The Rudolf Steiner Archive

By receiving the Spirit the human soul develops to ever further stages in the course of cosmic existence. The Spirit is eternal, but the way in which it takes effect, how it manifests in what man can feel, love and create on Earth—that is new in every epoch.

When we think in this way of the Spirit and its progressive manifestation in the course of man's existence, the Eternal and the Transitory are revealed to our eyes of soul. And in particular manifestations of life here and there, we can constantly perceive how the Eternal reveals itself, comes to expression in the Transitory and then vanishes again, thereafter to assert its reality in perpetually new forms.

And today too we can feel that the emblems of Christmas around us are reminiscent of past forms in which the Eternal, manifesting in the outer world, was wont to be symbolised. Certain it is that in the second half of December at the present time, when we go out into the streets of a great city and look at the lights that are intended to be invitations into the houses to celebrate the Christmas Festival, our aesthetic sense must be pained by displays of so-called Christmas goods, while inventions out of keeping with Christmas trees and Christmas symbols whiz past—motor cars, electric tramcars and the like. These phenomena, as experienced today, are utterly at variance with each other. We feel this still more deeply when we realise what the Christmas Festival has become for many of those who want to be regarded in the great cities as the representatives of modern culture. It has become a festival of presents, a festival in which little remains of the warmth and profound depth of feeling which in a past by no means far distant surrounded this most significant season.

Among the experiences restored to us by our anthroposophical conception of the world and way of thinking, will certainly be the warmth of feeling that pervaded the human soul at the times of high festival in the ancient Church's year. We must learn to understand once again how necessary it is for our souls to become aware at certain times of the connection with the great Universe out of which man is born, in order that our intellectual, perceptive and also moral forces may be revitalised. There was an epoch when Christmas was a festival when all morality, all love, all philanthropy could be revivified; in its symbols it radiated a warmth undreamed of by the dreariness and prosaicness of modern life. Nevertheless deep contemplation of these symbols could be a means of developing the perceptions, experiences and convictions of which we ourselves can be aware concerning the resurrection of mankind, the birth of the Spirit of Anthroposophy in our souls.

There is indeed a connection between the earlier conceptions of the Festival of Christ's birth and the modern anthroposophical conceptions of the birth of truly spiritual ideas and ways of thinking, of the birth of the whole anthroposophical spirit in the cradle of our hearts; there is indeed a connection. And maybe it is the anthroposophist of today who will most readily enter into what for long ages was felt at the time of the Christmas Festival and could be felt again if there were any hope of something similar emerging from the atmosphere of materialism surrounding us today.

But if we want to experience the Christmas Festival in the truly anthroposophical way, we cannot limit ourselves to what the Christmas Festival was once upon a time or is now. Wherever we look in the world, and into a past however distant, something that can be compared to the thoughts and feelings connected with the Christmas Festival has existed everywhere. Today we will not go back to the very far past but only to the feelings and experiences which men living in the regions of Middle Europe might have had before the introduction of Christianity at the time of the year when our own Christmas Festival is drawing near. We will think briefly of epochs prior to the introduction of Christianity into Europe, when in regions subject to relatively harsh climatic conditions our forefathers in Europe were obliged to make their living by spending the summer as pastoral or agricultural workers, while their feelings and inclinations were intimately connected with the manifestations of the great world of Nature. They were full of thanksgiving for the sun's rays, full of reverence for the great Universe—a reverence that was not superficial but deeply felt. And when the herdsman or cattle breeder of ancient Europe was out on his rough fields, often in scorching heat, he was inwardly aware not only of the outer, physical aspect of Nature, but in his whole being he felt intimately connected with whatever was radiated to him from Nature; with his whole heart he lived in communion with Nature. It was not only that in his eyes the physical rays of the sun were reflecting the light, but in his heart the sunlight kindled spiritual jubilation, summer-like exultation which culminated in the St. John's fires when the spirit of Nature shouted for joy and was echoed from the hearts of men. Intimate community was also felt with the animal world as being under man's guardianship.

Then came autumn, followed by the season of rigorous winter—and I am thinking now of times when winter swept through the land with a bleakness of which modern humanity has little idea. This was a time when, with the exception of what it was absolutely essential to preserve, the last head of cattle had to be slaughtered. All outer life was stilled; it was actually as though a kind of death made its way into the hearts of men, a kind of darkness, in contrast with the mood that pervaded these same hearts throughout the summer. Those were times when the unique manifestations of climate and of Nature, enabled echoes of ancient clairvoyance still to persist in Middle Europe. People who during the summer were full of joy and merriment, as though Nature herself were rejoicing in their hearts—these same people could become inwardly quiescent during the time of approaching winter; their own souls could respond to an echo of the mood that pervades a man when, unmindful of the outer world, he withdraws into his own inner world in order to become aware of the indwelling Divinity.

So it can be said that Nature herself made it possible for these ancient European peoples to descend from life in the external world deep down into their own inmost being. When November came near this descent into death and darkness was felt for weeks to be a solemn season, to be a harbinger of the approaching dawn of what was called the Yuletide Festival. This mood was a clear indication of how long the remembrance of ancient clairvoyant faculties had persisted among all the peoples of Northern and Middle Europe. During the season following the period roughly corresponding to our months of January and February, men felt inwardly aware of the portents of renewed rejoicing, renewed resurrection in Nature. They were aware of a foretaste of what they would subsequently experience in the external world; but when the fields were still covered with snow, when icicles were still hanging from the trees, when outside in Nature nothing indicated a future state of exultation, there was a persistent condition of withdrawal into themselves, of inner repose which was ultimately transformed in the soul in such a way that a man was, as it were, liberated from his own selfhood.

This intermediate state experienced by our forefathers at the approach of the season we now call spring was felt by them somewhat as the clairvoyant feels his astral body, before that astral body is completely cleansed and purified. It was as if the spiritual horizon were filled with all kinds of animal forms. And those men tried to give expression to this. For them it represented a transition from the profound, festival mood of approaching winter to the mood which would again pervade the soul during summer. And they imitated in symbols what the astral body reveals, imitated it in the form of uninhibited games and dances; by donning animal masks they imitated this transition from a state of complete inner repose to a state of exultant abandonment to great Nature.

When we ponder over this, when we reflect that the hearts and minds of peoples over wide areas were completely given up to such a mood, then we understand that there was present on this soil the feeling of sinking down into the outer physical darkness, into the outer physical death of Nature; we also understand the deep, persistent feeling that in sinking down into the physical death of Nature, into physical darkness, the supreme light of the Spirit can be revealed; and how the experience of being submerged in physical death is directly transformed into that mood of unbridled abandonment to which expression can be given by animal masks, unrestrained dancing and music. Admittedly there was not yet any fully developed feeling that if a human being is to find the highest light he must seek for it in the deepest depths of being; but through an inner, loving union with the weaving forces of Nature a soil was prepared into which there could be planted a knowledge to be imparted to men concerning their further evolution through the power of the Christ Impulse. To these peoples living all over Europe it was only necessary to say—not in dry, abstract words but speaking to the heart by means of symbols: ‘Where you plunge into darkness, into the death of outer Nature, there—if you have prepared your souls to perceive and feel rightly, you can find an eternal, imperishable Light. And this Light has been brought into the evolution of mankind through the quickening power of the Mystery of Golgotha, through the events in Palestine’.

It is characteristic of the centuries immediately following, that in Europe the warmest, most intimate feelings for the Christ Impulse were to be kindled by the thought of the Christ Child, by the birth of the Christ Child. And if we believe that mankind has a mission, what conception must we have of that mission? We must conceive that man has a divine-spiritual origin, that he can look back to that origin, but that he has descended farther and farther away from it, has become more and more closely interwoven with physical matter, with the outer physical plane. But we must also be aware that through the mighty Impulse which we call the Christ Impulse, man can overcome the forces that led him down into the physical world and tread the path upwards into the heights of spiritual life.

Having grasped this we must say to ourselves: as the human Ego is today, incarnated in a physical body, it has descended from divine-spiritual heights of existence and feels entangled with the world of the outer physical plane. But this Ego that has become sinful is rooted in another Ego, a guiltless Ego. Where then, does the Ego that is not yet interwoven with the physical world contact us? At the point when, looking back in memory over our life as it takes its course between birth and death, we come to the moment in our early years when consciousness of our Ego dawned for the first time. The Ego is there, although we are not aware that it is living and active within us, even when there is no realisation of Egohood at all. The Ego looks into the surrounding world, is interwoven with the physical plane even before there is any consciousness of Egohood. In its childlike, innocent state the Ego is nevertheless present and may hover before us as an ideal to be regained, but permeated then with everything that can be experienced in this school of physical life on the Earth. And so, although it will inevitably be difficult for the prosaic intellect to find words in which to clothe it, this ideal can be felt by warm human hearts: ‘Become what your Ego is before there is any concept of it! Become what you could be if you were to find your way to the Ego of your childhood! Then that Ego will shine into everything acquired by the Ego of your later years!’—And inasmuch as we feel this to be an ideal, it shines before us in Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ subsequently became incarnate.

Experiences such as these enable us to understand that an impulse promoting growth and development could move the hearts of the simplest people all over Europe when they contemplated the incarnation of the Being who was afterwards able to receive the Christ into himself. So we realise that it was truly a step forward when feelings connected with the Festival of the birth of Jesus were inculcated into experiences connected with the old Yuletide Festival. It was indeed a mighty step forward and may perhaps best be characterised by saying that in those dark days, when souls gathered together in order to prepare for the rejoicings of the new summer—in that darkness the light of Christ Jesus was kindled!

An echo of what took place among European peoples in those early times still persists in the Christmas Plays which during the nineteenth century, or at any rate during its latter half, had become little more than objects of study for learned investigators and for collectors. During the Middle Ages, however, these Plays were already being performed in a characteristic style during the Christmas period. All the emotions, all the vitality kindled in souls living in the regions where, when Yuletide was approaching, people of an even earlier period had experienced what I have been describing—all these feelings were awakened by the Plays. And as we turn from the description of the old Yuletide Festival to the medieval Christmas Plays, we ourselves can realise what warmth swept through the European peoples with the advent of Christianity. An impulse of a unique kind penetrated then into the hearts and souls of men.

Conditions now are, of course, different from those of earlier times, and in the nineteenth century these Plays were regarded simply as perquisites of erudition. Nevertheless it was a moving experience to make the acquaintance of older philologists and authorities on Germanic mythology and sagas, men who with intense enthusiasm devoted profound study to whatever fragments remained of the Christmas Plays that were performed in different regions. I myself had an elderly friend who during the fifties and sixties of last century had been a Professor at a College in Pressburg and while there had devoted a great deal of time to research among the Germanic peoples who had been driven from Western to Eastern Hungary. He also admired the charming customs and the language of the now Magyarised German gypsies and of other folk living at that time in Northern Hungary. It came to his knowledge that early Christmas Plays were still performed in a village near Pressburg. And he—I am speaking of my old friend Karl Julius Schröer—went to the village in an attempt to discover what vestiges of these old Plays still survived among the country people. Later on he told me a great deal about the wonderful impressions he had also received of what was left of Christmas Plays belonging to far, far earlier times.

In a certain village—Oberrufer was its name—there lived an old man in whose family it was an inherited custom when Christmas came near, to gather together those in the village who were suitable to be alloted parts in a Play in which the Gospels' story of Herod and the Three Kings would be presented in a simple way.

To understand the unique character of these Christmas Plays, however, we must have some idea of the kind of life led by simple folk in olden times. It now belongs to the past and must not be repeated. To make the gist of the matter clear, let me just put this question: Is there not a particular time of the year when the snowdrop flowers? Are there not for the lily-ofthe-valley and for the violet particular seasons when they take their own places in the macrocosm? Certainly, under glass they can be made to flower at other periods but it really gives one pain to see a violet flowering at a time other than that which properly belongs to it. There is little feeling for such things in our day but something of the kind can be said about the people of earlier times. What men felt during certain periods of the Middle Ages at the approach of autumn and of Christmas, when the dark nights were drawing on apace, what they felt in such a way that their intimate experiences were akin to the manifestations of Nature outside, akin to the snow and the snowflakes and the icicles forming on the trees—such feelings were possible only at the time of Christmas. It was a mood that imparted strength and healing power to the soul for the whole of the year. It renewed the soul, was a real and effective power. And how deeply one was moved a decade or so ago when the last indications of such feelings were still to be encountered here or there. From my own personal experience on the physical plane itself I can confirm that there were utterly good-for-nothing fellows who would not dare to be dissolute as the days shortened. At Christmastime those who were invariably the most quarrelsome, quarrelled less and those who quarrelled only now and then stopped quarrelling altogether. A real power was active in souls at that time of the year and these feelings abounded everywhere during the weeks immediately before the Holy Night.

What was it that people actually experienced during those weeks? Their experiences, translated into actual feelings, were that human beings had descended from a divine-spiritual existence to the deepest depth on the physical plane, that the Christ Impulse had been received and the direction of man's path reversed into one of reascent to divine-spiritual existence. That is what was felt in connection with everything to do with the Christ Event. Hence it was not only Christian happenings that people liked to present, but just as the Church calendar couples Adam and Eve's day on 24 December with the birthday of Jesus on the 25th, a performance of the Paradise Play was followed directly by the Play presenting Christ's birthday, denoting the impulse given for man's reascent to divine-spiritual existence. And this was deeply felt when the name EVA resounded in the Paradise Play – EVA, the mother of humanity, from whom men had descended into the vale of physical life. This theme was presented on one day and on the next there was a Play depicting the impulse which brought about the reversal of man's path. This reversal was indicated in the actual sounds: AVE MARIA. AVE was felt to be the reversal of EVA: AVE-EVA. People were deeply stirred by words which rang out countless times to their ears and hearts from the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth centuries onwards, and which were understood.

Ave maris stella (Hail, star of the sea,)
Dei mater alma (Nursing mother of God,)
Atque semper virgo (Virgin for ever and ever,)
Felix coeli porta (Blissful door to the heavens above.
Sumens illud Ave (Adopting that ‘Ave’
Gabrielis ore (Out of the mouth of Gabriel,
Funda nos in pace (Establish us in peace
Mutans nomen Evae! (Altering the name of ‘Eva’.

(Tr. by Owen Barfield)

It was felt that the Paradise Play must be performed in the mood of piety befitting the Holy Night of Christmas. This was a deep conviction, and as anthroposophists, when we hear how the performers in the Christmas Plays rehearsed, how they prepared themselves, how they behaved before and during the performances of the Plays, we may well say: Is this not reminiscent of the attitude to truth adopted in the Mysteries?—although that, admittedly, was a matter of even greater significance. We know that in the Mysteries truth could not be received in any superficial mood of soul. Those who are aware to some extent of the holiness of truth know how absurd it is to imagine that it could be found in the arid, prosaic lectures of modern times, lectures in which there is no longer any indication that truth must be sought by a pure, unsullied, well-prepared soul and that it will not be found by a soul inwardly unsanctified, whose feelings are not duly prepared for its reception. There is no longer any conception of this in our age of materialism when truth itself, in the way it is presented, has become utterly prosaic.

In the Mysteries, truth might be approached only after the soul had passed through probationary tests of purity, inner freedom and fearlessness. Are we not reminded of this when we hear of the old man whom Karl Julius Schröer had known, who while he was assembling his players demanded that they should observe the ancient rules. Anyone who has lived among village people knows what the first rule signifies. The first rule was that during the whole period of preparation none of the actors might visit a brothel. In the village this was a matter of tremendous importance, signifying that the task lying before the actors must be steeped in piety. Nobody, while he was rehearsing, might sing an unworthy song; that was another rule. Further, nobody should desire anything more than a good, honest livelihood. That was the third rule. And the fourth was that he who was the authentic guardian of the traditional Christmas Plays should in all things be obeyed. It was an office not willingly transferred to anyone else.

In the second half of the nineteenth century people collected these Plays, although by then the old feelings associated with them had vanished. Later on I myself came across indications of the piety and fervour of scholars who still had some contact with country folk living in the scattered provinces of Hungary, for example, and were collecting the old Plays and Songs. When I was once in Hermannstadt about Christmastime I found that the teachers at the Gymnasium (Grammar School) there had been busily collecting these Plays and I came across the Herod Play. And so in the second half of the nineteenth century it was still possible to find people who were gathering evidence of old customs in regions which I have mentioned in connection with the Yuletide Festival. Do not let us think of anything theoretical but let us picture this warm, magical breath of the Christmas mood presented in these Plays. We then have a conception of mankind's belief in divine-spiritual reality—a belief acquired through the Christ Impulse.

This deep study of the Christmas Plays was something that could be highly instructive for the present age when the realisation that Art is the offspring of piety, of religion and of wisdom has long since been lost! In these days, when people are apt to regard Art as being detached from everything else, when Art has degenerated, for example, into formalism, much could be learnt from considering how Art in all its aspects was once regarded as a flower of human life. Simple as was the presentation of these Christmas Plays, it nevertheless indicated a flowering of man's whole nature. In the first place, the boys taking part in the Plays must be God-fearing, must absorb into their whole character something that was like an essence of the Christmas mood. They were also obliged to learn how to speak in strict rhythm. At the present time, when the Art of speaking in the ancient sense has been lost, there is no inkling of the vitally important role played by rhythm and rhyme, or of how every movement and gesture of men otherwise accustomed only to handling flails were rehearsed in minutest detail. The actors devoted themselves for weeks on end to practising rhythm and intonation, and were wholly dedicated to what they were to present. For a true understanding of Art, much could be learnt from those customs today when we have forgotten to such an extent how to speak artistically that hardly more than the intellectual meaning of what we have to say is expressed. The essential charm of these old Christmas Plays, however, lay in the fact that in rhythm, intonation and gesture the whole man became articulate. It was indeed a significant experience to have witnessed even the last remnants of these customs.

When the Christmas days were over, the actors taking. the parts of the Three Holy Kings walked through the villages, but at no other time than immediately after Christmas. I still remember seeing the Three Kings going through the villages from house to house. They carried long strips of lattice work attached to shears, a star being fixed to the end of the lattice work. The star shot out when the shears were opened and the lattice work swung back in harmony with the rhythmic movements made by the Three Kings. The Kings wore the most primitive costumes imaginable but their way of bringing the appropriate facts to the notice of the people at the right time of the year and their complete forgetfulness of self, induced a mood of soul that will be utterly incomprehensible to our age unless there can be a spiritual awakening. What should awaken in us as the life of the spirit, transformed through Anthroposophy into Art, can be presented in Plays which transcend the normal standards of the present age. Such Plays will not necessarily be connected with festivals but will be concerned with what is eternal in the human soul, unrelated to any particular season.

The Christ Impulse that was a reality for the souls of a certain epoch could become for us a living experience. True, in a certain sense we are already deeply rooted in an age when materialism in the outer world has taken such a hold in every sphere that if this Christ Impulse is to be renewed, stimuli quite different from the simple methods employed in the Middle Ages are called for. A revitalisation of man's inner life is necessary. The goal of Anthroposophy should be to draw forth the deepest forces of the human soul, forces quite different from those indicated to us by the present Christmas symbols and customs. True as it is that through our Anthroposophy we can become aware of the breath of enchantment which filled men's hearts during performances of the Paradise and Christ-Plays and during all the experiences connected with the festival seasons, it behoves us also to face the other fact—that the eternal Spirit must live in ever new forms through the evolution of humanity. Hence the spectacle of the Christmas symbols should be an incitement to infuse into the Christmas mood the spirit of anthroposophical thinking. Those who have a right feeling of the mysteries of the Christmas night will be filled with hope as they look forward to what will follow the Christmas Festival as a second Festival: they will look forward to Easter, the Festival of Resurrection, when He who was born in the Christmas night will be victorious.

Thus we are convinced that all cultural life, all spiritual life must be pervaded and inwardly charged with anthroposophical conceptions, anthroposophical feeling, thinking and willing. In the future, my dear friends, there will either be an anthroposophical spiritual science or no science at all, only a kind of applied technology; in the future there will either be a religion permeated with Anthroposophy, or no religion at all, merely external ecclesiasticism. In the future, Art will be permeated with Anthroposophy or the various arts will cease to exist, because cut off from the life of the human soul they can have only a brief, ephemeral existence. So we look towards something that shines with the same certainty as Theodora's prophecy of the renewal of the vision of Christ in the first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. With as great a certainty there stands before our souls the resurrection of the anthroposophical spirit in Science, Religion, Art and in the whole life of humanity. The great Easter Festival of mankind is arrayed before our foreshadowing souls.

We can understand that still there are ‘mangers’, still lonely places in which there will be born, as yet in the form typical of childhood, that which is to be resurrected among men. In the Middle Ages people were led into the houses and shown the manger—an imitation of the stable with the ox and the ass—where the Child Jesus lay near his parents and the shepherds, and the people looking on were told: There lies the hope for the future of mankind!

May all that we cultivate in our anthroposophical centres become in the modern age new mangers in which, under the guidance of the Being we call Christ Jesus, the new spirit may come to life. Today this new spirit is still at the stage of childhood, still being born as it were in the mangers which are the centres of anthroposophical activities, and bearing the pledge of victory—the pledge that we, as mankind, will celebrate the great Easter Festival, the Resurrection Festival of humanity in the new spirit which we already anticipate and for which we strive—the spirit of Anthrophosophy.

Today's subject must obviously concern everyone, for illness and death enters the lives of all; usually it is unbidden and often in a way that is upsetting and even frightening. Death is indeed life's greatest riddle, so much so that the individual who could solve it would have solved also the other great riddle, that of life itself.

It is said that death is a riddle that no one ever has, or ever will solve. People who speak like that have no notion of the arrogance the words imply, nor of the fact that a solution to the riddle does exist, but a solution they fail to understand.

As we are dealing with a far-reaching and important subject, I ask you to bear especially in mind that all we can do is to attempt to answer the specific question, How can illness and death be understood? It is not possible to go into special cases of illness and health; we must confine ourselves to the question of how understanding can be reached concerning these two most important riddles of existence.

The well-known words of Saint Paul: “The wages of sin are death,” were for centuries regarded as an answer, a solution to the question concerning death. Nowadays these words have lost their meaning for most educated people. Modern people are unable to see how sin, which belongs to the sphere of morality and is connected with human behavior, can have anything to do with a physical fact such as death. Nor do we see any connection with illness.

Furthermore, the word “sin” is today used in a narrower, more materialistic sense. At the time of Saint Paul, the word was not taken to refer to ordinary failings or shortcomings, nor to anything extreme. The word sin was regarded as being connected with actions done for egoistic or selfish reasons, in contrast to impartial, objective actions. Here we must bear in mind that egoism and selfishness indicate that a person's “I” has reached a stage of independence and self-consciousness. These are aspects that must be taken into account if we are to understand the mind of a spirit such as that of Saint Paul.

Those who wish to reach a deeper understanding of the Old and New Testaments, who strive to grasp their deeper aspects, will be aware of a definite, one might say instinctive, philosophic current that runs through these records. It can be summed up by saying: All living creatures, in all realms of nature, strive towards a particular goal. Those belonging to lower species are still indifferent to pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, but we find that as life reaches higher levels things change. Those who shudder at the idea of teleology must realize that we are dealing with facts, not putting forward a theory. Every living being, at all levels including that of human beings, strives towards a specific target, a summit for all living creatures: the attainment of individual consciousness.

The initiates from whom the Old and New Testaments originated looked down to the animal kingdom and saw how all striving is directed towards the eventual attainment of an independent personality endowed with its own inclinations, and its own impulses to action. They also saw that to the independent personality belonged the possibility of egoistic selfish behavior.

A thinker like Paul would say: “If a personality capable of egoistic deeds dwells in a body, then that body is of necessity mortal. A soul possessing independence, self-consciousness, and consequently egoism would never be able to inhabit an immortal body.” The two go together: self-conscious personality with one-sidedly developed impulses, and a mortal body. This is what in the Bible is termed “sin,” and what Paul defines as: “The wages of sin are death.” You will realize that not only this, but also other sayings in the Bible must be modified to be understood. In the course of centuries their meaning has changed, sometimes to the opposite. However, the modification must not alter the original meaning; we must endeavor to transform the meaning given by modern theology into the original one. It will then be discovered that often the issue concerned is not only far more profound than thought at first sight, but also can be readily understood even today. This explanation is necessary in order to see things in the right perspective.

Throughout the ages, thinkers searching for a world conception have concerned themselves with the riddle of death—a riddle to which during thousands of years the most varied solutions have been offered. We cannot go into a historical survey of these solutions; it must suffice to mention just two philosophers, in order to show that contemporary thinkers have nothing substantial to contribute to the issue either.

Take for example a thinker like Schopenhauer. Those who have read this sentence will be acquainted with his pessimistic outlook: “Life is a disagreeable affair; I shall spend mine pondering it.” And they will realize that he could not arrive at any other conclusion than: “Basically death is the consolation for life, and life the consolation for death; for life is miserable; it can be endured only because of the knowledge that death puts an end to it. On the other hand, if one fears death, it is a consolation to know that life is no better, that nothing is lost by dying.” That is Schopenhauer's pessimistic view. He makes the Earth-Spirit say: “If new life is continuously to arise, then I need space.” At least Schopenhauer was aware that, as life forever brings forth new life, the old must die to provide new space. But as you can see, he provides nothing of significance to the problem of death; what he says elsewhere on the subject only reflects the same view.

In his last book Eduard von Hartmann concerns himself with the riddle of death. He says: “When we consider the most highly evolved being, man, we find that after one or two generations he no longer understands the world. Once a person is old he no longer understands the young. That is why the old must die and the new continuously arrive.” Thus, here again, nothing is said that throws light on the riddle of death.

Anthroposophy, or spiritual science, would wish to contribute to present-day world views what it has to say about the cause of illness and death. However, it must first be made clear that, unlike other sciences, spiritual science cannot speak in such an easy manner; it cannot treat every subject alike. Today's natural scientists do not understand that when illness and death are considered, a distinction must be made between humans and animals. In fact, if today's lecture is to be comprehensible, we must restrict it to that which applies to humans. Few of the things said today will apply to either the animal or vegetable kingdom. This is because the beings of the various kingdoms do not have certain abstract similarities; each kingdom has its own specific characteristic. In the main we shall speak only of human beings; anything else will be brought up merely for the sake of clarification.

For an understanding of illness and death in relation to human beings, it is important to bear in mind that, as spiritual science explains, a person is an extremely complex being. An individual's nature can only be understood on the basis of these following four members: first, the externally visible, physical body; second, the ether or life body; third, the astral body; and fourth, the “I,” or the center of the being. We must recognize that the forces and substances of the physical body are the same as those found in the physical world outside, and further that the ether body, which we have in common with the vegetable kingdom, contains the forces that call the physical substances to life. The astral body, which we have in common with the animal kingdom, is the bearer of the life of feelings, craving, pleasure and pain, joys and sorrows. The “I” makes human beings the crown of creation, for that an individual alone possesses.

When we consider a person's physical organism, we must be aware of the fact that within it the other three members are at work; they are the architects and contain the formative forces. The physical principle works on the physical organism, but only up to a point; in certain areas it is mainly the ether body that is at work, in others the astral body, and in yet others the “I.” From the viewpoint of spiritual science, the physical human being proper consists of bones and muscles, that is, of those organs that support and make him a firm structure so that he can walk about on the earth. It is, strictly speaking, only these organs that come into being wholly through the physical principle. However, to them must be added the organs that are comparable to physical instruments—the senses. The eye functions like a camera obscura, the ear like a complex musical instrument. What is significant is that these organs are built up by the first principle, whereas all the organs connected with growth, propagation and digestion are built not only by the physical principle, but also by the ether or life body.

Only the organs built according to physical laws are sustained by the physical principle; the processes of digestion, propagation and growth are sustained by the etheric principle. The astral body is the creator of the whole nervous system, right up to the brain, and also of the spinal cord and nerve fibers. Finally, the "I" is the architect of the blood circulation. In contemplating the human organism from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint, you will realize that the four members are in reality four entities that are completely different from one another. These entities have merged, and work together within human beings right down into the externally visible aspect of a person's organism. The four members of a person's being have different values. We shall understand their significance when we investigate how human development is dependent upon each of them.

Today we shall speak, mainly from the physiological viewpoint, about the work the physical principle accomplishes on a person's organism between birth and the change of teeth. During this period, the physical principle works on the physical body, just as before birth the forces and substances of the maternal organism work on the embryo. From the age of seven till puberty it is mainly the etheric principle that works on the physical body; after puberty it is mainly the forces of the astral body that are at work. Thus, we must think of the human embryo being enveloped by the maternal body up to the moment of birth; at that point the maternal body is, as it were, pushed aside; the senses are freed; the outer world begins to influence the human organism. Then at the age of seven another enveloping sheath is pushed aside. The development of an individual's being can only be understood when we recognize that at the change of teeth something happens spiritually that is similar to what happens physically at birth. The human being is truly born a second time about the seventh year, for the ether body is born and can begin to work independently, just as was the case with the physical body at its birth. The maternal body acts physically on the embryo before birth; up to the change of teeth the spiritual forces of the ether world act on the human ether body. At about the seventh year they are pushed aside, as was the maternal body at physical birth. Up to the seventh year the ether body remains latent within the physical body. At the time of the change of teeth the situation in regard to the ether body is comparable to a piece of wood being ignited. Up till then it was tied to the physical body; now it is freed and can act independently. The ether body's release is announced by the change of teeth. Those with deeper insight into human development recognize that the change of teeth is a significant event. Up to the age of seven the physical principle is at work unfettered, while the etheric and astral principles are still latent, that is, not yet born from their spiritual sheaths.

Up to the age of seven the human being displays a number of inherited factors. These are not built up by his own principles, but are derived from ancestors. The milk teeth belong to this category. Only the second teeth are produced by the child's own physical principle, whose particular task is to build up what constitutes the body's firm support. Before the physical principle produces the second teeth, which are the hardest part of the body's supporting structure and the culmination of its work—it works within the bodily nature, while the ether body, the principle of growth, is still latent.

Once the physical principle has finished its work, the ether body is freed and works on the physical organs up to puberty. At this time another covering, the external astral sheath, is thrust aside as was the maternal body at physical birth. Thus, at puberty the human being is born for the third time when the astral body is freed. At this stage the forces of the ether body culminate their creative activity by producing sexual maturity in the organs connected with propagation. In the seventh year the physical principle culminates its activity by producing the teeth as the last hard structure, and in the ether body the principle of growth is freed. Correspondingly, the moment the astral principle is freed, it produces the greatest concentration of urges and cravings, that is, expression of life insofar as it is bound up with the physical nature. As the physical principle is concentrated in the formation of the second teeth, so is the principle of growth concentrated in bringing about sexual maturity. This sets free the astral body, the sheath of the “I,” which then begins its work on the astral body.

A cultivated person does not follow his urges and passions blindly; he has purified and transformed them into moral feelings and ethical ideals. When we compare a person with a savage, we realize that a Johann von Schiller,¹ a Francis of Assisi² or indeed the average civilized person has purified and transformed, through his “I,” these urges and cravings. Consequently the astral body consists of two parts, one that contains the original tendencies and another created by the “I.” We can only understand the work of the “I” on the basis of reincarnation; we must recognize that we are subject to repeated lives on earth, which means that when we are born we bring with ourselves the fruits, the outcome of earlier lives. These fruits are contained in four separate bodies as the measure of energy and forces available to a person in life. Thanks to what a person has attained already, one person will be born with strong energy and forces with which to work on the astral body, while another will soon exhaust what is available to him.

By investigating clairvoyantly how the “I” spontaneously begins to work on the astral body, controlling urges and cravings, and by estimating the measure of energy the “I” has brought with it, it is possible to say for how long the “I” will be able to carry out its work. After puberty, every human being has available a measure of energy according to which one can estimate when he will have transformed in his astral body all that is possible for him in this life. The life force a person manages to purify and transform in his inner nature sustains itself. As long as it lasts, a person exists at the expense of what is self-sustaining in the astral body. Once it is exhausted, an individual loses the inclination to transform his cravings further; in short, a person lacks the energy to work on the self. This is when the thread of life begins to wear out, as of necessity it must in proportion to the measure allotted each human being. It is the time when the astral body must derive its forces from the principle of life that is nearest, that is, from the ether body. The astral body now lives at the expense of the forces stored in the ether body. This comes to expression as a gradual loss of memory and creative imagination.

That the ether body is the bearer of creative imagination and memory, and also of everything that can be termed fortitude and confidence in life, has often been explained. When these things attain a permanent character, they become a feature of the ether body. But they are drawn out by the astral body now that it exists at the expense of the ether body. When everything the ether body can give is exhausted, the astral body begins to consume the creative forces of the physical body. When these are used up, the life of the physical body dwindles, the body hardens, and the pulse slows down. Thus, at the end, the astral body lives at the expense of the physical body, depriving it of its forces. It can no longer be maintained by the physical principle.

If the astral body is to become free so that it can emerge and participate in the life and work of the “I,” it must, when its allotted task is over in the later part of life, necessarily consume the sheaths it built up. Thus, is individual life created out of the “I.”

What takes place can be compared with what happens when a piece of wood is set alight. Wood could not give birth to fire if it were differently constituted. A flame leaps from the wood, consuming it. The nature of the flame is to free itself and in so doing consume the foundation that gave it existence. The astral body is born three times in this way, each time consuming its own foundation as the flame consumes the wood. What gives individual life the possibility of existence is the fact that it absorbs its own foundation. The root of individual life is death; no individual conscious life could exist if there were no death. Death can only be understood by seeking and recognizing its origin; and life by recognizing its relation to death. The origin of illness can be discovered through a similar approach, which will also throw more light an that of death. Every illness destroys life to some degree. But what exactly is illness?

To understand illness we must look at the way human beings are related to the surrounding world of nature. Let us look at what takes place between a person as a living being and the rest of the natural world. With every breath, sound, light, and morsel of food that a person absorbs, he enters into a reciprocal relationship with nature. If you look at the matter more closely, you will realize, even without spiritual sight, that what exists in the outer world actually builds up the physical organs and causes the senses to function. When certain animals wandered into caves and stayed there, their eyes in time atrophied. The eye, a sense predisposed to light, cannot exist without light; conversely, only where there is light can this sense develop. Hence Goethe could say that the eye is created by the light, for the light. Naturally, the physical body is built up according to what might be designated as the inner architect, but the external substances are the material this architect uses.

Once this is fully recognized, we see the various forces and substances in a different light in relation to human beings. The genuine mystic, with his deeper insight, can tell us much in this respect. Paracelsus, [ Paracelsus (1493–1541) was a Swiss alchemist and physician. ] for example, saw the whole external world as an extended human organism, and a person's being as an extract of that world. According to Paracelsus, one can say, when looking at a plant: This plant is composed according to certain laws; in a person's healthy or sick organism something exists to which the plant corresponds. Thus, Paracelsus calls a patient suffering from cholera an “arsenicus,” because he saw arsenic as the remedy for cholera. There exists in nature something that relates to every human organ. If we could extract an essence of the whole natural world and give it human form, the result would be a human being. The letters that spell MAN are, as it were, spread throughout the whole of nature. This indicates how nature acts upon a human being and why he must construct his being from the materials of nature. Basically, everything absorbed by our life processes to build up the organism originated in external nature. When we understand the secret of how the external forces and substances are called to life, we shall also understand illness.

Nowadays the educated person finds difficulty in recognizing that many modern ideas concerned with medicine are extremely vague. If someone with knowledge of natural remedies mentions the word "poison," it immediately stirs up all kinds of suppositions. But what is a poison? What is an abnormal effect on the human organism? Whatever is introduced into the human organism acts according to natural laws; that anyone should think it could act otherwise is incomprehensible. But what is a poison? Water, if taken by the bucketful all at once, is a strong poison. What is today looked upon as poison could have most beneficial effects if rightly administered. It always depends on the quantity and the circumstances under which a substance is administered. Nothing, as such, is a poison.

A tribe in Africa uses a certain species of dog for hunting; in the same region there is a fly whose venom is deadly to the dogs they sting. The savages living by the Sambesi River have found a remedy for these stings. They take the bitches in pup to an area where there is an abundance of tsetse flies and let them be bitten. The tribe knows how to arrange matters so that the bitches do not die before the pups arrive. The pups born in this way are immune to the tsetse fly's sting and can be used for hunting.

This illustrates an important fact for understanding the element of life. When a poison is taken up into the process of life, just where a descending line passes over into an ascending one, the poison becomes an integral part of the organism. What is absorbed in this way not only strengthens but protects the organism.

Spiritual investigation shows that such a process is involved in the building up of the human organism. If you like, we might express it by saying that pure substances, which were originally poisonous, form the human organism; today's foodstuff can be absorbed because, through recurrent processes similar to the one described, we have become immune to their harmful effects. The more of such substances we have incorporated, the stronger we are. Rejecting external substances only makes us weak.
In regions where medicine is still based on occult knowledge, the healer even enlists his own body in the quest for remedies. For example, there are cures where he administers to himself the venom of a certain species of snake, in order to make his saliva into a remedy against their bite. He incorporates the poison into his own organism, thus making himself the bearer of healing forces. He becomes strong himself and makes others strong to withstand that particular venom.

The organism must necessarily incorporate what is outside in nature. All the harmless substances contained in the body have become so through the process indicated. However, as human beings are continuously exposed to substances that could become harmful, the possibility always exists that their effects go beyond the limit, and danger arises. This will depend upon whether the ether body is capable of absorbing the substance or not. If the organism is strong enough to absorb such a substance immediately, its tolerance greatly increases. We cannot avoid illness if we wish to be healthy. The possibility to gain sufficient strength to withstand harmful influences depends upon our capacity to become ill. Thus, health is conditioned by illness. The outcome, the gift bestowed upon us by illness, is greater strength. When the illness is overcome, the fruit of the experience is immunity to the illness, and this is retained even after death.

Whoever ponders these things will gain an understanding of illness and death. If we wish to have strength and health, we must accept into the bargain the preliminary condition of illness. To attain strength we must absorb weakness and transform it into strength. If this is grasped in a living way, illness and death become comprehensible. It is this comprehension spiritual science wishes to bring to humanity. Many will see it as something that speaks only to the intellect, but if the intellect has once fully grasped all that is implied, it will bring about an inner mood of deep accord. Comprehension of these things becomes wisdom of life.

You may well have heard it said that anthroposophical truths, derived as they are from spiritual knowledge, can be dangerous! We have plenty of opponents who maintain that anthroposophy is a poison and is harmful. Well, anthroposophists and esotericists themselves know that anthroposophy can be harmful because, in order to make human beings strong, it must be absorbed and digested. Anthroposophy is not something one can argue about; it acts as a spiritual power of healing, and its truths will be confirmed by life itself.

Spiritual science knows that the spirit creates the physical; therefore, when spiritual forces work upon the ether body, they have a health-giving effect also an the physical body. If our concepts and ideas about the world and life are sound, these healthy thoughts will act as a powerful force of healing. Anthroposophical truths can be harmful only to natures made weak by materialism and naturalism; when they can be absorbed and digested they make a person strong. Only when that happens can anthroposophy fulfill its task.

Goethe answered the question concerning life and death beautifully when he said: “Everything in nature is life; she only invented death to have more life.” One could add that, as well as death, nature also invented illness in order to produce strong health. Furthermore, she had to endow wisdom with apparently harmful effects to make it a powerful force of healing.

The anthroposophical world movement differs from other movements that may provide logical proofs to be argued and debated. Anthroposophy does not wish to be something that can be proved simply through logical arguments. It wishes to provide both spiritual and bodily health. Living proof of its truth will be increasingly discovered the more it is seen to enhance life, transforming discontentment into contentment. Spiritual science is like the so-called poison which, when transformed, fructifies life and becomes a source of healing.

• 1. Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), a leading figure in German literature, was a playwright, poet, and essayist.
• 2. Francis of Assisi, Saint (c. 1181–1226) was an Italian Roman Catholic mystic and founder of the Franciscan Order of Monks.

Much is said today about the difference between belief and knowledge. In particular, it is often asserted that anthroposophy, in view of what it has to say, must be regarded not as a science but as a matter of faith, as a religious belief. But basically, all the differences that are made in this way stem from the fact that people have very little insight into what has emerged as belief in the course of human development, and that they actually do not have much insight into what knowledge is.

All belief, everything that is connected with the word belief, actually goes back to very early times in human development. It goes back to those times when the breathing process played a much greater role in the life of man himself than is the case now. Man, with his present state of soul, does not really pay attention to his breathing process. He breathes in and breathes out, but he does not perceive any special experience in doing so.

The beliefs of older times have always pointed to the importance of breathing. One need only remember – as I pointed out a few days ago – that in the Old Testament the creation of man is associated with the breathing of breath, and one need only recall what I said about the striving that existed in ancient India, for example, to gain higher knowledge by regulating the breathing process in a certain way. This striving had meaning in that time when man paid more attention to his breathing. I have said that this striving took place in the time when man perceived around him not only the dead nature that we perceive today, but when man saw spiritual and soul activity in all things and facts of nature, when he perceived spiritual and soul activity in every spring, in every cloud, in the river and in the wind. During this time, the aim was to become more and more aware of one's breathing: to regulate inhaling, holding one's breath, and exhaling. And through this regulation of the breathing process, what one might call self-awareness was generated, the experience of the ego, of “I am”. But this was a time when the perception, the experience of breathing in general played a certain role in human life. From his ordinary consciousness, the person of the present cannot imagine much of what it was like. I would like to give you such an idea.

The breathing process is divided into inhaling, holding the breath and exhaling. This breathing process is initially regulated by human nature. The yoga scholars I have spoken of regulated it differently. Just as today, when someone studies, they develop a way of thinking that is not the thinking of everyday life, so in the times when breathing played a special role in life, a different breathing was developed than in ordinary life. But let us now consider not yoga breathing, the developed breathing, but the ordinary. I can best show you this schematically.

Let us assume that this is the human chest organism, then we can say: we distinguish the inhalation process, the breath-holding process – I will not draw that separately – and the exhalation process. When people in ancient times inhaled, they experienced it as if, with the inhalation, that is, with the inhaled air from the outside world, what was spiritual in the beings and facts of the outside world came in. So in what I have here color-coded red as the inhalation current, the person, let's say gnomes, nymphs, experienced everything that was spiritual and soulful in the surrounding nature. And as he exhaled (blue), as he sent the inhaled air outwards, these beings became invisible again in the exhalation. They were lost, so to speak, in the surrounding nature. You inhaled and knew: there is something spiritual-soul in nature outside, because you felt the effect of this spiritual-soul in the inhalation. You felt connected to the spiritual-soul of the outer nature. That had a certain intoxicating effect on people in those ancient times - but it is only comparatively speaking - in a certain way. He intoxicated himself with the spiritual soul of his surroundings. And by breathing out again, he sobered up. So that he lived in a state of intoxication and a state of sobering up. And in this intoxication and sobering up there was an interaction with the spiritual soul of the outside world. But there was something else as well. Man felt, by breathing in, by intoxicating himself, as it were, with the spiritual-soul, how the spiritual-soul beings quietly drew up into his head from the breathing current, how they filled him inwardly, how they united with his own physical being. So that what man felt there can be expressed something like this: I breathe in the spiritual and soul life of the environment. It fills my head. I feel it, I perceive it. Then the breath is held. And as he breathes out, the person would say: I give back my perception of the spiritual and soul life.

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But this had an intimate connection with life. Take just one very simple thing: here is chalk. If you take this chalk today, you look at it, you reach out, take it up. The people of the ancient epoch did not do that. We have the thought of looking at the chalk and then picking it up. This was not the case with ancient man, who looked at it and inhaled what was spiritually radiating from the chalk, exhaled, and only in the exhalation did he grasp the chalk, so that for him inhaling meant observing, exhaling meant being active. This was at a time when man actually always lived in a kind of rhythmic interaction with the environment. This rhythmic interaction has been preserved for later times, but without the living, observing consciousness of ancient times. Just imagine how, in our youth, threshing was still done by hand in the countryside: looking, beating, looking, beating, in rhythmic activity. This rhythmic activity corresponded to a certain breathing process.

Inhaling = observing

Exhaling = doing

As far as the later development of humanity is concerned, we can say that this experience of inhalation ceased to be perceived by the human being, and the human being perceived or perceives only that which goes up from breathing into his head. So in ancient times, the human being perceived how what was inhaled, which was intoxicating for him, continued into the head and connected there with the sense impressions. Later on, this was no longer the case. Later on, man loses consciousness of what is going on in his chest organism. He no longer perceives this upwelling of breathing because the sensory impressions become stronger. They extinguish what arises in the breath. When you see or hear today, the breathing process is included in the process of seeing and also in the process of hearing. In the ancient person breathing lived strongly in hearing and seeing, in the modern person seeing and hearing live so strongly that breathing is completely subdued. So that we can say, what was perceived by the ancient one in the breathing process in his inner being, no longer lives in the intoxicating, head-filling way that he said: Ah, the nymphs! Ah, the gnomes! Nymphs that whirl in the head, gnomes that hammer in the head, undines that surge in the head! Today, this hammering, surging, and whirling is drowned out by what comes from seeing and hearing and what fills the head today.

There was once a time when man perceived more strongly this upwelling of breathing into his head. This passed over into the time when man still perceived confusedly, when he still perceived something of the after-effects of the gnome-like hammering, the Undine-like surging, the nymph-like tumbling, when he still perceived something of the connection of these after-effects with the perceptions of sound, light and color. But then all that he still perceived of the breathing process was lost. And of those people who still had a trace of consciousness that breathing once introduced the spiritual-soul of the world into man, what now remained, what was established from sensory perception in connection with breathing, was called “Sophia”. But breathing was no longer perceived. So the spiritual content of breathing was killed, or rather, paralyzed by sensory perception.

This was particularly felt by the Greeks. The Greeks did not have the idea of such a science as we do today. If one had told the Greeks about a science as it is taught today at our universities, it would have seemed to them as if someone had continually pierced their brains with small pins. They would not have understood that it could give a person satisfaction. If they had had to take in science as we have it today, they would have said: That makes the brain sore, that wounds the brain, that stings. --- Because they still wanted to perceive something of that pleasant spreading of the intoxicating breath, into which, flowing in, the heard and the seen pours. So the Greeks did perceive an inner life in the head, an inner life such as I am describing to you now. And they called this inner life Sophia. And those who loved to develop this Sophia within themselves, who had a special inclination to devote themselves to this Sophia, called themselves philosophers. The word philosophy definitely points to an inner experience. The hideous, pedantic assimilation of philosophy, whereby one simply 'ochst' (as they say in student life) at philosophy, that familiarization with this science, was not known in Greece. But the inner experience of 'I love Sophia' is what is expressed in the word philosophy.

But just as the process of breathing that enters the body is taken up in the head by the sense perceptions, so what emanates as exhaled air is taken up by the rest of the body. In the limb-metabolism organism, just as sensory perceptions flow into the head through what is heard, just as what is seen flows into the head through what intoxicates the inhaled air, so too do physical feelings and experiences flow together with the exhaled air. The sobering effect of the exhaled air, the extinguishing of perception, flowed together with the physical feelings that were aroused while walking and working. Being active, doing, was linked to exhaling. And as man was active, as he was doing something, he felt, as it were, how the spiritual-soul left him. So that he felt when he did something, when he worked at something, as if he allowed the spiritual-soul to flow into the things. I take in the spiritual-soul: it intoxicates my head, it connects with what I have seen, with what I have heard. I do something, I breathe out. The spiritual-soul aspect goes away. It goes into what I hammer, it goes into what I grasp, it goes into everything I work. I release the spiritual-soul aspect from me. I transfer it, for example, by fizzling the milk, by doing something externally, I let the spiritual-soul aspect flow into things. That was the feeling, that was the sensation. So it was in the old days.

But this perception of the exhalation process, this perception of the sobering up, just stopped, and there was only a trace left in Greek times. In Greek times, people still felt something, as if, by being active, they were still giving something spiritual to things. But then everything that was there in the breathing process was dulled by the physical sensation, by the feeling of exertion, of fatigue in working. Just as the inhalation process was dulled in the head, so the exhalation process was dulled in the rest of the organism. This mental process of exhalation was paralyzed by the bodily sensation, that is, by the sensation of exertion, of becoming heated, and so on, by what lived in man so that he felt his own strength, which he applied by exerting himself, by doing something. He did not feel the breathing out process as fatigue in himself now, he felt a power effect in himself, he felt the body permeated with energy, with power.

This power that lived inside the human being was Pistis, faith, the feeling of the divine, the divine power that makes one work: Pistis, faith.

Sophia = the spiritual content of breathing, paralyzed by sensory perception

Pistis (faith) = the spiritual process of exhalation, paralyzed by the bodily sensation.

Thus wisdom and faith merged in man. Wisdom flowed to the head, faith lived in the whole of man. Wisdom was only the content of ideas. And faith was the power of this content of ideas. Both belonged together. Hence the only Gnostic writing that has survived from ancient times is the Pistis Sophia. So that in Sophia one had a rarefaction of inhalation, in faith a condensation of exhalation. Then wisdom became more rarefied still. And in the further rarefaction, wisdom became science. And then the inner power became more condensed. Man felt only his body: he lost consciousness of what faith, pistis, actually is. And so it came about that people, because they could no longer feel the connection, separated what was to arise subjectively from within as mere content of faith, so to speak, and what connects with external sense perception. First there was Sophia, then Scientia, which is a diluted Sophia. One could also say: originally Sophia was a real spiritual being that man felt as an inhabitant of his head. Today, all that is left of this spiritual being is the ghost. For science is the ghost of wisdom. This is something that should actually haunt the soul of today's human being like a kind of meditation, that science is the spectre of wisdom. And in the same way, on the other hand, faith — which is what it is usually called today; here one has not really grasped a particular difference in the words — faith as it is lived today is not the inwardly experienced faith of antiquity, pistis, but it is the subjective closely connected with egoism. It is the condensed faith of ancient times. In the faith that had not yet been condensed, people still sensed the objective divine within them. Today, faith only arises subjectively, as it were, rising like smoke from the body. So that one could say, just as science is the spectre of wisdom, so today's faith is the heavy residue of former faith, the lump of former faith.

These things must be held together, then one will no longer judge as superficially as many people do today, who say that anthroposophy is only a matter of faith. Such people do not know what they are talking about because they have never brought themselves to consciously perceive the whole connection between faith and wisdom, this inner experience of faith and wisdom, from the real history of mankind. Where today do we speak of history as we have to here? Where do we talk today about what the breathing process once was for man, how it represented a completely different experience than it is today? Where do we realize how abstract on the one hand and robustly material on the other that has become what was once a real spiritual-soul-like on the one hand and a real soul-bodily on the other?

When the development of faith had reached a certain point, it became necessary for humanity to include something very specific in this belief. In ancient times, man had the divine within the belief. He experienced the divine in the process of exhalation. But the process of exhalation was lost to his consciousness. He no longer had the consciousness that the divine passes out into things. Man needed a revival of the divine for his consciousness, and he received this revival through the fact that he now received an idea within himself that has no external reality on earth. It has no external reality on earth that the dead rise from the graves. But the Mystery of Golgotha has no real content for a person if he describes the course of Jesus' life until Jesus dies. After all, that is nothing special. That is why Jesus is no longer anything special for modern theology either. Because a person goes through some experiences and then dies, as modern theology presents the life of Jesus, that is nothing special. The mystery only begins with the resurrection, with the living life of the Christ being after the physical body has gone through death. And - that is also according to Paul's words - whoever does not take up this idea of the resurrection into his consciousness has not taken up anything of Christianity at all, which is why modern theology is actually only a Jesusology, actually no Christianity at all. Christianity needs such a concept that refers to a reality that does not take place on this earth as a direct perception of the senses, but that as a concept already lifts man up into the supersensible.

Through an inner experience, the old human being was lifted up into the supersensible. I have shown you in these days how the yoga student was led to the inner experience of being a baby. They experienced the first impressions of being a baby, that which shapes the human being in a plastic way. What one otherwise knows nothing about became conscious through the yoga exercises I have spoken to you about, but with it, at the same time, the whole prenatal life, or the life that lies before conception, when the human being's soul was in the spiritual world above before descending and taking on a physical body. Only a notion of this remained. This notion is also contained in the Gospels: Unless you become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. This saying refers to it, but in those days it no longer had any direct effect on life. This saying was, so to speak, a reminder that one could once place oneself back into the time of childhood and experience the Kingdoms of Heaven from which one descended through birth into physical existence. It is hardly the case that a person today, when he hears about the Kingdoms of Heaven from the Gospels or from some other ancient language, imagines something significant by it. He may think: Well, I have seen that here on earth – France, England and so on, they are divided into kingdoms. Whatever there is of kingdoms on earth is also there above, the kingdoms of heaven are there too. – Otherwise, people cannot really get a concrete idea of the kingdoms of heaven if they cannot imagine what is down there as being up there. I believe that in English, if I am not mistaken, they even say: the kingdoms of heaven. Yes, you don't get the idea of what is meant by the term “the kingdoms of heaven”, which has been modernized today. The gospel even usually says it in such a way that you can't even see what it actually means, it even says: the kingdom of God. In doing so, people hardly think of anything, but simply let a word resound. But in ancient times the heavens were exactly that which, when the earth is here (center), spread out as the sphere of the world (white, blue). And “kingdom” — what was that? Let us disregard all philology and take the observation to help here, which can be given by anthroposophical method itself. “Reich” = that which reaches out, encompasses, surrounds, that is the reaching, the sounding, the speaking, so that one must soar to the imagination: Through these heavens, for the one who learns to perceive, the spiritual-soul sounds through. He perceives not only the heavens, but the world-word that resonates and reaches through the heavens.

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Those who cannot become like little children cannot perceive the word of the heavens, the word that speaks from the heavens everywhere. If earthly realms are called “realms” and earthly rulers “rulers of these realms,” then one would have to have the secret idea that these rulers could speak or sing so loudly that their voice would resound throughout their entire realm. In older, legendary conceptions, there is also something like a resounding of the realm. And this was symbolically expressed by the fact that laws were given which were proclaimed with trumpets to the quarters of heaven, whereby the kingdom became a reality. The kingdom was not the plane on which men dwelt, but the kingdom was that which the trumpet-angels carried out into the wide spaces as the content of the laws.

But it was a memory. Another concept had to come that was more related to the will – what preceded related to the idea, to the thought – to that which accompanies a person when he passes through the gate of death. The will remains as his energy development. This goes with him through the gate of death with the world thought content. The human will, filled with world thoughts, enters with him into the spiritual worlds when the human being dies. And it was to this will that the new idea of the resurrected Christ turned, of the one who lives even if he has died in an earthly way. This was the strong, powerful idea that did not merely recall childhood, that pointed to death, and that appealed to what passes through the portal of death with man. Thus we find the irruption of the Christ idea, the whole Christ impulse, thoroughly grounded in the evolution of mankind itself.

Now, of course, one can say: Even today there are still many people on earth who know nothing of the Christ. Those people who know about him today usually know it badly, but they learn something about the Christ, even if, according to the sense of today's materialism, they do not have the correct idea of the Christ, the feeling for the Christ that they have within them. But there are many people on earth who live in other, older forms of religion. And that is where the big question arises, which I already hinted at yesterday. I said that the Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. The Christ died for all people. The Christ Impulse has become a power for the whole earth. In this objective sense, apart from consciousness, the Christ is there for Jews, pagans, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on. He is there. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, He has been alive in the forces of the evolution of humanity on Earth. But there is a difference between whether people live within a Christian sphere or a non-Christian one. The only way to study the difference that exists between the life that a person develops between death and a new birth and life on earth is to see the connection. If a person has passed through death and was a Buddhist or Hindu in life, say, if he has not absorbed any idea, any feeling of Christ, then he takes with him for the universe behind death what a person can experience here on earth from the external environment, from nature. One would know nothing of nature in the heavens if man did not take with him the knowledge of the earth when he enters the realms of the heavens through death. Man carries what he takes in here on earth over into the realm of the supersensible by passing through death, for it is only through this that the supersensible worlds have any knowledge at all of the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal on earth. But the one who knows something of Christ, who can have the idea that Christ lives in him, who experiences the Pauline word, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” now carries into the supersensible worlds not only the knowledge of the earth, but the knowledge of the earthly human being. Thus both are carried into them by the modern human being as well. Christians carry into the supersensible world the knowledge of the earthly human being, of the bodily earthly form of the human being. The Hindus, the Buddhists, and so on, carry into the heavens the knowledge of what is around the human being. Even today, human beings complement each other in what they contribute to the supersensible worlds by passing through death. Naturally it becomes more and more necessary that all secrets which man can experience in himself, through himself, are carried into the heavens, so that man is more and more permeated by Christianity. But above all it is important that what man experiences here on earth only as a human being with other human beings is carried through death by means of Christianity.

Consider that this is actually an extraordinarily important truth, a very essential truth. Take, for example, the Hindu or the Buddhist. What he experiences in looking at the world, in feeling the world, in sensing the world, what he experiences in thoughts about minerals, in feelings about plants, in feelings about animals, he carries all this through the gate of death and enriches the knowledge of the gods in the supersensible world with what he experiences. What the Christian experiences by entering into a social relationship with his fellow human beings, by developing social connections, that is, what one can only experience as a human being among other human beings, what is experienced in human brotherhood on earth, that is what the Christian carries with him through the gate of death. One would like to say: The Buddhist carries the beauty of the world through the gate of death, the Christian carries kindness through the gate of death. They complement each other. But the progress of Christianity consists in the fact that precisely the social earthly conditions acquire a significance for the heavenly worlds.

The Oriental tyrants might decapitate as many people as they liked, but it had little effect on the worlds beyond. It only affected them to the extent that the person received external impressions as a result: the external impressions of horror and so on were carried through the gate of death. The unkindness between people that is developing today as a result of miserable social conditions, and which is spreading across the earth as a false socialism due to a misunderstanding of social interrelationships, also has a great significance for the supersensible worlds that people enter through the gateway of death. And when today, under the flag of the realization of socialism in the east of Europe, a terrible, destructive force is being developed, then what is experienced there is also carried into the beyond as a terrible result. And when unloving conditions develop among people in the age of materialism, this is carried into the transcendental worlds through the portal of death, to the disgust of the divine spiritual worlds.

Through Christianity, man should come to bear the results of the evolution of the earth, which arise through him, into the supersensible worlds as well. What man himself develops on earth, he becomes capable of carrying into the spiritual worlds through the thought of the Risen Christ, of a living being who has gone through death and yet lives.

This is why even those people who do not want their social deeds to be carried by death today have such a horror of recognizing the Risen Christ.

The ancients were allowed to become intoxicated by the breath. The moderns are not allowed to become intoxicated by words. Words must not be intoxicating for them, but must be held in the sense of Sophia, penetrating man with wisdom.

These are the things through which anthroposophy also points to what is important in social relationships today. And it wants to express something of this in its name, this anthroposophy, anthroposophia, which is also a wisdom. During the Greek period, the human being was taken for granted. Sophia was already a human wisdom because the human being was still full of light and wisdom. Today, when one says Sophia, people only think of the ghost of Sophia, of science. Therefore, one must appeal to the human being one is calling upon, to the Anthropos: Anthroposophia. One must point out that this is something that comes from the human being, that shines out of the human being, that blossoms out of the best forces of the human being. One must point this out. But it also makes anthroposophy something that enlivens human existence on earth. For it is something that is experienced by man in a more spiritual, but no less concrete way than the ancient Sophia was experienced, and which at the same time is meant to bring about that which was then in the whole human being, the content of faith, pistis. Anthroposophy is not a belief, but a real body of knowledge, but one that gives people a strength that in earlier times was contained only in faith.

If you take what was presented to you yesterday and study it in greater depth, you will find that today’s interpretation of the world cannot lead to a real understanding of the human being. And if you go into further detail in your study of what could be only briefly described here and relate it to specific problems of life, you will find confirmation of all that was postulated in yesterday’s lecture.

Now, strangely, exponents of the modern worldview seem unaware of what it means that they cannot reach the specifically human sphere. Nor are they willing to admit that, in this sense, their interpretation of the universe is incomplete. This fact alone is more than enough to justify all the efforts made by spiritual scientific research. We can understand this all the more clearly by observing characteristic examples. When quoting Herbert Spencer, I did not intend to prove anything but only wanted to illustrate modern thinking. Spencer had already formulated his most important and fundamental ideas before Darwinism spread. So-called Darwinism aptly demonstrates how scientific, intellectualistic thinking approaches questions and problems that result from a deep-seated longing in the human soul.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, published in 1859, certainly represents a landmark in modern spiritual life. His method of observation and the way he draws conclusions are exemplary for a modern conceptual discipline. One can truly say that Darwin observed the data offered to his sense perceptions with utmost exactitude; that he searched for the underlying laws in a very masterly way; and he considering everything that such observations could bring to his powers of comprehension. Never did he allow himself to be deflected, not to the slightest degree, by his own subjectivity. He developed the habit of learning from the outer world in a way commensurate with the human intellect.

Observing life in this way, Darwin found links between the simplest, least developed organisms and the highest organism on earth—humankind itself. He contemplated the entire range of living organisms in a strictly natural scientific way, but what he observed was external and not part of the essential nature of human beings. Neither the true human being nor human spiritual aspirations were the object of his enquiry. However, when Darwin finally had to face an impasse, his reaction was characteristic; after having formulated his excellent conclusions, he asked himself, Why would it have pleased the Divine Creator any less to begin creation with a small number of relatively undeveloped and primitive organic forms, which would be allowed to develop gradually, than to miraculously conjure fully developed forms right at the beginning of the world?

But what does such a response imply? It shows that those who have made the intellectual and naturalistic outlook their own, apply it only as far as a certain inner sensing will allow and then readily accept these newly discovered boundaries without pondering too much over whether it might be possible to transcend them. In fact, they are even prepared to fall back on traditional religious concepts. In a subsequent book, The Descent of Man, Darwin did not fundamentally modify his views. Apart from being typical of the time, Darwin’s attitude reveals certain national features, characteristic of Anglo American attitudes and differing from those of Central Europe. If we look at modern life with open eyes, we can learn a great deal about such national traits.

In Germany, Darwinism was initially received with open enthusiasm, which nevertheless spread to two opposite directions. There was, first of all, Ernst Haeckel, who with youthful ardor took up Darwin’s methods of observation, which are valid only in nonhuman domains. But, according to his Germanic disposition, he was not prepared to accept given boundaries with Darwin’s natural grace. Haeckel did not capitulate to traditional religious ideas by speaking of an Almighty who had created some imperfect archetypes. Using Darwin’s excellent methods (relevant only for the non-human realm) as a basis for a new religion, Ernst Haeckel included both God and the human being in his considerations, thus deliberately crossing the boundary accepted by Darwin.

Du Bois-Reymond took up Darwinism in another way. According to his views, naturalistic intellectual thinking can be applied only to the non-human realm. He thus remained within its limits. But he did not stop there, unquestioning and guided by his feelings; he made this stopping point itself into a theory. Right there, where Darwin’s observations trail off into vagueness, Du Bois-Reymond postulated an alternative, stating that either there are limits or there are no limits. And he found two such limits.

The first limit occurs when we turn our gaze out into the world, and we are confronted with matter. The second is when we turn our gaze inward, toward experiences of our consciousness and find these also finally impenetrable. He thus concluded that we have no way of reaching the supra-sensory, and made this into a theory: one would have to rise to the level of “supernaturalism,” the realm where religion may hold sway, but science has nothing to do with what belongs to this religious sphere. In this way, Du Bois-Reymond leaves everyone free to supplement, according to personal needs, everything confirmed by natural science with either mystical or traditionally accepted forms of religious beliefs. But he insists that such supernatural beliefs could never be the subject of scientific scrutiny.

A characteristic difference between the people of Central Europe and those of the West is that the latter lean naturally toward the practical side of life. Consequently, they are quite prepared to allow their thoughts to trail off into what cannot be defined, as happens in practical life. Among Central Europeans, on the other hand, there is a tendency to put up with impracticalities, as long as the train of thought remains theoretically consistent, until an either/or condition has been reached. And this we see particularly clearly when fundamental issues about ultimate questions are at stake.

But there is still a third book by Darwin that deals with the expression of feeling. To those who occupy themselves with problems of the soul, this work seems to be far more important than his Origin of the Species and Descent of Man. Such people can derive great satisfaction from this book—so full of fine observations of the human expression of emotions—by allowing it to work in them. It shows that those who have disciplined themselves to observe in a natural scientific way can also attain faculties well suited for research into the soul and spiritual sphere of the human being. It goes without saying that Darwin advanced along this road only as far as his instinct would allow him to go. Nevertheless, the excellence of his observations shows that a training in natural scientific observation can also lead to an ability to go into the supra-sensory realm. This fact lies behind the hope of anthroposophic work, which, in any task that it undertakes, chooses not to depart by a hair’s breadth from the disciplined training of the natural scientific way of thinking. But, at the same time, anthroposophy wishes to demonstrate how the natural scientific method can be developed, thus transcending the practical limits established by Darwin, crossed boldly by Haeckel’s naturalism, and stated as a theory by Du Bois-Reymond. It endeavors to show how the supra-sensory world can be reached so that real knowledge of the human being can finally be attained.

The first step toward such higher knowledge does not take us directly into the world of education, which will be our central theme during the coming days. Instead, we will try to build a bridge from our ordinary conceptual and emotional life to suprasensory cognition. This can be achieved if—using ordinary cognition—we learn to apprehend the basic nature of our sense-bound interpretation of the world.

To do this, first I would like you to assume two hypotheses. Imagine that, from childhood on, the world of matter had been transparent and clear to our understanding. Imagine that the material world around us was not impermeable to our sight, but that with ordinary sensory observation and thinking we could fully penetrate and comprehend its nature. If this were the situation, we would be able to comprehend the material aspect of the mineral kingdom. We would also be able to understand the physical aspect of human nature; the human body would become completely transparent to our sight.

If such a hypothesis were reality, however, you would have to eliminate something from your mind that real life needs for its existence; you would have remove from your thinking all that we mean when we speak of love. For what is the basis of love, whether it is love for another person, for humankind in general, or for spiritual beings? Our love depends on meeting the other with forces that are completely different from those that illuminate our thinking. If transparent or abstract thoughts were to light up as soon as we met another being, then even the very first seeds of love would be destroyed immediately. We simply would be unable to engender love. You need only to remember how in ordinary life love ceases when the light of abstract thought takes over. You need only to realize how correct we are to speak of abstract thoughts as cold, how all inner warmth ceases when we approach the thinking realm. Warmth, revealing itself through love, could not come into being if we were to meet outer material life only with the intellect; love would be extinguished from our world.

Now imagine that there is nothing to prevent you from looking into your own inner structure; that, when looking inward, you could perceive the forces and weaving substances within you just as clearly as you see colors and hear tones in the outer world. If this were to happen, you would have the possibility of continuously experiencing your own inner being. However, in this case, too, you would have to eliminate something from your mind that human beings need to exist in the world as it is. What is it that lights up within when you turn your sight inward? You see remembered imagery of what you have experienced in the outer world. In fact, when looking inward, you do not see your inner being at all. You see only the reflection, or memory, of what you have experienced in the world.

On the one hand, if you consider that, without this faculty of memory, personal life would be impossible, and, on the other, consider that to perceive your own inner life you would have to eliminate your memory, then you realize the necessity of the built-in limits in our human organization. The possibility of clearly perceiving the essence of outer matter would presuppose a person devoid of love. The possibility of perpetually perceiving one’s own inner organization would presuppose a human being devoid of memory. Thus, these two hypotheses help us to realize the necessity of the two limits placed on ordinary human life and consciousness. They exist for the development of love and because human beings need personal memories for an inner life. But, if there is a path beyond these boundaries into the suprasensory world, an obvious question arise. Can we walk this path without damaging our personal life, on the one hand, and shunning a social life with others, on the other?

Anthroposophy has the courage to say that, with the ordinary established naturalistic approach, it is impossible to attain suprasensory knowledge. At the same time, however, it must ask, Is there any way that, when applied with the strict discipline of natural science, will enable us to enter suprasensory worlds? We cannot accept the notion that crossing the threshold into the supernatural world marks the limit of scientific investigation. It is the goal of anthroposophy to open a path into the suprasensory, using means equally as exact as those used by ordinary science to penetrate the sensory realm. In this way, anthroposophy merely continues along the path of modern science. Anthroposophy does not intend to rebel against present achievements, but it endeavors to bring something that is needed today and something contemporary life cannot provide from its own resources.

If we look at Darwin’s attitude as I have presented it, we might be prompted to say, If science can deal only with what is perceptible to the senses, then we have to fall back on religious beliefs to approach the suprasensory, and we simply have to accept the situation as inevitable. Such a response, however, cannot solve the fundamental, urgent human problems of our time.

In this context, I would like to speak about two characteristics of contemporary life, because, apart from supplementing what has been said, they also illuminate educational matters. They may help to illustrate how modern intellectual thinking—which is striving for absolute lucidity—is nevertheless prone to drift into the dark unconscious and instinctive domains.

If you observe people’s attitudes toward the world in past ages, you will find that ancient religion was never seen as mere faith—this happened only in later times—but that religions were based on direct experience and insight into spirit worlds. Knowledge thus gained was considered to be as real as the results of our modern natural scientific research. Only in subsequent ages was knowledge confined to what is sense perceptible, and suprasensory knowledge was, consequently, relegated to the religious realm. And so, the illusion came about that anything pertaining to metaphysical existence had to be a matter of faith. Yet, as long as religions rested on suprasensory knowledge, this knowledge bestowed great power, affecting even physical human nature. Modern civilization cannot generate this kind of moral strength for people today. When religion becomes only a matter of faith, it loses power, and it can no longer work down into our physical constitution. Although this is felt instinctively, its importance is unrecognized. This instinctive feeling and the search for revitalizing forces have found an outlet that has become a distinctive feature of our civilization; it is a part of all that we call sports.

Religion has lost the power of strengthening the human physical constitution. Therefore an instinctive urge has arisen in people to gain access to a source of strength through outward, Education Based on Knowledge of the Human Being 39 physical means only. As life tends toward polarity, we find that people instinctively want to substitute the loss of invigoration, previously drawn from his religious experiences, by cultivating sports. I have no wish to harangue against sports. Neither do I wish to belittle their positive aspects. In fact, I feel confident that these activities will eventually develop in a healthy way. Nevertheless, it must be said that sports will assume a completely different position in human life in the future, whereas today it is a substitute for religious experience. Such a statement may well seem paradoxical, but truth, today, is paradoxical, because modern civilization has drifted into so many crosscurrents.

A second characteristic of our intellectual and naturalistic civilization is that, instead of embracing life fully, it tends to lead to contradictions that destroy the soul. Thinking is driven along until it becomes entangled in chaotic webs of thought and contradictions, and the thinker remains unaware of the confusion created. For example, a young child in a certain sense will go through the various stages than humankind has passed through, from the days of primitive humanity up to our present civilization, and this fills certain naturalistic intellectuals with admiration. They observe the somewhat turned-up nostrils of a young child and the position of the eyes, which lie further apart than in later life. They observe the formation of the forehead with its characteristic curvature and also the shape of the mouth. All these features remind people of those found in primitive tribes, and so they see young children as “little savages.” Yet, at the same time, sentiments such as those expressed by Rousseau are trying to rise to the surface—sentiments that completely contradict what has just been said. When contemplating educational aims, some people prefer to “return to nature,” both from a physical and a moral aspect. But, being under the influence of an intellectual atmosphere, they soon aim at arranging educational ideas according to the principles of logic, for intellectuality will always lead to logic in thinking. Observing many illogical features in education today, they want to base it on principles of logic, which, in their eyes, are entirely compatible with a child’s natural development. Logic, however, does not meet the needs of children at all. One close look at primitive races will make one quickly realize that members of such tribes hardly apply logical thinking to their ways of life.

And so some reformers are under the illusion that they are returning to nature by introducing a logical attitude in educating the young, who are supposed to be little savages, an attitude that is completely alien to a child. In this way, adherents of Rousseau’s message find themselves caught in a strange contradiction with an intellectualistic attitude; striving toward harmony with nature does not fit with an intellectualistic outlook. And, as far as the education of the will is concerned, the intellectualistic thinker is completely out of touch with reality. According to this way of thinking, a child should above all be taught what is useful in life. For example, such people never tire of pointing out the impracticability of our modern mode of dress, which does not satisfy the demands of utility. They advocate a return to more natural ways, saying that we should concentrate on the utilitarian aspects of life. The education of girls is especially subjected to sharp criticism by such reformers.

So now they are faced with a paradox; did primitive human beings—the stage young children supposedly recapitulate—live a life of utility? Certainly not. According to archeologists, they developed neither logical thinking nor utilitarian living. Their essential needs were satisfied through the help of inborn instincts. But what captivated the interest of primitive people? Adornment. They did not wear clothing for practical reasons, but through a longing for self-adornment. Whatever the members of such tribes chose to wear—or not to wear, in order to display the patterns on their skin—was not intended for utility, but as an expression of a yearning for beauty as they understood it. Similar traits can be found in the young child.

Those who perceive these contradictions and imperfections in modern life will be ready to look for their causes. They will increasingly recognize how lopsided and limited the generally accepted intellectualistic, naturalistic way of thinking is, which does not see the human being as a whole at all. Usually only our waking state is considered, whereas in reality the hours spent in sleep are just as much part of human life as those of daytime consciousness. You may object by saying that natural science has closely examined the human sleeping state as well, and indeed there exist many interesting theories about the nature of sleep and of dreams. But these premises were made by people while awake, not by investigators who were able to enter the domains of sleep. If people who are interested in education think in rational and logical ways and in terms of what is practical and useful in life, and if, on the other hand, they feel pulled in the direction of Rousseau’s call to nature, they will become victims of strange contradictions. What they really do is pass on to children all that seems of value to themselves as adults. They try to graft onto the child something that is alien to the child’s nature. Children really do seek for beauty—though not in the ways suggested by Rousseau—which for them expresses neither goodness nor utility, but simply exists for its own sake.

In the waking state, human beings not only have consciousness but also experience an inner life and actively participate in life. During sleep, on the other hand, people loses their ordinary consciousness, and consequently they examine sleep while awake. A proper study of this phenomenon, however, requires more than abstract theories. Entering sleep in full consciousness is essential for understanding it.

By experiencing both wonder and astonishment when studying the phenomena of sleep, a serious and unbiased investigator is not likely to advance in ways that, for example, Greek philosophy considered important. According to an ancient Greek adage, every philosophy—as a path toward cognition—begins with wonder. But this indicates only the beginning of the search for insight. One must move on. One must progress from wonder to knowledge.

However, the first step toward suprasensory knowledge must be taken not with the expectation of being able to enter the spiritual world directly, but with the intent of building a bridge from the ordinary sensory world to suprasensory knowledge. One way of achieving this is to apply the discipline we use to observe the phenomena of the sensory world to the phenomena we encounter from the realms of sleep and dreams. Modern people have certainly learned to observe accurately, but in this case it is not simply a matter of observing accurately. To gain insight, one must be able to direct observations toward specific areas.

I would like to give you an example of how this can be done when studying dream phenomena, which infiltrate our waking life in strange and mysterious ways.

Occasionally one still encounters people who have remained aware of the essential difference between waking and sleeping, but their awareness has become only a dim and vague feeling. Nevertheless, they are aware that an awake person is an altogether different from one who is asleep. Therefore, someone tells them that sleep is a waste of time and sleepers are idle and lazy, these simple minds will say that, as long as we sleep, we are free from sin. Thus, they try to say that people, whom they consider sinful while awake, are innocent while asleep. A good instinctive wisdom is hidden in this somewhat naive attitude. But to reach clarity, we need to train our own observation. I would like to give you an example.

Surely there are some here—perhaps every one of you—who have had dreams reminiscent of what might have happened to you in daily life. For example, you may have dreamed that you were taken to a river and that you had to get across somehow. So you searched for a boat, which, after a great deal of trouble, you managed to get hold of. Then you had to work hard to row across. In your dream you might have felt the physical exertion of plying the oars, until at last you managed to get across, just as you might have in ordinary life. There are many such kinds of dreams. Their contents are definite reminiscences of our physical, sensory lives. But there are also other kinds of dreams that do not echo waking life. For instance, someone again may dream that it is necessary to get across a river. Wondering how this urge could possibly be fulfilled, the dreamer is suddenly able to spread wings and—presto!—simply fly across and land safely on the opposite bank. This sort of dream is certainly not a memory of something that could happen in waking life, because, to my knowledge, this is hardly the way ordinary mortals transport themselves across a river in real life. Here we have something that simply does not exist in physical life.

Now, if we accurately observe the relationship between sleep and being awake, we discover something very interesting; we find that dreams in which we experience the toil and exhaustion of waking life, which reflect waking life, cause us to awake tired. On waking, our limbs feel heavy and tiredness seems to drag on throughout the day. In other words, if strains and pains of a life of drudgery reappear in our dreams, we awake weakened rather than refreshed. But now observe the effects of the other kind of dream; if you managed to fly—weightless and with hearty enthusiasm, with wings you do not possess in ordinary life—once you have flown across your river, you awake bright and breezy, and your limbs feel light. We need to observe how these differing dreams affect the waking life with the same accuracy we use to make observations in mathematics or physics. We know quite well that we would not get very far in these two subjects without it. Yet dreams do not generally become the object of exact observations and, consequently, no satisfactory results are achieved in this field. And such a situation hardly encourages people to strive for greater powers of insight into these somewhat obscure areas of life.

This is not just a case of presenting isolated glimpses of something that seems to confirm previous indications. The more we ponder over the relevant facts, the more the reciprocal links between sleep and waking life become evident. For example, there are dreams in which you may see some very tasty food that you then enjoy with a hearty appetite. You will find that usually, after having thus eaten in your dreams, you wake up without much appetite. You may not even eat during the following day, as though there were something wrong with your digestion. On the other hand, if in your dream you had the experience of speaking to an angel, and if you entered fully into a dialogue, you will awake with a keen edge to your appetite, which may persist during the whole day. Needless to say, partaking of food in one’s dream represents a memory from waking life, for in the spiritual world one neither eats nor drinks. Surely you will accept this without further proof. Therefore, enjoying food in a dream is a reminiscence of physical life, whereas speaking to an angel—an event unlikely to occur to people these days—cannot be seen as an echo of daily life.

Such an observation alone could show even an abstract thinker that something unknown happens to us in sleep—something that nevertheless plays into our daily lives. It is wrong to surmise that it is impossible to gain exact and clear concepts in this realm. Is it not a clear discovery that dreams echoing earthly reality—the kind so popular among naturalistic poets, ever eager to imitate earthly life, never ready to enter the suprasensory realms—have an unhealthy effect on our waking lives? If impressions from ordinary life reappear in dreams, these dreams have an injurious effect upon our health. On the other hand, if unrealistic dream images appear—the kind scornfully dismissed as mystical rubbish by an intellectualistic philistine—they make us feel bright and fresh upon awaking in the morning. It is certainly possible to observe the strange interplay and the reciprocal effects between dreaming and sleeping.

And so we can say that something independent of the human physical condition must be happening during sleep, the effects of which we can observe in the person’s physical organism. Dreams cause astonishment and wonder to ordinary consciousness, because they elude us in our waking state. The more you try to collect such examples, the more you will find a real connection between the human sleeping and waking state.

You only need to look closely at dreams to see that they are different from our experiences during waking life. When awake, we are able to link or separate mental images at will, but we cannot do this when dreaming. Dream images are woven as objective appearances beyond the influence of our will. In dreams, the activities of the soul become passive, numb, and immobile.

If we study dreams from yet another aspect, we find that they can reveal other secret sides of human existence. Observe, for instance, your judgment of people with whom you may have a certain relationship. You might find that you keep your full inner feelings of sympathy or antipathy from arising to consciousness, and that your judgment of people is colored by various facts, such as their titles or positions in social life. However, when you dream about such a person, something unexpected may happen; you may find yourself giving someone a good beating. Such behavior, so completely at odds with your attitude in waking life, allows you to glimpse the more hidden regions of your sympathies and antipathies, some of which you would never dare admit, even to yourself, but which the dream conjures up in your soul. Subconscious images are placed before the dreaming soul. They are relatively easy to watch, but if you deeply investigate someone’s inexplicable moods of ill temper or euphoria that seem unrelated to outer circumstances, you find that they, too, were caused by dreams, completely forgotten by those concerned. Experiences in sleep and the revelations of dreams work into the unconscious and may lead to seemingly inexplicable moods. Unless we consider this other side of life, the hidden domain of our sleep life, by making exact investigations, we cannot understand human life in its wholeness.

All these reciprocal effects, however, happen without human participation. Yet it is possible to lift what happens subconsciously and involuntarily into a state of clear consciousness equal to that of someone engaged in mathematics or other scientific investigations. When achieving this, one’s powers of observation are enhanced beyond the indeterminate relationship between waking and sleeping to the fully conscious states of imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

Only through these three capacities is it possible to attain true knowledge of the human being. What life vaguely hints at through the phenomenon of sleep can be developed in full consciousness by applying methods given by anthroposophy, which strive toward a real knowledge of the universe and the human being.

In this course of lectures I should like to describe the relationship which we, human beings of the present day, may gain to that spiritual power which, as the power of Michael, intervenes in the spiritual and physical events of the earth. It will be necessary to prepare ourselves in today's lecture for this task. We shall need various points of view which will enable human intelligence really to present the various interferences with the just designated power on the background of the symptoms which we may observe in our surroundings. We must keep in mind, if we wish to speak seriously of the spiritual world, that we always may look upon the manifestations of the spiritual powers here in the physical world. We try to penetrate as it were, through the veil of the physical world to that which is active in the spiritual world. What exists in the physical world may be observed by everyone; what is active in the spiritual world serves to solve the riddles posed by the physical world. But we must sense the riddles of physical life in the right way. It is important, in connection with these weighty matters, to comprehend in full seriousness what I have said in recent lectures. {See Rudolf Steiner, Pneumatosophy: The Riddle of the Inner Human Being. Anthroposophic Press, New York.} It is impossible to link personal world views to a real understanding of that which so vitally concerns not only the whole of humanity, but the whole world. We must free ourselves from merely personal interests. Moreover, we will gain an understanding for the purpose and value of personality in the world if we have freed ourselves from the personal element in its narrower sense.

Now you know that our Earth evolution was preceded by another; that we stand within a cosmic evolution. First, you know that this evolution progresses, that it has arrived at a point beyond which it will pass to further, more advanced stages. Secondly, you know that if we consider the world as such, we have to deal not only with the beings which we meet in the earthly sphere, that is, in the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms, but that we have to deal with beings belonging to higher realms which we have designated as the beings of the higher hierarchies. If we speak of evolution in its entirety, we have always to consider these beings of the higher hierarchies.

These beings, on their part, also pass through an evolution which we can understand if we find analogies to our own human evolution and to the one which exists in the various kingdoms of the earth. Consider, for example, the following: You know that we human beings have passed through a Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution, we may say that we as human beings who experience ourselves in earthly surroundings have arrived at the fourth stage of our evolution.

Let us now consider the beings directly above our human stage whom we call the Angeloi, the Angels. If we merely wish to show an analogy we may say: these beings, although their form is entirely different from the human, and although they are invisible to physical human senses, are at the evolutionary stage of Jupiter.

Let us now turn to the Archangeloi, the Archangels. They are at the evolutionary stage which mankind will have reached upon Venus. And if we turn to the Archai, the time spirits, to the beings who especially influence our earthly evolution, we find that they have already attained the evolution of Vulcan.

Now the significant question arises: If we turn to the beings still higher in rank, to the hierarchy of the so-called Spirits of Form, on what stage do we find them? We must answer: They have already passed beyond the stages which we human beings conceive of as our evolutionary stages of the future. They have already passed beyond the Vulcan evolution. If we consider our own evolution as consisting of seven stages, which suffices for our present considerations, we must say that the Spiritsof Form have reached the eighth stage. We human beings are at the fourth stage of evolution; if we consider the eighth stage we find the Form Spirits.

Now we must not conceive of these successive stages of evolution as existing side by side, but we must conceive of them as interpenetrating one another. Just as the atmosphere surrounds and permeates the earth, so this eighth sphere of evolution to which the Form Spirits belong permeates the sphere in which we human beings live. Let us now carefully consider these two stages of evolution.

Let us repeat: We human beings exist in a sphere which has reached the fourth evolutionary stage. Yet we also exist, if we disregard everything else, in the realm which the Form Spirits, around us and through us, have to regard as theirs. Let us now consider human evolution concretely. We have often distinguished the development of the head from that of the human being. The latter we have again divided into two separate parts, the development of the breast and the development of the limbs. Let us disregard this latter differentiation and consider man as having, on the one hand, that which belongs to the development of the head and, on the other, everything that belongs to the rest of the human being.

Now imagine the following: You have here the surface of the ocean, the human being wading in it, moving forward with only his head rising about the water. In this image—of course it is only an image—you have the position of the present-day human being. Everything in which the head is rooted we would have to consider as belonging to the fourth stage of evolution, and everything in which man moves forward, wading or swimming in it, as it were, we would have to designate as the eighth stage of evolution. For it is a peculiar fact that the human being has, in a certain way, outgrown as far as his head is concerned, the element in which the Spirits of Form unfold their particular being. In regard to his head, man has become emancipated, so to speak, from the sphere which is interpenetrated by the beings of the Spirits of Form.

Only by thoroughly comprehending this can we arrive at a proper conception of the human being; only then can we understand the special position man has in the world; only then will it become clear to us that when the human being senses the Spirits of Form's creative influence upon him, he does not sense this directly through the faculties of his head, but indirectly through the effect of the rest of his body upon the head. You all know that breathing is connected with our blood-circulation, speaking in the sense of external physiology. But the blood is also driven into the head, creating an organic, vital connection of the head with the rest of the organism. The head is nourished and invigorated by the rest of the body.

We must carefully discriminate between two things. The first is the fact that the head is in direct connection with the external world. If you see an object, you perceive it through your eyes; there is a direct connection between the outer world and your head. If you, however, observe the life of your head as it is sustained by the processes of breathing and blood circulation, you will see the blood shooting up from the rest of the organism into the head and you may say there is not a direct, but only an indirect connection between your head and the surrounding world.

Naturally, you must not say, pedantically: well, the breath is inhaled through the mouth, therefore breathing also belongs to the head. I have stated above that we have here only an image. Organically, what is inhaled through the mouth does not actually belong to the head, but to the rest of the organism.

Focus your attention upon these two fundamental concepts which we have just gained; focus your attention upon the idea that we stand within two spheres: the sphere which we entered by passing through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution and being now within the Earth evolution which is the fourth evolutionary stage; then consider the fact that we live within a sphere which belongs to the Form Spirits just as our earth belongs to us, but which, as the eighth sphere, permeates our earth and our organism with the exception of our head and all that is sense activity. If we focus our attention upon these facts we have created a basis for what is to follow.

Yet let me first build a still firmer basis through certain other concepts. If we wish to consider our life under such influences, we must take into account the beings we have often mentioned as cooperating in world events: the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. Let us, at the outset, fix our attention upon the most external aspect of these beings. They dwell in the same spheres in which we human beings live. Considering their most external aspect, we may think of all Luciferic beings as possessing those forces which we feel when there arises in us the tendency to become fantastic, when we yield one-sidedly to fancy and over-enthusiasm, when we—if I may express it pictorially—tend to go out with our being beyond our head. If we tend to go out beyond our head, we employ forces which play a certain role in our human organism but which are the universal forces of the beings we call Luciferic. Think of beings formed entirely of those forces within us which strive to pass beyond our head and you have the Luciferic beings which have a certain relation to our human world.

Conversely, think of all that presses us down upon the earth, all that makes us sober philistines, makes us bourgeois, which leads us to develop materialistic attitudes, think of all that exists in us as dry intellect, and you have the Ahrimanic powers.

All that I have described here from the aspect of the soul can also be described from the aspect of the body. One can say, man is always in a midway position between the intentions of his blood and the intentions of his bones. The bones constantly tend to ossify us; in other words, to “ahrimanize” our bodies, to harden us. The blood would like to drive us out beyond ourselves. Expressed in pathological terms, the blood may become feverish. Then the human being is organically driven into phantasms. The bones may spread their nature over the rest of the organism. Then the human being becomes ossified, becomes sclerotic, as nearly everyone does to a certain degree in old age. Then he carries the death-dealing element in his organism, namely, the Ahrimanic element. We may say that everything that lives in the blood tends toward the Luciferic, everything that lives in the bones has the tendency toward the Ahrimanic. The human being is the equilibrium between the two, as he, from the aspect of the soul, has to be the equilibrium between over-enthusiastic and sober philistinism.

Now we may characterize these two kinds of beings from a more profound point of view. Let us observe the Luciferic beings and see what interests they have in cosmic existence. We shall find that their chief interest is to make the world, and above all the human world, desert the spiritual beings whom man must regard as his true creators. The Luciferic beings wish nothing more than to make the world desert the divine beings. Do not misunderstand me: it is not the prime intention of the Luciferic beings to appropriate the world to themselves. From various things I have said about them you can gather that this is not their chief intention; their chief aim is to make the human being forsake his own divine creator-beings, to liberate the world from these beings.

The Ahrimanic beings have a different aim. They have the decided intention to make the kingdom of man and the rest of the earth, subject to their sphere of power, to make mankind dependent upon them, to get control over human beings. While it always has been—and is now—the endeavor of the Luciferic beings to make human beings desert what they can feel as the Divine in themselves, the Ahrimanic beings have the tendency gradually to include mankind and everything connected with it in their sphere of power.

Thus, within our cosmos, into which we human beings are interwoven, there exists a battle between the Luciferic beings, constantly striving for freedom, universal freedom, and the Ahrimanic beings, constantly striving for everlasting power and might. This battle permeates everything in which we live. Please hold this fact in mind as the second idea, important to our further considerations. The world in which we live is permeated by Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings, and there exists this tremendous contrast between the liberating tendency of the Luciferic beings and the power tendency of the Ahrimanic beings.

If you consider this whole matter you will have to say to yourselves: I am only able to understand the world if I conceive of it in connection with the number three, the triad. For we have on the one hand the Luciferic, and on the other the Ahrimanic element, and in the middle the human being who, as the third element, in the state of equilibrium between the two, must feel his divine essence. We shall only arrive at an understanding of the world if we base it on this triad and become clear about the fact that human life is the scale-beam. Here the fulcrum; on the one side the scale pan with the Luciferic element, pulling upward; on the other side the scale pan with the Ahrimanic element, pulling downward. To keep the scales in perfect balance signifies the essential being of man. Those who were initiated into such secrets of the spiritual evolution of mankind have always emphasized the fact that it is only possible to understand cosmic existence into which man is placed if it is conceived of in the sense of the triad; that it cannot be understood if it is considered on the basis of any other number. Thus we may say, employing our own terminology: we have to deal with three main factors in cosmic existence, namely: the Luciferic element, representing the one scale of the balance, the Ahrimanic element, representing the other scale of the balance, and the state of equilibrium which represents the Christ Impulse.

Now you may well imagine that it is entirely in the interest of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers to conceal this secret of the triad. For the proper comprehension of this secret enables mankind to bring about the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers; that means, on the one hand, to use the Luciferic tendency toward freedom for the achievement of a wholesome cosmic aim, and on the other hand, to strive to achieve the same with the Ahrimanic element. The human being's normal spiritual condition consists in relating himself in the proper way to this trinity, this triune structure of the world.

For, the influences upon human spiritual and cultural life do have a strong tendency to confuse man in regard to the significance of the triad. We can observe very clearly in modern culture that the conception of this structure according to the triad is almost completely eclipsed by the conception of a structure according to the duad. If we wish to understand Goethe's Faust, we must realize, as I have often pointed out, that this confusion in regard to the triad influences even this great cosmic poem. If Goethe, in his day, had had a clear view of these matters, he would not have presented the Mephistophelean power as the only opponent of Faust who drags Faust down, but he would have contrasted this Mephistophelean power—of whom we know that it is identical with the Ahrimanic power—with the Luciferic power, and Lucifer and Mephistopheles would appear in Faust as two opposing forces. I have spoken of this here repeatedly. If we study the figure of Goethe's Mephistopheles, we can see clearly that Goethe in his characterization of Mephistopheles constantly confused the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements. Goethe's Mephistopheles is a figure mixed as it were, of two elements. There is no uniformity in it. The Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements are intermingled at random. I have dealt with this more explicitly in my brochure, Goethe's Standard of the Soul.

This confusion which thus plays even into Goethe's Faust is based upon the misconception which has arisen in the evolution of modern mankind—in former times it was different—of putting the duad in the place of the triad when considering the structure of the world; that is, one sees the good principle on the one side, the bad principle on the other: God and the Devil.

Thus we must emphasize the fact that if a person wishes to conceive of the structure of the world in a factual manner, he must acknowledge the triad, the two opposing elements of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic and the Divine element which holds the balance between the two. This has to be contrasted with the illusion which has arisen in mankind's spiritual evolution through the erroneous concept of the duad, of God and the Devil, of the divine-spiritual forces above and the diabolical forces below. It is as though we were to force man out of his position of equilibrium if we conceal from him the fact that a sound comprehension of the world can only result from the proper conception of the triad and if one makes him believe that the world structure is in some way determined by the duad. Yet, the highest human endeavors have fallen prey to this error.

If we wish to deal with this question, we must do it without prejudice, we must enter an unbiased sphere of thinking. We must carefully distinguish between object and name. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived into thinking that by giving a certain name to a being we have at any time experienced and felt this being in the right way.

If we think of those beings which man regards as his own divine beings, we must say: we can feel and sense them in the right way only if we conceive of them as effecting the equilibrium between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic principles. We can never feel in the right way what we should feel as the Divine if we do not enter upon this threefold order. Consider from this point of view Milton's Paradise Lost, or Klopstock's Messiah which came into existence under the influence of Paradise Lost. Here you have nothing of a real comprehension of a threefold world structure, you have instead a battle between the supposedly good and the supposedly evil, the battle between heaven and hell. You have the mistaken idea of the duad brought into man's spiritual evolution; you have what is rooted in popular consciousness as the illusory contrast between heaven and hell, introduced into two cosmic poems of modern times.

It is of no avail that Milton and Klopstock call the heavenly entities divine beings. They would only be so for man if they were conceived of on the basis of the threefold structure of world existence. Then it would be possible to say that a battle takes place between the good and the evil principles. But as the matter stands, a duad is assumed, the one member of which has the attributes of the good and receives a name derived from the divine, while the other member represents the diabolical, the anti-divine element. What does this really signify? Nothing less than the removal of the divine from consciousness and the usurping of the divine name by the Luciferic principle; so that in reality we have a battle between Lucifer and Ahriman; only, Ahriman is endowed with Luciferic attributes, and the realm of Lucifer is endowed with divine attributes.

You see the far-reaching consequences revealed by such a consideration. While human beings believe they are dealing with the divine and the diabolical elements when contemplating the contrasts described in Milton's Paradise Lost or Klopstock's Messiah, they are, in reality, dealing with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements. There is no consciousness present of the truly divine element; instead, the Luciferic element is endowed with divine names.

Milton's Paradise Lost and Klopstock's Messiah are spiritual creations which rise out of modern man's consciousness. That which manifests in them lives in the general consciousness of mankind; for the delusion of the duad has entered this modern consciousness, and the truth of the triad has been withheld. The most profound productions of the modern age which are, from a certain point of view, considered among the greatest creations of mankind, and rightly so, are a cultural maya and have sprung from the great delusion of modern mankind. Everything that is active in this illusory conception is the creation of the Ahrimanic influence, of that influence which in the future will concentrate in the incarnation of Ahriman of which I have already spoken. For this illusory conception in which we live today is nothing but the result of the false world view which springs up everywhere in modern civilization when human beings contrast heaven and hell. Heaven is considered to be the divine element, and hell the diabolical element, while, in truth, we have to do with the Luciferic element called heavenly and the Ahrimanic element called infernal.

You must realize what interests rule in modern spiritual history. Even the concept of the threefold nature of the human organism or the human being in its entirety has in a certain respect been abolished for occidental civilization by the eighth Œcumenical Council of Constantinople in the year 869. I have often mentioned this. The dogma was then established that the Christian does not have to believe in the threefold human being but only in a twofold human being. The belief in body, soul and spirit was tabooed, and medieval theologians and philosophers who still knew a great deal about the true facts had a hard time to circumvent this truth, for the so-called trichotomy, the “membering” of the human being into body, soul, and spirit had been declared a heresy. They were compelled to teach the duality, namely, that man consists of body and soul, and not of body, soul and spirit. And certain beings, certain men know very well that it is of tremendous significance for human spiritual life if the threefoldness is replaced by twofoldness.

We must consider such profound aspects if we wish to understand correctly why in the August number of Stimmen der Zeit (Voices of the Age) the Jesuit priest Zimmermann draws attention to the fact that one of the recent decrees of the Holy Office in Rome prohibits Roman Catholics from obtaining absolution if they read or possess theosophical writings or participate in anything theosophical. The Jesuit priest Zimmermann interprets this decree in his article in Die Stimmen der Zeit by stating that it applies, above everything else, to my Anthroposophy, and that those who wish to be considered true Roman Catholics must not occupy themselves with anthroposophical literature. He quotes one of the main reasons for this, namely, that Anthroposophy differentiates between body, soul and spirit, and thus teaches a heresy opposed to the orthodox belief that man consists of body and soul.

I have mentioned to you before that modern philosophers have adopted this differentiation of body and soul without being aware of it. They believe that they carry on unbiased, objective science; they believe they practice real observation which leads them to the conviction that man consists of body and soul. In truth, however, they are following in the footsteps of this dogma which has found its way into modern spiritual development. What is considered science today is actually completely dependent on such things as have been put into the world in the course of modern human evolution. Do not believe that you will be able with kind words to convert such people who from these quarters slander Anthroposophy; do not believe that you will prevail upon them and call forth their good will toward Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy must make its way in the world through its own force, and not through the protection of any power, be it ever so Christian in appearance. Through inner strength alone can Anthroposophy achieve what it must achieve in the world.

You must realize that the Christ impulse can only be comprehended if one sees in it the impulse of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic principles, if one gives it the right place within the trinity. We may ask: What must one do if one tries to deceive people in regard to the true Christ impulse? One must divert their attention from the true threefold ordering of the world and direct it toward the delusion of the duad which is justified only when we are concerned with the manifest and not when we are concerned with what lies behind the manifest in the sphere of truth.

In such matters we must go beyond mere names. Calling some being or other Christ does not mean that it is the Christ. If one wishes to prevent another human being from acquiring a true concept of Christ, one need only put the duad in the place of the triad; but if one wishes to point to the Christ impulse in its true meaning, it is necessary that the duad be supplanted by the triad. We need not join the group of people who declare others to be heretics; we need not declare Milton's Paradise Lost or Klopstock's Messiah to be damnable works of the devil; we may continue to enjoy their beauty and grandeur. But we must realize that such works, in as much as they are the blossoms of popular modern civilization, do not speak of Christ at all but originate from the delusion that everything that is not part of human evolution may be considered as belonging, on the one hand, to the realm of the devil and, on the other, to the realm of the Divine. But in reality, instead of dealing with the realm of the Divine we are dealing with the realm of Lucifer. Paradise Lost describes the expulsion of man from Lucifer's realm into the realm of Ahriman; it describes the longing of man not for the realm of the Divine, but for the paradise that has been lost, that means, the longing for the realm of Lucifer. You may regard Milton's Paradise Lost and Klopstock's Messiah as beautiful descriptions of human longing for the realm of Lucifer; this is what you should consider them to be, for this is what they are.

You see how necessary it is to revise certain conceptions which prevail today. If we are serious in our anthroposophical thinking and feeling we are faced, not with insignificant, but with important decisions. We are faced with the necessity of taking very seriously an expression which Nietzsche has often employed, namely the expression: “the revaluation of values.” We have to take this very seriously. The achievements of modern man are in great need of revaluation.

This does not mean that we ourselves have to become denouncers of heresy. We constantly perform here scenes from Goethe's Faust, and I have, as you know, devoted decades of my life to the study of Goethe. But from my little book, Goethe's Standard of the Soul, you can see that this has not blinded me to the false characterization drawn by Goethe in his Mephistopheles. It would be a philistine standpoint, were we to say: Goethe's Mephistopheles is a false conception; let's get rid of him. We should then be behaving like inquisitors. As modern men we must not place ourselves in such a position. On the other hand, we must not be indolently satisfied with the ideas that have entered, as it were, into the flesh and bones of the great masses of people today. Mankind will have to learn a great deal. It will have to transvalue many values.

All this is connected with the mission of Michael in relation to those beings of the higher hierarchies with whom he is connected. In the subsequent lectures we shall show how we may arrive at an understanding of those impulses which radiate from the Michael being into our earthly human existence.

We have spoken about the life between death and a new birth and have realised that after death man is received into a super earthly world which becomes manifest to us on Earth only through its signs or tokens—the stars; for the stars are tokens of another world, indications of spiritual worlds within our ken during our life between death and a new birth. We have heard, too, how man enters a Moon-sphere, a Mercury-sphere, a Venus-sphere, and yesterday we began to think about the Sun-sphere. At the same time I explained how, through Initiation knowledge, the nature of these worlds can be understood.

When through the methods described in my books, the power to look into the spiritual world has been acquired, we are able to survey in retrospect the whole of our earthly life. It lies there, displayed in a vast tableau, and we survey it in periods of time, each of about seven years' duration. We see our early childhood until the change of teeth, and with it the mystery of the Moon-sphere is revealed. The mystery of the Mercury-sphere is revealed by the retrospective survey of the period between the change of teeth at about the seventh year, and puberty. The mystery of the Venus-sphere is revealed by the retrospective survey of the period from the fourteenth or fifteenth year to the beginning of the twenties. And when, having grown older in earthly life, we look back on the period between approximately the twenty-first to the forty-second years when the human being is in the prime of life and has not begun to decline then the mysteries of the Sun-sphere present themselves to us. In this sphere there are no processes, no workings, of nature. None of the causes and effects to be perceived in earthly nature exist in the Sun-sphere. When we have passed the spheres of Moon, Mercury and Venus and have entered that of the Sun there are no activities of nature around us but only activities of a moral kind. Everything that is good has its corresponding good results; whatever is evil has long ago fallen away in the Moon-sphere. The Sun-sphere is pure goodness, shining, radiant goodness; no evil has any place in it. And we must live through this Sun-existence often for centuries, for time is more prolonged in the life between death and rebirth than here on Earth. In the Sun-sphere we come not only into the company of those souls with whom we were connected by karma on Earth, who have passed through the gate of death and have entered the spiritual world as we ourselves have done, but in the Sun-sphere we come also into the province of the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. The activities of these Beings are purely spiritual; their nature is purely spiritual. And the moral world we behold around us in the Sun-sphere belongs to them, just as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms belong to the Earth.

To understand the life of the human soul in the Sun-sphere we must realise that here on Earth we stand spatially enclosed within our skin. We look out upon the world from what is bounded by our skin. In the Sun-sphere the reverse is the case. There, everything we here call the world is within us; the Moon is within us, not outside us; Mercury is within us; indeed the Sun-sphere itself is within us, not outside us.

Here in earthly life we distinguish between our body and our head, realising that if the head is to do its work as an organ of cognition it must be set apart from the rest of the body. And just as we know that the head must be constructed differently from the rest of the body, so, in the Sun-sphere we know that the world organism is in us, belongs to us as Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun. But We also have something special which corresponds to the head in earthly life, namely, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. They constitute our head in the Sun-existence. We may say: In the Sun-existence, Moon, Mercury and Venus are our limbs; the Sun itself is our whole rhythmic system; the Sun-sphere itself, with all its Beings, is our heart and our lungs; whereas our organ of intelligence and reason, the head, is represented in the Sun-sphere by Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And just as we speak with the mouth in the lower part of the head, so, because we carry Mars within us in our cosmic body, we live by virtue of the cosmic word. The cosmic word sounds through the wide expanses of space. Thus, just as here on Earth we carry in our head those insignificant earthly thoughts, so through Jupiter we bear within us the wisdom of worlds. And as here we have memory, experiences of remembrance, so in the Sun-existence we bear within us the Saturn-existence which gives us cosmic memory. And just as here we live inside our skin and look outwards, so we live, as I have described, in our Sun-existence and look out upon the outside world, upon Man—not, of course, the being with whom anatomy is concerned, but a being as great, mighty and majestic as the Universe with all its stars.

Seen from an earthly standpoint we have far too low an opinion of what is comprised in man—and this is a good thing for earthly human beings who might otherwise become megalomaniacs. Fundamentally speaking, if we include all the human beings on the Earth, they are the bearers of all the Hierarchies, for the Beings of the Hierarchies unfold their nature in man. That in man which is far grander than the whole starry world, than the courses and phenomena of the stars—that is our outer world in the Sun-existence. And it is together with the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes, with the other Beings belonging to the Moon-sphere, with the Angels, with the Beings who inhabit Venus, with the Hierarchy of the Archai, with all the other human souls with whom we are karmically connected, that we prepare our next earthly life. This work in the Sun-existence for the elaboration of the next earthly life is infinitely grander than anything man can achieve for culture and civilisation on the Earth. What earthly civilisation offers is, after all, the work of man. But man himself is much more; to him it is vouchsafed to work for his later earthly life in collaboration with the Beings in the Sun-sphere. The result would be pitiable if man were merely to work with other human souls at the structure subsequently produced for earthly life. He must work in cooperation with all the higher Hierarchies. For the being born of a mother has not arisen on the Earth; it is only the scene of action, as it were, that comes into existence on the Earth. A wonderful cosmic creation, formed in super-sensible worlds, in the Sun-existence, incarnates into what is produced through physical heredity.

If such things are grasped with the right kind of understanding, we must surely look up to the Sun and say that its physical rays shining down to the Earth as warmth are the blessings bestowed by the Sun. But when we know what the Sun is in reality, we shall feel: Up yonder, where the glowing orb of the Sun moves through the Universe, is the scene where the spiritual prototypes of future generations of men first take shape; there the higher Hierarchies work together with the souls of men who lived on Earth in their previous incarnations, to bring the human beings of the future into existence. The Sun is actually the spiritual embryo of the Earth life of the future. In point of fact, it is the first half of the Sun-existence that we spend with the Gods, shaping together with them our future Earth-existence.

When we have lived through half the period between death and a new birth and have reached the point called in my Mystery Plays, the ‘Midnight Hour,' another kind of work begins. We have heard that the Sun-existence is pure goodness. If all that I have described to you had been the work of the higher cosmic wisdom alone, angel like, godlike beings would have come to the Earth instead of men. But these godlike beings would have had no freedom, for in keeping with the Sun-existence from which they sprang they would have been adapted only to do good. They would have had no choice between good and evil.

In the second half of the Sun-existence, part of the human reality produced there is transformed, dissolved as it were, to a picture. To begin with, man is formed in such a way that in his organism he would inevitably have become a wholly good being. Then, however, in the second half of the Sun-existence, part of his nature is not formed as a reality, but only as a picture, so that we go on our way in the Sun-sphere partly as spiritual reality, partly as a picture. This spiritual reality is the foundation for our body in the next earthly life. The part that is merely a picture is the foundation for our head. Because it is merely a picture it can be filled with much denser material, bony substance in fact. At the same time there is membered into this part that is not spiritual reality but a picture only, what we experience on Earth as the echoings of this picture. The requirements of our stomach, liver, and so on, are experienced as necessities of nature. The moral impulse within us is a spiritual experience here on Earth. The rudiment of what resounds from our conscience as the moral impulse is formed in that part of the Sun's embryonic prototype of man which becomes a picture.

Now the Earth in its evolution, the evolution of mankind on the Earth—each has its history; culture and civilisation evolve throughout the course of this history. The Sun life, the long period traversed between death and a new birth, has also its history. The most important event in the Earth's history is the Mystery of Golgotha, and in that history we make a clear distinction between the period before the Mystery of Golgotha and the period after it. A similar distinction must be made in the Sun-existence between what took place there before the Event of Golgotha on Earth, and after it. The following are the facts.—

Before the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place the Christ Being was not present on the Earth; His coming was expected but He was not yet there, He was still in His Sun-existence. Those who were initiated in the Mysteries had ways and means in their Mystery Centres of participating in the Sun life. When the Initiates succeeded in attaining higher knowledge outside the body, they were able, through their Initiation, to reach Christ in the Sun-sphere where He was to be found. Since the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass on the Earth, Christ has no longer been in the Sun-sphere. He has united Himself with Earth-existence. First, Christ is present in the Sun-sphere; afterwards He is no longer there. In Earth life it is exactly the reverse: to begin with, Christ is not there; after the Mystery of Golgotha He is. But just as the Christ Impulse penetrates radically into Earth life, so does it into the Sun life. Here on Earth it costs us effort so to deepen our life of soul that we may experience the Christ, that we may be inwardly filled, permeated by the Christ; similarly, it is difficult during the Sun life to survey, to behold, the essential nature of the whole man. And especially was it difficult in the early days of man's evolution, in spite of the instinctive clairvoyance then prevailing, to perceive the human being in the Sun life after death. Precisely because on Earth man saw something spiritual within himself, it was difficult for him in the Sun life to perceive the mystery of man as a world outside himself. Before the Mystery of Golgotha it was the Christ who gave to man in the Sun-sphere the power to behold his whole being. Since the Mystery of Golgotha we, as men on the Earth, must bring about the spiritual deepening that can be acquired through living contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha, through inward participation in the life of Christ. In this way, during our earthly existence, we can consciously marshal the forces which we can bear with us through death and which can give us power to see man's whole being in the Sun-sphere. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ gave to human beings in their life between death and rebirth the power to behold man in the Sun-existence; since the Mystery of Golgotha Christ prepares human beings during earthly life itself to be able to behold the whole, full nature of man in the Sun-existence. Thus it is only when we look out beyond Earth-existence into the Sun-existence that we can learn truly to understand the essence of Christianity. And, as we have seen, we learn to recognise in the Sun-existence a first half when man is originally formed as reality, when he is pure goodness. Then the picture-like part is engendered, and this projects into the later life, giving man freedom and containing the seed of moral experience.

Now if we study a man's moral aptitudes and the health-promoting forces in him with Initiation science, we see nothing correctly through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition unless these faculties are strengthened by what we can receive from the spheres into which man gradually enters on passing out of the Sun-existence—the spheres of Mars-existence, Jupiter-existence, Saturn-existence. Then, in order to fathom this second half of human life between death and rebirth, we must look back once more on certain seven-year periods in life. To see all this connectedly, however, we must have passed our sixty-third year, as I have already pointed out. If we look back on the period between the forty-second and forty-ninth years, the mysteries of Mars shine out from this period of life. From the forty-ninth to the fifty-sixth year, the Jupiter mysteries send out their light, and from the period between the fifty-sixth and the sixty-third years of life, illumination comes from the Saturn mysteries. Merely through the light which radiates towards us in this retrospective survey, we can understand what takes place in the spheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn to prepare man for a new life on Earth. For when a man enters these spheres, having passed through the Sun-existence, the Beings of the higher Hierarchies begin to work manifestly: first the Thrones in the Mars-sphere; then the Cherubim in the Jupiter-sphere; and the Seraphim in the Saturn-sphere.

When we have passed through this second half of the life between death and a new birth, once again the position is in a certain respect the opposite of that in earthly life. Here on Earth we look out into the wide spaces of the starry world, we see its wonders and its sublimity fills us with reverence. When in preparation for our future earthly life we proceed from the Sun-existence through the spheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, wherever we look we are in the sphere of religious life. But looking downwards towards the Earth, it does not appear to us in a physical form as we have it around us here; rather there appears in the direction of the Earth a sublime and mighty spiritual life, woven out of the events of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, out of the deeds of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Now, however, it is not quite as it was before, when we felt the whole world within us. We felt the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes within ourselves. Now, looking down as we experience the deeds of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, we see them, to begin with, outside ourselves; we see below us the super-sensible heaven, for the purely spiritual world is, for us, even above that. We see the super-sensible heaven and look down into the spheres of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; we see Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim living, striving, working. But what vista presents itself to us when we contemplate this work?—As we watch, we experience in a super-sensible way among the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones what will constitute the fulfilment of our karma in the next earthly life; we see what we shall experience through those other men with whom our karma is in some way interwoven. This we experience in the first place through divine deeds among the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. They determine among themselves what we shall experience as the fulfilment of our karma in the next life on Earth. The Gods are verily our creators, but they also create our karma. The fulfilment of our karma is first experienced by the Gods in a heavenly picture; and this makes the impression we carry with us into our further existence. We take our karma upon ourselves because we behold it first in the divine deeds of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. And in this vista we are shown what is in store for us in the next earthly life, carried into effect by the Gods.

From this you will realise that knowledge of karma is acquired through Initiation science if human life is followed through the second half of the journey from death to a new birth and if we are able to decipher what takes place in the spheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn through the deeds of the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. And for one who has learnt to look back in spirit over his life between his forty-second and forty-ninth years, it is possible to penetrate into the Mars mysteries, to have some vision of what takes place in that sphere—especially among the Thrones but in general among Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim—when man is passing through it. From the standpoint of earthly life alone, the way in which a man's karma works cannot be rightly judged; the super-sensible world must come to our assistance. And if someone wishes to study karma, he must turn his attention to that part of the Universe traversed by man between death and a new birth in the spheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Now in certain cases what is taking place in the Mars-sphere is of particular significance for the next earthly life.

Between death and a new birth we look at the Mars-sphere and perceive what is happening there. Everything is ‘word.' The Beings of Mars are ‘word beings'—if I may put it so. Picture it as follows. Man consists of flesh and blood; when he speaks he sets the air in motion. When the air waves strike against our ears, we hear; the sounds and tones are embodied in the air waves. The Mars Beings are formed of such waves; their whole nature consists of words, and when we hear with the ears of spirit we experience these Beings. If in later life we look back over the period between the forty-second and forty-ninth years, if this is the period that has the greatest influence on a man between death and a new birth, if it is in the Mars-sphere that his karma is chiefly worked out, then what he will experience on the Earth is very closely connected with the Mars-existence. At the decisive juncture in his life after death he looks down through the Mars-sphere and forms for himself an earthly life very strongly connected with the Mars-existence.

Now let us take an example. There was a man who lived at the time when the Arabs, under the influence of Mohammedanism, streamed from Asia and North Africa to battle against Europe, threatening the Spanish Empire and setting up Moorish Arabian sovereignty. Suppose that before the spread of Arabian domination in Africa a man had acquired learning in the form customary at that time. There was such a man. In North Africa he had imbibed the knowledge that was available there, not exactly as it had been imbibed by St. Augustine, but in a somewhat similar form. This man—I am not now speaking of St. Augustine but of the other personality—imbibed a later form of North African learning which by then contained elements of Moorish-Arabian thought. This personality subsequently went over to Spain where his beliefs underwent a kind of transformation; he turned to a more Christian point of view and mingled the Arabian concepts he had previously imbibed with the Christian teachings he was now receiving. Then he became imbued with elements of cabbalistic knowledge—not with what is now generally called Cabbalism but with certain trends of cabbalistic thought. The outcome was that he had many doubts, inner doubts and uncertainties; and in this mood of uncertainty he died. Comparatively soon afterwards, in the first half of the Middle Ages, this male personality was reborn as a woman, bringing into the new life an accumulation of all these doubts, which now became more deeply rooted than ever. The same personality appears again later on, having prepared for the transition from life as a woman to life again as a man, partly before and partly during the life between death and rebirth. The destiny for the next earthly life having been elaborated principally in the Mars-sphere, this personality was inevitably associated with the sphere of keen intellectuality on Earth—the sphere of intellectual judgments fraught with elements of criticism, of rebellion. This personality, two of whose previous incarnations I have here described, then became Voltaire.¹

You see how in the life between death and a new birth the earthly life is formed through the connection existing between man and the spiritual realities behind the stars. We understand the historical course of earthly life only when we can perceive the connection between one life and other earthly lives of the same individual.

How, then, do things that were present as causes and effects in earlier epochs of historical evolution pass over into the new epoch? It is men themselves who carry them over. All of you sitting here have brought over from your experiences in earlier epochs what you are experiencing in the present era. It is men themselves who make history, but we understand history only if instead of abstract speculation we are able to perceive what happens to individuals between death and a new birth in concrete reality.

Of particular importance for the understanding of human earthly life is the study of the karmic evolution that is revealed when a man brings with him from his earlier lives on Earth the results of having elaborated the main impulses of his karma in the Saturn-sphere. Men whose main karmic impulses take shape in the Mars-existence become like Voltaire. All their thoughts are concerned with life on Earth, criticising it, fighting against it, sometimes—in Voltaire's case with genius—epitomising it in caustic, aphoristic sayings. It is different when the karma is formed mainly through the Saturn impulses. These Saturn impulses have a very special influence on men. Even the perception of them when a man looks back upon his earthly life between the fifty-sixth and sixty-third years—even the sight of the Saturn mysteries is in many respects shattering; these mysteries are in a sense alien to earthly life. And whoever gradually learns through Initiation knowledge to perceive the Saturn mysteries that are connected with this period of life, undergoes experiences of dramatic intensity, shattering experiences, that are harder and harder to bear because these mysteries strike at the very roots of life. Nevertheless it can be said that we become aware of the whole wonderful setting of the settings of a man's life when we perceive how karma takes shape in this sphere. I will illustrate this too by an example, but something must be said in preparation.

A question may well occur to you—a question that is entirely justified and based upon statements often made by me in books and lectures, namely, that in earlier times there were great Initiates who lived among men. You may ask: Where are they now, in this later age? Probably if you look around at present you will not say of many of the men working in the world that they have the characteristic traits of Initiates—and this has been the case for some long time. So the question must be asked: Where are the Initiates in their later incarnations?

Now someone who was an Initiate in a former incarnation, in full consciousness and outwardly too, need not necessarily become one again in a subsequent incarnation. The fruits of the Initiation may remain in the subconsciousness. A man is obliged to make use of the body with which his epoch can provide him. The bodies of to-day are not well adapted for spiritual knowledge; they are actually a continual hindrance because they are products of a materialistic epoch; and the education we receive from childhood onwards is a greater hindrance still. When a person who was an Initiate in past ages grows up in these conditions, he cannot again give outward expression to what remained of the Initiation for this incarnation. We learn to write in childhood but our present writing is incapable of giving expression to what at one time was Initiation science; and it is the same in other domains. Initiates of earlier epochs may appear in life as great figures in a different sense, but not as Initiates. Many a life at the present time and in the immediate past points back to earlier Initiation.

I should like to give you an example of a personality who in a former earthly life was actually initiated into a high grade of the Hibernian Mysteries, the Mysteries of ancient Ireland, during the first Christian century when those great Mysteries were already in decline, though still preserving far reaching, profound knowledge. The knowledge possessed by these Irish Mysteries was especially profound, not in an intellectual but in an intensely human sense. An impression of the proceedings in these Mysteries can be described as follows: After a candidate had been prepared for a long time to realise that truth may be subject to deception on the Earth, to realise the possibility of doubt, he had to experience in a picture something that only in that form could make the necessary deep impression. The pupil was taken in front of two statues. One was made of elastic substance, but it was hollow. It was of huge dimensions and tremendously impressive. The pupil was told to touch it. This caused a violent shock, for the statue gave the impression of being alive. The finger was pressed into it, then quickly withdrawn, and the original shape was immediately restored. The impression was of something living that was at once restored when disturbed even in the slightest degree. This was intended to signify everything in man that is of the nature of the Sun.

The other statue was more plastic. Again the pupil was told to touch it, and in this case the impression left by the touch, remained. The next day, however, when the pupil was led before the statue again, its original shape had been restored during the night. Ritualistic acts of this kind brought about a change in the inner life of the pupil of the Mysteries.

In this way a deep impression had been made in the Irish Mysteries upon a certain personality who was living at that time as a man. You will realise that when examples of this kind are being given to-day, the male incarnations are the most likely to be conspicuous because in earlier epochs it was almost exclusively men who played any important part. Incarnations as women are intermediate. To-day, when women are beginning to be important figures in historical life and development, the time is coming when female incarnations will be increasingly significant.

Now there is a personality upon whom the Initiation rites and ceremonies of the Hibernian Mysteries had made a profound impression; they had a deep effect upon his inner life and his experiences were of such intensity that he forgot the Earth altogether. Then, after this personality had lived through an incarnation as a woman, when the impulses of earlier Initiation showed themselves merely in the general disposition of the soul, he came to the Earth again as an important figure in the 19th century. He had lived out the consequences of his karma in the Saturn-sphere—the sphere where one lives among Beings who, fundamentally speaking, have no present. It is a shattering experience to look with clairvoyant vision into the Saturn-sphere, where Beings live who have no present but only look back on their past. Whatever they do is done unconsciously; any action of theirs comes to consciousness only when it has happened and is inscribed into the world karma. Acquaintance with these Beings who draw their past after them like a spiritual comet's tail, has a shattering effect. The personality of whom I am speaking, who had at one time been initiated and had thus transcended earthly existence in a certain sense, bore his soul to these Beings who take no part in the present, and elaborated his karma among them. It was as if everything that had been experienced hitherto in an Initiate-existence now illumined with majestic splendour all the past earthly lives. This past was brought to fruition by what had been experienced through the Hibernian Initiation. When this personality appeared again on Earth in the 19th century he had now, by contrast, to unfold impulses for the future. And when, on descending from the Saturn-sphere, this soul, with its gaze into the past illumined by the light of Initiation, arrived on Earth, it presented this contrast: a firm foothold on the Earth while gazing into the future and giving expression to far reaching ideas, impulses and perceptions. This Hibernian Initiate became Victor Hugo.² We can assess a man rightly only when we also perceive the development he underwent between death and a new birth. His moral, religious and ethical qualities then become evident to us. A personality certainly does not become poorer but on the contrary, very much richer, when viewed with the eyes of spirit.

These examples have been selected with the greatest exactitude. How do they help us to understand the life of man, the collaboration of the Cosmos with man? How does a third example help us to understand much that might otherwise be problematical even to unprejudiced minds? How do the karmic connections in such a case explain something quite extraordinary, something which otherwise seems incomprehensible?

We are led to Mysteries that had fallen completely into decay. These Mysteries had at one time been a factor of great significance in America but had then become decadent, with the result that conceptions of the rites, and their actual enactment, had become thoroughly childish in comparison with the grandeur of earlier times. But even the elements of superstition and magic prevailing in these later Mysteries before the so called ‘discovery' of America—therefore not so very long ago—still echoed something of the suggestive power of the most ancient Mysteries.

There was a personality who received in these later Mysteries not only pictures but definite impressions of Beings then known by the names of Taotl, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcalipoca. These Beings made a tremendously strong impression, but it was an impure influence, impure in an ethical respect, as is often the case with decadent Mysteries. I see this personality born again later on as a man whose sub consciousness was permeated with the suggestive power that emanated from these Mysteries. He was reborn as Éliphas Lévi and his writings revive the abstract, rationalistic, purely external conceptions which invariably spring from decadent Mysteries. This throws light on an otherwise enigmatic figure, whose writings have a certain grandeur about them but also something that is apt to stupefy the soul.

No matter where we look, life is clarified by the concrete indications given by Anthroposophy. Is it now possible for you to suppose that genuine descriptions of conditions of existence above and beyond earthly life can be listened to without stirrings of the heart, without spiritual warmth and illumination being brought into your souls? Does not human life between birth and death look different, indeed is it not felt to be different, when these descriptions of super-sensible life are allowed to work upon the soul with all their inner power? We realise that we have come down from a world that can indeed be described; we carry into the physical world something that has lived among Gods.

To grasp these things theoretically is of very secondary importance. What matters is to realise that as human beings on the Earth in the physical body it is incumbent upon us to become worthy of what we have brought with us from super-sensible worlds. If knowledge becomes an impulse of will worthy of our soul life before the descent through birth, then what is taught in Anthroposophy has a direct moral influence. This strengthening of the moral impulse is an essential aspect of Anthroposophy. I think the content of these three lectures will have made this evident.

Let us now look at the other aspect, the aspect of death which ends physical life on Earth, setting Nothingness in the place of life. If, however, we can picture what it has been possible to describe of the super-sensible world, then behind the Nothingness there rises the spiritual world of the Gods, and man becomes conscious that he will have the strength to begin the work of forming a new physical body just where the Nothingness of his former physical body has been made evident. This gives a strong and true religious impulse. And so a picture of cosmic and human life springs from Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is moreover the source from which moral and religious ideals are imbued with strength.

I should like to conclude these lectures by speaking of the living Anthroposophy that must remain with us, so that even when we separate in space we are together in spirit. Our thoughts will meet and in reality we are not parting at all. Through study of super-sensible realities we know that those who have been brought together by Anthroposophy can always be together in soul and in spirit. Therefore let these lectures to the Group here conclude on this note: You and I have been together for a time in space, and in spirit we will remain united.

• 1. Voltaire, 1694–1778.
• 2. Victor Hugo, 1802–1885.

A great deal of course could still be added to all that I have touched upon in these lectures, but we shall endeavour today to conclude them with a summary of the whole subject.

The approach we have taken throughout these lectures raises an important issue: What is the attitude to Anthroposophy, to spiritual investigation as presented by Anthroposophy? What is the position in regard to the understanding of anthroposophical teachings seeing that few today can have immediate access to spiritual exercises and practices which enable them to perceive and test thoroughly for themselves the anthroposophical descriptions of other worlds? This is a question that lies close to the hearts of those who feel an urge and even a longing to take up Anthroposophy. But this question is always seen in a false light, and is the more likely to be misinterpreted precisely because they are unable to grasp the right procedures such as I have advocated in these lectures.

People may ask: what is the use of all these descriptions of the spiritual world if I cannot look into that world myself? I should like, therefore, to touch upon this question in my cursory analysis today.

It is not true to say that one cannot acquire an insight into anthroposophical teachings and an understanding of them unless one can investigate the spiritual world oneself. I t is essential to distinguish, especially at the present time, between the actual discovery of facts relating to the different worlds and the comprehension of those facts. This distinction will be clear to you when you recall that man, as we know him today, belongs in fact to different worlds and that his experiences are derived from different worlds. Man as he is constituted today acquires his stock of knowledge and his consciousness of everyday existence in the course of his day to day experiences. During his waking life this consciousness which was the starting-point of our enquiry gives him a certain perspective over a limited field, over that aspect of the world that is accessible to sense-observation, and which can be grasped and interpreted by means of the intellect which he has developed in the course of evolution.

With his understanding man penetrates in his dreams into this world concealed behind the phenomenal world, in a vague, indefinite way as I have already pointed out. In his psychic life man contacts the world through which he passes between death and rebirth only in dreamless sleep, where he is surrounded by spiritual darkness and where he lives out a life which normally he cannot recall.

Man knows three states of consciousness—waking, dreaming and deep sleep. But he does not live only in the worlds to which this threefold consciousness gives access, for he is a being whose kingdom has many mansions. His physical body lives in a different world from his etheric body, his etheric body again in a different world from his astral body and both live in different worlds from the Ego.

And this threefold consciousness—clear waking consciousness, dream consciousness and sleep consciousness (one would like to say absence of consciousness but one can only describe it as diminished consciousness)—belong to the Ego as it is today. And this Ego when it looks inwards has also three states of consciousness. When it looks outwards, it knows waking (day) consciousness, dream consciousness and sleep consciousness. When it looks inwards, it knows clear intellectual consciousness; a sentient consciousness, a sentient life, though this is far more opaque and dreamlike than one usually imagines; it knows als1˃ a sentient life and finally the dim, twilight will-consciousness that resembles the state of deep sleep. Normal consciousness can no more explain the origin of willing than it can explain the origin of sleep. When a man performs an act of will it is accompanied by a thought which is clear and lucid. He then shrouds this thought in feeling which is more indefinite. The thought that is imbued with feeling passes down into the limbs; the process cannot be experienced by normal consciousness. To the kind of investigation of which I spoke yesterday and the day before, willing presents the following picture: whilst a thought wills something in the head and is then transmitted to the whole body through feeling, so that a man wills in the whole of his body, something akin to a delicate, subtle and intimate process of combustion sets in meanwhile.

When man develops Initiate-consciousness he is able to experience this life of will which is subject to the influence of warmth, but it remains wholly subliminal to ordinary consciousness. This is merely one instance which shows how what lies in the subliminal consciousness can be raised to the level of Initiate-consciousness.

When the information in the book I mentioned yesterday is made progressively more accessible to the public, people will realize that when we contemplate with Initiate-consciousness an act of will performed by man, we have the impression that we are watching the lighting of a candle or even the kindling of a warmth-giving light. Just as we have in this instance a clear picture of the external phenomenon, so we shall be able to see the thought as it is precipitated into the will. We then say: the thought develops feeling and from feeling—it follows a downward direction in man—proceeds a sensation of warmth, a flame in man. And this flame wills; it is kindled by degrees. We can represent schematical1y this normal consciousness in the following way:

Now although, in order to investigate the spiritual world, we must of necessity direct our consciousness to that world which we seek to apprehend cognitively, none the less, if the fruits of our investigations are to be communicated honestly, the ideas communicated verbally must be expressed in the language of other forms of consciousness.

You can now understand, perhaps, that this is a twofold process. In the first place, for example, we investigate the world of the human organs as I explained yesterday. We investigate the phenomena in question by utilizing the emergent forces in man as he draws near to the spiritual world during the course of his life. We then discover the relevant facts as they are revealed to the understanding. And there are men in the world who are aware of these facts and who communicate them to the world. When they are imparted to the world by such men they can be comprehended by normal consciousness if we look at them with the necessary objectivity. In the course of human evolution there has always been a minority who devoted themselves to investigation of the facts relating to the spiritual world and who then communicated to others the fruits of their investigations.

Now one factor today militates against the acceptance of such knowledge, namely, that as a rule people grow up in a social environment and under an educational system that conditions their habitual responses to such an extent that they can believe only in the world of fact, in the sensory world, and the rational information derived from the world of the senses. This habit is so strongly ingrained that people are inclined to say: At the university there are graduate members of the teaching faculty who, in addition to teaching, investigate certain factual aspects of the phenomenal world or confirm the findings of other research workers in this field. Everyone accepts their findings. Even though one does not investigate the facts oneself, one still believes in them. This boundless credulity is reserved especially for modern science. People believe things which, to those who have insight, are not only problematical, but definitely untrue. This situation stems from centuries of education. I would like to point out that this form of education was unknown to men of earlier centuries. They were far more inclined to believe those who made researches into spiritual facts since they still preserved something of the old insight into, and participation in the spiritual world that was consistent with their will and feeling. Today people are strangers to such knowledge. They are accustomed to an outlook which on the Continent is more theoretical and in England and America more practical, and which has now become firmly established.

On the Continent there exist detailed theories about these matters whilst in England and America there is an instinctive feeling for them which is by no means easy to overcome. During the course of centuries mankind has become inured to a scientific outlook that is related to the phenomenal world and has come to accept the findings of astronomy, botany, zoology and medicine, for example, in the form in which they are presented in recognized schools or centres of learning. A chemist, for example, undertakes a piece of research in his laboratory. People have not the slightest understanding of the technique involved. The work is acclaimed and they unhesitatingly declare: “Here is truth, here is knowledge that makes no appeal to faith.” But what they call knowledge is, in effect, an act of faith.

And amongst the methods adopted for investigating the phenomenal world, for ascertaining the laws of the phenomenal world through the instrument of reason, not a single one gives the slightest information about the spiritual world. But there are few who can afford to dispense wholly with the spiritual world. Those who do so, are not honest with themselves, they persuade themselves into it. Mankind feels an imperious need to know something about the spiritual world. As yet men ignore those who can tell them something about the spiritual world as it is known today, but they are prepared to listen to historical traditions, to the teachings of the Bible and sacred scriptures of the East. They are interested in these traditional writings, because otherwise they cannot satisfy their need for some sort of relationship to a spiritual world. And in spite of the fact that both the Bible and the Eastern scriptures have been investigated only by individual Initiates, people claim that they reflect a different kind of outlook, which bears no relationship to the knowledge of the phenomenal world, scientific knowledge, and depends upon faith and appeals to faith. And so a rigid line of demarcation is set up between science and belief. Men refer science to the phenomenal world and belief to the spiritual world.

Amongst the theologians of the Evangelical Church on the Continent—not amongst the theologians of the Roman Catholic Church who have retained the old traditions, and who do not accept the dichotomy of the Evangelicals or the natural scientists—there exist innumerable theories showing that there are definite boundaries to knowledge and thereafter faith steps in. They are convinced there can be no other possibility.

England is less hag-ridden because theorizing is unpopular. Here the traditional attitude is, on the one hand, to listen to what science has to say, and, on the other hand, to live reverently—I will not go so far as to say sanctimoniously—in faith and to keep the two spheres rigidly apart.

For some time past, laymen and scholars have adopted this point of view. Newton laid the foundations of a theory of gravitation, i.e. of a conception of space which, by its very nature, excludes any possibility of a spiritual outlook. If the world were as Newton depicted it, it would be devoid of spirit. But no-one has the courage to admit it. One cannot imagine a divine-spiritual Presence that lives and moves and has its being in the Newtonian world.

But not only the devotees of these ideas ultimately accept a conception of space and time that excludes the spiritual, but also those who undertake independent research work. Newton offers an excellent example of the latter, for he not only laid the foundation of a world-outlook which excluded the spiritual, but at the same time in his interpretation of the Apocalypse he fully accepted the spiritual.

The links between knowledge of the phenomenal world and knowledge of the spiritual world have been severed. Today the theorists set out to give solid proof of this dichotomy and every effort is made to inoculate the thoughts and feelings of those who distrust theory with this idea, so that ultimately they become conditioned.

On the other hand, man's intelligence, power of comprehension and ideation, his capacity for ideas, have today reached a point where, if he keeps them under conscious control, he can grasp by reason, though he cannot investigate by reason, the teachings of Initiation Science.

It is essential that the following point of view should find wider acceptance: that investigations into the spiritual world must be undertaken by those who, in their present life on Earth are able to call upon forces from earlier incarnations, for it is these forces which release the necessary powers for spiritual investigation; and further, that the results of these investigations shall be accepted by increasing numbers of men and incorporated into ideas which are comprehensible; and that, when the results of spiritual research are accepted by healthy understanding, a way is prepared for these other men, by virtue of this understanding, to have real experience of the spiritual world. For I have often said that the healthiest way to enter the spiritual world is first of all to read about it or to assimilate what we are told about it.

If we accept these ideas, they become inwardly quickened and we attain not only to understanding, but also to clairvoyant vision in accordance with our karmic development. In this respect we must give serious thought to the idea of karma. Today man is not concerned with karma; he believes that just as we analyse sulphur in the laboratory, so we can analyse by laboratory techniques the origin of so-called trans-normal phenomena; and that, as with sulphur, we must subject the individual who manifests abnormal forms of knowledge to experimental tests.

But mineral sulphur has no karma. Only the sulphur associated with the human body has karma, for only human beings are subject to karma. We cannot assume that it is part of man's karma to be experimented upon in a laboratory which would be a necessary prerequisite if the investigations were to have any value.

For this reason we have need of Spiritual Science. It would first of all be necessary to enquire into the karmic conditions which enable us to gain knowledge of the spiritual world through the agency of another. I have explained this clearly at the end of the later editions of my book Theosophy. But mankind today is not yet ready to accept this idea, not from incapacity, but from conservatism; but it is of immense significance.

It is essential to realize that we must not immediately undertake investigations into the spiritual world; but on the other hand if we do not adopt undesirable practices, such as experimenting with karma when there is no karmic necessity, or with mediums whose procedure we do not understand; and if we rely upon the everyday consciousness, which is the right condition of consciousness for this world, then we will attain to a perfect understanding of the communications of Initiation Science. We are greatly mistaken if we imagine that we cannot have such an understanding without first being able to experience the spiritual world for ourselves. To say, “what avails the spiritual world, if I cannot experience it for myself?” is to encourage yet another of the errors commonly committed today. This is to commit one of the greatest, most dangerous and most obvious of errors and must be clearly recognized by those who are associated with a Movement such as the Anthroposophical Society.

Man's existence here on the physical plane is bound up with existence in other worlds. To the unprejudiced mind this can be explained by the fact that man's experiences, as seen in the light of total human experience, are such that, in relation to the most vital questions in life they meet with incomprehension on the part of the ordinary daily consciousness because they appear unrelated, whereas in certain instances they are in effect closely associated.

In this brief account, therefore, I should like first to speak of man's entrance into the physical world and his exit, of birth and death.

Birth and death, the two most momentous events of our life on Earth, appear to ordinary consciousness to be isolated phenomena. We associate all that precedes birth, all that is related to human incarnation, with the beginning of our life on Earth, and death with its end. They appear to be dissociated. But the spiritual investigator sees them drawing ever more closely together. For if we take the path leading to the Moon mysteries and woo the night into the day in the manner described yesterday, then we perceive how, during the processes of birth, the physical body and etheric body progressively grow and flourish: how they develop out of the germ, gradually assume human form, and how during earthly life their vitality progressively increases up to the age of thirty-five, when it gradually decreases and a decline sets in. This process, of course, can be observed externally. But he who follows the lunar path, which I described yesterday, perceives that whilst the cellular life of the physical and etheric bodies grows, develops and assumes embryonic form, another form of life, which in Anthroposophy we call the astral body and Ego, is subject to the forces of decay and death.

When we uncover the hidden recesses of life—I gave a concrete description of this yesterday—we become aware of the birth of the physical and etheric and the death of the astral and Ego. We perceive death interwoven with life, the winter of life allied to its springtime.

And again, when we observe man with Initiate-consciousness, we are aware that, as his body declines, there is a burgeoning of the Ego and the astral from the thirty-fifth year onwards. This burgeoning life is retarded by the presence of dying forces in the physical and etheric being. Nevertheless a definite renewal does take place. And so by means of spiritual investigation we come to recognize the presence of death in life and life in death. Thus we prepare ourselves to trace back that which is seen to be dying at the time of birth to its pre-earthly life where it is revealed in its full significance and greatness.

And because we perceive the gradual burgeoning of the astral and Ego within the declining etheric and physical (for they are imprisoned within the etheric and physical), we prepare ourselves to follow them into the spiritual world after their release from the physical and etheric bodies at the moment of death. Thus we see that birth and death are interrelated, whilst to ordinary consciousness they appear to be isolated events.

All this information which is revealed by spiritual investigation can be grasped by ordinary consciousness as I indicated in the first part of today's lecture. At the same time one must be prepared to abandon the demands of ordinary consciousness for factual or scientific proof.

I once knew a man who maintained that, just as a stone falls to the ground, so if I pick up a chair and let go, it also falls to the ground since everything is subject to gravitation. Wherefore if the Earth is not supported, as it is claimed, it must of necessity fall. But he failed to realize that objects must fall to the ground because they are subject to the gravitational pull of the Earth, that the Earth itself however moves freely in space like the stars which mutually support and attract one another.

Those who, like the modern scientist, demand that proof must be supported by the evidence of the senses resemble this man who believed that the Earth must fall unless it is firmly underpinned. Anthroposophical truths are like the stars which mutually support each other. People must be prepared to see the whole picture. And if they can do this by means of their normal understanding they will begin really to grasp anthroposophical ideas such as the interrelationship of birth and death.

Let us go a little further and take the case of the man who is well grounded in the principles of modern science, but whilst alert and receptive to anthroposophical ideas has not yet learned to take the whole man into consideration, but only the separate organs in the manner described yesterday.

Through this knowledge of the organs acquired in the course of Initiation we are not only aware of birth and death, but of something quite different. In the light of this knowledge of the organs, birth and death have lost their usual significance, for it is only the whole human being who dies, not his separate organs. The lungs, for example, cannot die. Science today dimly realizes that when the whole human being has died, his single organs can be animated to a certain extent. Irrespective of whether a man is buried or cremated, his separate organs do not die. The individual organs take their path into that sphere of the Cosmos to which each is related. Even if man is buried beneath the earth, every organ finds its way into the Cosmos through water, air or warmth, as the case may be. In reality they are dissolved, but they do not perish; only the whole human being perishes.

Death, then, can only have meaning in relation to the whole human being. In the animal the organs die, whereas in man they are dissolved into the Cosmos. They dissolve rapidly. Burial is the slower process, cremation the faster. We can follow the individual organs as they take their path towards the infinite, each towards its own sphere. They are not lost in infinity, but return in the form of the mighty cosmic being whom I described to you yesterday. Thus, as we observe the organs with Initiate-consciousness, we see what really befalls the organs at death, namely, this streaming out of the organs into those regions of the Cosmos to which they are severally related. The heart takes a different path from the lungs; the liver from lungs and heart. They are dispersed throughout the Cosmos. Then the Cosmic Man appears; we see him as he really is, integrated in the Cosmos. And in the vision of this Cosmic Man we become aware of what is the source of successive incarnations, for example. We need this vision which has its origin, not in the whole man, but in the perception of the several organs, in order to be able to recognize once more, clearly and distinctly, the karmic return of former Earth lives in the present life.

It is for this reason that those who approached the spiritual world through the Moon path, mystics, theosophists, and so on, perceived the strangest phenomena—human souls as they had lived on Earth, gods and spirits—but could neither recognize nor decide what they were, nor give any definite assurance whether they were in the presence of Alanus ab Insulis, Dante or Brunetto Latini. Sometimes the entities were given the most grotesque appellations. And they were unable to determine whether the incarnations they contacted were their own or other people's, or what they were.

Thus the spiritual world is associated with the realm of Moon consciousness that has been wooed into the day; then, under the influx of the Venus impulses, this vision is lost and we now behold the spiritual world in its totality, but without that clear definition which it should possess. It is in this realm that we first begin to realize man's situation in the world as a whole and his position as a cosmic being.

In this connection, however, we cannot escape a tragic realization. For if man were simply the complete physical man he appears to be here on Earth, what a virtuous, docile and noble being he would be! Just as little as we can investigate death with normal consciousness—we can always understand death in the sense already suggested—just as little can we discover by means of the ordinary consciousness why human beings, with their candid faces—and there is no denying they have candid faces—have a capacity for evil. It is not the whole man who can become evil. His outer tegument, the skin, as such is noble and good; but man becomes evil through his individual organs; in his organs lies the potentiality for evil.

And thus we come to recognize the relationship of the organs to their respective cosmic spheres and also from what spheres obsession with evil originates; for fundamentally, obsession is inherent in the slightest manifestation of evil.

Thus our knowledge of the total man reveals first, birth and death; secondly, a knowledge of his organization reveals his relationship to the Cosmos in health and disease, namely, evil.

And so we can only perceive spiritually that Figure who experienced the Mystery of Golgotha when we are able to behold Cosmic Man through human organology. For it was as Cosmic Man that Christ came from the Sun. Until that moment He was not earthly man. He approached the Earth in cosmic form. How can we expect to recognize Cosmic Man if we have not first prepared ourselves to understand Cosmic Man as he really is! It is precisely out of this understanding of the Cosmic Man that Christology can grow.

Thus you see how true paths lead into the spiritual world, to a knowledge of birth and death and of the relationship of the human organism to the Cosmos, to the recognition of evil and to knowledge of Christ, the Cosmic Man. All this can be understood, when it is presented in such a way that the various aspects are shown to support each other. And the best means of finding one's own way into the spiritual world is through understanding and by meditating upon what is understood. Other rules for meditation then serve as additional supports. This is the right path into the spiritual worlds for human beings today. On the other hand, all experimenting with other paths which fail to use and maintain the normal channels of consciousness, all experimenting with trance conditions such as mediumism, somnambulism, hypnotism and so on, all investigation into world-events that cannot be apprehended by a consciousness that is a travesty of modern natural science—all these are false paths, for they do not lead into the true spiritual world.

When man is sensitively aware of the findings of spiritual investigation, namely, that through knowledge of the organs the Cosmic Man returns, that this “return” can to some extent lead to an understanding of Christ when all that is disclosed to occult investigation and insight is admitted into the Initiate-consciousness and becomes an integral part of his sentient life, then, through feeling, the Divine manifests in the terrestrial. And this is the province of art.

Through feeling, art embodies half consciously that which man receives from the spiritual world along those paths of return of which I have spoken. In all ages, therefore, it was those who were predestined to do so by their karma, who clothed the spiritual in material form.

Our naturalistic art has abandoned the spiritual approach. Every high point in the history of art depicts the spiritual in sensuous form, or rather raises the material into the realm of the spiritual. Raphael is valued so highly because, to a greater degree than any other painter, he was able to clothe the spiritual in sensuous representation.

Now in the course of the history of art there existed a general movement which tended more to the plastic or graphic arts. Today we must once again inject new life into the plastic arts, for the immediacy of the original impulse was lost years ago.

For centuries the impulse towards music has been growing and expanding. Therefore the plastic arts have assumed a musical character to a greater or lesser extent. Music, which includes also the musical element in the arts of speech, is destined to be the art of the future.

The first Goetheanum at Dornach was conceived musically and for this reason its architecture, sculpture and painting met with so little understanding. And for the same reason, the second Goetheanum will also meet with little understanding because the element of music must be introduced into painting, sculpture and architecture, in accordance with man's future evolution.

The coming of the figure of Christ, the spiritually-living figure, which I referred to as the culminating point in human evolution, has been magnificently portrayed in Renaissance and pre-Renaissance painting, but in future will have to be expressed through music.

The urge to give a musical expression of the Christ Impulse already existed. It was anticipated in Richard Wagner and was ultimately responsible for the creation of Parsifal. But in Parsifal the introduction of the Christ Impulse into the phenomenal world where it seeks to give expression to the purest Christian spirit, has been given a mere symbolic indication, such as the appearance of the Dove and so on. The Communion has also been portrayed symbolically. The music of Parsifal fails to portray the real significance of the Christ Impulse in the Cosmos and the Earth.

Music is able to portray this Christ Impulse musically, in tones that are inwardly permeated with spirit. If music allows itself to be inspired by Spiritual Science, it will find ways of expressing the Christ Impulse, for it will reveal purely artistically and intuitively how the Christ Impulse in the Cosmos and the Earth can be awakened symphonically in tones.

To this end we only need to be able to deepen our experience of the sphere of the major third by an inner enrichment of musical experience that penetrates into the hidden depths of feeling. If we experience the sphere of the major third as something wholly enclosed within the inner being of man and if we then feel the sphere of the major fifth to have the characteristic of “enveloping,” so that, as we grow into the configuration of the fifth, we reach the boundary of the human and the cosmic, where the cosmic resounds into the sphere of the human and the human, consumed with longing, yearns to rush forth into the Cosmos, then, in the mystery enacted between the spheres of the major third and major fifth, we can experience musically something of the inner being of man that reaches out into the Cosmos.

And if we then succeed in setting free the dissonances of the seventh to echo cosmic life, where the dissonances express man's sentient experiences in the Cosmos as he journeys towards the various spiritual realms; and if we succeed in allowing the dissonances of the seventh to die away, so that through their dying fall they acquire a certain definition, then in their dying strains they are ultimately resolved in something which, to the musical ear, resembles a musical firmament.

If, then, having already given a subtle indication of the experience of the ‘minor’ with the ‘major,’ if, in the dying strains of the dissonances of the seventh, in this spontaneous re-creation of the dissonances into a totality, we find here a means of passing in an intensely minor mood from the dissonances of the seventh, from the near consonance of these diminishing dissonances to the sphere of the fifth in a minor mood, and from that point blend the sphere of the fifth with that of the minor third, then we shall have evoked in this way the musical experience of the Incarnation, and what is more, of the Incarnation of the Christ.

In feeling our way outwards into the sphere of the seventh, which to cosmic feeling is only apparently dissonant and that we fashion into a ‘firmament,’ in that it is seemingly supported by the octave, if we have grasped this with our feelings and retrace our steps in the manner already indicated and find how, in the embryonic form of the consonances of the minor third, there is a possibility of giving a musical representation of the Incarnation, then, when we retrace our steps to the major third in this sphere, the “Hallelujah” of the Christ can ring out from this musical configuration as pure music.

Then, within the configuration of the tones man will be able to conjure forth an immediate realization of the super-sensible and express it musically.

The Christ Impulse can be found in music. And the dissolution of the symphonic into near dissonance, as in Beethoven, can be redeemed by a return to the dominion of the cosmic in music. Bruckner attempted this within the narrow limits of a traditional framework. But his posthumous Symphony shows that he could not escape these limitations. On one hand we admire its greatness, but on the other hand we find a hesitant approach to the true elements of music, and a failure to achieve a full realization of these elements which can only be experienced in the way I have described, i.e. when we have made strides in the realm of pure music and discover therein the essence, the fundamental spirit which can conjure forth a world through tones.

Without doubt the musical development I have described will one day be achieved through anthroposophical inspiration if mankind does not sink into decadence; and ultimately—and this will depend entirely upon mankind—the true nature of the Christ Impulse will be revealed externally.

I wish to draw your attention to this because you will then realize that Anthroposophy seeks to permeate all aspects of life. This can be accomplished if man, for his part, finds the true path to anthroposophical experience and investigation. It will even come to ~ass that one day the realm of music shall echo the teachings of Anthroposophy and the Christian enigma shall be solved through music.

With these words I hope to have concluded what I could only indicate in these lectures, to indicate the purposes I had in view.

I should like to add, however, that I hope to have succeeded in awakening in your souls some recognition of anthroposophical truths; and that these truths will grow and multiply and fertilize ever wider fields of human life.

May this cycle of lectures be a small contribution to the far-reaching aim which Anthroposophy sets out to achieve.

When we consider the human being, two beings can be clearly distinguished. You will recall that in various recent studies I have explained how the physical organization of the human being is spiritually prepared during the pre-earthly life. In a certain sense it is then sent down as spiritual organization before the human being enters with his ego into earthly existence. This spiritual organization continues to be active essentially during the entire physical life on earth, but it does not express itself during physical earthly life as something outwardly visible. The outwardly visible aspect of this spiritual organization is essentially cast off at birth, consisting of the embryonic membranes that envelop the human embryo during its development—the chorion, the allantois, the amnion, the yolk sac—everything, in other words, that is cast away as physical organization when the human being attains a free physical existence on leaving the womb.

Yet this pre-earthly organization continues to be active in the human being throughout his entire life. It is somewhat different in character, however, from the body soul-spirit efficacy of the human being during his physical earthly life. And this is what I would like to speak about today.

In a certain sense, then, we have an invisible man within us. It is contained in our growth-forces as well as in those hidden forces through which nourishment occurs. It is contained in everything in which the human being is not consciously active. Its work extends into this unconscious activity, right into the growth activity, into the daily restoration of forces through nutrition. And this work is the aftereffect of the pre-earthly existence, which in earthly existence becomes a body of forces that is active in us but does not come to conscious manifestation. Today I would like to describe to you the character of this invisible man, which we all carry within us, contained in our forces: growth and nutrition, as well as in our reproductive forces.

Proceeding schematically, we can say that this invisible man also contains the ego, the astral organization, the etheric organization (and therefore the body of formative forces), and the physical organization. Of course in the human being after birth the physical organization of the invisible man is inserted into the other human physical organization, but in the course of today's considerations you will begin to understand how the invisible man can lay hold of the physical organization.

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Drawn schematically it would look like this (see drawing, [right]). In this invisible man we have first the ego organization (yellow); then we have the astral organization (red), then the etheric organization (blue), and finally we have the physical organization (white). This physical organization of the invisible man penetrates only into the nutrition and growth processes, into everything where the lower man, as we have often called it—the metabolic-limb man—manifests itself in the human organization. All currents, all effects of forces in this invisible man proceed from the ego organization into the astral, then into the etheric, and on into the physical organization (see arrow). They then spread out in the physical organization. In the human embryo, what we call here the physical organization of the invisible man is present in the embryonic envelopes, in the embryonic sheaths, the chorion, the allantois, the amnion, and the yolk sac. In the human being after birth, however, the physical organization of the invisible man is contained in the nourishing and restorative processes in the human being. Thus viewed from outside, this physical organization is not separated from the other physical organization of the human being but is united with it.

In a certain sense, then, in addition to this invisible man we have the visible human being that we encounter after birth. I will sketch this visible human being right next to the invisible one (see drawing). This is how the mutual interpenetration of the physical and superphysical human being would appear during earthly life. During earthly life there is a continuous stream from ego to astral body, to etheric body, to physical body (see arrows). In the human being after birth, this stream flows into the metabolic-limb organization, in the forces of our outer movement, and also in the inner forces of movement that carry ingested food into the entire organization up to the brain.

In addition to this, however, there is a direct intervention of forces that enter the entire human being directly from the ego. An activity thus penetrates us, a stream that flows directly from the ego into the nerve-sense organization without first passing through the astral body and etheric body; instead this stream lays hold of man's physical body directly. Naturally this penetration is strongest in the head, where most of the sense organs are concentrated, but I should actually draw this stream in such a way that it spreads out over the skin-senses, over the entire human being, just as I would have to draw a stream for the course of food taken in by the mouth. Schematically, however, my drawing is quite correct.

In the human head, then, we have one organization that flows up from below, proceeding from the ego but passing through the astral, etheric, and physical and then to the ego. We have another stream that enters the physical directly and flows down. If we examine the human organism, we arrive at the insight that this unmediated stream, which enters the physical directly from the ego and then branches out over the whole body, proceeds along the nerve pathways. Thus when the human nerves spread out in the organism, the outwardly visible nerve strand is the visible sign of these outspreading streams that enter the entire organism directly from the ego, proceeding from the ego into the physical organization without mediation. The ego organization at first runs along the pathways of the nerves. This has an essentially destructive effect on the organism. There the spirit enters directly into physical matter, and wherever the spirit enters physical matter directly a destructive process occurs, so that along the nerve pathways, proceeding from the senses, a delicate death process spreads out through the human organism.

The other stream, which in the invisible man goes through the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, can be traced in the human being by following the blood pathways up to the senses. Thus when we examine the human being as we encounter him here on earth, we can say that the ego flows in the blood. But the ego flows in such a way that it first ensouls its forces through the astral organization and through the etheric and physical organizations. After first taking along the astral and etheric organizations, the ego streams through the physical organization in the blood from below upward. Thus the entire invisible man flows in the blood as a constructive process, as a growth process, as the process that constantly renews the human being by working through his food. This stream flows in the human being from below upward (speaking schematically), pours itself into the senses, and therefore also into the skin, and encounters the other stream which, from the ego, takes hold of the physical organization directly.

Actually, however, this whole matter is even more complicated, because we must also consider the breathing process. In the breathing process, the ego flows into the astral body, but then it goes directly into the lungs along with the air. Thus something from the super-sensible man also underlies the breathing process, but not in the same way as occurs in the nerve-sense process, where the ego takes hold of the physical organization directly. In the breathing process, the ego permeates itself with the astral forces, taking hold of oxygen and only then, no longer as pure ego organization but as ego-astral organization, does it take hold of the organism with the help of the breathing process. It could also be said that the breathing process is a weakened process of destruction, a weakened death process. The actual death process is the nerve-sense process, and a weakened process of destruction, a weakened death process, is the breathing process.

This is then confronted by the process in which the ego further strengthens itself by streaming up to the etheric body and only then being taken up. This process, taking place mainly in the super-sensible so that it cannot be traced by the usual physiology, is active in the pulse; there it is still outwardly perceptible. It is a restorative process, not as strong as the direct metabolic-restorative process, but rather a weakened restorative process. As we have seen, the breathing process is to a certain extent a destructive process. Our life would be much shorter if we absorbed more oxygen. The more the carbonic acid formation process of the blood counters the absorption of oxygen in the breathing process, the longer our life will be.

Thus everything interacts within the organism, and in order really to understand what is going on, one needs to understand the super-sensible human being, because its outwardly visible aspects were cast off with the embryonic membranes and are active in the human being after birth only through invisible forces. These forces can be clearly designated, however, if we proceed from the anthroposophical knowledge of the human being.

If, for example, we look into the eye with this anthroposophical knowledge, we see that the blood process courses through the eye in fine ramifications. This is taken hold of by the nerve process going in the opposite direction. The blood process always moves toward the periphery in the human being, moving centrifugally; the nerve process, which is in fact a breakdown process, is always directed centripetally, toward man's inside. All processes that occur in the human being are metamorphoses of these two processes.

If the interaction of pulse and breathing is properly coordinated, then the lower man is properly connected to the upper man. If this is the case and no external injuries intervene, an individual should be basically healthy. Only when breakdown predominates will destructive processes encroach on the activities in the organism. The human being becomes ill because something foreign accumulates in his organism that has not been worked through in the right way, something containing excessive breakdown forces, containing too much of what is related to the physical nature that surrounds the human being in his earthly environment.

The spiritual element's direct penetration of the organism by way of the ego brings about those processes that produce pathological occurrences, foreign formations. These foreign formations may not manifest immediately in physical symptoms, but they may manifest in the fluid and even in the airy aspect of the human being. They can develop, and if they are not countered by a healing process that flows from below along the pathways of the blood, they cannot dissolve. These formations have the tendency to form tumor-like accumulations in the body and then to fragment within. If the blood-formation process confronts them in the right way, they can dissolve and again become part of the general life of the body. But when a damming up is brought about by an excessive breakdown process from above downward, it takes hold of one of the organs. Foreign bodies are then formed, which are first exudative, tumor-like, but then have the tendency to run their course like the external processes of earthly nature and fall to pieces. In this case we need to understand that not enough of the super-sensible human being is taken up along the path I have drawn here next to the physical human being.

You see, one cannot speak about healing directly through human activity, because the moment that too much activity is developed from the nerve-sense organization, in a centripetal direction—when too many of the environmental processes are “stuffed” into man so that these tumor-like formations develop somewhere, which then decompose—in that moment the other system, which runs along the blood vessels, becomes rebellious. It wants to bring about healing, wants to penetrate the organism with the proper astral and etheric forces that can come from below. It wants to prevent the ego, or the ego working with the astral body, from acting alone. The healer has to take into account this revolutionary principle in the human organism, and healing consists of supporting, by external means, what is already present in the organism as an original healing force.

When a tumor-like formation arises, it is a symptom of the ego activity from the stream of the invisible man not penetrating in the right way from out of the etheric body. The ego activity does assert itself, but may at times be unable to approach the tumor. We might then support the etheric body in this direction so that it can become active. It can become active in the right way if it is first permeated by the ego and astral body and then becomes active. That which comes from above and has not taken up etheric activity, but at most ego and astral activity, poisons the organism. When the etheric body approaches this, when we counter the ego and astral activity with etheric activity, we support the healing process already present and striving to be active in the human organization. We only have to know, in such a case, by what means the etheric organization, permeated in the right way by astral and ego organization, can penetrate the body. In other words, in such a case we simply need to help the etheric organization with a remedy. Therefore we must know which remedy will make the etheric organization stronger in such a case, so that its constructive force opposes the excessively destructive force. Thus we can see that we will never comprehend the pathology that underlies therapy unless we take into account the invisible man.

It may also be, however, that when a person is born he does not penetrate strongly enough with his ego and astral organization—his soul-spiritual organization—into the physical organization. The soul-spiritual organization does not push its way into the physical organization suffciently. Then in this individual there will continually be a preponderance of the growth forces active from below upward, which are not given sufficient heaviness through integration with the physical organization. An individual can be born in such a way that the invisible man takes insufficient hold of his physical body, refusing to penetrate into the blood process in the right way. Then man's spirit cannot approach the blood process. In such individuals we can already see the consequences of this from childhood on. They remain pale and thin, or, because of the predominating growth forces, grow radiply tall. The the soul-spiritual cannot properly enter the organism. And because the body refuses to take up the soul-spiritual, our goal must be to weaken the excessively strong etheric body where the activity has become too strong. In such pale, lanky individuals we must strive to contain the hypertrophic, excessively active forces in the etheric body, restraining them to their proper degree. By this means we can bring heaviness into the body; the blood, for example, by receiving the necessary iron content, receives the appropriate heaviness. Then the etheric body is not as active in an upward direction, and its effect on the upper man is weakened.

In such individuals another condition might be noticed: what I would like to call the night processes predominate over the day processes. You could say that at night the physical-etheric organization of every normal person refuses to absorb the soul-spiritual. This night organization of a person lying in bed—not of the invisible man, who is outside—is too strong in those people who have a sort of inborn consumption, as I have just described. In such cases, the day organization must be supported. This means that it has to be given a certain heaviness by encouraging the breakdown processes. If one enhances the breakdown processes and inwardly there appears that which hardens and finally falls to pieces (in healing, of course, this must happen only to a small extent) then the overflowing force of the etheric body is restrained and consumption is held back.

In this way, out of knowledge of the entire human being, we can comprehend the curious interaction between health and disease, This interaction is always present and is essentially balanced out by what occurs between pulse and breath. If we then come to know by what outer means one or the other can be enhanced, it will be possible to support the natural healing processes that are always present, but I would say, not always able to arise.

What outer means we use is not such a simple matter, for a totally foreign process cannot be introduced into the human organism. When some kind of foreign process is introduced, it is at once transformed into its opposite within the organism. If you eat something, the food contains certain chemical forces. In absorbing them, the organism transforms them at once into their opposite. This is necessary. If, for example, the food maintained its external character too long after being absorbed, then it would begin to break down as it does in outer nature and would thus bring destructive and death-bringing breakdown processes into the human being.

You can pursue the details of the processes that I have developed for you here from the entire human being. Let us assume, for example, that you stick yourself with a foreign object like a splinter. Your body can react in two ways. Suppose you cannot extract the foreign object so that it remains inside you. Then two things can happen. The constructive force active in the flowing blood surrounds the foreign object. It gathers around the object, but in doing so it moves away from its own customary position. This immediately leads to a preponderance of the nerve activity there. Then an exudate-like formation begins to encapsulate the foreign object. When this happens, the following takes place in that part of the body: whereas usually, when there is not a foreign object in that spot, the etheric body penetrates the physical body in a certain way, in this situation the etheric body is unable to penetrate the foreign object; instead, within this area a bubble will form that is filled out only with the etheric. We have within us a small portion of the body that contains a foreign object and where a small portion of the etheric body is not organized by the physical. In this case it is important to strengthen the astral body in that spot to such an extent that it can be effective in the small portion of the etheric body without the help of the physical body. Through this encapsulation our body has actually made use of the destructive forces, separating out these destructive forces in a small section of the body and then incorporating into it the healing etheric body. This will then have to be supported by the astral and the ego through an appropriate treatment.

In such a case we have to say that, in a certain sense, what lies above the physical in the human being has to become strong enough to be active without the physical in this small part of the human organization. This always happens in what is called a healing of some foreign intrusion in the human being, for example when a person gets stuck with a splinter and it becomes encapsulated. In this part of his body man's whole organization is moved a little bit upward. It can also happen that something foreign is formed purely out of the organism. This must be regarded in the same way.

A completely different process could take place, however, if we have been stuck by a splinter. It could be that the nerve activity surrounding the splinter gets stronger and predominates over the blood activity. Then the nerve activity, in which the ego is active (or possibly the ego strengthened by the astral body), stimulates the blood activity. The nerve-sense activity, which goes through the whole body, stimulates the blood activity and does not permit an exudate to form. Instead it stimulates a secretory process, leading to the formation of pus (white). And because the nerves are pushing out (arrows), the pus is also driven to the periphery by the push that goes through the nerve tracts in their destructive activity. The splinter comes out and the area heals over.

You can see, then, that if the splinter is too deep in the organism, so that the pushing force of the breakdown system, the nerve-sense system, is insufficient to bring it to the outside, then the constructive activity in the blood vessels will be stronger and lead to encapsulation. If the splinter is closer to the surface, then the nerve-pushing force, the destructive force, will be stronger. It will excite or stimulate what wants to become an exudate so that it will make use of the breakdown channels that are always present anyway, leading to the outside, and the whole area will suppurate. Therefore we can actually say that we carry in us, in incipient form, in the moment of coming into being, the tendency for our organism to harden toward the inside in a centripetal direction and to dissolve again toward the outside in a centrifugal direction. In the normal processes of the human body, however, the tumor-forming force that is directed inward and the suppurative-inflammatory force that is directed toward the periphery are in equilibrium. Generally our inflammatory process is strong enough to overcome the tumefying force tending toward breakdown. Only when one process is stronger than the other will a real tumefaction or a real inflammation develop.

You must not be under the impression, of course, that everything is as easy to comprehend in reality as it seems when matters have to be simplified in a schematic presentation. In reality the processes interpenetrate one another. In fact, you can observe that when the inflammatory forces are strong in the human being there will be febrile phenomena. These are essentially the result of excessively strong constructive processes located in the blood. With the force of selfhood (Eigenkraft) that frequently develops in a person with a fever, it could be possible to provide quite a bit of strength to a second person, if the means were available for diverting the forces from one to the other in the right way.

On the other hand, where the breakdown forces are working strongly, cooling phenomena occur. The presence of these phenomena is not as easy to substantiate as the febrile phenomena, but these two types of phenomena alternate so that in reality we are always dealing with interpenetrating activities that simply have to be distinguished if we wish to comprehend what is going on.

A question often arises concerning poisons that occur in nature, for example the poison in belladonna, the deadly nightshade: how are actual poisons different from ordinary substances that we find in our environment and use for food? When we eat food, something is introduced into the organism that is formed in outer nature similarly to the way in which our invisible man is formed. We take into us something that proceeds from a spiritual activity, enters an astral activity, then an etheric activity, and finally a physical activity. In nature such an activity is directed from above downward; it acts upon the earth from the periphery, as it were. This activity is related to our inner ego activity, which is a purely spiritual activity. If what I have depicted schematically flows down, but transforms itself via the astral, then further via the etheric, then going down into the physical, then the plant as a rule takes up such an activity. The plant grows toward this activity from below upward and takes up this etheric activity, which, however, already rightly contains from above the astral and ego activity, i.e., the soul and spiritual activity.

It is also possible for something else to take place, as it does with a poison. Poisonous substances have the peculiarity that they do not make use of the etheric as do the normal green substances in the plant; instead they turn directly to the astral, so that the astral enters into this substance. With belladonna, the fruit becomes especially greedy and is not satisfied by taking up just the etheric; instead the fruit takes up the astral directly, before this astral has taken up the life-forces through the etheric in streaming downward. You could say that in such cases the astral is continually dripping from the world-periphery directly down to the earth instead of entering the etheric. And such drops of the astral being, which have not gone through the ether atmosphere of the earth in the right way, can, for example, be found in the poison of the deadly nightshade. We also have this cosmic astral element dripping down into the plant in the poison of the Jimsonweed fruit, in hyoscyamus (henbane), etc.

What therefore lives in this plant substance, for example in the deadly nightshade, is related to the activity that enters the human nerves and circulation of oxygen directly from the ego or the astral body. Thus by taking in the poison of the deadly nightshade, we get a significant strengthening of the breakdown processes in us, those processes that usually enter the physical body directly from the ego. The human ego is not generally strong enough to tolerate such a strengthening of breakdown processes. If the opposite activity is too great, however—the activity that proceeds from below upward in the blood vessels—one can counter it with such breakdown processes from nature. Atropine, the poison of the deadly nightshade, can thus be used in small doses to counteract excessive growth processes in the human being. The moment there is too much of this poison, however, we cannot talk about an equilibrium anymore. Then the growth processes are pushed back and the human being is benumbed by a spiritual activity that he is not yet able to tolerate with his ego. He will be able to tolerate such a spiritual activity perhaps only in future conditions, in the Venus and Vulcan stages of evolution. This is why the peculiar symptoms of poisoning occur. First the point of origin of the activity effective in the blood is undermined; then the gastric manifestations arise that appear after the ingestion of deadly nightshade poison; then the forces working from below upward are strongly prevented from doing so in the right way; finally complete unconsciousness occurs with the destruction of the human being from the side of the breakdown processes.

Thus we can trace the effect of such a substance in the human organism if we know the spiritual content of a substance we have absorbed. This can best be studied in plants. Knowledge of the human organism must be joined with a proper knowledge of outer nature. We must come to know what lives in individual plants. Then we will also know how the different plants affect the human being, in dietary prescriptions for example.

Then we will really be able to achieve something if the proper social conditions are brought about at the same time so that these things can really be applied. Today, even if we know something, we are usually unable to do anything, because our social conditions are in no way adapted to the knowledge of nature. The knowledge of nature is abstracted, is driven into the abstract so that we cannot grasp the human being's real position in the whole universe. It would not yet be possible on a large scale, for example, for us to ensure that individuals who might need it could receive a certain plant substance in some sort of rhythm. In order to make this possible in a comprehensive way, our scientific medicine must take on a different character. The outer arrangements in all social life need to be related to what can be known about the human being's relationship to surrounding nature.

Certainly a great deal can be done in isolated instances. We can prepare roots by boiling them for someone in whom the breakdown processes proceeding from the head are too strong. We can decoct certain roots that are known to contain substances that have drawn the spiritual, the astral, and the etheric in the right way into the physical in the process of root formation. Through introducing substances from the process of root formation into the human organism and bringing them to activity in the organism, a person receives something that goes up to the finest ramifications of the blood vessels at the outermost periphery, going into the head. By doing this we can call forth something to counteract the excessively strong breakdown processes of the nervous system. But one needs to have an exact conception of the changes that plant substances from the root undergo when taken in through the mouth and worked through in order to go to the outermost periphery of the head organization or skin organization.

In other cases we would have to know how substances taken from the flower act in the human organism. These substances are already a little shaky in their relationship to the etheric, they have already taken up the astral to a significant extent. In a certain sense they already approach the poisonous, though only slightly. We would have to know that when these substances are added to baths, and thereby brought into the organism in a completely different way, we can stimulate the excessively weak upbuilding organization that lies in the blood vessels. We would then counteract from outside the influence from the breakdown activity.

It is similar if we wish to pursue the inner effectiveness of injected substances. There we are essentially trying to strengthen the upbuilding processes so that a proper equilibrium with the breakdown processes is established.

This is why, particularly when giving injections, we must always observe how the breakdown processes react. We will not get the right effect if we cannot see how the breakdown processes first resist and then only gradually enter into the upbuilding process in the right way. When injecting something, therefore, we may notice that slight visual disturbances and buzzing in the ears arise, because at first the breakdown processes refuse to enter into the right equilibrium with the strengthened upbuilding processes. But when such symptoms appear they provide a guarantee that we are indeed intervening in the processes.

You see, anthroposophy is really not concerned with furnishing sectarian aunt-and-uncle gatherings with schemes they can argue about, schemes describing how the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. Rather it is very seriously concerned with comprehending the human being and his relationship to the world, with bringing the spiritual into everything material. And if anthroposophy really wants to secure its place in the world, it must be understood that it is able to pursue the spiritual into the material. As long as we merely occupy ourselves with aunt-and-uncle gatherings in sectarian circles, with squabbling over the division of the human being, we will be engaged in conflict about all sorts of other sectarian things. The moment we can really show how anthroposophy touches on all other knowledge, casts light on all other earthly knowledge—just as astrology illuminated earthly processes in earlier times—then anthroposophy will be something that can take hold of modern civilization. Then truly constructive progress may begin in human civilization, even in the face of the destructive processes originating in older times.

Such seriousness must be combined with what could be called one's commitment to anthroposophy. Certainly not everyone can always participate so actively that he himself discovers, for example, how belladonna on one side and chlorine on the other work in the human organism. For each individual to discover this is not the point; instead what is important is for an understanding to arise in wider circles, a common feeling for how what is therapeutic for the human being can be gained from an anthroposophical knowledge of the earth and the human being. In Waldorf education, we would not expect that every person could be a teacher, or at least teachers of children from elementary school on. We do expect, however, that there be general understanding of how educational principles are established out of knowledge of the human being and the world. Anthroposophy needs to be met with understanding. It would be wrong to believe that everyone should know everything, but the activity of an anthroposophical community should consist of building a general understanding, based on healthy common sense, for what anthroposophy is striving to realize for the health and future of humanity.

Entry in Rudolf Steiner's Notebook, February 11, 1923

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The ether becomes similar to that of the nerve-sense system: A. The ether becomes similar to that of the metabolic system: B.

Pus = the organic (etheric) permeated by outer, centrifugal astrality—on the path to the outside

Congealed exudate = the (etheric) organic permeated by inner, centripetal astrality—on the path of disappearing out of the physical world—

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In healing, the organism only continues a process that is already active in the daily defense against outer processes penetrating into the human being, which are poisoning—

The lower system (which accomplishes this) separates the outer, after it has permeated the same with centrifugal forces, as they are active in the growth of plants—as they are present in sleep. What poisons is the centripetally active [force]—of the nerve-sense system—which leads the outer world inward—it leads the outer world inward after cooling it (making it into mere form), so that through it the spiritual penetrates inward directly.

The inhibited inhalation, nourishing, the excessively strong day processes; the excessive exhalation, digestion, the excessively strong night processes.

The body has not taken up the spirit, excessively strong night processes = one is feverish: a formation of inner softening—pus.

The body takes up the spirit too strongly, excessively strong day processes = one freezes: a formation of inner hardening—inward exudate-like—fragmenting.

Recently, the most diverse views, including those from various quarters here in Switzerland, have been expressed regarding the relationship between what has been cultivated for many years in our circles as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, led to the building of this structure here, the Goetheanum, and ultimately to what is to be brought into the world by us in another direction, linking up with the social movements and aspirations of the present day. The fact that we had to add this social endeavor to our anthroposophical striving has met with the most diverse assessments, both approving and disapproving. Of course, this cannot be decisive for the way we have to pursue our path; but it is necessary to draw attention to a number of facts that have come to light in this regard.

Anthroposophists often say that the anthroposophical movement should not have burdened itself with the task of realizing the threefold social organism. And some of those people who have taken an interest in the social movement that is to lead to the threefold social order find it disturbing that the idea of threefold order has taken as its starting point anthroposophical knowledge, which is often perceived as mystical, dark and unclear. Thus the threefolders are often criticized by the anthroposophists, and the anthroposophists by the threefolders. And on both sides, the community is sometimes not welcome.

As I said, this cannot deter us; but it is important to be fully aware of such a fact and to remember the inner connection that we have often had to bring before our souls in the considerations that have been practiced here.

But another thing has also come to light more and more, and this other thing is, I would like to say, something that perhaps needs to be considered more intensively for our task; because ultimately, if people with a social mindset criticize our association with anthroposophy, there is nothing we can do about it, just as there is nothing we can do about anthroposophists emphasizing that it would be better if we had not burdened ourselves with social thinking. We cannot do anything special about that either, but must continue unwaveringly on the path we have recognized as the right one. But what is perhaps more urgently to be taken into account is that more and more people are also speaking out and saying that it is necessary to create an anthroposophical foundation for the personal understanding of the idea of threefolding. The idea of threefolding would be much better understood if an anthroposophical basis were created. And, for example, especially in proletarian circles, there is more and more demand for such an anthroposophical basis. This is something that may come as a surprise to some, although basically it is not too surprising.

The way in which anthroposophical striving was often regarded in the past was already regarded by our friends — which was also due to class differences — in such a way that little anthroposophy could be brought into proletarian circles. And now it is inevitable that every person who encounters the threefold order will somehow also hear something about anthroposophy, and initially become acquainted with it in an external way. And it is very strange that a vivid need for anthroposophy arises precisely at this point.

For example, after the idea of threefolding had been cultivated for some time in Stuttgart without any anthroposophical discussion, we needed to give lecture cycles on purely anthroposophical subjects. This had become necessary for good reasons, and they will be continued.

This is a matter that should be given special consideration here, and it is this thought that I would like to present to you today. Here in Switzerland, we are in a very special position with regard to these two currents, the social current and the anthroposophical current that is connected with it, at least for us. The question of social striving born of anthroposophical thinking is indeed quite different for Central Europe than it is for Switzerland. For Central Europe, the situation is such that it is a matter of life and death, the life and death of the nation. There may be many people today who do not realize the seriousness of the situation; but it is a matter of the life and death of the nation. People think far too superficially about such things. When you say “death of the nation,” they think: you can't kill eighty million people in a short period of time, so it can't be about the death of the nation.

Anyone who thinks like that does not understand at all what is actually at stake. It is quite natural that you cannot physically kill eighty or ninety million people in a short time. But the death of a nation means something quite different. We only need to remember that when Jerusalem was destroyed, it was not a matter of the death of individual Jews living in Jerusalem at that time. Nevertheless, in a certain sense it was a matter of the death of the nation, and this death of the nation can occur in a completely different way than it occurred at that time. It is a matter of life or death! And life can truly — one could think of many other things about the threefold social order — be saved only by the inauguration of the threefold social order. In the immediate future, it is a matter of either-or: an understanding of the threefold social order or the death of the national culture. Today this may seem immodest and perhaps even foolish to people. But it is so. So that one can say: There is much reason to reach out to threefolding out of a certain compulsion. It may take longer or shorter, but there is reason for compulsion. This compulsion also exists towards the East of Europe, towards this East, indescribably crushed by its karma.

The situation here is different. Here there is — or would be — the possibility of voluntarily reaching out for something like the threefold social order; for here, as in the West, it is not a matter of life and death, but of the continuation of events in a more or less spiritual or unspiritual sense. Of course, life in Switzerland and in the West can continue in a materialistic sense for a long time without a spiritual impulse; or one can come voluntarily to see in an eminently spiritual movement, such as the threefold social order movement, that which must give a new impulse. There is no need to think that it is a matter of life or death.

But it is quite a different matter to carry out a task out of free will or under compulsion. And one could also say that for the overall development of the world, it would mean something quite different to arrive at the stream of threefolding out of free insight, especially in a place like Switzerland. Today it is extremely difficult, even for me, to formulate and express these things objectively. I believe it would be a great blessing if someone belonging to the West, or especially to a neutral country, would have the courage to express this openly; for outwardly it would mean something quite different. In particular, the following would have to be taken into account: What would come from the few countries that have remained neutral would also be of the greatest significance inwardly. If, therefore, something like the impulse of the threefold social organism could come out of a country or neutral territories in relation to the earlier warlike conditions, then something very significant would actually be done for the world-historical movement. To understand this is also an anthroposophical question. For only anthroposophy can answer the question: What does the integration of such an impulse mean in the overall development of humanity? And here it is not unimportant that this impulse should be formulated in an abstract form, but it is significant from which fact it arises: whether it arises from the fact of free knowledge or whether it arises from the fact of necessity, as it can only arise in Central Europe because nothing else can arise there now but that which arises out of the bitterest need.

So I think that here in Switzerland, in particular, we should consider what could provide enthusiasm for the idea of the threefold social organism. And the question then arises in the soul: how do you get over a certain dilemma? Among you there are many who have been participating in our anthroposophical movement for quite a long time and have been able to see for themselves how slowly or how quickly — mostly how slowly — what is meant in this anthroposophical movement penetrates people's souls. It is happening slowly. And if it were to depend on people first becoming anthroposophists in order to then be able to think socially in the right way, then it could, under certain circumstances, be much, much too late. Therefore, it had to be borne in mind that the idea of threefolding, even if it appears less strongly founded, has to be presented to the world in its own right, because it is not possible to wait until it emerges as a matter of course from anthroposophically oriented thinking. However, it will probably be necessary for this idea of threefolding to receive a certain amount of support. Since it cannot receive this support quickly enough from the real spread of anthroposophy, which is slow, it should be able to receive this support from the way the members of the anthroposophical movement act. In other words, the members of the anthroposophical movement should try to gain trust by acting socially.

In any case, this is a question that cannot be answered theoretically, but only practically, in line with life, because it is a question of appearance. We must try to represent the social aspect in such a way that people can see something inspiring in the way it is represented, even if the foundation from the anthroposophical side cannot be laid quickly enough.

Now you will ask me: Yes, how is it possible to find the right tact, so to speak, in representing the social movement? — Of course, no catechism-like instruction can be given about this either. But something can be said that, if sufficiently taken into account, will help a great deal: each and every one of us should make more and more effort to really get to know the so-called social movement in a way that is appropriate to life. When a socially oriented movement was started in our circles, it was obvious that this was not the case. Among the most well-meaning and benevolent co-workers in our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science movement, there were quite a few who had completely overlooked the fact that there was and is a modern social movement in the second half of the 19th century and into our own days. That is, I do not mean that all members did not know that there is a social movement. But it does not do anything to know that there is a social movement; nor does it do anything to follow what the newspapers report about the social movement. Rather, it is a matter of really knowing the concrete expressions and aspirations of this movement. Not so long ago I met people in our midst who did not know when threefolding began, that there are trade unions and what trade unions are. We have become too accustomed to ignoring people in life and not caring about what people actually do and do. We must learn to truly care about the souls of people, to really take an interest in the souls of people. There is a major obstacle to this, which I would like to mention without wanting to hurt anyone: “bourgeois goodwill” for the working population. This bourgeois goodwill for the working population, which often oozes with social impetus, is basically a serious obstacle to social effectiveness in the present day. We have experienced what I actually mean by this in a wide variety of areas. Just think of how we have experienced a certain getting to know the so-called 'people'. We have experienced historical novels, folk novels, folk novellas in which people who understood nothing about the people For example, Berthold Auerbach or similar authors – who understood nothing about the people – described the way the people were or are, and what came from this side was then accepted as an occupation, a cognitive occupation with the people. One even felt that it was something belonging to the social question when one saw Gerhart Hauptmann's “Weavers”. Of course, in Gerhart Hauptmann's “Weavers” one sees the misery of the proletarian masses in such a way that one is shown on stage how a poor family has to feed on a dead dog. But it is a strange conception of the understanding of social life when people sit in the stalls or in the gallery in some large city and watch how the poor family has to feed itself on a dead dog, and then go home to, say, have one of the usual soups. I do not want to say that it is perhaps possible in our time to bridge the class divide overnight. But what it comes down to is that we really have to get a sense of what is happening; that we have to stop walking past people and not knowing the contexts of their lives. What is really at issue today is whether each individual can visualize a broad context of world history, a context that only opens up when we look back to earlier times, which have left behind much that lives in our present, and when we look at new things that are emerging in this present as if from the depths of the earth to the surface of life.

One question that comes up again and again when talking about modern public life is that of organization. Our living conditions have become complicated. Work has become more and more compartmentalized. The individual is involved in a narrowly defined area of work and activity. We can only work, we can only be effective as modern people through organizations. There have always been organizations. But people do not take into account that older organizations were quite different from the organizations that have to arise today. Today we live almost exclusively in such organizations, which in part continue the old, but in part already have the new within them, and are constantly experiencing inner upheavals. However, the awareness has not penetrated that something truly radically new must emerge from the depths of human evolution.

When we inquire about older organizations, we can actually identify one thing as the impulse behind such organizations: human blood, the bond of blood. When we look at older times, we see tribes that belonged together, extended families that belonged together. What belongs together is actually organized out of human depths through blood. This means that the organizing principle is often subconscious and does not fully emerge into consciousness. People are organizing, but it does not emerge into consciousness. Higher spirits than man are involved in this organization.

Today we are faced with the necessity to do what used to happen unconsciously, that is, in many cases, to be carried out by higher spirits than man is, out of human consciousness itself. We consciously want to join together in associations, in organizations to promote social work. That which has united people out of blood is gradually losing its significance.

The observed, the recognized thing, the objective must provide the reasons for the union. Subconscious or unconscious union must give way to conscious union. We live in the midst of this interweaving of these two currents: conscious organizing and unconscious organizing, and the convulsions of the present are in many ways connected with the confluence of these two currents. Take, for example, the efforts of socialist parties of various shades that are currently in the public eye. In these socialist parties, there is a certain urge to organize consciously, even if it is still instinctive today. They want to organize. But on the other hand, they have not yet progressed to finding the object for conscious organizing.

You can, by wanting to make this clear to yourself, simply, I would like to say, look at the archetypal phenomenon of today's social striving. Suppose someone were to appear here – let us speak quite impartially – and say: Social striving should be done! – What would he mean by that? He would mean: Social striving should be done in Switzerland. If you were to expect him to think differently, he would naturally feel that this was an unreasonable demand. Or do you think that someone in France would act in this way: he would naturally think that social efforts should be made within French borders. It has also been stated in theory that socialist programs should use the old state borders as a framework for large socialist cooperatives. The state is to be transformed into a large socialist cooperative. But the state is, after all, what is left of the old, consanguineous associations, the old blood associations. So it is simply to be imposed on what comes out of the old consanguineous relationships.

We expect a great deal of people today when we expect them to think clearly about this matter. And people will not be able to think clearly about these things at all unless they become anthroposophists. As strange as it may seem, what I am saying now is true: people will not be able to think clearly about this at all. For what is the call that is going through this world? The call that is going through our world is: the liberation of peoples. That is, the old blood ties that come from the old days are to be reorganized in some way. Liberation of the peoples! As this call goes through the world, it completely ignores what organization out of consciousness should be. Things collide so violently in our present time. Therefore, only a truly anthroposophical, a general understanding of humanity will be able to lead to where we want to go.

But there are good reasons for this. For the anthroposophical understanding, namely the earlier so-called theosophical understanding, has always stopped at this question. It is true that people have said: fraternal understanding of people without distinction of race, color and so on. — But has this become real anywhere in our modern times? It has become theory, abstract theory; it has not become real in our time. And now it is least real of all.

As a result, this anthroposophical-theosophical striving has participated in the general love for the abstract, which has been spoken of so often here, that general love for the abstract that lives in the mental and emotional existences, which are separate from life. We live as modern people, as people of the present, the life that we are not allowed to live, the double life: on the one hand, life in our external work, where we have our profession, where we have many other things as well, and the life where we consider, where we feel. A life of everyday, a life of Sunday. We do not want to hear when the spirit is spoken of, something that intervenes in the life of Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday; we want to have a life when the spirit is spoken of, a life in which we feel comfortable when it is spoken of on Sunday , morning or afternoon, from the pulpit, where we do not need to think about what will happen on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but where we only feel a certain pleasure at the words: brotherhood, love of neighbor, and so on. This extends to the life of science. And there it shows itself in particular how it has been effected; this historical effect must be considered.

You see, our profane sciences no longer allow themselves to know anything about the spirit, and not even about the soul. It is taken for granted that the profane sciences do not allow themselves to know anything about the spirit and the soul. Scholars today proclaim that science must be free from that which is belief, and in so doing they think they are serving unprejudiced science. They think one is prejudiced if one still has something to say about the soul and the spirit in the field of science, because, so people think, only subjective faith decides about such things. But where does this actually come from? In reality it comes from the fact that the age has developed in such a way that religious creeds have monopolized the tendency towards the soul and the spiritual. The religious creeds have formed a monopoly for the soul and for the spiritual. And today it is taken for granted that when something like anthroposophy is judged from this point of view, people simply say: This must not be cultivated; science must remain free of these things, science has no say in the soul and spirit, because the relationship to the soul and spirit should be a monopoly of the denominations. That is why it is so humoristically serious – forgive me for using the expression in the face of a very serious fact, but just as there can be tragicomedy, there can also be humoristically serious, and the tragicomic is sometimes more significant for the development of the world It is humorous to hear from the lecterns today that science must be so and so objective, without getting involved in the things of the soul or the spirit, because that would break the exactness of science. It is therefore humorous to hear such things, because it comes from the fact that people who do not have to defend the faith were forbidden to speak about spirit and soul for so long. And those who believe today, as scientific scholars, that they have to keep science pure for the sake of its exactness, they really want to keep it pure because they have been forbidden by dogmatics to think about soul and spirit. It is the dregs, the residue, the residue of the old ecclesiastical prohibitions, which are proclaimed to us today as exact scientific demands from the lecterns. People simply do not know how historically what they proclaim today as a self-evident and sometimes, in their opinion, high truth has developed. And these things should not be slept through, but people should wake up to them. But without waking up to these things, we will not get anywhere. No matter how many beautiful things we pass down about the social question, we will not get anywhere if we succumb to any illusions about the greatest lie that actually exists, about the scientific lie of the present. We do not yet feel it, this scientific lie, but we must learn to feel it.

What I have just said is not meant emotionally, it is meant quite theoretically, and can only be understood correctly if it is taken up in this theoretical sense. You see, I only feel called upon to speak the word scientific lie because, just as I speak this word and unreservedly criticize present-day science from this point of view, I also defend it just as much ; for it has grown great through all that it has been able to achieve by the mere fact that for some time men have been investigating only the physical and bodily through science, without particularly turning to the soul and spirit. But this may only be regarded as a utilitarian and pedagogical principle of human development, not as something epistemological.

Thus, even today, the necessity must be recognized to permeate again the profane science with real knowledge of the soul and the spiritual. Only from this will the strength arise to tackle the social problems deeply enough. In our time, the human being is now faced with the necessity of recognizing differently than is recognized today in our schools. I would like to say that things are now coming to fruition in knowledge that did not need a long time to come to fruition. For a long time, the Copernican worldview was quite sufficient. It was useful for people to imagine it this way: here is the sun, the earth moves around in an ellipse, around the earth in turn moves the moon, between the sun and the earth Mercury and Venus, further away Mars and so on. — It was nice to present this whole picture of the movement of the planets around the sun in ellipses for humanity. This picture was enough until the present.

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But how did this picture come into being historically? I have mentioned this often enough. Historically, this picture came into being because the great Copernicus once wrote his book about the revolution of the heavenly bodies. Right at the beginning there are three sentences. If you pay attention to all three, then it is good. But they were not all three observed, only the first two. The third was ignored. If you only consider the first two Copernican sentences, then the Copernican system, continued in the Keplerian and Newtonian sense, emerges. But this system is not correct. If, according to the calculations of this system, a planet should be at a certain point and you point the telescope in that direction, it is not there! But according to this system, it should be there. Therefore, for some time now, the so-called “Bessel Reductions” have been used; the position is always corrected. Before setting up the telescope, one does not point it towards the point for which one would have to point it according to this system, but towards the point for which one would have to point it after applying the Bessel corrections. But what do these Bessel corrections actually mean? They mean that we must always apply anew what we would apply at once if we were to observe all three Copernican laws, that is, if we had not left the third out of account. But if we take this third Copernican law into account, then history is again at odds with the beautiful revolutions of the planets around the sun. Then we must think of a different world system. But people will not think of this other world system either before they are properly prepared for such a rethinking through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For how do people look at the world today? People look at it today as if they were sitting inside a train, never looking out the window and never getting off, but always sitting inside and only living with the passengers of the train. But a person could also travel through the world with a train in such a way that he travels a distance, then he leaves the train, gets off, experiences what is in a city; it may be that another train then comes along, it does not matter, in which he gets back on. He travels further, experiences something in another city. These are the stages that one experiences there. One then carries this with oneself.

Today's astronomical science experiences the Earth's journey through space as if one were sitting in a train and experiencing nothing but the experiences of one's fellow passengers, never getting off. Now you will say: How can you get off the Earth? Is it possible to get off the Earth? — You can, but it is different to get off the Earth than to get off a train. To get off a train means to walk out of the door of the carriage and then go somewhere. To get off the earth means to penetrate into the human soul. When you really penetrate into the soul, when you reach what is inside the soul, then you have gotten off the earth; then you have undergone the same procedure in relation to the earth as you do when you get off a train and get back on. But now the peculiar thing is that when you get off, that is, when you really delve inwardly, concretely delve, not through illusions, but concretely delve, then you experience something different with each getting off, really experience something different with each getting off. Reciting mysticism that delves into the human interior, that experiences God in the soul, that is just mere reciting. To really experience something inwardly, that turns out to be different in different ages, that it is always a renewed experience. If someone has really experienced something inwardly in 1870, and again inwardly in 1919, the two things are experienced differently inwardly. Why are they different? Because man experiences the universe, always at a different place.

It was through such an inner experiencing that the ancients found their system of the heavens, not through a purely outer experiencing. It was through an experiencing like that in the train that the Copernican system arose. The system of the future will again have to be experienced inwardly, in that man measures the journey through the world in inner experiences. Then something different will come out. Above all, we will learn to experience the world concretely, not in the abstract way that people love today.

Something special happened to me recently in Berlin that basically gave me great satisfaction. Some time ago, a disgraceful article was published in the German magazine “Die Hilfe” (“False Prophet” was the title of the article). Now, such articles are read, even overslept. But a few weeks ago, when I was in Berlin, an American visited me and said that he had actually come to see me because he had read the article in 'Die Hilfe' in which you railed so terribly and in such a way that one had to take an interest. I just want to say that by way of an introduction. What actually satisfied me was a question that this man asked, which was highly objective. He said that he had grasped very quickly what the threefold social order is about, but he would now like to ask: Do you think that this threefold social order is an eternal truth that, once found, creates social conditions that must now always remain, or is it a truth for a period of time that only replaces old things; is it a truth that will in turn be replaced by something else? I was positively amazed that there are still such reasonable people in the present day who do not believe in millenarianism, in the 'thousand-year Reich', where an absolute is once found and remains, only one truth over the whole earth and into all eternities. If someone today thinks in socialist terms, he thinks: tomorrow the social state must be realized; when it is there, it will never need to change.

I then formulated my answer in such a way that I said: Of course the last few centuries have striven for the unified state; now we have come so far in concrete terms that we must build it in three parts. After some time, the other, the synthesis, will come again; then the opposite will have to occur again. — You see, it is not so convenient to always have to follow the concrete circumstances, it is not as convenient as thinking up an absolute system. But today it is necessary to follow the concrete circumstances, to be aware that what we have to create, we have to create for the present world situation. But this can already be understood “astronomically” today, in that we see, firstly, that mystical experiences differ depending on whether they are gained in this decade or that decade, in this century or in that century, and that one can follow the movements of the earth itself, experience them inwardly in a mystical way. But today the “great astronomical” must be seen and felt together with the social. We must gain the possibility of advancing in such a way that we today cross a threshold that can only be compared with thresholds of earlier times, which were not only transitions but also leaps in development.

Take the ancient Greeks. They had their land area. As far as the Pillars of Hercules, the earth was still something concrete for them. Then came the indefinite, the completely indefinite. They had a land consciousness. The newer times emerged, the discovery of America, sailing to the East Indies, similar things. Earth consciousness emerged. The land consciousness of the Greeks became the earth consciousness of modern times. Just as for the Greeks, what lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules was indeterminate, so today what is outside of earth consciousness is indeterminate for man, merely mathematical fantasy, Galilean, Newtonian fantasy, and so on. This imagination must be replaced by real facts. We must transform terrestrial consciousness into cosmic consciousness, as one transformed the terrestrial consciousness of the Greeks into terrestrial consciousness. We are at this point today, and we will not make social progress if we do not find the way to develop the world consciousness of the future out of the earth consciousness of modern times, just as the land consciousness of the Greeks was transformed into the earth consciousness of modern times.

If we do not educate through the teachings of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science the great astronomical world view of that which is outside as outer space, then we do not grasp the truth of outer space. But if we do not grasp the truth of outer space, we cannot become citizens of the world. But we will not become social citizens until we have become citizens of the world in our consciousness.

[The meeting began with a discussion of some children Dr. Steiner had observed that morning.]

Dr. Steiner: E. E. must be morally raised. He is a Bolshevik.

A teacher who was substituting in the first grade poses a question.

Dr. Steiner: You should develop reading from pictorial writing. You should develop the forms from the artistic activity.

A teacher suggests beginning the morning with the Lord’s Prayer.

Dr. Steiner: It would be nice to begin instruction with the Lord’s Prayer and then go on to the verses I will give you. For the four lower grades I would ask that you say the verse in the following way:

The Sun with loving light
Makes bright for me each day;
The soul with spirit power
Gives strength unto my limbs;
In sunlight shining clear
I reverence, O God,
The strength of humankind,
That thou so graciously
Hast planted in my soul,
That I with all my might
May love to work and learn.

From Thee come light and strength,
To Thee rise love and thanks.

The children must feel that as I have spoken it. First they should learn the words, but then you will have to gradually make the difference between the inner and outer clear to them.

The Sun with loving light
Makes bright for me each day;
The soul with spirit power
Gives strength unto my limbs;

The first part, that the Sun makes each day bright, we observe, and the other part, that it affects the limbs, we feel in the soul. What lies in this portion is the spirit-soul and the physical body.

In sunlight shining clear
I reverence, O God,
The strength of humankind,
That thou so graciously
Hast planted in my soul,
That I with all my might
May love to work and learn.

Here we give honor to both. We then turn to one and then the other.

From Thee come light and strength (the Sun),
To Thee rise love and thanks (from within).

This is how I think the children should feel it, namely, the divine in light and in the soul.

You need to attempt to speak it with the children in chorus, with the feeling of the way I recited it. At first, the children will learn only the words, so that they have the words, the tempo, and the rhythm. Later, you can begin to explain it with something like, “Now we want to see what this actually means.” Thus, first they must learn it, then you explain it. Don’t explain it first, and also, do not put so much emphasis upon the children learning it from memory. They will eventually learn it through repetition. They will be able to read it directly from your lips. Even though it may not go well for a long time, four weeks or more, it will go better later. The older children can write it down, but you must allow the younger ones to learn it slowly. Don’t demand that they learn it by heart! It would be nice if they write it down, since then they will have it in their own handwriting. I will give you the verse for the four higher classes tomorrow.

[The verse for the four higher grades was:]

I look into the world;
In which the Sun shines,
In which the stars sparkle,
In which the stones lie,
The living plants are growing,
The animals are feeling,
In which the soul of man
Gives dwelling for the spirit;
I look into the soul
Which lives within myself.
God’s spirit weaves in light
Of Sun and human soul,
In world of space, without,
In depths of soul, within.
God’s spirit, ‘tis to Thee
I turn myself in prayer,
That strength and blessing grow
In me, to learn and work.

[The texts of the verses are exactly as Dr. Steiner dictated them according to the handwritten notes. It is unclear whether he said, “loving light” (liebes Licht) or “light of love” (Liebeslicht).]

[Lesson plan for the independent anthroposophical religious instruction for children:]

Dr. Steiner: We should give this instruction in two stages. If you want to go into anthroposophical instruction with a religious goal, then you must certainly take the concept of religion much more seriously than usual. Generally, all kinds of worldviews that do not belong there mix into religion and the concept of religion. Thus, the religious tradition brings things from one age over into another, and we do not want to continue to develop that. It retains views from an older perspective alongside more developed views of the world. These things appeared in a grotesque form during the age of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Modern apologies justify such things—something quite humorous. The Catholic Church gets around it by saying that at that time the Copernican view of the world was not recognized, the Church itself forbade it. Thus, Galileo could not have supported that world perspective. I do not wish to go into that now, but I mention it only to show you that we really must take religion seriously when we address it anthroposophically.

It is true that anthroposophy is a worldview, and we certainly do not want to bring that into our school. On the other hand, we must certainly develop the religious feeling that worldview can give to the human soul when the parents expressly ask us to give it to the children. Particularly when we begin with anthroposophy, we dare not develop anything inappropriate, certainly not develop anything too early. We will, therefore, have two stages. First, we will take all the children in the lower four grades, and then those in the upper four grades.

In the lower four grades, we will attempt to discuss the things and processes in the human environment, so that a feeling arises in the children that spirit lives in nature. We can consider such things as my previous examples. We can, for instance, give the children the idea of the soul. Of course, the children first need to learn to understand the idea of life in general. You can teach the children about life if you direct their attention to the fact that people are first small and then they grow, become old, get white hair, wrinkles, and so forth. Thus, you tell them about the seriousness of the course of human life and acquaint them with the seriousness of the fact of death, something the children already know.

Therefore, you need to discuss what occurs in the human soul during the changes between sleeping and waking. You can certainly go into such things with even the youngest children in the first group. Discuss how waking and sleeping look, how the soul rests, how the human being rests during sleep, and so forth. Then, tell the children how the soul permeates the body when it awakens and indicate to them that there is a will that causes their limbs to move. Make them aware that the body provides the soul with senses through which they can see and hear and so forth. You can give them such things as proof that the spiritual is active in the physical. Those are things you can discuss with the children.

You must completely avoid any kind of superficial teaching. Thus, in anthroposophical religious instruction we can certainly not use the kind of teaching that asks questions such as, Why do we find cork on a tree? with the resulting reply, So that we can make champagne corks. God created cork in order to cork bottles. This sort of idea, that something exists in nature simply because human intent exists, is poison. That is certainly something we may not develop. Therefore, don’t bring any of these silly causal ideas into nature.

To the same extent, we may not use any of the ideas people so love to use to prove that spirit exists because something unknown exists. People always say, That is something we cannot know, and, therefore, that is a revelation of the spirit. Instead of gaining a feeling that we can know of the spirit and that the spirit reveals itself in matter, these ideas direct people toward thinking that when we cannot explain something, that proves the existence of the divine. Thus, you will need to strictly avoid superficial teaching and the idea of wonders, that is, that wonders prove divine activity.

In contrast, it is important that we develop imaginative pictures through which we can show the supersensible through nature. For example, I have often mentioned that we should speak to the children about the butterfly’s cocoon and how the butterfly comes out of the cocoon. I have said that we can explain the concept of the immortal soul to the children by saying that, although human beings die, their souls go from them like an invisible butterfly emerging from the cocoon. Such a picture is, however, only effective when you believe it yourself, that is, when you believe the picture of the butterfly creeping out of the cocoon is a symbol for immortality planted into nature by divine powers. You need to believe that yourselves, otherwise the children will not believe it.

You need to arouse the children’s interest in such things. They will be particularly effective for the children where you can show how a being can live in many forms, how an original form can take on many individual forms. In religious instruction, it is important that you pay attention to the feeling and not the worldview. For example, you can take a poem about the metamorphosis of plants and animals and use it religiously. However, you must use the feelings that go from line to line. You can consider nature that way until the end of the fourth grade. There, you must always work toward the picture that human beings with all our thinking and doing live within the cosmos. You must also give the children the picture that God lives in what lives in us. Time and again you should come back to such pictures, how the divine lives in a tree leaf, in the Sun, in clouds, and in rivers. You should also show how God lives in the bloodstream, in the heart, in what we feel and what we think. Thus, you should develop a picture of the human being filled with the divine.

During these years, you should also emphasize the picture that human beings, because they are an image of God and a revelation of God, should be good. Human beings who are not good hurt God. From a religious perspective, human beings do not exist in the world for their own sake, but as revelations of the divine. You can express that by saying that people do not exist just for their own sake, but “to glorify God.” Here, “to glorify” means “to reveal.” Thus, in reality, it is not “glory to God in the highest,” but “reveal the gods in the highest.” Thus, we can understand the idea that people exist to glorify God as meaning that people exist in order to express the divine through their deeds and feelings. If someone does something bad, something impious and unkind, then that person does something that belittles God and distorts God into something ugly.

You should always bring in these ideas. At this age you should use the thought that God lives in the human being. In the lower grades, I would certainly abstain from teaching any Christology, but just awaken a feeling for God the Father out of nature and natural occurrences. I would try to connect all our discussions about Old Testament themes, the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and so forth, to that feeling, at least insofar as they are useful, and they are if you treat them properly. That is the first stage of religious instruction.

In the second stage, that is, the four upper grades, we need to discuss the concepts of fate and human destiny with the children. Thus, we need to give the children a picture of destiny so that they truly feel that human beings have a destiny. It is important to teach the child the difference between a simple chance occurrence and destiny. Thus, you will need to go through the concept of destiny with the children. You cannot use definitions to explain when something destined occurs or when something occurs only by chance. You can, however, perhaps explain it through examples. What I mean is that when something happens to me, if I feel that the event is in some way something I sought, then that is destiny. If I do not have the feeling that it was something I sought, but have a particularly strong feeling that it overcame me, surprised me, and that I can learn a great deal for the future from it, then that is a chance event. You need to gradually teach the children about something they can experience only through feeling, namely the difference between finished karma and arising or developing karma. You need to gradually teach children about the questions of fate in the sense of karmic questions.

You can find more about the differences in feeling in my book Theosophy. For the newest edition, I rewrote the chapter, “Reincarnation and Karma,” where I discuss this question. There, I tried to show how you can feel the difference. You can certainly make it clear to the children that there are actually two kinds of occurrences. In the one case, you feel that you sought it. For example, when you meet someone, you usually feel that you sought that person. In the other case, when you are involved in a natural event, you have the feeling you can learn something from it for the future. If something happens to you because of some other person, that is usually a case of fulfilled karma. Even such things as the fact that we find ourselves together in this faculty at the Waldorf School are fulfilled karma. We find ourselves here because we sought each other. We cannot comprehend that through definitions, only through feeling. You will need to speak with the children about all kinds of fates, perhaps in stories where the question of fate plays a role. You can even repeat many of the fairy tales in which questions of fate play a role. You can also find historical examples where you can show how an individual’s fate was fulfilled. You should discuss the question of fate, therefore, to indicate the seriousness of life from that perspective.

I also want you to understand what is really religious in an anthroposophical sense. In the sense of anthroposophy, what is religious is connected with feeling, with those feelings for the world, for the spirit, and for life that our perspective of the world can give us. The worldview itself is something for the head, but religion always arises out of the entire human being. For that reason, religion connected with a specific church is not actually religious. It is important that the entire human being, particularly the feeling and will, lives in religion. That part of religion that includes a worldview is really only there to exemplify or support or deepen the feeling and strengthen the will. What should flow from religion is what enables the human being to grow beyond what past events and earthly things can give to deepen feeling and strengthen will.

Following the questions of destiny, you will need to discuss the differences between what we inherit from our parents and what we bring into our lives from previous earthly lives. In this second stage of religious instruction, we bring in previous earthly lives and everything else that can help provide a reasoned or feeling comprehension that people live repeated earthly lives.

You should also certainly include the fact that human beings raise themselves to the divine in three stages. Thus, after you have given the children an idea of destiny, you then slowly teach them about heredity and repeated earthly lives through stories. You can then proceed to the three stages of the divine.

The first of these stages is that of the angels, something available for each individual personally. You can explain that every individual human being is led from life to life by his or her own personal genius. Thus, this personal divinity that leads human beings is the first thing to discuss.

In the second step, you attempt to explain that there are higher gods, the archangels. (Here you gradually come into something you can observe in history and geography.) These archangels exist to guide whole groups of human beings, that is, the various peoples and such. You must teach this clearly so that the children can learn to differentiate between the god spoken of by Protestantism, for instance, who is actually only an angel, and an archangel, who is higher than anything that ever arises in the Protestant religious teachings.

In the third stage, you teach the children about the concept of a time spirit, a divine being who rules over periods of time. Here, you will connect religion with history.

Only when you have taught the children all that can you go on, at about the twelfth grade, to—well, we can’t do that yet, we will just do two stages. The children can certainly hear things they will understand only later. After you have taught the children about these three stages, you can go on to the actual Christology by dividing cosmic evolution into two parts: the pre-Christian, which was really a preparation, and the Christian, which is the fulfillment. Here, the concept that the divine is revealed through Christ, “in the fullness of time,” must play a major role.

Only then will we go on to the Gospels. Until then, to the extent that we need stories to explain the concepts of angel, archangel, and time spirit, we will use the Old Testament. For example, we can use the Old Testament story of what appeared before Moses to explain to the children the appearance of a new time spirit, in contrast to the previous one before the revelation to Moses. We can then also explain that a new time spirit entered during the sixth century B.C. Thus, we first use the Old Testament. When we then go on to Christology, having presented it as being preceded by a long period of preparation, we can go on to the Gospels. We can attempt to present the individual parts and show that the four-foldedness of the Gospels is something natural by saying that just as a tree needs to be photographed from four sides for everything to be properly seen, in the same way the four Gospels present four points of view. You take the Gospel of Matthew and then Mark, Luke, and John and emphasize them such that the children will always feel that. Always place the main emphasis upon the differences in feeling.

Thus, we now have the teaching content of the second stage. The general tenor of the first stage is to bring to developing human beings everything that the wisdom of the divine in nature can provide. In the second stage, the human being no longer recognizes the divine through wisdom, but through the effects of love. That is the tenor, the leitmotif in both stages.

A teacher: Should we have the children learn verses?

Dr. Steiner: Yes, at first primarily from the Old Testament and then later from the New Testament. The verses contained in prayer books are often trivial, therefore, you should use verses from the Bible and also those verses we have in anthroposophy. In anthroposophy, we have many verses you can use well in this anthroposophical religious instruction.

A teacher: Should we teach the Ten Commandments?

Dr. Steiner: The Ten Commandments are, of course, in the Old Testament, but you should make their seriousness clear. I have always emphasized that the Ten Commandments state that we should not speak the name of God in vain. This is something that nearly every preacher overdoes since they continually speak vainly of Christ. Of course, this is something we must deepen in the feeling. We should not give religious instruction as a confession of faith, but as a deepening of feeling. The Apostles’ Creed as such is not important, only what we feel in the Creed. It is not our belief in God the Father, in God the Son, and in God the Holy Spirit, but what we feel in relationship to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What is important is that in the depths of our soul, we feel that it is an illness not to know God, that it is a misfortune not to know Christ and that not to know the Holy Spirit is a limitation of the human soul.

A teacher: Should we teach the children about historical things, for instance, the path of the Zarathustra being up to the revelation of Christianity, or the story of the two Jesus children?

Dr. Steiner: You should close the religious instruction by teaching the children about these connections but, of course, very carefully. The first stage is clearly more nature religion, the second, more historical religion.

A teacher: Then we should certainly avoid teaching about functionality in natural history? Schmeil’s guidelines for botany and zoology are teleological.

Dr. Steiner: With regard to books, I would ask that you consider them only as a source of factual information. You can assume that we should avoid the methods described in them, and also the viewpoints. We really must do everything new. We should completely avoid the books that are filled with the horrible attitude we can characterize with statements such as “God created cork in order to cork champagne bottles.” For us, such books exist only to inform us of facts. The same is true for history. All the judgments made in them are no less garbage, and in natural history that is certainly true.

In my opinion it would not be so bad if we used Brehm, for example, if such things are to be up-to-date. Brehm avoids such trivial things, though he is a little narrow-minded. It would be a good idea to copy out such things and use stories as a basis. Perhaps, that would be the best thing to do. The old edition of Brehm is pretty boring. We cannot use the new edition written recently by someone else.

In general, you can assume all school books written after 1885 are worthless. Since that time, all pedagogy has regressed in the most terrible way and simply landed in clichés.

A teacher: How should we proceed with human natural history? How should we start that in the fourth grade?

Dr. Steiner: Concerning human beings you will find nearly everything somewhere in my lecture cycles. You will find nearly everything there somewhere. You also have what I presented in the seminar course. You need only modify it for school. The main thing is that you hold to the facts, also the psychological and spiritual facts. You can first take up the human being by presenting the formation of the skeleton. There, you can certainly be confident. Then go on to the muscles and the glands. You can teach the children about will by presenting the muscles and about thinking by presenting the nerves. Hold to what you know from anthroposophy. You must not allow yourselves to be led astray through the mechanical presentation of modern textbooks. You really don’t need anything at the forefront of science for the fourth grade, so perhaps it is better to take an older description and work with that. As I said, all of the things since the 1880s have become really bad, but you will find starting points everywhere in my lectures.

A teacher: I put together a table of geological formations based on what you said yesterday.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, you should never pedantically draw parallels. When you go on to the primeval forms, to the original mountains, you have the polar period. The Paleozoic corresponds to the Hyperborean, but you may not take the individual animal forms pedantically. Then you have the Mesozoic, which generally corresponds to Lemuria. And then the first and second levels of mammals, or the Cenozoic, that is, the Atlantean age. The Atlantean period was no more than about nine thousand years ago. You can draw parallels from these five periods, the primitive, the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, the Cenozoic, and the Anthropozoic.

A teacher: You once said that normally the branching off of fish and birds is not properly presented, for example, by Haeckel.

Dr. Steiner: The branching off of fish is usually put back into the Devonian period.

A teacher: How did human beings look at that time?

Dr. Steiner: In very primitive times, human beings consisted almost entirely of etheric substance. They lived among other things but had as yet no density. The human being became more dense during the Hyperborean period. Only those animal forms that had precipitated out, lived. Human beings lived also with no less strength. They had, in fact, a tremendous strength. But they had no substance that could remain, so there are no human remains. They lived during all those periods but only gained an external density during the Cenozoic period. If you recall how I describe the Lemurian period, it was almost an etheric landscape. Everything was there, but there are no geological remains. You will want to take into account that the human being existed through all five periods. The human being was everywhere. Here in the first period (Dr. Steiner points to the table), “primitive form,” there is actually nothing else present except the human being. There are only minor remains. There the Eozoic Canadensa is actually more of a formation, something created as a form that is not a real animal. Here in the Hyperborean/Paleozoic period, animals begin to occur, but in forms that later no longer exist. Here in the Lemurian/Mesozoic period, the plant realm arises, and here in the Cenozoic period, Atlantis, the mineral realm arises, actually already in the last period, in these two earlier periods already (in the last two sub-races of the Lemurian period).

A teacher: Did human beings exist with their head, chest, and limb aspects at that time?

Dr. Steiner: The human being was similar to a centaur, an extremely animal-like lower body and a humanized head.

A teacher: I almost have the impression that it was a combination, a symbiosis, of three beings.

Dr. Steiner: So it is, also.

A teacher: How is it possible that there are the remains of plants in coal?

Dr. Steiner: Those are not plant remains. What appears to be the remains of plants actually arose because the wind encountered quite particular obstacles. Suppose, for instance, the wind was blowing and created something like plant forms that were preserved somewhat like the footsteps of animals (Hyperborean period). That is a kind of plant crystallization, a crystallization into plantlike forms.

A teacher: The trees didn’t exist?

Dr. Steiner: No, they existed as tree forms. The entire flora of the coal age was not physically present. Imagine a forest present only in its etheric form and that thus resists the wind in a particular way. Through that, stalactite-like forms emerge. What resulted is not the remains of plants, but forms that arise simply due to the circumstances brought about by elemental activity. Those are not genuine remains. You cannot say it was like it was in Atlantis. There, things remained and to an extent also at the end of the Lemurian period, but as to the carbon period, we cannot say that there are any plant remains. There were only the remains of animals, but primarily animals that we can compare with the form of our head.

A teacher: When did the human being then stand upright? I don’t see a firm point of time.

Dr. Steiner: It is not a good idea to cling to these pictures too closely, since some races stood upright earlier and others later. It is not possible to give a specific time. That is how things are in reality.

A teacher: If the pistil is related to the Moon and the stigma to the Sun, then how do they show the movement of the Sun and Moon?

Dr. Steiner: You must imagine it in the following way (Dr. Steiner draws). The stigma goes upward, that would be the path of the Sun, and the pistil moves around it, and there you have the path of the Moon. Here we have the picture of the Sun and Earth path as I drew it yesterday. The Moon moves around the Earth. That is in the pistil (Dr. Steiner demonstrates with the drawing). It appears that way because the path of the Moon goes around also, of course, but in relationship, not in a straight line. The path of the Sun is the stigma. This circle is a copy of the helix I drew yesterday. It is also a helix.

A teacher: You have told us that the temperaments have to do with predominance of the various bodies. In GA 129, you said that the physical body predominates over the etheric, the etheric over the astral, and the I over the astral. Is there a connection with the temperaments here? In GA 134, you mention a figure that gives the proper relationship of the bodies.

Dr. Steiner: That gives the relationship of the forces.

A teacher: Is there a further relationship to the temperaments?

Dr. Steiner: None other than what I presented in the seminar.

A teacher: You have said that melancholy arises due to a predominance of the physical body. Is that a predominance of the physical body over the etheric?

Dr. Steiner: No, it is a predominance over all the other bodies.

A question arises about parent evenings.

Dr. Steiner: We should have them, but it would be better if they were not too often, since otherwise the parents’ interest would lessen, and they would no longer come. We should arrange things so that the parents actually come. If we have such meetings too often, they would see them as burdensome. Particularly in regard to school activities, we should not do anything we cannot complete. We should undertake only those things that can really happen. I think it would be good to have three parent days per year. I would also suggest that we do this festively, that we print cards and send them to all of the parents.

Perhaps we could arrange it so that the first such meeting is at the beginning of the school year. It would be more a courtesy, so that we can again make contact with the parents. Then we could have a parent evening in the middle of the year and again one at the end. These latter two would be more important, whereas the first, more of a courtesy. We could have the children recite something, do some eurythmy, and so forth.

We can also have parent conferences. They would be good. You will probably find that the parents generally have little interest in them, except for the anthroposophical parents.

A teacher asks Dr. Steiner to say something about the popularization of spiritual science, particularly in connection with the afternoon courses for the workers [at the Goetheanum].

Dr. Steiner: Well, it is important to keep the proper attitude in connection with that popularization. In general, I am not in favor of popularizing by making things trivial. In my opinion, we should first use Theosophy as a basis and attempt to determine from case to case what a particular audience understands easily, or only with difficulty. You will see that the last edition of Theosophy has a number of hints about how you can use its contents for teaching. I would then go on to discussing some sections of How to Know Higher Worlds, but I would never intend to try to make people into clairvoyants. We should only inform them about the clairvoyant path so that they understand how it is possible to arrive at those truths. We should leave them with the feeling that it is possible with normal common sense to understand and know about how to comprehend those things. You can also treat The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity in a popular way. There you have three books that you can use for a popular presentation. Generally, you will need to arrange things according to the audience.

Several children are discussed.

Dr. Steiner: The most important thing is that there is always contact, that the teacher and students together form a true whole. That has happened in nearly all of the classes in a very beautiful and positive way. I am quite happy about what has happened.

I can tell you that even though I may not be here, I will certainly think much about this school. It’s true, isn’t it, that we must all be permeated with the thoughts:

First, of the seriousness of our undertaking. What we are now doing is tremendously important.

Second, we need to comprehend our responsibility toward anthroposophy as well as the social movement.

And, third, something that we as anthroposophists must particularly observe, namely, our responsibility toward the gods.

Among the faculty, we must certainly carry within us the knowledge that we are not here for our own sakes, but to carry out the divine cosmic plan. We should always remember that when we do something, we are actually carrying out the intentions of the gods, that we are, in a certain sense, the means by which that streaming down from above will go out into the world. We dare not for one moment lose the feeling of the seriousness and dignity of our work.

You should feel that dignity, that seriousness, that responsibility. I will approach you with such thoughts. We will meet one another through such thoughts.

We should take that up as our feeling for today and, in that thought, part again for a time, but spiritually meet with one another to receive the strength for this truly great work.