8th and 9th centuries at the Court of Charlemagne in Europe, men of the highest social rank (including Charlemagne himself) were only just beginning to make their first attempts at writing; at the same Court, Eginhart was endeavouring to formulate the early rudiments of grammar. In days when everything in Europe was extremely primitive, over in Asia much brilliant spiritual culture was personified in Haroun al Raschid whom Charlemagne held in great veneration. But this was a kind of culture which knew nothing of Christ nor wished to have anything to do with Christianity; it preserved and cultivated the best elements of Arabism and also kept alive ancient forms of Aristotelian thought—those forms which had not made their way to Europe, for it was chiefly Aristotelian logic and dialectic which had spread so widely in the West and were the principles upon which the work of the Church Fathers and later on that of the Schoolmen was based.

As a result of the achievements of Alexander the Great, it was the more mystical and scientific knowledge imparted by Aristotle that had been cultivated in Asia where it had all come under the influence of the tremendously powerful intelligence of Arabism—which was, however, held to be a revealed, an inspired intelligence.

The existence of Christianity was known to the learned men at the Court of Haroun al Raschid but they regarded it as primitive and elementary in comparison with their own intellectual achievements.

We will now follow the subsequent destinies of these two personalities; Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor. Having worked in the way I have described, they bore with them through the gate of death the impulse to ensure that the kind of thinking, the world-conception cultivated at this Court, should spread in the world.

Let us consider soberly and in all earnestness, what then ensued. Two individualities start out from Asia: the wise Counsellor and his overlord, Haroun al Raschid. For a time after death they remained together. It was to Alexandrianism, to Aristotelianism, that they owed the knowledge they had acquired. But they also absorbed all that in later times had been done to re-cast, to re-model these teachings. Unless it is possible to grasp what is happening in the spiritual world while the events of the physical world take their course on the earth below, we can understand only a tiny fraction of the world.

History gives a picture of what transpired after the epoch of Charlemagne and Haroun al Raschid. But while all that history relates about Asia and Europe was proceeding in the 8th and 9th centuries and on into the late Middle Ages, other most significant happenings were taking place in the spiritual world above. It must not be forgotten that while the physical life below and the spiritual life above flow on, influences from souls passing through their existence between death and rebirth stream down perpetually upon earthly life. Therefore we do right to attach importance to what the discarnate souls yonder in the spiritual world are experiencing and how they are acting in any particular epoch. Human life, above all in its course through history, can never be really comprehensible unless we turn our attention to what is happening behind the scenes of external history, in the spiritual world.

Now it must be remembered that the impressions which men carry with them through the gate of death often differ in a very marked degree from the impressions people have of them during earthly life. And those who cannot throw off preconceptions when they are observing the spiritual life may find it difficult to recognise some particular individuality who in his existence after death is revealed to the eye of the seer. Nevertheless there are means whereby one can learn to perceive phases of spiritual life other than the one immediately following earthly existence. I have spoken of this in the Lecture-Course that is being given here¹ and I shall have still more to say about the later phases of the life stretching from death to a new birth. We shall then understand more clearly the nature of the paths which enable us to make contact with the so-called Dead.

It is by these same paths that we are able to follow the further destinies of individuals such as Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor. In order to understand later developments in European civilisation it is of the greatest importance to take account of these two individuals, above all of the bond between them in their thought and principles of action. Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor also bore with them through the gate of death a deep and strong affinity with the individualities of Alexander and Aristotle—who had, of course, preceded them in earthly existence by many centuries—and an intense longing to come into direct contact with them again. Moreover a meeting actually took place, with consequences of far-reaching significance.

For a while, Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor journeyed onwards together in the super-sensible world, looking down from thence upon happenings in the civilised world further to the West, in Greece, in certain regions North of the Black Sea, and so forth. They looked down upon it all and among the events upon which their gaze fell was one of which much has been said in anthroposophical lectures, namely the 8th General Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in the year 869 A.D.

The effect of this 8th Ecumenical Council upon the development of Western civilisation was incisive and profound, for Trichotomy, the definition of man as body, soul and Spirit, was then declared heretical. It was decreed that true Christians must speak of man as a twofold being, consisting of body and soul only, the soul possessing certain spiritual qualities and forces. The reason why so little inclination to spirituality is to be discerned in Christian civilisation is that acknowledgment of the Spirit was declared heretical by the 8th Ecumenical Council in the year 869.

It was a momentous event, the effects of which have been far too little heeded. The Spirit was done away with: man was to be regarded as consisting only of body and soul. But the shattering experience for one who can observe the spiritual life and above all for one who truly participates in it is that precisely when here on earth in the year 869 A.D. the Spirit was done away with, there took place in the spiritual world above the meeting between the souls of Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor and the souls of Alexander the Great and Aristotle.

In thinking about what follows, you must accustom yourselves to the fact that super-sensible happenings will now be spoken of in Anthroposophy as naturally as we speak of happenings in the physical world. The lives of Alexander the Great and of Aristotle in those particular incarnations marked the culmination of a certain epoch. The impulse which had been given by ancient cultures and had come to expression in Greece was formulated by Aristotle into concepts which in the form of ideas dominated the West and human civilisation in general for long ages of time.

Alexander the Great, the pupil and friend of Aristotle, had with stupendous forcefulness spread the impulses given by Aristotle over wide areas of the then known world. This impulse was still working in Asia in the days of Haroun al Raschid. It had long possessed a centre of brilliant and illustrious learning in Alexandria but at the same time, working through many hidden channels, it had a profound effect upon the whole of oriental culture.

All this had reached a certain culmination. The impulses of ancient spirituality in their manifold forms had converged in Alexandrianism and Aristotelianism. Christianity was born. The Mystery of Golgotha took place—in an age when the individualities of Alexander and Aristotle were not incarnated on the earth but were in the spiritual world, in intimate communion with what we call the dominion of Michael whose earthly rule had also come to its close, for Oriphiel had then succeeded Michael as the ruling Time-Spirit. Centuries had passed since the Mystery of Golgotha. What Alexander and Aristotle had established on earth, the aims to which they had dedicated all their powers, the one in the field of thought, the other giving effect to a great genius for rulership—all this had been at work on the earth below. And from the spiritual world these two souls beheld it flowing on through the centuries, during one of which the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place. They turned their gaze upon all that was being done to spread a knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. They saw their work spreading abroad on the earth beneath, spreading too through the activities of individuals like Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor.

But in the souls of Alexander and Aristotle themselves there was an urge for something completely new, for a new beginning—not a mere continuation of what was already on the earth, but veritably a new beginning. In a certain respect, of course, there would be continuation, for it was not a question of sweeping away the old. But a new and mighty impulse whereby a particular form of Christianity would be instilled into earthly civilisation—it was to the inauguration of this impulse that Alexander and Aristotle dedicated themselves.

When their karma led them down again to incarnation on the earth (—it was before the meeting had taken place with Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor—) they lived, unknown and unheeded, in a corner of Europe not without importance for Anthroposophy, dying at an early age, but gazing for a brief moment as it were through a window into the civilisation of the West, receiving impressions and impulses but giving none of any significance themselves. That was to come later.

They had returned again into the spiritual world and were in the spiritual world when in the year 869 the 8th Ecumenical Council was held at Constantinople. It was then that the meeting took place in the spiritual world between Aristotle and Alexander on the one side and Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor on the other. It was an exchange of thought and ideas in the super-sensible world, of immense, far-reaching significance. We must realise that exchanges or conferences of this nature in the super-sensible world are of infinitely greater moment than mere discussions in words. When people on the earth sit together in discussion, when words shoot hither and thither without having much effect one way or the other, this is not even a shadowy image of what transpires when great decisions affecting the spiritual life as well, are taken in super-sensible worlds.

Alexander and Aristotle affirmed at that time that what had been established in earlier days must now be guided undeviatingly into the dominion of Michael. For it was known that Michael would again assume his Regency in the 19th century.

At this point we must understand one another. As the evolution of mankind flows onwards, one of the Archangels becomes Regent and exercises earthly rule for a period of three to three-and-a-half centuries. At the time when Aristotelianism was carried by Alexander the Great to Asia and Africa, at the time when the spread of this culture was pervaded by a cosmopolitan, international spirit, Michael was the Ruling Archangel; the spiritual life was under his dominion. The Regency of Michael was followed by that of Oriphiel. Then, until the 14th century A.D., there follow the Rulerships of Anael, Zachariel, Raphael, Samael—each lasting for three to four centuries. Gabriel is Regent from the 15th until the last third of the 19th century, when Michael again assumes dominion. Seven Archangels follow one another. Thus the earthly Rulerships of six other Archangels follow that of Michael, which was in force at the time of Alexander, and Michael assumes dominion again at the end of the 19th century. We ourselves, do we but rightly understand the spiritual life, live under the direct influence of the Michael Rulership.

And so in the century when the meeting with Haroun al Raschid took place, Alexander and Aristotle turned their gaze to the earlier Rulership of Michael under which their work had been carried forward, they turned their gaze to the Mystery of Golgotha which as members of the Michael-community they had experienced from the sphere of the Sun, not from the earth—for at that time Michael's rule on earth was over. Michael and his own, among them Alexander and Aristotle, did not experience the Mystery of Golgotha from the vantage-point of the earth; they did not witness the arrival of Christ on the earth, they witnessed His departure from the Sun. But all that they experienced formed itself into the impulse which remained alive in them—the impulse to ensure that the new Michael Rulership, to which with every fibre of their souls Alexander and Aristotle had pledged their troth, would bring a Christianity not only firmly established but more inward, more profound. The new dominion of Michael was to begin in the year 1879 and last for three to four centuries. This is our own epoch and it behoves Anthroposophists to understand what it means to be living under the Michael Rulership.

Neither Haroun al Raschid nor his Counsellor were willing to accept this—the Counsellor with less emphasis, but fundamentally it was so in his case too. They desired, first and foremost, that the world should be dominated by the impulse that had taken such firm root in Mohammedanism. The participants in this spiritual struggle in the 9th century A.D. confronted each other in resolute, intense opposition—Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor on the one side and, on the other, the individualities who had lived as Aristotle and Alexander.

The aftermaths of this spiritual struggle worked on in the civilisation of Europe, are indeed working to this day. For what happens in the spiritual world above works down upon and into the affairs of the earth. And the very opposition with which Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor confronted Aristotle and Alexander at that time added strength to the impulse, so that from this meeting two streams went forth—one taking its course in Arabism and one whereby, through the impulses of the Michael Rulership, Aristotelianism was to be led over into Christianity.

After this encounter in the super-sensible world, Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor continued along a path leading towards the West, watching and observing what was happening below on the earth. From this super-sensible existence, the one (he who had lived as Haroun al Raschid) concerned himself deeply with civilisation in Northern Africa, in Southern. Europe, in Spain, in France. During approximately the same period, the other (he who had been the wise Counsellor) concerned himself with the happenings of the spiritual life more towards the East, in the neighbourhood of the Black Sea, and thence through Europe as far as Holland and even England. And at roughly the same time, both were born again in European civilisation.

Now there need not necessarily be external similarity between such reincarnations. It is as a rule quite erroneous to believe that a man who has in him a particular kind of spirituality will be born again with that same spirituality. We must look more deeply into the roots of the human soul if we are to speak truly about repeated earthly lives. So, for example, we may take the famous Pope Gregory VII, the former Abbot Hildebrand—a Pope who worked fervidly for the cause of Catholicism and to whom is due much of the power wielded by the Papacy in the Middle Ages. He was born again in the 19th century as Ernst Haeckel, a bitter opponent of the Papacy. Haeckel is the reborn Abbot Hildebrand, Gregory VII, Gregory the Great. In giving this example my only object is to show that it is the inner, deep-rooted impulses of the soul and not external similarity of thought and outlook that are carried over from one earthly life into another.

And so while the Arabians were still surging across Africa into Spain, it was the natural tendency of Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor to watch and exercise a protective influence over these campaigns. Outwardly, of course, the spread of Mohammedanism was checked, but its inner characteristics and trends were carried through the spiritual life by both these individualities on their journey between death and rebirth—carried over from the past into the future.

Haroun al Raschid was born again as Bacon of Verulam. His wise Counsellor too was born again, almost at the same time, as Amos Comenius, the educational reformer.

Think of what was brought into the world through Bacon of Verulam who was only outwardly a Christian and who introduced the abstract trend of Arabism into European science; and then think of what Amos Comenius instilled into education—his advocacy of material, concrete realism, his principles of the form in which all teaching matter should be imparted. It is a trend that has no direct connection with Christianity. Although Amos Comenius worked among the Moravian Brothers, what he actually brought into being is to be explained by the fact that in a previous incarnation he stood in the same relationship to the development of the spiritual life of mankind as did the culture flourishing at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

Think of every line of Bacon's writings, of what lies inherent in the sense-realism, as it is called, of Amos Comenius—it is all a riddle, perplexing, inexplicable. Lord Bacon is a violent opponent of Aristotelianism. His passionate antagonism is so clearly in evidence that one can perceive how deeply this impulse is rooted in his soul. The spiritual investigator who is able to discern and penetrate these things, not only studies Bacon of Verulam and Amos Comenius but also follows their life in the super-sensible world between death and rebirth. In the writings of Bacon of Verulam and Amos Comenius, in the very tone of their writings, in everything about them there is evidence of rebellion against Aristotelianism. How is this to be explained?

The following must be remembered. When Bacon and Amos Comenius returned to earthly life, Alexander and Aristotle had already again been in incarnation during the Middle Ages, at a time when they, for their part, had accomplished- what it was then possible to accomplish for Aristotelianism, moreover when Aristotelianism itself was present in a form very different from that in which it had been cultivated by Haroun al Raschid—who, as I said, is the same individuality as Bacon of Verulam.

Picture to yourselves the whole situation. Think of the meeting—if I may express it so—in the year 869 A.D. and of how under this influence there had taken shape in Haroun al Raschid impulses of soul which now encountered something that had already been partially accomplished on the earth—for Alexander and Aristotle had already been in incarnation and their lives as men on earth in the pre-Christian era had played no part in giving effect to their aim. Realising this, you will understand the nature of the impulses resulting from that meeting in the spiritual world. And from the fact that Bacon and Amos Comenius could now perceive what Alexandrianism and Aristotelianism had become in the world, you will be able to understand the tone pervading their writings—the writings of Bacon especially, but also those of Amos Comenius.

Studied in the true and real way, history, as you see, leads us from the earth to the heavens. Account must be taken of happenings that can only be revealed in the super-sensible world. To understand Bacon of Verulam and Amos Comenius we must follow them backwards, first through the epoch when Aristotelianism was being promulgated by Scholasticism, backwards again to the encounter in the year 869 at the time of the 8th Ecumenical Council and then still further back, to the epoch when Alexandrianism and Aristotelianism were being promoted and cultivated by Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor in the form that was possible in those days. The happenings of life on the earth can only be really comprehensible when account is taken of how the super-sensible world works into the physical world.

This much I wanted to say, in order to show you that the work and influence of certain personalities on earth can only be understood by following and observing their several incarnations.

There is no time to say more about these things to-day and I will therefore bring the lecture to a brief conclusion.

As we study the progress of human civilisation it becomes apparent that through such individualities as Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor who was subsequently reborn as Amos Comenius, there creeps into the development of Christianity an element that will not merge with Christianity but inclines strongly towards Arabism. Thus in our own time we have on the one side the direct, unbroken line of Christian development and on the other, the penetration of Arabism, first and foremost in abstract science.

What I want particularly to lay on your hearts is the following: Spiritual contemplation of these two streams leads our gaze to many things which have taken place in the super-sensible world, for example to an event like that of the meeting between Alexander, Aristotle, Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor. Impulses kindled by many such events furthered the spread of true Christianity, while other events were the causes of hindrances along its path. But because in the spiritual world the Michael Impulse has taken the course I have indicated to you, there is good hope that in time to come Christianity will receive its real and true form under the sign of the Michael Impulse. For under the sign of the Michael Impulse other exchanges of thought have also taken place in the super-sensible world.

Let me add only this. Many personalities have come together in the Anthroposophical Society. They too have their karma which leads back to earlier times and appears in many different forms as we go backwards to the pre-earthly existence and then to earlier incarnations. Among those who come to the Anthroposophical Movement with real sincerity, there are only a few who were not led by their karma to participate in such happenings as I have now been describing to you. In one way or another, those who with deep sincerity feel the urge to enter the Anthroposophical Society are connected with events like the meeting of Alexander and Aristotle with Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor. Something of the kind has determined the karma which then, in the present earthly life, takes the form of a longing to receive the spiritual knowledge that is cultivated in the Anthroposophical Movement.

But something else must here be added. Because of the particular form which the Michael Rulership assumes, there will be many deviations from the laws determining reincarnation in the case of those persons whose karma and connection with the Michael dominion leads them into the Anthroposophical Movement. For they will appear again at the turn of the 20th/21st century—therefore in less than a hundred years—in order to carry to full and culminating effect what as Anthroposophists they are able to do now in the service of Michael's dominion. The urge to be a true Anthroposophist expresses itself in the interest taken in matters of the kind of which we have been speaking—provided the interest is deep and sincere. The very understanding of these things gives rise to the impulse to return to the earth in less than a century in order to give effect to the intent and purpose of Anthroposophy.

I should like you to think deeply about the indications that have been given. In these brief words much may be found that will help you to find your true place in the Anthroposophical Movement and to feel that your membership of this Movement is deeply connected with your karma.

• 1. True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1969.

Today I want to point once again to an ideal associated with the Goetheanum, which we have just had the great misfortune of losing. My purpose in referring to it again is to make sure that correct thinking prevails on the score of a step about to be taken in Stuttgart in the next few days, a step in the direction of making a new life in the Anthroposophical Society. Whatever anthroposophy brings forth must be built on a solid foundation of enthusiasm, and we can create the right enthusiasm only by keeping oriented to that ideal that every anthroposophical heart should be cherishing and that is great enough to unite all the Society's members in its warmth.

It cannot be denied that enthusiasm for this ideal of anthroposophical cooperation has dwindled somewhat during the three successive phases of anthroposophical development, though the ideal itself remains. As we stand grieving beside the ruins of the building that brought that anthroposophical ideal to eloquent external expression, it becomes the more important that we join forces in the right common feeling toward it. Shared feeling will lead to shared thoughts and beget a strength much needed in view of the constantly increasing enmity that confronts us. Therefore, instead of continuing to discuss matters that have been the focus of my lectures of the past several weeks, you will perhaps allow me to recall an outstanding memory that has a connection with the Goetheanum and is well-suited to restoring the kind of relationships between members that we need in the Anthroposophical Society. For to hold common ideals enkindles the love that every single anthroposophist should be feeling for his fellow members and that can be relied on to dissipate any hard feelings that members of the Society could be harboring against any others, even if only in their thoughts about them.

You may remember that when we started the first High School course at the Goetheanum, I gave a short introductory talk stressing the fact that what people were accomplishing there represented a new kind of striving whereby art, science and religion were to be united in a truly universal sense.

What was being striven for at the Goetheanum, what its forms and colors were meant to convey, was an ideal, a scientific, artistic and religious ideal. It should be the more deeply graven on our hearts now that it can no longer speak to us through outer forms and colors. That will perhaps be brought about if we continue to do as we have been doing these past few weeks in regard to other subjects under study and enquire how earlier periods of human evolution went about pursuing a scientific, artistic and religious ideal.

If we look back at the tremendous, lofty spiritual life of the ancient Orient, we come to a time when the spiritual content of everything revered by these Oriental peoples was immediate revelation to them—a time when they had no doubt whatsoever that the things their senses perceived were mere tracings in matter of divine realities that had been revealed to a visionary capacity none the less real to them for its dreamlike quality.

That way of beholding, instinctive though it was, was at one time such that people in certain specific states of consciousness could perceive spiritual beings in the universe in all their immediate reality, just as with their bodily senses they perceived things and creatures of the three natural kingdoms. The Oriental of an older time was just as convinced by immediate perception of the existence of the divine-spiritual beings connected with the human race as he was of the existence of his fellow men.

This was the source of his inner religious certainty, which differed in no way from his certainty concerning things in nature round about him. He saw his god, and could therefore believe in his existence just as firmly as he believed in the existence of a stone, a plant, clouds or rivers. What modern science dubs animism, picturing the ancients relying on poetic fantasy to endow nature with a living spiritual element, is an invention of childish dilettantism. The fact is that people beheld spiritual beings in the same way they beheld the world of nature and the senses.

This was, as I said, the source of the certainty in their religious life. But it was equally the source they drew on for artistic creation. The spiritual appeared to them in concrete form. They were familiar with the shapes and colors assumed by spiritual elements. They could bring their perception of the spiritual to material expression. They took such building materials as were available, the materials of sculpture and of the other arts, and applied such techniques as they had to express what was spiritually revealed to them.

The reverence they felt in inner soul relationships to their gods was the content of their religious life. When they imprinted on matter what they had beheld in the spirit, that was felt to be their art. But the techniques and the physical materials at their disposal for expressing what they thus beheld fell far short of their actual visions.

We come upon a period in the evolution of the ancient Orient when the divine-spiritual—or, as Goethe called it, the sensible-super-sensible—that man beheld was exceedingly lofty and gloriously beautiful. People's feelings and fantasy were powerfully stirred by their perception of it. But because techniques for dealing with material media were still so rudimentary, artistic creations of the period were but primitive symbolical or allegorical expressions of the far greater beauty human beings perceived with spiritual eyes. An artist of those ancient times describing his work with the feeling-nuance we have today would have said, “What the spirit reveals to me is beautiful, but I can bring only a weak reflection of it to expression in my clay or wood or other media.”

Artists in those days were people who beheld the spiritual in all its beauty and passed on their vision in sense perceptible form to others who could not behold it for themselves. These latter were convinced that when an artist embodied what he saw spiritually in his symbolical or allegorical forms, these forms enabled them, too, to find their way into the world beyond the earth, a world that a person had to enter to experience his full dignity as a human being.

This relationship to the divine-spiritual was so immediate, so real, so concrete that people felt that the thoughts they had were a gift of the gods, who were as present to them as their fellow men. They expressed it thus, “When I talk with human beings, we speak words that sound on the air. When I talk with the gods, they tell me thoughts that I hear only inside me. Words expressed in sounds are human words. Words expressed in thoughts are communications from the gods.”

When human beings had thoughts, they did not believe them to be products of their own soul activity. They believed that they were hearing thoughts whispered to them by divinities. When they perceived with their ears, they said they heard people. When they heard with their souls, when their perception was of thoughts, they said they heard spiritual beings. Knowledge that lived in idea form was thus communication from divine sources in the experiencing of ancient peoples, perception of the Logos as it spoke directly through the gods to men.

We can say, then, that men's beholding of the gods became the inner life of the religious ideal. Their symbolical-allegorical expression of divine forms through the various media was the life underlying the ideal of art. In their re-telling of what the gods had told them lived the ideal of science. These three ideals merged into one in ancient Oriental times, for they were at bottom one and the same.

In the first ideal, men looked up to divine revelation. Their whole soul life was completely suffused with religious feeling. Science and art were the two realms in which the gods shared mankind's life on earth. The artist engaged in creative activity felt that his god was guiding his hand, poets felt their utterance being formed by gods. “Sing to me, Muse, of the anger of the great Peleid, Achilles.” It was not the poet speaking; it was, he felt, the Muse speaking in him, and that was the fact. The abstract modern view, which attributes such statements to poetic license, is a grotesque piece of the childish nonsense so rampant today. Those who adopt it do not know how truly Goethe spoke when he said, “What you call the spirit of the times is just your own spirit with the times reflected in it.”

If we now turn our attention from the way the threefold ideal of religion, art and science lived in ancient Oriental man to consider how it was expressed by the Greeks and the Romans who were such a bare, prosaic copy of them, we find these three ideals in a further form of development. The divine-spiritual that had revealed itself to man from shining heights above was felt by the Greeks to be speaking directly through human beings. Religious life attached itself much more closely to the human, in the sense that a Greek not only experienced his inner life, but his very form, as god-permeated, god-suffused. He no longer looked up to shining heights above him; he looked at the marvellous shape of man. He no longer had the ancient Oriental's direct contemplation of divinity; his beholding was only a weak shadow of it. But anyone who can really enter into Greek poetry, art and philosophy perceives the basic feeling the Greek had, which led him to say that earthly man was more than just a composite of the material elements that his senses perceived in the external world; he saw in him a proof of the existence of divinity. This man of earth whom the Greek could not regard as of earthly origin was for him living proof that Zeus, that Athene ruled in spiritual worlds.

So we see the Greeks looking upon the human form and man's developing inner life as sublime proof of the gods' governance. They could picture their gods as human because they still had such a profound experience of the divine in man.

It was one thing for the Greek to picture his gods as human beings and quite another for modern man to conceive a divine man under the influence of a degraded anthropomorphism. For to the Greek, man was still a living proof of his divine origin. The Greeks felt that no such thing as man could exist if the world were not permeated through and through by the divine.

Religion played a vital part in conceiving man. A person was revered not for what he had made of himself, but just because he was a human being. It was not his everyday achievements or an ambitious earthly striving to excel that inspired reverence; it was what had come with him as his humanness into life on earth. The reverence accorded him enlarged to reverence for the divine-spiritual world.

The artistic ideal entertained by the Greeks was, on the one hand, a product of their feeling for the divine-spiritual element they embodied and to which their presence on earth testified. On the other hand, they had a strong sense—unknown to the ancient Oriental—of the laws governing the physical world of nature, the laws of consonance and dissonance, of volume, of the inertia or the supporting capacity of various earth materials. Where the Oriental handled his media awkwardly and was unable to go beyond a crudely symbolical-allegorical treatment of the spiritual reality that overwhelmed and overflowed him, so that the spiritual fact he was trying to give expression to in some work of art was always far more glorious and grand than the awkward representation of it, the Greek's striving was to embody all the fulness of his spiritual experience in the physical medium he had by this time learned to handle.

The Greeks never allowed a column to be any thicker than it had to be to carry the weight it was intended to support. They would not have permitted themselves to represent anything of a spiritual nature in the awkward manner characteristic of ancient Oriental art; the physical laws involved had to have been perfectly mastered. Spirit and matter had to be united in a balanced union. There is as much of spirit as of material lawfulness in a Greek temple, and a statue embodies as much of the spiritual element as the expressiveness of the material allows. Homer's verses flow in a way that directly manifests the flowing of divine speech in the human. The poet felt as he shaped his words that he had to let the laws of language itself be his guide to the achieving of perfect control over every aspect of his utterance. Nothing could be left in the awkward, stammering form typical of ancient Oriental hymns. It had to be expressed in a way that did full justice to the spirit. The goal, in other words, was so fully to master the physical laws inherent in the artistic medium employed that every last vestige of what the spirit had revealed was made manifest in sense perceptible form.

The Greeks' feeling that man was evidence of divine creation was matched by their feeling that works of art, like temples and statues, also had to bear witness to divine governance, though that was now conceived as acting through the agency of human fantasy. Looking at a temple, one could see that its builder had so mastered all the laws of his medium that every least detail of their application reflected what he had experienced in his intercourse with the gods.

The earliest Greek tragedies were plays in which the dramatis personae represented spiritual beings such as Apollo and Dionysos, with the chorus an echo of sorts, an echo of the divine that ruled in nature. Tragedies were intended to bring to expression through human beings as an adequate medium events transpiring in the spiritual world. But this was not conceived as in ancient Oriental times, when man had, as it were, to look up into a higher realm than that where the work of art stood. Instead, it was thought of as taking place on the level on which the tragedy was being enacted, making it possible to experience in every gesture, every word, every recitativ of the chorus how a spiritual element was pouring itself into sense perceptible forms beautifully adapted to it. This constituted the Greek ideal of art.

And the scientific ideal? The Greek no longer felt as livingly as the Oriental had that the gods were speaking to him in ideas and thoughts. He already had some inkling of the fact that effort was attached to thinking. But he still felt thoughts to be as real as sense perceptions, just as he felt earthly human beings with their human forms and inner life to be walking evidence of divinity. He perceived his thoughts in the same way that he perceived red or blue, C # or G, and he perceived them in the outer world in the same way that eyes and ears receive sense impressions. This meant that he no longer experienced the speaking of the Logos quite as concretely as the Oriental did. The Greeks did not compose Vedas, of which the Orientals had felt that the gods gave them the ideas they expressed. The Greek knew that he had to work out his thoughts, just as someone knows that he has to use his eyes and look about him if he wants to see the surrounding world. But he still knew that the thoughts he developed were divine thoughts impressed into nature. A thought was therefore earthly proof of the gods' speaking. Whereas the Oriental still heard that speaking, the Greek discerned the human quality of language, but saw in it direct earthly proof of the existence of divine speech.

To the Greeks, science was thus also like a divine gift, something obviously despatched to earth by the spirit, exactly as man with his divine outer form and inner experiencing had been sent here. So we see how the religious, artistic and scientific ideal changed in the course of humanity's evolution from the Oriental to the Greek culture.

In our epoch, which, as I have often explained, began in the first third of the fifteenth century, Western man's development has again reached a point where he is confronted with the necessity of bringing forth new forms of the venerable, sacred ideals of religion, art and science. This development was what I had in mind when we were launching the first High School course at the Goetheanum. I wanted to make it clear that the Goetheanum stood there because the inner laws of human evolution require that the religious, artistic and scientific ideals be clothed in magnificent new forms transcending even those of Greece.

That is why one feels so overwhelmed by grief as one's eye falls on ruins where a building should be standing and indicating in its every form and line and color the new shape that the three great ideals should be assuming as they emerge from the innermost soul of an evolving humanity. Grief and sorrow are the only emotions left to us as we contemplate the site that was meant to speak so eloquently of the renewal of man's three great ideals. Ruins occupy it, leaving us only one possibility, that of cherishing in our hearts everything we hoped to realize there. For while another building might conceivably be erected in its place, it would certainly not be the one we have lost. In other words, it will never again be possible for a building to express what the old Goetheanum expressed.

That is why everything the Goetheanum was intended to contribute to the three great ideals of the human race should be the more deeply graven on our hearts. In our day we cannot say with the clairvoyant Oriental of an older time that the divine-spiritual confronts us in all its shining immediacy as do the creatures of the sense world, or that the deeds of the gods are as present to our soul perception as any sense perceptible acts that may be performed in the external world in everyday living. But when we quicken our inquiry into man and nature with the living quality with which anthroposophical thinking and feeling endow such studies, we see the world for the cosmos, or the universe clothed in a different form than that in which the Greeks beheld it.

When a Greek made nature the object of his study or contemplated human beings moving about in the world of the senses, he had the feeling that where a spring welled up or a mountain thrust its cloud-crowned peak into the sky, when the sun came up in the rosy brilliance of the dawn or a rainbow spanned the heavens, there the spirit spoke in these phenomena. The Greeks beheld nature in a way that enabled them to feel the presence of the spirit in it. Their contemplation of nature really satisfied them; what they saw there satisfied every facet of their beings.

I have often emphasized how justifiably people speak of an advance in natural science, and anthroposophy is in a unique position to recognize the real significance of the scientific progress of recent centuries. I have often stressed this. Anthroposophy is far from wanting to denigrate or to criticize science and scientific inquiry; it honors all truly sincere study. In the course of recent centuries, my dear friends, people have indeed learned an enormous amount about nature. If one goes more deeply into what has been learned, the study of nature leads, as I have often stated from this platform, to insight into man's repeated earth lives, insight into the transformation of nature. One gets a preview of the future, when man will bring to new forms of life what his senses and his soul and spirit are experiencing in the present moment.

If one undertakes a suitably deeper study of nature, one's total outlook on it becomes different from that that the Greeks had. It might be said that they saw nature as a fully matured being from which the glory of the spiritual worlds shone out. Modern man is no longer able to look upon nature in this light. If we survey everything we have come to know and feel about nature's creations as a result of making use of our many excellent devices and instruments, we see nature rather as harboring seed forces, as bearing in its womb something that can come to maturity only in a distant future.

The Greek saw every plant as an organism that had already reached a perfect stage for the reason that the god of the species lived in each single specimen. Nowadays we regard plants as something that nature has to bring to still higher stages. Everywhere we look we see seed elements. Every phenomenon we encounter in this unfinished nature, so pregnant with future possibilities, causes us to feel that a divine element reigns over nature and must continue to do so to ensure its progressing from an embryonic to an eventually perfect stage.

We have learned to look much more precisely at nature. The Greek saw the bird where we see the egg. He saw the finished stage of things; we, their beginnings. The person who feels his whole heart and soul thrill to the seed aspects, the seed possibilities in nature, is the man who has the right outlook on it.

That is the other side of modern natural science. Anyone who starts looking through microscopes and telescopes with a religious attitude will find seed stages everywhere. The exactness characteristic of the modern way of studying nature allows us to see it as everywhere creative, everywhere hastening toward the future. That creates the new religious idea.

Of course, only a person with a feeling for the seed potentialities that each individual will live out in other, quite different earthly and cosmic lives to come can develop the religious ideal I am describing.

The Greeks saw in man the composite of everything there was in the cosmos of his own period. The ancient Orientals saw in man the composite of the whole cosmic past. Today, we sense seeds of the future in human beings. That gives the new religious ideal its modern coloring.

Now let us go on to consider the new ideal of art. What do we find when we subject nature and its forms to a deeper, life-attuned study, refusing to call a halt at externalities and abstract ideas? My dear friends, you saw what we find before your very eyes in the capitals of our Goetheanum pillars and in the architrave motifs that crowned them. None of this was the result of observing nature; it was the product of experiencing with it. Nature brings forth forms, but these could just as well be others. Nature is always challenging us to change, to metamorphose its forms. A person who merely observes nature from the outside copies its forms and falls into naturalism. A person who experiences nature, who doesn't just look at the shapes and colors of plants, who really has an inner experience of them, finds a different form slipping out of every plant and stone and animal for him to embody in his medium. The Greek method, which aimed at completely expressing the spirit through a masterly handling of the medium, is not our method. Our way is to enter so deeply into nature's forms that one can bring them to further, independent metamorphosis. We do not resort to the symbolical-allegorical Oriental treatment or strive for the Greek's technical mastery of a medium. Our method is so to handle every line and color in the work of art that it strives toward the divine. The Oriental employed symbolism and allegory to express the divine, which rayed out like an aura from his works, rayed out and welled over and submerged them, speaking much more eloquently than the forms did. We moderns must create works where in the form element speaks more eloquently than nature itself does, yet speaks in a manner so akin to it that every line and color becomes nature's prayer to the divine. In our coming to grips with nature we develop forms wherein nature itself worships divinity. We speak to nature in artistic terms.

In reality, every plant, every tree has the desire to look up in prayer to the divine. This can be seen in a plant's or a tree's physiognomy. But plants and trees do not dispose over a sufficient capacity to express this. It is there as a potential, however, and if we bring it out, if we embody in our architectural and sculptural media the inner life of trees and plants and clouds and stones as that life lives in their lines and colors, then nature speaks to the gods through our works of art. We discover the Logos in the world of nature. A higher nature than that surrounding us reveals itself in art, a higher nature that, in its own entirely natural way, releases the Logos to stream upward to divine-spiritual worlds.

In Oriental works of art the Logos streamed downward, finding only stammering expression in human media. Our art forms must be true speech forms, voicing what nature itself would say if it could live out its potential. That is the new artistic ideal that comes to stand beside the religious ideal that looks at nature from the standpoint of its seed endowment.

The third is our scientific ideal. That is no longer based on the feeling the Orientals had that thoughts are something whispered straight into human souls by gods. Nor can it have kinship with the Greek ideal, which felt thoughts to be inner witnesses to the divine. Nowadays we have to exert purely human forces, work in a purely human way, to develop thoughts. But once we have made the effort and achieved thoughts free of any taint of egotism, self-seeking, subjective emotionality or partisan spirit such as colors thoughts with prejudiced opinions, once we have exerted ourselves as human beings to experience thoughts in the form they themselves want to assume, we no longer regard ourselves as the creators and shapers of our thoughts, but merely as the inner scene of action where they live out their own nature. Then we feel the largeness of these sefless and unprejudiced thoughts that seem to be our own creations, and are surprised to find that they are worthy of depicting the divine; we discover afterwards that thoughts that take shape in our own hearts are worthy of depicting the divine. First, we discover the thought, and afterwards we find that the thought is nothing less than the Logos! While you were selflessly letting the thought form itself in you, your selflessness made it possible for a god to be the creator of that thought. Where the Oriental felt thought to be revelation and where the Greek found it proof of divine reality, we feel it to be living discovery: we have the thought, and afterwards it tells us that it was permitted to express divinity. That is our scientific ideal.

Here we stand, then, in the ongoing evolution of the human race, realizing what point we have reached in it. We know, as we look at the human head with the ears at the side, at the larynx and the distorted shoulder blades, that we must be able to do more than just contemplate them. If we succeed in transforming these shapes of nature, a single form emerges from a further development of the shoulder blades and a growing-together of the ears and larynx: a Luciferic form, composed of chest and head, wings, larynx and ears.

We reach the point of perceiving the artistic element in nature, the element that endows its forms with life, allowing a higher life of form to emerge than that found in nature itself.

But this also puts us in the position of being able to trace nature's own activity in the metamorphoses whereby it transforms the human being, and we are able to apply this same artistry in the pedagogical-didactic field. We bring this same creative artistry to pedagogical work with children, who are constantly changing. For we have learned it at hand of an art that we recognize to be the Logos-producing nature-beyond-nature. We learn it from springs that are more than springs, for they commune with the gods. We learn it from trees that are more than trees; for where the latter achieve only a stammering movement of their branches, the former disclose themselves to modern artistic fantasy in forms that point to the gods with gesturings of branch and crown. We learn it from the cosmos as we metamorphose its forms and re-shape them, as we tried to do in our Goetheanum. All these studies teach us how to work from day to day with children to help support the process that daily re-shapes, re-creates them. This enables us to bring artistry into the schooling of the human race, and the same holds true in other areas.

That is the light in which the three great ideals of humanity—the religious ideal, the artistic ideal, the scientific ideal—appear, re-enlivened, to the contemplating soul of the anthroposophist. The forms of the Goetheanum were intended to fill him with enthusiasm for experiencing these lofty ideals in their new aspect. Now we must quietly engrave them on our hearts. But they must be made a source of enthusiasm in us. As we acquire that enthusiasm and are lifted toward the divine in our experiencing of the three ideals, earth's highest ideal develops in us. The Gospel says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself, and God above all.” Another way of putting it is, “If one looks upon the divine in the light of the present day aspect of the three ideals, as a modern human being must, one learns to love the divine.” For one feels that one's humanness depends on devoting oneself with all the love at one's command to the three ideals. But then one feels oneself united with every other individual who is able to do likewise and offer up the same love. One learns to love the divine above all else, and, in loving God, to love one's neighbor as oneself. That keeps any hard feelings from developing.

That is what can unite and make a single entity of the separate members of the Society. That is the present need. We have had the experience of going through a phase in the Society in which anthroposophy was poured into separate channels, such as pedagogy and other practical concerns, into artistic activities, and so on. Now we need to pull together. We have first-rate Waldorf School teachers and other professionals. Everyone who is giving of his best at a special post needs to find a way to bring the sources of anthroposophical life to ever fresh flowing. That is what is needed now.

Since that is our need, since the leading anthroposophists need to prove their awareness of the present necessity of re-enlivening the Anthroposophical Society, we have arranged a meeting on these matters. It is to take place in Stuttgart in the next few days. Those who mean well by the Society should be cherishing the warmest hopes for what will come of that occasion. For only if the individuals present there can develop the right tone, a tone ringing with true, energetic enthusiasm for the three great love-engendering ideals, only if the energy and content of the words they speak guarantee this, can there be hope of the Anthroposophical Society achieving its goal. For what eventuates there will set the tone for the turn things will take in wider circles of the Society.

I will know, too, what my own course must be after seeing what comes of the Stuttgart conference. Great expectations hang on it. I ask all of you who cannot make the journey to Stuttgart to be with us in supporting thoughts. It is a momentous occasion that calls for participation and wholesomely based, energetic effort on behalf of the great ideals so essential to modern humanity. We are informed of them not by any arbitrary account set down by human hand, but in that script graven by the whole course of evolution, the whole import of man's earthly development, which declares itself to us every bit as plainly as does the sun to waking human beings.

Let us set about kindling this enthusiasm in our souls; then it will become deeds. And deeds are essential.

In wishing to describe the development of groupings which have a certain connection with the Anthroposophical Society, I yesterday had to make reference to the impact of H.P. Blavatsky, because Blavatsky's works at the end of the nineteenth century prompted the coming together of those whom I described as homeless souls.

Blavatsky's works have very little to do with anthroposophy. I do not, however, want simply to describe the history of the anthroposophical movement, but also to characterize those of its aspects which relate to the Society. And that requires the kind of background which I have given you.

Now it is of course quite easy—if we want to be critical—to dismiss everything that can be said about Blavatsky by pointing to the questionable nature of some of the episodes in her life.

I could give you any number of examples. I could tell you how, within the Society which took its cue from Blavatsky and her spiritual life, the view gained ground that certain insights about the spiritual world became known because physical letters came from a source which did not lie within the physical world. Such documents were called the Mahatma Letters.¹ It then became a rather sensational affair, when evidence of all kinds of sleight of hand with sliding doors was produced. And there are other such examples.

But let us for the moment take another view, namely to ignore in the first instance everything which took place outwardly, and simply examine her writings. Then you will come to the conclusion that Blavatsky's works consist to a large degree of dilettantish, muddled stuff, but that despite this they contain material which, if it is examined in the right way, can be understood as reproducing far-reaching insights into the spiritual world or from the spiritual world—however they were acquired. That simply cannot be denied, in spite of all the objections which are raised.

This, I believe, leads to an issue of extraordinary importance and significance in the spiritual history of civilization. Why is it that at the end of the nineteenth century revelations from a spiritual world became accessible which merit detailed attention, even from the objective standpoint of spiritual science, if only as the basis for further investigation; revelations which say more about the fundamental forces of the world than anything which has been discovered about its secrets through modern philosophy or other currents of thought? That does seem a significant question.

It contrasts with another cultural-historical phenomenon which must not be forgotten, namely that people's ability to discriminate, their surety of judgement, has suffered greatly and regressed in our time.

It is easy to be deceived about this by the enormous progress which has been made. But it is precisely because individual human beings participate in the spiritual life as discerning individuals that we get some idea of the capacity which our age possesses to deal with phenomena which require the application of judgement.

Many examples could be quoted. Let me ask those, for example, who concern themselves with, say, electrical engineering, about the significance of Ohm's Law. The answer will be, of course, that Ohm's Law constitutes one of the basic rules for the development of the whole field of electrical engineering. When Ohm² completed the initial work which was to prove fundamental for the later formulation of Ohm's Law his work was rejected as useless by an important university's philosophical faculty. If this faculty had had its way, there would be no electrical engineering today.

Take another example: the important role which the telephone plays in modern civilization. When Reis,³ who was not part of the official scientific establishment, initially wrote down the idea of the telephone and submitted his manuscript to one of the most famous journals of the time, the Poggendorffschen Annalen, his work was rejected as unusable. That is the power of judgement in our time! One simply has to face up to these things in a fully objective manner.

Or there are occasional fine examples which characterize the judicial competence of the trendsetters among those who are responsible for administering, say, our cultural life. And the general public moving along the broad highway is completely spellbound by what is deemed acceptable by these standards today. No country is better or worse than any other.

Take the case of Adalbert Stifter,⁴ a significant writer. He wanted to become a grammar school teacher. Unfortunately he was thought to be totally unsuitable, not talented enough for such a post. Coincidentally a certain Baroness Mink, who had nothing to do with judging the ability of grammar school teachers, heard about Adalbert Stifter as a writer, acquainted herself with the material he had produced so far—which he himself did not think was particularly good—and prevailed upon him to have it published. That caused a great stir. The authorities suddenly took the view that there was no one better equipped to become the schools inspector for the whole country. And thus a person who a short while before had been thought too incompetent to become a teacher was suddenly appointed to supervise the work of every other teacher!

It would be an exceedingly interesting exercise to examine these things in all areas of our intellectual life, finishing with someone like, for instance, Julius Robert Mayer.⁵ As you know, I have called into question the application under certain circumstances of the law of conservation of energy, which attaches to his name. But contemporary physics defends this law unconditionally as one of its pillars. When he went to Tubingen University, he was advised one fine day to leave, because of his performance. The university can certainly take no credit for the discoveries he made, because it wanted to send him down before he sat the exams which enabled him to become a doctor.

If all this material were seen in context, it would reveal an exceedingly important element in contemporary cultural history; an element through which it would be possible to demonstrate the weakness of this age of materialistic progress in recognizing the significance of spiritual events.

Such things have to be taken into account when taking full stock of the hostile forces opposing the intervention of spiritual movements. It is necessary to be aware of the general level of judgement which is applied in our time, an age which is excessively arrogant, precisely about its non-existent capacity to reach the right conclusions.

It was, after all, a very characteristic event that many of the things traditionally preserved by secret societies, which were at pains to prevent them reaching the public, should suddenly be published by a woman, Blavatsky, in a book called Isis Unveiled. Of course people were shocked when they realized that this book contained a great deal of the material which they had always kept under lock and key. And these societies, I might add, were considerably more concerned about their locks and keys than is our present Anthroposophical Society.

It was certainly not the intention of the Anthroposophical Society to secrete away everything contained in the lecture cycles. At a certain point I was requested to make the material, which I otherwise discuss verbally, accessible to a larger circle. And since there was no time to revise the lectures they were printed as manuscripts in a form in which they would otherwise not have been published—not because I did not want to publish the material, but because I did not want to publish it in this form and, furthermore, because there was concern that it should be read by people who have the necessary preparation in order to prevent misunderstanding. Even so, it is now possible to acquire every lecture cycle, even for the purpose of attacking us.

The societies which kept specific knowledge under lock and key and made people swear oaths that they would not reveal any of it, made a better job of protecting these things. They knew that something special must have occurred when a book suddenly appeared which revealed something of significance in the sense that we have discussed. As for the insignificant material—well, you need only go to one of the side-streets in Paris and you can buy the writings of the secret societies by the lorry load. As a rule these publications are worthless.

But Isis Unveiled was not worthless. Its content was substantive enough to identify the knowledge which it presented as something original, through which was revealed the ancient wisdom which had been carefully guarded until that moment.

As I said, those who reacted with shock imagined that someone must have betrayed them. I have discussed this repeatedly from a variety of angles in previous lectures.⁶ But I now want rather to characterize the judgement of the world, because that is particularly relevant to the history of the movement. After all, it was not difficult to understand that someone who had come into the possession of traditional knowledge might have suggested it to Blavatsky for whatever reason, and it need not have been a particularly laudable one. It would not be far from the truth to state that the betrayal occurred in one or a number of secret societies and that Blavatsky was chosen to publish the material.

There was a good reason to make use of her, however. And here we come to a chapter in tracing our cultural history which is really rather peculiar. At the time there was very little talk of a subject which today is on everyone's lips: psychoanalysis. But Blavatsky enabled the people of sound judgement who came into contact with this peculiar development to experience something in a living way which made what has been written so far by the various leading authorities in the psychoanalytic field appear amateurish in the extreme. For what is it that psychoanalysis wishes to demonstrate?

Where psychoanalysis is correct in a certain sense is in its demonstration that there is something in the depths of human nature which, in whatever form it exists there, can be raised into consciousness; that there is something present in the body which, when it is raised to consciousness, appears as something spiritual. It is, of course, an extremely primitive action for a psychoanalyst to raise what remains of past experience from the depths of the human psyche in this way; past experience which has not been assimilated intensively enough to satisfy the emotional needs of a person, so that it sinks to the bottom, as it were, and settles there as sediment, creating an unstable rather than a stable equilibrium. But once brought into consciousness it is possible to come to terms with such experiences, thus liberating the human being from their unhealthy presence.

Jung⁷ is particularly interesting. It occurred to him that somewhere in the depths—of course there is some difficulty in defining where—there are all the experiences with which the human being has failed to come to terms since birth; that embedded in the individual psyche there are all kinds of ancestral and cultural experiences stretching far back. And today some poor soul goes to his therapist who psychoanalyses him and discovers something so deep-seated in the psyche that it did not originate in his present life, but came through his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and so on, until we arrive at the ancient Greeks who experienced the Oedipus problem. It passed down through the blood and today, when these Oedipal feelings make their presence felt in the human psyche, they can be psychoanalysed away. Furthermore, people believe that they have discovered some very interesting connections through their ability to psychoanalyse away what lies in the far distant past of ones civilization.

The only problem is that these are thoroughly unscientific research methods. You need only have a basic knowledge of anthroposophy to know that all kinds of things can be extracted from the depths of the human psyche. First there is our life before birth, the things which the human being has experienced before he descended into the physical world, and then there are those things which he has experienced in earlier lives on earth. That takes you from a dilettantish approach to reality! But one also learns to recognize how the human psyche contains in condensed form, as it were, the secrets of the cosmos. Indeed, that was the view of past ages. That is why the human being was described as a microcosm.

What we encounter as psychoanalysis today really is dilettantish in the extreme. On the one hand it is psychologically amateurish because it does not recognize that at certain levels physical and spiritual life become one. It considers the superficial life of the soul in abstract terms, and does not advance to the level where this soul life weaves creatively in the blood and in the breathing—in other words, where it is united with our so-called material functions. But the physical life is also amateurishly conceived, because it is observed purely in its outer physical aspects and there is no understanding that the spiritual is present everywhere in physical life, and above all in the human organism. When these two amateurish views are brought together in such a way that the one is supposed to illuminate the other, as in psychoanalysis, then we are simply left with dilettantism.

Well, the manifestation of this kind of amateurism may be seen with Blavatsky from a psychological perspective. A stimulus may have come from somewhere, through some betrayal. This stimulus had the same effect as if a wise and invisible psychiatrist had triggered within her a great amount of knowledge which originated in her own personality rather than from ancient writings.

Up to the fifteenth century or thereabouts it was not an infrequent occurrence for visions of cosmic secrets to be triggered within human beings by some particularly characteristic physical happening. Later this became seen as an extremely mystical event. The tale told about Jakob Boehme,⁸ who had a magnificent vision as he looked at a pewter bowl, is admired because people do not know that up to the fifteenth century it was very common for an apparently minor stimulus to provoke in human beings tremendous visions of cosmic secrets.

But it became increasingly rare, due to the increasing dominance of the intellect. Intellectualism is connected with a specific development of the brain. The brain calcifies, as it were, and becomes hardened. This cannot, of course, be demonstrated anatomically and physiologically, but it can be shown spiritually. This hardened brain simply does not permit the inner vision of human beings to rise to the surface of consciousness.

And now I have to say something extremely paradoxical, which is nevertheless true. A greater hardening of the brain took place in men, ignoring exceptions which, of course, exist both in men and women—which is not to say that this is a particular reason for female brains to celebrate, for at the end of the nineteenth century they became hard enough too. But it was nevertheless men who were ahead in terms of a more pronounced intellectualism and hardening of the brain. And that is connected with their inability to form judgements.

This was exactly the same time at which the secrecy surrounding the knowledge of ancient times was still very pronounced. It became obvious that this knowledge had little effect on men. They learnt it by rote as they rose through the degrees. They were not really affected by it and kept it under lock and key. But if someone wished to make this ancient wisdom flower once more, there was a special experiment he could try, and that was to make a small dose of this knowledge, which he need not even necessarily have understood himself, available to a woman whose brain might have been prepared in a special way—for Blavatsky's brain was something quite different from the brains of other nineteenth-century women. Thus, material which was otherwise dried-up old knowledge was able to ignite, in a manner of speaking, in these female brains through the contrast with what was otherwise available as culture; was able to stimulate Blavatsky in the same way that the psychiatrist stimulates the human psyche. By this means she was able to find within herself what had been forgotten altogether by that section of mankind which did not belong to the secret societies, and had been kept carefully under lock and key and not understood by those who did belong. In this way what I might describe as a cultural escape valve was created which allowed this knowledge to emerge.

But at the same time there was no basis on which it could have been dealt with in a sensible manner. For Madame Blavatsky was certainly no logician. While she was able to use her personality to reveal cosmic secrets, she was not capable of presenting these things in a form which could be justified before the modern scientific conscience.

Now just ask yourselves how, given the paucity of judgement with which spiritual phenomena were received, was there any chance of correctly assessing their re-emergence only twenty years later in a very basic and dilettantish form in psychoanalysis? How was proper account to be taken of something which had the potential to become an overwhelming experience, but to which psychoanalysis can only aspire once it has been cleansed and clarified and stands on a firm basis; when it is no longer founded on the blood which has flowed down the generations, but encompasses a true understanding of cosmic relationships? How was such experience, which presents a magnificent uncaricatured counter-image to today's impaired psychoanalytical research, to be assimilated adequately within a wider context in an age in which the ability to form true judgements was such as I have described? In this respect there were some interesting experiences to be had.

Let me illustrate this with an example of how difficult it is in our modern age to make oneself understood if one wants to appeal to wider, more generous powers of judgement; you will see from the remainder of the lectures how necessary it is that I deal with these apparently purely personal matters.

There was a period at the turn of the century in Berlin during which a number of Giordano Bruno societies were being established, including a Giordano Bruno League. Its membership included some really excellent people who had a thorough interest in everything contemporary which merited the concentration of ones ideas, feelings and will. And in the abstract way in which these things happen in our age, the Giordano Bruno League also referred to the spirit. A well-known figure⁹ who belonged to this League titled his inaugural lecture “No Matter without Spirit”. But all this lacked real perspective, because the spirit and the ideas which were being pursued there were fundamentally so abstract that they could not approach the reality of the world. What annoyed me particularly was that these people introduced the concept of monism at every available opportunity. This was always followed with the remark that the modern age had escaped from the dualism of the Middle Ages. I was annoyed by the waffle about monism and the amateurish rejection of dualism. I was annoyed by the vague, pantheistic reference to the spirit: spirit which is present, well, simply everywhere. The word became devoid of content. I found all that pretty hard to take. Actually I came into conflict with the speaker immediately after that first lecture on “No Matter without Spirit”, which did not go down well at all. But then all that monistic carry-on became more and more upsetting, so I decided to tackle these people in the hope that I could at least inject some life into their powers of discernment. And since a whole series of lectures had already been devoted to tirades against the obscurantism of the Middle Ages, to the terrible dualism of scholasticism, I decided to do something to shake up their powers of judgement. I am currently accused of having been a rabid disciple of Haeckel at that time.

I gave a lecture on Thomas Aquinas¹⁰ and said, in brief, that there was no justification to refer to the Middle Ages as obscurantist, specifically in respect of the dualism of Thomism and scholasticism. As monism was being used as a catchword, I intended to show that Thomas Aquinas had been a thorough monist. It was wrong to interpret monism solely in its present materialistic sense; everyone had to be considered a monist who saw the underlying principle of the world as a whole, as the monon. So I said that Thomas Aquinas had certainly done that, because he had naturally seen the monon in the divine unity underlying creation. One had to be clear that Thomas Aquinas had intended on the one hand to investigate the world through physical research and intellectual knowledge but, on the other hand, that he had wanted to supplement this intellectual knowledge with the truths of revelation. But he had done that precisely to gain access to the unifying principle of the world. He had simply used two approaches. The worst thing for the present age would be if it could not develop sufficiently broad concepts to embrace some sort of historical perspective.

In short, I wanted to inject some fluidity into their dried-out brains. But it was in vain and had a quite extraordinary effect. To begin with, it had not the slightest meaning to the members of the Giordano Bruno League. They were all Lutheran protestants. It is appalling, they said; we make every attempt to deal Catholicism a mortal blow, and now a member of this self-same Giordano Bruno League comes along to defend it! They had not the slightest idea what to make of it. And yet they were among the most enlightened people of their time. But it is through this kind of thing that one learns about powers of discrimination; specifically, the willingness to take a broadly based view of something which, above all, did not rely on theoretical formulations, but aimed to make real progress on the path to the spirit, to gain real access to the spiritual world.

Because whether or not we gain access to the spiritual world does not depend on whether we have this or that theory about the spirit or matter, but whether we are in a position to achieve a real experience of the spiritual world. Spiritualists believe very firmly that all their actions are grounded in the spirit, but their theories are completely devoid of it. They most certainly do not lead human beings to the spirit. One can be a materialist, no less, and possess a great deal of spirit. It, too, is real spirit, even if it has lost its way. Of course this lost spirit need not be presented as something very valuable. But having got lost, deluding itself that it considers matter to be the only reality, it is still filled with more spirit than the kind of unimaginative absence of anything spiritual at all which seeks the spirit by material means because it cannot find any trace of spirit within itself.

When you look back, therefore, at the beginnings you have, to understand the great difficulty with which the revelations of the spiritual world entered the physical world in the last third of the nineteenth century. Those beginnings have to be properly understood if the whole meaning and the circumstances governing the existence of the movement are to make sense. You need to understand, above all, how serious was the intention in certain circles not to allow anything which would truly lead to the spirit to enter the public domain. There can be no doubt that the appearance of Blavatsky was likely to jolt very many people who were not to be taken lightly. And that is indeed what happened. Those people who still preserved some powers of discrimination reached the conclusion that here there was something which had its source within itself. One need only apply some healthy common sense and it spoke for itself. But there were nevertheless many people whose interests would not be served by allowing this kind of stimulus to flow into the world.

But it had arrived in the form of Blavatsky who, in a sense, handled her own inner revelation in a naive and helpless manner. That is already evident in the style of her writings and was influenced by much that was happening around her. Indeed, do not believe that there was any difficulty—particularly with H.P. Blavatsky—for those who wanted to ensure that the world should not accept anything of a spiritual nature, to attach themselves to her entourage. In a sense she was gullible because of her naive and helpless attitude to her own inner revelations. Take the affair with the sliding doors through which the Mahatma Letters were apparently inserted, when in fact they had been written and pushed in by someone outside. The person who pushed them in deceived Blavatsky and the world. Then, of course, it was very easy to tell the world that she was a fraud. But do you not understand that Blavatsky herself could have been deceived? For she was prone to an extraordinary gullibility precisely because of the special lack of hardness, as I would describe it, of her brain.

The problem is an exceedingly complicated one and demands, like everything of a true spiritual nature which enters the world in our time, a quality of discernment, a healthy common sense. It is not exactly evidence of healthy common sense to judge Adalbert Stifter incapable of becoming a teacher and subsequently, when the nod came—in this case it was again due to a woman, and probably one with a less sclerotic brain than all those officials—to find him suitable to inspect all those he had not been allowed to join.

A healthy common sense is required to understand what is right. But there are some peculiar views about this healthy common sense. Last year I said that what anthroposophy had to say from the spiritual world could be tested by healthy common sense. One of my critics came to the conclusion that it was a wild-goose chase to talk about healthy common sense, because everyone with a scientific education knew that reason which was healthy understood next to nothing, and anybody who claimed to understand anything was not healthy. That is the stage we have reached in our receptivity to things spiritual.

These examples show you how contemporary attitudes have affected the whole movement. For it is almost inevitable—particularly given someone as difficult to understand as Blavatsky—that such an atmosphere should lead to a variation of the one message: any clever person today, anyone with healthy common sense, will say ignorabimus;¹¹ anyone who does not say ignorabimus must be either mad or a swindler.

If we really want to understand our times in order to gain some insight into the conditions governing the existence of the anthroposophical movement, then this must not be seen purely as the malicious intent of a few individuals. It has to be seen as something which in all countries, in contemporary mankind, belongs to the flavour of our times. Then, however, we will be able to imbue the strong and courageous stand we should adopt with something which, if one looks at our age from an anthroposophical point of view, should not be omitted—despite the decisive, spiritually decisive, rejection of our opponents' position—compassion. It is necessary to have compassion in spite of everything, because the clarity of judgement in our times has been obscured.

• 1. These are the so-called Mahatma Letters which were printed in A. P. Sinnett's The Occult World, London, 1881. They are linked with the so-called Coulomb affair of a later date, which is what Rudolf Steiner is referring to when he speaks about the rather sensational affair, and all kinds of sleight of hand with sliding doors.
• 2. Simon Ohm, 1787–1854. Famous physicist.
• 3. Philipp Reis, 1834–1874. Teacher and physicist.
• 4. Adalbert Stifter, 1805–1868. Writer and painter. The episode concerning his discovery as a writer by Baroness Mink in 1840 and his later appointment as schools inspector in 1849/50 is recounted in every biography.
• 5. Julius Robert Mayer, 1814–1878. Doctor and physicist.
• 6. cf. Dornach, 11 October 1915 in The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by D. S. Osmond. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1973. Berlin, 23 October, 1911 in Earthly and Cosmic Man. Translated by D. S. Osmond. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London, 1948. Address in Helsingfors, 11 April, 1912, in GA 158; typescript (Z409) in Rudolf Steiner House library, London.
• 7. Carl Gustav Jung, 1875–1961. Leading proponent of psychoanalysis. cf. also Rudolf Steiner's lectures of 10 and 11 November 1917 in Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy. Translated by M. Laird-Brown. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, and Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1946 as well as the question-and-answer session related to the lecture of 28 April 1920 in The Renewal of Education. Rudolf Steiner Schools Fellowship, 1981.
• 8. Jakob Boehme, 1575–1624. Cf. Rudolf Steiner, Eleven European Mystics. pp. 123ff.
• 9. Dr. Bruno Wille, author of Offenbarungen des Wacholderbaums (Novel of a Seer). Leipzig, 1901. cf. Rudolf Steiner's detailed review reprinted in GA 34. Also The Course of My Life, Chapter XXIX, and Briefe II.
• 10. The reference is to the lecture “Monismus und Theosophie” of 8 October 1902. cf. also The Course of My Life, Chapter XXIX, and Briefe II.
• 11. Ignoramus et ignorabimus (we do not know and we will never know). Phrase coined by the Berlin physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) in his speech “ber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens”, which passed into common usage.

Among the spiritual conditions of evolution that have led to the Anthroposophical Movement and that are contained within its karma from the spiritual side, I have mentioned two external symptoms. The one is expressed in the rise of the Catechism with its questions and answers, leading towards a faith which is no longer in direct touch with the spiritual world. The other is represented by the Mass becoming exoteric. The Mass in its totality, including the Transubstantiation and Holy Communion, was made accessible to all, even to the unprepared. It thus lost its character of an ancient Mystery.

These two earthly events led those who observed them from the spiritual world to prepare in a very definite way, within the stream of spiritual evolution, for what was to become a spiritual revelation at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries,—a revelation fitly adapted to the course of time. For this new spiritual revelation had to come after the Michael event, and in the time when the old, dark Age of Kali Yuga had run its course and a new Age was to arise for humanity. Today we have a third thing to add. We must first bring before our souls these three spiritual conditions, which were able to draw together a number of human beings even before they descended into the physical world in the last third of the 19th or at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. For only when we are aware of these conditions, shall we be able to understand certain extra-karmic events which flowed into the streams of life that are welded together in the Anthroposophical Movement.

The peculiar attitude to Nature on the one hand and to things spiritual on the other, which has evolved so greatly by our time, comes down to us only from the period that began in the 14th (15th) century. Before that time, the relationship of mankind especially to the things of the Spirit was very different. Man approached the Spirit not in concepts and ideas but in living experiences that still penetrated to the Spiritual, however slightly.

We today, when we speak of Nature, have a dead abstraction—empty of all being. And when we speak of the Spirit, we have something vague whose existence we presume somehow or other in the world, and comprise it in abstract concepts or ideas. It was not so in the time when the souls who are now finding their way together in the longing for a new Spirituality, had their important former incarnation,—when in that incarnation they harkened to what Initiates and Leaders of Mankind had to tell them for their inner needs. To begin with we have the age that goes on into the 7th or 8th century, when we still find a delicate connection of the human soul with the spiritual world—a conscious experience of the spiritual world itself. Even the men of knowledge and learning in that time were still in a living relationship to the spiritual world. Then we have the age beginning in the 7th or 8th century and going on to the great turning point in the 14th and 15th,—the time when the human souls who had lived in the first Christian centuries, partaking in that former period upon the earth, were once more in the life between death and a new birth.

But though—from the 6th, 7th or 8th century onwards—there was no direct connection with the spiritual world, nevertheless a certain awareness of this connection still found a haven of refuge, if I may put it so, in isolated centres of learning. In isolated centres of learning men still spoke, in knowledge, in the way they had spoken in the first Christian centuries. Nay more, it was possible for single, chosen human beings to receive deep inner impulses from the way in which the spiritual world was spoken of,—impulses enabling them, at certain times at least, to break through into the spiritual world. There were indeed isolated centres where teachings were given in a manner of which the people of today can have no conception.

This only came to an end in the 12th, 13th century, when at length it all flowed into a great poem in which it found as it were its consummation for the experience of mankind. I mean the Divina Commedia of Dante.

In all that lies behind the origin of the Commedia we have a wonderful chapter of human evolution. For at this moment the influences from the earth and from the cosmos are found in perpetual interplay. The two were ever flowing into one another. Human beings on the earth had lost, to some extent, the connection with the spiritual world. And in those who lived above—who, while on earth, had still experienced such a connection,—the earthly conditions which they now beheld called forth a strangely painful feeling. They saw the slow death of what they themselves had still experienced on earth. Then from the super-sensible world they enthused-inspired-inspirited—certain individualities in the world of sense, so that here or there at any rate there might arise a home and centre for the real connection of man with the spiritual world.

Let us clearly bear in mind what I indicated here many years ago. Even until the 7th or 8th century—in a kind of echo of pre-Christian Initiation—Christianity was taught in centres that had remained as the high places of knowledge, relics of the ancient Mysteries. In those centres human beings were prepared, not so much by way of instruction, but by an education towards the Spirit—a training both bodily and spiritual. They were prepared for the moment when they might have at least a delicate vision of the spirituality that can manifest itself in the environment of man on earth. Then they looked outward to the realms of mineral and plant-nature and to all that lives in the animal and human kingdoms. And they saw, springing forth like an aura and fertilised in turn out of the cosmos, the spiritual-elemental beings that lived in all Nature.

Then above all there appeared to them as a living Being, whom they addressed as they would address a human being—only it was a being of a higher kind,—the Goddess Natura. She was the Goddess whom they saw before them in her full radiance, in full reality of soul. They did not speak of abstract laws of Nature, they spoke of the creative power of the Goddess Natura, working creatively in all external Nature.

She was the metamorphosis of Proserpine of antiquity. She was the ever-creating Goddess with whom he who would seek for knowledge must in a certain way unite himself. She appeared to him—appeared to him from every mineral, from every plant, from every creeping beast, from the clouds, the mountains, the river-springs. Of this Goddess who alternately in winter and in summer creates above the earth and beneath,—of this Goddess they felt: She is the hand-maid of that Divinity of whom the Gospels tell. She it is who fulfils the divine behests.

And when the seeker after knowledge had been sufficiently instructed by the Goddess about the mineral and plant and animal natures, when he was introduced into the living forces, then he learned to know from her the nature of the four Elements:—Earth, Water, Air and Fire. He learned to know the waving and weaving within the mineral and animal and plant kingdoms of the four Elements which pour themselves in all reality throughout the world:—Earth, Water, Fire, Air. He felt himself with his etheric body interwoven with the life of the Earth in its gravity, Water in its life-giving power, Air in its power to awaken sentient consciousness, Fire in its power to kindle the flame of the I. In all this he felt his human being interwoven, and he felt: This was the gift of instruction from the Goddess Natura—the successor, the metamorphosis of Proserpine. The teachers saw to it that their disciples should gain a feeling, an idea of this living intercourse with Nature—Nature filled with divine forces, filled with divine substance. They saw to it that their pupils should penetrate to the living and weaving of the Elements.

Then when they had reached this point, they were introduced to the planetary system. They learnt how with the knowledge of the planetary system there arises at the same time the knowledge of the human soul. “Learn to know how the wandering stars hold sway in the heavens, and thou shalt know how thine own soul works and weaves and lives within thee.” This was placed before the pupils. And at length they were led to approach what was called “The Great Ocean,”—but it was the Cosmic Ocean, which leads from the planets, from the wandering stars, to the fixed stars. Thus at length they penetrated into the secrets of the I, by learning the secrets of the universe of the fixed stars.

Mankind today has forgotten that such instructions were ever given; but they were. A living knowledge of this kind was cultivated until the 7th or 8th century in the last relics of the ancient Mysteries. And as a doctrine—as a theory—it was still cultivated even until that turn of the 14th and 15th centuries of which we have so often spoken. In certain centres we still see these old teachings cultivated, though with the greatest imaginable difficulties. They were well-nigh shadowed-down to concepts and ideas; yet the concepts and ideas were still living enough to kindle, in one man and another, the upward vision of all the realities of which I spoke just now.

In the 11th and especially the 12th century, reaching on to the 13th, a truly wonderful School existed. In this School there were teachers who still knew how the pupils in preceding centuries had been led to a conscious experience of the Spirit. It was the great School of Chartres. Here there flowed together all the conceptions that had issued from the living spiritual life which I have described.

Wonderful masterpieces of architecture are to be seen in Chartres to this day. Thither there had come above all a ray of the still living wisdom of Peter of Compostella, who had worked in Spain. He had cultivated a living exemplary Christianity, speaking still of Natura the handmaid of Christ, and describing still how when great Nature has introduced man to the elements, to the planetary world, to the world of stars, then and then only does he become ripe to make acquaintance in very reality of soul with the seven helpmates, who come before the human soul, not in abstract chapters of theory, but as the living Goddesses: Grammatica, Dialectica, Rhetorica, Arithmetica, Geometria, Astronomia, Musica. The pupils learned to know them as Divine-spiritual figures, living and real.

Those who were around Peter of Compostella spoke of them still as living figures. His teachings radiated into the School of Chartres. In the same School of Chartres there lived, for example, the great Bernard of Chartres, who inspired his pupils, for though he could no longer show them the Goddess Natura, nor the Goddesses of the seven Liberal Arts, still he spoke of these in so living a way that their imagined pictures at least were conjured before his pupils.

There taught Bernardus Silvestris, raising before his pupils in mighty and powerful descriptions what had been the ancient wisdom.

And above all there was John of Chartres who spoke of the human soul with an inspiration truly majestic. It was here that John of Chartres, also known as John of Salisbury, unfolded the conceptions wherein he dealt with Aristotle,—Aristotelianism. His chosen pupils were so influenced that they arrived at a new insight. They saw that such teaching as had existed in the first centuries of Christendom could no longer exist on earth, for earthly evolution could no longer bear it. It was made clear to them:—There was an ancient, almost clairvoyant knowledge, but it grew darkened. We can only know of Dialectic, Rhetoric, Astronomy, Astrology—we can no longer behold the Goddesses of the seven Liberal Arts.

Henceforth Aristotle must work,—Aristotle who already in antiquity was equal to the concepts and ideas of the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch.

With an inspiring force, what had thus been taught in the School of Chartres was then transplanted to the Order of Cluny, where it was turned to a more worldly form in the ecclesiastical enactments of the Abbot Hildebrand—Abbot of the Monks of Cluny—who afterwards became Pope under the name of Gregory the Seventh.

Meanwhile in the School of Chartres itself these teachings continued to be given with remarkable purity. The whole of the 12th century was radiant with them. And there was one who was in reality greater than all the others,—who taught in Chartres, with what I would call a true inspiration of ideas, the Mysteries of the seven Liberal Arts in their connection with Christianity. I mean Alain de Lille, Alanus ab Insulis. Alain de Lille at Chartres in the 12th century fired his pupils with a true enthusiasm. His great insight showed him that in the coming centuries it would no longer be possible to endow the earth with spiritual teachings such as these. For these teachings were not only Platonism; they contained the teachings from the old seership of the pre-Platonic Mysteries, with the difference that it had since received Christianity into itself.

To those in whom he presumed an understanding for such things, Alain de Lille taught already in his life-time that an Aristotelian form of knowledge would now have to work for awhile on earth,—Aristotelianism with its sharply defined conceptions and ideas. For in this way alone would it be possible to prepare for what must come again as a Spirituality in later time.

To many a human being of today who reads the literature of that time, it appears dull and dry. But it is by no means dry, when we gain some conception of what stood before the souls of those who taught and worked in Chartres.

And in the poetry too, which went out from Chartres, how vitally do we feel the sense of union with the living Goddesses of the seven Liberal Arts. In the poem ‘Bataille des Sept Arts,’ deeply penetrating as it is for anyone who understands it, we feel the living spiritual breath of the seven Liberal Arts. All these things were working in the 12th century.

You see, all this was living in the spiritual atmosphere of that time, and was still making itself felt. It was still to some extent akin to the Schools that continued to exist in Northern Italy, in Italy generally, and in Spain, though their existence was sporadic. Nevertheless these things became transplanted in a living way into all manner of spiritual currents on the earth. Towards the end of the 12th century much of this was still working at the University of Orleans, where remarkable teachings of this kind were cultivated, and something was still present of an inspiration from the School of Chartres.

And then, one day down in Italy, an Ambassador who had been in Spain, standing at that moment under a great historic impression, received a kind of sun-stroke, and there arose in him as a great and mighty revelation all that he had received as a preparatory training in his School. All this became a mighty revelation under the influence of the slight sun-stroke which came over him. Then he saw what man could see under the influence of the living principle of knowledge: He saw a mountain mightily arising with all that lived and sprang forth from it, minerals, plants, and animals, and there appeared to him the Goddess Natura, there appeared the Elements, there appeared the Planets, there appeared the Goddesses of the seven Liberal Arts, and at length Ovid as his guide and teacher. Here once again there stood before a human soul the mighty vision that had stood before the souls of men so often in the first centuries of Christianity. Such was the vision of Brunetto Latini which was afterwards handed down to Dante and from which Dante's Divina Commedia took its source.

But there was still another outcome for all those who had worked in Chartres, when they passed again through the gate of death, and, having passed through the gate of death, entered the spiritual world. Deeply significant was the spiritual life which they had led: Peter of Compostella, Bernard of Chartres, Bernardus Silvestris, John of Chartres (John of Salisbury), Henri d'Andeli, author of the poem “Bataille des Sept Arts,” and above all, Alain de Lille. Alain de Lille, in his own style of course, had written the book Contra Hereticos, where on behalf of Christianity he turned against the heretics, writing directly out of the old vision which was in fact the vision of the spiritual world. And now, all these souls, these individualities who had been the very last to work within the echoes of seership, the wisdom seen in fulness of spiritual light,—they all of them entered into the spiritual world. And in that spiritual world they came together with other souls, of great significance, who were preparing for a new earthly life just at that time. For they were preparing to descend in the very near future into an earthly life where they would work in the sense that was necessary, to bring about the subsequent turning-point: the turning-point of the 14th and 15th century. We have a great spiritual life before us, my dear friends. The last great ones of the School of Chartres had just arrived in the spiritual world. Those individualities who afterwards brought forth the full flower of Scholasticism were still there in the spiritual world, and at the beginning of the 13th century there took place one of the most important exchanges of ideas behind the scenes of human evolution,—an exchange of ideas between those who had carried up the old Platonism, inspired by spiritual vision, from the School of Chartres into the super-sensible world, and those on the other hand who were preparing to carry Aristotelianism down to earth, as the great transition to bring about a new Spirituality that was to flow into the evolution of mankind in the future.

They came to an agreement with one another. The individualities from the School of Chartres spoke, as it were, to those who were preparing to descend into the physical world of sense, who were preparing to cultivate Aristotelianism in the Scholastic system which was right for that age. They spoke to them as it were, and said: For us it is impossible to work on earth for the present; for the earth is not now in a condition to cultivate knowledge in this living way. What we, the last bearers of Platonism, were still able to cultivate must now give place to Aristotelianism. We will remain up here.

Thus the great spirits of Chartres remained in the super-sensible world, nor have they returned hitherto in any earthly incarnations of significance. But they were working mightily, helping in the formation of that mighty Imagination in the spiritual world that was formed in the first half of the 19th century and of which I have already told you. They worked in full harmony with those who descended with their Aristotelianism to the earth.

The Dominican Order, above all, contained individualities who lived in this kind of “super-sensible contract,” if I may so describe it, with the great spirits of Chartres, for they had agreed with them: “We will descend in order to continue the cultivation of knowledge in the Aristotelian form. You will remain up here. On earth too we shall remain in union with you. Platonism for the present cannot prosper on the earth. We shall find you again when we return, and then together we will prepare for that time when the period of Scholastic Aristotelianism will have been completed in earthly evolution, and it will be possible to unfold Spirituality once more in communion with you, with the spirits of Chartres.”

It was, for example, an event of deep significance when Alain de Lille, as he had been called in earthly life, sent down to earth a pupil well instructed by him in the spiritual world. For in this pupil he sent down on to the earth all the discrepancies, it is true, which could arise between Platonism and Aristotelianism, but he sent them down so that they might be harmonised through the Scholastic principle of that time. Such was the spiritual working, especially in the 13th century, to the end that there might flow together the workings of those who were on the earth,—who were on the earth for instance in the garment of Dominicans,—and those who had remained in yonder world. For the time being, these latter could find no earthly bodies in which to stamp their spirituality. For theirs was a spirituality which could not come down to the Aristotelian element.

So there arose in the 13th century a wonderful co-operation of that which was being done on earth with that which was flowing down from above. Often those who were on earth were not conscious of this working from the other side, but those who were working on the other side were all the more conscious. It was a truly living co-operation. One would say, the principle of the Mysteries had ascended to the heavens and sent down its Sun-rays thence upon all that was working on the earth.

This went into all the details and can be traced above all in the detailed things that happened. Alain de Lille, in his own earthly life as a teacher at Chartres, had only been able to go so far that at a certain age of life he put on the garment of the Cistercians. He became a priest of the Cistercian Order. In the Cistercian Order at that time, in the exercises of that Order, the last relics of a striving to awaken Platonism—the Platonic world-conception, in unison with Christianity—had found a refuge.

The way in which he sent a pupil down to the earth expressed itself in this: he sent his pupil down to continue through the Dominican Order the task that was now to pass over to Aristotelianism.

The transition expressed itself outwardly in a remarkable symptom. For the pupil of Alanus ab Insulis of whom I am speaking,—his pupil, that is to say, in the worlds above the earth,—having descended to the earth, first wore the garment of a Cistercian, which he only afterwards exchanged for that of a Dominican.

Such were the individualities who worked together: those who afterwards became the leading Schoolmen and their pupils,—human souls long connected with one another,—and these in turn united with the great spirits of the School of Chartres, united in the sensible and super-sensible worlds during the 13th and on into the early 14th century.

Such was the mighty world-historic plan. Those who could not descend to Aristotelianism upon the earth remained in the spiritual world above, waiting until the purposes in which they were all so intimately united should have been carried forward by the others upon the earth, under the influence of the sharply outlined concepts and ideas proceeding from Aristotelianism.

It was really like a conversation upward and downward from the spiritual to the earthly world, from the earthly to the spiritual world, in that 13th century.

Indeed it was only into this spiritual atmosphere that true Rosicrucianism was able to pour its influence.

When those who had descended to the earth to give the impulse of Aristotelianism had accomplished their task, they too were lifted into the spiritual world and went on working there: Platonists and Aristotelians together. And now there came and gathered round them the souls whom I have already spoken to you—the souls of the two groups I mentioned.

Thus we find entering into the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement a large number of disciples of Chartres. Entering into this discipleship of Chartres we find the souls who had come from one or other of the two streams of which I spoke here in the last few days. It is a large circle of human beings, for many are living in this circle who have not as yet found their way to the Anthroposophical Movement. Nevertheless it is so: what we find in the field of Anthroposophy today has been prepared for through these manifold experiences.

A remarkable influence came over the Cistercian Order for example, when Alain de Lille, Alanus ab Insulis, put on the garment of a Cistercian—when he with his Platonism became a Cistercian Priest. Indeed this element never left the Cistercian Order. In relation to these things which we must now unveil, I may perhaps be allowed a few personal observations that could not be included in my autobiography. There was a circumstance in my life which was destined to lead me to the knowledge of many an inner connection in this domain, (other connections were revealed to me from different quarters). I was led to many things through the circumstance that in my life, before the Weimar period, I could never escape from the presence, in one way or another, of the Cistercian Order; and yet again I was always somehow kept at a distance from it. I grew up, so to speak, in the shadow of the Cistercian Order, which has important settlements in the neighbourhood of Wiener-Neustadt. Those who had to educate most of the youth in the district where I grew up, were Priests of the Cistercian order. I had the robe of this Order perpetually before me, the white robe with the black band around the waist, or, as we call it, the stola. Had I had occasion to speak of such things in my autobiography I could have said: Everything in my life tended in the direction of a classical education at the Gymnasium and not of that modern education which I actually underwent in the Real-Schule in Wiener-Neustadt. Now the Gymnasium in that place was at that time still in the hands of the Cistercians. It was a strange play of forces that drew me to them and at the same time held me at a distance.

Again, the whole circle of monks in the Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna,—the circle around Marie Eugenie delle Grazie,—consisted of Cistercians. With these Cistercians I had the most intimate theological conversations—the most intimate conversations on Christology. I only indicate this fact, seeing that it enters into my perception of that period of the 12th century, when the power of the School of Chartres poured its life into the Cistercian Order. For indeed, in the peculiarly attractive scholarship of the Cistercians there lived on—albeit in a corrupted way—something of the magic of the School of Chartres. Important and manifold enquiries were pursued by Cistercians whom I knew well. And to me those things were most important which revealed to me: It is indeed impossible for any of those who were the disciples of Chartres to incarnate at present, and yet it seems as though some of the individualities connected with that School became incorporated, if I may call it so, for brief periods, in some of the human beings who wore the Cistercian garment.

Separated, if I may put it so, by a thin wall only, there ever continued to work on the earth what was being prepared as I have described it, in super-sensible worlds, leading to that great preparation in the first half of the 19th century.

And for me it was a highly remarkable experience to have that conversation to which I referred in my autobiography,—that conversation on the Christ Being with a Priest of the Cistercian Order, which took place not in delle Grazie's house but as we were going away from her house together. For the conversation was carried on, not from the present-day dogmatic standpoint of Theology, but from the standpoint of Neo-Scholasticism. It went with full depth into the things that had once existed upon the earth, with Aristotelian clarity and definition of concept, and yet at the same time with Platonic spiritual light.

That which was to arise in Anthroposophy shone through already, though in secret and mysterious ways, through the events of the time. Though indeed it could not shine through into human souls where they were harnessed to one religious or social group or another, nevertheless it shone through, through the connections which certain human souls still had with the great spiritual currents that do, after all, work upon the earth.

Between the beginning of the Michael Age and the end of the Kali Yuga, it was indeed possible to recognise, in much that was working in individual human beings in the most varied domains of life, the language of the Spirit of the Time. For the speaking of the Spirit of the Time was a great call for the anthroposophical revelations to come. We saw the living rise of Anthroposophy, as of a being that was to be born but that was still resting in a mother's womb. For it was resting in the womb of preparation, that had worked from the first Christian centuries towards the School of Chartres, then to be continued in super-sensible spheres, in cooperation with what was here on the earth, in the Aristotelian defence of Christianity. It was out of these impulses, as we find them expressed in Alain de Lille's work Contra Hereticos, that there afterwards arose such a work as the Summa Fidei Catholicae contra Gentiles of Thomas Aquinas. And there arose that characteristic feature of the time which speaks to us from all the pictures, where we see the Dominican Doctors of the Church treading Averroes, Avicenna and the others under foot. For this indicates the living and spirited defence of spiritual Christianity, and yet withal the transition to intellectualism.

My dear friends, I cannot describe this world of facts in any theoretic way; for by theorising, these things are weakened and made pale. Facts I wanted to place before your souls,—facts from which you will feel whereto your gaze must be directed if you would see those souls, who passed before their present earthly life through a spiritual experience between death and a new birth, in such a way that when on the earth, they longed for Anthroposophy.

The most divergent, the most opposite conceptions work together in the world, weaving a living whole.

And today, those who were working in the great School of Chartres in the 12th century, and those who were united with them at the beginning of the 13th century in one of the greatest spiritual communities,—albeit in the super-sensible world—today again they are working together. The great spirits of Chartres are working with those, who in unison with them subsequently cultivated Aristotelianism on the earth. It matters not, that some of them are working here on the earth, while others cannot yet descend to the earth. They are working together now, intending a new spiritual epoch in earthly evolution. And their great purpose now, is to collect the souls who for a long time have been united with them,—to gather together the souls with whose help a new spiritual age can then be founded. Their purpose is, in one way or another and within a comparatively short time, in the midst of an otherwise decadent civilization, to make possible a renewed cooperation in earthly life between the spirits of Chartres from the 12th century and the spirits of the 13th century who are united with them. Their purpose is to prepare, so that they will be able to work together in an earthly life, cultivating spirituality once more within the civilization which, apart from this, is sailing on into destruction and disintegration.

Intentions that are being cherished today, not upon earth but as between earth and heaven, such intentions I have wanted to explain to you. Enter deeply into all that lies in these intentions, and you will feel, as a living influence upon your souls, the spiritual background, of which the necessary foreground is the streaming together of human souls in this Anthroposophical Movement.

I have raised the question: How can we find in earlier earthly lives the explanation of a later incarnation, in the case not only of historical personages but also in that of many a personality unnoticed by history whose influence nevertheless arouses our interest? And to-day, as a foundation for further studies, I shall indicate connections in the incarnations of certain individuals. What I shall put before you is the outcome of a particular kind of spiritual investigation, and with this foundation—which will be given in narrative form to-day—we shall begin to understand how the successive earthly lives of individuals can be discovered.

We will take characteristic personalities whose names I gave as examples in the last lecture. Such personalities make us alive to the fact that spiritual impulses of very different kinds are working in our present civilisation. For well nigh two thousand years Christianity has been spreading in the West and in many colonial territories, influencing civilisation to a greater extent than is imagined. It is true, of course, that really close study may reveal the working of the Christ Impulse in many things where there is at first no evidence of it. But for all that, it cannot be denied that there are elements in our civilisation which seem to have no connection whatever with Christianity. Certain views and customs of life which seem to be utterly at variance with Christianity take root in our civilisation.

The attention of one who calls super-sensible research to his aid in order to discover the deeper reasons for the course taken by the spiritual life of mankind, is drawn to a phenomenon insufficiently studied in connection with the growth of Western civilisation. His attention is drawn to the work of an institution which flourished in the East in the days of Charlemagne in the West. I am referring to that Court in the East whose ruler, surrounded by oriental splendour and magnificence, was Haroun al Raschid, the contemporary of Charlemagne whose achievements in the West fade into insignificance as compared with the brilliance of what was going forth, at the very same time, from the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

All branches of spiritual life had been brought together at this Court in Western Asia. It must be remembered that through the expeditions of Alexander, Greek culture had been carried over to Asia in a form of which only a faint inkling remains to-day. The finest fruits of Greek culture had found their way to Asia, brought thither by the genius of Alexander the Great. And as a result, many centres of learning in the East had adopted conceptions of the world which faithfully preserved the old, while rejecting many elements that in the West were threatening to submerge the old.

Through the expeditions of Alexander the Great, a certain rational and healthy form of mysticism had been carried over to Asia, with the result that men who were more adapted for the kind of philosophical thinking thus introduced, regarded the world as pervaded by the Cosmic Intelligence. Over in Asia in those times a man did not say: “I think this or that out for myself, I have my own, personal intelligence”—but he said: “Everything that is thought is thought by Gods, primarily by the supreme Godhead—the Godhead as conceived by Aristotelianism.” The intelligence in a human being was a drop of the Universal Intelligence manifesting in the individual, so that in head and heart man felt himself to be an integral part of the Universal Intelligence.

Such was the mood-of-soul in those times and it prevailed, still, at the Court of Haroun al Raschid in the 8th and 9th centuries after the founding of Christianity. Nor must it be forgotten that many learned sages had taken refuge in Asia when the Schools of Greek philosophy were exterminated in Europe. Astronomy with a strongly mystical trend, architecture and other forms of art revealing truly creative power, poetry, sciences, directives for practical life—all these things flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. He was a splendour-loving but at the same time a highly gifted organiser and he gathered at his Court the most learned men of his day, men who although they were no longer working as Initiates, still preserved and cultivated in a living way much of the ancient wisdom of the Mysteries.

We will consider more closely one such personality. He was a very wise Counsellor of Haroun al Raschid. His name is of no consequence and has not come down to posterity, but he was a man of great wisdom and in order to understand him we must pay attention to something that may surprise even those who are to some extent conversant with Spiritual Science.

There is a question which may occur to all of you. You may say: Anthroposophy tells us that there were once Initiates, living here or there, possessing far-reaching knowledge and profound wisdom. But since men live again in new earthly lives, why is it that to-day, for example, we do not recognise reincarnated sages of old? This would be an entirely reasonable question.

But one who is aware of the conditions by which earthly life is determined, knows that an individuality whose karma leads him from pre-earthly existence to birth in a particular epoch, must accept the educational facilities which that epoch affords. And so it may well be that although some individual was an Initiate in bygone times, the knowledge he possessed as an Initiate remains in the subconscious realm of the soul; his day-consciousness gives indications of powers of some significance but does not directly reveal what was once in his soul in an earlier incarnation as an Initiate.

This is true of that wise Counsellor of Haroun al Raschid. In very ancient Mysteries he had been an Initiate. He had reincarnated and he lived as a reincarnated Initiate at the Court of Haroun al Raschid; the fruits of his earlier Initiation revealed themselves in a genius for organisation and he was able to administer in a truly masterly way the work of the other learned men at that Court. But he did not make the direct impression of an Initiate. Through his own being and qualities, not merely through the fact of earlier Initiation, he preserved the ancient Initiation-Science—but as I said, he did not actually give the impression of having attained Initiation.

Haroun al Raschid held this wise man in high esteem, entrusting him with the organisation of all the sciences and arts flourishing at the Court. Haroun al Raschid was happy to have this man at his side, feeling tied to him by a deep and sincere friendship.

We will now turn our attention to these two individuals, Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor—remembering that in the 8th and 9th centuries at the Court of Charlemagne in Europe, men of the highest social rank (including Charlemagne himself) were only just beginning to make their first attempts at writing; at the same Court, Eginhart was endeavouring to formulate the early rudiments of grammar. In days when everything in Europe was extremely primitive, over in Asia much brilliant spiritual culture was personified in Haroun al Raschid whom Charlemagne held in great veneration. But this was a kind of culture which knew nothing of Christ nor wished to have anything to do with Christianity; it preserved and cultivated the best elements of Arabism and also kept alive ancient forms of Aristotelian thought—those forms which had not made their way to Europe, for it was chiefly Aristotelian logic and dialectic which had spread so widely in the West and were the principles upon which the work of the Church Fathers and later on that of the Schoolmen was based.

As a result of the achievements of Alexander the Great, it was the more mystical and scientific knowledge imparted by Aristotle that had been cultivated in Asia where it had all come under the influence of the tremendously powerful intelligence of Arabism—which was, however, held to be a revealed, an inspired intelligence.

The existence of Christianity was known to the learned men at the Court of Haroun al Raschid but they regarded it as primitive and elementary in comparison with their own intellectual achievements.

We will now follow the subsequent destinies of these two personalities; Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor. Having worked in the way I have described, they bore with them through the gate of death the impulse to ensure that the kind of thinking, the world-conception cultivated at this Court, should spread in the world.

Let us consider soberly and in all earnestness, what then ensued. Two individualities start out from Asia: the wise Counsellor and his overlord, Haroun al Raschid. For a time after death they remained together. It was to Alexandrianism, to Aristotelianism, that they owed the knowledge they had acquired. But they also absorbed all that in later times had been done to re-cast, to re-model these teachings. Unless it is possible to grasp what is happening in the spiritual world while the events of the physical world take their course on the earth below, we can understand only a tiny fraction of the world.

History gives a picture of what transpired after the epoch of Charlemagne and Haroun al Raschid. But while all that history relates about Asia and Europe was proceeding in the 8th and 9th centuries and on into the late Middle Ages, other most significant happenings were taking place in the spiritual world above. It must not be forgotten that while the physical life below and the spiritual life above flow on, influences from souls passing through their existence between death and rebirth stream down perpetually upon earthly life. Therefore we do right to attach importance to what the discarnate souls yonder in the spiritual world are experiencing and how they are acting in any particular epoch. Human life, above all in its course through history, can never be really comprehensible unless we turn our attention to what is happening behind the scenes of external history, in the spiritual world.

Now it must be remembered that the impressions which men carry with them through the gate of death often differ in a very marked degree from the impressions people have of them during earthly life. And those who cannot throw off preconceptions when they are observing the spiritual life may find it difficult to recognise some particular individuality who in his existence after death is revealed to the eye of the seer. Nevertheless there are means whereby one can learn to perceive phases of spiritual life other than the one immediately following earthly existence. I have spoken of this in the Lecture-Course that is being given here¹ and I shall have still more to say about the later phases of the life stretching from death to a new birth. We shall then understand more clearly the nature of the paths which enable us to make contact with the so-called Dead.

It is by these same paths that we are able to follow the further destinies of individuals such as Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor. In order to understand later developments in European civilisation it is of the greatest importance to take account of these two individuals, above all of the bond between them in their thought and principles of action. Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor also bore with them through the gate of death a deep and strong affinity with the individualities of Alexander and Aristotle—who had, of course, preceded them in earthly existence by many centuries—and an intense longing to come into direct contact with them again. Moreover a meeting actually took place, with consequences of far-reaching significance.

For a while, Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor journeyed onwards together in the super-sensible world, looking down from thence upon happenings in the civilised world further to the West, in Greece, in certain regions North of the Black Sea, and so forth. They looked down upon it all and among the events upon which their gaze fell was one of which much has been said in anthroposophical lectures, namely the 8th General Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in the year 869 A.D.

The effect of this 8th Ecumenical Council upon the development of Western civilisation was incisive and profound, for Trichotomy, the definition of man as body, soul and Spirit, was then declared heretical. It was decreed that true Christians must speak of man as a twofold being, consisting of body and soul only, the soul possessing certain spiritual qualities and forces. The reason why so little inclination to spirituality is to be discerned in Christian civilisation is that acknowledgment of the Spirit was declared heretical by the 8th Ecumenical Council in the year 869.

It was a momentous event, the effects of which have been far too little heeded. The Spirit was done away with: man was to be regarded as consisting only of body and soul. But the shattering experience for one who can observe the spiritual life and above all for one who truly participates in it is that precisely when here on earth in the year 869 A.D. the Spirit was done away with, there took place in the spiritual world above the meeting between the souls of Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor and the souls of Alexander the Great and Aristotle.

In thinking about what follows, you must accustom yourselves to the fact that super-sensible happenings will now be spoken of in Anthroposophy as naturally as we speak of happenings in the physical world. The lives of Alexander the Great and of Aristotle in those particular incarnations marked the culmination of a certain epoch. The impulse which had been given by ancient cultures and had come to expression in Greece was formulated by Aristotle into concepts which in the form of ideas dominated the West and human civilisation in general for long ages of time.

Alexander the Great, the pupil and friend of Aristotle, had with stupendous forcefulness spread the impulses given by Aristotle over wide areas of the then known world. This impulse was still working in Asia in the days of Haroun al Raschid. It had long possessed a centre of brilliant and illustrious learning in Alexandria but at the same time, working through many hidden channels, it had a profound effect upon the whole of oriental culture.

All this had reached a certain culmination. The impulses of ancient spirituality in their manifold forms had converged in Alexandrianism and Aristotelianism. Christianity was born. The Mystery of Golgotha took place—in an age when the individualities of Alexander and Aristotle were not incarnated on the earth but were in the spiritual world, in intimate communion with what we call the dominion of Michael whose earthly rule had also come to its close, for Oriphiel had then succeeded Michael as the ruling Time-Spirit. Centuries had passed since the Mystery of Golgotha. What Alexander and Aristotle had established on earth, the aims to which they had dedicated all their powers, the one in the field of thought, the other giving effect to a great genius for rulership—all this had been at work on the earth below. And from the spiritual world these two souls beheld it flowing on through the centuries, during one of which the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place. They turned their gaze upon all that was being done to spread a knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. They saw their work spreading abroad on the earth beneath, spreading too through the activities of individuals like Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor.

But in the souls of Alexander and Aristotle themselves there was an urge for something completely new, for a new beginning—not a mere continuation of what was already on the earth, but veritably a new beginning. In a certain respect, of course, there would be continuation, for it was not a question of sweeping away the old. But a new and mighty impulse whereby a particular form of Christianity would be instilled into earthly civilisation—it was to the inauguration of this impulse that Alexander and Aristotle dedicated themselves.

When their karma led them down again to incarnation on the earth (—it was before the meeting had taken place with Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor—) they lived, unknown and unheeded, in a corner of Europe not without importance for Anthroposophy, dying at an early age, but gazing for a brief moment as it were through a window into the civilisation of the West, receiving impressions and impulses but giving none of any significance themselves. That was to come later.

They had returned again into the spiritual world and were in the spiritual world when in the year 869 the 8th Ecumenical Council was held at Constantinople. It was then that the meeting took place in the spiritual world between Aristotle and Alexander on the one side and Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor on the other. It was an exchange of thought and ideas in the super-sensible world, of immense, far-reaching significance. We must realise that exchanges or conferences of this nature in the super-sensible world are of infinitely greater moment than mere discussions in words. When people on the earth sit together in discussion, when words shoot hither and thither without having much effect one way or the other, this is not even a shadowy image of what transpires when great decisions affecting the spiritual life as well, are taken in super-sensible worlds.

Alexander and Aristotle affirmed at that time that what had been established in earlier days must now be guided undeviatingly into the dominion of Michael. For it was known that Michael would again assume his Regency in the 19th century.

At this point we must understand one another. As the evolution of mankind flows onwards, one of the Archangels becomes Regent and exercises earthly rule for a period of three to three-and-a-half centuries. At the time when Aristotelianism was carried by Alexander the Great to Asia and Africa, at the time when the spread of this culture was pervaded by a cosmopolitan, international spirit, Michael was the Ruling Archangel; the spiritual life was under his dominion. The Regency of Michael was followed by that of Oriphiel. Then, until the 14th century A.D., there follow the Rulerships of Anael, Zachariel, Raphael, Samael—each lasting for three to four centuries. Gabriel is Regent from the 15th until the last third of the 19th century, when Michael again assumes dominion. Seven Archangels follow one another. Thus the earthly Rulerships of six other Archangels follow that of Michael, which was in force at the time of Alexander, and Michael assumes dominion again at the end of the 19th century. We ourselves, do we but rightly understand the spiritual life, live under the direct influence of the Michael Rulership.

And so in the century when the meeting with Haroun al Raschid took place, Alexander and Aristotle turned their gaze to the earlier Rulership of Michael under which their work had been carried forward, they turned their gaze to the Mystery of Golgotha which as members of the Michael-community they had experienced from the sphere of the Sun, not from the earth—for at that time Michael's rule on earth was over. Michael and his own, among them Alexander and Aristotle, did not experience the Mystery of Golgotha from the vantage-point of the earth; they did not witness the arrival of Christ on the earth, they witnessed His departure from the Sun. But all that they experienced formed itself into the impulse which remained alive in them—the impulse to ensure that the new Michael Rulership, to which with every fibre of their souls Alexander and Aristotle had pledged their troth, would bring a Christianity not only firmly established but more inward, more profound. The new dominion of Michael was to begin in the year 1879 and last for three to four centuries. This is our own epoch and it behoves Anthroposophists to understand what it means to be living under the Michael Rulership.

Neither Haroun al Raschid nor his Counsellor were willing to accept this—the Counsellor with less emphasis, but fundamentally it was so in his case too. They desired, first and foremost, that the world should be dominated by the impulse that had taken such firm root in Mohammedanism. The participants in this spiritual struggle in the 9th century A.D. confronted each other in resolute, intense opposition—Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor on the one side and, on the other, the individualities who had lived as Aristotle and Alexander.

The aftermaths of this spiritual struggle worked on in the civilisation of Europe, are indeed working to this day. For what happens in the spiritual world above works down upon and into the affairs of the earth. And the very opposition with which Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor confronted Aristotle and Alexander at that time added strength to the impulse, so that from this meeting two streams went forth—one taking its course in Arabism and one whereby, through the impulses of the Michael Rulership, Aristotelianism was to be led over into Christianity.

After this encounter in the super-sensible world, Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor continued along a path leading towards the West, watching and observing what was happening below on the earth. From this super-sensible existence, the one (he who had lived as Haroun al Raschid) concerned himself deeply with civilisation in Northern Africa, in Southern. Europe, in Spain, in France. During approximately the same period, the other (he who had been the wise Counsellor) concerned himself with the happenings of the spiritual life more towards the East, in the neighbourhood of the Black Sea, and thence through Europe as far as Holland and even England. And at roughly the same time, both were born again in European civilisation.

Now there need not necessarily be external similarity between such reincarnations. It is as a rule quite erroneous to believe that a man who has in him a particular kind of spirituality will be born again with that same spirituality. We must look more deeply into the roots of the human soul if we are to speak truly about repeated earthly lives. So, for example, we may take the famous Pope Gregory VII, the former Abbot Hildebrand—a Pope who worked fervidly for the cause of Catholicism and to whom is due much of the power wielded by the Papacy in the Middle Ages. He was born again in the 19th century as Ernst Haeckel, a bitter opponent of the Papacy. Haeckel is the reborn Abbot Hildebrand, Gregory VII, Gregory the Great. In giving this example my only object is to show that it is the inner, deep-rooted impulses of the soul and not external similarity of thought and outlook that are carried over from one earthly life into another.

And so while the Arabians were still surging across Africa into Spain, it was the natural tendency of Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor to watch and exercise a protective influence over these campaigns. Outwardly, of course, the spread of Mohammedanism was checked, but its inner characteristics and trends were carried through the spiritual life by both these individualities on their journey between death and rebirth—carried over from the past into the future.

Haroun al Raschid was born again as Bacon of Verulam. His wise Counsellor too was born again, almost at the same time, as Amos Comenius, the educational reformer.

Think of what was brought into the world through Bacon of Verulam who was only outwardly a Christian and who introduced the abstract trend of Arabism into European science; and then think of what Amos Comenius instilled into education—his advocacy of material, concrete realism, his principles of the form in which all teaching matter should be imparted. It is a trend that has no direct connection with Christianity. Although Amos Comenius worked among the Moravian Brothers, what he actually brought into being is to be explained by the fact that in a previous incarnation he stood in the same relationship to the development of the spiritual life of mankind as did the culture flourishing at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

Think of every line of Bacon's writings, of what lies inherent in the sense-realism, as it is called, of Amos Comenius—it is all a riddle, perplexing, inexplicable. Lord Bacon is a violent opponent of Aristotelianism. His passionate antagonism is so clearly in evidence that one can perceive how deeply this impulse is rooted in his soul. The spiritual investigator who is able to discern and penetrate these things, not only studies Bacon of Verulam and Amos Comenius but also follows their life in the super-sensible world between death and rebirth. In the writings of Bacon of Verulam and Amos Comenius, in the very tone of their writings, in everything about them there is evidence of rebellion against Aristotelianism. How is this to be explained?

The following must be remembered. When Bacon and Amos Comenius returned to earthly life, Alexander and Aristotle had already again been in incarnation during the Middle Ages, at a time when they, for their part, had accomplished- what it was then possible to accomplish for Aristotelianism, moreover when Aristotelianism itself was present in a form very different from that in which it had been cultivated by Haroun al Raschid—who, as I said, is the same individuality as Bacon of Verulam.

Picture to yourselves the whole situation. Think of the meeting—if I may express it so—in the year 869 A.D. and of how under this influence there had taken shape in Haroun al Raschid impulses of soul which now encountered something that had already been partially accomplished on the earth—for Alexander and Aristotle had already been in incarnation and their lives as men on earth in the pre-Christian era had played no part in giving effect to their aim. Realising this, you will understand the nature of the impulses resulting from that meeting in the spiritual world. And from the fact that Bacon and Amos Comenius could now perceive what Alexandrianism and Aristotelianism had become in the world, you will be able to understand the tone pervading their writings—the writings of Bacon especially, but also those of Amos Comenius.

Studied in the true and real way, history, as you see, leads us from the earth to the heavens. Account must be taken of happenings that can only be revealed in the super-sensible world. To understand Bacon of Verulam and Amos Comenius we must follow them backwards, first through the epoch when Aristotelianism was being promulgated by Scholasticism, backwards again to the encounter in the year 869 at the time of the 8th Ecumenical Council and then still further back, to the epoch when Alexandrianism and Aristotelianism were being promoted and cultivated by Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor in the form that was possible in those days. The happenings of life on the earth can only be really comprehensible when account is taken of how the super-sensible world works into the physical world.

This much I wanted to say, in order to show you that the work and influence of certain personalities on earth can only be understood by following and observing their several incarnations.

There is no time to say more about these things to-day and I will therefore bring the lecture to a brief conclusion.

As we study the progress of human civilisation it becomes apparent that through such individualities as Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor who was subsequently reborn as Amos Comenius, there creeps into the development of Christianity an element that will not merge with Christianity but inclines strongly towards Arabism. Thus in our own time we have on the one side the direct, unbroken line of Christian development and on the other, the penetration of Arabism, first and foremost in abstract science.

What I want particularly to lay on your hearts is the following: Spiritual contemplation of these two streams leads our gaze to many things which have taken place in the super-sensible world, for example to an event like that of the meeting between Alexander, Aristotle, Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor. Impulses kindled by many such events furthered the spread of true Christianity, while other events were the causes of hindrances along its path. But because in the spiritual world the Michael Impulse has taken the course I have indicated to you, there is good hope that in time to come Christianity will receive its real and true form under the sign of the Michael Impulse. For under the sign of the Michael Impulse other exchanges of thought have also taken place in the super-sensible world.

Let me add only this. Many personalities have come together in the Anthroposophical Society. They too have their karma which leads back to earlier times and appears in many different forms as we go backwards to the pre-earthly existence and then to earlier incarnations. Among those who come to the Anthroposophical Movement with real sincerity, there are only a few who were not led by their karma to participate in such happenings as I have now been describing to you. In one way or another, those who with deep sincerity feel the urge to enter the Anthroposophical Society are connected with events like the meeting of Alexander and Aristotle with Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor. Something of the kind has determined the karma which then, in the present earthly life, takes the form of a longing to receive the spiritual knowledge that is cultivated in the Anthroposophical Movement.

But something else must here be added. Because of the particular form which the Michael Rulership assumes, there will be many deviations from the laws determining reincarnation in the case of those persons whose karma and connection with the Michael dominion leads them into the Anthroposophical Movement. For they will appear again at the turn of the 20th/21st century—therefore in less than a hundred years—in order to carry to full and culminating effect what as Anthroposophists they are able to do now in the service of Michael's dominion. The urge to be a true Anthroposophist expresses itself in the interest taken in matters of the kind of which we have been speaking—provided the interest is deep and sincere. The very understanding of these things gives rise to the impulse to return to the earth in less than a century in order to give effect to the intent and purpose of Anthroposophy.

I should like you to think deeply about the indications that have been given. In these brief words much may be found that will help you to find your true place in the Anthroposophical Movement and to feel that your membership of this Movement is deeply connected with your karma.

• 1. True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1969.

Questions are raised concerning pregnancy and the possible effects of outer events during pregnancy.

Dr. Steiner: Gentlemen, these are extremely important aspects of life. Generally, no significant influence can be exerted on the child during pregnancy except indirectly by way of the mother, since the child is connected with the mother, as I have said here already, by numerous delicate blood vessels. The unborn child receives everything it requires, including its nourishment, from its mother. Later, it acquires a completely different breathing process.

We can best consider the matters that you have brought up if we deal further with the general basis of human states of illness and health. In pregnancy, it is even more difficult than in the case of common hunger and thirst to say where the inclination toward illness begins and where it ends. Other things also enter into pregnancy that prove beyond doubt that the mother's condition of soul has an extraordinary influence on the developing child. You only have to observe what happens, for example, if the mother, especially in the early months of pregnancy, is badly frightened. As a rule, the child will be affected for its whole life. Naturally, you cannot say that a physical change occurs in the child but only that the mother suffers a fright. How can a mother's fright affect the child?

Modern science basically gives the most inadequate answers here, because it really knows nothing, or claims to know nothing, of what influences the human soul and spirit. We can best approach these difficult questions—and they are indeed complicated—if we focus on two phenomena of life that man experiences primarily in illness, that is, fever and shock. These are two opposite conditions that man undergoes, fever and shock.

What is fever? You know that man's normal body temperature is 98.6°. If it rises any higher, we say that he has a fever. The fever is visible outwardly through a person becoming hotter. What is shock? Shock is actually the opposite condition. Shock occurs when a person is incapable of developing sufficient warmth within. If you take an overdose of a poison such as henbane (Hyoscyamwus niger), for example, which is also used as a remedy, you risk the danger of going into shock. The reaction is that, through the shock, all the membranes in the abdomen of the mother, where the child must also be developing—therefore, the membranes of the intestines but also those of the organ in which the child rests during pregnancy, the so-called uterus, the womb, in other words, all the membranes through which a substance is introduced into the body—become slack. It is as if a sack were stretched too far, becoming worn out and unable to hold anything any longer. With the introduction of henbane, undigested food backs up, and the proper functioning of the abdomen, which I described recently, is disrupted. A large amount of food accumulates in a man's abdomen that he cannot assimilate.

In order to understand what is at work here, we must take a closer look at the human organism. What actually happens when the abdomen does not work properly? Although it is the abdomen that isn't working properly, you will find that something is actually wrong with the front portion of the brain. A very interesting relationship!

Consider the human being—the abdomen, the chest, the diaphragm, which is about here (Rudolf Steiner sketched on the blackboard). There we have abdomen, chest, and head. If something is out of order in the abdomen, then something is not functioning properly also in the front part of the brain. The two therefore belong together. In the human being they belong inwardly together, the forebrain and abdomen. We can also say that the heart with its arteries, as I have described them to you, is connected with the midbrain. Finally, the chest with the lungs and the breathing process is related to the back portion of the brain.

Every time something is amiss with the breathing, something is also wrong in the back part of the brain. Whenever a person has difficulty breathing and doesn't receive enough oxygen, one can observe that something is wrong with the back of the brain. When a person suffers from disorders of the heart, especially if the rhythm of the heart's activity is disrupted so that the pulse is irregular, then something is wrong in the midbrain. In a disorder of the abdomen, one always finds some irregularity in the forebrain. Everything is remarkably related in the human being.

You see, people often don't want to believe these things, because in the formation of the forehead they see the noblest aspect of the human being and the less noble in the abdomen. And if one speaks the truth about these things, such people find it unworthy of man. You will have realized from my lectures, however, that the digestive system is in turn related to the limb system in such a way that it represents a most significant aspect of the human being.

Once I knew a man who had quite an unusual forehead. A Greek forehead is different (sketching). In Greek statues we find foreheads that slope backward. This man actually had a pronounced bulge, and his forebrain was actually pushed out. I am convinced that this man, whose brain was pushed forward so much, possessed a particularly well-formed abdomen and never suffered from diarrhea or constipation, for example; he never suffered from stomach aches and the like. The man in question was, in fact, a person of unusual sensitivity, but this sensitivity depended on his always feeling inwardly comfortable. This indicates that his powerful, protruding forehead never permitted disorders of the abdomen. You can see from this that a man's forehead is related in a remarkable way to his abdomen.

If I give someone too large a dose of henbane, he goes into shock. What causes this shock? Something goes wrong with the forebrain, because everything possible collects in his abdomen. Oddly, however, when a person complains of a stomach ache, caused perhaps by mild constipation, I can give him henbane in highly diluted form, and he will become healthy. He gets a slight fever and becomes well.

Here you see a strange fact. If I give too much henbane to a perfectly healthy person, he goes into shock. He will suffer severe abdominal distress, his head will feel cold, his abdomen will swell, the intestines will slacken, and the abdominal functions will cease. What do you see from this? You see that I have introduced too much henbane into the stomach. The stomach should react with vastly increased digestive activity, because henbane is extremely difficult to digest. Being poisonous simply means that a substance is difficult to digest. The stomach therefore must become furiously active. The brain is not strong enough, the front part of the brain. These things thus are related in the human body. The brain is not strong enough to stimulate the stomach sufficiently; the brain becomes cold and the person goes into shock.

What happens now if I give a person a minute, diluted dose of henbane? In this case, the stomach has less to do, and the brain is strong enough to regulate this minor task. Through introducing a minute amount of henbane, which the brain can manage, I have stimulated the brain into working harder than before. If the brain can overcome it, it is like asking a person to do a job that he can manage; then, he does it well. If I ask him to do a job in one day that actually requires ten, he would be ruined. This is the case with the brain. It contains, as it were, the workman in charge of the abdomen. If I ask too little of the brain, the workman remains lazy; if he is stimulated through his activity, he does well; if I ask too much of the abdomen, however, he refuses to participate and the person goes into shock.

What is the cause of fever? Fever is actually the result of an over-activity of the brain, which penetrates the entire human being. Assume that a person suffers from a disorder in some organ, say the liver or the kidneys, or especially the lungs, in the way I discussed with you recently. The brain begins to rebel against it. If the lungs no longer function correctly, the back portion of the brain rebels and stimulates the front part into rebelling against this lung disease, and hence fever occurs.

This shows that man becomes warmer from his head downward and colder from below upward. This is very interesting. The human being actually is warmed downward from above. With fever we are concerned with our head. If there is an inflammation in the big toe, we produce the ensuing fever with the head. It is interesting that what lies farthest down is regulated by the foremost parts of the brain. Just as in the case of the dog, whose tail is regulated by his nose, so it is with the human being. If he struggles with a fever in his big toe, the activity that begets this fever lies entirely in the front of his brain. It is no slight to his dignity that, if man has an infection in his big toe, the fever originates entirely from the front, from a point above his nose. The human being thus always becomes warmer from above and colder from below.

This is related to why shock can be induced if excessively large doses of certain substances are administered to the human being but why a healing rise in temperature can be produced if we do not overtax the brain but stimulate its activity only with small doses. The activity of the brain, however, is stimulated all day not only by substances that we introduce into the brain; what we see and hear also stimulate it constantly. Also, when you eat, you not only fill your stomachs, but you taste your food as well. Taste is stimulated, as is the sense of smell, all of which stimulates the brain.

Consider a woman who is pregnant. The child is in the first period of the pregnancy, which entails a tremendous increase in the mother's abdominal activity. Except during pregnancy, such activity in the abdomen is never necessary; in men, it doesn't occur at all. The abdominal activity thus is increased in an unprecedented way. When abdominal activity is increased, the sensory nerves above all are stimulated, because the abdomen and the forebrain belong together.

What does it mean when a person is hungry? I have explained to you that here a certain activity that really should be continuous cannot be performed. When hungry, a person craves food, which means that at the same time he longs for the stimulation of his taste buds. He can alleviate this by eating.

When a woman is pregnant, however, and must provide in her abdomen something for the growing child, much is stimulated also in the brain, particularly in the sensory nerves, the nerves of taste and smell. Eating does not satisfy these nerves of taste and smell, because the food doesn't go directly to the child but to the stomach. An excess of activity is required. The abdomen must work overtime in a certain way, and so the need arises in the head for beyond-normal smells and tastes. The best care for the unborn child naturally requires an understanding of these matters.

Pregnant women thus often are not at all satisfied when they obtain what they momentarily crave; as soon as they have it, they crave another taste. Being also extremely moody, their taste is subject to abrupt change. One can appease them, however, by being kind to them and paying heed to what, in one's own opinion, is only a figment of their imagination. In the early months of pregnancy, women live in fantasies of tastes and smells. If you simply say to a pregnant woman, it is just your imagination, it is a real emotional slap to her. What is developing in her quite naturally due to the connection between the brain or head and the abdomen is repulsed. But if one cheers her up by being attentive, neither denying her wishes nor taking them literally, it is much easier to satisfy her. If, for example, one buys her something with vanilla flavor the second she craves it, by the time it is brought to her it may no longer be the right thing; she might say, “Yes, but now I want sauerkraut!” It is well that it should be so! You must realize that if something so extraordinary is to take place in her abdomen it is because the child's development must demand it, and the pregnant woman must therefore receive special consideration.

Indeed, this shows us a lot more. It shows us that a powerful influence is exerted on the child by the environment of soul and spirit in which the mother lives. With some insight, the following can be understood. There are children who are born with “water on the brain,” that is, with hydrocephalus. In most cases this can be traced back to the fact that the mother, who perhaps rightly sought stimulation in life, was bored stiff during the first months of pregnancy, particularly the first few weeks. Perhaps her husband frequently went out alone to the local pub and she, being left at home, was extremely bored. The result was that she lacked the energy required to influence the brain cells. Boredom makes her head empty; the empty head, in turn, imparts emptiness to the abdomen. It does not develop sufficient strength to hold the forces of the child's head together properly. The head swells up, becoming hydrocephalous. Other children are born with abnormally small heads, particularly the upper portion of the head, that is, with acrocephaly. Most of these cases are connected with the fact that during the first weeks of pregnancy the mother engaged in too much diversion and amused herself excessively. If such matters are observed properly, a relationship can always be noted between the child's development and the mother's mood of soul during the early weeks of pregnancy.

Naturally, much is accomplished with medicine, but regarding these questions we have as yet no real medicine today but only a kind of quackery, because the many relationships are not correctly discerned by a merely materialistic science. These relationships require individual observation in most instances, and during the embryonic life of the human being, and therefore during pregnancy, they can be observed particularly well. Consider the significantly increased abdominal activity during pregnancy; the abdomen must be terribly active. This, in turn, calls for the strongest possible activity of the forebrain. It is not surprising, therefore, that some mothers actually become a little crazy during the first stage of pregnancy. They become a little crazy, because the abdomen and the forebrain, which actually thinks, are closely related. One arrives at very remarkable and interesting results if one looks for the relationships between the abdomen and what humanity accomplishes spiritually. It is curious and funny that spiritual science must call attention to these matters, whereas materialistic science completely fails in this area.

It would be extraordinarily interesting, for example, to consider the following. You see, there were a great many philosophers in England—Hobbes, Bacon, Locke, Hume. These philosophers, even including John Stuart Mill, led essentially to the great rise of materialism. These philosophers all had such heavy thoughts that they could not penetrate the spiritual with their thoughts. They clung to matter with their thoughts. It would be extraordinarily interesting to examine the digestions of all these philosophers, these many philosophers. I am convinced they all suffered from constipation! Starting with Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and proceeding all the way into the nineteenth, this whole philosophy that brought us materialism was actually caused by the constipation of individual philosophers! This materialism could have been prevented—what I say now is not in earnest, I only wish to make a joke!—if one had given Hobbes, Bacon, Locke, and the others regular laxatives in their youth. Then all this materialism most likely would not have arisen.

It is indeed odd, you see, that something that people frequently call materialistic must be pointed out by spiritual science. But the reason for this is that when the human being is really observed, the spirit is revealed where others see only matter. Anthroposophy does not assume that the abdomen is only a chemical factory. I once told you that the liver is a wondrous organ, that the kidney with its functions is also a marvelous organ. Only by comprehending these organs will one find the spirit everywhere. If you stop finding the spirit in some area, if you think that digestion is a process that is too materialistic to be studied in a spiritual way, you then become a materialist. Indeed, materialism came into being through spiritual arrogance. I have told you this before, though it sounds remarkable: when the ancient Jews of the Old Testament had bad thoughts during the night, they did not blame the bad, unhealthy thoughts on their heads but on their kidneys. When they said, “This night God has affected my kidneys,” they were more correct than today's medicine. The ancient Jews also said that God reveals Himself to man not through man's head but directly through the activity of his kidneys and generally through his abdominal activity.

Considering this viewpoint, it is most interesting, though I don't know if you gentlemen have seen it, to watch an Orthodox Jew pray. When a devout Orthodox Jew prays, he does not take his phylactery out of a pocket that he wears over his heart or that hangs over his head. He wears his phylactery over his abdomen and prays with it in this position. People today naturally no longer know what the relationship is here, but those who long ago gave the ancient Jews their commandments were aware of the relationship. In western regions of Europe, people don't have much opportunity anymore to see this, but in eastern European regions it makes quite a special impression to observe how the old Jews pray. When they prepare for prayer, they take the phylactery out of the slit in their trousers; it then hangs around them and they pray.

This knowledge that humanity once possessed by means of various dreamlike, ancient clairvoyant forces has been lost, and humanity today is not advanced enough to rediscover the spirit in all matter. You can comprehend nothing if you simply take your ordinary thoughts into a laboratory and mechanically execute experiments, and so on. You are not thinking at all while doing this. You must experiment in such a way that something of the spirit emerges everywhere; for that to happen, your experiments must be arranged accordingly. And so one can say that it is funny that anthroposophy, the science of the spirit, has to point out how the human brain, the so-called noblest part, is connected with the lower abdomen, but it is simply so. Only a true science leads to these facts. Similarly, any number of things can cause a disorder of the heart, for example. It can come through an internal irregularity, but in most cases an irregular activity of the heart can be traced to some disorder in the midbrain, where the feelings are particularly based (see sketch, Diagram 1). It is interesting to discover that just as the abdomen is related to the forebrain, so this forebrain is related, from the viewpoint of the soul, to the will, and the midbrain is related to feeling. Actually, only the back part of the brain is related to thinking. If we look into the brain, we see that the hindbrain is related to breathing and to thinking. Breathing has, in fact, a pronounced relationship to thinking.

Picture the following case. A person lacking the benefits of Waldorf education, in which these things are frequently discussed, develops in his youth in such a way that he turns out to be a scoundrel. His feelings are confused, causing him to be malicious. What does this mean? It means that the soul does not work correctly in the midbrain. If the soul is not properly nourished, the heart's rhythm becomes irregular. You can cause an irregular rhythm of the heart and all sorts of diseases of the heart by developing into an ill-tempered person.

Naturally, if a woman in early pregnancy goes into a forest, let us say, and has the misfortune of discovering a person who has hanged himself from a tree and is already dead—if he is still twitching, it's even worse—she sustains a terrible shock. It becomes an image in her, and probably, unless other measures can be taken—usually by life itself, not by artificially induced means—she will give birth to a child who is pale, with a pointed chin and skinny limbs, and who is unable to move around properly. With a pregnant woman, just one such frightening sight suffices to affect the unborn child. In later life, when one is eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years old, to be a scoundrel only once won't hurt; one must become a habitual scoundrel, and that takes longer. With a pregnant woman, however, a single incident is enough.

The results of such experiments can reach much further. Imagine a young mother-to-be who is busy with her work. She hasn't been told that army maneuvers are being held nearby. Cannons begin to thunder, and her ears are given a frightful shock. Since hearing is strongly connected with the hindbrain as well as with the breathing, such a fright can cause a disorder of the breathing system of her developing child.

You might ask, “What is he saying? Why, he wants us to pay attention to every little detail in life!” Yes, gentlemen, if a healthy educational system and healthy social conditions existed, you wouldn't have to think at all about many of these things, since they would develop by force of habit like other routine matters. I don't believe that there are many men who, when they habitually beat their wives in the middle of every month, give it too much thought. They do it out of habit. There are such husbands. Why do they beat their wives? Because they have run out of money, they cannot go down to the local pub, so they amuse themselves at home by abusing their wives. These are habits that are formed. Well, gentlemen, if we had a sound educational system for everybody, we would acquire different habits. Were it known, for example, that army maneuvers would be held one morning and that there would be explosions, it should as a matter of course be called to the attention of any pregnant woman in the area. Something like this can become a habit. Sound education and socially acceptable conditions can give rise to a number of habits that need not be thought about any longer but simply carried out. This is something toward which we must work. Essentially, however, this can be accomplished only through proper education.

This is why the science of the spirit in particular will be in a position to explain the material world correctly. Materialism only looks at the material realm but is ignorant of all that lives in the material. It observes fever but does not know that fever is called forth by tremendously expanded brain activity. Materialism is always greatly astonished by shock but does not rightly recognize that shock comes from a drop of body temperature, because the proper “internal combustion” [Verbrennung] can no longer continue. Thus we can say that the way the head of a pregnant woman is stimulated is strongly connected with the child's development.

People pay no heed to what is contained in spiritual culture. A sound education will also gradually permeate everything we read and are told. Someday, for example, when people pay attention to what anthroposophy says, novels will perhaps be published for pregnant women. When pregnant women read them, they will receive impressions of ideal human beings. As a result, beautiful babies will be born who will grow to be strong, fine-looking human beings. What a woman does with her head during pregnancy becomes the source of the activity taking place in her abdomen. She shapes and forms the child with what she imagines, feels, and wills.

Here, spiritual science becomes tangible to the point where one can no longer say that the spirit has no influence on the human being. For the rest of his life, unless education sets it right later on, a person is under the influence of what his mother did during the first months of pregnancy. The later months are not as particularly important, because man has already been shaped, and definite forms have become fixed, but the first months are of particular importance and are full of significance. When one sees the physical origin of the human being in the womb, something reveals itself that in every respect points to spiritual science.

If one thinks reasonably, one can say to oneself that the warmth streaming down from above and the cold streaming up from below must always meet in the right way in the abdomen. One must care for the abdomen in the right way. This is something that must be seen, so that what comes from above can meet what comes from below in the right way. When we are clear that a person is so strongly influenced by his mother's experiences of soul and spirit that he can end up with a large or a small head, a ruined heart or breathing system, then we see that a person is, in fact, completely influenced by soul-spiritual considerations.

It can also happen that a mother-to-be, in the first or second months of pregnancy, could run into somebody with an unusually crooked nose, the likes of which she has never seen before. Unless some corrective measure is taken, in most cases the child will receive a crooked nose. You will even be able to see that in most cases if the woman was startled by the sight of a person whose nose was twisted to the right, the child will be born with a nose twisted to the left. Just as a man's right hand is connected with the left speech center in the brain, just as everything is reversed in the human being, so the twist of the nose is also reversed. We can conclude that if someone has a crooked nose, he most likely has it because his mother was frightened by someone with a crooked nose. A person has many other features. Materialistic science, when it doesn't know something's origin, always talks of heredity. If one has a crooked nose—well, that's inherited; the red skin tone of another—that's inherited, too. Things are not like this, however. They arise from causes such as I have related. The concept of heredity is one of the most ambiguous held by modern science. If you look at a person and see a twisted nose or a birthmark, this does not necessarily indicate that the mother saw the same birthmark. She might have seen something else that caused the child's blood to flow in the wrong direction. These are all deviations from the normal human form, but there is indeed a normal human form.

One cannot say simply that deviations from the normal human form do not come from bodily but from spiritual experiences while still maintaining that the entire human being comes merely from the belly of the mother, from that which is within the material realm! If one wishes to explain deviations spiritually, one must explain the entire human being spiritually. Naturally, the mother no more than the father can produce a human being spiritually. To do so would require the production of something impossible, that is, the art of being human, which is infinite. We are led to understand, therefore, that man already exists prior to birth as a spiritual being, and as soul he united with what is made available to him corporeally. Only regarding abnormal features can the embryo be influenced spiritually. It is much more remarkable, however, that I have a nose in the middle of my face or that I have two eyes! If I am born with a crooked nose, that is an abnormal feature, but recall the nose in the middle of the face with its marvelous normal form, which I recently explained to you, and the eye—what a wonder-filled thing! All this does not grow out of the mother's womb; it is something that already exists in the soul realm before the human being arises in the womb.

Here, correctly understood, natural science points to what human life is like in the spiritual world before conception. Today's materialists will naturally say that this is fantasy. Why do they say this? All the ancient people who, in primordial human times, still possessed certain dreamlike perceptions, which we no longer have, knew that man exists before he appears on earth. Throughout the Middle Ages, however, it was forbidden by decree of the Church to think of so-called pre-existence, which means pre-earthly existence; the Church forbade it. When a materialist agitates today, the rostrum is only the continuation of the medieval pulpit, and though he no longer speaks the language of those preachers, using instead the words of an agitator, he only says what medieval sermons stated long ago. Materialism has simply taken over the medieval preachings, and, though they are not aware of. it, today's materialists basically elaborate on what the Church taught. Materialism stems basically from the Church of the Middle Ages. Then, no soul was permitted to have existed before its earthly life. The intention was to teach people that God creates the soul when conception takes place. If a couple were in the mood to let conception occur—we know that in many instances this can be a mood of the moment—the Good Lord had to move quickly and create a soul for them! This is what the Church edict really implied and what one was supposed to believe.

It is not a sensible viewpoint, however, to make God the servant of the moods of human beings, so that he must hurriedly produce a soul when they happen to be in a mood to let conception take place. If you give this some thought, you discover what is actually contained in the materialistic viewpoint, which undermines human dignity. A real and true knowledge of the human being leads us instead to the realization that the soul is already there, has always lived. It descends to what is offered it through the human seed and its fertilization.

Anthroposophy has not, therefore, arrived back at the spirit because of some arbitrary fantasy but simply because it must, because it takes scientific knowledge seriously, which the others do not. People study natural science, which would lead to the spirit, but they are too lazy to come through natural science to the spirit on their own. That would require a little effort on the part of their heads. Instead, they allow some old teachers to deprive them of the spirit, and yet they still manage to be religious! Then they are dishonest, however; it is like keeping two sets of books. A person who is consistent in his reckoning must ascend from nature to spirit, and matters such as those we have discussed today, for example, will lead us there.

In the various recent reflections that have been presented here, I have tried less to convey individual concepts and ideas to you than to characterize a certain way of relating to the world. For it must be borne in mind over and over again that the most important thing in relation to the acquisitions to be made through spiritual science is not the conceptual, the imaginative, but the whole soul disposition, the whole soul mood, which the human being of the future will be able to acquire for our development on earth through spiritual science.

Today, almost all those who engage with spiritual science still have some remnants of old attitudes and old soul moods. And this is especially the case to an even greater extent because a certain soul mood in the modern soul has only been evoked for a relatively short time, for three, four to five centuries, in the search for the unraveling of natural phenomena. This soul mood, which I would like to describe as emanating from the so-called scientific world view, is regarded in the broadest circles today as the only valid one. We know that the permeation of scientific concepts and ideas as the basis of a world view has only taken hold among a small part of the world's population today; after all, modern school education basically ensures that it is not so much science as this scientific attitude that is spreading rapidly. And since this scientific frame of mind has only taken hold for a short time, it is naturally difficult for the spiritual-scientific world-view to become established in that which has only taken hold for a short time and which must first develop in the majority of people as a transitional stage in evolution. This scientific world-view mood necessarily leads gradually to a kind of materialism, because it cannot be otherwise than one-sided. It has been acquired in a one-sided way through what may be called man's head experiences, and it also strives to exclude from the mentioned world-view conceptions everything that does not correspond to this head mood of man, that is not thought up, invented, won through experiment or observation with the help of thinking and inventing. One could say that this world-view sentiment has also really retained its one-sidedness with regard to the view of the human being, and in view of the many impulses that have entered the human soul, we can feel how difficult it will be to unfold through spiritual science the more comprehensive soul mood of the world, which emanates from the whole human being again.

If someone today who is thoroughly steeped in the scientific world view gets hold of a book such as, for example, “The Secret Science in the Outline”, he naturally regards the content of this book as a kind of crazy nonsense, because he cannot derive any special meaning from this book due to his one-sided brain and head mood. Now, something of a radical contrast between the spiritual-scientific world-view mood and the natural-scientific world-view mood is evident from one phenomenon in particular – from many phenomena, of course, but most strikingly from one phenomenon. I would like to emphasize this point first.

When we study the human being from a spiritual scientific perspective, we see that the further we go back into the distant past, as we say, into the lunar evolution of our planetary existence, the more we realize that what appears to be so significant for the human being's development on earth was not actually present in the old lunar evolution. In this ancient lunar development, what was present in today's human being was essentially – I say essentially – that which is more or less connected with the present-day development of the human brain. And what the human being has besides his head, besides what mainly belongs to the skull, to the head, his remaining physicality, that is essentially an earthly product, a product of earthly organization.

Essentially, I say again. One could also say: if one traces man back to the ancient development of the moon, then one gradually sees, the further one goes back, his outer limbs, through which he is an earthly human being today, shrink, and what remains is his head, which has of course been transformed by the development of the earth, but which essentially remains when one goes back to the development of the moon. The other has become inorganic, attached. I once explained this in more detail in the lectures on 'Occult Physiology', which I hope will be published soon, in the Prague cycle that I gave in 1911. So, essentially, we come to the conclusion that the human being has emerged from what is now compressed and concentrated in his skull organization; the other has become attached. We must therefore say that, schematically drawn, we would have man in his lunar development like this, and in his earthly development we would have him like this, with the rest of the organization attached to it.

Take what I have just said and compare it with what the one-sided natural scientific world view has achieved to date. In a one-sided way - of course there is something justified at the basis of all these things - it assumes that man has gradually developed from the lower animal stages to his present perfection. What do we see in the lower animal kingdom? We see in them precisely that which has been added to the development of the brain and head in the course of human evolution; and we see the atrophy in the animals of precisely that which is contained in the human head. In animals we see the limbs, the appendages, particularly developed, and what had already developed particularly in the head in man during the ancient lunar evolution, and what then concentrated, we see in animals still shrivelled up and stunted. But only this is seen by the scientific world view. We can say that the scientific world view actually puts the cart before the horse, because it takes what has only been added in humans as its starting point, and what was present in humans before they even had organs like those that present-day animals have, as something that is supposed to have developed from these forms themselves.

From a logical point of view, this means nothing less than concluding: First you look at a child and then at the father and find that the father is taller than the child. Since you now assume, as a result of a logical conclusion, that the larger, developing thing could only have emerged from the smaller, the father would have to have developed from the child, and not the other way around. That is how one actually concludes. The one-sidedness of the modern scientific way of thinking will one day seem as grotesque as the newer awareness of humanity. It will be known that the one-sidedly conceived Darwinian theory is logically nothing more than the assertion that the child has born its father.

Now you can imagine the efforts that will be necessary before humanity relearns about such things, as they have now been hinted at, and what is needed to truly relearn. They have happily managed to establish a world view that turns the world upside down, and now humanity will be confronted with the necessity of turning the world right side up again. But it has taken hardly three to four centuries to get used to the idea that the “upside down” position is the right one.

It is truly one of our tasks not just to acquire theoretical ideas about this or that in the world, but to acquire feelings and perceptions for the tasks that lie before us within the spiritual-scientific movement. We must be clear about how much what must follow for us from the spiritual-scientific view of the world must really differ from what surrounds us everywhere outside today. Otherwise we shall fall again and again into the error of not noticing the radical differences and of wanting to make compromises thoughtlessly, whereas we must be aware that we cannot but develop something from the earlier world-views by grafting it on, but must develop out of a new original cell of world-view life that which can more and more come to our mind as the right thing out of spiritual science. Only with this consciousness will we succeed in putting our soul into our task, and we must get used to the fact that many questions that arise outside the circle of spiritual science can only be tackled, as I showed with reference to a question yesterday, if we open ourselves to what spiritual science can trigger in our soul.

Let us consider something else that may be close to us in relation to the place where we are now standing, the place where we have built our structure. I have emphasized it often in the past, how art, science and religion are three branches of human spiritual life that spring from one root. If we go back, as I have often said, to the time of the primeval mysteries, we do not find the practices of the primeval mysteries in such a way that we could say they were art or religion or science, but they are all that together. In the primeval mysteries, science, religion and art are one unit, organically connected with each other.

What people today try to visualize with the impotent concepts and ideas I spoke of yesterday, man saw in living representation, in living contemplation in the primeval mysteries. He perceived what he can only think today. We will not approach a work of art in the future as we look at a work of art today. In the future, we will not approach the work of art by looking at it and then believing that we understand it only with our thoughts, but we will understand it by directly looking at it and experiencing it in our soul. Thus, by directly experiencing what he was looking at, the person who was initiated into the mysteries understood what he was meant to consciously grasp. What he was to grasp so consciously, what he was to understand by looking and to look at by understanding, was at the same time something beautiful, appearing in outer forms and colors, speaking in sounds and words: it was art at the same time. They were one, science and art.

Today only art, which has separated itself from what science is supposed to give us, gives us an idea of how one can be united with the object inwardly at the same time as being united with it outwardly in direct contact; and only those who want to introduce the barbarism of symbolism, of symbolizing, into art sin against this direct experiencing understanding of the work of art. For the moment one begins to interpret a work of art, one leaves behind that which one might call the experiential understanding of the work of art. It is, in fact, a real barbarism, let us say, to proceed in this way with “Hamlet”, so that the individual persons are interpreted as the principles of the theosophical view or the like. I would not like to live to see the individual forms of our structure interpreted symbolically in this way, because it is the direct, understanding experience that is at stake here!

Thus, in the primeval mysteries, the scientific experience of the world was at the same time the artistic experience of the world, and at the same time this scientific and artistic experience of the world was the religious feeling of the world. For what was experienced in this way in direct living contemplation, in experiencing understanding and in understanding experience, was at the same time that which could be venerated, to which one could lift one's whole soul with religious fervor. Religion, art and science were one; and it was because of human weakness through original sin that there had to be a separation into science, art and religion. What was originally one had to split, so that a religious current, an artistic current and a scientific current arose. What originally took hold of the whole human soul as an organism, woven from scientific, religious and artistic content, had to be distributed among the individual powers of the soul. For the intellect, for thinking, science was given to man, so that when he experiences the world in thought through science, his will and feeling can sleep, can rest.

Man became weak. One-sidedly, in thinking, he sought to experience the world scientifically, and again one-sidedly he sought to experience it artistically so that the other powers could sleep. Again one-sidedly, he sought to experience the world religiously for the same reason. Man would not be able to shape in such perfection that which he can work out intellectually, as is happening today, if a one-sided scientific trend had not developed; he would not have been able to achieve what has been accomplished artistically if art had not separated itself; and religious fervor would not have reached the heights it was destined to reach if it had not separated itself from the other powers of the soul that are devoted to science and art.

But with regard to this separation, we have indeed reached a crisis, and this crisis is clearly expressed; it is expressed very, very clearly. In what? I would say that especially in the last few centuries, humanity has had to experience more and more how this crisis expresses itself. Science, art and religion have become so divorced that they no longer understand each other, that they can no longer have any relationship with each other. Slowly we see how the “diplomatic relations” between religion, science and art are broken off. We see how such relationships still existed, say, in the heyday of the Italian Renaissance, where an intimate bond was woven between religion and art in the creations of Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. But the more we delve into more recent times, the more we find that a mutual lack of understanding has gradually developed between science, art and religion. We see – and unfortunately have to admit – how, in many cases in recent centuries, religion has even become hostile to art; we see how it has thrown out art, how there are religious movements that seek to achieve the height of religious feeling by throwing out sculptures and making churches as sober and artless as possible. We also see how another religious current has come to have sculptures, but mostly those that are no longer works of art, because what we still find in churches in the form of sculptures from past centuries is not intended to awaken the sense of art, the aesthetic sense, but to thoroughly eradicate it. And on the other hand, we see how art has increasingly lost sight of its connection with the conception of the divine-spiritual being, how everything has passed over into naturalism, how more and more people only want to depict what has a model in external nature.

Of course, art must then break off its, if I may say so, “diplomatic relations” with religion if it only wants to be naturalistic art, because that which religion must venerate cannot have a model in external nature. That is quite obvious. And how little science has maintained its relations can be seen from the slow approach of this breaking off of relations. Yes, we can see that it is approaching slowly.

We have an excellent artist in the 16th century who was also active as an anatomist and technician in the most diverse fields: Leonardo da Vinci. Anyone who studies his scientific works can still feel everywhere how these scientific works are imbued with artistic meaning. But one can see how this sense has increasingly evaporated in more recent times, how unartistic it has become, and how today it seems to be believed that the greatness of science consists precisely in being unartistic. It has almost become a dogma for a certain direction of modern times that Goethe is such a visionary physicist because the artistic sense did not allow him to become a proper physicist.

In short, misunderstanding has arisen between the three currents. But this marks the crisis. For when that which comes from one root separates in its mutual relationships in such a way that the life juices no longer come from the common root, the crisis must occur, the one-sided development must lead these currents to wither away. In recent times, we have reached a crisis in our failure to understand what a common organism, a coherent organism in human nature, is and how it separates in the outer evolution. We are in the crises. Such crises can be described in such a way that we can say that human nature demands organic unification of what has had to go separate ways in the outer world for some time. In many areas of life, the person who does not go through the evolution of the world indifferently can perceive such crisis, and such a person will observe much of what cannot remain as it is in today's development in these crises, and he will gain insight into what has to happen in order to overcome the crises.

We have already hinted at one crisis in the fact that science, art and religion no longer understand each other. Another crisis is going through the world, which is noticed only by a few, but which is terrible in its effect, a crisis that stems from the lack of understanding between two currents. The one current is that which was once breathed through the world in the infinitely deep sayings engraved in the human heart: “My kingdom is not of this world” and “You are from below, but I am from above”. Man's root is in the spiritual world.

The second current, which must develop more and more into a crisis-ridden confrontation with what is expressed in the words: “My kingdom is not of this world” and “I am from above, but you are from below,” is the word: “L'état c'est moi! The state is me!” My kingdom, the kingdom of my ego, is completely bound to this world. The right way lies in the synthesis of the two sentences. It lies in a universally conceived Christianity, expressed in the words “Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.” In correctly understood Christianity there is no false turning away from the world. But there is also not that one-sidedness in it, which can only be lived out in the attachment to the material institutions of world existence.

In speaking of this, we are touching on the very deepest tasks of anthroposophy. For anthroposophy, in the true sense of the word, must not arise one-sidedly from the mood of the head, but from the whole soul of man. And only then will this soul find the transition into anthroposophical life when it is completely seized by spiritual science, not only in its life of ideas, but when it is completely seized by it.

It is a fact that what has become the human head during the moon-life is on the way to becoming the whole human being during the earth-life. During the old moon-evolution there was a being, the ancestor of the present human being. What was then an outer organism has today become the head. The limbs have been added. When the coming Jupiter evolution is complete, this whole organism of today's human being will have become the head. What you are today as a whole human being will become the brain, the head, of the Jupiter human, just as the whole moon human has become the head of the earth human.

The task of true spiritual development consists in truly anticipating the future. Therefore, we must become aware that there is a head culture around us and that it is our responsibility to create a human culture. Our head could not think, could not reflect any ideas or concepts if it behaved like the rest of our organism; it could never truly fulfill its task. Our head reflects the world, which then becomes our world of perception, only because it can forget itself in its perception, can truly forget itself. In its feeling, the human being is - thank God - always headless. If you try to feel your way through and ask yourself: What do I feel least in my organism? - it is really the head that forgets itself most in normal life. And when it does not forget itself, then it hurts, and then it also prefers not to perceive anything, but to be left in peace and without perception. That is where it asserts its egoism. Otherwise, however, it extinguishes itself, and because it extinguishes itself, we can perceive the whole surrounding world. It is organized to extinguish itself.

If you were to forget even the slightest part of the outer periphery of the head, but instead focus on it, then you would no longer be able to perceive the external environment. Imagine that instead of perceiving the external world, you would see your eye; for example, if you were to take a step back with your perception, then you would see the cranial cavity, but with the perception of the external world it would be nothing. To the same extent and at the same moment that a person succeeds in completely switching off their organism – which, as is well known, is achieved through meditation and in initiation – to that same extent and in that same moment, this organism becomes a real mirror of the world, only that we then see not the organism but the cosmos. Just as the head does not see itself either, but what is around it, so the whole human being, when it becomes an organ of perception, sees the cosmos. This is the ideal that we must have in mind: forgetting the organism as it appears to us on the physical plane, and being able to use it instead as a mirroring apparatus for the secrets of the cosmos.

In this way we gradually expand our head-centered view to a whole-humane view of the world, and we must learn to sense, to feel, to perceive something of how truly anthroposophy human being, overcoming this head-centeredness – so I may call it in contrast to the anthroposophical centeredness – the one-sided head-centeredness that comes from modern science and so only takes hold of the head.

If you take something of what I said yesterday, when I described how man can become aware that he is a lamp for the cherubim, a heating apparatus for the seraphim, how he enters into the world of cherubim and seraphim in thinking and willing, how he means something for this world, how his self is not only there for itself, but stands in a living relationship to the weaving and life of the spiritual hierarchies - if you make that an attitude, then you will feel something of how the whole person can truly become brain, how he as a whole person can thus come into communication with his surroundings, as otherwise only the head can. Then you will feel what is actually meant by this: to perceive the world as a whole human being.

But if you perceive the world as a whole human being, then you cannot think, feel and will one-sidedly, but you become immersed in the whole of earthly existence. You immerse yourself in the whole experience of the world, and it arises by itself, I would say, the inner sense of dependence on it, not only in thoughts but also in forms, not only in the formless thoughts but in the beautiful, expressive forms. The urge arises, the need to express things in artistic forms that you understand intellectually.

And again: when a person delves into the entire spiritual life of the world, his life basically becomes prayer, and he no longer has such an urgent need to single out little minutes in which to pray. Rather, he knows: when I think, I am a lampstand for the cherubim; when I act, when I act with will, I am a heating apparatus for the seraphim. Man knows that he lives in the whole spiritual world structure. Thinking becomes a religious conviction for him, and acting becomes a moral prayer.

We see how these three areas, art, religion and science, which had to go their separate ways in the world for a while, are seeking each other out of the whole human being again. At the beginning of the development of the earth, man brought so much with him from extra-terrestrial development that he still had the living, unified feeling, the unified striving, as it expressed itself in the old days in the union of art, religion and science. One could say that in man at that time there still strove his angel, his Angelos. But man would never have become free if it had continued like this. Man had to be emancipated from this old inheritance. But he must find again in the ascending evolution what he has lost in the descending evolution.

Goethe's beautiful words about architecture have been mentioned several times. He called architecture frozen music. Let us dwell on this saying. It is truly possible to call architecture, in its previous development, a kind of frozen music. The forms of architecture are like frozen melodies, like solidified harmonies and rhythms. But we have the task, since we are in the midst of the crisis mentioned, of bringing the frozen back into motion, into liveliness, of making the frozen forms musically alive again, so to speak. When you see our building, you will see our efforts to set the old, rigid forms of construction in motion, to transform them into life, to make them musical again. This is the reason why we do not have a round building, but a single axis of symmetry, along which the motifs move.

Thus we see how the spiritual-scientific worldview, including its artistic aims, is intimately connected with all the tasks and necessary impulses of our time, which we recognize in the crises of our time. Understanding and seeing this is our task, it is of utmost importance for our task. We must gradually bring together all the details of our task from this point of view.

Today, people quickly forget how to use their entire organism like a kind of brain. He has the potential, but as soon as he has developed from a crawling child into an upright human being in the first years of life, he quickly forgets how to relate to his entire organism, just as he will then relate to his brain throughout his entire life; for this straightening up, this bringing-himself-into-the-vertical is in fact a working of the spirit on the whole human being. This is the last remnant of what we bring with us from our spiritual, prenatal life, because in our earthly life we quickly unlearn it. And then we drag the whole organism, which eats and drinks and digests, through life like a burden; we drag it through life and no longer bring it into a respectful relationship with the spiritual world, but far away from the spiritual world.

The child still has the great wisdom to know that man's task lies in the heights far from the world and has the direction towards heights far from the world in its organism. When that is over, the organism becomes a digestive and gastric sac and is separated from the relationship with the outside world.

Not even the relationship to the outside world, of which I spoke yesterday, is maintained. When we, for example, rest our head in our hand in order to express something weighty in the external organism, we hardly notice it. And if someone in their unconsciousness still retains the habit of using the whole organism and not just thinking with the brain, but also placing the hand or the index finger on the forehead or the nose, thus indicating that they are really distinguishing and judging - we do not notice that this is an instinctive effort to use the whole organism like a brain. It does not have to happen in this external way. Of course, spiritual science does not intend to turn human beings into fidgets who think with their whole bodies. But spiritually, of course, the consciousness must expand to include the whole human being in the cosmos, to know that the cosmos can be mirrored by the whole body, just as the cosmos is now only mirrored by the brain.

When consciousness is broadened in this way, when the human being really goes beyond merely dragging his organism through life, so to speak, and learns to use and handle it, then the foundation is laid for what must be laid in our time: a human, a totally human world view, as opposed to a mere cerebral view, must become what anthroposophy has to strive for.

If we try to do this, and if we try to elevate our attitudes in this way, which otherwise remain only ideas, then we will achieve what is intended with this spiritual scientific movement of ours. For we will gradually find our way as human beings, ascending in development, to the real figure of Christ, when we have become more and more familiarized with the all-human conception of the world. That this Christ-figure cannot be found is only the fault of the brain-view. The moment this is overcome, the moment spiritual science has become so strong that man's consciousness is so completely reorganized in the way described, then what has often been said about the Christ-view will really come to pass. But then our human world will be able to achieve what it can only achieve from within and which will lead it beyond many things that have now led to a crisis among the earth's human race, not only inwardly, in terms of world views, but also outwardly, in terms of people and nations.

One would like people to gradually realize, at least a small part of people, that real help is needed. Then one will also realize that the help that humanity needs can only be provided by the souls, only from within, and that everything else cannot even be a surrogate, because surrogates can no longer help against the great crises of our time, only the real and the true. And the genuine and true must be conquered by humanity in the spirit. Christmas celebration

Roman Boos: The aim of this evening is to strengthen the awareness of those present and to clarify the idea of what concrete effects of what is intended at the Goetheanum can be expected in the near or distant future. The task should be such that the course should give the participants something to take away, so that everyone has the opportunity to say or know where they can help, where they can actively participate in the work.

The first thing to be discussed is the idea that in the very near future, the spiritual life must be detached with the greatest intensity from the entanglement in the powers of the state. The political states, in the West as well as in the East, are no longer even able to economically maintain the usurped school supervision rights. Schools are to be established over those areas that were not involved in the economic collapse and want to emerge from the spiritual collapse. The idea of a world school association on an international basis was indeed expressed and carried out in a large number of meetings in Holland a few weeks ago. And so today, Dutch friends have promised to share more information about this World School Association. And I would also like to point out in this regard that those gathered here can be trusted to help the World School Association become a reality.

The enterprises founded under Futurum AG and Der Kommende Tag AG were also set up to grow into what are currently unlimited expanses. What grew up as a Stinnes group, for example, has joined forces with the worst of existences; if such a monster were to receive international credit, it would be to the detriment of healthy development. It is therefore necessary to gain a foothold in economic life, to bring into being economic associations that do justice to the international dimension; it is necessary to seek the way forward in international discussions. In order to say something internationally significant, it will be necessary to speak across the divides created by the currency situation, of the future and of the day to come.

We are being accosted from all sides. And so it is an absolute necessity for the continuation of our work in Switzerland and beyond that we are given the opportunity to regularly publish a journal here at the Goetheanum, at least a weekly publication, in which we do not have to continually polemicize and discussions — although this will sometimes be necessary — but in which brief sketches and suggestions could be used to outline what is actually at stake here, and in which the international idea of a world school association or a world economic association, in particular, would have to be expressed again and again. In a sense, here in Switzerland we still have a foundation that we can speak of more clearly and impressively than anywhere else. Otherwise the Goetheanum would have to remain silent if it cannot make itself known in this way. Actually, very few people have come to this course. The Goetheanum itself, as a work of art, as a building, as a physical reality, has not yet been permeated with sufficient intensity. It is becoming necessary to carry out what is to be achieved for the whole world from the Goetheanum.

All those who have the opportunity to help us find the economic basis for such a newspaper are warmly invited to do so. We have to calculate 50,000 francs for one year; we cannot start before then. The reason we cannot start before then is that otherwise we might have to stop the project again after a while. If any of you could help to ensure that the newspaper can be published, you would be doing a great service that could hardly be achieved in any other way under the present circumstances.

Elisabeth Vreede: I would like to say a few words about the 'World School Association'. It is actually more of an appeal than a concrete foundation. The first steps towards the founding of a World School Association have been taken in the Netherlands, in order to get a world-wide response to what would now have to be done, and that is to liberate spiritual life, especially education, and make it independent. The hope has been expressed that this can be done in Holland. On February 27, Dr. Steiner gave a captivating lecture in The Hague on “Educational, Teaching and Practical Life Issues from the Perspective of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science” and drew attention to the necessity of a free spiritual life and of the school's detachment from state authority, which was met with strong applause from the audience. Afterwards, our member, Mr. de Haan, addressed an appeal to those present. As a result, a number of things have happened; people with good reputations have become interested in working for independent schools. Representatives from Switzerland, Germany and England expressed their conviction of the necessity of a world school association and promised to work for the cause in their own countries. A similar thing happened the next day in Amsterdam. But the World School Association was not yet founded, because such a foundation is only of value if it arises from within, so to speak. But we must not draw the conclusion that nothing should be done; rather, the most intensive work is needed to bring about a concrete foundation.

The first thing to be done now is to approach all educated people with a kind of prospectus - they are, after all, fundamentally interested in a free spiritual life; Dr. Steiner has given the guidelines for this. An appeal is to be made to all educated people to join us in providing our movement with the breeding ground and the air it needs to thrive. Since the whole thing started in Holland, I would like to draw attention to the address of Mr. de Haan, Utrecht; he is willing to provide information. From the events of the past few years, enough has emerged to show how important and significant it is, but also how much work will be needed if something like this is to be undertaken. So let us make an appeal that will find an echo throughout the educated world, so to speak.

(Applause)

Josef van Leer: Dear attendees, a few weeks ago the World School Association was discussed for the first time in The Hague and in Amsterdam. However, nothing will come of it if we do not take action immediately. We did have about 150 names that evening in The Hague, but you can't do anything with just names. Our friends in the Netherlands have the good will, but they are too weak.

A little less than ten years ago, similar discussions were held in Berlin, when Baron von Walleen spoke about his experiences on lecture tours in Scandinavia and England and said that it was so difficult to present Dr. Steiner's ideas there; what is today the Anthroposophical Society emerged from these discussions.

If you talk about an independent spiritual life in England today, everyone will say: We don't need one, we have one. That is an abstraction, of course, but that is how it is; as far as the people in England belong to the bourgeoisie, they can educate their children as they wish, they do not need certified teachers. If you have to propagate the World School Association in England, you are dealing with something quite different than in Germany or in Holland or in Switzerland. I believe that Scandinavia, Holland, England — even if it is not neutral, but it does not matter — all the countries that do not belong to the medium-sized states, should join together. In Holland, one has gained plenty of confidence, but the 25 sounding names do not help much. Dr. Steiner gave about ten lectures in Holland, but of the thousands who were there, not three voted in favor of it. It will be difficult to get only these three.

The question was raised: How do we propagate? — It is necessary to work differently for each country. Our friends in Stuttgart know best what to do because they are in the work. I would therefore like to suggest that we people from different countries — America, England, France, Switzerland, Italy — that we sit down together and say this evening: we will do it this way! I would like to propose this right now. Who from all the countries represented here is willing to participate? Let's start with America: Mr. Monges? Mr. Wheeler from England? Miss Wilson from England? Norway, Sweden: Mrs. Ljungquist? Denmark: Mr. Hohlenberg? Finland: Mr. Donner? Russia? From the Netherlands: Mr. Ledebour, Mr. Zagwijn, Mr. Deventer? From France: Mademoiselle Rihouet? Italy: Miss Schwarz? Czechoslovakia and Poland? I would therefore like to suggest that the various people sit down together and consider what is right for their countries, how it should be done, which people should be approached, which people can be given which material. It is possible that the representatives of a particular country are not in a position to make the right decision, but then perhaps together we will be able to find something better.

I would like to put up for discussion whether what I have suggested would be the right starting point.

Roman Boos: It could be very valuable to speak in smaller groups for each area this evening. But I would just like to ask very sincerely that when personalities are chosen, the matter should not be considered in the same way as parliaments or other associations: as a mandate to work like a commission. We should not put off until the evening what should be done during the day: to promote the idea of the World School Association in each individual group. We just have to try to see how what we have to say can be expressed in the other countries.

Johannes Hohlenberg: I would like to report on the work in Denmark regarding the World School Association. Unfortunately, in terms of results, it is not very much, but it may serve as an example for others. In the last fall course, particular emphasis was placed on the fact that everyone who goes back to their country should talk to as many people as possible and spread the idea of the World School Association. All those who were here have probably done what they could.

Now, to my personal experiences: I gave various lectures in Copenhagen, but unfortunately the timing was bad, because a few years ago the state took over almost all schools from the communities. This is a new fact, two or three years old, not yet fully implemented everywhere. Teachers are generally satisfied because their economic and financial situation has improved a lot and, as civil servants, they have the prospect of a pension. The teaching staff is therefore very reluctant to make any changes to these conditions. But on the other hand, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction among parents with the school system that exists in Denmark today; parents would be willing to try something new. The main difficulty, however, is financial. It should not be forgotten that state schools are completely free of charge; school lessons, materials and books are free.

The only possible way to establish independent schools would be as in Stuttgart, namely a large factory that takes it all in hand. In Denmark, it is just mainly a financial issue, quite simply! If a way could be found to establish such schools that would not cost more than the state schools, then the children would come and the parents would be very satisfied. I have collected a list of names – there are perhaps no more than 200 of them, so it is still nothing – and I am convinced that if you really do the propaganda, you can find real understanding.

Elisabeth Vreede: You have to do the right thing. As Dr. Steiner explained in Holland, it is not primarily a matter of founding individual schools that can only exist on the side and that can only gain their right to exist by stealth; it is about something much bigger: to really implement a free spiritual life! Today, we have a spiritual life that needs fresh air above all and that will wither without it. In this mood, the demand must arise in public: spiritual life must be liberated!

This does not mean that individual schools, such as the Waldorf School, cannot be founded. But it is not enough to found a school or institute here and there. Legally, they all have a meager existence. They always have a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, whether they are legal or not. Schools that depend on the mercy of the state should not be established.

Our Goetheanum is also a school, a free university. First and foremost, a world school association should be created that would feel the need to support or maintain such institutions as the Waldorf School and the Goetheanum. It is necessary that something concrete is already there. There are also teachers' associations, artists' associations; for them it would be a positive goal to work towards the need for a free spiritual life. The goal must be set higher than just setting up individual schools; everything must be seen on a larger scale so that the larger context is also recognized.

We have heard that in Denmark the teachers are very satisfied because they have become “state teachers” and are better paid. We cannot turn to the teaching profession in general; those who are involved in the matter are often the most dried up and do not have the broad view. This public opinion and mood must arise from a broader base than the teaching profession is or can be. Then the national differences will not carry as much weight as they would otherwise, because that would act as a unifying force. The points of view must be taken from the big picture, so that one encompasses everything that one can experience as a human being in our intellectual life, and elevates it to a different level; otherwise we get stuck in the details too much.

Roman Boos: It would be good if, in the discussion, a position could be taken on the recently asserted claim that Switzerland is a country in which a free

spiritual life can develop fully. Mademoiselle Rihouet has the floor first.

Simone Rihouet: I would just like to express a wish for France, that here at the Goetheanum this international purpose may be fully expressed and that the national may not again triumph over the international. It is striking to see that in France we have exactly the same situation as in Germany regarding the schools. But Swiss teachers, for example, who feel so little compulsion from the state, are not in the same situation as teachers in France and Germany, where the state's influence is so strong that there is already a great need among teachers for liberation and independence in their profession. In France, it will be particularly the student body that will show an understanding for the free spiritual impulses that have been given here. And so, as far as France is concerned – I cannot speak for Germany – I would like to express the wish that a student body should emerge from France that could create an alliance with its colleagues from other countries, an alliance of brotherhood.

Roman Boos: These words from France are all the more warmly welcomed to us because a certain kind of intense fraternization has already arisen on the opposing side. At about the same time that in Germany there was talk of “treason of the fatherland” by Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophists, a similar claim was circulating in the French newspapers, namely that Dr. Steiner's circles were working towards a war of revenge that would last for three years. And in the face of this “League of Nations” of the opposing clans, it will be necessary for an association of people from different nations to form here and work from the Goetheanum.

A German student talks about the attitudes of young people at the universities and the possibility of winning them over to the anthroposophical cause.

Fritz Wullschleger: I would like to speak briefly as a Swiss citizen. It is indeed the case in our country that teachers themselves can exercise a great deal of freedom, for example, in relation to the cantonal government; but they can also exert a great deal of influence on the authorities. If you want to introduce changes in your school, you can request them and they will usually be granted.

Now, I believe that these college courses have a tremendous impact on us. And under this tremendous impact, we can now try to approach our colleagues in conferences and so on and try to create an understanding for the fertilization of the school, at least to make a start in shaping the spiritual life freely. I heard Dr. Steiner's lectures in Basel this spring and – I speak as a teacher – I have so far had the impression that our task is to reshape our teaching as much as possible in the way that anthroposophy demands. Does that mean that we should transfer all our manpower into our schools? No, we should also direct our time and energy and work outwards. We must try to inform the Swiss, perhaps with lectures; we must try to win over the Swiss teacher magazine and, above all, the cantonal teacher magazine. This could perhaps be a start in making a difference in this direction.

Roman Boos: We thank Mr. Wullsch and I would like to take the liberty of adding just a few words to what has been said. In recent years, teacher newspapers in Switzerland have reprinted various articles and reports from our circles, including the excellent essays in the education booklet. But since then, there has not been much interest in the work; there are not many Swiss teachers present at these courses. Imagine if it said in the invitation: “Cantonal Department of Education” – don't you think the hall would be full? These are the small criteria by which one can see whether intellectual life among teachers in Switzerland is truly freely developed.

About a year and a half ago, the teachers of Basel-Stadt were invited by the cantonal education department, and the lectures on educational issues were received with great enthusiasm; a number of school people spoke very enthusiastically about them. Subsequently, a course was set up by the Goetheanum – not by the education department – but there were considerably fewer people there than at the course organized by the education department. And what has grown out of these courses today is, so to speak, nothing. Individual teachers may have taken very great and valuable things from the course, but in social terms, virtually nothing has happened. Why? Because nothing can happen! Because people everywhere are bound by the state. As the student says: we can win every ground, but not the state ground. This can be seen more or less clearly in Switzerland too; because if it were not the case here, we would be making more intensive progress. A long time ago there was a lecture in St. Gallen; and a Swiss teacher came who said: It is quite different for us in Switzerland; we do not have this subservience towards the authorities. We have not been accustomed to censorship and official decrees and so on. And when it was pointed out to him that this was not entirely true, the man replied: Yes, there is a big difference, because we did it voluntarily!

Friedrich Husemann talks about medical education in Germany.

Roman Boos: In order to provide the necessary economic basis for the entire spiritual movement, the two joint-stock companies Futurum AG and Der Kommende Tag AG have been founded in Dornach and Stuttgart. It was intended to say more about these two companies this evening and to give the opportunity to ask questions. But I think it will now be too late to go into it.

Futurum brochures are available in German, French and English, so that everyone has the opportunity to support the cause by subscribing to shares in the manner indicated. You can also contact Mr. Ith at Futurum A. G., who can personally provide you with all the necessary information. It is absolutely necessary in this day and age that we support these economic enterprises with all the strength at our disposal to help them move forward.

Time is getting very late, so that not much more can be debated on the other questions that may still be outstanding. Perhaps someone has something significant to contribute? I would now like to give Dr. Steiner the floor for the final remarks.

Rudolf Steiner: I do not wish to keep you much longer, but I would like to make a few comments, first in connection with what our friend van Leer has proposed here, which is certainly quite commendable and will be, if it leads to the promised goal. I would just like to note that it would be a questionable basis if the matter were to be built on the same foundation as the “covenant” to which [Mr. van Leer] has referred. At that time, work was indeed carried out with a certain zeal in the way Mr. van Leer has roughly outlined today: people sat together in small committees, discussed all sorts of things, what should be done and so on – but then Mr. van Leer made a statement, which is of course a small mistake at first, but which, if it were to continue to have an effect, could lead to a big mistake. It was said, in fact, that the Anthroposophical Society emerged from the work that was so tirelessly carried out that night. No, that is not the case at all: nothing emerged from that night and from that founding of the society! I would like to protect the “restless work of this night” that is intended today from this fate. There was a lot of talk back then about what needed to be done, but nothing came of it. And the mistake that could arise is based on the fact that one might think that something must now be done in the direction indicated by that “covenant”. What was done at that time was that those who were already involved in our anthroposophical work, who were already with us, founded the Anthroposophical Society, quite separately from this covenant. This then developed further, while the “covenant” gradually passed from a gentle sleep into social death, let us say. So, it would be a small mistake! And this must be emphasized, so that the mistakes of that night committee are not repeated in its second edition. That is one thing.

The other point I would like to make, and which Miss Vreede has already mentioned, is that what should be aimed at with the world school association should now really be put on a broad footing and tackled from the outset with a certain courage and a comprehensive view. Our friend Mr. van Leer quite rightly emphasized that the approach to be taken to the free life of the spirit in connection with the threefold social order must be different for the most diverse fields. But this must really be done in such a way that the approach is appropriate for the territories concerned. I myself will always point out that, for example, in England it will be necessary to present things in a way that is appropriate to the English civilization. But one must not overlook the fact that one must thoroughly understand what is imagination in relation to the great human questions of the present and what is reality. One must not, therefore, put the case in such a way as to create the belief that English intellectual life is freer than other countries. And you will see, if you really go through the “key points”, that there is less emphasis on the negative aspect – the liberation of intellectual life from the state – and much less emphasis on it than on the establishment of a free intellectual life in general. And here it will always remain a good word: that it depends on the human being, that it really depends on the spiritual foundations from which the human being emerges, which spiritual foundations are created for his education. It is not so much a matter of emphasizing the negative, but rather of emphasizing the positive. And I need only say this: if intellectual life were formally freed from state control, but everything else remained the same, then this liberation from the state would not be of much use.

The point is that positive spirit, as it has been advocated here this week, as it has been tried to advocate it, that this free spirit be introduced into intellectual life internationally. And then things will happen as they are meant to happen. For example, it is not just the case that a Waldorf school is a truly independent school, that it does not even have a head teacher, but that the teaching body is truly a representative community. The point is not that all measures are taken in such a way that “nothing else” speaks except what comes from the teaching staff itself, that one really has “an independent spiritual community” here, but the point is also that in all countries the spiritual life that has been talked about here all week is missing. And when one hears it emphasized somewhere that “the spiritual life is free in this country” – I am not talking about Switzerland now, I am talking about England – that is another matter. And it is this positive aspect, above all, that is important. It must then be emphasized that this will only exist, of course, if one tries to actually respond to the specific circumstances in the individual countries and territories.

But one must have a heart and mind for what unfree intellectual life has ultimately done in our time. Not in order to respond to what was said here yesterday, but to show the blossoms of human thinking in our present intellectual, moral, and cozy life, I would like to read you a sentence. I do not wish to detain you for long, and I do not wish to speak from the standpoint from which there was such virulent opposition to anthroposophy and the threefold social order here yesterday; but I would like to read a sentence from the brochure that had to be discussed here yesterday. General von Gleich writes about me: “Around the turn of the century, which also marks a turning point in the supersensible world of Anthroposophy, Mr. Steiner, then almost forty years old, was gradually led to Theosophy through Winter's lectures on mysticism.” Now you may ask who this “Herr Winter” is, whom Herr von Gleich cites here as the person through whose lectures I was “converted” to Anthroposophy in Berlin. One can only put forward the following hypothesis: in the preface to those lectures that I gave in Berlin in the winter of 1900/1901, there is a sentence in which I say: “What I present in this writing previously formed the content of lectures that I gave last winter at the Theosophical Library in Berlin.” That 'Mr. Winter' who converted me to Theosophy in 1901/1902 became the 'winter' during which I gave my lectures. You see, I do not want to use the expression that applies to the intellectual disposition of a person who is now called upon to lead the opponents of the anthroposophical movement with it; I do not want to use the expression; but you will certainly be able to use it sufficiently. Today, spiritual life leads to such blossoms of human intellectual activity, through which one could pass in the present day up to the point where one could become a major general.

So one must look at the matter from a somewhat greater depth. Only then will one develop a heart and a mind for what is necessary. And just because the spiritual life must be tackled first of all from the school system, it would be so desirable to found this World School Association, which would not be so difficult to found if the will for it exists. But it must not be a smaller or larger committee, but it must be founded in such a way that its membership is unmanageable. Only then will it have value. It must not – I do not want to give any advice on this, because I have said enough on the subject – it must not, of course, impose any special sacrifices on any individual. It must be there to create the mood for what urgently needs a mood today! – That is something of what I still had to tie in with what has come to light today.

Finally, I must say something that I would rather not say, but which I must say, since otherwise it would not have been touched upon this evening and it might be too late for the next few days, when the pain of departure will probably already be setting in. I must point this out myself. The point is that it is a matter of course that everything that has been said today should be put into practice. But this work only makes sense if we can maintain the Goetheanum as it stands and, above all, can complete it.

Even if things go well with 'Futurum AG' and even if things go well with 'Kommenden Tag' – they will certainly not be any economic support for this Goetheanum for a long time to come, they certainly will not. And the greatest concern — despite all the other concerns that weigh on me today, allow me to speak personally for once — the greatest concern is this: that in the not too distant future it could be the case that we have no economic inflows for this Goetheanum. And that is why it is above all necessary to emphasize that everyone should work towards this, that everyone who can contribute something should do so, so that this building can be completed! That is what is needed above all: that we may be put in a position, through the friends of our cause, to be able to maintain this Goetheanum, to be able above all to finish building this Goetheanum. And that, as I said, is my great concern. I must say so here, because after all, what would it help if we could do as much propaganda as we like and we might have to close this Goetheanum in three months from now? This, too, is one of the social concerns that, in my opinion, are connected with the general social life of the present day. And I had to emphasize this concern because the facts on which it is based should not be forgotten; only this makes it possible to strengthen the movement that emanates from this Goetheanum.

We can see the intellectual foundations on which those who are now taking up their posts against us are fighting. That will be a beginning. We must be vigilant, very vigilant, because these people are clever. They know how to organize themselves. What happened in Stuttgart is a beginning, it is intended as a beginning. And only then will we be able to stand up to them if we spark such idealism – I would like to say it again this time – that does not say: Oh, ideals are so terribly high, they are so lofty, and my pocket is something so small that I do not reach into it when it comes to lofty ideals. – It must be said: Only idealism is true that also digs into its pockets for the ideals!

The nine lectures that follows were delivered by Rudolf Steiner at the turn of 1922/23 in Dornach, Switzerland. They were directed to an audience containing some professional scientists and others particularly interested in science, mangy of whom were members of the Anthroposophical Society. 1922/23 happens also to have been an historical moment in the life of the Society and indeed of the lecturer. No one reading them would suspect that between Lectures 5 and 6 both parties had been stricken by a crushing blow. On New Year's Eve, 1922, the building named the Goetheanum, in which the first five lectures had been given, was totally destroyed by fire and was indeed still burning on January 1 when Steiner delivered Lecture 6 in his private Studio. The great wooden structure, a temple rather than a mere headquarters or meeting-place, had been designed by Steiner himself, its building supervised by him at all stages, and much of its interior worked with his own hands; but this is not the place to enlarge on his personal tragedy or the courage and determination it must have required to continue with the lecture course on the following day almost as if nothing had happened. The most that critical appraisal might detect as a possible consequence of that grievous interruption is perhaps a certain repetitiveness not apparent elsewhere in either his books or his lectures; and this the translator has taken the liberty of slightly reducing.

One more preliminary observation may be desirable. Most members of the original audience would have been familiar, to a greater or less degree, with the fundamental teachings and thus with the terminology of anthroposophy, or spiritual science, as Steiner also named them. Here and there in the lectures some of that terminology is introduced, for example “etheric” and “astral,” “the Age of the consciousness soul.” Mostly their meaning is briefly indicated when they first appear; but it remains true that some previous familiarity with them is of considerable assistance towards a full understanding, not only of particular passages, but also of the radical message of the whole.

Their basic argument is that modern science, and the scientism based on it, so far from being the only possible “reality-principle” is merely one way of conceiving the nature of reality; a way moreover that has arisen only recently and which there is no reason to suppose will last forever. Many today might admit as much, but in doing so they would be thinking of modern science mainly as a theory or set of theories capable of proof or disproof by accepted methods. For Steiner modern science, including its empirical method, is a stage, and an important stage, in the whole evolution of human consciousness. And that is something different from, though it underlies, the history of ideas. Perception itself is determined by the human psyche, the consciousness which determines perception precedes the formation of thoughts based on that perception, and the human psyche is an evolving one. Only hitherto it has not been conscious of that fact. Certain ideas were formed, and could only be formed, at certain stages in that evolution. Ideas for instance or theories about the nature of the world, or the nature of Nature, are necessarily based on certain “givens”—experiences taken for granted—which are so immediate that no ideas at all can be formed about them. Isaac Newton, as Lecture Three points out, was sufficiently aware of this to declare the “givens” of his own day as the “postulates” from which he started. They were time, place, space and motion. And these remain the givens for our day, even if their slight unsettling by Einstein's relativity should be the first faint breath of coming winds of change. But they were not so for other days and other men. They were not so before at most the fifteenth century. They are given for us, because for us the outer world of natural objects and events is experienced as completely detached from the inner world of our own awareness of them, that is to say, from our humanity. Descartes was the first to formulate this—then comparatively novel—given, when he divided the world into extended substance and thinking substance.

Writing in 1818 an essay on Method, Coleridge prophesied:

“... there will soon be seen a general tendency toward, an earnest seeking after, come ground common to the world and to man, therein to find the one principle of permanence and identity, the rock of strength and refuge, to which the soul may cling amid the fleeing surge-like objects of the sense.”

The abiding thrust of these lectures is Steiner's unshakable conviction that from now on the progress of science will depend on the overcoming of the received dichotomy between man and nature just as from the fifteenth or sixteenth century up to now the progress of science has depended on that dichotomy. Incidental to that progress would be escape from the crudities of popular scientism, but the lectures are only marginally concerned with that. Their content is based on the fact that the understanding, perhaps of any phenomenon but certainly of any phenomenon so basic as to be “given,” entails a patient examination of its provenance, that is to say of the steps by which it came into being. Consequently they are, as the title suggests, lectures not on science, but on the history of science. In sum they tell the story of the origin and then of the growth of that gulf between inner and outer, between subject and object, extending from a time before Pythagoras down to our own day, as it is manifest in the writings and biographies of a selection of well-known thinkers. Particular attention is given to transitional figures, men whose perceptions were still determined by the past, while their thoughts were confronted by what was approaching from the future; and perhaps especially interesting in this regard are the observations of Giordana Bruno's cosmos in Lecture Four and Galen's theory of “fermentation” in Lecture Eight.

The story is at the same time one of the steadily increasing predominance of mathematics in determining scientific method. Perception of this is not peculiar to Steiner. What distinguishes him from other historians of science is the psychological detail into which he pursues the story and, more than that, his account of the origin of mathematics, The Cartesian coordinates are not as abstract as they seem; or rather they were not always so. Steiner sees them as an extrapolation or projection of man's experience of his own body; that is to say, of his physical body. And here is one of the places where some previous acquaintance with anthroposophy and its terminology would be helpful, though it should not indispensable. It is unfortunate that the word “body” has become, for most people, almost synonymous with “lump of solid matter;” Particularly unfortunate, where it is the human body that is at issue, since nine-tenths of that is composed of fluids, and of fluids that are for the most part in motion. “Body” in Steiner's terminology, signifies something more like “systematically organized unit or entity,” as distinct from the matter or substance of which it is composed. Thus, the fact that the frame of a living human being contains, and not at random, fluid and airy, as well as solid, substance, entails the existence of other “bodies” besides the physically organized one. These are especially relevant when the discourse turns from knowledge of quantity (measurement and mathematics) to knowledge of quality, an aspect of nature that is virtually a closed book to the science of today.

The development of that science of today, a purely quantitative one, is the main thread on which the lectures are strung, and the reader will follow it or himself. Not much perhaps would be gained by informing him in advance that, if he does so, he will be shown for example, how the projection of mathematics, and particularly the coordinates, outward from the body and thus from human selfhood, has led to the reification of space—that long-settled mental habit which advanced psychics has only recently begun to question. He will also find an answer to a question which has puzzled many thinkers: why should mathematics, a seemingly artificial construction of the human brain, have been found an effective key to unlock so many of the secrets of nature? How is it that the one has happened to fit so snugly on the other? More generally he will be led down a sort of ladder of “descent,” accompanied throughout by mathematics, from man's original psychic participation in the life of nature to his present detachment from it; to be shown at the end that an understanding of the way of ascent to reunion with that life also begins with mathematics. The last is an aspect of the matter with which Steiner was to deal more specifically in a subsequent course of lectures translated into English as The Boundaries of Natural Science.

“Descent” and “ascent” are of course loaded terms, and their use can be misleading. The same is true of the term “dehumanization” when in these lectures it is applied to the history of science. Steiner was no enemy of science, though he vigorously questioned many of its theories. “Technology” is not a dirty word in his vocabulary. Pointing to a fact is not necessarily abuse. Science has become dehumanized in the sense that it has turned its attention more and more away from human experience and human values. But in doing so it has furthered, if not partly engendered, one supreme human value—that detached, individual self-consciousness that is the pre-condition of freedom. Man has become separated from the world that gave him birth; but he needed that separation in order to become truly man. To draw attention to that separation is, says our lecturer, “a description of the scientific view, not a criticism.” He continues (and I will conclude this Introduction by quoting the closing words of Lecture Six):

Let us assume that somebody says: “Here I have water. I cannot use it in this state.I separate the oxygen from the hydrogen, because I need the hydrogen.” He then proceeds to do so.If I then say what he has done, this is not criticism of his conduct.I have no business to tell him he is doing something wrong, and should leave the water alone. Nor is it criticism when I say that since the Fifteenth Century science has taken the world of living beings and separated it from the true nature of man, discarding it and retaining what the age required. It then led this dehumanized science to the triumphs that have been achieved.

It is not criticism if something like this is said: it is only a description. The scientist of modern times needed a dehumanized nature, just as a chemist needs deoxygenized hydrogen and therefore has to split water into its two components. The point is to understand that we must not constantly fall into the error of looking to science for an understanding of man.