The Rudolf Steiner Archive

You will have seen from the previous lectures, how the souls who out of the depths of their subconscious life feel impelled towards the Anthroposophical Movement, bear this impulse within them through their special relationship to the forces of Michael. We have accordingly considered the working of these Michael-forces throughout the centuries, in order to see what influence the impulses of Michael can have upon the lives of those who stand in any kind of connection with them.

Now the Michael impulses—and this is of great importance for the karma of every single anthroposophist—the Michael impulses are of a kind to enter deeply and intensely into the whole being of man. We know from previous descriptions that the rulership of Michael, if so we may call it, beginning for earthly life at the end of the eighteen-seventies, was preceded by the rulership of Gabriel; and I have described how the rulership of Gabriel is connected with forces that go through the line of physical inheritance—forces related to physical reproduction.

The forces of Michael are the very opposite of this. The rulership of Gabriel is characterised by the fact that his impulses enter strongly into the physical bodily nature of man. Michael, on the other hand, works intensely into the spiritual being of man. You can tell this from the very fact that he is the administrator of the Cosmic Intelligence. But Michael's impulses are strong and powerful. Taking their start from the spiritual, they work through and through the human being. They work into the spiritual, thence into the soul-nature, and thence again into the bodily nature of man. Now in the karmic connections of life, these super-earthly forces are constantly at work. Beings of the higher Hierarchies are working with man and upon him. It is thus that the karma of a man takes shape. And so it is with the Michael-forces. Working as they do upon the whole human being, they work also very strongly into his karma. Gabriel-forces work only very little—I do not say not at all—but very little into the essential karma of a human being. Michael-forces on the other hand work very strongly into his karma.

If, therefore, certain human beings—and this in the last resort applies to you all, my dear friends—if certain human beings are especially connected with the stream of Michael, their individual karmas can only be understood when thought of in connection with the stream of Michael.

Now Michael is a Spirit who stands in a special relationship to the Sun and to all Sun-impulses. This being the case, we shall realise what a profound significance his impulses must have for those who are especially exposed to them. In effect, his forces will work right into the physical organisation. For Michael-men therefore (if we may use this term), we must connect the physical phenomena of health and illness with karma in an even higher degree than for Gabriel- or Raphael-men, or the like. Things in the universe are very complicated; and although Raphael is the Spirit most intimately connected with the art of Healing, nevertheless it is Michael who brings the karma of men nearest of all to health and to disease.

There is another fact in this connection. The Michael-forces not only work in a cosmopolitan sense, but they also work in such a way as to tear a man out of the narrower earthly connections of his life and carry him up on to a spiritual height, where he feels the earthly connections less strongly than others do. At any rate his karma predestines him for this. This again has a profound influence upon the karma of every single man who belongs to the stream of Michael.

You see, in the last third of the 19th century it did really happen that human beings—I will not say of nervous temperament—but human beings intense in soul and spirit, were able to feel the penetration of the Michael-forces into the world. In those who were essentially men of Michael, this penetration of the Michael-forces into the world came to expression in this way: they felt many things, which other men would have passed by more or less indifferently, entering deeply and incisively into their lives.

Above all their karma was such that they had a strong feeling—though they did not understand it clearly—a strong feeling of the battle I described the day before yesterday, the battle between Michael and Ahriman. In the present age, Ahriman can only have a strong influence upon men when their consciousness is diverted in one way or another. The most radical phenomenon is that of a fainting fit, or a diminution of consciousness lasting for a considerable time. In times like this, when a man is overcome by faintness or diminution of consciousness, the Ahriman forces can most effectively approach him. At such times they work their way into him, he is exposed to them. But it was above all in the last third of the 19th century—and especially in the time when the end of the Kali Yuga was approaching, in the very last years of the 19th century,—it was a shattering experience to see behind the scenes of this external, physical world which is spread out before man's senses.

For directly adjoining this outer world there is a world revealing very, very much of those historic processes in which the higher super-sensible Beings enter and play a part.

In the last third of the 19th century, and especially in the last decade, only a thin veil concealed that which we recognise as the dominion of Michael, the great battle of Michael and all the facts connected with him. Since then, Michael himself has been taking part in the battle even in the outer world, and we need a far stronger power to behold what is present supersensibly than was needed before the end of the Kali Yuga, when, as I said, the next adjoining world, where Michael was battling as yet behind the scenes, was severed from our own by a thin veil only.

But Michael insists, as I have told you, that his dominion shall prevail and penetrate at any cost. Michael is a Spirit filled with strength, and he can only make use of thoroughly brave men, men full of inner courage.

Now in the whole nexus that I have described, in the super-sensible School of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and in the great super-sensible Cult of the beginning of the 19th century, among all the spirits who partake in these things, great numbers of Luciferic figures are all the time playing their part. The Luciferic figures are necessary, necessary in the whole connection of these things. Michael needs the Luciferic spirits, he needs their co-operation to overcome the polar antithesis of Ahriman. Thus the men of Michael are placed into the very midst of the battle—or, if we may not call it so—the surging waves of interplay, of Luciferic impulses and Ahrimanic.

Just at the end of the 19th century these things showed themselves with great clarity and definition. In those years it was by no means rarely that one caught a glimpse, through the veil, as I have called it. Then one saw how intensely Michael was having to battle against Ahriman, and how easy it was for the consciousness of men to be diverted by all manner of Luciferic influences.

You may say: Disturbances of consciousness, attacks of faintness and the like, are nothing out of the ordinary. Outwardly considered they are not, of course; but they can become most significant through that which happens as a consequence,—through that which ensues when the diversion or diminution of consciousness takes place. I will give you an example.

It was once a question of someone being made more intimately acquainted with a certain historic personality. He was to study an historic personality who had lived in the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. I want you to understand me precisely. All the preparations had been made for this man (it was at the end of the eighteen-nineties) to become historically acquainted with a personality who had lived at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. Indeed, with all the conditions that had gone before, it seemed scarcely possible for anything else to happen, than that he would become familiar with that historic personality in the perfectly ordinary, and if I may call it so, pedantic way of scholarship. But look what happened. Through the refined workings of karma he became incapable of using his consciousness just at the very time when he was to have had this experience. He fell into a kind of sleep from which he could not awaken, and was thus prevented.

Of course in ordinary life one pays little heed to such a thing. Yet it is through happenings like these that we look directly from the earthly into the spiritual world. And if you want an explanation of this fact, then we must say: This man, who was to have become historically acquainted with a certain personality of the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, would undoubtedly have received a very strong impression if he had had this experience. He did not have it; he missed it, he was prevented. But in that very time, the impression which he would have received was transformed. He received it in another form; it was transformed into a peculiar impressionability for the Michael element. He actually received, though unconsciously, a real power of understanding for the Michael element.

I give this somewhat strange example in order to show you by what paths the Michael element was approaching human beings at that time. We could give many examples of this kind. Indeed, human beings today would be quite different if such things had not occurred to many individuals. Such things may happen in hundreds of different ways. In the case I have just related, my dear friends, the man actually fell into a kind of sleep. In other cases it happened thus:—Some event that would have led a man away from Michael was prevented by a friend or someone else coming and taking him away to a different place, and his consciousness was veiled around in a most natural and matter-of-fact way. He was prevented from partaking in what was karmically set before him to begin with. It was just in those years that the strongest interferences took place with the ordinary smooth course of karma.

And as a rule in such cases it became evident how deeply these Michael influences work. In many instances one saw that such human beings had been affected not only in soul but even down into the body when their karma had received a jerk of this kind, because Michael needed to enter through the portals of a human consciousness into the earthly world of sense.

It is interesting in the highest degree to see how in the eighteen-nineties men were led into events which were none other than the paths of Michael from the spiritual into the physical world. For you must remember, the entry of Michael into the physical world was taking place in the last third of the 19th century. But it had been prepared for, in the spiritual world, for a long time before—already since the beginning of the eighteen-forties. If I may put it so, Michael and his hosts were drawing ever nearer and nearer, and it became more and more evident that those human beings would now descend, who in their earthly destiny were connected with the task of Michael,—the task of receiving the Intelligence here upon earth again after it had fallen away from the hosts of Michael in the super-sensible world.

Into the midst of all these things, as you will recognise from my presentation of the Mysteries, the Anthroposophical Movement is placed. For the Anthroposophical Movement is connected, as you will see from former lectures, with this whole stream of Michael.

Now I want you to consider in this light the karmic conditions of individual human beings who are led by an inner urge to approach the Anthroposophical Movement. They come, to begin with, from the world. They stand in many connections in the world. There have indeed been many communities in the world's history in which human beings have become united. But there was never a cohesive power of that peculiar quality which the Michael forces engender. Hence a peculiar situation is brought about for those who find their way, from other connections in the world, into the Anthroposophical Society. One can find one's way into other societies too, and could always do so, but one's destiny did not need to be very deeply affected. Into the Anthroposophical Society one cannot come—not at least in a thoroughly sincere way that really moves the soul—without being deeply and fundamentally influenced in one's destiny. This becomes especially clear when we consider these things along a right line of approach.

Take a human being who is just coming into the Anthroposophical Society, and who until then had certain connections with non-anthroposophists, which he may perhaps still continue to have. The difference between the one who stands within and the one who stands or remains outside, is of far greater significance than in the case of any other communities. There are two kinds of relationships.

Through the fulfilment of all the things I have described, we are living, once and for all, in a time of great, immense decisions. Thus the standing side-by-side today of anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists is fraught with great decisions. Either it is a question of the dissolving of old karma for the one who is in the Anthroposophical Society, or it is a question of the weaving of new karma for the one who is outside it. And these are great differences.

Let us assume an anthroposophist stands very near in life to a non-anthroposophist. It may be to begin with that the anthroposophist has old karmic connections to settle with the non-anthroposophist. On the other hand it may be that the non-anthroposophist has to enter into karmic connections with the anthroposophist, for the future. At any rate these are the only two cases I have hitherto been able to observe, though of course they are of many different kinds. There are no intermediates, there are no others beside these two. From this you will see that this is really a time of great decisions, for, if we may describe it so, either non-anthroposophists are being influenced in such a way that they come to the Michael community, or else the influences work in such a way that those who do not belong to the Michael community will be avoided by it. This indeed is the time of great decisions—the great crisis to which the sacred books of all time have referred—for in reality the present age is meant. Such indeed is the peculiar nature of the Michael impulses: they are fraught with great decisions, and they become decisive especially in this our age.

Human beings who in the present incarnation receive the Michael impulses through Anthroposophy, are thereby preparing their whole being in such a way that these Michael impulses enter even into the forces that are otherwise determined merely by the connections of race and nation.

Think how much this means:—Here is a man who stands within some national group. We can see at once, he is a Russian, he is a Frenchman, he is an Englishman, he is a German. We recognise it by his appearance, and we locate him by thinking, as we see him, where can this man belong? We think it a matter of some importance if we can recognise: he is a Turk, he is a Russian, or the like. Now with those who today receive Anthroposophy with inner force of soul, with deep impulse and strength of heart—who receive it, therefore, as the deepest force of their life—such distinctions will have no more meaning when next they return to earth. People will say: Where does he come from? He is not of any nation, he is not of any race, he is as though he had grown away from all races and nations.

When the last Michael dominion took place, in the age of Alexander, the point was to spread Grecian culture in a cosmopolitan way, carrying it out in all directions. The campaigns of Alexander were an immense achievement in the equalising of men on earth, I mean in the spreading among them of a common element. But the thing was not yet able to strike so deep, for at that time Michael still administered the Cosmic Intelligence. Now Intelligence is on the earth, now it strikes far deeper, it strikes down even into the earthly element of man. For the first time, the Spiritual is preparing to become a race-creating force. The time will come when one will no longer be able to say: the man looks as if he belonged to this or that country,—he is a Turk, or an Arabian, an Englishman, a Russian or a German,—but one will have to say what will amount to this: ‘In a former life on earth this man felt impelled to turn towards the Spirit in the sense of Michael.’ Thus, that which is influenced by Michael will appear as an immediate, physically creative, physically formative power.

Now this is a thing that takes root deeply, very deeply in the karma of the individual. Hence the strange destiny of those who are sincere anthroposophists, the strange destiny that they are not able to come to terms with the world: they cannot quite master it, and yet at the same time they have to approach the world and enter into it with full earnestness.

I have said that those who stand with full intensity within the Anthroposophical Movement will return at the end of the century, and others will then unite with them, for by this means the salvation of the earth and earthly civilisation from destruction must eventually be settled. This is the mission of the Anthroposophical Movement, which weighs on the one hand so heavily upon one's heart, while on the other hand it moves the heart, uplifts it with enthusiasm. This mission we must understand and see.

It is most necessary for the anthroposophist to know that in this situation as an anthroposophist his karma will be harder to experience than it is for other men. From the very outset those who come into the Anthroposophical Society are predestined to a harder, more difficult experience of karma than other men. And if we try to pass this harder experience by—if we want to experience our karma in a comfortable way—it will surely take vengeance on us in one direction or another. We must be anthroposophists in our experience of karma too. To be true anthroposophists we must be able to observe our own experience of karma with constant wide-awake attention. If we do not, then our comfortable, easy-going experiencing of our karma—or rather our desire to experience it so—will find expression and take vengeance in physical illnesses, physical accidents and the like.

These finer, more intimate connections of life must indeed be seen and observed, for then we shall see many another thing besides. It is the best preparation for true and real spiritual sight, to observe these more intimate connections of life attentively. It is a wrong principle to want to evolve all manner of nebulous, abnormal, visionary states. On the other hand it is immensely right to occupy oneself with all that goes on more finely and intimately in the connections of destiny which we can recognise.

Do we not see how this becomes our karma, my dear friends: we live, or have lived, alongside of human beings who are absolutely prevented, inwardly prevented, from coming near to things anthroposophical. They are prevented, in spite of all that we—I will not say have brought to them of Anthroposophy—but that we might have brought to them if they would only take it. We see this happen, surely. Now this also is among the great decisions of present-day life. For the things that take place in this way will have great karmic significance, both for the one who comes into the Anthroposophical Movement and for the one who remains outside it. It will have extraordinary significance.

Let us imagine that these human beings meet one another again in a future incarnation. We know that what happens to us in future incarnations is already being prepared for in this present. The meeting-again with human beings to whom we are related in the way I have just described, will be such that the usual strangeness between man and man will be essentially enhanced. For Michael works right down into the physical sympathies and antipathies. Now all this is taking place already now in a preparatory way, for every single anthroposophist. It is immensely important for an anthroposophist to study just those karmic relationships which unfold between him and non-anthroposophists. For in this connection things are taking place which reach up into the next kingdom of the Hierarchies. For you must see, there is a counterpart to what I have just described, when I said that the Michael impulses appear as a race-creating force. There is a counterpart to it.

Let us take the following karmic instance. Someone is taken hold of in the very highest degree by the impulses of Anthroposophy. He is taken hold of in heart and mind, in soul and spirit. In such a case something will necessarily happen, which, expressed in words, sounds very strange indeed; and yet it is necessary. In such a case the Angel of the man must learn something. This is a thing of untold significance. The destiny of anthroposophists,—the destiny that works itself out between anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists,—casts its waves even into the worlds of the Angeloi. It leads to a parting of the Spirits, even in the world of the Angeloi. The Angel who accompanies the anthroposophist to his next incarnations learns to find his way still more deeply into the spiritual kingdoms than he could do before, while the Angel who belongs to the other man—to the one who cannot enter,—descends. It is in the destiny of the Angeloi that we first perceive how this great separation is taking place. To this, my dear friends, I would now direct your hearts. It is happening now, that the comparatively single and uniform kingdom of the Angeloi is being turned into a twofold kingdom of Angeloi, a kingdom of Angeloi with an upward tendency into the higher worlds, and with a downward tendency into lower worlds.

While the Michael community is being formed here upon earth, we can behold above it the ascending and the descending Angeloi. Looking more deeply into the world today, one can perpetually observe these streams, which are such as to stir the heart to its foundations.

Now I have told you that those who come into the anthroposophical life fall into two main groups. There are the ones who still carry into it a knowledge from the old heathen times, and have had little experience of that Christian development which took its course during the Kali Yuga. They have gone on evolving out of the old Pagan sources, and they now grow into the Christianity which is to be a cosmic Christianity once more. They are souls with a Pagan predestination, who in reality are only now growing into Christianity. The others are souls who are a little weary of Paganism, though they do not confess this to themselves. From the outset they grow into the Anthroposophical Movement on account of its Christian character, but they do not enter so deeply into the anthroposophical Cosmology, the anthroposophical Anthropology, and so forth. They enter, rather, into the more abstractly religious side. These two groups are clearly to be distinguished.

Now for the group of a more Pagan predestination it is particularly necessary to take hold of the sustaining forces of Anthroposophy with full intensity of inner life. For this group, it is most necessary to avoid all side-tracks and other considerations, and steer straight forward in the direction of the anthroposophical sustaining forces.

We can only grasp these things when we receive them in our hearts; but they must enter into the hearts of anthroposophists. For only then will a real living-together within the Anthroposophical Society be possible, on a true anthroposophical foundation. When the more Pagan kind of souls, if I may call them so, bring forth their forces, which are in many cases already there in this incarnation deep within their souls, though they will often only come forth with difficulty,—when as I say they do bring forth the forces that are there in them, then there will spread over the whole Anthroposophical Society an atmosphere of steady and courageous progress in the good sense of Michael.

If this is to be so, we must have the courage to look straight into the intense conflict that is taking place, as between the things that Michael must undertake to achieve his great task, and the things that Ahriman is perpetually placing in his way.

Ahriman has already taken hold of certain tendencies in civilisation and placed them in his service. Consider this one fact:—Only since the 15th century has it become most thoroughly possible for man to take hold of the Intelligence. For since that time the Spiritual Soul is present in man, and the Spiritual Soul is man's very own; therefore it can make the Intelligence its very own. Moreover it is only since that time that those things have come to men, which have made them so exceedingly keen—if I may say so—on their own personal Intelligence.

Make this little calculation; it embraces huge dimensions, though the greatness of it be only in a spatial sense. Try to make this little calculation, my dear friends. Add up in thought all that is being thought today within a single day by all the writers in newspapers over the whole earth, so that newspapers may be produced. Try to imagine the tremendous sum-total of Intelligence that is being chewed out from their pens, put on to paper, printed, and so on. See what an enormous amount of personal Intelligence is flooding through the world. And now go back a few centuries, go back into the 13th century, and see whether such a thing is there at all. It is simply not there, there can be no question of its being there.

But I will give you another task. Imagine in your thought (today is Sunday, it is a good opportunity) just imagine how many meetings are being held on political questions from West to East,—we need not go beyond Europe for the moment. Here again, how much personal Intelligence is flooding through the atmosphere of the earth! And now imagine yourself in the 13th century. They managed without the newspapers and without the meetings. None of these things existed. Compare the 13th century with the present time. We may put it thus:—When you transplant yourself into the 13th century you can look out over the world, your vision is clear and unobstructed. There are no editorial offices, no political meetings, none of these. You look through, clear and free. But today, as you look over the world, everywhere the waves of personal Intelligence are surging forth. They are there everywhere. You simply cannot penetrate. It is a spiritual air that you could cut with a knife, as in some meeting-rooms where everyone is smoking his pipe or his cigar like a chimney-pot, and you say ‘it is an air that you could cut with a knife.’ So is the spiritual atmosphere today.

Such differences must be considered, if we would judge at all truly of the succession of historic epochs. When you read historians like Ranke you see nothing of these things, yet these are the real facts of history.

And all this that has come about since the 13th century, what is it? It is spiritual nourishment for the Ahrimanic Powers. Here in this region, they are first able to make their attacks. Hence the possibilities for Ahriman to take a hand in civilisation have become ever greater and greater. Needless to say, Spirits like Ahriman are not there to incarnate in physical bodies on the earth. Nevertheless, they can work on the earth, not indeed by incarnating but by incorporating themselves for certain spaces of time; when in one man or another there happens what I mentioned before: a diminution or diversion of consciousness. At such moments the human being provides a vehicle, and Ahriman is able—not indeed to incarnate,—but to incorporate himself and to work out of that human being, with that human being's faculties.

It will be my further task to tell you of this kind of working of the Ahrimanic Powers. I shall have to show, for example, how Ahriman has appeared in the course of modern time even as an author. This will show you what things must be observed today by those who would fain observe realities.

You will have seen from the previous lectures, how the souls who out of the depths of their subconscious life feel impelled towards the Anthroposophical Movement, bear this impulse within them through their special relationship to the forces of Michael. We have accordingly considered the working of these Michael-forces throughout the centuries, in order to see what influence the impulses of Michael can have upon the lives of those who stand in any kind of connection with them.

Now the Michael impulses—and this is of great importance for the karma of every single anthroposophist—the Michael impulses are of a kind to enter deeply and intensely into the whole being of man. We know from previous descriptions that the rulership of Michael, if so we may call it, beginning for earthly life at the end of the eighteen-seventies, was preceded by the rulership of Gabriel; and I have described how the rulership of Gabriel is connected with forces that go through the line of physical inheritance—forces related to physical reproduction.

The forces of Michael are the very opposite of this. The rulership of Gabriel is characterised by the fact that his impulses enter strongly into the physical bodily nature of man. Michael, on the other hand, works intensely into the spiritual being of man. You can tell this from the very fact that he is the administrator of the Cosmic Intelligence. But Michael's impulses are strong and powerful. Taking their start from the spiritual, they work through and through the human being. They work into the spiritual, thence into the soul-nature, and thence again into the bodily nature of man. Now in the karmic connections of life, these super-earthly forces are constantly at work. Beings of the higher Hierarchies are working with man and upon him. It is thus that the karma of a man takes shape. And so it is with the Michael-forces. Working as they do upon the whole human being, they work also very strongly into his karma. Gabriel-forces work only very little—I do not say not at all—but very little into the essential karma of a human being. Michael-forces on the other hand work very strongly into his karma.

If, therefore, certain human beings—and this in the last resort applies to you all, my dear friends—if certain human beings are especially connected with the stream of Michael, their individual karmas can only be understood when thought of in connection with the stream of Michael.

Now Michael is a Spirit who stands in a special relationship to the Sun and to all Sun-impulses. This being the case, we shall realise what a profound significance his impulses must have for those who are especially exposed to them. In effect, his forces will work right into the physical organisation. For Michael-men therefore (if we may use this term), we must connect the physical phenomena of health and illness with karma in an even higher degree than for Gabriel- or Raphael-men, or the like. Things in the universe are very complicated; and although Raphael is the Spirit most intimately connected with the art of Healing, nevertheless it is Michael who brings the karma of men nearest of all to health and to disease.

There is another fact in this connection. The Michael-forces not only work in a cosmopolitan sense, but they also work in such a way as to tear a man out of the narrower earthly connections of his life and carry him up on to a spiritual height, where he feels the earthly connections less strongly than others do. At any rate his karma predestines him for this. This again has a profound influence upon the karma of every single man who belongs to the stream of Michael.

You see, in the last third of the 19th century it did really happen that human beings—I will not say of nervous temperament—but human beings intense in soul and spirit, were able to feel the penetration of the Michael-forces into the world. In those who were essentially men of Michael, this penetration of the Michael-forces into the world came to expression in this way: they felt many things, which other men would have passed by more or less indifferently, entering deeply and incisively into their lives.

Above all their karma was such that they had a strong feeling—though they did not understand it clearly—a strong feeling of the battle I described the day before yesterday, the battle between Michael and Ahriman. In the present age, Ahriman can only have a strong influence upon men when their consciousness is diverted in one way or another. The most radical phenomenon is that of a fainting fit, or a diminution of consciousness lasting for a considerable time. In times like this, when a man is overcome by faintness or diminution of consciousness, the Ahriman forces can most effectively approach him. At such times they work their way into him, he is exposed to them. But it was above all in the last third of the 19th century—and especially in the time when the end of the Kali Yuga was approaching, in the very last years of the 19th century,—it was a shattering experience to see behind the scenes of this external, physical world which is spread out before man's senses.

For directly adjoining this outer world there is a world revealing very, very much of those historic processes in which the higher super-sensible Beings enter and play a part.

In the last third of the 19th century, and especially in the last decade, only a thin veil concealed that which we recognise as the dominion of Michael, the great battle of Michael and all the facts connected with him. Since then, Michael himself has been taking part in the battle even in the outer world, and we need a far stronger power to behold what is present supersensibly than was needed before the end of the Kali Yuga, when, as I said, the next adjoining world, where Michael was battling as yet behind the scenes, was severed from our own by a thin veil only.

But Michael insists, as I have told you, that his dominion shall prevail and penetrate at any cost. Michael is a Spirit filled with strength, and he can only make use of thoroughly brave men, men full of inner courage.

Now in the whole nexus that I have described, in the super-sensible School of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and in the great super-sensible Cult of the beginning of the 19th century, among all the spirits who partake in these things, great numbers of Luciferic figures are all the time playing their part. The Luciferic figures are necessary, necessary in the whole connection of these things. Michael needs the Luciferic spirits, he needs their co-operation to overcome the polar antithesis of Ahriman. Thus the men of Michael are placed into the very midst of the battle—or, if we may not call it so—the surging waves of interplay, of Luciferic impulses and Ahrimanic.

Just at the end of the 19th century these things showed themselves with great clarity and definition. In those years it was by no means rarely that one caught a glimpse, through the veil, as I have called it. Then one saw how intensely Michael was having to battle against Ahriman, and how easy it was for the consciousness of men to be diverted by all manner of Luciferic influences.

You may say: Disturbances of consciousness, attacks of faintness and the like, are nothing out of the ordinary. Outwardly considered they are not, of course; but they can become most significant through that which happens as a consequence,—through that which ensues when the diversion or diminution of consciousness takes place. I will give you an example.

It was once a question of someone being made more intimately acquainted with a certain historic personality. He was to study an historic personality who had lived in the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. I want you to understand me precisely. All the preparations had been made for this man (it was at the end of the eighteen-nineties) to become historically acquainted with a personality who had lived at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. Indeed, with all the conditions that had gone before, it seemed scarcely possible for anything else to happen, than that he would become familiar with that historic personality in the perfectly ordinary, and if I may call it so, pedantic way of scholarship. But look what happened. Through the refined workings of karma he became incapable of using his consciousness just at the very time when he was to have had this experience. He fell into a kind of sleep from which he could not awaken, and was thus prevented.

Of course in ordinary life one pays little heed to such a thing. Yet it is through happenings like these that we look directly from the earthly into the spiritual world. And if you want an explanation of this fact, then we must say: This man, who was to have become historically acquainted with a certain personality of the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, would undoubtedly have received a very strong impression if he had had this experience. He did not have it; he missed it, he was prevented. But in that very time, the impression which he would have received was transformed. He received it in another form; it was transformed into a peculiar impressionability for the Michael element. He actually received, though unconsciously, a real power of understanding for the Michael element.

I give this somewhat strange example in order to show you by what paths the Michael element was approaching human beings at that time. We could give many examples of this kind. Indeed, human beings to-day would be quite different if such things had not occurred to many individuals. Such things may happen in hundreds of different ways. In the case I have just related, my dear friends, the man actually fell into a kind of sleep. In other cases it happened thus:—Some event that would have led a man away from Michael was prevented by a friend or someone else coming and taking him away to a different place, and his consciousness was veiled around in a most natural and matter-of-fact way. He was prevented from partaking in what was karmically set before him to begin with. It was just in those years that the strongest interferences took place with the ordinary smooth course of karma.

And as a rule in such cases it became evident how deeply these Michael influences work. In many instances one saw that such human beings had been affected not only in soul but even down into the body when their karma had received a jerk of this kind, because Michael needed to enter through the portals of a human consciousness into the earthly world of sense.

It is interesting in the highest degree to see how in the eighteen-nineties men were led into events which were none other than the paths of Michael from the spiritual into the physical world. For you must remember, the entry of Michael into the physical world was taking place in the last third of the 19th century. But it had been prepared for, in the spiritual world, for a long time before—already since the beginning of the eighteen-forties. If I may put it so, Michael and his hosts were drawing ever nearer and nearer, and it became more and more evident that those human beings would now descend, who in their earthly destiny were connected with the task of Michael,—the task of receiving the Intelligence here upon earth again after it had fallen away from the hosts of Michael in the super-sensible world.

Into the midst of all these things, as you will recognise from my presentation of the Mysteries, the Anthroposophical Movement is placed. For the Anthroposophical Movement is connected, as you will see from former lectures, with this whole stream of Michael.

Now I want you to consider in this light the karmic conditions of individual human beings who are led by an inner urge to approach the Anthroposophical Movement. They come, to begin with, from the world. They stand in many connections in the world. There have indeed been many communities in the world's history in which human beings have become united. But there was never a cohesive power of that peculiar quality which the Michael forces engender. Hence a peculiar situation is brought about for those who find their way, from other connections in the world, into the Anthroposophical Society. One can find one's way into other societies too, and could always do so, but one's destiny did not need to be very deeply affected. Into the Anthroposophical Society one cannot come—not at least in a thoroughly sincere way that really moves the soul—without being deeply and fundamentally influenced in one's destiny. This becomes especially clear when we consider these things along a right line of approach.

Take a human being who is just coming into the Anthroposophical Society, and who until then had certain connections with non-anthroposophists, which he may perhaps still continue to have. The difference between the one who stands within and the one who stands or remains outside, is of far greater significance than in the case of any other communities. There are two kinds of relationships.

Through the fulfilment of all the things I have described, we are living, once and for all, in a time of great, immense decisions. Thus the standing side-by-side to-day of anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists is fraught with great decisions. Either it is a question of the dissolving of old karma for the one who is in the Anthroposophical Society, or it is a question of the weaving of new karma for the one who is outside it. And these are great differences.

Let us assume an anthroposophist stands very near in life to a non-anthroposophist. It may be to begin with that the anthroposophist has old karmic connections to settle with the non-anthroposophist. On the other hand it may be that the non-anthroposophist has to enter into karmic connections with the anthroposophist, for the future. At any rate these are the only two cases I have hitherto been able to observe, though of course they are of many different kinds. There are no intermediates, there are no others beside these two. From this you will see that this is really a time of great decisions, for, if we may describe it so, either non-anthroposophists are being influenced in such a way that they come to the Michael community, or else the influences work in such a way that those who do not belong to the Michael community will be avoided by it. This indeed is the time of great decisions—the great crisis to which the sacred books of all time have referred—for in reality the present age is meant. Such indeed is the peculiar nature of the Michael impulses: they are fraught with great decisions, and they become decisive especially in this our age.

Human beings who in the present incarnation receive the Michael impulses through Anthroposophy, are thereby preparing their whole being in such a way that these Michael impulses enter even into the forces that are otherwise determined merely by the connections of race and nation.

Think how much this means:—Here is a man who stands within some national group. We can see at once, he is a Russian, he is a Frenchman, he is an Englishman, he is a German. We recognise it by his appearance, and we locate him by thinking, as we see him, where can this man belong? We think it a matter of some importance if we can recognise: he is a Turk, he is a Russian, or the like. Now with those who to-day receive Anthroposophy with inner force of soul, with deep impulse and strength of heart—who receive it, therefore, as the deepest force of their life—such distinctions will have no more meaning when next they return to earth. People will say: Where does he come from? He is not of any nation, he is not of any race, he is as though he had grown away from all races and nations.

When the last Michael dominion took place, in the age of Alexander, the point was to spread Grecian culture in a cosmopolitan way, carrying it out in all directions. The campaigns of Alexander were an immense achievement in the equalising of men on earth, I mean in the spreading among them of a common element. But the thing was not yet able to strike so deep, for at that time Michael still administered the Cosmic Intelligence. Now Intelligence is on the earth, now it strikes far deeper, it strikes down even into the earthly element of man. For the first time, the Spiritual is preparing to become a race-creating force. The time will come when one will no longer be able to say: the man looks as if he belonged to this or that country,—he is a Turk, or an Arabian, an Englishman, a Russian or a German,—but one will have to say what will amount to this: ‘In a former life on earth this man felt impelled to turn towards the Spirit in the sense of Michael.’ Thus, that which is influenced by Michael will appear as an immediate, physically creative, physically formative power.

Now this is a thing that takes root deeply, very deeply in the karma of the individual. Hence the strange destiny of those who are sincere anthroposophists, the strange destiny that they are not able to come to terms with the world; they cannot quite master it, and yet at the same time they have to approach the world and enter into it with full earnestness.

I have said that those who stand with full intensity within the Anthroposophical Movement will return at the end of the century, and others will then unite with them, for by this means the salvation of the earth and earthly civilisation from destruction must eventually be settled. This is the mission of the Anthroposophical Movement, which weighs on the one hand so heavily upon one's heart, while on the other hand it moves the heart, uplifts it with enthusiasm. This mission we must understand and see.

It is most necessary for the anthroposophist to know that in this situation as an anthroposophist his karma will be harder to experience than it is for other men. From the very outset those who come into the Anthroposophical Society are predestined to a harder, more difficult experience of karma than other men. And if we try to pass this harder experience by—if we want to experience our karma in a comfortable way—it will surely take vengeance on us in one direction or another. We must be anthroposophists in our experience of karma too. To be true anthroposophists we must be able to observe our own experience of karma with constant wide-awake attention. If we do not, then our comfortable, easy-going experiencing of our karma—or rather our desire to experience it so—will find expression and take vengeance in physical illnesses, physical accidents and the like.

These finer, more intimate connections of life must indeed be seen and observed, for then we shall see many another thing besides. It is the best preparation for true and real spiritual sight, to observe these more intimate connections of life attentively. It is a wrong principle to want to evolve all manner of nebulous, abnormal, visionary states. On the other hand it is immensely right to occupy oneself with all that goes on more finely and intimately in the connections of destiny which we can recognise.

Do we not see how this becomes our karma, my dear friends: we live, or have lived, alongside of human beings who are absolutely prevented, inwardly prevented, from coming near to things anthroposophical. They are prevented, in spite of all that we—I will not say have brought to them of Anthroposophy—but that we might have brought to them if they would only take it. We see this happen, surely. Now this also is among the great decisions of present-day life. For the things that take place in this way will have great karmic significance, both for the one who comes into the Anthroposophical Movement and for the one who remains outside it. It will have extraordinary significance.

Let us imagine that these human beings meet one another again in a future incarnation. We know that what happens to us in future incarnations is already being prepared for in this present. The meeting-again with human beings to whom we are related in the way I have just described, will be such that the usual strangeness between man and man will be essentially enhanced. For Michael works right down into the physical sympathies and antipathies. Now all this is taking place already now in a preparatory way, for every single anthroposophist. It is immensely important for an anthroposophist to study just those karmic relationships which unfold between him and non-anthroposophists. For in this connection things are taking place which reach up into the next kingdom of the Hierarchies. For you must see, there is a counterpart to what I have just described, when I said that the Michael impulses appear as a race-creating force. There is a counterpart to it

Let us take the following karmic instance. Someone is taken hold of in the very highest degree by the impulses of Anthroposophy. He is taken hold of in heart and mind, in soul and spirit. In such a case something will necessarily happen, which, expressed in words, sounds very strange indeed; and yet it is necessary. In such a case the Angel of the man must learn something. This is a thing of untold significance. The destiny of anthroposophists,—the destiny that works itself out between anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists,—casts its waves even into the worlds of the Angeloi. It leads to a parting of the Spirits, even in the world of the Angeloi. The Angel who accompanies the anthroposophist to his next incarnations learns to find his way still more deeply into the spiritual kingdoms than he could do before, while the Angel who belongs to the other man—to the one who cannot enter,—descends. It is in the destiny of the Angeloi that we first perceive how this great separation is taking place. To this, my dear friends, I would now direct your hearts. It is happening now, that the comparatively single and uniform kingdom of the Angeloi is being turned into a twofold kingdom of Angeloi, a kingdom of Angeloi with an upward tendency into the higher worlds, and with a downward tendency into lower worlds.

While the Michael community is being formed here upon earth, we can behold above it the ascending and the descending Angeloi. Looking more deeply into the world to-day, one can perpetually observe these streams, which are such as to stir the heart to its foundations.

Now I have told you that those who come into the anthroposophical life fall into two main groups. There are the ones who still carry into it a knowledge from the old heathen times, and have had little experience of that Christian development which took its course during the Kali Yuga. They have gone on evolving out of the old Pagan sources, and they now grow into the Christianity which is to be a cosmic Christianity once more. They are souls with a Pagan predestination, who in reality are only now growing into Christianity. The others are souls who are a little weary of Paganism, though they do not confess this to themselves. From the outset they grow into the Anthroposophical Movement on account of its Christian character, but they do not enter so deeply into the anthroposophical Cosmology, the anthroposophical Anthropology, and so forth. They enter, rather, into the more abstractly religious side. These two groups are clearly to be distinguished.

Now for the group of a more Pagan predestination it is particularly necessary to take hold of the sustaining forces of Anthroposophy with full intensity of inner life. For this group, it is most necessary to avoid all side-tracks and other considerations, and steer straight forward in the direction of the anthroposophical sustaining forces.

We can only grasp these things when we receive them in our hearts; but they must enter into the hearts of anthroposophists. For only then will a real living-together within the Anthroposophical Society be possible, on a true anthroposophical foundation. When the more Pagan kind of souls, if I may call them so, bring forth their forces, which are in many cases already there in this incarnation deep within their souls, though they will often only come forth with difficulty,—when as I say they do bring forth the forces that are there in them, then there will spread over the whole Anthroposophical Society an atmosphere of steady and courageous progress in the good sense of Michael.

If this is to be so, we must have the courage to look straight into the intense conflict that is taking place, as between the things that Michael must undertake to achieve his great task, and the things that Ahriman is perpetually placing in his way.

Ahriman has already taken hold of certain tendencies in civilisation and placed them in his service. Consider this one fact:—Only since the 15th century has it become most thoroughly possible for man to take hold of the Intelligence. For since that time the Spiritual Soul is present in man, and the Spiritual Soul is man's very own; therefore it can make the Intelligence its very own. Moreover it is only since that time that those things have come to men, which have made them so exceedingly keen—if I may say so—on their own personal Intelligence.

Make this little calculation; it embraces huge dimensions, though the greatness of it be only in a spatial sense. Try to make this little calculation, my dear friends. Add up in thought all that is being thought to-day within a single day by all the writers in newspapers over the whole earth, so that newspapers may be produced. Try to imagine the tremendous sum-total of Intelligence that is being chewed out from their pens, put on to paper, printed, and so on. See what an enormous amount of personal Intelligence is flooding through the world. And now go back a few centuries, go back into the 13th century, and see whether such a thing is there at all. It is simply not there, there can be no question of its being there.

But I will give you another task. Imagine in your thought (to-day is Sunday, it is a good opportunity) just imagine how many meetings are being held on political questions from West to East,—we need not go beyond Europe for the moment. Here again, how much personal Intelligence is flooding through the atmosphere of the earth! And now imagine yourself in the 13th century. They managed without the newspapers and without the meetings. None of these things existed. Compare the 13th century with the present time. We may put it thus:—When you transplant yourself into the 13th century you can look out over the world, your vision is clear and unobstructed. There are no editorial offices, no political meetings, none of these. You look through, clear and free. But to-day, as you look over the world, everywhere the waves of personal Intelligence are surging forth. They are there everywhere. You simply cannot penetrate. It is a spiritual air that you could cut with a knife, as in some meeting-rooms where everyone is smoking his pipe or his cigar like a chimney-pot, and you say ‘it is an air that you could cut with a knife.’ So is the spiritual atmosphere to-day.

Such differences must be considered, if we would judge at all truly of the succession of historic epochs. When you read historians like Ranke you see nothing of these things, yet these are the real facts of history.

And all this that has come about since the 13th century, what is it? It is spiritual nourishment for the Ahrimanic Powers. Here in this region, they are first able to make their attacks. Hence the possibilities for Ahriman to take a hand in civilisation have become ever greater and greater. Needless to say. Spirits like Ahriman are not there to incarnate in physical bodies on the earth. Nevertheless, they can work on the earth, not indeed by incarnating but by incorporating themselves for certain spaces of time; when in one man or another there happens what I mentioned before: a diminution or diversion of consciousness. At such moments the human being provides a vehicle, and Ahriman is able,—not indeed to incarnate,—but to incorporate himself and to work out of that human being, with that human being's faculties.

It will be my further task to tell you of this kind of working of the Ahrimanic Powers. I shall have to show, for example, how Ahriman has appeared in the course of modern time even as an author. This will show you what things must be observed to-day by those who would fain observe realities.

In looking back at the considerations set forth here during the last few days, we shall see, on the one hand, standing there before our soul the relations existing between the individual man and the universe, and, on the other, the relations existing between a single human being living at a certain time and mankind's whole earthly development.

Today I should like to round out these considerations by adding a few thoughts. You will have inferred from what was said that the human being, in ancient times preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, stood much closer than we do today to outward nature, to the external world. This statement goes counter to the present-day belief that we, by means of our science, stand extremely close to nature. We do nothing of the kind. We have intellectual thoughts on nature drawn only from external observation, but we no longer experience nature.

Had the human being remained dependent on the spiritual element in nature, he would not have become the free being into which he developed during the recent stages of historical evolution. He would not have attained his full ego-consciousness.

If today we look into our own self, into that which we carry within us as the memory images of things experienced by us previously, what do we find in ourselves (and rightfully so)? We find our ego with all its experiences. When ancient man, living several millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, looked into himself, he did not find his ego. He did not say: “I have experienced this or that ten or twenty years ago.” Just by means of his memory, it was clear to him that he had to say: “the Gods let me have this or that experience.” And he did not say: “the ego within me had this or that experience,” but: “the God within me had the experience.” It was just because the human being participated spiritually, by means of his physical body, his etheric body, his astral body, in the processes of nature outside of himself, just because he stood in a closer, more intimate relationship to nature, he could say: “The God within me experiences the world.”

Today man acquires a knowledge of nature by means of his intellect. His knowledge is concerned exclusively with dead nature. Thus he has become able to speak of himself, out of his innermost feeling, as an ego; to be a free ego-being.

This was felt with especial strength by Paul when passing through the event of Damascus. For Paul, before passing through the event of Damascus, was an initiate in the sense of ancient initiation. He had learned in the Semitic wisdom-schools of those days that the God Whom one might justifiably call the Christ could be seen only in pre-earthly existence. This he had been told in the wisdom-schools.

The disciples and pupils of the Christ, however, whom he came to know, made the following assertion: “The Christ has dwelt among us within the man Jesus of Nazareth. He was here on earth. While we were His contemporaries, we experienced Him not only in our memory going back to a pre-earthly existence, but here on earth itself.” And Paul answered out of his initiatory knowledge: “That is impossible, for the Christ can be seen only in pre-earthly existence.”

And he was an unbeliever persecuting Christianity until the vision, the imagination of Damascus revealed this to him: The Christ lives now in connection with the earth. Then he, Paul, coined the expression which has since become so significant for inner Christianity: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

Man can recognize his ego in a natural way. He simply needs to look into himself. But in order to reach God anew, he must unite himself, in full consciousness, with the Mystery of Golgotha and say to himself: “the Christ in me.”

The men of ancient times have said: “We were together with the Christ, and hence with God the Father, before descending to earth.” Now they had to say: “the Christ is on earth.” Physically, Christ was on earth during the Mystery of Golgotha. Spiritually He has, since the Mystery of Golgotha, remained united with all men on earth.

Such knowledge is also contained in Christianity. We are told that the Christ revealed to man that the Kingdom of Heaven has come near. Yet just the interpretation of this word shows clearly that the human beings, although outwardly believing, are inwardly unbelieving. You need only consider what many modern theologians have to say about this coming near of the Kingdom of Heaven. They say: “Well, in this respect the Christ depended on the judgment of his age. Then people believed that the earth would become more spiritual at a certain time. Here the Christ was mistaken.”

It is not the Christ, however, Who was mistaken. Human beings were mistaken. They have interpreted these words in such a way as though the Kingdom of Heaven, by coming near, would make the grapes grow ten times larger and let the earth overflow with milk and honey. Such was not the meaning of what the Christ said. The Christ spoke of the Kingdom of the Spirit which He had brought near. It is not allowable to say: “What the Christ told us was a mistake. Today we must think differently.” Instead of this we should ask ourselves: “How can I understand what the Christ has said?”

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, it has indeed become more and more necessary for us to find the spiritual within the earthly and perceive the truth of the saying: “The spiritual worlds are descended to the earth.” They are descended. We need only to look for the path upon which they can be found. In order that we find something of that which leads towards this path, I would like to discuss once more certain points that are apt to bring about a better comprehension of these matters.

In those ancient times when men, in their fifties, felt the paralysis of their physical bodies setting in, it was still possible to recognize individual destinies by means of the stars. Since then, every sort of astrological calculation has become the practice of amateurs. The ancient human being felt himself related to the transformation of his physical body into the earthly element. But this transformation of the physical body into the earthly element, this perception of the earth by means of the physical body enabled him to recognize, in the course of the stars, the spiritual element within destiny. Thus, thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha, the wisdom of the stars was highly estimated.

Then came the age during which, as I have told you, the human being acquired a greater feeling for his surroundings. After reaching the forties, he felt language in such a way that he could say: “Within me the folk spirit, the folk genius is speaking.” Man learned to regard language as something objective.

In connection with this feeling, the human being experienced that which rotated around him, as it were, in a circle. At a later time, he still experienced the daily sunrise, the daily sunset. To a certain extent, he arranged his life in accord with these phenomena. The course of the year, however, was no longer really understood by him.

Yet there was a time, during the sixth, fifth and fourth millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, when men lived in unison not only with day and night, but also with the year. This unison with the year has been partly preserved, especially up here in the North. For instance, a relic of this past unison can still be felt in the Olaf-Saga, where Olaf experiences the course of the year in such a way that around and after Christmas he enters the life of the spiritual world. Here appears a memory of the unison between human life and the course of the year as it came to flower in very ancient times in the Orient, which was the scene of mankind's loftiest civilization.

At that time, human beings understood what later became known to them only by means of tradition, namely, how to arrange their festivals in accord with the course of the year. They took part in the course of the year. In what way was this accomplished?

Today we have no immediate experience of the fact that we breathe in and breathe out; that the air is alternately within and without us. The present-day human being would be hardly aware of these things were he not told by science. He does not experience, so vividly as did the people of ancient times, the process of inspiration and expiration.

Yet it is not only man that breathes, but also, even though in a different way, our earth. Just as man possesses a soul element, so does the earth possess a soul element. In the course of one year, the earth first breathes in, and then breathes out her soul element. And the wintry days, during which the Christmas Festival takes place, approach at a time when the earth's breathing-in process is at its height; when the earth-soul is entirely within the earth. Then the earth has the greatest amount of soul-life within herself. Hence, at this time, the spirit and soul element becomes visible in the earth.

If we can inwardly experience how the earth, having concluded this breathing-in process, is now inhabited by her whole soul and thereby lets come out of the earth-element the elemental beings, who live with the snow-covered trees, who live with the earth's surface where the water congeals at a time when the earth covers herself with a blanket of ice—if we can inwardly experience all this, then the spiritual beings within the earth begin to stir. The mere naturalist would say: The husbandman scatters the seed, which lies in the earth all winter and sprouts forth in the spring. This, however, could not happen unless the elemental beings preserved, during the winter, the spiritual force of the seeds. The spiritual beings, the spirits of nature, are most wakeful when the earth has breathed in during the winter-time, during the Christmas-time, her whole soul. Thus the birth of Jesus could be best understood through the fact that it took place at Christmas, when the earth is inhabited by her entire soul.

Yet, even at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, there were very few people who had been able to retain an understanding of this spirit and soul element contained in the earth during winter.

Men of earlier ages, however, knew that in mid-summer—around the Day of St. John, on the twenty-fourth of June—the state of the earth is just the opposite to her wintry state. In midsummer, the process of exhaling is at its height. Then the earth has given her soul to the extra-terrestrial cosmos. From Christmas until the Day of St. John, this breathing out of the soul-element into the vast universe is perceived more and more. The soul of the earth is striving towards the stars. The soul of the earth wishes to know something about the life of the stars. And, in its own way, the soul of the earth is most firmly united through the light of the summer sun with the star movements at the season of St. John's Day.

All this could be recognized, thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha, in certain parts of the world. And out of this knowledge arose the inception of Summer Mysteries.

In the mid-summer mysteries, the mysteries of St. John that were celebrated especially in the North, the pupils of initiates under the guidance of these initiates, tried to accompany the earth-soul to the vast expanse of the stars, in order to read out of the stars what spiritual happenings and facts are connected with the earth. And, during the time between Christmas and the Day of St. John, they pursued this soaring of the earth-soul towards the world of the stars, this striving of the earth-soul towards the stars. And an echo—but only a traditional echo—of this striving of the earth-soul towards the stars is still to be found in the way the date for the Easter Festival is set.

The Easter Festival is set for the first Sunday following the vernal full moon and thus takes place in conformity with the stars. The reason for this must be sought in ancient times, when it was said: the soul of man desires to follow the earth-soul on her path to the stars and consider the star-wisdom as something whereby man may be guided.

Thus the Spring Festival, the Easter Festival, was set not according to earthly calculation, but according to heavenly calculation, to star calculation.

Especially in the span of time between the eighth pre-Christian century and the fourth post-Christian century, the feeling prevailed in the folk souls of civilized people that human beings were saddened by mankind's cosmic destiny. For there still existed the longing to follow the earth-soul, which desired to soar up to the stars in springtime. But the human soul, which was tied to the body, could do so no longer. There was no possibility of gaining from nature the ability to soar upward to the world of stars, such as it had existed in ancient times.

Human beings, therefore, could easily comprehend why the Easter Festival, which was to celebrate the Christ's death and resurrection, should occur just in springtime.

And the Deity came to their aid, by letting the death of Christ Jesus occur in the spring. Even the setting of the Easter Festival, however, revealed the fact that it was not permissible to use earthly calculations. The Christmas Festival could be computed by earthly means; for then the world-soul was inhabiting the earth. Thus the Christmas Festival had to be set for a definite day.

This setting of the Easter Festival contains profound wisdom. Yet the modern age thinks differently. About twenty-four years ago, I had weekly meetings with a well-known astronomer. Our meetings took place in a small circle of friends. This astronomer could reason only in the following way: All the account books of the earth are thrown into disorder by having the Easter Festival take place on different days. According to his opinion, the least one could do was to set the Easter Festival for the first Sunday in April, or regulate the date in some abstract way. As you know, a movement exists in the world which strives for such an abstract regulation of the Easter Festival. People want to have order in their debits and credits, which play such an important part in modern life. And now the Easter Festival, whose celebration, after all, requires several days, causes a great deal of disorder. It would be much more efficient to set one definite day of the year for its observance!

These things are an outward symbol of the fact that people want to banish from the world all that conforms to spiritual standards. Here is preeminently shown that we have become materialists who want to banish the spiritual more and more from human existence.

Formerly, however, the human being experienced the course of the year in such a way that, by accompanying the earth-soul into the cosmos in springtime and around the time of St. John's Day, he also learned every year how to follow the spiritual entities of the higher Hierarchies and, above all, the human souls who had passed out of this world.

In ancient times, people were conscious of the fact that, by experiencing the course of the year, they learnt how to follow the souls of the dead; learnt to find out, as it were, how their dead kinfolk were faring. And people felt that springtime not only brought them the first blossoms, but also the opportunity of discovering how their kinfolk were faring. Something spiritual was united, in a very concrete way, with this experiencing of the seasons.

And people in ancient times were much concerned with that which is connected with the earthly element, to the degree that the earthly is influenced by the stars. All this, however, has been outgrown by modern man. When we observe St. John's Day—the time when we could accompany the earth-soul soaring upward to unite itself with the stars—the antipodes celebrate Christmas. Thus, in that part of the world, the earth-soul retires into the earth.

You must consider that human beings during ancient, spiritualized times knew so little of the antipodes that the earth was thought of as a disk. Therefore it was impossible to have any relation to the antipodes.

By learning to think of the earth as a rounded body, one became independent of the course of the year. As long as one lived in a restricted region, the course of the seasons was an absolute fact. Today, when one travels across the globe without hindrance and, entering different localities, minimizes the incidents of the seasons, one is unable to experience their course. One also lacks the former intensive relation to the Festivals. You will realize how much less concrete and much more abstract our Festivals have become. People know by tradition that Christmas is the time for exchanging presents—and, besides, children enjoy their few days' vacation. At Easter, one or the other ritual may be witnessed. But in what way do present-day people concretely experience the spiritual world by means of the seasons? Today we are unable to understand the connection between our Festivals of the year and the course of the seasons.

Not only the human being has, in regard to his own person, become an Ego-being, a free being, but also the earth has emancipated herself from the universe. In modern times, the earth stands no longer in so close a relation to the universe as was formerly the case, at least as far as mankind's evolution is concerned. Hence man has become increasingly obliged to seek in his inner being what he cannot find outside.

As men became more and more intellectual, they acquired a natural science concerned with all that is outside of man. What I have in mind is not physics or chemistry which, in a purely external sense, are concerned only with what lies outside of man. I am speaking of biology. This science occupies itself in an intensive way with the lower, and also the higher animals, right up to the very highest species. And we have attained to a marvelous, admirable science in regard to the animal form, so that we are able today to have conceptions of how one animal form has developed out of another. Out of this grew the Darwin-Haeckel conception that the human form has developed out of the animal form. Yet this theory teaches us extraordinarily little about our own nature. It only marks the end of a zoological line. The human being does not attain a knowledge of himself as man, but only as the highest animal. This is a great scientific accomplishment, but it must be interpreted in the right way. People must learn to concede that science can only teach us what man is not.

As soon as it has become general knowledge that science must concern itself not with what man is, but with what man is not, then science will become enlightened. Then we shall be able to study all the forms living in the animal kingdom, as well as those in the plant kingdom.

Then we shall be able to say: “There outside, we have all the animal shapes. These we had to leave behind in the outer world; for, if they were still within us, we could never have become men. Natural science tells us of the things that we had to conquer within ourselves. We evolved by discarding, more and more, the natural forms, by ejecting them and retaining that which is not nature, but which pertains to spirit and soul.”

Man must come to the point where he can address science in the following way: “You are great, for you have taught me what man is not. Hence I must look for man's being in a sphere totally different from external, physical science. I can become a true scientist only by recognizing that man is not a product of nature, topping the line of animals, but that the animals are formations cast off and left behind by man. Only thus can I attain a correct relation to science.” In order to speak such words, man will be compelled to recognize things, now not through external observation, but out of his inner nature. And at the moment when man is able to say to himself: “Science, in the modern sense, does not inform us about man, but it only informs us concerning what man is not”—at this moment it will be recognized how much the world has need of spiritual science. For there is nothing else that gives us the possibility of recognizing man as Man. Without spiritual science, we can come to know only the external sheath of man as the final product of the animal kingdom.

Just by standing correctly on natural-scientific ground, we may fully appreciate natural science as something lying outside of man. To attain a knowledge of man—also with regard to his physical attributes—we must pursue a different path.

Anthroposophy has to strive for this spiritual observation. I shall demonstrate this fact by a few concrete examples.

Because we are influenced by the materialistic spirit of the age, there is a tendency in our schools to educate children by pointing to their bodily nature. Nowadays people make experiments involving the memory, even the faculties of willing and thinking. I do not object to such things, which may be quite interesting, inasmuch as science is concerned. It is, nevertheless, terrible to apply such experiments in a pedagogical way. If we can approach the child only by means of external experiments, this proves how completely estranged we have become from man's real being. Anyone inwardly connected with the child does not need external experiments. I wish, however, to emphasize once more that I am not opposed to experimental psychology. Yet we must acquire the faculty to enter man's being by the inward means of spirit and soul.

For instance, we are told: “A child's memory, his power of remembering, may be exerted too much or too little in his ninth or tenth year.” The clamor against over-exerting the memory can lead to the result of exerting it too little. We must always try to find the middle course. For instance, we may make too great demands on a nine or ten-year-old's memory. The real consequences will not appear before the person in question has reached the age of thirty or forty, or perhaps still later. Then this person may develop rheumatism or diabetes. By overexerting a child's memory at the wrong time—let us say between the ninth and tenth year—we cause during this youthful stage an exaggerated depositing of faulty metabolic products. These connections, lasting during a man's entire earth-life, go generally unnoticed.

On the other hand, by exercising the memory too little—that is, by letting a child's memory remain idle—we bring forth a tendency to all kinds of inflammations appearing in later years.

What is important to know is the following: that the bodily states of a certain life-period are the consequences of the soul and spirit states of another.

Or let us mention something else. We make experiments as to how quickly eight, nine, or ten-year old children in the grammar school tire during a reading lesson. We can work our graphs which show that the pupils tire after a certain length of time when doing arithmetic, and again after a certain length of time when doing gymnastics. Then the lessons are arranged according to these charts.

Of course, these charts are very interesting for purely objective science, to which I pay all due respect. I have no quarrel with such methods; but, with regard to education, they are of no use whatsoever. For between the change of teeth and puberty—that is, just at the grammar school age—we can educate and teach in the right way only by not over-exerting either the head or the limbs, but by stressing the use of the respiratory and circulatory system, the rhythmical system. Above all, we should inject into gymnastic exercises rhythm and time-beat: an element of art should be introduced.

Hence the art of eurythmy is so well adapted to educational purposes. Here the artistic element enters into the child's movements. Similarly, we should relieve the child's head by keeping him away from too much thinking; but teach him instead in a pictorial, imaginative way, present things to the child pictorially. For then he is not made to exert either his nervous-sensuous or his motor system, but mostly his rhythmic system. And this system does not become tired.

You only need to consider that our hearts must beat all night long, even when we are tired and want to rest. We must ceaselessly breathe between our birth and death. It is only the motor and sensuous-nervous systems that tire. The rhythmic system never tires. Therefore the child's schooling, at a time when he must take into his soul things of the greatest importance, should be organized in such a way that those of the child's faculties are called forth which never tire. If we calculate, however, that some subject exhausts the child in a stated period, and then employ charts of this kind, the educational methods are worked out in a wrong way, and not in a correct way. We must realize one thing: What experimental psychology makes clear is essentially the non-human. The human must be inwardly recognized.

In this way, medicine too will be penetrated by thoughts pertaining to spirit and soul. In ancient times, medicine was dominated by such thoughts, and the activities of healing and educating were designated by the same word. When the human being entered the world, he was considered of being in need of healing. Education was tantamount to healing. This will again be possible once the knowledge given by spirit and soul will have advanced to a point where the deeper connections of these things can be discerned. As I said before: Too little exertion of the memory causes subsequent inflammations; too great exertion causes deposits of metabolic products.

By looking at the effect of the action of spirit and soul on the physical, the spiritual element can be found in every single illness. And, conversely, we learn to recognize the cosmos; to recognize the spiritual state of matter within the cosmos. Then therapy may be added to pathology. And here we are filled with the thought that since the Mystery of Golgotha we are obliged to appeal to the soul's inner essence. We can no longer draw the spirit-soul element out of our external surroundings. By considering, in the lecture-halls of anatomy, merely the physical-sensible, we shall call forth a cry such as was uttered during a recent medical Congress. Impelled by the misery of the age, a medical scientist called out: “Give us corpses! Then we shall be able to advance in medicine. Give us corpses!”—Certainly, this cry is perfectly valid today; and, again, I do not fight against this demand for corpses. All this, however, can develop in the right way only if, on the other hand, the cry is uttered: “Give us the possibility of looking into spirit and soul, so that we may recognize how they continually build up the body, and continually destroy it.”

All this is connected with the right comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. For the Christ wanted us to comprehend again how to heal out of our inner being. Because of this, He sent the Healing Spirit. What He wanted to implant into mankind will bring us physical knowledge, but a physical knowledge permeated by the spirit.

Thus we comprehend the Christ correctly by grasping, in the right way, this word of the Gospel: “Whoever utters incessantly the cry: Lord, Lord! or Christ, Christ! should not, therefore, be considered a true Christian.” Anthroposophy is often reproached for speaking less of the Christ than does external religion. Then I often say to those who blame Anthroposophy: “Is there not an ancient Commandment recognized also by Christians, but forgotten in this eternal mentioning of the Christ: `Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain?' This is one of the ten Commandments.”

Whoever speaks ceaselessly of the Christ; whoever has the Christ's name constantly on his lips, sins against the sacredness of His name. Anthroposophy wants to be Christian in all it does and is. Therefore it cannot be reproached for speaking too little of the Christ. The consciousness that the Christ is living permeates everything brought forth by Anthroposophy. And thus it does not want to have Lord, Lord! incessantly on its lips. The less it speaks of the name “Christ,” the more truly does it desire to be Christian.

I

Albert Steffen's “Four Beasts” has been felt by many to be a “pilgrimage” into the world of ideas of anthroposophy. Such a feeling cannot arise if the soul with its experience really penetrates into the drama. For in this drama, events flow from the external, sensory reality into the spiritual sphere through the deeper knowledge of the human being, which is inherent in the poet as the inner essence of his spirit. This poetical spirit, with the persons of his drama, rises in the right moments into a spiritual world, for this it does not need to rely on theory. It does not need to learn the path to the spiritual world from anthroposophy. But anthroposophy can help him to learn about the living “pilgrimage” to the spiritual world that is inherent in the life of the soul.

Such a poetical spirit must, if it is properly felt, be felt within the anthroposophical movement as the bearer of a message from the spiritual sphere. It must be felt as a good fate that he wants to work within this movement.

He adds to the proofs that Anthroposophy can give of its truth, the proof that in a creative personality, as a living spirit-bearer, he works like the light of this truth itself.

The appearance of a little book by Albert Steffen coincides with the public formation of an opinion about the “Four-Beast”: “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life.” (Verlag Seldwyla, Zurich).

A little book that lives. For when the reading soul unites with what speaks from the wonderful sentences, everything that one has before one is transformed. The impression spiritualizes; a person stands before the soul who sees through the intimate secrets of earthly nature, who is able to point to nature in such a way that it reflects its mysteries in his light.

Thus Albert Steffen's poetic spirit is behind the little book and appears spiritual when one feels the light that radiates from it.

"I like to receive my visitors in the garden. Each person who comes teaches me to look at the plants in a new way. The way a person strolls through the grounds with me, casting their eyes around, soon reveals to me whether they are a naturalist, painter, musician, farmer, and so on. Lovers show themselves in their most glorious bloom. Those in love with themselves remain dry and bare, even when standing next to an apple tree covered in blossoms.

Thus speaks he whose soul draws its life forces from the vastness of the stars; for what it receives in this way, it reveals when it looks at the creatures that surround man, so that through them he may receive life anew from the depths of his being in every moment.

And so the “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life” becomes a spiritual refreshing drink for the poetically receptive soul, and the mediator of an acquaintance with a poet spirit, who is able to reveal nature in its spirit-word.

What do words like these express: “If only we knew what goes on in a boy's mind when he picks up the first hay apple of the season, tests it with his thumb, bites into it with a crunch and, before eating it, looks at the seeds in the husk, which are still white or at most have a yellowish tinge! He feels it with a kind of natural conscience: Only when the seeds are dark brown have the sun and moon completed their work on the apple, making it suitable for my tummy. Before that, it is wrong to break it. And if the twig on which the apple hangs does not want to let go of it and has to be bent, the boy feels remorse. (Not so much for robbing the farmer...) Adults lose the ability to appreciate the divine alchemy. Why? Because they harden in their self-confidence.

But true poetic spirits are there in life to repeatedly introduce the hardened self-confidence to the divine alchemy.

My gaze is drawn back from this “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life” to Albert Steffen's debut work, “Ott, Alois und Werelsche”, with which he greeted the world in 1907. (S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin.)

For it is first and foremost as a greeting to the world that I perceive the book. It is the greeting of a human soul that has embarked on a pilgrimage after a full life of its own kind and that, filled with the impressions it receives, must speak to other people as one speaks when one extends a hearty greeting to another.

The poet of this novel has lived intimately with nature and human life. His soul had received the gift of being not only within himself, but above all in that which loving observation can bring to the life of the soul. But it is the secret of the human soul that the more it is absorbed in the external world through devoted experience, the more it sinks into its own interior.

Whether his work would become a “novel” was not yet of any concern to the young observer of the world. He is not yet “composing”; he is bringing the poetic light into the world that he himself has received.

You have to pause and savor every moment when you read “Ott, Alois und Werelsche”. For from the lines this poetic light rises as mild sparks. They are love that shines through the existence of a human heart. And “shining love” is indeed the revealer of true life.

Even nature does not “compose”; it presents its creations to the world. And spirit-nature is what the young Albert Steffen connected himself with; it led him further on the “pilgrimage to the tree of life”. Anyone who looks at life in the same way as the poet of “Ott, Alois and Werelsche” does, will, on this “pilgrimage”, come to the point where the creative world spirit radiates into the observed world of nature and people.

The poet of “Ott, Alois and Werelsche” sees what is revealed of the secrets of existence in the simple human gestures, in the everyday actions as a symptom. A symptomatology of the most beautiful kind is Steffen's debut work. But the symptoms, which still have to be interpreted emotionally – even if unconsciously – if the spirit is to become manifest through them, become transparent – and on the other side of reality appears what presents itself to the eye of the spirit in the “Viergetier”, without interpretation, speaking for itself. - - The soul's gaze must be able to rest lovingly on the spirit-interpreting symptoms of the Tree of Life, as did the young Albert Steffen's gaze; it must be able to penetrate the soul so fully of light if it is to grow into that feeling gaze that brings the “Tree of Life” to full revelation in the “four-legged creature”.

Anthroposophy seeks the all-encompassing nature of the Tree of Life; and it seeks Albert Steffen's poetic spirit. That is why the two have come together.

II

It was only in 1912 that Albert Steffen sent his second novel out into the world: “The Destiny of Crudity”. (S. Fischer's Verlag, Berlin.) Anyone who reads it and looks back at the one published five years earlier will feel as if they have had to search for this poet's soul on a journey into deep spiritual worlds in the meantime.

Albert Steffen's words speak from “Ott, Alois and Werelsche”, like the words of a soul to which the world has much to say, because it wants to listen with loving devotion to many things. How many small events, but which in their smallness speak of the greatness of the world, are revealed in Albert Steffen's luminous, soul-warm first work. But one has the impression that the world is speaking through a soul that, in the fullness of its impressions, abandons itself to the paths by which it is led by existence.

Now the same soul speaks in the novel “The Destiny of the Rough”. But something has broken into this soul. Precisely the impressions of a journey into deep spiritual worlds. A journey in which the human being becomes a mystery to spiritually inclined souls. But a mystery to which the powers of the seeing spirit can draw understanding and light.

The impressions of such wanderings of the poet's spirit are intimate. It would be indelicate to want to follow him on such a journey. For he only follows himself in a very specific way. In such a way that the impressions are not torn from the fullness of their revelation by the intellect.

Albert Steffen's soul knocked on many spiritual doors during its journey and found entry. There it learned to ask for the secrets of existence in hidden places.

The booklet 'Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life' has two parts. The first part is titled 'Preparation' and was written in 1910. Albert Steffen speaks from the heart during his soul's journey.

I see this poetical spirit at the beginning of his twenties, when “Ott, Alois and Werelsche” was created. Eyes that long to absorb everything beautiful in the world. Gestures that long to follow the gestures with which life speaks to man.

I see him again as he writes “the destiny of rawness”. Eyes from which the secrets of the world speak. Gestures in which the world gives its revelations through the whole person. But in between, the poet speaks in “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life”: “There is really no other way out: if we want to feel the infinity of space, we must feel an inexhaustible wealth within us. If the infinity of the spheres is not to fill us with awe and diffidence, we must know or believe that we can educate ourselves to similar power and greatness. We must acquire ideas that include an eternity and subordinate the ephemeral to them.

On his journey, the poet within has brought the second person to speak. The person who can ignite within himself the language of eternal becoming.

Thus standing in the world, Albert Steffen's soul must look at the riddle of “man and woman”. The poet feels how far apart what is experienced in the subconscious of woman and man as the human sense lies. Nowhere in the world does another contrast reveal itself among the many that are there, a greater one.

And at the same time this poetical spirit feels that a supreme event in the world's history must be able to take place in the physical existence on earth between “man and woman”. A supreme event because something of the kind is always being raised anew, not through concepts, but through the world's history itself, but also always brought to a tragic or happy solution.

Albert Steffen observes that there is something unconsciously provocative in the male essence, which is released in some form of coarseness in intercourse with the female. He may otherwise be of a delicate nature; there are moments when the man acts and speaks in such a way that the dignity of the woman seems crushed beside him.

But Albert Steffen also notes what effect this encounter with coarseness has on the woman. She experiences the man's coarseness as a kind of self-discovery, a strengthening of her consciousness.

Anyone who wants to enter such realms of life with the poet's genius must be able to absorb into his language something that removes the words from everyday life. He must be able to speak in such a way that the words he says stand there, but that something essential can live in the intuitive soul of the reader. Speaking in these matters as one speaks in everyday life is something that offends a person with a proper sense of feeling.

In Albert Steffen's novel, language takes on a different quality in places where this main enigma comes to light, where it moves away from the mode of expression of everyday life. In such places, the style becomes as if the poet's genius wanted to reveal itself to the reader in a confidential, subdued and suggestive language.

And this stylistic nuance is again stylishly distinguished from the style in the presentation of the novel's characters. Here is the portrayal of a soul that, on its journey into true life, has looked deeply into the weaving of the human being.

The personalities stand there after the spiritual and physical being. The sensitive reader must be able to give an answer when asked about traits of the outer and the soul. The characters in the novel emerge so vividly. One has the feeling that one can discuss even the most diverse things, which are far removed from Steffens' portrayal, with these people.

This stylistic nuance between vivid revelation, in which everything that is inside flows out, and the subdued speaking of soul secrets that people cannot fully come to consciousness of, is what makes the novel “The Destiny of the Rough” so irresistibly appealing.

The poet-genius occupies such a position in life, experiencing the moment in full, most honest inner perception, when he may say: “If the infinity of the spheres does not fill us with awe and humility, then we must know or at least believe that we have something in us that is equal to or even conquers it, that we can educate ourselves to similar power and greatness.”

In Albert Steffen's “The Nature of Brute Force,” a poet-genius speaks, for whom brute force reveals the important mystery that has otherwise occupied the age so intensely and that many perceive as the “battle of the sexes”.

Steffen, on the other hand, when he perceives the contrast between man and woman, immediately seeks to lead the soul out of the world of matter and into the world of spirit. From the spirit, light is to be shed on this riddle of life. — In the case of others, the problem is dragged down into the sphere where the soul turns to the material. But in doing so, it is transferred into the region of triviality.

As a result, Albert Steffen's poetic genius stands out so brilliantly in his time that he takes those who approach his art with understanding to regions of existence that he himself first enters in his own deeply serious human soul-searching.

But this is hardly what is expected of a poet today. He is supposed to descend into the regions where the trivial concepts of everyday life prevail, where everything that is not approved by a scientific way of thinking may be relegated to the realm of fantasy. — In this region, however, there is no understanding for the “Viergetier”.

In the “Determination of Crudity,” Albert Steffen's original path into the secrets of the human world is revealed in a significant way. — In this novel, too, the narrative does not follow the thread of a novel's composition. Small episodic novellas are woven into the plot, which is introduced from the beginning, and which, viewed purely externally, could also have a different content. And at the end, the reader is surprised by an attached story that appears in the novel as something completely new. Steffen introduces this story as follows: “The story of a person with whom Aladar came together is now to be told, so that from it one can sense how his whole being was raised to a high level by his new friend.”

Aladar is a character who deeply engages the reader from the very beginning: a main character of the novel. The new friend only appears at the end.

Albert Steffen's spiritualization of art can now be felt particularly in such a kind of “composition”. One feels immediately, when reading the “attached” story, the artistic necessity of this poetic genius out of its special nature.

For Albert Steffen, in 'Determining Crudity', the processes depicted are like the artistic means by which a spiritual world can be seen behind these processes. However, the interpretation is not a symbolic one, but one that unfolds in the same way as the colors of the plants, as the shine of the stones in relation to the spirit.

And from the world that one beholds when one allows the beauty of the image to take effect, the people emerge and stand before us in the art of Albert Steffen.

Steffen's style thus becomes that which is able to unfold a representation artistically like a physical ground, which the personalities that appear enter from the spiritual world.

This is what one already senses as the luminous originality of Albert Steffen in The Defining of Crudity

III

One year after the publication of “The Determination of Crudity” in 1913, Albert Steffen's next novel “The Renewal of the Covenant” was published (S. Fischer, Verlag, Berlin 1913). The poet's genius now penetrates into human life, as the soul strengthens the visionary power of the imagination both in breadth and depth. Into the expanse, by drawing into its realm the destinies of many people who are connected by their lives. Into the depths, by seeking to explore the powers at work in these destinies, where human life wells up from the spiritual sources of existence.

The imagination takes a legend as its starting point. A man and his sons had once migrated from the far north to lower-lying regions. The circumstances of the settlement led to a situation in which, after some time, some of the man's descendants lived in a bright, friendly area; others lived nearby, but in a miserable area of the earth where souls become desolate, spirits are humiliated and morals fall prey to the mire.

The poet presents a luminous image of where these people of common descent are led, some to circumstances in which life can flourish, and others to those in which it must perish. One of the descendants climbed higher and higher day after day, where he was able to absorb sunlight into his soul. He was thus far removed from the area where his relatives fell into the misery of life. But the ascent was dangerous. The miasma of the marshy region, which devoured life, spread upwards, and in the enjoyment of the sun the sea of fog penetrated, bringing death. During one of the ascents to the heights, the sun seeker's wife died. But dying, she left him a vision: herself with a child in her arms. And dying she said to him: paint us and set up the picture “under the lime tree”. So a friendly human settlement arose around the place, which was given strength by the picture. The mists of the neighboring moor avoided the area where the power of the picture was at work. The sun prevailed where this effect was present.

The poet's spirit wonderfully evokes how human intimacy pulses through nature's effects in deep-lying forces at the beginning of his creation.

This poet genius has found nature in the spirit-imbued search of his senses; he has found the divine-spiritual in the spirit-filled search of the soul through nature.

An ancient historian has the depicted saga in his collection. He is a member of the family to which the saga refers. It is his own ancestors who came from the north, who then developed in their further life in such a way that one part can have a dignified existence in a beautiful area, but the other part is condemned to a life in the moral swamp.

Thus neighboring groups of people find themselves in juxtaposition. Their living conditions have given them completely opposite characteristics in terms of body, soul and spirit. But life brings them into contact. Connections arise between the two groups of people. The poet observes what is experienced there and, with his broad outlook and deep, observant imagination, he presents it in such a way that, as a reader, one follows a performer who, where nature reveals itself in what it receives from the starry regions, takes in the spiritual in a lively and active way into the realm of his observation.

A picture of rare clarity presents itself. Marriage is described between a man who has sprung from an evil environment and a woman who comes from a good environment. This marriage unfolds in the most enigmatic transformations of character in both man and woman. With a penetrating gaze at what works its way up from the depths of being into human life, the poet's spirit pursues these enigmatic transformations, and what he finds in the souls of human beings from the sensuality of his observation of nature and from the intensity of his observation of the spirit is itself life that solves enigmas.

Marriage leads to the point where the woman becomes “knowing”, where she realizes - especially in the Easter season - how man is a “child of the sun”, how he takes his nature from the sun and only carries it into the earthly realm. The power of the image that the saga tells of becomes a living entity in the woman; such a living entity, when it takes hold of the soul, carries it off into the spiritual world.

A wonderful spiritual magic reigns over this passage in the novel. Novalis' “magical idealism” shines forth as it can shine through a true poet a century after Novalis.

Thus speaks the woman: “In these meadows sleeps a spirit, waiting to enter the hearts of men and become healing love there. How glorious it must be to be united with the beings who conjure up the green blanket of plants in harmony. All people will one day be such friends. Yes, you and I and all have the longing to come together, however much we think we are enemies... Why do we always accuse ourselves that we cannot give anything to anyone! Can the person we love look at the mat with the flower stars without becoming happier? Oh, could I be such a disciple! Is it possible to have any other wish on earth?"

And the poet-genius speaks, revealing the interweaving of his soul with this spirit-nature-language of those who have become knowledgeable, in the “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life” profound words. He is transported by the most vivid immersion in the weaving of nature. He says: “Now I suddenly understood the primal plant. I saw how the plant germinates, grows, flowers and bears fruit, in order to arise again and again from the seed, through a whole world age, according to natural necessity, and how it connects the earth with heaven in the process. I discovered a multifaceted rhythm in the arrangement of the leaves, in the formation of the flowers, in the rising and evaporating of the water, in the blossoming and fading of the colors: tones, counterpoints and chords, a dance of countless spirits.” Anyone who reads these words in “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life” and then remembers the passages in the novel will feel, in this poetic spirit, how the light of Novalis' “magical idealism” and Goethe's “contemplative judgment” emerge from the depths of the mind.

The second half of the novel, “The Renewal of the Covenant,” can only be felt as a genuine spiritual pilgrimage of artistic imagination. A boy, who has his origin in the connection between the members of the light and the dark lineages, is portrayed on his educational path. His connection with the spirit gives Albert Steffen deep insights into the heart and soul of this boy. We find him as a gifted boy when he begins his school career. Then a devastating event occurs in the young life. A teacher punishes the boy. The boy sees in his soul the “withered bone hand” of the old schoolmaster. The whole being of the child changes. He absorbs what he has to learn, but when asked, he cannot bring anything out of himself. Albert Steffen was only able to describe the nuances in the transformation of this child's soul as he does because in “Renewal of the Covenant” he reflects the spiritual pilgrimage he was undertaking at the time.

There is Hartmann, the brother of the boy's grandfather. Hartmann is a man before whom destruction goes hand in hand. He does not consciously intend this destruction. A female being who dies because of him, the brother who becomes an untrue man because of him, and much more is tied to his existence and actions. He sees himself as the center of a world of destruction. All this can only be described by a poetic imagination that has clairvoyantly stood in the realm of the spiritual and looked at human hearts from this point of view. Since Albert Steffen's imagination is capable of this, even a character as complicated and extreme as Hartmann, who moves in the most unheard-of extremes of life, seems true inwardly. And he remains true to himself because he locks himself up in his estate like a hermit, in order to devote himself solely to the destruction of the world and life. For his life has led him to believe that the world has reached the point in its development from which it must proceed towards destruction. And since he bears within himself the sum of all human destructive powers, he would like to make himself an instrument of the process of destruction.

And yet again: this hard man can become pious when he is with the boy, whose educational path has been indicated, and the boy's little sister. The spirituality of the child's soul shines brightly in the interaction between Hartmann and the two children of his relative.

A blind man who has been harmed by Hartmann because the latter has closed his property with a dog that bites, and the blind man has entered the dog's range, is to be avenged by a crowd of wildly passionate people. While this crowd is preparing to destroy Hartmann, we hear the words from the blind man's mouth: “I see an army of souls taking flight upwards. I see another one streaming towards it and plunging it into the abyss in a confused mass.” Thus Albert Steffen's imagination introduces man to the spiritual world in order to illuminate his innermost being with the rays of this world. This appears more vividly in ‘Viergetier’; spiritually, one already feels it in full force in this second half of ‘Renewal of the Covenant’.

The novel's conclusion is deeply moving. The “blind man” speaks to another character from the group of depraved people: “Hear what just passed through my soul: the Redeemer hung on the cross; on his right and on his left, the two malefactors. From heaven, darkness descended in great circles on the peoples who were gathered around the rock of Golgotha. They shouted: “If you are the chosen one of God, help yourself.” Then the poet follows the conversation of the two misdeeds with Jesus. - And then the radiant image follows: “At the foot of the rock stood two old men, old friends. It seemed to them as if a being of light descended upon the cross of one of the murderers and gently carried his soul away. At the same time, however, a devilishly curled beast came riding by in a whistling wind and snatched the soul of the other murderer from his convulsing body.” The friends parted. In the days that followed, they underwent experiences that were hard on their souls. And what they now feel is expressed by one of them: “I feel just like you. So let's make a pact. We will vow never to follow the other into the beautiful spiritual lands, but to remain forever with the murderer in the darkness.”

They had realized how people like this murderer could not fall into error if they themselves were different. And while they believed that they had to stay with the murderer as atonement, “a third party” whom they did not know stood beside them and said, “Let me be in your covenant.” Christ was the third. In his kingdom of light, the tested souls are found.

With deep reverence for the powers of existence that prevail in the human being, one lays this novel out of one's hand.

Albert Steffen created it as the image of his spiritual pilgrimage. And what the imagination experiences on this pilgrimage is joyfully experienced by the poetical heart in joy. Spiritual worlds experienced in joyfulness are revelations of beauty. Albert Steffen's novel speaks of beautiful spirituality. For he who experiences the spirit as he does can describe what is beautiful or ugly before the senses. It becomes beautiful in the light he conjures over it.

(I will now conclude this presentation of Albert Steffen's early poetic period. I plan to continue the reflection after a short time, which will then extend to Albert Steffen's later creations.

The task underlying our present studies is, in the widest sense, to try to understand the Universe through the relations existing between it and Man. I am far from wishing to convey the idea to those who have had certain glimpses into the Universe during the foregoing lectures that the truth of these matters can be found in any quick and easy way such as one hears of in ordinary Astronomy when it tells of the celestial motions. I would, however, like the friends who have come to the General Meeting not merely to hear something that comes right in the middle of a consecutive series, but in these few lectures held during the General Meeting, also to have a self-contained picture. I will therefore continue our studies of yesterday, giving indications of how the conception of the nature of Man leads to the conception of the Universe, its being and its movements. Of course, this subject is so vast that it is impossible to exhaust it for the friends who are now present. It will be continued later. For the benefit of those here for the first time to-night, I should like to put before them at any rate a few of the salient features of the subject embodied in previous lectures.

From other lectures you all know of the relation existing in human life between waking and sleeping. You know that in the abstract the relation is something like this: In the waking condition, the physical, etheric and astral bodies, together with the Ego-being, are in a certain inner connection; whereas during sleep, we have on the one side, the physical and etheric bodies united, and on the other—separated from them at any rate in comparison with the waking state—we have the astral body and the Ego. This, as you know, is merely an abstract assertion, for I have often emphasised that as regards all that belongs to the limb-nature—which is continued into the inner organisation, and is also the real bearer of metabolism—all this part of man, connected as it is at the same time with the human will, is really in a perpetual state of sleep. We must be absolutely clear that this state of sleep continues in regard to our inner organism, when we ourselves are awake. We can therefore say that the ‘Limb-man’ as carrier of the ‘Will-man’, is in a permanent state of sleep. The Circulation or ‘Rhythmic-man’, which may be described as in the middle between the Head-organisation and the Limb-man (the latter extending into the interior of man) persists in a continuous dream state. This is at the same time the outer instrument for our world of feeling. The world of feeling is rooted wholly within man's rhythmic organisation and while the metabolic man, together with its outward extension—the limbs—is the vehicle of the will, the rhythmic man is the vehicle of the life of feeling, and is related to our consciousness in the same way as our dream state to our waking life. Between waking and falling asleep, we are only really awake in our life of ideation and thought.

In this way we have set before us the fact that man, in his life between birth and death, is in an intermittent waking state in respect to his life of thought, in a dream state regarding his emotions and feelings, of which the rhythmic man is the vehicle; and he is in a state of continuous sleep as regards his limbs and metabolic system. We must realise at this point that really to comprehend human nature, it is necessary to fix our attention upon the fact of the extension of the limb-nature into the interior of man. All the processes that are ultimately connected with the abdominal region, everything connected with assimilation, digestion, as also with the secretion of milk in females, and so forth, all these processes are a continuation of the limb nature, directed inwards. So that in speaking of the will-nature or metabolic-nature, we do not mean only the outer limbs, but the continuation inwards too of this limb activity. In respect to all this, intimately connected as it is with the will-nature, man is continuously asleep.

This complicates the abstract idea we gain in the first place of the departure of the Ego and astral body; and it also necessitates a corresponding comprehension of another important fact.

When the materialistic physiologist of today speaks of the will, saying for instance, that it manifests in the movement of the limbs, he has in mind that some kind of telephonic signal is sent from the central organ, the brain, proceeds through the so-called motor-nerves, and thus moves the right leg, for instance. This however is quite unproven—in fact, a quite erroneous hypothesis! For spiritual observation shows the following: If a man's right leg is raised or moved by the will, a direct influence of the Ego-being of man takes place, acting upon that limb, so that it is really raised by the Ego-being itself; only, the process takes place in a state like that of sleep. Consciousness knows nothing of it. The nerve merely informs us that we have a limb, it tells us of the presence of such a limb. This nerve as such has no part in the activity of the Ego upon that limb. A direct correspondence exists between the limb and the will, which latter is associated in man with the Ego-being, and in the animal with the astral body. All that Physiology has to say in respect, for instance, of the speed of transmission of the so-called will, needs to be revised; it should be impressed upon us that here we have to do rather with the velocity of transmission in respect of the perception of that particular limb. Naturally anyone initiated into modern physiology can challenge this assertion in a dozen ways. I am well acquainted with these objections. But we have to try to rise a really logical thought process in this matter, and we shall find that what I say here corresponds with actual facts of observation, while what is said in physiological textbooks does not.

Sometimes indeed these things are so obvious as to be evident to all. Thus at a meeting of scientists in Italy—I think it was in the 80's of the last century—a most interesting discussion took place concerning the contradictions which came to light between the usual theory of the motor-nerves and the movement of a limb. As however the tendency to take notice of the spiritual aspect of things is absent in the physiology of today, even during a discussion such as this little was arrived at, except that contradictions existed in the hypothetical explanation of a certain fact. It would be extremely interesting if our learned friends, and there are such among us, were to investigate and test the physiological and biological literature of the last 40 years. They would make extremely interesting discoveries, were they to take up these subjects. They would find facts everywhere, which merely need handling in the proper way to confirm the findings of Spiritual Science. It would form one of the most interesting problems of the Institutes of Scientific Research which ought now to be erected, to proceed in the following way: International literature on the subject should first be carefully studied. We must take the international literature, for in English, and particularly in American literature, most interesting facts are substantiated, although these investigators do not know what to make of them. If you look into the discovered facts and substantiate them, there is but one step more needed in the sequence of investigation—given the right kind of vision in response to which the thing will, as it were, come out and show itself—and magnificent results would be arrived at today. Once we have advanced sufficiently to possess such an Institute, furnished with adequate apparatus and the necessary material, the facts will be found all around us, waiting as it were. Today people fail to notice the universal urge towards an Institute such as I have in mind, for the series of tests and experiments commenced are always discontinued just at the most critical moments, simply because people are ignorant of the ultimate direction of such experiments. Really important foundations would be laid by such an Institute, foundations for practical work. People do not dream at the present time of the technique that would result if these things were actually done, first as experiments and then building up from them further. It is only the possibility of putting it into practical effect that is lacking.

This is only by the way. To return to our subject, we have to do with a portion of man which sleeps even while he is awake. I now wish to bring to your notice a fact which has played an important part in all the older conceptions of the Universe. I refer to the assertion that the starting-point of the lower limbs is under the rulership of the Moon, while the region of the larynx, which we may consider as the meeting-point of the higher limbs, is associated with Mars. The man of today who is deeply involved in the modern conception of the Macrocosm, cannot of course make anything of such assertions; and the nonsense which hazy mystics and theosophists of today say or write about these things should not be awarded any special value, for these facts lie far deeper than, for instance, the repeated statements of materialistic theosophy that we have first coarse physical matter, and then other rather ‘finer’, then the astral still ‘finer’ and so forth. Those and similar things that pass for theosophy are in reality no spiritual teaching at all, but a spiritual untruth, for they are nothing more than a perpetuation of materialism.

Statements, however, that have come down to us as remnants of the ancient wisdom, have power to lead us to a state of real veneration and deep humility before that ancient knowledge of man, as soon as we begin to understand its meaning. These indications of an ancient wisdom persisted, not only till far into the Middle Ages, but even into the eighteenth century (where they may be found in the literature of the period), and perhaps into the nineteenth century, though here they have become merely copies, so to speak, and are no longer the direct result of an original primeval consciousness. And when these things are found introduced into quite modern literature, then they are still more certain to be copies. Up to the earlier part of the eighteenth century, however, we can still find traces of a certain consciousness of these things, and here again an association was thought of as between the nature of the Moon and this region of the human organism.

What I have just said—that man in relation to his will-metabolic nature is in a constant state of sleep—is most forcibly expressed in the lower limbs. In other words, through the metamorphosis which the arms and hands have undergone, man wrests from unconsciousness that which is really the sleep-nature of the limb-man. If to some degree we sharpen our sensitiveness for these things, we shall perceive what a really remarkable difference exists between the movement of a leg and the movement of an arm. The movements of the arms are free, and in a sense follow the feelings. The movement of the legs is not as free—I mean in respect to the laws by which we produce their movements. This, of course, is something which is not always noticed, nor sufficiently appreciated, as exemplified by the fact that the greater portion of the public attending our performances of Eurythmy are merely passive observers, and fail to notice that the leg movements are less articulated and the movements of the arms and hands more so. The reason for this is that, to understand the movements of the arms, a certain co-operation of the soul on the part of the observer is necessary. In our cinema age, people do not want to give this co-operation. While watching the movements of a dance where only the legs are in movement, and the arms at most are subject to arbitrary movements, there is little need either to think or feel in union with the dancer. This is by the way.

As we have seen, the most intensely unconscious process is in connection with the movements of the lower limbs. There, man is in a sense, fast asleep. How the will works into the legs or into the abdominal region, is entirely missed by man, owing to this state of sleep. In respect to this process, man's own nature sends back to him what is a reflection only of the process. Of course we follow the movement of our legs, but this observation does not make us conscious of the processes taking place in the nervous system as the will acts upon it; only the reflection of this becomes manifest to us. The nature of our lower man turns one side away, as it were, and only the other side is turned towards us. It is exactly the same with the Moon. She revolves round the Earth, and is altogether a most courteous lady, who never turns her back upon us, but shows us always the same side. She does not show us first one side, and then the other, while proceeding along her journey round the Earth. Nobody has ever seen her back. On account of this we never receive anything from the Moon which may be termed her own, but always a reflected light. In this fact we have an absolute inner parallel between the Moon-nature and the whole inner being of man. As we look up to the Moon, we understand her only as regards her outer formal side, but we should try to feel her inner relationship with the lower physical organisation of man. The deeper we go into these matters, the more we find this to hold good. It was the simple, instinctive observations of the Ancients which enabled them to realise these inner relations between human nature and the celestial bodies ...

Now let us take the other fact—that the arms, in their connection with the upper portion of the middle or rhythmic man, come awake in a sense in man; the movements of the arms can be taken as equivalent at least to the dream-state. We feel that the activity of the arms is related in a much nearer sense to human consciousness than is the activity of the lower limbs. Hence we find that a man who has elementary feelings, generally accompanies his speech, which is in close relation to the middle man, with a gesture of the arms, by way of emphasis or as a help in explaining his meaning. Speech is closely related to the upper part of the rhythmic-man. I do not suppose there are many speakers who use movements of the legs as a help for speech, or many audiences who would consider such movements attractive!

So if we feel in the right way this necessity or tendency in man's nature, we can also feel the real relationship between the hands and arms, which belong to the upper portion of the limb-man, and the middle-man or rhythmic-man, who has as his spiritual counterpart, the feeling nature. Quite naturally we try to support our speech, which is often in danger of becoming too abstract, by gestures of our arms and hands. We endeavour to project our emotional nature into our speech.

Today, in many circles—I will not name them—it is considered a sign of intellectual clarity to abstain as much as possible from using gesture in speech. We may however, look at the matter from another standpoint and say: If a person acquires the habit of putting his hands in his trouser pockets while speaking, it may not only mark him as a man of linguistic ability, but also perhaps as being somewhat blasé. That is another aspect of the matter. I am not speaking in favour of either of these points of view, but you will see how the nature of the arms clearly indicates their connection not only with the metabolic limb man, but also with the middle, the rhythmic or circulation man. This was understood and felt by the Ancients when they connected the combination of speech and arm-movement with the sphere of Mars. This planet is not so intimately connected with the Earth as is the Moon, nor is that which underlies the foundation of speech and the arm-organisation so intimately connected with the earthly man as is that which underlies the abdominal and leg-organisation. In a certain sense we can say: what in its activity corresponds to the lower limbs, works very strongly upon the unconscious man. What corresponds to the arms and hands, however, works very powerfully upon the semiconscious man. It is indeed a fact that no one with wholly unskilled hands, no one wholly unable to perform any dexterous movements with the fingers, can be a very subtle thinker. He would in a sense seek a coarse thought-mesh rather than fine links of thought. If he has coarse, clumsy hands, he is much more qualified for materialism than one whose hand movements are more adroit. This has nothing to do with having an abstract conception of the Universe, but with the true inclination to a spiritual view of the Universe, which always demands to be comprehended in finely-meshed thoughts.

All these matters are taken fully into consideration in a comprehensive educational science. You would probably be very pleased if you came to our Waldorf School and visited the classroom where, from ten o'clock, instruction is given in handicrafts. You would see the boys as well as the girls industriously absorbed in knitting or crochet. These things are the outcome of the whole spirit of the Waldorf School, for it is not a question of writing sundry abstract programmes, but of taking in earnest that for the whole training of human knowledge, one should as a teacher know the great difference it makes to the thinking whether I understand how to move my fingers dexterously, whether I am able in ordinary circumstances to cross the middle finger over the first, like a caduceus, or not. The movements of our fingers are to a great extent the teachers of the elasticity of our thinking. These things must be followed with understanding and discernment. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in crossing the middle finger over the first with elasticity, making a serpent and the caduceus, but it is not so easy to do the same with the second and third toes. In this we see what great distinctions there are in the whole organisation of man. It is very important to bear this in mind, for the construction of the foot is intimately connected with our whole human earthly nature. By the organisation of our hands we raise ourselves above the earthly nature. We raise ourselves to the super-earthly. This was felt by the ancient wisdom, for it said that the lower man belonged to the Moon, but that the part of man which raised itself above the earthly nature belonged to Mars. Primeval Wisdom felt the organisation in the whole Universe in the same way as we feel the organisation there is in man. Materialism, however, has brought it about that we do not understand man any more. Again and again I must emphasise that the tragedy of materialism is that it turns its attention to matter, and all the time understands nothing at all of matter but simply loses connection with material existence. For this reason materialism can only cause social harm; for the socialistic materialists, the Marxists, are, as regards reality, just talkers. This they have learnt from the middle classes which have indulged in materialistic chatter for centuries; but they have not applied it to the social institution, and have remained satisfied with half-truths. A spiritual philosophy of life will once more reveal the nature of man, not in the abstract, but as possessing a concrete soul and spirit, which can work into each individual member of the human organisation.

One cannot advance in these things without constantly turning to the other side of life; for this development which our organisation manifests is two-fold, in so far as the upper man is a metamorphosis of the lower man from the last Earth-life. There is a point of time between death and rebirth when a complete reversal takes place, when the inner is turned to the outer, when what is presented as the connection between the organisation of the liver and that of the spleen is changed in the whole structure of its forces into, what becomes our hearing organisation when we are reborn. The whole of the lower man appears transformed. We have today in our lower man a certain relationship between the spleen and the liver. They slide into one another as it were. What is now the spleen slips right through the liver, and comes out, in a certain respect, on the other side, appearing again in the hearing organisation. So too with the other organs. People say that proofs should be found for repeated Earth-lives. Well, the methods by which such proofs can be found have first to be created. Anyone who is able to observe the human head in the right way, possessing a sense for such observation, comes to a way of understanding the transformation of the lower man into the human head; but he cannot understand it without filling in the intermediate stages of the experiences between death and rebirth.

In this connection very remarkable things are experienced. It may perhaps astonish some of you when I say that an artist who has become well acquainted with our conception of the Universe, said: “All that Anthroposophy says is very beautiful, but there is no proof. De Rochas, for instance, has given proofs, for he has shown how in certain conditions of hypnosis, reminiscences of former earth-lives may arise.” It seemed to he very remarkable that an artist of all people should have said such a thing. I might have assured him that it is as though I were to say to him: “My dear friend, your pictures tell me nothing; show me first the original of them, then I will believe that they are good”, or something of the kind. That of course, would be nonsense. As soon as he leaves his own domain, however, he has no power to understand how out of what he has before him, out of the true form of the human head, one can arrive at what is expressed in this human head. The picture must speak through itself, not through the mere likeness to the original. The human head speaks for itself. It corresponds to reality. It is the transformed lower man and points us back to the former Earth-life. One must however first provide what will make it possible to understand the reality aright.

The physical is thus seen to be a direct expression of the Spiritual. It is possible to understand the physical man as an expression of the Spiritual which is experienced between death and re-birth. The physical world explains itself and brings the spiritual world into this explanation. But we must first know this, saying to ourselves: The phenomena of nature are only a half, as long as we have them as mere sense-phenomena. We must first know this. Then we can find the bridge and understand the event that gave Earth its true meaning—the event of Golgotha: then we can understand how a purely spiritual event can at the same time enter right into physical life. If a man is not prepared to see the relation of the physical to the spiritual aright, he will never be able to grasp the fact that the Event of Golgotha is both a spiritual Event and an Event of the physical plane. When in the eighth General Ecumenical Council, in the year 869, the Spirit was eliminated, it was made impossible to understand the Event of Golgotha. The interesting point is that while the Western Churches started from Christianity, they took great care that the essence of Christianity should not be understood. For the nature and essence of Christianity must be grasped by the Spirit. The Western creeds set themselves against the Spirit, and one of the principal reasons why Anthroposophy is prohibited from the Roman Catholic side is that in Anthroposophy we have to relinquish the erroneous statement that ‘man consists of soul and body’ and return to the truth that ‘man consists of body, soul and Spirit’. The prohibition indicates the interest taken on that side to prevent man from coming to the knowledge of the Spirit, and so arriving at the true significance of the Event of Golgotha. Thus the whole knowledge which, as we see, throws so much light on the understanding of Man, has been entirely lost.

How then is an educational science to be constructed for the humanity of today, when the vision of the true nature of Man has been lost? To be an educationalist means to solve those sublime riddles which the child propounds to us, as it gradually brings forth that which has been laid into it between death and re-birth. The creeds however, reckon only with the post-mortem life—in order to humour human egotism; they have not reckoned that human life on Earth should be regarded as a continuation of the heavenly life. To demand of man that he should prove himself worthy of the claim made on him before he entered earthly life through birth, requires a certain selflessness of view, whereas the creeds have chiefly reckoned with egotism up to the present. Here, in Anthroposophy, whatever is of the nature of creed or faith gains, as it were, a moral colouring. Here purely theoretical knowledge is made to flow out into the higher ethical view and conception of the Universe. This should be understood by the friends of Anthroposophy. They should understand that in a sense, a moral inclination to spirituality is the preliminary condition for a knowledge of spiritual beings. In our present difficult time, it is specially necessary that attention should be paid to this moral side of the nature of the conception of the Universe. If we glance at what is taking place in the external world, we must say that empty talk, which is the sister of falsehood, is what has resulted from materialism, even for the ethical experience of humanity. This would become stronger and stronger if humanity were not helped by knowledge which leads to the Spirit, and which must be united with a raising of man's inner moral sense. We ought to acquire a realisation of how a spiritual-scientific conception of the world stands to the tasks and the whole dignity of Man and we should take this feeling as a starting point of our knowledge. This is only too necessary to mankind today, and one would like to find new phrases, new forms of expression in which to describe this aspect of the task of Spiritual Science!

Our last lectures showed the fundamental difference between man's whole conception here, from birth to death, and in the spiritual world, from death to a new birth. We have already explained that in the present epoch; i.e., ever since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, man may gain freedom during his existence between birth and death; everything on earth which he fulfils out of the impulse of freedom, gives his being, as it were, weight, reality and life. When we emancipate ourselves from the necessities of earthly existence, when we rise up to free motives guiding our will; that is to say, if we do not take anything out of earthly life for our will, then we create the possibility of independence also between death and a new birth. But in the present epoch this capacity of preserving our own independent existence after death calls for something which we may designate as the connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, for the Mystery of Golgotha may be viewed from many different aspects. In the course of the past years, we have already studied quite a number of these aspects; today we shall view the Mystery of Golgotha from a standpoint arising from the study of freedom and its significance for the human being.

Here on earth, between birth and death, the human being really does not have in his ordinary consciousness any conception of his own self. He cannot look into his own self. It is, of course, an illusion to believe, as external science does, that it is possible to obtain a knowledge of the inner constitution of the human organism by observing man's lifeless parts, indeed sometimes by studying only the corpse. This is an illusion, a deception. Here, between birth and death, man only has a conception of the external world. But of what kind is this conception? It is one which we have frequently characterized as the conception of illusion (Schein), of semblance, and I have again emphasized this yesterday.

When our senses are turned to the things which surround us in the world in which we live from birth to death, then the world appears to us as a semblance, as an illusion. This semblance may be taken into our Ego being. We may, for example, preserve it in our memory, and in a certain sense make it our own. But insofar as it stands before us when looking out into the world, it is an illusion which manifests itself particularly—as I have already explained to you yesterday—by disappearing with death and by re-appearing in another form; that is to say, we then no longer experience it within us, but before or around us.

If, however, in the present epoch we were not able to experience the world as an illusion during our existence from birth to death, if we were unable to experience this illusion, we could not be free. The development of freedom is only possible in the world of illusion. I have mentioned this in my book, The Riddle of Man, and have pointed out that in reality the world which we experience may be compared with the images that look out at us from a mirror. These pictures cannot force us, for they are only pictures, only a semblance. Similarly the world which we experience may be compared with the images that look out at us from a mirror. These pictures cannot force us, for they are only pictures, only a semblance. Similarly the world which we perceive is a semblance, an illusion. But the human being is not completely woven into this illusion of the world. He is woven into it only in regard to his perception, which fills his waking consciousness. But when he considers his impulses, instincts, passions and temperament, and everything that surges up from the human depths without his being able to grasp it in the form of clear concepts, at least in the form of waking concepts, then all this is not only a semblance or illusion; it is a reality, but one which does not rise up in man's present consciousness.

From birth to death, man lives in a real world unknown to him, one which cannot ever give him freedom. It may implant in him instincts which deprive him of freedom; it may call forth inner necessities, but never can it enable him to experience freedom. Freedom can only be experienced within a world of pictures, of semblance. When we wake up in the morning, we must enter a perceptive life of semblance, so that freedom may unfold. But this life of semblance, which constitutes our waking perceptive life, did not always exist in this form in mankind's historical evolution.

If we go back into ancient times, which have so often been envisaged in our lectures, to times when people still had a certain instinctive clairvoyance, or remnants of this clairvoyance (which lasted until the middle of the Fifteenth Century), we cannot in the same way say that man was surrounded only by a world of semblance. Of course, everything which man saw in his own way as the world's spiritual background, spoke through this semblance. He perceived the illusion, but differently; to him it was an expression, a manifestation of a spiritual world. This spiritual world then vanished behind the semblance, and only the semblance remained. The essential thing in the development of mankind is that in older times the semblance was viewed as the manifestation of a divine spiritual world, but the divine spiritual vanished from the semblance, so that man was confronted only by illusion, in order that he might discover freedom in this world of semblance. Man must therefore find freedom in a world of illusion; he does not find it in the world of reality which completely withdrew to the darkened experiences of his inner being; there, he can only find necessity. We may therefore say that the world which man perceives from birth to death—but everything I say applies to our age—is a world of semblance, of illusion. Man perceives the world, but in the form of semblance.

How do matters stand in regard to the life between death and a new birth? In our last lectures we explained that after death the human being does not perceive the external world which he sees here, between birth and death, but between death and a new birth he essentially perceives the human being himself, man's inner being. Man's world is then the human being. What is concealed here on earth, becomes manifest in the spiritual world. Between death and a new birth, man obtains insight into the whole connection between man's soul life and his organic life, or the activity of the single organs; in short, into everything which, symbolically speaking, lies enclosed within the human skin.

But we find that in the present age man cannot live in a world of illusion after death. He can only live in a world of illusion from birth to death. But between death and a new birth he cannot live in an illusion. When he passes through death, necessity imprisons him, as it were. Here on earth, he feels that he is free in regard to his perceptions, for he may turn his eyes to the things he wants to see; he may collect his perceptions in the form of thoughts, so as to feel the freedom of action in the sphere of thought; but between death and a new birth he feels a complete lack of freedom in regard to the world of his perceptions. This world takes hold of him violently, as it were. It is just as if he perceived as he would perceive here on earth if every sense perception were to hypnotize him, as if every sense perception were to take hold of him so as to render him unable to free himself from them of his own accord.

This is the course of man's development since the middle of the Fifteenth Century. The divine spiritual worlds vanished from the semblance which confronted him, but between death and a new birth, the divine spiritual worlds imprison him so that he cannot maintain his independence. I said that if we really develop freedom on earth; i.e., if we submit completely to the semblance in life, we may carry our own being through the portal of death. By envisaging still another difference between the present time and older human conceptions, we shall realize, however, what is needed in addition to this.

Whether we consider mankind in general, or the initiates and the Mysteries of ancient times, we find that the whole conception of the world had another direction from that of today. If we remain standing by what the human being has acquired ever since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, through the form of knowledge which has arisen since that time, we come across certain definite ideas on the development of the earth and of the human race. But man lost track of the conceptions which might have given him satisfactory indications about the beginning and end of the earth. We might say that he was able to survey a certain line of development; he looked back into history; he looked back into the geological development of the earth. But when he went back still further, he began to construct hypotheses. He imagined that the beginning of the world was a nebula, a kind of physical structure. Out of it developed; i.e., not really, but people imagined that this was so—the higher beings of the kingdoms of Nature: plants, animals, etc. Again, in accordance with conceptions of physics, people thought that life on earth and the earth itself would end by heat—again, a hypothesis. A fragment was thus surveyed, which lies between the beginning and end of the earth. Beginning and end became a hazy, unsatisfactory picture.

But this was different in a more remote past. In past times people had very clear notions of the beginning and end of the world, because they still saw the divine spiritual in the semblance. Bear in mind, for example, the Old Testament, or other religious teachings of the past. In the Old Testament we find ideas which are above all connected with the beginning of the world, and they are described in a form accessible to man, which enabled him to grasp his own existence upon the earth. The Kant-Laplace nebula instead, does not enable him to understand human life on earth. If you take the wonderful cosmogonies of the various pagan nations, you will again find that they enabled man to grasp his earthly existence. The human being thus directed his gaze towards the beginning of the earth and obtained thoughts which encompassed man. Conceptions of the end of the earth remained for a longer time in human consciousness. In Michelangelo's “Last Judgment,” for example, we come across ideas connected with the end of the world, which were handed down as far as our own epoch and which encompass man; for although the conceptions of sin and atonement are difficult, they do not do away with man.

But take the modern hypothetical conception of the end of the world: viz. that everything will end in uniform heat. Man's whole being dissolves, there is no room for him in the world. In addition to the disappearance of divine spiritual life from the illusion of perception, man therefore lost, in the course of time, his conceptions of the world's beginning and end. Within these ideas he could still assert himself and view himself within the cosmos as a being connected with the beginning and end of the earth.

How did the people of past epochs view history? No matter in what form they saw it, history was something which moved from the beginning to the end of the earth, and it obtained its meaning through the conceptions of the beginning and end of the earth. Take any of the pagan cosmologies: they will enable you to picture mankind's historical development. They reach back to ages when earthly life was still united with a divine spiritual weaving. History has a meaning. If we turn to the beginning and also to the end of the earth, history acquires a meaning. Whereas the conception of the end of the earth, as an imaginative conception contained in religious feeling, continued to exist even in more recent epochs; the conception of the end of the earth lived on in historical ideas, as a kind of straggler, even in more recent times. In historical works, such as Rotteck's “World History,” you may still find the influence of this idea of the world's beginning, which gives a meaning to history. The significant, peculiar fact is that at the same time in which man entered the stage of perceiving the world as an illusion, so that he perceived external Nature as an illusion, history began to lose its meaning and became inaccessible to man's direct knowledge, because he no longer had any notion of the earth's beginning and end.

Consider this fact quite seriously. Take the nebula at the beginning of the earth's development, from which undefined forms first condensed themselves, and then all the beings, rising as far as man. And consider the death by heat at the end of the earth's development, in which everything will perish. In between lies what we know, for example, concerning Moses, the great men of ancient China, the great men of ancient India, Persia, Egypt—and further on, of Greece and Rome, as far as our present time. In thought we may add all that has still to come. But all this takes place on earth like an episode, with no beginning and end. History thus appears to have no meaning. Let us realize this.

Nature may be surveyed, even if we cannot survey its inner essence. It rises up before us as a semblance together with the experience of our own self, between birth and death. Modern people simply lack the courage to admit that history has no meaning; it is meaningless, because man has lost track of the beginning and end of the world. He should really feel that mankind's historical development is the greatest of riddles. He should say to himself that the historical course of development has no sense.

Some people had an idea of this truth. Read what Schopenhauer wrote on the absence of meaning in history, when one sets out from occidental beliefs. This will show you that Schopenhauer really felt this absence of meaning in history. We should be filled with the longing to rediscover the meaning of history in some other way. The world of semblance enables us to develop a satisfactory knowledge of Nature, particularly in Goethe's meaning, if we give up hypotheses and remain by the phenomena; i.e., by the truths based on semblance, on illusion. Natural science may satisfy us, if we eliminate all the disturbing hypotheses connected with the beginning and end of the world. But we are then imprisoned, as it were, in our earthly cave and we do not look out of it. The Kant-Laplace theory and the end of the world by heat block our outlook into Time's cosmic distances.

This is after all the situation of present-day mankind from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness: consequently mankind is threatened by a certain danger. It cannot quite penetrate into the mere world of phenomena; above all it is unable to penetrate into this world of semblance with the forces of inner life. Man would like to submit to the inner necessity, to his instincts, impulses, and passions. Today we do not see much of all that may be realized on the basis of free impulses born out of pure thinking. But in the same degree in which man lacks freedom during his life from birth to death, he is overcome by lack of freedom, by the necessity of perception arising out of the hypnotizing coercion which exists between death and a new birth. Man is therefore threatened by the danger of passing through the portal of death without taking with him his own being and without penetrating into a free realm in regard to his perceptive world, but into something which submerges him into a state of coercion, which makes him, as it were, grow rigid in the external world.

The impulse which must in future enter the life of mankind is that the divine spiritual should appear to man in a new way, not in the same way in which it appeared in ancient times. In past epochs man could imagine a spiritual essence in the physical at the beginning and end of the earth, to which he was united and which did not exclude him. But this must take place in an ever-growing measure from the centre, instead of from the beginning and end. Even as in the Old Testament the beginning of the world was looked upon as a genesis of the human being, in which his existence was ensured, even as the pagan cosmogonies spoke of mankind's development out of a divine-spiritual existence, even as the contemplation of the end of the earth, which—as stated—was still contained in the conceptions of the end of the world and the final judgment, which do not deprive man of his own self, so modern times must find in a right conception of the Mystery of Golgotha, at the centre of the earth's development, that which again enables man to see divine life united with earthly life.

We should grasp in the right way that God passed through Man in the Mystery of Golgotha. This will replace what we lost in regard to the beginning and end of the earth. But there is an essential difference between the way in which we should now look upon the Mystery of Golgotha and the old way of looking at the beginning and end of the earth.

Try to penetrate into the way in which the pagan cosmogonies arose. In the present time we often come across conceptions stating that these pagan cosmogonies were thought out in the same way in which modern men freely join thought to thought and disconnect them again. But this is an erroneous University conception which has no reasonable foundation. We find instead that in the past, man gave himself up entirely to the contemplation of the world; he could see the beginning of the world only in the way in which it appeared to him in the cosmogony and in the myths. There was no freedom in this; it was altogether the result of necessity. Man had to envisage the beginning of the earth, he could not refrain from doing so. In the present time, we no longer conceive in the right way how in the past man's soul confronted the beginning of the world and, in a certain respect, also the end of the world with the aid of an instinctive knowledge. Today it is impossible for the human soul to envisage the Mystery of Golgotha in this way. This constitutes the great difference between Christianity and the ancient teachings of the Gods. If we wish to find Christ, we must find him in freedom and turn to the Mystery of Golgotha freely. But the content of the ancient cosmogonies was forced upon man, whereas the Mystery of Golgotha does not force itself upon him. He must approach the Mystery of Golgotha in freedom and his being must pass through a kind of resurrection.

Man is led to such freedom by an activity which I have recently designated in anthroposophical spiritual science as the cognitive activity. A clergyman who believes that he may gain knowledge of the “Akasha Chronicle” through an “illustrated luxury edition”, that is to say without any inner activity on his part, for the grasping of truths which should appear before his soul in the form of concepts and become images—such a clergyman would simply show that he is predisposed to grasp the world only in a pagan way, not in a Christian way; for Christ must be reached in inner freedom. Particularly the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha should be faced, constitutes the most intimate means of an education towards freedom.

If the Mystery of Golgotha is experienced rightly, it already tears us away from the world. What arises in that case? In the first place, we live in a world of apparent perception and in it surges up something which leads us to a spiritual life guaranteed by the Mystery of Golgotha. This is one thing. But the other thing is that history ceased to have a meaning, because beginning and end were lost; it obtains a new meaning when it receives it anew from the centre. We learn to recognize that everything before the Mystery of Golgotha tends towards the Mystery of Golgotha as its goal, and everything after the Mystery of Golgotha sets out from it.

History thus once more acquires a meaning, whereas otherwise it is an illusory episode without beginning and end; the world which we perceive outside faces us as an illusion for the sake of our own freedom and also changes history into something which it should not be—an illusory episode without any centre of gravity. It dissolves into fog and mist and theoretically we already find this in Schopenhauer's writings.

By tending towards the Mystery of Golgotha, all that was once mere illusion in history obtains inner life, an historical soul, connected with everything which modern man requires through the fact that he must develop freedom in life. He will then pass through the portal of death with the great teaching of freedom. Avowal of the Mystery of Golgotha throws into life a light which must fall on everything in man that is capable of freedom. And having the disposition to freedom in the illusory aspect of the world which is given to him, he has the possibility to escape the danger of failing to develop freedom, because after death he submits to instincts and passions, thus falling a prey to necessity. By accepting a religious faith which is quite different from those of the past, by allowing his whole soul to be filled by a religious faith which only lives in freedom, he becomes able to experience freedom.

In the present civilization, only a small number of people have really grasped that only a knowledge gained in freedom, a knowledge gained by inner activity, is able to lead us to Christ, to the Mystery of Golgotha. The Bible gave man the historical record so that he might have a message of the Mystery of Golgotha for the time when he could not yet take in spiritual science.

To be sure, the Gospel will never lose its value. It will have an every greater value, but the Gospel must be added to the direct knowledge of the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ should be felt and recognized also with the aid of human forces, not only with the aid of the forces working through the Gospel. This is what spiritual science strives for in regard to Christianity. Spiritual science seeks to explain the Gospels, but it is not based upon the Gospels. It is able to appreciate the Gospels so fully, just because it discovered, as it were, subsequently, all that lies concealed in them, all that has already been lost in the course of mankind's outer development.

You see, the whole modern development of mankind is thus connected on the one hand with freedom and the illusion of perception, and on the other, with the Mystery of Golgotha and the meaning of the historical development. The sequence of many episodes which constitutes history as it is generally described and accepted today, obtains its true weight if the Mystery of Golgotha can be set into the historical course of development.

Many people felt this in the right way and also used appropriate images for this. They said to themselves: Once upon a time, man looked out into the heavenly spaces; he saw the Sun, but not as we see it now. Today there are physicists who think that out there in the universe there swims a large sphere of gaseous matter. I have frequently said that they would be astonished if they could build a world airship and reach the Sun, for where they suppose the existence of a gaseous sphere, they would find negative space, which would transport them in a moment not only into Nothing, but beyond Nothing, far beyond the sphere of Nothing. The cosmologies developed today, the modern materialistic cosmologies, are pure fantasy. In past epochs, people did not imagine the Sun as a gaseous sphere swimming in the heavenly spaces, but they saw a Spiritual Being in the Sun. Even today the Sun is a Spiritual Being to those who contemplate the world in a real way; it is a Spiritual Being manifesting itself only outwardly in the way in which the eye is able to perceive the Sun. In Christ an older human race felt the presence of this central Spiritual Being. When speaking of Christ, it pointed to the Sun.

By recognizing the Sun as a Spiritual Being, it was possible to connect a conception worthy of man with the beginning and end of the earth. The conception of Jesus, who was Christ's abode, renders possible a conception worthy of man in regard to the middle of the earth's development, and from there will ray out towards beginning and end that which will once more make the whole cosmos appear in a light that gives man his place in the universe. We should therefore envisage a future in which hypotheses concerning the world's beginning and end will not be constructed on the basis of materialistic, natural-scientific conceptions, but in which the point of issue will be the knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. This will also enable us to survey the whole cosmic development. In ancient times, the Christ was felt to be outside in the cosmos, where the Sun was shining. A true knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha enables us to see in the historical development of the earth the Sun of the earth's development shining through Christ. The Sun shines outside in the world and also in history—it shines physically outside, and spiritually in history; Sun here, and Sun there.

This indicates the path to the Mystery of Golgotha from the aspect of freedom. Modern mankind must find it, if it wants to come out of the forces of descent and enter the ascending forces. This should be realized fully and profoundly. This knowledge will not be abstract, not merely theoretical, but one that fills the whole human being. It will be a knowledge which must be felt and experienced in feeling. The Christianity which Anthroposophy will have to teach, will not only imply looking at Christ, but being filled by Christ.

People always want to know the difference between the teachings of the older Theosophy and the truths that live in Anthroposophy. Is this difference not evident? The older Theosophy warmed up the pagan cosmology. In the theosophical literature you will discover everywhere warmed-up pagan cosmologies, which are no longer suited to modern men, and although Theosophy speaks of the world's beginning and end, this no longer means what it meant in the past. What is missing in the writings of an older Theosophy? The centre is missing, the Mystery of Golgotha is missing throughout. It is missing to an even greater extent than in external natural science.

Anthroposophy has a continued cosmology which does not blot out the Mystery of Golgotha, but admits it, so that it is contained in it. The whole evolution, reaching back as far as Saturn and forward as far as Vulcan, will take its course in such a way that the light enabling us to see it, will ray out from our knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. If we but recognize this fundamental contrast, we shall no longer have any doubt as to the difference between the older Theosophy and Anthroposophy.

Particularly when so-called Christian theologians again and again put together Anthroposophy and Theosophy, this is due to the fact that they do not really understand much about Christianity. For it is deeply significant that Nietzsche's friend, Overbeck, the truly conspicuous theologian of Basle, wrote a book on the Christianity of modern theology, in which he tried to prove that modern theology; i.e., the Christian theology, is no longer Christian. One may therefore say: Even in regard to this point, external science has already drawn attention to the fact that modern Christian theology does not understand anything about Christianity and knows nothing about it.

One should thoroughly understand all that is unchristian. Modern theology, in any case, is not Christian; it is unchristian through love of ease, through indolence. Yet people prefer to ignore these things, which should not be ignored, for to the extent in which they are ignored, people will lose the possibility to experience Christianity in a real way, from within. This must be experienced, for it is the other pole of the experience of freedom, which must appear. Freedom must be experienced, but the experience of freedom alone would lead us into the abyss. Only the Mystery of Golgotha can lead us across this abyss.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends! It is incumbent upon me to open this third official members’ meeting of this association for an independent school system, the Waldorf School Association. It gives me great satisfaction to be able to welcome you warmly in the name of the Board, and I would also like to express my pleasure in the fact that you intend to discuss with us the future fate of the Waldorf School Association. Before we embark on today’s official agenda, please allow me to preface the report from the Board with some remarks on the affairs of the Waldorf School and on the course of the Waldorf School movement as such, to the extent that you are involved in this process.

Just a short time ago, an extremely gratifying pedagogical and artistic conference¹ took place, at which the aspirations of the Waldorf School movement (actually, of any educational movement that does justice to the demands of the present and the near future) were graphically presented to an audience that probably included all of you as well as many other interested parties. For the moment, therefore, in speaking of the current status of the Waldorf School movement, it is only necessary to point to what came to light at this pedagogical-artistic conference.

However, I would like to still allow myself the luxury of emphasizing a few things that were important for the basic tone of this gathering. We held this last conference at a time when, as I was able to make you aware, the will of the Waldorf School movement had been able to prove itself and demonstrate its spread, as was apparent from the fact that I myself had been invited to speak on the nature of this movement on the occasion of the Shakespeare festival in Stratford in 1922. As a result of this, the Waldorf School movement became known in England, and this in turn resulted in an invitation to hold the vacation lecture series in Oxford. This put me in a position to speak at some length in England on what the Waldorf School is actually trying to accomplish. These Oxford lectures then resulted in the founding of an English school association that will focus for the time being on transforming the Kings Langley School into a Waldorf School of sorts. It will also work to disseminate the idea of the Waldorf School in England. This demonstrates, however, that ideals and impulses that are inherent in the Waldorf School movement engage current interests in a very intense way. And here, too, the fact that a number of teachers from England visited the Waldorf School over a longer period of time at the beginning of this year shows how strongly this interest has taken hold in England in particular.

A further consequence of the spread of the Waldorf School idea was the course that I held in Dornach just a short time ago for a number of Swiss teachers and educators who organized it.² In addition to the Swiss teachers, however, seventeen Czech teachers took part in the course. At this course in particular, it was evident that in the hearts of people involved in education, it is a matter of course that something such as what is being attempted by our school movement needs to come about. In everything you heard at this course in Dornach, you could really recognize the educational professionals’ deep longing for something to enter the art of education that would aim very strongly at both spiritualizing the art of education and making it truly practical.

It is also very understandable that a quite specific feeling should have come up and been expressed by the participants in this last educational course in Switzerland. Those who experience strongly what such a course attempts to accomplish come away with a feeling of consternation; they feel overwhelmed. Now, I am only recounting what was expressed to me at the course in Dornach: Someone who was stating the view of many of the attendees said that the serious-minded among them were overwhelmed to see how little they were in a position to cope in their own souls with all the pedagogically necessary impulses that assailed them over a period of just a few days.

You can see that I then had to respond to this objection, which seemed totally justified to me. A thought such as this expresses what is present in many people today. Many people of the present day know perfectly well that some incisive intervention must take place if our system of education is to be able to meet the social demands placed on it and to extricate itself from the circumstances into which it has fallen. We really do not often take stock of how necessary an incisive reform of our educational impulses is. But if we think about it, we find that in their heart of hearts, parents and teachers are half-consciously or fully consciously convinced of the need for such incisive impulses to enter the system of education. Then people hear what we have to say. In fact, at the artistic and pedagogical conference, many people reached the point of saying, in effect, “All that needs to be done? How are we going to manage that? We get such a wealth of demands dumped on us in the course of just a few days;”—excuse me for expressing it like this, but this is a feeling I have often heard—“we come here with the best of intentions and leave feeling like a poodle that has been drenched with ideals instead of water. Our first impulse is to shake off what has been dumped on us.”

As I said, this was actually expressed frequently at the last conference in Dornach. My response was, “Yes, certainly I can see that, but you need to keep in mind that people have had a long time to get used to the educational practices that are prevalent everywhere in schools today. They grew up with them and are comfortable with them. Because people always have only a few days available to devote to progressive impulses, everything we have to say to them has to be said in a few days. Under these circumstances, it is totally understandable that people feel dumped on. However, if it is possible for the suggestions that will continue to be made to arouse interest in these issues among ever broader circles, then we will also eventually be in a position to present what we have to say at a slower place. Then people would not need to feel overwhelmed.”

This is proof that very intensive work is needed so that it will eventually be possible for us to actually set the pace that most people need, it seems, in order to grasp our ideas, rather than burdening people with them in the twinkling of an eye, as it were. I must point out that if this insight is taken as a starting point, then people would give us the opportunity to express ourselves more exactly and more slowly. So everything depends on a real interest in this issue of ours developing in ever broader circles. As things stand at the moment, the situation is very strange.

You know, we must keep in mind the inner process the Waldorf School movement has gone through in the four years of its existence. Naturally, the facts need to be weighed up in the right way. We now have around seven hundred students in the Waldorf School and nearly forty teachers. Years ago we started with fewer teachers and not even two hundred fifty students. The meaning of these two numbers—two hundred or two hundred fifty students then, and seven hundred now—is something extremely characteristic of the Waldorf School movement. They indicate not only a pedagogical and methodological, but also a complete cultural and social transformation of the Waldorf School movement, a real transformation. Depending on your taste, you can say either that it has found its feet or that it has been stood on its head; it does not matter to me. What I mean is the following: When the Waldorf School was founded, the thought among our friends was a social one. The intention was to found a comprehensive school of some sort, in accordance with the social impulses that prevailed at that time and that were surfacing in people’s social thinking and feeling in 1919. The idea of the Waldorf School was conceived on the basis of social circumstances. And now neither you nor Herr Molt will take it badly if I put forth a risky hypothesis—which is of course to be taken with the famous grain of salt—of how this transformation has taken place. I will try to express it clearly.

Assume for a moment that Herr Molt had not been an anthroposophist, but simply one of the many philanthropic factory owners of that time. This was not the case, but we may suppose that it was. On the basis of the social circumstances of the times, he would still have conceived the idea to found a school, but the Waldorf School as it is today would surely not have come about. The Waldorf School as it is today came about simply because it was born out of anthroposophy—that is, out of the circumstance that someone who was not only a philanthropic factory owner, but also Herr Molt the anthroposophist, conceived the idea and turned to anthroposophy for help with the school’s instructional methodology.

These are the cultural, historical and social factors. An idea characteristic of the times was realized with the help of anthroposophy, which was to provide the instructional methodology.

Now you see, over the course of time a transformation has taken place, and now a large percentage of the students we have today are here because of the pedagogy and methods that are cultivated in the Waldorf School. That the idea of the Waldorf School has expanded within the school itself is due to this pedagogy and these methods, so the original idea has been turned inside out. The original idea attracted the pedagogy and methodology that is used here. However, the Waldorf School is what it is today—and rightly so—because of this pedagogy and methodology. They were the main reason why parents who brought their children to us later on sought out the Waldorf School. Thus, in the course of these four years, an important development has taken place: Within the Waldorf School, a pedagogy and methodology born out of anthroposophy have come into their own.

And this pedagogy and methodology were what interested the people in England, what called forth the course in Dornach and so on. There is a specific pedagogical idea that is being realized in the Waldorf School, and that is what I have recently had to emphasize ever more strongly. The seven hundred students and the general expansion of the Waldorf School are due to the pedagogy and methodology that are practiced in the school. This is also demonstrated by frequent attempts to found schools on the example of the Waldorf School.

For me, naturally, what has become a reality here was the important thing from the very beginning. From the very beginning I conceived of the task of the Waldorf School as a purely pedagogical and methodological one, and in fact it has become apparent over time that wherever people were interested in the idea of the Waldorf School, this was because of its pedagogy and methodology.

Now there was a decisive interest in these various courses on the part of teachers and educators, but I must say that it has also been demonstrated in the longings of the parents. You know, the day before yesterday a number of parents from Berlin approached me again and told me that they had started small school groups in which they had offered instruction and tried to apply Waldorf School principles, but that now the government had come and would no longer allow it, so they had to send their children to the public schools. They asked whether it would not perhaps be possible to create a means of informing people by setting up a branch of the Waldorf School in Berlin. They thought that since it is still possible here, where things are administered more liberally, to not have the government intervening in the Waldorf School, it might also be possible in Berlin if a branch Waldorf School were opened.

I told them that it would not work, and that we needed to realize from this example that carrying out the idea of the Waldorf School is not possible without outreach into the broadest possible circles on behalf of the idea, which recognizes what thousands and thousands of people, or even more than that, are unconsciously wanting. These people basically want the same thing that is wanted here and simply are afraid to admit that they want it. And I still maintain that I did the right thing in issuing the challenge to found the World School Association once the model was there. I also still maintain that our task is not to get involved in all kinds of other experiments that pop up all over the place like quackery in the field of medicine, if I might put it like that—not real quackery, of course, but what is branded as quackery—but that it is more important to spread a real understanding of Waldorf education ever further and further. It must be spread ever further, and then the other thing will happen too.

You see, the Waldorf School is actually a challenge inherent in the evolution of education and in the relationship of educational evolution to the great ideas of culture and society. Perhaps it will be of interest to you if I draw your attention to how a turn-about in human feeling has occurred over a longer period of time, and how our thoughts have not caught up with it.

In March, 1792, there was an imperial chancellor in Central Europe for whom the task of educating the populace was merely a matter to be summarized as follows: “It is incumbent upon governments as a matter of course to disseminate the riches of the spirit, and in this just as in the enjoyment of man’s other social affairs it is up to governments to form a national policing agency of a sort.” This was spoken out of the feeling of concern for educational matters that was current at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was thought that the people had to receive directives from above with regard to the enjoyment of all social and human concerns, and especially with regard to administering pedagogical and methodological affairs.

And in the nineteenth century there was a person named Fröbel³ who said already as a young man of twenty-three, “All experiments in the field of pedagogy, including those of Pestalozzi, seem to me to be something crude and merely empirical. It would be necessary to arrive at exact principles of instruction, just as natural science has exact principles.” That was what Frobel said.

These two things, the pronouncement of the imperial chancellor Rottenhahn in 1792 and the passage from the letter by young Fröbel to his friend Krause, permit us an approximate characterization of what was alive at that time. The opinion prevalent at that time, which is still prevalent and must now be overcome, was that there was no need for further ideas on issues such as education and its methods; it was a matter of course to leave such things to the state. And the other idea was the sovereignty of the natural sciences: Whoever studied them and took them as their point of departure would necessarily discover the appropriate pedagogy.

Within both the current of subordination to the state and the current of science, it has become evident that we have reached a dead end in the field of education. Of course people had the best intentions in saying that it was necessary to establish a form of state policing in the field of pedagogy. Of course they had the best in mind, but that did not prevent the development of all the things that people now feel must change.

Educators are sighing to see things change; they say that they do not know how they ought to be dealing with human beings, that they believed that the art of dealing with human beings could derive from a—I cannot call it a mishmash, since that is not how the adherents of exact science would talk, so let us call it a synthesis simply to use a different word—a synthesis of anthropology, psychology, and ethnology. More recently, psychiatry is also being included. Time has shown that what Frobel wanted is not acceptable to a deeper feeling for education. In all the people attending the courses, in the wish for a branch Waldorf School in Berlin, it was evident that people are certain that something has to happen, but when Waldorf school people talk to them about things, they are like poodles drenched with the water of ideals. It cannot work its way into their heads in a few days; nevertheless, they know that something has to happen.

We must keep clearly in mind that our efforts correspond to the desires of thousands and thousands of people, and that we must do everything we can to make the idea of the Waldorf School and all its impulses become ever more popular, so that people begin to see it as a challenge of our times. All this needs is to awaken in many people the courage to recognize and act on what they have long experienced in their heart of hearts in an indefinite way. It has still been my hope recently that this would flow into the hearts of the friends of the Waldorf School ideal who come to gatherings such as this one, because this is the most important thing we need—to have the interest spread, to have the efforts to popularize the Waldorf School spread. This is what we need.

And you know, something similar is necessary with regard to our method’s inner progress. When we founded the Waldorf School four years ago, we had eight grades. It was clearly apparent to us that we had to work out of a striving that had remained unconscious to Fröbel and his ilk, that we had to create our curricula and educational goals on the basis of a true understanding of the human being, which can only grow out of the fertile ground of anthroposophy. Then we would have a universally human school, not a school based on a particular philosophy or denomination, but a truly universally human school.

The ideal that had been hovering over people for centuries was clear to us then. Since we had to take other existing circumstances into account, we had to accept compromises, but only to a certain extent: The first three school years would have to be allowed to run their course in a way that derived its standards for instructional goals and curricula only from the teachings of human nature itself. Upon completion of grade six (at age twelve) and grade eight (at age fourteen) we would try to have the children at a point where they would be able to transfer to other schools. We wanted to create the possibility of making the Waldorf School ideal a reality for as long as possible, on the one hand, and yet still offer the children the possibility to transfer.

This is something that is actually easier to carry out with regard to the eight primary grades than it is for the expansion of the school into grades nine through twelve, which has also become necessary. To the primary school education we offer, we need to add college-preparatory and vocational high school education. People are now saying that we need to get these young ladies and gentlemen to the point where they can pass the Abiturand enter a college or university. (Although the good will is there among certain individuals to open an institution of higher learning ourselves, this is a huge illusion for the time being, and the things we cultivate must always rest on real and solid ground.)

Naturally, there are inherent difficulties in our needing to prepare the young ladies and gentlemen who graduate from this school to take the Abiturso that they will be able to attend colleges that will grant them the degrees they need in what is now called “real life.” It immediately becomes apparent that in the upper grades, it is much more difficult to cope with both the challenge of the Waldorf School ideal of deriving educational goals and curricula from human nature itself, on the one hand, and the coincidental curricula that include nothing of what human nature demands, on the other.

When these young adults are fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years old, we would really need to be introducing them to real practical life, which means that they should understand something of what happens in real practical life. But instead of that, along comes the teacher of Greek and Latin, reproaching us for trying to incorporate real demands based on understanding the human being, for including lessons in chemical and technological subjects, in weaving and spinning—in short, in things people should know about in real life. Along comes the Latin teacher, complaining of not having enough time to prepare people for the Abitur.

This is how these unsolvable conflicts arise. On the one hand, we are trying to make the idea of the Waldorf School a reality in the best and purest way possible, and on the other hand we have to break this up with all kinds of compromises that are imposed by the fact that we are not allowed to tear the young people away from so-called real life, if you will excuse the expression. If we help them find their place in life as they should, they are rejected by so-called real life and become bohemians. (I used that word recently in the course in Switzerland and immediately had to apologize because some of the participants were from Bohemia.) The fact is, however, that we must come to the fundamental realization that we are not striving for bohemianism as an ideal, but for a really practical life, for a way of teaching and raising children that gives people a firm footing in real life. But before we can do this, an understanding of what human nature really encompasses and demands must become as widespread as possible.

Thus, we will not popularize the idea of the Waldorf School without first deciding to make understandable what I have pointed out today. In broader circles we will not popularize the idea of the Waldorf School if we speak only of abstract things, of having the children learn comfortably and through play and so on. If we present the same trivial thoughts that others also present, if we do not go into the concrete things that really lie dormant in people’s hearts, we will not succeed in popularizing the idea of the Waldorf School.

Today we are faced with the difficult task of having to do something so that in future we are not always living from hand to mouth with regard to the Waldorf School’s finances. Given the existing state of the finances, we never know whether we will be able to sustain the school for three or four months into the future; we are forced to economize with no end in sight. Of course it is true that the idea of the Waldorf School gives us such a firm footing that we can also summon the enthusiasm to go on into the unknown. On the other hand, however, responsibilities do arise. Actually, hiring each new teacher is such a responsibility that it really needs to be said for once that financing the Waldorf School, which is the point of departure of the Waldorf School movement as the first pedagogical example of how to raise and educate children according to this method, would have to rest on foundations that guarantee a certain measure of stability.

That is what I wanted to add as the necessary consequence of what I said before, so to speak. This august body would need to apply every means available to come to decisions that will make it possible to stabilize the financing of the Waldorf School at least to the extent that we know we will be able to carry the responsibility for it, and that it will never get to the point where the whole thing falls apart in a few months. We see the factors involved in taking our cause to the world in a financial sense. If this would happen, the outer framework would be there too.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I can assure you that the things we experience in courses such as the ones I gave at Oxford and in Switzerland, the things we experience as the longings of teachers and parents, show that the Waldorf School movement is a challenge that is deeply embedded in the evolution of our civilization. This is proved in practical terms today by what has gone before. On the other hand, our ways of working in the Waldorf School, the fact that there is actually something present in the college of teachers, gives evidence of something from which the entire Waldorf School impulse radiates. It demonstrates how a strong will is making itself felt in the world out of the purest possible enthusiasm, as may have become evident to you most clearly during the recent artistic and pedagogical conference. In these two aspects, I might say, the school stands on firm foundations. Please excuse me for asking you to consider ways in which these two pillars which I have particularly tried to characterize, the first pillar of the challenge of the times coming from parents and teachers and the second pillar of the sacred, expert and fully appropriate enthusiasm that lives in the Waldorf School, can be joined by the third pillar of stabilizing the school’s financial foundations.

It is sad to have to speak of this. However, the fact of the matter is that doing anything at the present time takes money, lots of money. We can be certain that if we find ways to awaken understanding for the impulse of the Waldorf School, we will also arrive at the necessary financial means. This is why we must find the way from the first part of what I presented to what I have so presumptuously—there is no other word for it in this case—added to it by way of conclusion.

Points of business followed.

• 1. In Stuttgart, April 25-29, 1923. See Rudolf Steiner’s Pädagogik und Kunst, Pädagogik und Moral [Pedagogy and Art; Pedagogy and Morality], lectures and speeches, Dornach, 1978.
• 2. April 15-22, 1923. See Die pädagogische Praxis vom Gesichtspunkte geisteswissenschaftlicher Menschenerkenntnis [Pedagogical Practice from the Perspective of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge of the Human Being], eight lectures given in Dornach in 1923, GA 306, Dornach 1975. The Child’s Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996.
• 3. Friedrich Fröbel, 1782-1852.

[ 1 ] Yesterday we referred to the important turning point in human evolution at the beginning of the third mystery epoch, when man's participation in the cosmic things in transubstantiation and in the act of consecration of man began to occur in the astral body. This is that member of the human being which leaves the physical body as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, and which is unreceptive for percepts from the environment during the time of the separation.

[ 2 ] Let's try to get a clear idea of how this astral body functions in present-day man. It is the member which transmits the thoughts which enable us to understand the world. For thoughts about one's environment disappear as soon as one's astral body leaves the physical and etheric bodies.

[ 3 ] We can round out this idea if we realize that the ego-organization—the actual ego in man as he is today—is the receiver of sense impressions. However, the latter are obliterated when the ego-organization leaves the physical and etheric bodies.

So that we can say: here are the physical and etheric bodies of the human being, and during sleep the astral body and ego-organization are outside. The ego-organization gives us our sense percepts and sensations when we are awake. There is no sense perception during sleep, because the ego-organization is not in the physical and etheric bodies and because the ego is not receptive for impressions from the environment during that time. Likewise, the astral body gives us thoughts when it is in the physical and etheric bodies, but when it is outside it is not sensitive to things in the world and it gives us no impressions.

[ 4 ] However, it was this astral body which became receptive for what I described to you, during the third mystery epoch when man was to connect himself with divine, spiritual beings through cultic words and through everything the priest did in the way of preparatory exercises. It became receptive for the elaboration of the transubstantiation in itself during communion, and after the transubstantiation was elaborated it became receptive for apocalyptic things.

[ 5 ] The same kind of thing has to happen in the ego-organizations of people from the present epoch on. Even though this ego-organization can only experience sense impressions in ordinary consciousness, it must be constituted in such a way that it experiences transubstantiations and in such a way that it can participate in apocalyptic things through the latter.

[ 6 ] People can really become receptive for these things today, that is, someone can really become a priest if he takes in ideas which are true spiritual copies of the supersensible world. Therewith we have described the esoteric or inner connection between the esotericism which rightfully exists today and what must live in a priest's soul. We have described what can make the Christian Community a bearer of an important part of the new mysteries. We must only consider how the Anthroposophy which is approaching human beings today is really constituted.

[ 7 ] I have often used an analogy. I said that people are inclined to accept things which are supported by outer perceptions and experiments today, but they don't want to accept things which are not supported in this way. However, anyone who has this attitude is like a person who says: every rock on earth must be supported so that it won't fall down and therefore the planets in the universe must also be supported so that they won't fall down. Of course, since it's taught in a traditional and authoritative way, people believe that the planets in the universe mutually carry each other without supports. However, many people doubt that Anthroposophical truths support and carry each other, and that they don't have to be supported by outer observations and experiments.

[ 8 ] As soon as one sees that Anthroposophical truths are valid because they all support each other, so that the truths mutually support each other, in that moment one will stop saying: I can't see anything in the spiritual world yet and therefore I can't understand the content of Anthroposophy. Instead one will begin to understand Anthroposophy through the fact that its truths mutually support each other, and one will then work one's way further into it.

[ 9 ] The main thing which can and must put this body of priests on its inner path today is the task of penetrating what is given about the spiritual world. If it does tread this path, we should make it clear to ourselves that the attitude of soul which someone gets into if he takes possession of Anthroposophy in an honest way enables him to approach the Apocalypse. It enables one to approach it in such a way that one can say: It's true that the Apocalypse exists, but if I let it work upon me, each one of its images or Imaginations becomes united with my own ego. And then comes the moment where this Apocalypse can be a creation of the human ego and not just a personal experience. However, we must try to approach the Apocalypse in an Anthroposophical way. There's no other context which leads to it today.

[ 10 ] We will now try to grasp a few of the main points in the Apocalypse in a spiritual way, if I may put it that way. [ 11 ] “I am Alpha and Omega.” Expressed in an ancient form: one only understands alpha or A if one knows that a sound or letter as a component of a word was not the abstract, separate and meaningless thing back then, that we experience today. A sound was something which deserved to have a name. Mankind has treated The sounds of language which really enclose a great mystery in a peculiar way.

[ 12 ] Mankind has treated the sounds of language in the way that a policeman treats a criminal. A long time ago it numbered the letters in the way that we give numbers to criminals when they are put into their cells, so that they lose their names and get numbers. Sounds have lost their identity through the numbering process. This is a pictorial way of putting it, but a true one nevertheless.

[ 13 ] For if we go back before the late Hebraic period when they first gave numbers to the sounds, we find that mankind was fully aware that it is quite right for a sound to have a name, and that one can say alpha to it because it is a divine, supersensible being. If we want to find out what this first letter alpha of the so-called alphabet really is, we will have to go through a kind of spiritual development or conceptual development.

[ 14 ] You know that Anthroposophy goes back in earth evolution through Moon, Sun to Saturn. It tries to dig up things in the world which are connected with the evolution of man. We find the first cosmic human germ on Saturn, which became the present human body after manifold transformations during Sun, Moon and earth. Man was present on Saturn in his first, germinal form.

[ 15 ] For anyone who honestly and seriously wants to see the true state of affairs in this area, it's no doubt quite important to ask what men really experienced on old Saturn. Man experienced successive conditions of warmth. Man absorbed various states of warmth and cold. He existed in states which really only told him something about warmth conditions in the cosmos, for although they also told him many spiritual things, they only disclosed a limited region of the spirit through differentiated warmth and cold.

[ 16 ] If we go on from Saturn to Sun, we find that man's organism has become differentiated. During Sun existence man lives in a physical body which is differentiated into warmth ether and air. Differentiation also occurs within as man becomes filled with a richer content. He not only perceives the differentiated warmth like on old Saturn, but something like an inner life emerges. Man perceives the warmth on the Sun with his old perception and he also perceives an inner breathing rhythm in himself which in turn is an expression and a reflection of cosmic secrets.

[ 17 ] Just look at how the human being becomes richer as he evolves from Saturn to Sun. He also gets richer as he evolves from Sun to Moon and from Moon to Earth. And he will continue to get richer as he develops on Jupiter and up to Vulcan.

[ 18 ] Let's ask ourselves what the relation of man to the world is on ancient Saturn. On old Saturn man's relation to the world is such that he perceives a very large number of different warmths, but qualitatively he perceives very little. Not much of the world is in man. Man is present as man and he is just a man, as it were; not much of the world is in him yet. As he moves forward through Sun, Moon, earth and on to Jupiter his inner life becomes filled with the world more and more, and therefore it is richer. We already have a large part of the world in us here on earth. And when the earth gets to the stage where it will pass away again, man will have elaborated a large part of the macrocosm and he will bear it in him as earthly copies.

[ 19 ] We bear it within us already, but people are not usually aware of this. When a human being moves upwards through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to a knowledge of the spirit, his inner soul life becomes ever more magnificent. Look at how little man knows about the human eye in his ordinary consciousness. But this eye is a whole cosmos, and like the macrocosm all of its details are marvelous and great. Every single organ in man becomes unveiled in a wonderful way in his physical body already. So that when an initiate looks around him he sees a world with the elements down below and its sun, moon and stars up above. If he looks into himself he sees that the eye, ear, lung, liver and every other organ is a world in itself, and that man's physical body is a marvelous interaction of worlds. Some of these worlds are finished, others are just beginning, some are sensory, others are half supersensible or entirely supersensible. Man really bears ever more worlds in himself as he works his way through one evolution after another.

[ 20 ] Thus we can distinguish man at the start of old Saturn evolution, where he is just beginning, where he is man, although he doesn't bear the world in himself yet. The first thing which man acquired during old Saturn evolution was a perception of the circumference of the warmth body which he felt that he was. So that in a schematic way we can say that man feels that he is warmth on old Saturn, but after he has felt that he is a warmth mollusk he gradually feels something like an accumulation of warmth, like an outer skin, a warmth skin, a somewhat cooler sheath than the warmth which is in him. He feels manifold degrees or intensities of warmth within him, and the warmth skin is the coolest.

[ 21 ] We express this in our present language, but this language is abstract and it doesn't conjure up the greatness of such a mental image before our soul, if we look into the course of time and we want to go back to old Saturn. However, people who are moved by a perception of these things at all are also moved by the awe with which such things were looked upon in the ancient mysteries. In the ancient Greek chthonic mysteries, they still spoke of Saturn men who didn't have a warmth skin yet, and then of men who had taken the first part of the world into their warmth skins; for the latter had a certain structure and form which imitated the world. This was the first thing from the world.

[ 22 ] What do man's experiences which he had while he was still a warmth man look like from a subjective, psychic viewpoint? They are like absolute amazement about the world. If one wants to describe them, one has to call them complete amazement. For one cannot grasp warmth in any other way than as sheer amazement. Outwardly it is warmth and inwardly it is complete astonishment. It's only because people have become as blockheaded as old Kant was, that they speak of a thing in itself which can't be explained. The thing in itself of warmth is astonishment;' and Saturn man is astonishment just as much as he is warmth. He lived in amazement or astonishment about his own existence, for he was just entering into this existence. This is alpha; the Saturn warmth man who is living in amazement. And the first thing which man experiences as the housing of the world, namely his skin, is beta,—building, this building or house. Man was a man in his house, and the house or temple or skin was the first thing from the world: beta.

[ 23 ] If we go through the alphabet like this, we go through the whole world. When man gradually absorbs everything which the world was and unites it with his being, until by Vulcan he will become united with the whole wide world to which he belongs, he will be the one he was at the beginning of Saturn evolution plus the whole world. He will be alpha and everything else too. But everything else amounts to the whole world. This is omega—man and everything in him which is the world. The “I am alpha and omega” describes what man will be at the end of the Vulcan period. At the end of Vulcan evolution, man will be able to say: I am alpha and omega. [ 24 ] Let's look at the Mystery of Golgotha from the vantage point of what we have placed before ourselves as the beginning, middle and end of human evolution. At the Mystery of Golgotha or approximately the halfway point in world evolution, we have the being who dwelt in Jesus' body at the stage of development that man will be in at the end of Vulcan evolution. We have a being as god which man will be at the end of Vulcan evolution.

[ 25 ] What is the difference between God's existence and man's existence? The difference between a god's existence and a man's existence is that the god already is what the human being will be later on in time. Don't say that this brings the god down to the human level and makes him into a human being. It doesn't. Because for supersensible perception, time is a simultaneous reality, if you'll permit me to use this paradoxical expression. The difference between man and God is the one which existed at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. One shouldn't relate different times or beings from different times when one looks at these things.

[ 26 ] A great deal of what is in writings like the Apocalypse is expressed in the language which was used in the mysteries, and it can only be understood if it is deciphered. On the other hand, one shouldn't blame the author of the Apocalypse for speaking in mystery language, for it was customary for people to do this at that time. People still knew that sounds are supersensible beings and that alpha is the supersensible human being when he was first created, and that when one goes from alpha to beta one is turning away from man and towards the world, including the divine world, and that if one goes through all the sounds to omega one has the entire divine world in omega.

[ 27 ] It's rather shocking that we're surrounded by experiences today which we consider to be trivialities. For instance, all the sounds are basically trivialities for us. Someone who only knows the alphabet doesn't know very much. The ABCs are trivialities. However, these trivialities point to divine, spiritual beings at the starting point, and our trivial letters are the descendents of what were once divine, spiritual beings for mankind. The whole alphabet was a number of such divine spiritual beings. Sounds were gods who assailed men from all sides with their din. The sounds AB were man in his house, and so on. Man with the whole world was alpha to omega. When someone uttered a sound he felt that it permeated him with spirituality.

[ 28 ] A last remnant of this life of a divine, spiritual element in sounds still existed in the intonation of cultic language during the third mystery epoch. They still understood this completely in very ancient times. When someone successively intoned what has now become our abstract, traditional alphabet, he was intoning the cosmic word. He intoned everything which exists and he connected himself with all the gods: In the beginning was the word. And when Christ says “I am alpha and omega,” he could say “I am the word” and mean the same thing.

[ 29 ] You can see that the Apocalypse is written in a mystery language, and it uses terms which remind us of the long period during which man felt that the macrocosm was a speaking universe. We have obscured the sounds of our language and made them trivial, whereas men used to know that they were something very spiritual. We must be able to feel what happened there. What happened? The sounds exist, but the gods are no longer in them as far as men are concerned. The gods have left the sounds. Our sounds contain Ahrimanic beings in a demonic way. The popular idea that the fixed sounds of our language are connected with black magic is not entirely unfounded. This idea of the people is a healthy one. For our sounds are now Ahrimanic gods. The gods who were once in them left, and Ahrimanic beings moved in. People will permeate language with more and more Ahrimanic powers if they don't find their way back to the gods in this sphere.

[ 30 ] We must approach the Apocalypse with such feelings about, language. This is the only way that the real greatness and power of what is placed, before our souls in the Apocalypse can become manifest to us. For what does the author of the Apocalypse want to do? He wants to do the same thing that all those who speak out of a true knowledge of the Christ want to do. [ 31 ] He wants to place the Christ before mankind. He draws attention to the fact that he is there. He begins by saying that he exists. For if one takes the first words of the Apocalypse and translates them into our language in accordance with their real meaning, they read: Look at the manifestation of Christ Jesus: Look over there; I want to show you the vision of Jesus Christ which God has given.

[ 32 ] Thus the first thing which is pointed out is that the author of the Apocalypse wants to let Christ appear to humanity in an apocalyptic way. But he also points out that he doesn't just want to report about the appearance or the Imagination of Jesus Christ, which presupposes vision, but he also wants to indicate that the divine world power which placed this phenomenon into the world and made it visible also expressed it in words.

[ 33 ] God has sent these words by his angel unto his servant John, and they are like an interpretation of the vision of Jesus Christ. This is how we must read the beginning of the Apocalypse.

[ 34 ] Two things are really being said here. An Imaginative element in Christ is mentioned, and something is said about what Christ's tidings are. And what John affirms and testifies to in his second sentence is the vision of Christ and the interpretation of this vision. The Christ in a picture and the Christ in words. The author of the Apocalypse wants to place the Christ before human beings in a picture and in words.

[ 35 ] Therewith we are also made aware of something which was quite obvious to people at that time, although most people today have lost sight of it completely. Our impoverished psychologists speak of sense percepts and ideas. To make the thing as poor as possible, people let the sense percepts arise through the senses and they say that ideas are created within. Everything is subjective and there is nothing cosmic there at all; they make a Kantian world out of a rich one, and they completely forget that man is standing in the whole world.

[ 36 ] The intuitive element in our words has shriveled into impoverished ideas: the second thing or so-called supersensible percept which John affirms, testifies to and tells us about is what the Apocalypticer places there as the manifestation of Christ. So that we have to say [ 37 ] “Behold the manifestation of Jesus Christ which is given by God, for this is how God must be shown to you [ 38 ] (I will interpret this later). [ 39 ] He has put it into words and has sent it to his servant John via his angel. John has affirmed God's words and the manifestation of Jesus Christ in the way that he saw it. [ 40 ] He wants to give mankind what he has seen and a letter he received from God.”

[ 41 ] We must approach Christian writings in this concrete way again. If you really want to become priests out of the deepest and most honest impulses in your heart you will have to see to it that these writings become concrete. For the fact is that people are basically dishonest when they say they understand the gospels the way they are translated today. The Apocalypse begins in the way that I said. One translation of the beginning of the Apocalypse reads, “This is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him to show his servants, and he has interpreted it and sent it to his servant John by his angel;” this is how it reads. And then the whole world is told that this is what the Apocalypse says. But no one can really make any sense out of these words. The same goes for most of the gospels, because one wants to explain things to people with wording which doesn't tell one what's really there anymore. This is why the idea gradually arose that one shouldn't penetrate very deeply into the gospels. For how can one really do that? No matter what modern language one reads the gospels in, one can't really read them if one is honest about it. For the modern versions tell one nothing.

[ 42 ] One has to go back to what is really there, just as we did this for the first two sentences and as we will continue to do it. Or some people might say that one has to go back to the Greek for certain parts of the gospels. Now, with all due respect to our contemporaries, who take great pains to understand Greek, the fact is that no one understands Greek any more today, because we don't have the same things in us which the Greeks had when they spoke or listened.

We're basically like sacks of flour when we listen to someone or when we speak ourselves. We remain just as quiet inwardly as flour in a sack should, if it is packed properly. This was not the case with the Greeks. The consciousness of a Greek vibrated when he listened to someone. He became alive inwardly and he spoke out of this vitality. The words which he heard and spoke were alive; they were still living bodies. Not to speak of oriental people. The latter are decadent today but unlike European people they can still perceive and understand things inwardly in a vital way when they speak or hear.

Just listen to an ordinary oriental like Rabindranath Tagore and watch how he presents the inner weaving and life which can exist in language.

[ 43 ] Today one has language in such a way that one even thinks one has it if one takes a dictionary and a German word stands on one side and the English word on the other. People very calmly place the English words where the German words are. They are blissfully unaware that one steps over an abyss here and that one comes into an entirely different world, and that one really has to treat what lives in language as something which is divine.

[ 44 ] People have to become aware of this again. Then they will decide to go back to what vibrates out of writings like the Apocalypse, which conjures up a vision of Jesus Christ before our soul. If we can see this mighty vision it's as if the clouds, which could give us wonderful things, suddenly became concentrated and took on human and angelic forms, and the past, present and future welled out of the clouds' substances as they go past and revealed the world's content of spiritual substances, which includes human beings. This is how the manifestation of Jesus Christ is presented.

[ 45 ] The vision is there and we fall silent before it, so that we become united with the world and are no longer conscious of ourselves, and so that we confront the vision until nothing but the vision remains, while we become insignificant.

Then when we perceive the Father God who has given the vision we find that he holds back the inspiring words behind the vision. The words are the interpretation of the vision and they are his secret; but the time is at hand and God gives the secret to an angel, and he brings it down to men as an epistolary message from God on the path on which Inspirations from God generally come down.

[ 46 ] As soon as a man becomes quiet and disappears and becomes immersed in the vision and begins to be not in himself, and he takes in God's letter, which he first has to open, which is sealed with seven seals, which he takes in as a letter with seven seals which has been sent to him by the godhead—as soon as he does this he becomes the letter, because he gets to the point where he looks upon the contents of the letter as his own ego-being. Then he stands before the vision with God's ideas and concepts and with spiritual mental images.

[ 47 ] If you imagine John the priest in this way, with the vision of Jesus Christ before him, disappearing selflessly, if you see him receiving the letter of God that is sealed with seven seals from the angels there, and if you see the resolve arising in him to unseal God's letter and to communicate its contents to mankind—you have the picture or Imagination which stands at the beginning of the Apocalypse. For we must interpret the words which stand there in what we receive in such a way that it is like the Imagination I described. This is what the author of the Apocalypse wants to say. That is why he says, “Blessed is he that reads and hears the words in the macrocosm and who takes in and preserves what is written in the book, when he understands it. For the time for this has come.”

[ 48 ] It has come. It is not just chance that we're discussing the Apocalypse in this context; it lies in the karma of the community for Christian renewal.

In these lectures, which were given in Christiania (Oslo) in June 1910, I ventured to give a sketch of the psychology of the development of peoples. The lectures are based upon the teachings of Anthroposophy which can be found in my books Theosophy, Occult Science—an Outline, Riddles of Man, Riddles of the Soul,¹ etc. I was able to build upon this foundation because my hearers were familiar with the scientific views which are presented in my publications. That is the external reason for the choice of my point of view; there is however a further reason, an inner reason. The orthodox study of anthropology, ethnology, or even history cannot provide an adequate framework for a true psychology of the various folk characters. Neither the information provided by orthodox science, nor the study of anatomy and physiology suffice for an understanding of the psychic life of man. If we wish to understand the inner life of an individual we must study the soul as well as the body, and if we desire to gain real insight into national characteristics we must explore the psychic and spiritual element underlying them. This psychic and spiritual element, however, reflects not merely the activity of individual human souls working in concert, but has its origin in a higher order. The higher spiritual element is a province in which modern science is a total stranger. Before the bar of science it is paradoxical to speak of Folk Souls as real entities in the sense that we speak of the reality of thinking, feeling and willing in individual human beings; and it is equally paradoxical to relate the evolution of peoples on Earth to the forces of the heavenly bodies in space. But the matter ceases to be paradoxical if we recall that one does not look for the forces which determine the north-south direction of a magnetic needle in the needle itself. One attributes the deflection of the needle to the effect of the Earth's magnetic field but looks to the Cosmos for the causes of this deflection. Shall we not therefore have to seek the reasons for the development of folk characters, folk migrations, etc. in the Cosmos outside the peoples themselves? Apart from the anthroposophical view which considers higher spiritual Beings to be a reality, a totally new element is introduced into these lectures which sees a higher spiritual reality behind the evolution of peoples and seeks the forces which direct this evolution in this spiritual reality. We then investigate the facts which are manifested in the life of the peoples and we find that these facts become intelligible on this basis. The conditions in the life of the various peoples, as well as their mutual relationships, can thus be clearly understood, whereas without this basis there can be no true understanding of this approach. Either one must seek a basis for the psychology of peoples in a spiritual reality or one must abandon such a psychology in toto.

I have not hesitated to use the traditional names of the early centuries of Christianity to describe the higher spiritual Beings. An Oriental would choose other names. Nevertheless, although the use of this terminology may be regarded as rather unscientific today, there seems to be no reason to fight shy of it. In the first place, we thereby acknowledge the essentially Christian character of our Western civilization, and secondly, if entirely new names were chosen, or if an oriental terminology were adopted whose real meaning could only be fully comprehended by one who is spiritually at home in that civilization, we should be in danger of misapprehension. It seems to me that whoever wishes to investigate these spiritual relationships, assuming he does not reject our whole approach, will not object to names such as Angels, Archangels, Thrones, etc. any more than physical science objects to terms such as positive and negative electricity, magnetism, polarized light, etc.

Whoever relates the content of my earlier lectures to the painful trials of mankind at the present time will find that what I then said throws a flood of light upon what is taking place now. (February 1918.) Were I to give these lectures now you could well imagine that in the light of the present world-situation these earlier investigations were a necessity. Thus for example on page 23 of the first lecture you will find the following passage: “ ... we have every reason, especially at the present time, to speak quite impartially about the mission of the individual Folk Souls. Just as it was justifiable to maintain complete silence about their mission hitherto, so it is in order today to begin to speak of this mission. This is particularly important because the destiny of mankind in the near future will bring men together in far greater measure than has hitherto been the case in order to fulfil a mission common to all mankind. But the members of the individual peoples will only be able to offer their proper, free and positive contributions if they have, above all, an understanding of their ethnic origin, an understanding for what we might call ‘the self-knowledge of the folk’. ” No doubt the time has now come when the fate of humanity itself demonstrates the truth of this view.

Perhaps it is precisely the theme of the “Folk Souls” which shows how spiritual investigation which penetrates into the super-sensible reality of existence provides at the same time a practical view of life which also throws light upon the most diverse problems of life.

This is not possible for a view of life which only uses such concepts as are valid in the sphere of natural science in order to describe the nature and development of peoples. This mechanistic-physical science has been highly successful in exploiting the mechanical, physical and chemical resources for the benefit of civilization; but in order to promote the spiritual life of mankind we need a science which is spiritually orientated. Such a science is the first demand of our age.

• 1. Riddles of Man was not yet (1970) published in English. A translation of a section of Riddles of the Soul is published with the main title of The Case for Anthroposophy, with an Introduction by Owen Barfield.

Towards⁵⁶ the end of the meeting, Dr Steiner spoke the following words:

In addition to what I took the liberty of saying at the close of the last course which I was able to hold for the Swiss teachers, I have perhaps only a few more remarks to make in connection with the difficulties of the Swiss school movement. It seems to me that things do in part indeed depend on how the educational movement connected with Anthroposophy is run here in Switzerland.

The Waldorf School in Germany has remained essentially in a position of isolation. Though there have been one or two further foundations, in Hamburg, Cologne and so on, the Waldorf School in Germany, in other words in a relatively extensive area, has remained a solitary example. It will remain to be seen, therefore, whether what is to be started in England as a kind of Waldorf school, and also the school with three classes that already exists in Holland, will also to begin with remain as solitary examples.

Apart from everything else it has to be said that the reason why these schools are still only isolated examples, and also why it can be expected that they will remain so for a long time, is simply that the present social circumstances really do make it impossible for an attitude to come about that could lead to the financing of a larger number of such schools. Experience over the years has shown this quite clearly. And this challenges us to think carefully about the whole direction we should take with our educational movement.

This is especially necessary with regard to Switzerland. For Switzerland is pervaded by a very strong sense for everything represented by the state. And now that the Swiss school association for independent education has been founded, I do believe that the chief difficulties will arise from this Swiss sense of statehood. Even less than anywhere else will it be possible here in Switzerland to find an opening for the belief that a truly independent school could be an example for a model method of education, or that schools such as this could be founded on a larger scale. We should not allow ourselves to be under any illusion in this respect. Aversion to a system of education that is independent of the state is very great here.

Of course what Herr Gnädiger has just said is right, namely that there will be interest in how things are done in a model school.

Least of all here in Switzerland can you expect the president of the Schweizerischer Schulverein, of whom you have spoken, to have any interest in the school other than that pertaining to its status as a model. Perhaps his interest will turn out to be such that he would like to influence Swiss state schools to take up certain methodological aspects from this model school. But this seems to me to be the only aspect that can be counted on to attract interest here in Switzerland. That is why it seems to me to be important to take up these two things wherever educational associations of the kind you have mentioned are founded; and also that many such associations should be founded, more and more of them!

Another aspect is that the crux of anthroposophical education is its method. The schools apply a certain method. It is not a question of any particular political direction but purely and simply of method. It is also not a question of any particular religious creed, or of seeing Anthroposophy somehow as a religious creed. It is simply a question of method.

In the discussion that followed my lecture cycle⁵⁷ my answer to questions on this was simply that the educational method represented here can be applied anywhere, wherever there is the good will to introduce it.

If this is done on the one hand, and if on the other hand—in order to create an understanding in wider circles—it is clearly emphasized that this is the proper method and that it is being applied in a school that can serve as a model, if these two points are given the main emphasis in the programme, if it is stressed that every school could use these methods and that a model school could demonstrate how fruitful they are, and if things are worked out neatly, then I believe that something could be achieved even in Switzerland. And then on the basis of these two points educational associations ought to be founded everywhere. But it would have to be made clear to everyone that the aim was not to found as many private schools as possible to compete with the state schools. In Switzerland such a thing would be regarded as something very peculiar and it would never be understood. But there would be an understanding for a model school which could be a source of inspiration for a method of education. Progress cannot be made in any other way. It is important to present these things to people in principle again and again and wherever the opportunity arises.

I believe it would be a good thing if you could always give the greatest prominence to these two aspects. They are perfectly true, and much damage has been done to us by the constant repetition of the view that Waldorf education can only be carried out in schools apart from the main stream, whereas I have constantly repeated that the methods can be applied in any school.

This is what I wanted to say, for everything else is linked to this. I also believe that a financial basis will only be won when there can be an understanding of these things. There will be very little understanding in Switzerland for independent schools if they are not linked to what I have just been saying. But if this is done, I believe that our efforts could lead to a greater degree of success than has been the case hitherto. So far the existing financial situation is not sufficient basis for the founding of a school in Basel.

• 56. ‘Schulverein für freies Erziehungs- und Unterrichtswesen in der Schweiz’, later ‘Goetheanum-Schulverein’, Dornach. Founded 1922. From 1924, after the Christmas Foundation Conference, under the directorship of Rudolf Steiner.
• 57. See Rudolf Steiner Swiss Teachers' Course, Report by Albert Steffen. English text available in typescript only. GA 306.