The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Mementos of time, the Festivals direct our feelings and thoughts to the past. By their own inner significance they awake in us the thoughts which bind us to all that our own souls held sacred in the past. And moreover, the understanding of everything which underlies the Festivals awakes in us thoughts which direct our gaze to the future of mankind, in other words, to the future of our own souls. Feelings are awakened in us which fill us with enthusiasm to fit ourselves to play our part in times to come; our will is fired by ideals which give us strength so to labour that we may be enabled to fulfil more and more perfectly our tasks for the future.

In the deeper sense of the word Whitsuntide may be characterised by a looking in spirit back to the past and yet on towards the future. The significance of the Festival for the nations of the West stands out before us in a stupendous scene, which appeals to the deepest feelings of our nature. The scene is familiar to every one here present. After the accomplishment of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Founder of Christianity lingers awhile among those who are able to see Him in that body which He used after the Mystery, and the further succession of events is placed before our souls in an impressive series of pictures. The body which the Founder of Christianity took after the Mystery of Golgotha, dissolves visibly, and is revealed to His most intimate disciples in the mighty vision known to us as the Ascension and ten days later there follows that which is now to be shown us in a picture, speaking a language which goes to the very hearts of all willing to understand it. The disciples of Christ are assembled; those who first understood Him are gathered together. Profoundly they feel the mighty impulse which has entered through Him into the evolution of mankind and their souls anxiously await the fulfilment of the promise made to them, of events which should be accomplished in their own souls. Gathered together in deep fervour of spirit are these first disciples and followers of the Christ-Impulse on the day, time-honoured in their land, of the Feast of Pentecost. Their souls are raised to a loftier perception; they are called upon, as it were, by a ‘rushing mighty wind,’ to direct their powers of observation to that which should come, to that which awaited them when, reborn again and again with that fiery impulse which they had received into their hearts, they should live on this Earth of ours. Before our souls there rises a picture of the ‘fiery tongues’ as they descend on the head of each disciple and a new and mighty vision appears to those present, in which they see what the future of this impulse will be.

Those first disciples of Christ who were assembled together and who beheld in spirit the spiritual world, felt that they were not addressing only those nearest to themselves within the Emit of space and time. They felt their hearts transported far away to the people scattered over the face of the Earth; they felt that something lived in their hearts translatable into all languages and into the understanding of the hearts of all men. In this mighty vision, in which the future of Christianity is revealed, these earliest disciples saw themselves as if encircled by the future believers out of all the nations of the Earth; it impressed them with the feeling that they would one day have the power to announce the Christian message in words which would be understood, not alone by those nearest to them in space and time, but by all the human beings who would in future work out their destiny on the Earth.

That was the sum of feeling and inner experience which filled the minds of those first followers of Christ on that first Christian Whitsunday. But according to the explanation given in the true esoterically Christian sense and clothed in symbolical language, the Spirit, also called the Holy Ghost, Who lives, and Who poured out His force on Earth at the time when Christ Jesus descended in spirit into the Earth, Who first appeared again at the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist—the same Spirit in another form, in that of many single fiery tongues, descended on the different individualities of the first Christian believers. On Whitsunday, we hear of the Holy Ghost in a special form. Let us call up the meaning of the expression ‘Holy Ghost,’ as it is understood in the Gospels. How in olden times (including pre-Christian times) was the spirit generally described?

In ancient times spirit was mentioned in many connections but especially in one. The view was held, which is now again justified by the knowledge gained through our present Spiritual Science, that when a human being at birth enters upon the existence between birth and death, the body in which this individuality incarnates is determined in a two-fold manner. In reality this body has a double task to perform. As regards our corporality we belong to the whole human race, but we are also more particularly individuals of a certain nation, race or family. In those olden times preceding the proclamation of Christianity, there was but little to be observed of what we may call ‘common humanity,’ there was little of that feeling of belonging to one another which has been gaining ground more and more in the human heart ever since the proclamation of Christianity, the feeling that prompts the words: ‘Thou art man in common with all men on Earth!’ On the other hand, the feeling of the individual that he belonged to a particular nation or family was all the stronger. This feeling is even expressed in the venerable Hindu religion, in the belief that only he can be a true Hindu who is one by community of blood. In many respects, though they had often broken through it, the old Hebrews kept strictly to this principle before the coming of Christ Jesus. In their opinion a man was one of their nation only because his parents, who also belonged to it through blood relationship, had placed him there. But there was something else that invariably made itself felt. In old times and in all nations the individual always felt himself more or less to be the member of a group, the member of an organism which was his nation, and the farther we retreat into the far distant past the more intense do we find the feeling of membership of an organism, of a nation and the rarer becomes the feeling of being a single individual. But gradually the human being learnt also at the same time to be conscious of himself as an individual,—as a separate human being with distinct human qualities of his own. Two principles were felt to be at work in ordinary human life: the attachment to a people, and the individualisation as a separate human being.

Now the forces behind these two principles were variously attributed to the parents. The principle by which the human being belonged to his nation, that which made him a part of the community, was ascribed to heredity on the mother’s side. One in sympathy with these old opinions would say of the mother: The spirit of the people reigns in her; she was filled with the spirit of the people, and has handed on to the child the attributes common to all the members of his nation. Of the father it was said that he was the bearer and transmitter of the principle that tends to confer the individual, personal qualities. When, therefore, a human being was born into the world, it was said—among the old Hebrews of pre-Christian time, for instance—he is a person, an individual, by virtue of the paternal forces, whereas the whole nature of the mother was steeped in the spirit of her people and she has handed that spirit on to her child. It was said of the mother that the national spirit dwelt in her. And in this connection the spirit specially meant was that Spirit who from the spiritual regions directs his forces to mankind, by causing them to flow into the human race in the physical world, by way of the maternal principle.

But now, through the impulse of Christ a new point of view had arisen, namely, a belief that the Spirit formerly reverenced, the National Spirit, should be replaced by one akin to him, indeed, but Whose activity was of a far, far loftier character—a Spirit Who held the same relationship to all mankind as the former Spirit had held to the separate peoples. This Spirit was to be communicated to mankind, and was to fill men with the inward strength which should inspire the thought: 11 no longer feel myself belonging merely to a fraction of humanity, but to the whole of it. I am a member of the whole human race—I shall continue to feel more and more a member of that whole race!’ The force which thus poured out over the whole of mankind the element of common humanity, was ascribed to the Holy Ghost. The Spirit dwelling in the force which communicated itself from the nation to the mother was exalted from ‘Spirit’ to ‘Holy Spirit.’

He Who should bring mankind the power of developing in earthly existence that principle common to all mankind, could only dwell as the First-born in a body inherited by the power of the Holy Ghost; and this power of the Holy Ghost was conceived in the Annunciation, by the mother of Jesus. And in the Gospel of St. Matthew we read of the consternation of Joseph, of whom we are told that he was a pious man. According to the old meaning of the words this would imply that Joseph was one who would consider that, if he ever had a, child, it must be born out of the Spirit of its nation. Joseph now learns that the mother of his child is filled, ‘penetrated’ (for this is the true meaning of the word in our language) by the force of a Spirit, but not merely of a National Spirit (Archangel); she is penetrated by the force of that Spirit Who is the Spirit of universal humanity I And he believes that he can have no fellowship with a woman who bears in her the Spirit of all humanity and not that Spirit in whom he had piously placed his confidence; he does not believe that such a woman could ever be the mother of his children. Therefore, as it is said, he was ‘minded to put her away privily.’ And it was not until he, too, had received from the spiritual world a communication bestowing power on him, that he could make up his mind to have a son of that woman who was penetrated and filled with the power of the Holy Ghost. This Spirit is therefore creatively active, inasmuch as He pours out His forces into the evolution of mankind at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. And the same Spirit is again active in that stupendous deed, the Baptism of John in the Jordan. Now we understand what is meant by the power of the Holy Ghost. It is the force which will raise man more and more above all that would tend to differentiate and isolate him, to that which makes him a member of the whole of humanity over all the Earth, that force which works like a link binding every soul to every other soul—no matter in what body it may be.

Now we are told of this same Holy Ghost that it is He Who descended, in a new revelation at Whitsuntide, into the individualities of the first confessors of the Christian faith. At the Baptism by John we have the picture of the Spirit in the form of a dove; but now another picture is given in the tongues of fire. It is one dove, a single form, in which the Holy Ghost manifests at the Baptism by John; whereas at Whitsuntide He manifests in many separate tongues! And every one of these tongues is an inspiration for the individual souls for every single individual among the first confessors of Christianity. What then does this Whitsun symbol represent to our souls?

After the Bearer of the universal human spirit had finished His labours on Earth, after the Christ had rendered up His last vestures to be dissolved in the Universe; when the visible form of Christ was dissolved as Unity in the spiritual part of the Earth,—then, for the first time, the possibility was created, that from the hearts of the disciples of the Christ-Impulse should go forth the ability to speak of that Christ-Impulse, to labour in conformity with that Christ- Impulse. Gone is the Christ-Impulse in so far as He had manifested in visible form, into the one and indivisible spiritual world, in the Ascension; ten days later He reappears, bom out of the hearts of every one of these first disciples. The reappearance in manifold form of the same Spirit that had been operative in the force of the Impulse of Christ, made of the first disciples of Christianity the channels and preachers of the Message of Christ, thus placing at the beginning of the Christian evolution the mighty token which proclaims to us the message. As each of the first disciples was privileged individually to receive the Christ-Impulse in the form of fiery tongues, kindling inspiration in his own soul, so can each one of you, if you endeavour to understand the Impulse of Christ, receive this power individually in your hearts. That power can then grow more and more in you and can become more and more perfect. That token that was set up at the beginning of Christianity may become the fountain of a vast hope welling up in us. And as he advances in perfection, the human being can feel that the Holy Ghost speaks from within him in proportion as his thought, feeling and will are penetrated with the Holy Ghost, Who, by cleaving asunder, or multiplying Himself, becomes an individual Spirit in each separate human individuality in whom He works. Thus, as regards our future evolution, the Holy Ghost is for us men the Spirit of development into free men, the freedom of the human soul. The spirit of freedom reigns in that Spirit which was poured out on the first disciples of Christianity, on that first Christian Whitsun Festival—the Spirit Whose most salient quality is indicated by Christ Jesus Himself in the words: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free 1’ Man can be free only in spirit; so long as he is dependent on that in which his spirit dwells, namely his body, so long is he a slave of that body; he can only be free when he finds himself again in spirit and when, out of that spirit, he becomes master of that which is within him. ‘To be free’ presupposes that we have found the spirit within us. The true spirit, in whom we can find ourselves, is the universal human spirit, which we recognise as the force of the Holy Ghost entering us at Whitsuntide, the spirit to which we must give birth within ourselves and which we must allow to become manifest.

Thus we see the symbol of Whitsuntide transformed into our mightiest ideal of the free unfolding of the human soul to a self-contained, free individual. This was felt more or less dimly even by those who, not impelled by any clear consciousness of their own, but acting on inspiration, were concerned in the fixing of Whitsunday on a definite day in the year. Even this outer institution of the Feast-days is remarkable and no one who is unable to trace the guiding wisdom, even in the fixing of the Festivals, has any real understanding of the world.

Let us take the three Festivals, Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide. As a Christian Festival Christmas falls on a certain fixed day of the year. It is fixed once for all on that particular day of December; every year we celebrate the Christmas Feast on that same day. Easter is different, it is a ‘movable’ feast, dependent on the constellations in the heavens. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the Vernal equinox. In order to determine this, man must turn his gaze heavenward, to the expanse in which the stars follow their course and from the fields of space proclaim to us the laws governing the world. Easter is a movable feast, precisely as in every individual the moment varies which awakens the force of the higher man, endowed with a higher consciousness, to free himself from ordinary, lower human frailty. As in one year Easter falls on one day, the next year on another day, so also in the case of the individual human being—according to his past and the earnestness of his striving—sooner or later the moment will come in which he will be able to say with conviction: ‘I feel that I have the strength to bring forth a higher self from within me!’

Christmas is, however, an immovable feast. At that Festival one can look back over the course of the year, on the blossoming and the decay of Nature, with all the joys of the swelling and bursting forth of Nature’s forces. Then one sees the Earth-life in its state of sleep, into which it has withdrawn its germinal force. External Nature has withdrawn, taking with it all its germinating forces. When the outer world of the senses sees least of the manifestation of these springs of growth, when the Earth itself shows how at a certain period the spiritual forces withdraw, in order that they may gather strength for a new year of life, when physical nature is most silent, at that time of the Christmas Festival man should let the thought of a hope stir within him—the hope that he is not only united with the Earth-forces now lying dormant at Christmastide, but is also united with those other forces, which are never dormant, the forces dwelling in the spiritual regions as well as on Earth. This hope should rise in his soul when he watches the Earth as it were sinking to rest. From the inmost depths of the soul itself this hope will spring; it will be the spiritual light of the soul at the time of deepest gloom outside in physical Nature. Then shall man be reminded by the token of the Christmas Festival that he is for a while bound to his earth-body with the forces of the ego, in the same way as everything in the nature of manifestation around him is bound to the circuit of the Earth during the year. Coinciding with the sleep of the Earth, which every year begins at the same period, is the Christmas Festival when man should call to mind that he is chained to a body, but that he is not condemned to remain bound to that body; that he may cherish the hope that he will find strength to make of himself a free soul. What we recognise as important in the Christmas Festival should thus remind us of our connection with our body and of the heritage which is ours to free ourselves from that body. But it depends on the earnestness of our endeavour whether we bring to fruition sooner or later the forces for which we dare to hope, and which will lead us back again to spiritual worlds, to heavenly places.

The Easter Festival should awaken such thoughts in us. It should remind us that we have not only at our disposal those forces that are ours through our body and which are also divine, spiritual forces; it should remind us besides that as human beings we can rise above the Earth. It is the Easter Festival that reminds us of that force which sooner or later will be awakened within us. The Easter Festival has been instituted as a movable feast, in conformity with the heavenly constellations. Man must arouse in himself the remembrance of what he can become, by raising his eyes to Heaven, in order to find help to free himself from all earthly existence, to raise himself above all earthly life. In the strength we derive in this way lies the possibility of our inner freedom, our inner liberation. When we feel in ourselves the ability to rise above ourselves, we shall be striving verily to attain that elevation. Then shall we desire to make our inner man free from the bonds that chain him to the outer man. Then shall we indeed dwell in the outer man, but we shall be fully conscious of our inner spiritual force, the inner man. On the consciousness that we can liberate ourselves, on the experience of that inward Easter Festival within us, depends the attainment of that other experience, that of Whitsuntide—the penetration of that spirit which has now found itself, with a content, not of this world, but of the spiritual realms. This content from the spiritual worlds can alone make us free. It is the spiritual truth of which Jesus Christ said: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ The Festival of Whitsuntide depends on the Easter Festival. It is a consequence of the Easter Festival—that feast determined by the constellations in the heavens; Whitsuntide is, as it were, a necessary consequence, one that must follow the Easter Festival at the end of a certain number of weeks.

On deeper reflection, we thus discover sovereign wisdom even in the fixing of the seasons for those Festivals; we discover that their recurrence precisely in this order in the course of the year is a necessity and that they show us with each new year what we as human beings have been, are, and may yet become. If we are able to reflect on these Festivals in this way, as Festivals uniting us with all the past, they will be to us like an impulse bestowed on humanity, urging us forward. Whitsuntide especially, if we so understand it, arms us with confidence, strength and hope, when we know what our inward growth may be if we become followers of those who, through their understanding of the Christ-Impulse first made themselves worthy of the outpourings of the tongues of fire. The anticipation of the conception of the Holy Ghost enraptures our spiritual gaze when we understand its character as a Festival of the future. But if we would attain this we must learn to understand the true Christian significance of Whitsuntide. Then we must learn to understand the language of those mighty tongues, of the stupendous Pentecostal Inspirations. What were the tones, as of sounding brass, which were heard above the ‘rushing’ of the mighty wind, described in that picture presented to us as that of the first Christian Whit-Sunday? What voices were those which in a wonderful cosmic harmony declared ‘Ye who are the first to understand it, have felt the force of the Christ-Impulse, and the power of Christ has become such a force in your own souls, that, since the Crucifixion on Golgotha, every one of these souls has become able to behold Christ present with you; thus mightily has the Christ- Impulse worked in some among you!’

The Christ-Impulse is one of freedom; its effect, in the truest sense, is not seen in its operation outside the human soul. The true working of the Christ Impulse appears when it is active within the individual human soul itself. Those who were the first to understand Christ felt themselves called by their experience on the Day of Pentecost to announce what they had witnessed, what was revealed to them in the visions and inspirations of their own souls as the content of the doctrine of Christ. Being conscious that the Christ-Impulse had been at work in the holy preparation that they had made before the Whitsuntide Festival, they felt themselves called by the power of the Christ-Impulse working in them, to let the tongues of fire speak through them—the Holy Ghost individualised in themselves—and to go forth and preach the message of Christ. Not merely what Christ had said to them, not alone the words spoken by Him, were recognised by those who understood the significance of the Day of Pentecost; they recognised as the words of Christ those uttered by the power of a soul that feels within it the Impulse of the Christ. For this reason the Holy Ghost pours Himself, as an individualised Spirit, into every single human soul that develops in itself the power to feel the Christ-Impulse. To such a soul the words: ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!’ have a new meaning. Those whose efforts to receive the Christ-Impulse are sincere, may also feel called by the stimulus of that Impulse working in their hearts to proclaim the Word of Christ, however new, however different it may sound in every fresh epoch of humanity. The Holy Spirit was not poured forth so that we might adhere to the few words in the Gospels which were uttered in the first decades after the founding of Christianity, but He was poured forth, so that the message of Christ might always say something new. According as the human souls advance from one epoch to another, and from incarnation to incarnation, a new message must be proclaimed to them. Is it reasonable to suppose that the souls progressing from incarnation to incarnation should always be obliged to listen to the proclamation of Christ in the words which were spoken when those same souls were living in bodies contemporary with the historical appearance of Christ on earth? The power to speak to all men till the end of the Earth-cycle is innate in the Christ-Impulse.

But something else is necessary, in order to make it possible that the message of Christ may be announced in every epoch, in conformity with the advance that has meantime taken place in the human souls. When the whole power and might of the Pentecostal Impulse is borne in upon us, we must feel that it is our bounden duty to give heed to the words: ‘I am with you always unto the end of the Earth-cycle!’ And if we are filled with the Christ-Impulse, we can hear those words, first spoken at the beginning of Christianity by its Founder, sounding through all ages—the words that Christ speaks at all times, because He is always with us—but words audible only for those who desire to hear them.

Thus we comprehend the power of the Whitsuntide Impulse as something that bestows on us the right to regard Christianity as an ever growing organism, ever revealing itself to us in new aspects. And we whose mission it is to proclaim in the Anthroposophy of our day the words of Christ, echoing to us from the heavenly choirs—we say to all who would preserve Christianity in its original form: ‘We are those who truly understand Christ, for we understand the true significance of Whitsuntide!’

When we feel thus called again and again to draw from Christianity new treasures of wisdom, we find in it that wisdom which is needed by the soul, developing from incarnation to incarnation. Christianity is infinite in its fulness and inexhaustible in its riches; but mankind was not ready for the reception of this fulness in the early centuries of its development, when it was necessary to proclaim it for the first time. Even to-day it would be a presumption to say that mankind is now ripe for the understanding of Christianity in its boundless fulness and magnitude! True Christian humility alone consists in the feeling that the extent of Christian wisdom is unlimited, but man’s receptivity for this wisdom, though at first restricted, will become ever more and more complete. Let us glance at the first centuries of Christianity and on up to our own time. A vast and powerful impulse, the greatest that has been given during the evolution of the Earth, was imparted to the world in the Christ-Impulse. Any one can realise this truth who has become acquainted with the fundamental laws governing the evolution of the Earth. But one thing must not be forgotten in this connection, namely, that only a fraction of all that is contained in the Christ-Impulse is as yet understood. In the two thousand years of Christian evolution which have almost elapsed since the coming of Christ, the teachings of esoteric Christianity have been hidden from the world to which Christianity was brought, nor have they yet penetrated into exoteric life. That doctrine, for instance, which can be proclaimed as a Christian truth in the present epoch, the return of the human soul to earth-life, or reincarnation, could not become a part of the Christian teachings at an earlier time. And if we now proclaim reincarnation, we do so in full consciousness, and in the same sense in which we have to-day characterised the Whitsuntide Festival—that reincarnation is a Christian truth which can be communicated to mature souls to-day, even exoterically, but which could not be proclaimed to the still immature souls of the first centuries of Christendom.

It is of little use to point out particular passages to prove that the idea of reincarnation is found in Christianity. We can learn from all the opponents of Anthroposophy who call themselves ‘Christians,’ how little is known of reincarnation in exoteric Christianity. All that is known is that theosophy teaches something called rebirth, and this is quite enough to call forth the assertion: ‘That is an Indian—or Buddhist—doctrine!’ How little do such people know that the living Christ is the living Teacher from the spiritual worlds of reincarnation. They merely think that reincarnation and with it the doctrine of Karma, have not as yet been able to find their way into exoteric Christianity. In fragments, and at different times, mankind has gradually to be prepared for the reception of the fulness of truth contained in Christianity. Together with the Impulse of the Christ, which is no doctrine or theory, but a force that must be experienced in the depths of the soul, we gain something else. What do we gain? It is precisely when we unite the doctrine of reincarnation with the Christ-Impulse that we can understand what it brings us.

We know that only a few centuries before the dawn of Christianity, other, more doctrinal teachings were given in the East:—the teachings of Buddha. While the force and the impulse of Christianity had spread from Asia Minor westwards, the East was the scene of a widespread extension of Buddhism. We know that that religion contains the doctrine of reincarnation. But in what form? For those acquainted with the facts, Buddhism presents itself as the final outcome of teachings and revelations that had gone before. Hence the accumulated greatness of primal ages is contained in Buddhism; yet we see in it the final consequence of the primeval wisdom of humanity, which likewise contained the teaching of reincarnation. What form does reincarnation assume in the revelations of Buddhism? It is presented so that the human being looks back on incarnations through which he has lived—and forward to others still lying before him. The doctrine that the human being passes from life to life is entirely exoteric in Buddhism. Let no one speak in abstract terms of the similarity of all religions; in reality, vast and mighty differences exist, for instance, between Christianity, in which for centuries there was no thought of reincarnation, and exoteric Buddhism, which lived and moved in this doctrine. Instead of bringing together abstractions, we must be willing to admit facts. To the Buddhist it is a positive truth that man returns over and over again to earth-life; but he regards it in a light which urges him to say to himself: ‘Fight against the desire to return to incarnation, for it is your duty to free yourself as soon as possible from the longing for rebirth, and to live in a spiritual realm free from all earthly incarnations.’ Thus the Buddhist recognises the sequence of human lives; but he strives to acquire all possible strength in order to free himself as soon as possible from the necessity for reincarnation. There is something lacking in Buddhism,—its exoteric teaching proves this. It is wanting in something which we may call an impulse strong and vigorous enough to prompt the Buddhist to say: ‘Let me be born again and again if necessary!’ We can so change ourselves through the Christ-Impulse that we are enabled to draw more and more strength from it. Through that Impulse a strength comes to us that makes each incarnation more perfect than the last. Penetrate Buddhism—or the teaching of reincarnation in Buddhism—with the Impulse of Christ, and you have a new element, one which imparts to the Earth a new significance in the evolution of man!

On the other hand we have Christianity. The Christ-Impulse is contained in it indeed, but exoterically. What has this Impulse been to Christians in the past centuries? The exoteric Christian undoubtedly sees in its infinite perfection something to which he looks up as his great ideal and which he approaches ever more and more. But what presumption would it be for the Christian to imagine that in a single life he could somehow gather strength sufficient to bring to fruition the germ that can be stimulated by the Impulse of Christ. What presumption it would be for the exoteric Christian to suppose that he were capable of doing anything adequate to bring the Christ-Impulse to fruition and unfoldment! Such a belief would cause the exoteric Christian to say: ‘We pass through the gates of death; in the spiritual realms the opportunity will be given us of evolving and of bringing to fuller development the Christ-Impulse there.’ And thus the exoteric Christian believes in a spiritual life after death—one from which he does not return to Earth. Does the exoteric Christian who believes in a never-ending spiritual existence following life on Earth, understand the Christ-Impulse? He does not understand it. Did he understand it, he would never believe that, without returning to earth, he could win for himself what the Christ-Impulse has to give him in a spiritual existence following death.

In order that the Deed on Golgotha might be accomplished, in order that the victory over death might be achieved, it was necessary that Christ Himself should descend to Earth-life;—this was necessary in order to fulfil that which could only be fulfilled and experienced on our Earth. For this reason Christ descended to Earth; because the force of that Deed of the Mystery on Golgotha must of necessity influence man in the physical body. If he has received the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha while in the physical body, that impulse will continue to work when he has passed through the gates of death. Only as much of the impulse as man has received in his life on Earth, continues to work after death. When he returns again to Earth, he must work out for himself the perfecting of what he has received. Only in the later earth-lives succeeding one another can man learn what is the real nature of the Christ- Impulse. Never could he understand the Christ-Impulse in one life; it must be his guide through repeated earth-lives; because Earth is the place for the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus Christianity will be lacking in something till the presumptuous thought that the Christ-Impulse could be exhausted in one life is replaced by that other: that repeated earth-lives are necessary to enable man so to perfect himself that he can give free expansion to the ideal of Christ within him. Then he can carry with him into the spiritual worlds the result of his experiences on Earth. But he can bring with him only as much of that Impulse as he has assimilated while on Earth,—that Impulse, the most important event in the whole history of our Earth, which had to be accomplished on the Earth.

We thus see that the next revelation by which Christianity must be enriched from the spiritual worlds, is the idea of rebirth, evolved out of Christianity itself. When we understand this we shall recognise the importance for us to-day, in the region of Spiritual Science, of the knowledge gained by us as a result of the Whitsuntide revelation. That knowledge confers on us the right to participate in the revelation; it means that we can feel a renewal of the revelation of the force conveyed in the ‘tongues of fire’ that descended on the first disciples of Christ.

We are reminded to-day in a new form, of much of what has been said of late in our movement. It is like the drawing together of East and West, of the two mighty revelations of Christianity and Buddhism. In spirit we can see the fusion of those two streams, and, through a right understanding of the Christian signification of Whitsuntide, we are able to vindicate the fusion of these two greatest of all religions at present on the face of the Earth. But it is not possible to unite two such streams of revelation by mere outer impulses: that would only be theory. Were any one to take what Christianity has given us up to the present time and weld it into a new religion, together with what Buddhism has so far given to the world, he would provide nothing new for the nourishment of the souls of mankind, but merely an abstract theory incapable of inflaming a single human soul. If such an event is to happen, new revelations must come. For us that is the message which has become known as Anthroposophy—a message now indeed audible only to those who have, by an assiduous assimilation of Spiritual Science, prepared themselves to let Christ speak through them—the Christ Who is ever with us. It has been pointed out that the present is a momentous time for the evolution of mankind; that before the close of this century new forces will be developed in the human soul, which will produce in man a kind of etheric clairvoyance, by which, as by a natural development, a repetition of the vision beheld by Paul on his way to Damascus will be experienced by certain persons; so that Christ will reappear clothed with etheric raiment, to those whose spiritual forces have been raised. The vision of Paul at Damascus will become a more and more frequent occurrence. Then the world will become aware of the existence of Anthroposophy, and will see in it the revelation foretold of a new presentment of the truth of the Christ-Impulse. This new revelation will be understood by those alone who believe that the fresh current of spiritual life into which Christ once and for ever poured Himself, will remain a living force for all time to come. Those who will not believe this may continue to proclaim a Christianity that has outlived its time. But they who understand it and believe in the real Whitsuntide outpouring will be able to comprehend that that which began with the Christian Annunciation will grow continually and will speak to mankind again and again in tones that are ever new. They will understand that the individualised outpouring of the Holy Ghost, the ‘fiery tongues,’ will ever be with us and that the human soul will know and bring to fruition the Christ Impulse with constantly renewed ardour and devotion.

We can believe in the future of Christianity when we truly understand the significance of Whitsuntide. And then with a power that works as a force immanent in the soul, the stupendous scene comes before us; then we realise the future as the first apostles realised it, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; so that we long to bring to life in our own souls something that knows not the bounds set between the separate fragments of humanity; something that speaks a tongue understood by all the souls on the face of the Earth. We are sensible of the peace, the love and harmony contained in the thoughts of Whitsuntide, and we feel the vivifying power of those thoughts at our Whitsun Festival. We recognise in them a pledge of our hope of freedom and of eternity. As we feel in our souls the awakening of the individualised spirit, the most momentous attribute of spirit—the infinity of the spiritual—is aroused within us. By his participation in the spiritual, man may become aware of his immortality and eternity. In the thought of Whitsuntide we feel most deeply the power of those primeval words, which Initiate after Initiate has implanted in various languages, revealing to us the meaning of Wisdom and Eternity. We feel them as a Whitsuntide thought that has been transmitted from epoch to epoch, in words spoken to-day for the first time exoterically:

‘Wesen reiht sich an Wesen in den Raumesweiten,
Wesen folgt auf Wesen in den Zeitenlaufen.
Verbleibst du in Raumesweiten und Zeitenläufen,
Bist du, O Mensch, allein im Gebiete der Vergänglichkeit.
Über sie aber erhebt deine Seele sich gewaltiglich,
Wenn sie erahnend oder wissend schaut das Unvergängliche
Jenseits der Raumesweiten und jenseits der Zeitenläufe!’

An approximate rendering of the foregoing is:

‘Being is ranged beside Being in the realms of space,
Being follows Being in the cycles of time.
Wouldst thou remain within the limits of space and time,
Then art thou, 0 man, in the realms of the Temporal alone.
But mightily thy soul wings its flight above space and time,
When, dimly foreseeing or knowing, it beholds the Eternal
Beyond the bounds of space and beyond the cycles of time.’

To get even closer to the problems we have opened up in these lectures, I want to make some incidental comments today. You probably know the amusing experiment so often done by conjurers: they show the audience some heavy weights and the effort required to lift them. To make the thing more credible, the pretend weights usually have figures written on them—so and so many hundredweight, or kilogram or whatever. Having made enormous efforts and slowly lifted the weights, so that the audience can admire his muscular strength, the conjurer then suddenly lifts them up high, or may even bring on a small boy who'll trot off swinging the weights—for the whole is made of cardboard. It is merely that the shape and the figures have been imitated to give the impression that those are real weights.

This experiment will frequently come to mind for anyone who has a little bit of spiritual science and who learns what people, even the more intelligent ones, are saying or writing about historical events or historical figures. This applies even to biographers and historians who, according to current opinion, are doing their work extremely well. If you have training in spiritual science, you may be entirely satisfied with the descriptions which are given—for a time. But when you go over it all in your mind again, it does seems as if a child might as well come and run off swinging all this stuff.

Perhaps there are not very many people who feel like this, though I have found something like it, at an instinctive level, with quite a number of people when it comes to the historical writings one gets today. The whole of Roman history, and particularly also Greek history, which is written today comes under this heading. And I am forced to say that historians dealing with one particular field, people whom I respect highly, nevertheless leave me with this impression. I have enormous respect for the historian Herman Grimm,¹ as will be evident from several of my lectures. But when I take up his books on Goethe, Michelangelo or Raphael, these figures seem as if they had no real weight—comparatively speaking—as if they were but darting shadows. The whole of Grimm's Goethe, the whole of his Michelangelo, are merely figures from a magic lantern, for these, too, have no weight.

What is the reason for this? It is that people who are merely equipped with the education, the intellectual content, of our present time do not have a real idea of the true reality, even though they generally think they are describing such a reality. People are infinitely far away from the true reality today because they do not know the element which is always around us and gives spiritual, if not exactly physical, weight to the figures.

Luther is being presented in hundreds, if not thousands, of ways during these weeks.² All very erudite, of course, for today's writers generally are most erudite; I am quite serious about this. But the Martin Luther described by our contemporaries is like the image we have of the weight made of cardboard, for the element which lends weight to a figure is missing. You may say: If one is sitting on a chair and watching the man lifting weights, it looks exactly the same whether the weights are made of cardboard or are real weights. You could even paint the scene; it would look the same. The painting could be perfectly true, even if the weights lifted by the model were made of cardboard. The descriptions given of historical figures like Luther may be eminently true, and the individuals who are so proud of their realism may have succeeded extremely well in using numerous details, numerous characteristic and significant things to create a sophisticated image, but the image does not necessarily correspond to reality, because the spiritual weight is lacking.

If we really want to understand Luther today we must know the inner quality of his true nature, quite independent of our own point of view; we must know he lived a short time after the dawn of the fifth post-Atlantean age, but that all the impulses of the fourth post-Atlantean age were alive in his heart and mind. He was out of place in the fifth post-Atlantean age, for he felt, thought and reacted like someone from the fourth post-Atlantean age; the task facing him belonged to the fifth postAtlantean age which then was just beginning. And so the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age, the horizon of that age, sees an individual whose inner impulses really came from all the qualities of the fourth post-Atlantean age. The prospect of what was to come in the fifth post-Atlantean age lived in Luther's soul at an unconscious, instinctive level.

That age was to bring all the materialism which could only arise for humanity in post-Atlantean times and would gradually penetrate every human sphere. To put it as a paradox—paradoxes never represent the actual facts, of course, but we are able to deduce the facts from them—we might say: Luther was entirely rooted in the fourth post-Atlantean age when it came to the impulses in his heart and mind and feelings, and this meant that he did not really understand the innermost nature of the materialistic human beings of the fifth post-Atlantean age. He certainly had an instinctive, more or less unconscious, inner grasp of the conflicts which would arise between the people of the fifth post-Atlantean age and the outside world, of how they would act in that world and be caught up in its works. Yet all this was really of no concern to him, because his feelings were those of the people who had lived in the fourth postAtlantean age. Hence his insistence that no good would come of being connected with the works of the world and being involved in the world. You must distance yourselves from these works and from everything which exists in the outside world, and find the way to the world of the spirit solely in your heart and mind. You must build your bridge between the spiritual and the earthly world not on the basis of what you are able to know, but what you are able to believe; it must grow from your inner mind and soul. Because he was not connected with the outside world, Luther emphasized that the relationship with the spiritual world was a purely inward one based on faith.

Or consider this: In some respects the world of the spirit lay open before Luther's inner eye. His visions of the devil do not need to be explained in the way Ricarda Huch³ explains them in her book, which otherwise has considerable merit. There is no need to make excuses for his visions of the devil by saying that he did not believe in a devil with horns and tail walking around in the street. Luther really had the devil appear to him; he knew full well the nature of this ahrimanic spirit. To some extent the spiritual world still lay open before his mind's eye as it had done for the people of the fourth post-Atlantean age, and it lay open specifically for the phenomena which were, in fact, to be of the essence in the fifth post-Atlantean age. The ahrimanic powers were pre-eminent in the fifth post-Atlantean age, and Luther saw them. People of the fifth post-Atlantean age are characteristically under the influence of these powers but not able to see them. Luther, however, was an individual of the fourth post-Atlantean age displaced into the fifth, and he saw those powers and therefore gave them such emphasis. This is the concrete situation as regards the spiritual world, and Luther cannot be understood unless this is taken into account.

If you go back to the fifteenth, fourteenth, thirteenth and, ultimately, the twelfth century, you will always find that people understood the conversion of matter. Anything written about this at a later date was largely fraudulent, because the real secrets were lost with the end of the fourth post-Atlantean age. But not everything written is fraudulent, and some of the things which were said were true, though they are difficult to find. What has been written is not exactly outstanding, however, especially anything printed at a later time. Yet at the time when the secrets of alchemy were known, which was during the fourth post-Atlantean age, church people were well able to speak of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and the blood, for there were definite ideas connected with these words. Luther was caught up in the thinking and inner responses of the fourth post-Atlantean age; yet he lived in the fifth post-Atlantean age. He had to separate transubstantiation from the process of physical conversion of matter. So what did the sacrament of the transubstantiation become for him?—It became a process which occurs entirely in the realm of the spirit. Nothing is transformed, he said; but when the faithful receive the bread and the wine the Body and blood of Christ enter into them. Everything Luther said, thought and felt was said, thought and felt by someone whose heart and mind belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean age. He clung to the spiritual connection between man and the gods which belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean age, taking this with him into the godless fifth age, an age of materialism, empty of spirit, without faith and without understanding.

Now Luther has weight, and we understand why he said the things he said—we know it quite apart from the impression he makes on us today. We see him standing in the outside world and he is like the real weight, not the cardboard one. Hundreds or thousands of modern theologians or historians may now come and give their impressions—these will not give us the man, someone with real weight; they will only give us the kind of thing produced by someone who is not holding up a real weight but one made of cardboard.

You see now what really matters at the present time. We must labour to gain awareness of the factors which give the world around us spiritual weight, and be aware of the fact that the spirit is alive in everything, and that this spirit can only be found with the help of anthroposophy. You can collect all the documents you want and scribble endless notes on Luther, you can present an accurate picture as far as the outer aspects are concerned—but, to stay with our analogy, you will always have a cardboard figure, unless you are truly able to look for the things that give the figure real weight. Now you may well say it seems hard to say to compare the work of some of the most erudite people to cardboard weights. And even if this were so, their work was really beautiful and satisfying in many ways. Is all this to be changed? Could we not go on enjoying their work?

You see, two questions arise for people in the present-day state of consciousness, questions which may well touch us deeply. Why did the spiritual world demand that these people should have the instincts which have led to such works? Well, these things really point to something which is very widespread today and closely bound up with human nature. As I have already mentioned, we are living at a time when certain truths have to become known which are not welcome truths. Yet anyone who can read the signs of the times knows that they have to become known.

In the first part of my essay on The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, written for the next issue of the journal Das Reich,⁴ I have touched lightly on some of these truths. Just a short while ago it was still taboo for those in the know to speak of these things in public. Today one must speak of them, even if this may cause problems. A short passage in my essay relates specifically to what I am going to say now.

Is it not true that as we move about in this world we do not have full and real knowledge of the things which are immediately around us, at least not to begin with? I think this is something anyone can quite easily establish for himself. We mainly use our sense of sight as we move through the world; but if we did not have other kinds of experiences as well, we would never know with complete certainty if something we see weighs a great deal or only little. We would have to pick it up to check the weight. Think of how many things there are where you cannot know if they are heavy or light as air until you pick them up. And finally, when you know that something is not as light as air, this knowledge has not come from looking at it but from having lifted something like it before. You do not even think about it, but unconsciously, instinctively come to the conclusion: If it looks the way such things always look, it will also weigh the same. Just looking at objects therefore provides you with nothing at all.

What does looking at objects provide? Illusion! If you regard the world with just one of the senses, you are deceived wherever you go. You only escape the illusion because you are unconsciously and instinctively drawing on experience. The whole world is really trying to deceive us, even in the world we perceive around us with the senses. The illusion may be very naturalistic nowadays. Painters and sculptors, who aim to present something to just one of the senses, fail to realize that they are merely presenting maya, illusion; for the more you try and present something realistically for just one of the senses, the more you are presenting maya. This is necessary, however, for if it were not for this illusion we would not be able to progress in conscious awareness. We owe our progress in consciousness to this illusion. To stay with my original analogy: If all objects appeared in their true weight, even when they were just perceived by the eye, if I were to feel the burden of their weight as I looked around me, I would quite obviously be unable to develop conscious awareness of the outside world. We owe our consciousness to this illusion. It lies at the root of all things which make up our consciousness. We have to be deceived in order to progress in consciousness, for our consciousness is the child of illusion. To begin with, however, the illusion must not enter into human beings or they will become unsure. The illusion remains beyond the threshold of conscious awareness. The Guardian makes sure that we do not realize how the world around us is deceiving us at every step. We fight our way upwards because the world does not reveal its weight to us and in this way lets us rise above it and be conscious. Consciousness also depends on many other things, but it mainly depends on the fact that the world around us is full of illusion.

Yet, necessary as it may be for illusion to be there for a time so that consciousness may arise, it is also necessary that when consciousness has developed we rise above the illusion, particularly in certain areas. Because it is based on maya, on illusion, our consciousness cannot gain access to true reality. Over and over again it would have to be subject to the kind of confusion I have mentioned. And so there must be alternating periods, periods when weightless situations and people are presented, and periods when the weight, the spiritual weight, is perceived. We are now facing the latter kind of period with regard to major world events as well as everyday events. We have to see through the things which seriously come into consideration in this respect.

One thing is particularly important: When the world looks to the East now, to what really lives in the east of Europe today, the people of Central Europe and America see the east of Europe exactly like someone who is looking at weights made of cardboard. They do not see the true spiritual weight of it. And indeed, neither do the people who actually live in eastern Europe have a real idea of the spirit which lives there. We can see Luther as an individual whose inner life belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean age, but who himself lived in the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. In the same way the world must come to see the true nature of the spirit in eastern Europe, for this is how we should actively consider these things in the fifth post-Atlantean age. If you take everything I have said about eastern Europe in lectures and lecture cycles—how the spirit-self is actively seeking to develop and how it must unite with the consciousness soul⁵ of the West—and if you add the fact that impulses for the sixth post-Atlantean age are in preparation in the east of Europe, then you have something which will lend weight to the east of Europe. If on the other hand you take all the statements people make today, however erudite, then you have weights which may just as well be made of cardboard.

However, we cannot buy or sell maya, illusion; we can only buy and sell real objects. You would say ‘thank you very much' if your grocer were to put cardboard weights rather than real ones on the scales. You would certainly demand real weights, not just some which look as if they were real. All political principles and impulses discussed with reference to Russia will be nothing, they will be null and void, unless they come from the awareness gained by knowing what gives spiritual weight. The way people talk today you would really think they are putting cardboard weights on the scales of world history. However, once awareness has come, it must not be used in the old lackadaisical and slovenly way, but must address itself to reality, not just to outer illusion. A transition will have to be made from the familiar, comfortable way of looking at things to one which is much more alive in its concepts—these will, of course, be less comfortable, for they also Shake us awake. Life will be less comfortable with the views which have to be taken in future. Why is this so? Let me give you an analogy which will probably also take you aback. I am not going to flinch, however, and I will say these things, irrespective of what individual people may feel about them.

As I have mentioned, in earlier ages, including the fourth post-Atlantean age, powers were available to humans which have been transformed into something else today. As I said, clairvoyance has become something different today, it is based on different things. Certain things can no longer be as they were even as late as the fourth post-Atlantean age, and one of these is the following.

In the fourth post-Atlantean age—people only know tales about it today and of course they do not believe them—there was an ordeal by fire. To prove guilt or innocence, people were made to walk a red hot grid. If they got burned, they were considered to be guilty, if not, if they walked across without being harmed, they were considered to be innocent. People consider this to be an old superstition today, but it is true. It is one of the abilities people had in the past and are no longer able to have today. In those days, human nature had this quality: Innocents who were utterly convinced of their innocence and knew themselves to be in the protection of the divine spirits at such a solemn moment, people who were so firmly connected with the spiritual world in their consciousness that the astral body would be taken out of the physical body, could walk across the embers with their physical bodies. It really was so in the past. This is the truth. It is really a good thing for you to be fully and completely clear in your minds that this old superstition is based on truth—though of course it is not a good idea for you to go and tell the vicar all about it.

These things have undergone a transformation. In the past, individuals who had to prove their innocence in a particular way, could be made to walk the embers on occasion. You can, however, be quite certain, that, generally speaking, people were afraid of fire even then; they did not enjoy walking over red hot grids. Even in those days it would generally make them shudder—except for those who were able to prove their innocence in this way. But some of the power which carried people through the embers in those days has now become more inward in the sense I spoke of in my last lecture. The clairvoyance of the fifth post-Atlantean age, the connection with the world of the spirit, is based on the same powers, except that the powers which formerly enabled people to walk through fire have been transformed and become more inward.

If one wants to be in touch with certain factors which belong to the world of the spirit, one has to overcome much the same reluctance as had to be overcome when people went through fire. That is the reason why many people fear the spiritual world today as much as they fear fire. We cannot really say people are just speaking figuratively when they say they are afraid of getting burned; they really are afraid. This is the reason for the opposition to anthroposophy: people are afraid of getting burned. Yet the progress of time demands that we gradually approach the fire and do not shy away from reality. The new inwardness of life of which I have spoken has many factors which demand that we gently draw closer to the world of the spirit—gently for the time being; later it will be stronger and stronger—in all spheres, but especially in the field of education.

In the sphere of education people will have to realize that quite different factors need to be considered than those which arise from the great climax now reached in the age of materialism. The realization must come that many of the things which from the materialistic point of view are eminently right—though the point of view is based on the senses and hence on maya, illusion—must be set aside and the opposite put in their place. Today it is considered important, especially in the field of education, to train teachers by teaching them as much method as possible. All the time it is said: This must be done like this, and that must be done like that. The aim is to develop well-regulated ideas of how one should educate. People love the idea of the regulative ideal. They would like to have the image of the ideal teacher and then always have such a teacher. But they only have to think a little bit about themselves and the issue will be clear. Ask yourself with as much self-knowledge as you are able to muster what has become of you—up to a certain point we can all see what has become of us—and then ask yourself who the teachers, the educators were who influenced you when you were young. Or, if this is a problem, try and think of a well-known and reasonably important person and then consider the teachers of that individual to see if you can somehow connect the significance of those teachers with the achievements of the individual.

It would be interesting if biographies told us more about the teachers; some interesting things would then emerge. But we would not be able to find out much about what those teachers did to make the individuals in question what they were. In most cases we would have the situation we have in the case of Herder, who achieved much;⁶ one of his best-known teachers was headmaster Herman Grimm.⁷ He was in the habit of tanning the boys' backsides as hard as he could. Herder's achievements did not come from having his backside tanned; he was a good boy and had few beatings. The teacher's general inclinations therefore did not have any effect on him! A nice story is told of this teacher, and it is really true. On one occasion he gave a terrible beating to a boy in Herder's class. Later, the boy was walking in the street when a man who had brought calfskins and sheepskins from the country asked him: ‘Tell me, boy, where can I find someone who'll bark tan these skins for me?’ ‘Ah,’ said the boy, ‘go to Mr Grimm, he is good at it.’ And the man actually went and rang Mr Grimm's doorbell—that taught the headmaster a lesson. But, you see, Herder did not become a great man because his teacher had this inclination. You will find many such things if you look into the education of individuals who later became great people.

Something else, however, which relates to something much more subtle, will be important. It will be important that the question of karma, or destiny, is taken into account, especially with regard to education and teaching methods. The people with whom my karma brought me together in childhood and youth certainly are important. And a tremendous amount depends on it that in our teaching we are aware that we and our pupils have been brought together. You see, much depends on a particular quality of mind and attitude.

Take the things we are already able to say about education today from the point of view of anthroposophy and you will find this to be wholly in accord with what I have said. It really has to be emphasized today that for the first seven years, up to the changing of the teeth, children want to imitate everything, and during the next seven years, until they reach puberty, they must submit to authority. We therefore have to do things which the children can imitate in the right way. Children will of course imitate everybody, but they do so especially with their teachers. They also believe everybody from their seventh to fourteenth year, but they should do so especially when it comes to their teachers and educators. We will know how to behave if we are constantly aware of the idea of karma; but we must have a real inner connection with this. Whether we are particularly good at teaching something, or perhaps less good, is not really so important. Even completely inept teachers may on occasion have a tremendous influence. Now, in the age of inwardness of which I have spoken, the question as to whether we are the right teacher or educator depends on the way in which we were connected with the child's soul before either of us—teacher and child—were born. The difference is merely that we teachers have come into the world a few years earlier than the children. Before that we were together with them in the world of the spirit.

Where does the desire to imitate come from, this tendency to imitate after we are born? We are imitators in our early years because we bring the tendency to Imitate with us from the world of the spirit. And whom do we like best to imitate? The individual who gave us our qualities in the world of the spirit, from whom we took something when we were in that world, be it in one particular field or another. The child's soul was connected with the soul of the teacher before birth. The connection was a close one; later, the outer physical being who lives in the physical world merely has to follow this line.

If you do not merely take what I am saying as an abstract truth but let it enter fully into your soul, you will find it has tremendous significance. Just think of the truly serious mood, the profundity of feeling which would come if, in the field of education, people lived with the idea: You are now showing the child something which it accepted from you in the world of the spirit before it was born. Just think, if this were to be the real impulse! It is much more important that such a mood, such a feeling, is brought to the task, rather than teaching people how to do this and how to do that. This will follow if the atmosphere is right between teacher and pupil, and if teachers are truly conscious of the great task life has given them. Above all there has to be this truly serious mood. It is poison to demand that children should understand everything, as it is often demanded today. I have frequently pointed out that children cannot understand everything. From their first to their seventh year they cannot understand at all; they imitate everything. And if they do not imitate sufficiently they will not have enough in them later which they can use. From their seventh to the fourteenth year they must believe, they must be under the influence of authority, if they are to develop in a healthy way. These things have to be made part of human life.

It is generally considered most important today to understand everything. We are not even supposed to teach the children their tables without their understanding it. But they do not understand anyway! Such an approach makes children into calculating machines rather than sensible people. They are supposed to accept the intellect which is in the elemental environment of which I have spoken,⁸ rather than develop their own understanding. This happens a great deal nowadays. Instead of helping the mind of the individual to develop, efforts are actually in progress to make it the ideal to inculcate the elemental intellect which is outside the human being, so that children are caught up in the elemental world. Many instances can be seen today where we can actually say: These people are not thinking for themselves, they are thinking in the general thinking atmosphere, as it were. And if something of an individual nature should come up, its origins are not in the divine element which can be perceived in human nature.

Human beings must enter into truly living ways again, even in their understanding of the world. As I have said, this is more difficult than working with mere corpses of ideas. Humanity must once again find a living approach, and people must realize that dead truths cannot govern life, only living truths can do so. The following is a dead truth.

We are supposed to train human beings to be intelligent human beings. Therefore—as dead truth says—we must cultivate the intellect as early as possible, for this will produce intelligent people. This is arrant nonsense, however. It is as much nonsense as it would be to train a one-year-old to be a shoemaker. People will, in fact, be intelligent only if they are not given intellectual training too early. It is often necessary to do the opposite of what we want to achieve in life. We cannot eat our food raw, but have to cook it first. And if this cooking process were to include the processes which are involved in eating, we might perhaps save ourselves the effort of eating! You cannot make people intelligent by cultivating the intellect as early as possible, but only by cultivating in them when very young the faculties which will later have them prepared to be intelligent. The abstract truth is: the intellect is cultivated via the intellect. The living truth is: the intellect is cultivated by healthy belief in rightful authority. Both parts of the statement have quite a different content in the living truth compared to the dead, abstract truth. This is something humanity will have to come to realize more and more as time goes on.

It is awkward. Consider how comfortable it is to have a goal and to believe this can be achieved by doing exactly what the goal says. But in life one has to do the opposite. This is certainly awkward. It is the challenge of our time that we must find our way to reality and life; this is what we must eminently make our own. There is need for this in both the great and the small things in life. You will not understand this age, you will be doing things as wrong as they can possibly be done, unless you consider this. People have no idea today of how immensely abstract they are, with everything forced always into the same mould. But the reality is not produced in the same mould, for it is in constant metamorphosis. The modified vertebrae which form part of the human head look very different from the vertebrae which make up the spine. Let me give you an example taken from everyday life. Imagine someone on the teaching staff of a university who teaches something which I, or someone else, must go against. I would of course make every effort to show that the things this person teaches are wrong; wanting to do my duty, I would go to any length to show that he is wrong and everything he says—well, to put it bluntly—is balderdash. This is one side of the matter.

Now let us assume the individual concerned found himself in a situation where the authorities wanted to dismiss him from his post or discipline him in some way. Well, of course, I would stand up for him in every possible way, against his dismissal or disciplining; for this would not be a question of the content of his teaching, but of ensuring academic freedom. For as long as we are dealing with people's theories, we have to fight; when it comes to an external institution, the fight ends and may even be transformed into coming to the individual's defence. It has to be realized that it is abominable if someone lets his opposition to someone induce him to take an active part in disciplining such a person. Let us assume, however, the individual concerned was a lecturer or professor of economics or politics and were appointed to hold a government office. What would our attitude be then? It would have to be such that one got him out of that office as quickly as possible, for there his theories would cause real damage.

In anything we do, we must relate to the immediate, living reality and not let ourselves be ruled by concepts. In the sphere of concepts, on the other hand, it is important to take a good hard look at the concepts we use. I have given this example to demonstrate the difference between dealing with reality and dealing with concepts. People who do not make this distinction will find it quite impossible to live with the tasks of the immediate future; they will at best be Wilsonians. What matters is to consider carefully what lives in reality and what one has to have by way of convictions in the sphere of concepts.

This is particularly important in the education of the young. Teachers in training are weighed down today with all kinds of principles as to how they should teach, how they should educate. In the immediate future this will become much less important. The important thing will be for them to get to know human nature and the different ways in which it comes to expression; they have to become psychologists in a most subtle way and really know the human soul. The relationship of the teacher to the pupil must in future be something analogous to clairvoyance. Teachers may not be fully conscious of this, and it may only live instinctively in their souls, but they must instinctively, at a level close to prophecy, have a picture of what wants to emerge from the individual who is to be educated. Then a strange thing will happen, peculiar as it may sound today. The teachers of the future will dream a great deal of their pupils, for the prophecies will be wearing the garment of dreams. The pictures we see in our dreams arise only because we are not used to connecting our dreams with the future; we dress them in elements remembered from the past, as in a garment. In reality dreams always point to the future. Yes, it is indeed true that the inner life will have to be changed, especially in those who educate the young. This is the most important aspect. Of course, everybody is more or less involved in educating the young, with just a very few exceptions, and it must therefore also hold true in a more general sense that we must have understanding for the karmic connections, as I have mentioned. Tremendously much will depend on this becoming general knowledge.

The present generation is mainly educated to think in abstract terms, and keeps confusing abstract and living ways of thinking. This is why it is so rare for anyone to support someone with glowing enthusiasm, for, having his own concepts, he dislikes those of the other person, and it suits him rather well if others come and put the other person out of action. These, however, are the very things which can teach us. And there can be no better education for people but to find ways in which they can stand up for their opponents with ever-increasing enthusiasm. This should not be forced, of course. People are friends or enemies today on a purely abstract basis. There is no point to this, however. Only the realities of life have a point to them, and they are given by life, not by our sympathies and antipathies. We should still have those sympathies and antipathies, but the pendulum should not merely swing up in one direction but also go down and in the opposite direction. Humanity must learn to live on two levels at once, in dualism—to enter into profound thought and, where reality demands this, to pour ourselves out over reality. Today, people want to take their thought-forms into everything connected with real life; and they are only prepared to put up with reality if it fits in with their own thought-forms. Uniformity is what they are after. But uniformity cannot be justified in the light of the spirit; this is impossible. The world cannot be easy and comfortable the way it is in reality. Not everyone will have the kind of face we like and find sympathetic. But it is wrong to let our actions towards others be determined by our personal sympathies and antipathies. Other impulses must come into play. People find it difficult to manage today because they look at the world, and if they do not find it in accord with their sympathies and antipathies then, in their view, everything is crooked and awry and quite wrong, and they are governed by just one impulse—that the world ought to be different.

This is one thing which has to be said. On the other hand we must not allow this to take us to the opposite, equally lackadaisical extreme, where we say that one should not be too fussy and just take the world as it is. This would be equally wrong. There are situations in life when serious objections must be raised, and this is what should be done. It means that due recognition must be given to reality. What really matters is the pendulum swing between a clear-minded inner life in well-defined concepts and loving care extended to the phenomena of the world.

Anthroposophy can show the way if we have the right attitude to it. But this, too, is something which has to be learned. The truths which are won from the world of the spirit are like communications, even for clairvoyant individuals. If we treat these truths in the same way we treat the facts of the outside world which are accessible to our unrefined senses, we are being unfair to spiritual science. The whole of spiritual science is open to our understanding. But it is wrong to ask the spiritual scientist ‘Yes, but why?’ each time he says anything, for these are communications he has received from the spiritual world. And if I say: ‘Jack Miller has told me this or that,’ it is pointless to say: And why did he tell you this?' He simply told me; the question as to why has little relevance. The things which come from the spiritual world must be considered as communications of this kind. It is important to understand this.

We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 1. Herman Grimm (1828–1901), German cultural historian.
• 2. Reference to the 400th Anniversary of the Reformation, which started on 31 October 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg.
• 3. See Note 3 of lecture 4.
• 4. See Note 2 of lecture 2.
• 5. To understand Steiner's concept of the consciousness soul (another translation would be ‘awareness soul’), see his Theosophy and Occult Science.
• 6. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), German critic and poet who was a major influence on Goethe.
• 7. Herman Grimm: see Note 1 above. The story told by Rudolf Steiner is in a biography of Gottfried Herder which was published by his son (Gottfried Herders Lebensbild, 1. Band, S. 39). This also gives a more detailed description of Grimm's educational method.
• 8. See Lecture 4.

As early as 1891 I drew attention¹ to the relation between Schiller's Aesthetic Letters² and Goethe's Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.³ I would like today to point to a certain connection between what I gave yesterday as the characteristic of the civilization of the Central-European countries in contrast to the Western and Eastern ones and what arises in quite a unique way in Goethe and Schiller. I characterized, on the one hand, the seizure of the human corporality by the spirits of the West and, on the other hand, the feeling of those spiritual beings who, as imaginations, as spirits of the East, work inspiringly into Eastern civilization. And one can notice both these aspects in the leading personalities of Goethe and Schiller. I will only point out in addition how in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters he seeks to characterize a human soul-constitution which shows a certain middle mood between one possibility in the human being—his being completely given over to instincts, to the sensible-physical—and the other possibility—that of being given over to the logical world of reason. Schiller holds that, in both cases, the human being cannot come to freedom. For if he has completely surrendered himself to the world of the senses, to the world of instincts, of desires, he is given over to his bodily-physical nature and is unfree. But he is also unfree when he surrenders himself completely to the necessity of reason, to logical necessity; for then he is coerced under the tyranny of the laws of logic. But Schiller wants to point to a middle state in which the human being has spiritualized his instincts to such a degree that he can give himself up to them without their dragging him down, without their enslaving him, and in which, on the other hand, logical necessity is taken up into sense perception (sinnliche Anschauen), taken up into personal desires (Triebe), so that these logical necessities do not also enslave the human being.

Schiller finds this middle state in the condition of aesthetic enjoyment and aesthetic creation, in which the human being can come to true freedom.

It is an extremely important fact that Schiller's whole treatise arose out of the same European mood as did the French Revolution. The same thing which, in the West, expressed itself tumultuously as a large political movement orientated towards external upheaval and change also moved Schiller—but moved him in such a way that he sought to answer the question: What must the human being do in himself in order to become a truly free being? In the West they asked: How must the external social conditions be changed so that the human being can become free? Schiller asked: What must the human being become in himself so that, in his constitution of soul, he can live in (darleben) freedom? And he sees that if human beings are educated to this middle mood they will also represent a social community governed by freedom. Schiller thus wishes to realize a social community in such a way that free conditions are created through [the inner nature of] human beings and not through outer measures.

Schiller came to this composition of his Aesthetic Letters through his schooling in Kantian philosophy. His was indeed a highly artistic nature, but in the 1780s and the beginning of the 1790s he was strongly influenced by Kant and tried to answer such questions for himself in a Kantian way (im Kantischen Sinne). Now the Aesthetic Letters were written just at the time when Goethe and Schiller were founding the magazine Die Horen (The Hours) and Schiller lays the Aesthetic Letters before Goethe.

Now we know that Goethe's soul-configuration was quite different from Schiller's. It was precisely because of the difference of their soul-constitutions that these two became so close. Each could give to the other just that which the other lacked. Goethe now received Schiller's Aesthetic Letters in which Schiller wished to answer the question: How can the human being come inwardly to a free inner constitution of soul and outwardly to free social conditions? Goethe could not make much of Schiller's philosophical treatise. This way of presenting concepts, of developing ideas, was not unfamiliar to him. Anyone who, like myself, has seen how Goethe's own copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is filled with underlinings and marginal comments knows how Goethe had really studied this work of Kant's which was abstract, but in a completely different sense. And just as he seems to have been able to take works such as these purely as study material, so, of course, he could also have taken Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. But this was not the point. For Goethe this whole construction of the human being—on the one hand logical necessity and on the other the senses with their sensual needs, as Schiller said, and the third, the middle condition—for Goethe this was all far too cut and dried, far too simplistic. He felt that one could not picture the human being so simply, or present human development so simply, and thus he wrote to Schiller that he did not want to treat the problem, this whole riddle, in such a philosophical, intellectual form, but more pictorially. Goethe then treated this same problem in picture form—as reply, as it were, to Schiller's Aesthetic Letters—in his Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily by presenting the two realms on this and on the far side of the river, in a pictorial, rich and concrete way; the same thing that Schiller presents as sense-life and the life of reason. And what Schiller characterizes abstractly as the middle condition, Goethe portrays in the building of the temple in which rule the King of Wisdom (the Golden King), the King of Semblance (the Silver King), the King of Power (the Copper King) and in which the Mixed King falls to pieces. Goethe wanted to deal with this in a pictorial way. And we have, in a certain sense, an indication—but in the Goethean way—of the fact that the outer structure of human society must not be monolithic but must be a threefoldness if the human being is to thrive in it. What in a later epoch had to emerge as the threefold social order is given here by Goethe still in the form of an image. Of course, the threefold social order does not yet exist but Goethe gives the form he would like to ascribe to it in these three kings; in the Golden, the Silver, and the Copper King. And what cannot hold together he gives in the Mixed King.

But it is no longer possible to give things in this way. I have shown this in my first Mystery Drama⁴ which, in essence, deals with the same theme but in the way required by the beginning of the twentieth century, whereas Goethe wrote his Fairy-tale at the end of the eighteenth century.

Now, however, it is already possible to indicate in a certain way—even though Goethe had not himself yet done so—how the Golden King would correspond to that aspect of the social organism which we call the spiritual aspect: how the King of Semblance, the Silver King, would correspond to the political State: how the King of Power, the Copper King, would correspond to the economic aspect, and how the Mixed King, who disintegrates, represents the 'Uniform State' which can have no permanence in itself.

This was how, in images, Goethe pointed to what would have to arise as the threefold social order. Goethe thus said, as it were, when he received Schiller's Aesthetic Letters: One cannot do it like this. You, dear friend, picture the human being far too simplistically. You picture three forces. This is not how it is with the human being. If one wishes to look at the richly differentiated inner nature of the human being, one finds about twenty forces—which Goethe then presents in his twenty archetypal fairy-tale figures—and one must then portray the interplay and interaction of these twenty forces in a much less abstract way.

Thus at the end of the eighteenth century we have two presentations of the same thing. One by Schiller, from the intellect as it were, though not in the usual way that people do things from the intellect, but such that the intellect is permeated here with feeling and soul, is permeated by the whole human being. Now there is a difference between some dry, average, professional philistine presenting something on the human being in psychological terms, where only the head thinks about the matter, and Schiller, out of an experience of the whole human being, forming for himself the ideal of a human constitution of soul and thereby only transforming into intellectual concepts what he actually feels.

It would be impossible to go further on the path taken by Schiller using logic or intellectual analysis without becoming philistine and abstract. In every line of these Aesthetic Letters there is still the full feeling and sensibility of Schiller. It is not the stiff Königsberg approach of Immanuel Kant with dry concepts; it is profundity in intellectual form transformed into ideas. But should one take it just one step further one would come into the intellectual mechanism that is realized in the usual science of today in which, basically, behind what is structured and developed intellectually, the human being has no more significance. It thus becomes a matter of no importance whether Professor A or D or X deals with the subject because what is presented does not arise from the whole human being. In Schiller everything still has a totally personal (urpersönlich) nature, even into the intellect. Schiller lives there in a phase—indeed, in an evolutionary point of the modern development of humanity which is of essential importance—because Schiller stops just short of something into which humanity later fell completely.

Let us show diagramatically what might be meant here. One could say: This is the general tendency of human evolution (arrow pointing upwards). Yet it cannot go [straight] like this—portrayed only schematically—but loops round into a lemniscate (blue). But it cannot go on like that—there must, if evolution takes this course, be continually new impulses Antriebe) which move the lemniscates up along the line.

Schiller, having arrived at this point here (see diagram), would have gone into a dark blue, as it were, of mere abstraction, of intellectuality, had he proceeded further in objectifying what he felt inwardly. But he drew a halt and paused with his forms of reasoning just at that point at which the personality is not lost. Thus, this did not become blue but, on a higher level of the Personality—which I will colour with red (see diagram)—was turned into green.

Thus one can say: Schiller held back with his intellectuality just before that point at which intellectuality tries to emerge in its purity. Otherwise he would have fallen into the usual intellect of the nineteenth century. Goethe expressed the same thing in images, in wonderful images, in his Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. But he, too, stopped at the images. He could not bear these pictures to be in any way criticized because, for him, what he perceived and felt about the individual human element and the social life, did simply present itself in such pictures. But he was allowed to go no further than these images. For had he, from his standpoint, tried to go further he would have come into wild, fantastic daydreams. The subject would no longer have had definite contours; it would no longer have been applicable to real life but would have risen above and beyond it. It would have become rapturous fantasy. One could say that Goethe had to avoid the other chasm, in which he would have come completely into a fantastic red. Thus he adds that element which is non-personal—that which keeps the pictures in the realm of the imaginative—and thereby came also to the green.

Expressing it schematically, Schiller had, as it were, avoided the blue, the Ahrimanic-intellectuality; Goethe had avoided the red, excessive rapturousness, and kept to concrete imaginative pictures.

As a human being of Central Europe, Schiller had con-fronted the spirits of the West. They wanted to lead him astray into the solely intellectual. Kant had succumbed to this. I spoke about this recently⁵ and indicated how Kant had succumbed to the intellectuality of the West through David Hume. Schiller had managed to work himself clear of this even though he allowed himself to be taught by Kant. He stayed at the point that is not mere intellectuality.

Goethe had to do battle with the other spirits, with the spirits of the East, who pulled him towards imaginations. Because at that time spiritual science was not yet present on the earth he could not go further than to the web of imaginations in the Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. But even here he managed to remain within firm contours. He did not go off into wild fantasy or ecstasies. He gave himself a new and fruitful stimulus through his journey to the South where much of the legacy from the Orient was still preserved. He learnt how the spirits of the East still worked here as a late blossoming of oriental culture; in Greek art as he construed this for himself from Italian works of art. It can therefore be said that there was something quite unique in this bond of friendship between Schiller and Goethe. Schiller had to battle with the spirits of the West; he did not yield to them but held back and did not fall into mere intellectuality. Goethe had to battle with the spirits of the East; they tried to pull him into ecstatic reveries zum Schwärmerischen). He, too, held back; he kept to the images which he gives in his Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Goethe would have had either to succumb to rapturous daydreams (Schwärmerei) or to take up oriental revelation. Schiller would have had either to become completely intellectual or would have had to take seriously what he became—it is well known that he was made a 'French citizen' by the revolutionary government but that he did not take the matter very seriously.

We see here how, at an important point of European development, these two soul-constitutions, which I have characterized for you, stand side by side. They live anyway, so to speak, in every significant Central-European individuality but in Schiller and Goethe they stand in a certain way simultaneously side by side. Schiller and Goethe remained, as it were, at this point, for it just required the intercession of spiritual science to raise the curve of the lemniscate (see diagram) to a higher level.

And thus, in a strange way, in Schiller's three conditions—the condition of the necessity of reason, the condition of the necessity of instincts and that of the free aesthetic mood—and in Goethe's three kings—the Golden King, the Silver King, and the Copper King—we see a prefiguration of everything that we must find through spiritual science concerning the threefold nature of the human being as well as the threefold differentiation of the social community representing, as these do, the most immediate and essential aims and problems of the individual human being and of the way human beings live together.

These things direct us indeed to the fact that this threefolding of the social organism is not brought to the surface arbitrarily but that even the finest spirits of modern human evolution have already moved in this direction. But if there were only the ideas about the social questions such as those in Goethe's Fairy-tale and nothing more one would never come to an impetus for actual outer action. Goethe was at the point of overcoming mere revelations. In Rome he did not become a Catholic but raised himself up to his imaginations. But he stopped there, with just pictures. And Schiller did not become a revolutionary but a teacher of the inner human being. He stopped at the point where intellect is still suffused with the personality.

Thus, in a later phase of European culture, there was still something at work which can be perceived also in ancient times and most clearly, for modern people, in the culture of ancient Greece. Goethe also strove towards this Greek element. In Greece one can see how the social element is presented in myth—that is, also in picture form. But the Greek myth, basically, Is image in the same way that Goethe's Fairy-tale is image. It is not possible with these images to work into the social organism in a reforming way. One can only describe as an idealist, as it were, what ought to take shape. But the images are too frail a structure to enable one to act strongly and effectively in the shaping of the social organism. For this very reason the Greeks did not believe that their social questions were met by remaining in the images of the myths. And it is here, when one follows this line of investigation, that one comes to an important point in Greek development.

One could put it like this: for everyday life, where things go on in the usual way, the Greeks considered themselves dependant on their gods, on the spirits of their myths. When, however, it was a matter of deciding something of great importance, then the Greeks said: Here it is not those gods who work into imaginations and are the gods of the myths that can determine the matter; here something real must come to light. And so the Oracle arose. The gods were not pictured here merely imaginatively but were called upon (veranlasst) really to inspire people. And it was with the sayings of the Oracle that the Greeks concerned themselves when they wanted to receive social impulses. Here they ascended from imagination to inspiration, but an inspiration which they attained by means of outer nature. We modern human beings must certainly also endeavour to lift ourselves up to inspiration; an inspiration, however, that does not call upon outer nature in oracles but which rises to the spirit in order to be inspired in the sphere of the spirit. But just as the Greeks turned to reality in matters of the social sphere—just as they did not stop at imaginations but ascended to inspirations—so we, too, cannot stop at imaginations but must rise up to inspirations if we are to find anything for the well-being of human society in the modern age.

And we come here to another point which is important to look at. Why did Schiller and Goethe both stop at a certain point—the one on the path towards the intellectual (Verstandiges) and the other on the path to the imaginative? Neither of them had spiritual science; otherwise Schiller would have been able to advance to the point of permeating his concepts in a spiritual-scientific way and he would then have found: something much more real in his three soul-conditions than the three abstractions in his Aesthetic Letters. Goethe would have filled imagination with what speaks out in all reality from the spiritual world and would have been able to penetrate to the forms of the social life which wish to be put into effect from the spiritual world—to the spiritual element in the social organism, the Golden King; to the political element in the social organism, the Silver King; and to the economic element, the Bronze, the Copper, King.

The age in which Goethe and Schiller pressed forward to these insights—the one in the Aesthetic Letters and the other in the Fairy-tale—was not yet able to go any further. For, in order to penetrate further, there is something quite definite that must first be realized. People have to see what becomes of the world if one continues along Schiller's path up to the full elaboration (Ausgestaltung) of the impersonally intellectual. The nineteenth century developed it to being with in natural science and the second half of the nineteenth century already began to try to realize it in outer public affairs. There is a significant secret here. In the human organism what is ingested is also finally destroyed. We cannot simply go on eating but must also excrete; the substance we take in has to meet with destruction, has to be destroyed, and has then to leave the organism. And the intellectual is that which—and here comes a complication—as soon as it gets hold of the economic life in the uniform State, in the Mixed King, destroys that economic life.

But we are now living in the time in which the intellect must evolve. We could not come to the development of the consciousness-soul in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch without developing the intellect. And it is the Western peoples that have just this task of bringing the intellect into the economic life. What does this mean? We cannot order modern economic life imaginatively, in the way that Goethe did in his Fairy-tale, because we have to shape it through the intellect (verständig). Because in economics we cannot but help to go further along the path which Schiller took, though in his case he went only as far as the still-personal outbreathing of the intellect. We have to establish an economic life which, because it has to come from the intellect, of necessity works destructively in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In the present age there is no economic life that could be run imaginatively like that of the Orient or the economy of medieval Europe. Since the middle of the fifteenth century we have only had the possibility of an economic life which, whether existing alone or mixed with the other limbs of the social organism, works destructively. There is no other way. Let us therefore look on this economic life as the side of the scales that would sink far down and therefore has to work destructively. But there also has to be a balance. For this reason we must have an economic life that is one part of the social organism, and a spiritual life which holds the balance, which builds up again. If one clings today to the uniform State, the economic life will absorb this uniform State together with the spiritual life, and uniform States like these must of necessity lead to destruction. And when, like Lenin and Trotsky, one founds a State purely out of the intellect it must lead to destruction because the intellect is directed solely to the economic life.

This was felt by Schiller as he thought out his social conditions. Schiller felt: If I go further in the power of the intellect (verständesmassiges Können) I will come into the economic life and will have to apply the intellect to it. I will not then be portraying what grows and thrives but what lives in destruction. Schiller shrank back before the destruction. He stopped just at the point where destruction would break in. People of today invent all sorts of social economic systems but are not aware, because they lack the sensitivity of feeling for it, that every economic system like this that they think up leads to destruction; leads definitely to destruction if it is not constantly renewed by an independent, developing spiritual life which ever and ever again works as a constructive element in relation to the destruction, the excretion, of the economic life. The working together of the spiritual limb of the social organism with the economic element is described in this sense in my Towards Social Renewal (Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage).⁶

If, with the modern intellectuality of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, people were to hold on to capital even when they themselves could no longer manage it, the economic life itself would cause it to circulate. Destruction would inevitably have to come. This is where the spiritual life has to intervene; capital must be transferred via the spiritual life to those who are engaged in its administration. This is the inner meaning of the threefolding of the social organism; namely that, in a properly thought out threefold social organism, one should be under no illusion that the economic thinking of the present is a destructive element which must, therefore, be continually counterbalanced by the constructive element of the spiritual limb of the social organism.

In every generation, in the children whom we teach at school, something is given to us; something is sent down from the spiritual world. We take hold of this in education—this is something spiritual—and incorporate it into the economic life and thereby ward off its destruction. For the economic life, if it runs its own course, destroys itself. This is how we must look at things. Thus we must see how at the end of the eighteenth century there stood Goethe and Schiller. Schiller said to himself: I must pull back, I must not describe a social system which calls merely on the personal intellect. I must keep the intellect within the personality, otherwise I would describe economic destruction. And Goethe: I want sharply contoured images, not excessive vague ones. For if I were to go any further along that path I would come into a condition that is not on the earth, that does not take hold with any effect on life itself. I would leave the economic life below me like something lifeless and would found a spiritual life that is incapable of reaching into the immediate circumstances of life.

Thus we are living in true Goetheanism when we do not stop at Goethe but also share the development in which Goethe himself took part since 1832. I have indicated this fact—that the economic life today continually works towards its own destruction and that this destruction must be continually counterbalanced. I have indicated this in a particular place in my Towards Social Renewal. But people do not read things properly. They think that this book is written in the same way most books are written today—that one can just read it through. Every sentence in a book such as this, written out of practical insight, requires to be thoroughly thought through!

But if one takes these two things [Goethe's Fairy-tale and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters], Schiller's Aesthetic Letters were little understood in the time that followed them. I have often spoken about this. People gave them little attention. Otherwise the study of Schiller's Aesthetic Letters would have been a good way of coming into what you find in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—How is it Achieved? Schiller's Aesthetic Letters would be a good preparation for this. And likewise, Goethe's Fairy-tale could also be the preparation for acquiring that configuration of thinking (Geisteskonfiguration) which can arise not merely from the intellect but from still deeper forces, and which would be really able to understand something like Towards Social Renewal. For both Schiller and Goethe sensed something of the tragedy of Central European civilization—certainly not consciously, but they sensed it nevertheless. Both felt—and one can read this everywhere in Goethe's conversations with Eckermann, with Chancellor von Müller⁷ , and in numerous other comments by Goethe—that if something like a new impulse from the spirit did not arise, like a new comprehension of Christianity, then everything must go into decline. A great deal of the resignation which Goethe felt in his later years is based, without doubt, on this mood.

And those who, without spiritual science, have become Goetheanists feel how, in the very nature of German Central Europe, this singular working side by side of the spirits of the West and the spirits of the East is particularly evident. I said yesterday that in Central European civilization the balance sought by later Scholasticism between rational knowledge and revelation is attributable to the working of the spirits of the West and the spirits of the East. We have seen today how this shows itself in Goethe and Schiller. But, fundamentally, the whole of Central European civilization wavers in the whirlpool in which East and West swirl and interpenetrate one another. From the East the sphere of the Golden King; from the West the sphere of the Copper King. From the East, Wisdom; from the West, Power. And in the middle is what Goethe represented in the Silver King, in Semblance; that which imbues itself with reality only with great difficulty. It was this semblance-nature of Central European civilization which lay as the tragic mood at the bottom of Goethe's soul. And Herman Grimm, who also did not know spiritual science, gave in a beautiful way, out of his sensitive feeling for Goethe whom he studied, a fine characterization of Central-European civilization. He saw how it had the peculiarity of being drawn into the whirlpool of the spirits of the East and the spirits of the West. This was the effect of preventing the will from coming into its own and leads to the constantly vacillating mood of German history. Herman Grimm⁸ puts it beautifully when he says: 'To Treitschke German history is the incessant striving towards spiritual and political unity and, on the path towards this, the incessent interference by our own deepest inherent peculiarities.' This is what Herman Grimm says, experiencing himself as a German. And he describes this further as 'Always the same way in our nature to oppose where we should give way and to give way where resistance is called for. The remarkable forgetting of what has just past. Suddenly no longer wanting what, a moment ago, was vigorously striven for. A disdain for the present, but strong, indefinite hope. Added to this the tendency to give ourselves over to the foreigner and, no sooner having done so, then exercising an unconscious, determining (massgebende) influence on the foreigners to whom we had subjected ourselves.'

When, today, one has to do with Central European civilization and would like to arrive at something through it, one is everywhere met by the breath of this tragic element which is betrayed by the whole history of the German, the Central European element, between East and West. It is everywhere still so today that, with Herman Grimm, one can say: There is the urge to resist where one should give way and to give way where resistance is needed.

This is what arises from the vacillating human beings of the Centre; from what, between economics and the reconstructing spirit-life, stands in the middle as the rhythmical oscillating to and fro of the political. Because the civic-political element has celebrated its triumph in these central countries, it is here that a semblance lives which can easily become illusion. Schiller, in writing his Aesthetic Letters, did not want to abandon semblance. He knew that where one deals purely with the intellect, one comes into the destruction of the economic life. In the eighteenth century that part was destroyed which could be destroyed by the French Revolution; in the nineteenth century it would be much worse. Goethe knew that he must not go into wild fantasies but keep to true imagination. But in the vacillation between the two sides of this duality, which arises in the swirling, to and fro movement of the spirits of the West and of the East, there is easily generated an atmosphere of illusion. It does not matter whether this illusionary atmosphere emerges in religion, in politics or in militarism; in the end it is all the same whether the ecstatic enthusiast produces some sort of mysticism or enthuses in the way Ludendorff⁹ did without standing on the ground of reality. And, finally, one an also meet it in a pleasing way. For the same place in Herman Grimm which I just read out continues as follows: 'You can see it today: no one seemed to be so completely severed from their homeland as the Germans who became Americans, and yet American life, into which our emigrants dissolved, stands today under the influence of the German spirit.'

Thus writes the brilliant Herman Grimm in 1895 when it was only out of the worst illusion that one could believe that the Germans who went to America would give American life a German colouring. For already, long before this, there had been prepared what then emerged in the second decade of the twentieth century: that the American element completely submerged what little the Germans had been able to bring in.

And the illusionary nature of this remark by Herman Grimm becomes all the greater when one finally bears in mind the following. Herman Grimm makes this comment from a Goethean way of thinking (Gesinnung), for he had modelled himself fully on Goethe. But he had a certain other quality. Anyone who knows Herman Grimm more closely knows that in his style, in his whole way of expressing himself, in his way of thinking, he had absorbed a great deal of Goethe, but not Goethe's real and penetrating quality—for Grimm's descriptions are such that what he actually portrays are shadow pictures, not real human beings. But he has something else in him, not just Goethe. And what is it that Herman Grimm has in himself? Americanism! For what he had in his style, in his thought-forms, apart from Goethe he has from early readings of Emerson. Even his sentence structure, his train of thought, is copied from the American, Emerson.¹⁰

Thus, Herman Grimm is under this double illusion, in the realm of the Silver King of Semblance. At a time when all German influence has been expunged from America he fondly believes that America has been Germanized, when in fact he himself has quite a strong vein of Americanism in him.

Thus there is often expressed in a smaller, more intimate context what exists in a less refined form in external culture at large. A crude Darwinism, a crude economic thinking, has spread out there and would in the end, if the threefolding of the social organism fails to come, lead to ruin—for an economic life constructed purely intellectually must of necessity lead to ruin. And anyone who, like Oswald Spengler,¹¹ thinks in the terms of this economic life can prove scientifically that at the beginning of the third millenium the modern civilized world—which today is actually no longer so very civilized—will have had to sink into the most desolate barbarity. For Spengler knows nothing of what the world must receive as an impulse, as a spiritual impulse.

But the spiritual science and the spiritual-scientific culture which not only wishes to enter, but must enter, the world today still has an extremely difficult task getting through. And everywhere those who wish to prevent this spiritual science from arising assert themselves. And, basically, there are only a few energetic workers in the field of spiritual science whereas the Others, who lead into the works of destruction, are full of energy.

One only has to see how people of today are actually completely at a loss in the face of what comes up in the life of Present civilization. It is characteristic, for instance, how a newspaper of Eastern Switzerland carried articles on my lectures on The Boundaries of Natural Science during the course at the School of Spiritual Science. And now, in the town where the newspaper is published, Arthur Drews¹², the copy-cat of Eduard von Hartmann, holds lectures in which he has never done anything more than rehash Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious.¹³ In the case of Hartmann it is interesting. In the case of the rehasher it is, of course, highly superfluous. And this philosophical hollow-headedness working at Karlsruhe University is now busying itself with anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science.

And how does the modern human being—I would particularly like to emphasize this—confront these things? Well, we have listened to one person, we now go and listen to someone else. This means that, for the modern human being, it is all a matter of indifference, and this is a terrible thing. Whether the rehasher of Eduard von Hartmann, Arthur Drews, has something against Anthroposophy or not is not the important point—for what the man can have against Anthroposophy can be fully construed beforehand from his books, not a single sentence need be left out. The significant thing is that people's standpoint is that one hears something, makes a note of it, and then it is over and done with, finished! All that is needed to come to the right path is that people really go into the matter. But people today do not want to be taken up with having to go into something properly. This is the really terrible and awful thing; this is what has already pushed people so far that they are no longer able to distinguish between what is speaking of realities and what writes whole books, like those of Count Hermann Von Keyserling,¹⁴ in which there is not one single thought, just jumbled-together words. And when one longs for something to be taken up enthusiastically—which would, of itself, lead to this hollow word-skirmishing being distinguished from what is based on genuine spiritual research—one finds no one who rouses himself, makes a stout effort and is able to be taken hold of by that which has substance. This is what people have forgotten—and forgotten thoroughly—in this age in which truth is not decided according to truth itself, but in which the great lie walks among men so that in recent years individual nations have only found to be true what comes from them and have found what comes from other nations to be false. The disgusting way that people lie to each other has fundamentally become the stamp of the public spirit. Whenever something came from another nation it was deemed untrue. If it came from one's own nation it was true. This still echoes on today; it has already become a habit of thought. In contrast, a genuine, unprejudiced devotion to truth leads to spiritualization. But this is basically still a matter of indifference for modern human beings.

Until a sufficiently large number of people are willing to engage themselves absolutely whole-heartedly for spiritual science, nothing beneficial will come from the present chaos. People should not believe that one can somehow progress by galvanizing the old. This 'old' founds 'Schools of Wisdom' on purely hollow words. It has furnished university philosophy with the Arthur Drews's who, however, are actually represented everywhere, and yet humanity will not take a stand. Until it makes a stand in all three spheres of life—in the spiritual, the political and the economic spheres—no cure can come out of the present-day chaos. It must sink ever deeper!

• 1 . See Rudolf Steiner's own review (GA 51) of his lecture to the Vienna Goethe Association (Wiener Goetheverein) on 27 November 1891 entitled Über das Geheimnis in Goethes Rätselmarchen in den 'Unterhaltu deutscher Ausgewanderter' (On the Secret in Goethe's Enigmatic Fairy Tale in 'Conversations of German Emigrants) in Literarisches Frühhwerk, Vol III, Book IV, Dornach, 1942. See also Goethe's Standard of the Soul (Goethes Geistesart in ihrer Offenbarung durch seine 'Faust' und durch sein 'Märchen von der grünen Schlange und der Lilie') (GA 22).
• 2 . See On the Aesthetic Education of Man published in 1795 in the Die Horen. This work arose from letters sent by Schiller to the Duke of Augustenburg between 1793 and 1795.
• 3 . Published in the Die Horen in 1795 as the close to the short story Conversations of German Emigrants.
• 4 . See The Portal of Initiation—A Rosicrucian Mystery, 1910, in Four Mystery Dramas, (GA 14).
• 5 . See Lecture One of this volume.
• 6 . See Towards Social Renewal, 1919, (GA 23). For what follows on here, see Chapter Two.
• 7 . See, for example, the conversation with Chancellor von Müller on 8 June 1830 and that with Eckermann on 11 March 1832.
• 8 . Herman Grimm (1828–1902). The quotations are from his essay Heinrich von Treitschke's German History (Heinrich von Treitschhes Deutsche Geschichte) in Contributions to German Cultural History, (Beitrage zur Deutschen Kultur-geschichte) Berlin, 1897, page. 5
• 9 . Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937), German general.
• 10. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), American writer and philosopher.
• 11. Reference is made here to Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) and his work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline and Fall of the Occident), the first part of which was published in 1918.
• 12. Arthur Drews (1865–1935), Professor of Philosophy at the Technical University at Karlsruhe, spoke on 10 October 1920 in lectures organized by the free religious congregation at Konstanz on 'Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy'. He repeated this lecture on 19 November in Mainz. His articles opposing Anthroposophy were published as a collection under the title Metaphysik and Anthropasophie in ihrer Stellung zur Erkenrunis des Obersinnlichen (Metaphysics and Anthropasophy in their Position Regarding Knowledge of the Supersensible), Berlin, 1922.
• 13. Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), Philosophie des Unbewucsten: Versuch einer Weltanschauung (Philosophy of the Unconscious: An Attempt at a World-View), Berlin, 1869.
• 14. Count Hermann Keyserling (1880–1946). Compare, for example, the chapter 'Für and wider die Theosophie' ('For and Against Theosophy') in Philosophic als Kunst (Philosophy as an Art), Darmstadt, 1920.

If we bring to mind what we have gathered from our recent lectures, including yesterday's lecture, and not from their various details but from their whole trend and meaning, then we can say it is the following: It is demanded of the civilisation that must replace ours towards the future in an energetic way, that it should look deeper into true reality, that above all such high-sounding phrases, or rather, such high-sounding theories as those of Monism, Idealism, Realism, and so on, come to an end, and that men realise that the maya-reality, the reality of the surrounding external phenomena, is actually a confluence of two worlds, of two worlds, in fact, in conflict with one another. To look at reality means something very different from merely following up theoretically all that exists in the world of appearances around us, which is the way of modern natural science.

In order to discuss this theme practically, we will first go into a concrete example. Who would not suppose that the materialistic concept of the world which has spread among civilised nations since the 60's, 70's of last century, and the materialistic mode of living which indeed results from this concept, must necessarily have the effect of making men more materialistic? If one looks at the world merely from appearances one naturally supposes that there arises a sort of external manifestation of the ideas which men have had in their heads; but that is not the case. As soon as one turns one's mind to the conditions that in reality follow one another then that does not accord at all, it is not true that the world is somehow or other organised according to the ideas men set in their heads. One only understands that this cannot be the reality if one realises that the human being is of a double nature, as we have explained, that in him the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic forces are working through each other continually. Only because that is so is the following concrete phenomenon possible. Let us assume that an age would give itself up to materialistic ideas for a sufficiently long time, as our age has done. Misled by these ideas it would also in conscious will develop a kind of materialistic mode of life. The results will not enter the part of human nature that is the bearer of the conscious life. To begin with, the bearer of the conscious life has not that thoroughgoing influence on human life that a superficial observation is inclined to attribute to it; the results enter the unconscious. You can picture this schematically: in man's conscious head-nature lives materialism; in his subconscious nature, which goes through a metamorphosis after we have passed through the gate of death and live over into the next earth-incarnation, but which we carry in us now as an incomplete formation—this, let us say, lower nature of man is the bearer of the unconscious soul-life and in a remarkable way this unconscious soul-life becomes under the influence of materialism more and more spiritual. So that the actual result of materialistic ideas and of the materialistic way of life is that the lower nature of man becomes increasingly spiritual. You must therefore imagine the following. If you are completely immersed in concepts of matter and energy and believe solely in these, and order your life on the lines of “eat and drink and then the nothingness of death”—then, carrying out all your actions on this basis, materialism really enters your mode of living, and the lower nature gets increasingly spiritual.

The lower nature, however, which is becoming more and more spiritual, needs something to work on it; it cannot make its necessary way through evolution alone. Now since in the head, in man's upper nature, there are only materialistic ideas and sympathies, this upper nature is unable to work on man's lower nature, and in consequence of this deprivation, the lower nature is exposed to the working of the Luciferic principle. The Luciferic principle, as I said in the last lecture, does not manifest in sense-perceptible reality: the Luciferic beings are spiritual beings. They enter man's lower nature when it becomes so spiritual under the influence of materialism, and when this very materialism prevents anything from man himself flowing into the lower nature. The paradoxical truth appears before our soul that a materialistic age actually prepares a spiritual culture, but a Luciferic one.

Conversely, taking the reverse case, let us suppose that an ecclesiastical truth, not imbued with spirituality, but supported purely by tradition, takes hold of man, or works towards taking hold of him. And related to such an ecclesiastical truth is abstract idealism which believes only in abstract ideals, in morality and has no knowledge of how these abstract ideals arise—however fine and beautiful they may be, they are of no use if one has no feeling for the way in which such forces can come about. Purely religious and purely idealistic ideas have again the consequence that the lower nature of man becomes more material. Whereas materialistic ideas promote spirituality in man's lower nature, purely clerical concepts built on tradition without spiritual influence, as well as abstract idealism, promote an increasing growth of materialism in man's lower nature. Speaking crudely, one might say that the type of this increasing materialism of the lower nature through the traditional abstract churchy element is the corpulent parson; he devotes himself to traditional church conceptions and in this way fattens up his little stomach. This is only a comparison, it is no fact and no law—I merely want to make things clear, yet it corresponds to a fundamental reality. But now again the increasing materialism of mans lower nature has no nourishment if the head harbours none but traditional and abstract traditional ideas. Hence a humanity which founds such a culture is pre-eminently exposed not to their own head-nature but to Ahrimanic influences. And so we must say that the abstractly religious the abstractly idealistic, promotes in fact an Ahrimanic materialism, while, conversely, materialistic thinking promotes a Luciferic spiritualism.

All these things rest fundamentally on the fact that true reality is of a totally different nature from external apparent reality. But it is now required of man that he should get to know true reality according to its law and being. Social science, the science of human community-life and man's historical life must in particular always be permeated by a spiritual science that, as these lectures have shown, can really build the bridge between the nature-order and the spirit-order, real bridges, not those abstract ones built by monism. It will be necessary, however, for certain laws which are held back from the general consciousness of mankind by certain initiation quarters whose thinking is incorrect for the present time—for certain laws concerning true reality to become increasingly known.

One such law can be set before the soul in the following way, If you give real study to my Outline of Occult Science you know the point of time in the earthly sense when present-day humanity actually appeared on earth. We showed in the last lecture how this humanity has also a cosmic pre-history, a Saturn, Sun, Moon history, but Earth history was, to begin with, a recapitulation, and earthly humanity appeared at quite a definite time. And if you consult my Occult Science you will find that this human state appeared at the same time as clearly and distinctly there arose on earth the origin of the mineral kingdom. For we know that what we now call the mineral kingdom did not exist in the same way in the Saturn, Sun, Moon evolutions, There existed then the three elementary kingdoms which preceded the mineral kingdom. The mineral kingdom entered earthly evolution and simultaneously with this macrocosmic fact of the entry of the mineral kingdom into earthly evolution, man entered earthly evolution in his present form, in the form of his present bodily formation. Although this bodily formation has only later in the course of time come to its full completion, yet the rudiments of the present human body appeared in earthly evolution at the same time as the entry of the mineral kingdom. In a certain sense therefore man, has formed a link as earth-man between the fourth member of his being, which then developed to the ego, and the mineral kingdom. One could also say that in the human microcosm the ego corresponds to the macrocosmic mineral kingdom;

Now we know—and even a simple superficial knowledge of nature tells us—that the cosmic mineral kingdom has a crystal-formation. In school our children must learn the different forms in which the various minerals crystalise. They must first learn them according to the laws of geometry, how they can be represented through these laws, and then how they appear in reality, in the mineral kingdom—octahedron, cube, and so on. When we see these forms of the mineral kingdom which may be expressed in geometry we have before us the original form proper to the minerals. These crystalisations, or rather, these crystal-forms, are in a certain sense the inborn, archetypal characteristic of the mineral kingdom. And the earth, when this kingdom was incorporated into its cosmic evolution, received at the same time the tendency to crystalise its mineral substances in the forms in which the mineral kingdom crystalises.

Now there is a counterpole, a polar opposite, to the form of the mineral kingdom, and I ask you to come to an understanding through the following picture. We will approach an important fact in life through a picture. The dissolving of any kind of substance is a very well-known phenomenon, You know that if you throw a certain amount of salt into a certain amount of water, the water is able to dissolve the salt completely, so that it is no longer there in its solid form. You also know that for certain purposes of practical life the solid salt will not do and it has to be dissolved. Now the tendency in earthly evolution to the crystalisation form of the minerals must not be allowed to remain united with the earth any more than for certain practical purposes the salt may retain its solid form. The cook must be able to change the solid form by dissolving it—she must use methods of dissolving, otherwise the salt will be of no use. So too in the cosmos the earth's tendency to crystalise the mineral must be dissolved. This means that a polar counter-tendency must exist which will bring, it about that when the Earth has reached the goal of its evolution and is ready to pass over to the next form, the Jupiter-form, this crystalising tendency is no longer there—has been dissolved, has disappeared. Jupiter must not possess the inclination to crystalise mineral substances. This particular tendency must be reserved solely for the Earth, and it must cease when the Earth has reached the goal of its earthly evolution.

Now the polar opposite to the tendency of crystalising is that other tendency which is imprinted into the human form—not the animal form. Every corpse which we give over to the earth-planet, whether by burial, fire, or in any other way, every corpse deserted by its spirit and soul and in which still works the human form as purely mineralogical form, works in opposition to the crystalising tendency, precisely as negative electricity, works in opposition to positive electricity, or as darkness to light, And at the end of earthly evolution the totality of human forms given over to the earth in the course of this evolution—I repeat: human forms, for in the form of man lies the force-tendency and it is matter of force not substance—these human forms will have cosmically dissolved the mineralising tendency, the crystalisation-tendency in mineralising.

You see how here again we have a point where a bridge is built between two world-currents which natural science cannot build. For natural science investigates what happens to the human form after death solely on the lines of mineralogy and its laws, it looks out for what lies in the earth's tendency to crystalise and deals with the corpse in that way. It can never arrive therefore at what a significant role in the household of the whole being of the earth is played by men, by the dead bodies, the form, of men. The earth has essentially altered since the middle of the Lemurian alter since mineralisation entered and with it the tendency to crystalise. What is less mineral today in the earth less inclined to the crystalisation-tendency than in the middle of the Lemurian age is due to the dissolving forms of human bodies. And when the Earth has reached its goal there will no longer remain any tendency at all to crystalisation. The totality of human forms given over to the earth will have worked as the solar opposite and dissolved crystalisation.

Here we have the event of human death placed into the whole household of world-order as a purely physical phenomenon. Here we have a bridge thrown between two phenomena which otherwise, as the phenomenon of death, remain quite incomprehensible in the household of the world and the phenomena which modern natural science describes. It is important to develop increasingly such concepts as alone give to the natural science world-conception its true, genuine character. What I have described to you here is just as much a fact of natural science as other facts are that are discovered by the natural science of today. But it is a fact which natural science with its present methods cannot discover. It therefore remains of necessity incomplete and cannot grasp the whole of life's phenomena: it must find its completion through spiritual science. And when such laws as this are known—that through the human forms given to the earth-planet the crystalising tendency of the earth is dissolved, then such laws will also make the human spirit ready to enter more deeply into the reality of spiritual evolution.

Those who think and make research only along the lines of modern natural science cannot build the bridge from natural science to social and political science. Those alone who know the great laws resulting from spiritual science which relate to the greatness of nature in the way I have just explained, are able then to lead across the bridge from natural science to the science of man, above all to the historical and political life of mankind. The natural scientist does not hesitate in the least to speak of polarity in nature. He will distinguish two magnetisms, the North and the South, he will distinguish two electricities, the positive and the negative. And if some day natural science is guided more into the right path of Goethe's world-conception, then natural science too will be still more Goetheanism than it can be today, when it is hardly so at all. Then the law of polarity in the whole of nature will be recognised as the fundamental law, as it has indeed already figured in the ancient Mysteries from atavistic clairvoyance. In the ancient Mysteries everything was founded on the knowledge of polarity in the world. In natural science itself, that is, in the knowledge of natural order the scientist of today is not disturbed by recognising polarity, but he will not approach polarity in the human order and spiritual order. Nevertheless, what we call the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic fully correspond as regards the spirit and its ordering, in which man too is placed, with what is recognised in natural science, for instance, as North and South magnetism or as positive and negative electricity. The creation of real harmony between spirit and nature will never be reached unless men find the reality of the concrete polarity of the Ahrimanic and the luciferic in the spirit-ordering. For true reality cannot be found in the abstract ideas which are simply transferred from nature to the spirit, but solely through being able to deepen oneself in the spirit itself and there find the polarities corresponding to the spirit.

And so it must be too with the other natural facts. One cannot simply study natural facts and then say that one should found a spiritual order, a spiritual world-conception on these natural science facts. That leads nowhere. If the spiritual life is to be studied in its reality, if the phenomena of life into which the spirit plays are also to be grasped, then one must decide to study the spirit-orderings themselves. Moreover what has taken place at some period of time or other through human souls or human organisations cannot be explained by natural science, it can only be understood in reality if it is explained through spiritual science.

If, for instance, we look at certain phenomena of present-day culture we must consider to what degree the Luciferic influence is there and to what degree the Ahrimanic. I made this attempt in 1914 before the outbreak of our present catastrophic war, in the lectures I held in Vienna: The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth. And I should therefore like to refer you to the decisive passage in which is set forth the whole essence of what is taking place today. I said then: The reason why spiritual science is now here in the world is because the evolution of humanity requires that this realisation of the spiritual worlds and the conditions of existence in them shall become more and more alive in human souls, instinctively at first, then consciously. Let me draw your attention to a purely external phenomenon, but one of immense significance, showing that a grasp of the laws of spiritual existence will become increasingly essential for any true judgment of life on the physical plane.

When we contemplate nature we observe the remarkable fact that in every case a small number only of seeds, of germinating entities, are used in the production of the same species of life, while myriads of seeds come to nothing. Of the myriads of fish-spawn in the sea, only a few become fish; the rest perish. Looking out over the fields we see vast multitudes of grains of corn, only a few of which become plants; as grains of corn the rest perish, being used as food-stuffs and for other purposes. In nature a great deal more has to be produced than actually comes to fruit and again seed in the on-flowing stream of existence. This is a wise provision; for in nature the rule is that what thus deviates from its own inherent stream of existence and fruiting is used in such a way as to serve the other stream of existence. Beings would not be able to live if all seeds actually became fruit and achieved the development possible to them. Seeds must be there to form the soil, as it were, out of which beings can grow. It is only apparently, only in maya, that anything is lost; in reality nothing is lost in nature's creative work. Spirit holds sway in nature, and the fact that something is apparently lost from the on-flowing stream of evolution is founded in the wisdom of the spirit; it is a spiritual law, and these things must be viewed from the standpoint of the spirit. Then we soon perceive that what seems to be diverted from the straightforward stream of world-processes has its well-justified place in existence. This provision is founded in the spirit; hence it can also take effect on the physical plane, to the extent that we had a spiritual life there.

My dear friends, take a concrete case which concerns us very closely. Public lectures have to be given on spiritual science. They are given to audiences brought together simply through the announcements. There is a similarity here to what happens with the grains of corn, only a part of which are used in the direct stream of existence One must not be put off by the fact that the streams of spiritual life have to be brought, apparently without choice, to many, many people, and that then only a few separate out and really enter into this spiritual life, become anthroposophists and join in the on-flowing stream. In this domain it still happens that these scattered seeds find their way to many who, after a public lecture, for example, go away saying: What crazy nonsense the fellow talked! Seen in direct relation to external life, this is life—shall we say—the spawn of fish that come to nothing in the sea. But from the standpoint of deeper investigation it is not so. The souls who through their karma came to a lecture and who then went away saying: What crazy nonsense the fellow talked!—these souls were not yet ready to receive the truth of the spirit, but it is necessary for their souls in the present incarnation to feel the approach of the force inherent in spiritual science. However much they may protest; this force remains in their souls for their next incarnation, and then the seeds have not been lost; they find their ways. With respect to the spiritual, existence is subject to the same laws, no matter whether we are following the working of the spirit in nature or in the case we could quote as our own.

But let us suppose that we wanted to refer this principle also to external, material life, and were to say: Well, people are doing the same thing in external life. Yes, my dear friends, that is just it. What I am now going to describe is happening, and we are living towards a future when it will happen to an ever-increasing extent. Production steadily increases, factories are built without asking: How much is needed?—as used to be the case when the village tailor made a suit only when it was ordered. There it was consumption which indicated how much should be produced, but now production is for the market; the goods are piled up in as large quantities as possible. Production goes on entirely in line with nature's principle. Nature is carried over into the social order. This tendency will, to begin with, more and more gain the upper hand. But here we are in the realm of the material. The spiritual law has no application to external life, precisely because it is valid for the spiritual world;—and something very remarkable results from this. As we are speaking among ourselves, these things can be said; the world today would certainly not understand us.

Goods are now produced for the market without regard to consumption, not according to the principle indicated in my essays on anthroposophy and the Social Questions. What is produced is piled up in warehouses, priced according to the money market, and then the producers wait to see how much is bought. This tendency will steadily increase until—and you will discover why I say the following—until its own nature it destroys itself.

(In this sentence is contained the most important of the present so-called causes of the War; but it is to be derived from spiritual life.)

One who observes social life with spiritual vision sees terrible tendencies to social ulcers springing up everywhere. That is the great anxiety for civilisation which arises in those who see to the roots of existence; that is the terrible fact which weighs so heavily and which—even if one could suppress all other enthusiasm for spiritual science and the impulse which makes one long to proclaim it—makes one long to cry out to the world the remedy for what is already so strongly under way and will gain increasing momentum. In the spreading of spiritual truths there is an element which of its own ground must work as nature works, but this way of working becomes a cancer when it enters into civilisation in the way described.

It was put before you previously in that lecture all that throws light on the Ahrimanic and Luciferic tendencies. But you can clearly see from it that one only arrives at real knowledge of the social cancer or carcinoma-formation if one can find the Ahrimanic and Luciferic tendencies at work in the modern social order, find on the path of reality, not by simply comparing the social life with natural facts. What occurs in the social order must be sought on the spiritual path. And if it is sought on the materialistic path it can amount to no more than at most a comparison, an analogy of social occurrences with abstract facts of nature.

My dear friends, the fact that a number of cancerous tumours exist in modern society was expressed at that time in those lectures of 9th to 14th April 1914 But the expression was in fact a gathering together of what I had stated in various forms throughout our whole anthroposophical development, in order to prepare men for the point of time when the social cancer would reach its special crisis—1914!

There now appears a book which in itself is fairly worthless and stupid. It is by a C. H. Meray, entitled World Mutation, and published by Max Rasoher in Zurich in 1918. I will read you a few paragraphs of this book, the author of which has a merely intellectual grasp of industrial facts. And so just as the lectures on the inner nature of man are able to further reality the author by means of this book furthers the deviation from true reality, the misleading to false thinking. But I will let you hear a few of the sentences. There is an attempt to grasp the development of European and American civilisation merely through analogies, comparisons with facts in nature. Whereas in my lectures of 1914 you have reality, here you have abstract monistic comparisons, analogies which actually say nothing, because when one merely talks of natural facts and then points out that something similar exists in the social order these mere analogies rather darken understanding than shed light But what does this amount to? It is shown how seeds of disintegration have gradually entered western civilisation ever since ancient times aid how civilisation has been eaten into inwardly. Such an apercu is then summarised in words like:

“These unhealthy changes began in the fresh and flourishing early Renaissance cities, in the still purely production City-Republics of the striving citizens, as they had to nourish their giant cancer cells, prepared themselves for it and had to change themselves into an instrument for nourishing a cancerous growth.”

“The formation of this organisation out of which the structure of the modern State emerged, advanced side by side with the metamorphosis of the productive tissue which is definitely not to be regarded as belonging to its own life.”

(He calls regulated civilisation a productive tissue, that is, he picks up only a tissue of natural facts, not the real facts of the spirit.)

“For foreign elements in the body cannot normally come in contact with each other without producing inflammation—as in fact in the beginning such inflammations were produced when the soldiers of the Count of the city came in contact with the citizens (let us remember the bell, signalling the latter to form into bands!). Normally only the complete excision of the poisonous growth would have happened, such an effort was made to begin with and was also followed up later. The moment however the two elements, the cancerous growth and the working tissue, could carry on without inflammation, there arose an abnormality which could only preserve itself under pathological conditions

“Such abnormalities are everywhere to be found in organisms where tumours, ulcers, discharges, in short, foreign elements, are surrounded with a web that no more inflammation arises. The web or tissue which is formed there is a deformity and after the cure can be used for nothing further for the organism. Yet during the illness it serves as a protection for the organism; it forms a structure that renders the poison of the disease harmless to the body, although this formation meanwhile develops immeasurably and can itself become a serious phenomenon of disease.

“Thus the modern State also arose as a deformity of the completely uprooted working life; as it arose , however, the whole tissue had to co-operate for its own protection in order to paralyse the evil in it and remove the disintegrating poison-effects. Accordingly the State arose as a separate structure, interwoven it is true by the productive life, though it never became itself an apparatus of productivity. The whole system of modern political economy developed separately side by side with the State.”

“The wealthiest have the most direct connections with the poisonous growths, as they need an extensive protection for the sale of their goods. Hence they are more eager, and as being rich, also more capable of giving to the Governor a higher nourishment; he needs money, they as the ones who procure it for him; if he wants to accomplish something within the city he turns to the patricians. It lies in the interest of these patricians to strengthen the City-Prince, whereas those whose material business-circle does not extend beyond the walls feel a perpetual natural grudge against the Governor. (Physiologically: a negative chemico-tactic effect). They put up with him really only on account of the protecting of the wall-ring. The toxic effect, however, no longer changes the individuality of the patricians—or only seldom, they seldom become themselves warlike nobles—they belong already far too much to the antitoxic, working tissue. Their wealth has arisen from it and is bound up with it; a toxic effect is certainly shown – not on the individual but on the protoplasm, in the wealth.” (And protoplasm is now the wealth!)

“Whereas formerly wealth was not employed as yet to function as capital, but merely formed the reserves of life and well-being, its rôle now alters: wealth begins to annex to itself processes of work."

In connection with this passage I beg you to remember how in my lectures at Nuremberg in 1908 (on The Apocalypse) I pointed out that direct personal influence had withdrawn from modern industry and that money, that is, capital as such was beginning to work. I spoke of how the modern social order uses such exertion under Ahrimanic influence that someone is now below, now above. Personality no longer counts; it is a matter of the money itself doing business, now throwing someone up, now down again. Funds, accumulation of capital, and its counterpole, credit, this a-personal and anti-personal element is what is to evolve as the Ahrimanic counter-image of Spirit-Self for the future of the social order.

All of this is expressed here in this book in a purely Ahrimanic manner. But, my dear friends, there is a danger that something of this sort gains immense respect, since on every page it makes extensive quotations from natural science. Years after the reality has been pointed out through the researches of spiritual science, this Ahrimanic caricature of spiritual science appears, even with the same words for the same phenomena. This will impress people in spite of misleading and alluring them, because they will never understand reality unless they build the bridge between the purely external facts of natural science which are employed in this book and the purely spiritual-scientific processes which indeed can only be discovered through spiritual science. But it will certainly be accepted as genuine science—just as other similar things which have appeared and which I have spoken about in the course of our lectures—whereas in the near future the scientific nature of spiritual science will most certainly be attacked in a terrible way, in a way which you are not at all willing today to picture in its intensity!

These things, my dear friends, must be thoroughly realised, They must be seen through all the more as they touch upon facts which lie under the semblance of external reality. To possess insight into these facts requires the goodwill to pursue seriously and intelligently with sound human understanding the researches of spiritual science.

Opposite currents, polarities, must be held in balance, That can only be done if continually new influxes come directly from the spiritual world into what happens on earth, that is, if new facts which concern the world are continually revealed out of the spirit.

When once in Rome someone brought a Jesuit up to me, I had a conversation with him about just such things, I knew that it availed nothing and was actually a labour of love quite lost, but there were other reasons for it: there too it is necessary to lock at the true reality and not the outer semblance, I sought to make it clear to the Jesuit that, first, he must himself admit a revelation out of the supersensible in the course of the Mystery of Golgotha and what is written about it through the inspired Evangelists; that, moreover, the Catholic Church in which as a Jesuit he would believe accepts a continued evolution of the spiritual life through its saints. He replied, as was only to be expected: “Yes, that is all true, but that's done with; one must not bring that about of oneself. To work oneself through to spiritual life today is to begin to deal with the devil. One may study the Mystery of Golgotha, study the Gospels, the life of the saints, but unless one wants to fall a prey to demonic powers. one may not try in any way to come into direct relation with the spiritual world.” It is obvious that that would be said from such a quarter, and I could give you many similar examples.

There is the strongest opposition from certain quarters to the flowing in of new and ever newer spiritual truths. The Roman Catholic Church, for instance, is even terribly afraid of spiritism, which of course is not sympathetic to us, because they live in the dread of something coming through a medium from the spiritual world which the Church, living solely in its old traditions, cannot accept. And it fears spiritism because it has materialist foundations and because—so it has believed for decades—it can easily gain followers through the fact that one could find something trickling in on a bypath out of the spiritual world into the world which the Roman Catholic Church wishes to rule.

Now you know, my dear friends, in the 1870s, in 1879, the possibility arose of a powerful, deeply-penetrating flowing-in from the spiritual world. I have often spoken of it, how a conflict that had taken place earlier in the spiritual worlds flowed into the earthly order, in the Michael-order. Since that time special opportunities have been given for men who so wish it to receive spiritual knowledge. Please do not imagine that the initiates of the Roman Catholic Church are not aware of such things! They are of course aware of them, but they construct their protective dams. And precisely in connection with the fact that spiritual life was particularly furthered by the spiritual worlds from the year 1879 on the Roman Catholic Church in a far-seeing way established the Infallibility-dogma in order through this to build a dam against any influx of any sort of new spiritual truths. It is obvious that if people are only allowed to frame their views in accordance with what is announced ex cathedra from Rome in the light of the dogma of Infallibility, then a powerful dam is erected against the inflow of spiritual truths from the spiritual world itself. That is the one thing, the Romish element, which had its natural stipulations in earlier times and brought over from these the rigidity in tradition, the rigidity in excluding the spiritual substance which could flow into the human soul out of the spiritual worlds.

Another stream is to be sought in that Centre which in a high degree—approximately at the time when Rome prepared the Infallibility-dogma—must be assigned to the English and American, the English-speaking peoples. We have already referred here to this occult Centre, in many connections. Just as the traditional element and false idealism in the head brings about the Ahrimanic element in the lower man, so, as you have seen, does materialism bring about the development of the spiritual in the lower man. And when this is not nourished from the head by new spiritual truths which are revealed to the world from time to time it will naturally be seized upon by Luciferic forces, the Luciferic principle. The Centre that has great influence on the English-American peoples (that is the best expression) prefers to reckon with the other pole. The occult Masonry which is anchored in that Centre and from there strongly influences the course of the outer culture of the whole civilised world, just as much promotes materialism—realising things of course—as Rome has promoted it through the papal Infallibility. Through the Infallibility-dogma Rome has intended to erect a dam against the influx of spiritual truths from the spiritual worlds; this Centre consciously promotes the spread of materialism in the modern civilised world, the spread of materialistic ideas in a more or less materialistic mode of life. And the strange thing is that when the Anglo-American initiates speak about Rome as a rule what they say is correct, and however much they inveigh against Rome they say what is right. They too, however, know that there is a spiritual life and that a continuous influx is possible, but they keep that secret and let it flow into civilisation only through unknown channels. And the non-English-speaking peoples in the civilised world have in the last decades, or last half-century, accepted an immense amount of what has flowed in there through this Centre; For these other civilisations in their present structure are in no way individualised, they are largely nourished by the materialistic tendency originating in his Centre.

And again, when Rome speaks about that occult Freemasonry, the Orders, it speaks correctly. One can therefore say that what Rome says is right, what the Freemasons of the West say is also right. That in fact is just the difficulty; these things in the most outstanding sense can be thrusting human nature towards the Luciferic or the Ahrimanic, and yet in what they say they cannot possibly be seized upon because what they say is right; when they speak of each other it is correct.

That is a factor that must be borne in mind very fundamentally in the present cultural tendencies. People nowadays are not inclined to consider what grows out of some affair or other, but merely look at what is expressed verbally in propaganda. But it is not at all a matter of the sounds and words of a propaganda, it is really a matter of making thane lower nature materialistic through materialism in the world of ideas—it becomes, however, spiritualised. And it is supposed to be a matter of making man more moral through an abstract idealism and discussion of every kind of fine ideal—yet one makes him—I speak figuratively of course—obese, materialistic in his lower nature, one makes him heavy and sleepy. And whereas on the one hand a strong tendency exists to scleroticise man Ahrimanically, which is particularly a Jesuit-tendency, there exists on the other hand a definite tendency to place the Luciferic beings in the service of the materialistic world-order, whereby precisely through materialism a spirituality may arise which is however a Luciferic spirituality. It is indeed not enough merely to look in its literal sense at what plays on the surface; one must go into the actual reality, which as is shown precisely by our instances today—however paradoxical they appear, often have an exactly opposite purpose to what one is led to believe through a superficial maya-observation. Things are being done in the world today from many different quarters on the principles of the occult Orders, though they are kept secret. Rome works just as much in accord with occult precepts as that other Centre does. Power lies just in the fact that men are kept in the dark and are not told what is actually going on. Hence arise the hatred and enmity against those who make their appearance and say what is taking place.—Naiveté moreover is especially harmful, the sort of naiveté which men show when they persist in believing that one attains something with these two streams if one tells them that spiritual science can give a beautiful understanding of Christ-Jesus, or something like that, or tells them how the deeper truths of spiritual science are to be found in true Christianity. It is a naiveté to suppose one can win over certain circles by showing them one has a truth which they really must recognise according to their whole hypotheses. That simply calls out hostility. The more we show in certain circles that we have the truth, the greater the hostility, and the more this truth proves effective all the more intense will the enmity appear. In recent times one has only waited to see if the moment would come when anthroposophical books would need larger editions, when thousands and thousands would listen to anthroposophy, in order from certain quarters not because they think anthroposophy says untruth, but because they fear it will say the true—in order to lay hold of this anthroposophy. That is what should be borne in mind. No naiveté should prevail among us, but penetrating knowledge, unbiased, unprejudiced observation of what happens.

It would please me much if you took away a feeling of this from this lecture; for once again let it be recapitulated what I said at the beginning of today's lecture: It is not so much a matter of the details, but of our receiving a firm impression of what lies in the whole spirit of these lectures. And then we must make ourselves more and more capable of taking such a place in the cultural life of today as befits a man of the present who is thoroughly awake and not sleeping.

The delay in arriving yesterday prevented me from speaking to you, as was my wish, about what has been happening in the Anthroposophical Society since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum. As the purpose and intentions of that Meeting will have become known to friends through the News Sheet, I propose to speak briefly about the most important points only and then to continue with more intimate studies concerning the significance of this Christmas Foundation Meeting for the Anthroposophical Society.

The Christmas Meeting was intended to be a fundamental renewal, a new foundation of the Anthroposophical Society. Up to the time of the Christmas Foundation Meeting I was always able to make a distinction between the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society. The latter represented as it were the earthly projection of something that exists in the spiritual worlds in a certain stream of the spiritual life. What was taught here on the Earth and communicated as anthroposophical wisdom—this was the reflection of the stream flowing in spiritual worlds through the present phase of the evolution of mankind. The Anthroposophical Society was then a kind of ‘administrative organ’ for the anthroposophical knowledge flowing through the Anthroposophical Movement.

As time went on, this did not turn out satisfactorily for the true cultivation of Anthroposophy. It therefore became necessary that I myself—until then I had taught Anthroposophy without having any official connection with the Anthroposophical Society—should take over, together with the Dornach Executive, the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society as such. The Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society have thereby become one. Since the Christmas Foundation Meeting in Dornach, the opposite of what went before must be recognised: no distinction is to be made henceforward between Anthroposophical Movement and Anthroposophical Society, for they are now identical. And those who stand by my side as the Executive at the Goetheanum are to be regarded as a kind of esoteric Executive. Thus what comes about through this Executive may be characterised as ‘Anthroposophy in deed and practice,’ whereas formerly it could only be a matter of the administration of the anthroposophical teachings.

This means, however, that the whole Anthroposophical Society must gradually be placed upon a new basis—a basis which makes it possible for esotericism to stream through the Society—and the essence of the Anthroposophical Society in the future will be constituted by the due response and attitude on the part of those who desire to be Anthroposophists. This will have to be understood in the General Anthroposophical Society which henceforward will be an entirely open Society—so that, as was announced at Christmas, the Lecture-Courses too will be available for everyone, prefixed by the clauses laying down a kind of spiritual boundary-line.

The prosperity and fruitful development of the anthroposophical cause will depend upon a true understanding of the esoteric trend which, from now onwards, will be implicit in the Anthroposophical Movement. Care will be taken to ensure that the Anthroposophical Society is kept free from bureaucratic and formal administrative measures and that the sole basis everywhere is the human element to be cultivated within the Society. Naturally, the Executive at the Goetheanum will have much to administer: but the administration will not be the essential. The essential will be that the Executive at the Goetheanum will act in this or that matter out of its own initiative. And what the Executive does, what in many ways it has already begun to do—that will form the content of the Anthroposophical Society.

Thereby a great many harmful tendencies that have arisen in the Society during recent years will be eliminated; difficulties will be in store for many Members, because all kinds of institutions, founded out of good-will, as the saying goes, did not prove equal to what they claimed to be and have really side-tracked the Anthroposophical Movement. Henceforward the Anthroposophical Movement will, in the human sense, be that which flows through the Anthroposophical Society.

The more deeply this is realised and understood the better it will be for the Anthroposophical Movement. And I am able to say the following.—Because that impulse prevailed among those who gathered at the Goetheanum at Christmas, it has been possible since then to introduce a quite different note into the Anthroposophical Movement. And to my deep satisfaction I have found heartfelt response to this in the different places I have so far been able to visit. It can be said that what was undertaken at Christmas was in a certain sense a hazard. For a certain eventuality existed: because the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society was now combined with the presentation of the spiritual teachings, those Powers in the spiritual world who lead the Anthroposophical Movement might have withdrawn their guiding hands. It may now be said that this did not happen, but that the contrary is true: these spiritual Powers are responding with an ever greater measure of grace, with even greater bounty, to what is streaming through the Anthroposophical Movement. In a certain sense a pledge has been made to the spiritual world. This pledge will be unswervingly fulfilled and it will be seen that in the future things will happen in accordance with it. And so not only in respect of the Anthroposophical Movement but also in respect of the Anthroposophical Society, responsibility is laid upon the Dornach Executive.

I have only spoken these few preliminary words in order to lead up to something that it is now possible to say and is of such a nature that it can become part of the content of the Anthroposophical Movement. I want to speak about something that has to do with the karma of the Anthroposophical Society itself.

When we think to-day of how the Anthroposophical Society exists in the world as the embodiment of the Anthroposophical Movement, we see a number of human beings coming together within the Anthroposophical Society. Any discerning person realises that there are also other human beings in the world—one finds them everywhere—whose karma predisposes them to come to the Anthroposophical Society but, to begin with, something holds them back, they do not immediately, and in the full sense, find their way into it—though eventually they will certainly do so, either in this or in the next incarnation. We must, however, bear the following in mind: Those human beings who through their karma come to the Anthroposophical Movement are predestined for this Movement.

Now everything that happens here in the physical world is foreshadowed in spiritual worlds. Nothing happens in the physical world that has not been prepared for spiritually, in the spiritual world. And this is the significant thing: What is coming to pass here on the Earth in the twentieth century as the gathering together of a number of human beings in the Anthroposophical Society, was prepared for during the first half of the nineteenth century when the souls of those human beings who are now in incarnation and are coming together in large numbers, were united in the spiritual realms before they descended into the physical world. In the spiritual worlds at that time a kind of cult or ritual was lived through by a number of souls who were working together—a cult which instigated those longings that have arisen in the souls of those who now, in their present incarnations, come to the Anthroposophical Society. And whoever has a gift for recognising such souls in their bodies, does indeed recognise them as having worked together with him in the first half of the nineteenth century, when, in the spiritual world, mighty, cosmic Imaginations were presented of what I will call the new Christianity. Up there—as in their bodies now—the souls were united in order to gather into themselves out of what I will call the Cosmic Substantiality and the Cosmic Forces, that which, in mighty pictures, was of cosmic significance. It was the prelude of what was to become anthroposophical teaching and practice here on the Earth. By far the majority of the Anthroposophists who now sit together with one another would be able, if they perceived this, to say: Yes, we know one another, we were together in spiritual worlds, and in a super-sensible cult we experienced mighty, cosmic Imaginations together!

All these souls had gathered together in the first half of the nineteenth century in order to prepare for what, on Earth, was to become the Anthroposophical Movement. In reality it was all a preparation for what I have often called the ‘stream of Michael,’ which appeared in the last third of the nineteenth century and is the most important of all spiritual intervention in the modern phase of human evolution. The Michael stream—to prepare the ways for Michael's earthly-heavenly working—such was the task of the souls who were together in the spiritual world.

These souls, however, were drawn together by experiences they had undergone through long, long ages—through centuries, nay, in many cases through thousands of years. And among them two main groups are to be distinguished. The one group experienced the form of Christianity which during the first centuries of the Christian era had spread in Southern Europe and also, to some extent, in Middle Europe. This Christianity continued to present to its believers a Christ conceived of as the mighty Divine Messenger who had come down from the Sun to the Earth in order thereafter to work among men. With greater or less understanding, Christ was thus pictured by the Christians of the first centuries as the mighty ‘Sun God.’

But throughout Christendom at this time the faculty of instinctive clairvoyance once possessed by men was fading away. Then they could no longer see in the Sun the great spiritual kingdom at whose centre the Christ once had His abode. The ancient clairvoyant perception of the descent of the Christ to the Earth became superseded by mere tradition—tradition that He had come down from the Sun to the Earth, uniting Himself with Jesus of Nazareth in the physical body. The majority of Christians now retained little more than the concept that once upon a time a Being had lived in Palestine—Christ Jesus—whose nature now began to be the subject of controversy. Had this Being been fully God? Or was He both God and Man and, if so, how was the Divinity related to the Humanity? These questions, with others arising from them, were the problems and the causes of strife in the Church Councils. Eventually the mass of the people had nothing left to them but the Decrees issued by Rome.

There were, however, among the Christians certain individuals who came more and more to be regarded as heretics. They still preserved as a living remembrance the tradition of the Christ as a Being of the Sun. To them, a Sun Being, by nature foreign to this Earth, was once incarnate. He descended to existence in this physical, material world. Until the seventh and eighth centuries these individuals found themselves placed in conditions which caused them to say: In what is now making its appearance in the guise of Christianity there is no longer any real understanding of the nature of the Christ! These “heretics” became, in effect, weary of Christianity. There were indeed such souls who in the early Christian centuries until the seventh and eighth centuries passed through the gate of death in a mood of weariness in regard to Christianity. Whether or not they had been in incarnation in the intervening period, the incarnation of importance for them was that which occurred in the early Christian centuries. Then, from the seventh and eighth centuries onwards, they were preparing in the spiritual world for that great and powerful action of which I told you when I said that in the first half of the nineteenth century a kind of cult took place in the super-sensible world. These individuals participated in this cult and they belong to the one group of souls who have found their way into the Anthroposophical Society.

The other group of souls had their last important incarnation in the latest pre-Christian—not the first Christian—centuries, and in the ancient Pagan Mysteries prior to Christianity they had still been able to gaze with clairvoyant vision into the spiritual world. They had learnt in these ancient Mysteries that the Christ would come down one day to the Earth. They did not live on Earth during the early centuries of Christianity but remained in the super-sensible worlds and only after the seventh century descended to incarnations of importance. These are souls who, as it were from the vantage-point of the super-sensible, witnessed the entry of the Christ into earthly culture and civilisation. They longed for Christianity. And at the same time they were resolute in a desire to work actively and vigorously to bring into the world a truly cosmic, truly spiritual form of Christianity.

These two groups united with the other souls in that super-sensible cult during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was like a great cosmic, spiritual festival, lasting for many decades as a spiritual happening in the world immediately bordering on the physical. There they were—the souls who then descended, having worked together in the super-sensible world to prepare for their next incarnation on the Earth, those who were weary of Christianity and those who were yearning for it. Towards the end of the nineteenth century they descended to incarnation and when they had arrived on Earth they were ready, having thus made preparation, to come into the Anthroposophical Society.

All this, as I have said, had been in course of preparation for many centuries. Here on the Earth, Christianity had developed in such a way that the Gospels had gradually come to be interpreted as if they spoke merely of some kind of abstract “heights” from which a Being—Jesus of Nazareth—came down to proclaim the Christ. Men had no longer any inkling of how the world of stars as the expression of the Spiritual is connected with the spiritual life; hence it was also impossible for them to understand what is signified by saying: Christ, as a divine Sun Hero, came down into Jesus in order that He might share the destiny of men. It is precisely those facts of most significance that escape the ordinary student of history. Above all, there is no understanding of those who are called “heretics.” Moreover, among the souls who came down to Earth as the twentieth century approached—the souls weary of Christianity and those longing for it—there is, for the most part, no self-recognition. The “heretic-souls” do not recognise themselves.

By the seventh and eighth centuries such traditions as had been kept alive by the heretics who had become weary of Christianity had largely disappeared. The knowledge was sustained in small circles only, where until the twelfth century—the middle of the Middle Ages—it was preserved and cultivated. These circles were composed of Teachers, divinely blessed Teachers, who still cultivated something of this ancient knowledge of spiritual Christianity, cosmological Christianity. There were some amongst them, too, who had directly received communications from the past and in them a kind of Inspiration arose; thus they were able to experience a reflection—whether strong or faint, a true image—of what in the first Christian centuries men had been able to behold under the influence of a mighty Inspiration of the descent of the Sun God leading to the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so two main streams were there. One, as we have seen, is the stream which derives directly from the heretical movements of the first Christian centuries. Those belonging to it were fired still by what had been alive in the Platonism of ancient Greece. So fired were they that when through the tidings emanating from ancient times their inner vision opened, they were always able, under the influence of a genuine, albeit faint Inspiration, to perceive the descent of the Christ to the Earth and to glimpse His work on the Earth. This was the Platonic stream.

For the other stream a different destiny was in store. To this stream belonged those souls above all who had their last important incarnation in the pre-Christian era and who had glimpsed Christianity as something ordained for the future. The task of this stream was to prepare the intellect for that epoch which had its beginning in the first half of the fifteenth century. This was to be the epoch when the human intellect would unfold—the epoch of the Spiritual Soul. It was prepared for by the Aristotelians, in contrast—but in harmonious contrast—to what the Platonists had accomplished. And those who propagated Aristotelian teachings until well into the twelfth century were souls who had passed through their last really important incarnation in ancient Pagan times, especially in the world of Greek culture. And then—in the middle of the Middle Ages, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—there came about that great and wonderful spiritual understanding, if I may call it so, between the Platonists and the Aristotelians. And among these Platonists and Aristotelians were the leaders of those who as the two groups of souls I have described, advanced the Anthroposophical Movement.

By the twelfth century a certain School had come into being—as it were through inner necessity—a School in which the afterglow of the old Platonic seership lit up once again. It was the great and illustrious School of Chartres. In this School were great teachers to whom the mysteries of early Christianity were still known and in whose hearts and souls this knowledge kindled a vision of the spiritual foundation of Christianity. In the School of Chartres in France, where stands the magnificent Cathedral, built with such profusion of detail, there was a concentration, a gathering-together, as it were, of knowledge that only shortly before had been widely scattered, though confined to the small circles of which I have spoken. One of the men with whom the School was able to forge a living link was Peter of Compostella. He was able, with inspired understanding, to bring the ancient spiritual Christianity to life again within his own heart and soul. A whole succession of wonderful figures were teachers in Chartres. Truly remarkable voices spoke of Christianity in the School of Chartres in this twelfth century. There, for example, we find Bernard of Chartres, Bernardus Sylvestris, John of Salisbury, but above all the great Alanus ab Insulis. Mighty teachers indeed! When they spoke in the School of Chartres it was as if Plato himself, interpreting Christianity, were working in person among them. They taught the spiritual content and substance of Christianity. The writings that have come down from them may seem full of abstractions to those who read them to-day. But that is due simply to the abstract trend that characterises modern thinking. The impulse of the Christ is implicit in all the descriptions of the spiritual world contained in the writings of these outstanding personalities. I will give you an idea of how Bernardus Sylvestris and Alanus ab Insulis, above all, taught their initiated pupils. Strange as it will seem to the modern mind, such revelations were indeed given at that time to the pupils of Chartres.

It was taught: New life will come to Christianity. Its spiritual content and essence will be understood once again when Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness, has come to an end and the dawn of a new Age breaks. And with the year 1899 this has already come to pass for us who are living at the present time; this is the great and mighty change that was to come for humanity at the end of Kali Yuga, the mighty impulse given two decades previously through the advent of Michael. This was prophetically announced in the School of Chartres in the twelfth century, above all by Bernardus Sylvestris and Alanus ab Insulis. But these men did not teach in the Aristotelian way, they did not teach by way of the intellect. They gave their teachings entirely in the form of mighty, imaginative pictures—pictures whereby the spiritual content of Christianity became concretely real. But there were certain prophetic teachings; and I should like by means of a brief extract to give you an indication of one such teaching.

Alanus ab Insulis spoke to the following effect to a narrow circle of his initiated pupils:—‘As we contemplate the universe to-day, we still regard the Earth as the centre, we judge everything from the Earth, as the centre. If the terrestrial conception which enables us to unfold our pictures and our imaginations... if this conception alone were to fertilise the coming centuries, progress would not be possible for mankind. We must come to an understanding with the Aristotelians who bring to humanity the intellect which must then be spiritualised so that in the twentieth century it may shine forth in a new and spiritual form among men. We, in our time, regard the Earth as the centre of the Cosmos, we speak of the planets circling around the Earth, we describe the whole heaven of stars as it presents itself to physical eyes as if it revolved around the Earth. But there will come one who will say: Let us place the Sun at the spatial centre of the cosmic system! But when he who will thus place the Sun at the centre of the spatial universe has come, the picture of the world will become arid. Men will only calculate the courses of the planets, will merely indicate the positions of the heavenly bodies, speaking of them as gases, or burning, luminous, physical bodies; they will know the starry heavens only in terms of mathematical and mechanical laws. But this arid picture of the world that will become widespread in the coming times, has, after all, one thing—meagre, it is true, yet it has it none the less. ... We look at the universe from the Earth; he who will come will look at the universe from the standpoint of the Sun. He will be like one who indicates a “direction” only—the direction leading towards a path of majestic splendour, fraught with most wonderful happenings and peopled by glorious Beings. But he will give the direction through abstract concepts only.’ (Thereby the Copernican picture of the world was indicated, arid and abstract yet giving the direction...) ‘For,’ said Alanus ab Insulis, ‘everything we present through the Imaginations that come to us must pass away; it must pass away and the picture men now have of the world must become altogether abstract, hardly more than a pointer along a path strewn with wonderful memorials. For then, in the spiritual world, there will be One who will use this pointer—which for the purposes of world-renewal is nothing more than a means of directive—in order that, together with the prevailing intellectualism, he may then lay the foundations of the new spirituality ... there will be One who will have this pointer as his only tool. This One will be St. Michael! For Him the ground must be made free; he must sow the path with new seed. And to that end, nothing but lines must remain—mathematical lines!’

A kind of magic breathed through the School of Chartres when Alanus ab Insulis was giving such teachings to a few of his chosen pupils. It was as if the ether-world all around were set astir by the surging waves of this mighty Michael teaching.

And so a spiritual atmosphere was imparted to the world. It spread across Western Europe, down into Southern Italy, where there were many who were able to receive it into themselves. In their souls something arose like a mighty Inspiration, enabling them to gaze into the spiritual world.

But in the evolution of the world it is so that those who are initiated into the great secrets of existence—as to a certain degree were Alanus ab Insulis and Bernardus Sylvestris—such men know that it is only possible to achieve this or that particular aim to a limited extent. A man like Alanus ab Insulis said to himself: We, the Platonists, must go through the gate of death; for the present we can live only in the spiritual world. We must look down from the spiritual world, leaving the physical world to those others whose task it is to cultivate the intellect in the Aristotelian way. The time has come now for the cultivation of the intellect. Late in his life Alanus ab Insulis put on the habit of the Cistercian Order; he became a Cistercian. And in the Cistercian Order many of these Platonic teachings were contained. Those among the Cistercians who possessed the deeper knowledge said to themselves: Henceforward we can work only from the spiritual world; the field must be relinquished to the Aristotelians.

These Aristotelians were, for the most part, in the Order of the Dominicans. And so in the thirteenth century the leadership of the spiritual life in Europe passed over to them.

But a heritage remained from men such as Peter of Compostella, Alanus ab Insulis, Bernard of Chartres, John of Salisbury and that poet who from the School of Chartres wrote a remarkable poem on the Seven Liberal Arts. It took significant hold of the spiritual life of Europe. What had come into being in the School of Chartres was so potent that it found its way, for example, to the University of Orleans. There, in the second half of the twelfth century, a great deal penetrated in the form of teaching from what had streamed to the pupils of Chartres through mighty pictures and words—words as it were of silver—from the lips of Bernardus Sylvestris, of Alanus ab Insulis.

The spiritual atmosphere was so charged with this influence from Chartres that the following incident happened.—While a man, returning to Italy from his ambassadorial post in Spain, was hastening homeward, he received news of the overthrow of the Guelphs in Florence, and at the same time suffered a slight sunstroke. In this condition his etheric body loosened and gathered in what was still echoing through the ether from the School of Chartres. And through what was thus wafted to him in the ether, something like an Intuition came to him—an Intuition such as had come to many human beings in the early Christian centuries. First he saw outspread before him the earthly world as it surrounds mankind, ruled over, not by ‘laws of Nature,’ as the saying went in later times—but by the great handmaiden of the Divine Demiurgos, by Natura, who in the first Christian centuries was the successor of Proserpine. In those days men did not speak of abstract laws of Nature; to the gaze of the Initiates, Being was implicit in what worked in Nature as an all-embracing, divine Power. Proserpine, who divides her time between the upper and the lower worlds, was presented in the Greek Mysteries as the power ruling over Nature. Her successor in the early Christian centuries was the Goddess Natura.

While under the influence of the sunstroke and of what came to him from the School of Chartres, this personality had gazed into the weaving life of the Goddess Natura, and, allowing this Intuition to impress him still more deeply, he beheld the working of the Elements—Earth, Water, Air, Fire—as this was once revealed in the ancient Mysteries; he beheld the majestic weaving of the Elements. Then he beheld the mysteries of the soul of man, he beheld those seven Powers of whom it was known that they are the great celestial Instructors of the human race.—This was known in the early Christian centuries. In those times men did not speak, as they do to-day, of abstract teachings, where something is imparted by way of concepts and ideas. In the first Christian centuries men spoke of being instructed from the spiritual world by the Goddesses Dialectica, Rhetorica, Grammatica, Arithmetica, Geometria, Astrologia or Astronomia, and Musica. These Seven were not the abstract conceptions which they have become today; men gazed upon them, saw them before their eyes—I cannot say in bodily reality but as Beings of soul—and allowed themselves to be instructed by these heavenly figures. Later on they no longer appeared to men in the solitude of vision as the living Goddesses Dialectica, Rhetorica and the rest, but in abstract forms, in abstract, theoretic doctrines.

The personality of whom I am now speaking allowed all that I have related to work upon him. And he was led then into the planetary world, wherein the mysteries of the soul of man are unveiled. Then in the world of stars, having traversed the “Great Cosmic Ocean,” he was led by Ovid, who after he had passed through the gate of death had become the guide and leader of souls in the spiritual world. This personality, who was Brunetto Latini, became the teacher of Dante. What Dante learned from Brunetto Latini he then wrote down in his poem the Divina Commedia. And so that mighty poem is a last reflection of what lived on here and there as Platonism. It had flowed from the lips of Sylvestris at the School of Chartres in the twelfth century and was still taught by those who had been so inwardly fired by the old traditions that the secrets of Christianity rose up within them as Inspirations which they were then able to communicate to their pupils through the word.

The influence of Alanus ab Insulis, brought into the Cistercian Order, passed over to the Dominicans. Then to the Dominicans fell the paramount task: the cultivation of the intellect in the Aristotelian sense. But there was an intervening period: the School of Chartres had been at its prime in the twelfth century—and in the thirteenth century, in the Dominican Order, the intensive development of Aristotelian Scholasticism began. The great teachers in the School of Chartres had passed through the gate of death into the spiritual world and were together for a time with the Dominicans who were beginning to come down through birth and who, after they had descended, established Aristotelianism on the Earth. We must therefore think of an intervening period, when, as it were in a great heavenly Council, the last of the great teachers of Chartres after they had passed through the gate of death were together with those who, as Dominicans, were to cultivate Aristotelianism—were together with them before these latter souls came down to Earth. There, in the spiritual world, the great “heavenly contract” was made. Those who under the leadership of Alanus ab Insulis had arrived in the spiritual world said to the Aristotelians who were about to descend: It is not the time now for us to be on the Earth; for the present we must work from here, from the spiritual world. In the near future it will not be possible for us to incarnate on the Earth. It is now your task to cultivate the intellect in the dawning epoch of the Spiritual Soul.—

Then the great Schoolmen came down and carried out the agreement that had been reached between them and the last great Platonists of the School of Chartres. One, for example, who had been among the earliest to descend received a message through another who had remained with Alanus ab Insulis in the spiritual world for a longer time than he—that is to say, the younger man had remained longer with the spiritual Individuality who had borne the name ‘Alanus ab Insulis.’ The younger one who came down later worked together with the older man to whom he conveyed the message and thus within the Dominican Order began the preparation for the Age of Intellectualism. The one who had remained somewhat longer in the spiritual world with Alanus ab Insulis first put on the habit of the Cistercian Order, exchanging it only later for that of the Dominican. And so those who had once lived under the influence of what came into the world with Aristotle, were now working on the Earth, and up above, keeping watch, but in living connection with the Aristotelians working on the Earth, were the Platonists who had been in the School of Chartres. The spiritual world and the physical world went hand in hand. Through the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was as though Aristotelians and Platonists were stretching out their hands to one another. And then, as time went on, many of those who had come down in order to introduce Aristotelianism into Europe were in the spiritual world with the others once again.

But the further course of evolution was such that the former leaders in the School of Chartres, together with those who held the leading positions in the Dominican Order, placed themselves at the head of those who in the first half of the nineteenth century, in that mighty super-sensible cult enacted in the pictures already indicated, made preparation for the later anthroposophical stream. In the nature of things, the first to come down again were those who had worked more or less as Aristotelians; for under the influence of intellectualism the time for a new deepening of spirituality had not yet come. But there was an unbreakable agreement which still works on. In accordance with this agreement there must go forth from the Anthroposophical Movement something that must find its culmination before this century has run its course. For over the Anthroposophical Society a destiny hovers: many of those in the Anthroposophical Society to-day will have to come down again to the Earth before, and at the end of, the twentieth century, but united, then, with those who were either the actual leaders in the School of Chartres or were pupils at Chartres. And so, if civilisation is not to fall into utter decadence, before the end of the twentieth century the Platonists of Chartres and the Aristotelians who came later will have to be working together on the Earth.

In the future, the Anthroposophical Society must learn to understand, with full consciousness, something of its karma. For a great deal that is unable to come to birth—above all at the present time—is waiting in the womb of the spiritual evolution of mankind. Also, very many things to-day assume an entirely different form; but if one can discern the symptoms, the inner meaning of what is thus externalised becomes evident and the veils are drawn aside from much that continues to live spiritually through the centuries. At this point I may perhaps give a certain indication. Why, indeed, should it not be given, now that the esoteric impulse is to flow through the Anthroposophical Society?—I should like to speak of something that will show you how observation of surrounding circumstances opens up a vista into manifold connections.

When I myself, in preparing for the Anthroposophical Movement, was led along a particular path of destiny, this showed itself in a strange connection with the Cistercian Order, which is closely connected, in its turn, with Alanus ab Insulis. [Let me say here, for those who like to weave legends, that I, in respect of my own individuality, am in no way to be identified with Alanus ab Insulis. I only want to prevent legends arising from what I am putting before you in an esoteric way. The essential point is that these things stem from esoteric sources.] In an altogether remarkable way my destiny allowed me to discern through the external circumstances, such spiritual connections as I have now described. Perhaps some of you know the articles in the Goetheanum Weekly entitled, Mein Lebensgang (The Course of My Life). I have spoken there of how in my youth I was sent, not to a Gymnasium, but to a Real Schule, and only later acquired the classical education given in the Gymnasia. I can only regard this as a remarkable dispensation of my karma. For in the town where I spent my youth the Gymnasium was only a few steps away from the Real Schule and it was by a hair's breadth that I went, not to the Gymnasium but to the Real Schule. If, however, at that time I had gone to the Gymnasium in the town, I should have become a priest in the Cistercian Order. Of that there is no doubt whatever. For at this Gymnasium all the teachers were Cistercians. I was deeply attracted to all these priests, many of whom were extremely learned men. I read a great deal that they wrote and was profoundly stirred by it. I loved these priests and the only reason why I passed the Cistercian Order by was because I did not attend the Gymnasium. Karma led me elsewhere ... but for all that I did not escape the Cistercian Order. I have spoken of this too in my autobiography. I was always of a sociable disposition, and in my autobiography I have written of how, later on, in the house of Marie Eugenie della Grazie in Vienna, I came into contact with practically every theologian in the city. Nearly all of them were Cistercian priests. And in this way a vista opened out, inducing one to go back in time ... for me personally it came very naturally ... a vista leading through the stream of the Cistercian Order back to the School of Chartres. For Alanus ab Insulis had been a Cistercian. And strange to say, when, later on, I was writing my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, I simply could not, for reasons of aesthetic necessity, do otherwise than clothe the female characters on the stage in a costume consisting of a long tunic and what is called a stole. If you picture such a garment—a yellowish-white tunic with a black stole and black girdle—there you have the robe of the Cistercian Order. I was thinking at the time only of aesthetic necessities, but this robe of the Cistercian Order came very naturally before me. There you have one indication of how connections unfold before those who are able to perceive the inner, spiritual significance of symptoms appearing in the external world.

A beginning was made at Christmas more and more to draw aside the veils from these inner connections. They must be brought to light, for mankind is waiting for knowledge of inner reality, having for centuries experienced only that of the outer, material world, and civilisation to-day is in a terrible position. Among the many indications still to be given, we shall, on the one side, have to speak of the work of the School of Chartres, of how Initiates in this School passed through the gate of death and encountered in the spiritual world those souls who later wore the robe of the Dominicans in order to spread Aristotelianism with its intellectuality and to prepare with vigour and energy the epoch of the Spiritual (or Consciousness) Soul. And so—let me put it in this way—in the Anthroposophical Society we have Aristotelianism working on, but in a spiritualised form, and awaiting its further spiritualisation. Then, at the end of the century many of those who are here to-day, will return, but they will be united, then, with those who were the teachers in the School of Chartres. The aim of the Anthroposophical Society is to unite the two elements. The one element is the Aristotelianism in the souls who were for the most part connected with the old Pagan wisdom, who were waiting for Christianity and who retained this longing until, as Dominicans, they were able through the activity of the intellect to promulgate Christianity. They will be united with souls who had actually experienced Christianity in the physical world and whose greatest teachers gathered together in the School of Chartres. Up to now, these teachers of Chartres have not incarnated, although in my contact with the Cistercian Order I was able again and again to come across incorporations of many of those who were in the School of Chartres. In the Cistercian Order one met many a personality who was not a reincarnation of a pupil of Chartres but in whose life there were periods when—for hours, for days—he was inspired by some such Individuality from the School of Chartres. It was a matter, in these cases, of incorporation, not incarnation. And wonderful things were written, of which one could only ask: who is the actual author? The author was not the monk who in the Cistercian Order at that time wore the yellowish-white robe with the black stole and girdle, but the real author was the personality who for hours, days or weeks had come down into the soul of one of these Cistercian Brothers. Much of this influence worked on in essays or writings little known in literature.—I myself once had a remarkable conversation with a Cistercian who was an extremely learned man. I have mentioned it, too, in The Course of My Life. We were going away from a gathering, and speaking about the Christ problem. I propounded my ideas which were the same, essentially, as those I give in my lectures. He became uneasy while I was speaking, and said: ‘We may possibly hit upon something of the kind; we shall not allow ourselves to think such things.’ He spoke in similar terms about other problems of Christology. But then we stopped for a short time—the moment stands most vividly before me—it was where the Schottenring and the Burgring meet in Vienna, on the one side the Hofburg and on the other the Hotel de France and the Votiv-Kirche ... we stopped for a minute or two and the man said: “I should like you to come with me. I will give you a book from my library in which something remarkable is said on the subject you have been speaking about.” I went with him and he gave me a book about the Druses. The whole circumstances of our conversation in connection with the perusal of this book led me to the knowledge that when, having started from Christology, I went on to speak of repeated earthly lives, this deeply learned man was, as it were, emptied mentally in a strange way, and when he came to himself again remembered only that he possessed a book about the Druses in which something was said about reincarnation. He knew about it only from this one book. He was a Hofrat (Councillor) at the University of Vienna and was so erudite that it was said of him: “Hofrat N. knows the whole world and three villages besides.” ... so great was his learning—but in his bodily existence he knew only that in a book about the Druses something was said about repeated earthly lives. This is an example of the difference between what men have in their subconsciousness and what flows as the spiritual world through their souls.—And then a noteworthy episode occurred. I was once giving a lecture in Vienna. The same person was there and after the lecture he made a remark which could only be interpreted in the sense that at this moment he had complete understanding of a certain man belonging to the present age and of the relation of this man to his earlier incarnation. And what the person said on that occasion about the connection between two earthly lives, was correct, was not false. But through his intellect he understood nothing; it simply came from his lips.

By this I want only to indicate how spiritual movements reach into the immediate present. But what to-day shines in as it were through many tiny windows must in the future become a unity through that connection between the leaders of the School of Chartres and the leading spirits of Scholasticism, when the spiritual revival whereby intellectualism itself is lifted to the Spirit, sets in at the end of the twentieth century. To make this possible, let human beings of the twentieth century not throw away their opportunities! But everything to-day depends upon free will, and whether the two allied groups will be able to descend for the re-spiritualisation of culture in the twentieth century—this depends very specially upon whether the Anthroposophical Society understands how to cultivate Anthroposophy with the right devotion.

So much for to-day.—We have heard of the connection of the anthroposophical stream with the deep mystery of the epoch which began with the manifestation of the Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha and has developed in the way I have described. More will be said in the second lecture.

To-day I would like to bring our recent studies to a certain conclusion. To begin with, as I may remind you, you are already aware what awaits the human being immediately after death. His physical body being laid aside, he is in a condition in which he can never be, in the prevailing consciousness of our time, during earthly life. Within and about him he has his I, his astral body and his ether-body. From birth till death, as you know, the ether-body remains united with the physical. Even in sleep it is only with the I and astral body that the human being is outside the physical,—and thus outside the etheric body too. Now, however, then for a short while after death (only a matter of days, you will remember), man still inhabits his etheric body—his body of formative forces—and he is thereby enabled to look back on the whole course of his past earthly life, which is in fact always contained in the etheric body. As I have mentioned in the recent public lectures, this can happen in Initiation too; when man is able to set the etheric body free, he beholds the entire vista of his earthly life.

Yet it is not for long that we can retain the etheric body after death. Belonging as it does to the entire Cosmos, the ether-body is always wanting to expand. Even during life, if we lost hold of our physical body for a single instant, our ether-body would at once be tending—drawing as it were by an elastic power—to dissolve into the whole Cosmos. Only the physical body, in which it stays throughout our life, holds it together. And then when the physical body’s coherent power, is no longer ours, straightway the ether-body begins to expand, so much so that in a few days' time it is there for us no longer. It is as when you take a little drop of water; the drop is there before you; warm it and it evaporates and expands in all directions; then it is there no more—you can no longer see it. So does the ether-body expand into the Cosmos after death; after a very few days it is there no more.

Initiation-wisdom shows that this can last only for few days. For by Initiation we are able—as it were, artificially—to make use of the ether-body even during earthly life. Though it remains in the physical body, we become able to disregard the latter, using the ether-body as such. At once we have the panorama of our earthly life until the given moment. Yet at the same time we see glistening and shining forth in our etheric body a reflection of the great Universe. The entire starry Heavens are there in the etheric body. Indeed you cannot ever see the ether-body apart from the physical without its showing you at once the starry world on every hand—the planets and the fixed stars too. It is the planets and the fixed stars which at long last receive our etheric body. Initiation-science shows that we can hold the pictures in our etheric body only for three or four days at the most; then they vanish, and to avoid being disconnected altogether we must return into our physical body before this happens, otherwise the ether-body will no longer hold together. And thus indeed, a few days after death the ether-body vanishes, we have it no longer. Yet we ourselves are thereby progressively received into the world of stars.

At first, when divested of our ether-body, we feel like strangers amid the world of stars. Only the Moon, only the Lunar forces seem as it were familiar to us there. The Moon emerges on the one hand as in an after-image of its physical appearance. Yet at the same time we now begin to discover what kind of spiritual forces are connected with it. We realise how with the Moon the Jahve-power of the Universe is connected, as was explained in our last lecture. For the soul who has passed through the Gate of Death, the Moon is transformed, as it were, into a colony of spiritual Beings, and Jahve is their Leader. Now after death, we really learn to know what Initiation Science tells of, for pictures of these spiritual truths can be received by Initiation Science even into earthly life. We learn to know what it signifies that man on Earth must die. Yes, it is through the Moon—through the Jahve Powers—that we learn the significance of death.

Looking at death from the earthly standpoint, we see the physical body of a human being rendered lifeless, while all the soul and spirit and the etheric life that filled it hitherto have disappeared. The physical body is received by the forces of the Earth, that is to say, the Elements,—earth and water if it is buried, or air and fire if cremated. The human physical body, laid aside by the human being who indwelt it, is now received by the forces of the Earth. Yet we must ask: What does it mean for the physical body to be thus laid aside by man and given over to destruction? Truth is: When man is born and has in him the force of childlike growth—nay, even before his birth, when, as an embryo in his mother's womb, as to the body he belongs already to the Earth—it is these very forces, made manifest as destroying forces when man dies, which help to build his body. The self-same forces which take leave of the human physical body at death, made manifest in death in that the physical body is disintegrated, play an essential part in building up this very body. Through his ethereal and subsequent astral experiences the man himself goes on into the Spiritual World, yet something of importance happens also here on Earth. From the physical body a spiritual apparition is released, emerging, as it were, out of the human body. While the real human being goes upon his way, here on the other hand, we might say, another being issues from the human body. Truly it is so when a human being dies. There lies his physical body the man himself is departing from it, and simultaneously another being leaves it. What is this other being? It is the forces of the Moon, living as they do also here on Earth. Concentrated though they be in the cosmic entity we call the Moon, the range of these forces extends far and wide, and on the Earth they are made manifest in the powers of Death. Moreover the powers of Death are at the same time those of Birth. They lead the human being into earthly life and are made manifest when he leaves it. We thus begin to realize the deep connection between birth and death. Take all the human beings who die in successive times. From each of them in turn the apparition of death, as it were, comes forth and joins a spiritual atmosphere which is there around the Earth no less than is the air we breathe. This spiritual atmosphere contains what death gives up and birth receives. From the very forces that soar upward, as it were, from human corpses, human beings in their turn, are born. Spiritually, our powers of growth are intimately connected with this sphere of death-force—or forces made manifest in death—which surrounds the Earth.

Now, my dear friends, think of the following: These spiritual forces—at once of death and birth, as we have seen—are forces of the Moon, and into them is mingled all that the dead human being, all along the way from birth till death, accumulated by way of moral powers, moral values. Have you been good in any way,—in the sphere of these death-Moon-forces you will find, as it were, a specific being, imbued with inner force deriving from your goodness. Yet the same being is imbued with all that derives from your badness. It is a being we ourselves engender, all the time, while living on the Earth. Unaware of it as we are in our normal consciousness, we bear it in us. We leave it every night when we are sleeping, for in effect this entity remains in the physical body when we but go out of it in sleep. I told you, did I not, that our moral and religious feelings are left behind in sleep in the physical and ether-body? There too is left behind this real being which we ourselves give birth to during earthly life—the bearer of our Karma.

This being now remains with us after death so long as we are in the realm of the Moon forces. Indeed, just because this being keeps us amid the Moon-forces, that is, in the near neighbourhood of Earth, during the first time after death we are obliged to remain connected with these Lunar forces and with our own Karma, so much so that we live again through all the deeds we did on Earth from birth till death. We have to live them through again in a spiritual form of being, three times as fast as we did on Earth. We live them through again in backward order. So do we spend a period of time after death, obliged to do things intimately connected with our earthly deeds. We are united, it is true, no longer through the physical body with the Moon-forces of death (for we have laid the physical body aside), and yet as beings of soul and spirit we are obliged to carry out deeds intimately connected with our deeds on Earth. And as we thus go through our life again in backward order, our Karma is ever more convincingly brought home to us.

Yet with all this, my dear friends, you must remember to mostly judge spiritual matters in a spiritual way. If you were fond of a human being on the Earth, you may now be feeling: Today, alas, after his death, he will be living again through all that was bad or faulty in his actions! From your physical and earthly standpoint you are sorry for him. But if you asked the soul himself who has gone through the gate of death, whether he too judges it thus, he would answer: “No. I should not want to be undergoing this after-death life in any other way than with the judgment which is mine here and now, as a being of pure soul and spirit experiencing all things again, so to impress them ever more deeply into the true being of my soul. If I have been responsible for any deed which makes me appear a morally imperfect man, and if I were not to go through it all again deeply and inwardly as I am doing now, I should not feel the strong impulsion to make it good. I should not want to free myself from this my failing. Precisely by experiencing the deed all over again in soul and spirit, the urge is born in me to overcome it by a better action.” Not for anything in the world would the dead forgo this opportunity to make good again, for this alone will give him power to achieve his full humanity,—will give him strength to be made whole. In this respect you may be sure, even as a landscape looks very different seen from the valley or from a mountain-top, so life itself looks different seen from this physical world where we are now and from yonder side. Only too often the relationships of earthly life to the life after death, which after all transcends the physical, are misjudged for this reason. Think of another example, my dear friends. Maybe you are a really good anthroposophist, very keen on spiritual science, but you are living in the same house and in very close connection with someone else who detests it, who regards Anthroposophy as his greatest enemy. Now you may say, you are extremely sorry to be causing him so much pain by your attachment to what he detests. From the aspect of earthly life this may be rightly judged. Seen from the other side however, very often it turns out in such a case that it lay in the other person's Karma not to be able to come near to Anthroposophy owing to hindrances brought from a former life, making him in his head a very hater of it. As to his head, he simply cannot bear it. He becomes vexed and excited every time he hears tell of anthroposophical truths. Yet all the time, in his inmost heart he may not be averse to them at all, and when he dies it may well be that he has after death a very deep longing for Anthroposophy. Often therefore you will be doing just what is needed for one who hated it during earthly life, if after his death, you turn to him with thoughts derived from Anthroposophy, so as to bring them to him. Paradoxical as it may sound, not a few relatives who raged and stormed when another member of the family became [an] anthroposophist have become deeply attached to it after death. In this respect once more, you must take seriously what I said during my last sojourn here: we judge life very differently from yonder side than we do from this side.

Yes, man becomes very different after his death. For you should also think of this: In physical and earthly life there is your brain inside the cavity of your skull; a little farther down there is the lung, and then the other organs. More outwardly, towards the surface of the body, there are your senses. Through all that is thus contained within the limits of your skin, you are enabled to perceive the outer world. Now after death you yourself go out into the world. At first the stars are only shining into your etheric body, but when the etheric body too has been laid aside, you will actually identify yourself with the stars. Before, you had in you a brain; now you will have in you the Spiritual essences of Venus, Mercury, the Sun, and so on. You can truly say: Even as on the Earth I had in me my lung, my heart, my kidneys and so forth, so Moon and Mercury and Sun are in me now. You in your inner being are at one with the great Universe. Do you imagine that the Universe will provide you with the same kind of perception and understanding as your brain does? The world will look very different to you now! The Earth itself looks different when we behold it from the Sun than when we ourselves are on Earth and looking upwards to the Sun.

So then we undergo in all reality this backward recapitulation of our life, during which time we still remain in close connection with Moon and Mercury and Venus, while our relation to the more distant stars—to Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, and to the Fixed Stars above all—is as yet feebly developed.

When we have thus retraced our actions all the way backward until birth, then do we judge them from the standpoint of the stars; and in our judgment of ourselves we are no longer merely looking backward now, but forward. We have the kind of judgment which tells us: You must do thus to balance out this action, and thus to balance out another action, and so on.

We are immersed in the recapitulation of our life during the first twenty or thirty years after death, according to the age we reached,—it takes a third as long as earthly life. (Children who have died go through it quickly: while for very little children, you will easily conclude, it scarcely comes into question.) Connected still in soul and spirit with your past earthly life, you live it through again in backward sequence. And when at last you have arrived at birth, only the “memory” of it will remain with you. It is as though at this moment you were to lay aside yet another body. We are accustomed to say, we lay aside the astral body. What happens in reality is that the living action in which you were hitherto immersed is now transformed for you into a thought-picture,—only it is a consciousness pertaining to the stars that thinks it, whilst here on Earth an earthly consciousness was thinking.

As you set forth now on your further way within the spiritual world you will be living with the Beings of whom the physical refulgence are the Sun and Moon and Stars. With the spiritual Beings of the Stars you will now live on. Moreover into this life amid the Stars you bear with you the memory of the Karmic entity you had to lay aside with your astral body. Once more, the “laying aside” means nothing else than that the life we were immersed and actively engaged in is but a memory to us now—a memory which we as cosmic Man take with us. Weighted with this memory—the legacy of our earthly life—we step forth into a purely spiritual world.

*

While undergoing the aforesaid recapitulation of his past earthly life, man is essentially within the planetary sphere. Advancing from the spiritual forces of the Moon to those of Venus, Mercury, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and at last Saturn,—living therefore between the spheres of Moon and Saturn, feeling within himself the Planetary Cosmos—throughout this time man is still undergoing the backward recapitulation of his recent Earth-life. A few days ago I was telling you of how the Moon- and Saturn-forces counteract each other. Whereas the Moon harbours the forces which bring man down into the earthly realm, seeking ever and again to hold him fast on Earth, Saturn on the other hand seeks to bear him out into the Universe of Stars. Yet we must understand this truly, for when man goes into the Universe of Stars between death and new birth, he is no longer seeing the physical reflection of the Stars; he is living now with the Beings, to whom the several Stars belong.

When after death we have passed the sphere of Saturn, we become ripe to experience the pure spiritual world. In the book Theosophy this moment is described as the passage from the soul-world into Spirit-land. Trammeled however as he is by the memory of his past earthly life, man is unable to achieve the crossing by himself. He needs a helper in the spiritual world,—and of this too, you will recall, I was telling in recent lectures. In the age before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Initiates in the Mysteries could say to their disciples: If you have duly sent your religious offerings up into the spiritual world, you will be able to find the sublime Being of the Sun who goes with you from the time when you with yourself take leave of the Sun-sphere. He in His spiritual Being will accompany you to the other side, where, so to speak, the Sun shines spiritually outward into cosmic space, even as He himself shines physically down on to the Earth. The sublime Being of the Sun will then go with you; He will escort you to the Saturn sphere and farther out from thence into the sphere of Stars. The spiritual Sun will, as it were, be shining for you; thus and thus only will you win your passage from the soul-world into Spirit-land.

Now through the Mystery of Golgotha it has grown different. The Being of the Sun came down to Earth,—took on a body in the Man, Jesus of Nazareth. By turning now in heart and mind and feeling to the Christ and to the Mystery of Golgotha, already here upon the Earth, man receives power that will enable him to get beyond the spheres of Sun and Saturn, so to gain entry into Spirit-land,—in other words, into the world of Stars.

Then comes the state in which man undergoes his further life between death and new birth. If I am now to tell you more about this state, in the way man of present time—after the Mystery of Golgotha—can undergo it by virtue of the power of Christ which he has received, I must insert the following. In the first place I must point out what it really means, when we are out yonder in the world of Stars, in Spirit-land, for us to have the “memory” of our earthly life. The following will help you understand it.

Getting beyond the Saturn sphere, we enter into what was named the Zodiac, in ancient world-conceptions. Though it was meant to typify the fixed-star-heavens as a whole—the Spirit-land, in other words—in the sum-total of the stars which constitute the Zodiac we have a comprehensive picture of the path which Man must undergo, to build from the entire Cosmos, with the help of the Beings of the Hierarchies, the Spirit-seed of his physical body for the next incarnation. If you should say: “Here upon Earth we have such interesting work to do, building up civilisation, working for our fellowmen and so on; how meagre it must be to be engaged only in forming a body for ourselves,” you would be making a great mistake. Nothing that you can ever do on Earth can be as great and manifold as what you have to do when from the starry worlds you build this temple of the Gods, the human body. This is by far the greater task and the more manifold. Nor do you merely make your own body for yourself. As we shall see in a moment, you really make it so that it belongs to mankind as a whole. Associated as you are by Karma with one human being or another, while building your new body you imbue it with the tendency to bring you together again in a beneficial way, so that you and they together can make good. You are working for mankind in a far higher degree out there than you are able to do while here on Earth. Now as to how you work amid the Stars, let me describe it in more detail, only remember please what I said before. Telling of yonder worlds sublime, I can speak only in pictures; the human concepts of our time are not so formed as to enable one to express it otherwise.

In its entirety, once more, you have to build the spiritual seed of your next physical body. From the ingredients of the whole Universe you built it. When for example you are living in and with those spiritual Beings who have their physical reflection in the constellation of Aries, the Ram, you will work with the Hierarchies of Aries in forming your future head, which is indeed a Universe in itself. No matter how contracted here in the physical body, in your head you carry the entire Cosmos—the Cosmos seen from the aspect of Aries. And while, upon the scene of Aries, you are at work with the Hierarchy of that constellation, meanwhile the planets are shining; as they shine physically down on to the Earth, so do they shine spiritually to the other side. Say for example that you have worked your way from Aries to the next constellation—Taurus, the Bull. While working with the Hierarchies in Taurus, you elaborate the region of your larynx in its connection with the lungs. Mars in the meantime, from the planetary spheres, shines up into the sphere of Taurus, and in the movements of Mars there is expressed all that you did with your organs of speech, rightly or wrongly, while you were on the Earth. Every untruth which a man uttered shines at him spiritually from the planet Mars while he is working through the Taurus sphere. You may imagine therefore, what is the nature of the “memory” we there retain of our own deeds. We find it after death, written into the Universe—nay, as the very Logos, speaking from the Universe towards that other side of world-existence.

Thus for the region of the speech-organs we have to work at our future body, hindered or helped according as we lied or told the truth. And so it is, to take another example, when we are going through the constellation of Leo. It is the Sun now that sheds spiritual light on all the imperfections of our heart—more or less deep or superficial as we have been in our feelings and in our sympathies and antipathies, belonging as these do to our temperament and blood-circulation while on Earth. So while we work and build at our future body, the language of the Planets, sounding into the cosmic spaces, utters forth the whole of our preceding life. It is so in deed and truth, strange as it may seem from an earthly standpoint. We watch the planetary movements from yonder side, even from without,—Mars for example moving in the face of Taurus. The movements form themselves into a cosmic writing, but the writing is not mute, it actually sounds into the Universe. Such is the writing of the Stars, by our own deeds inscribed into the cosmic spaces. Small wonder if on our return we prepare what will then be ours—the measure of our Karma. For we can only build the physical body for our future life under the ceaseless influence of this speaking of the Stars.

So then we work our way through the spiritual realm. We spend the longer time upon this spiritual journey, the greater the proportion of our full consciousness in the past earthly life to the dim consciousness we had as a little child. For we are now in a state of consciousness transcending the consciousness we had on Earth, even as our earthly consciousness as grown-up men and women transcends the dreamy state of childhood. There are distinctly these three stages. If a man lived to the age of thirty and spent the first five years in the dream-consciousness of childhood, he will have lived in fuller consciousness six times as long. So now again he lives six times longer than his entire Earth-life in the still fuller consciousness which pertains to him out there amid the Stars. We understand it therefore quite simply: a child who dies will live only for a short time between death and new birth. The older a man grows, the longer must he spend there. For by his longer life on Earth his higher consciousness was darkened for a longer time,—I mean the higher-than-earthly consciousness which he underwent in the spiritual world after his former death. The longer this was darkened, the longer must he work to make it light again. For we must enter right fully into the light.

When we are fully in the light, then comes the time between death and new birth which you will find described in one of the Mystery Plays as the midnight hour in the spiritual life of man. It is about the middle of the time between death and new birth. This is the time when our consciousness, amid the Beings of the Hierarchies in the spiritual world, is most steeped in Spiritual light. Yet at this very time we also experience most deeply: Down yonder in the planetary sphere is the abiding record of all that you, man, did. You may not abandon it, you cannot leave it thus,—so say we to ourselves—nor can you ever alter it while you are here; you can change it only by going down to Earth. And so the urge arises, to descend again to Earth,—to resolve, as it were, between Moon and Saturn. The forces of the Moon are drawing for us once again and we resolve to follow them, so to set forth on our returning journey. If a man grew to adult life in his last incarnation, it will be centuries later.

The nearer we now come to the planetary sphere and notably to the spheres of Mercury, Venus and Moon, the more we lose the consciousness of community with the Beings of the Hierarchies. To tell it more precisely: the consciousness we enter into now contains only the revelations of these spiritual Beings, whereas we felt ourselves till lately living among them and within them. While preparing the human head of our next incarnation for example, we felt ourselves working, very intimately with them. Now they appear to us as if in pictures. Meanwhile the forces of the Moon arise within us. We feel once more: we are a being destined to live a life of our own. Although not yet in a physical body, we have a premonition of living in and by ourselves, a stranger to the Cosmos. No longer do we see the spiritual Beings as they really are; all that we now possess are the pictures of them.

Whilst we are going through these pictures, the spiritual seed of the physical body which we were preparing falls ever farther from us and disappears. We are obliged to witness this: the spiritual seed has fallen from us; it has gone down into a physical mother and father, entering into the forces of generation, into the stream of generation upon the physical Earth. So it is in all reality. The physical body we also were preparing shrinks and contracts and falls into the streams of generation,—into a physical father and mother upon Earth,—while we ourselves as soul and spiritual being are left behind, feeling that we belong to what has fallen from us, yet cannot unite with it directly. In this condition—it is our only means of re-uniting with it—we now begin to draw to ourselves the forces of the Ether that are there throughout the Cosmos; we begin to form our ether-body. We do this when the spirit-seed of our physical body has already fallen from us and is down there on Earth, preparing the physical body in the mother's womb, while we are gathering the forces with which we form our ether-body. With this etheric body we then unite ourselves, when the human seed has already been for a time in the mother's womb.

Such is the process of return to earthly life. We have been living with the pictures—no more than the pictures—of the spiritual Beings; now we incorporate what we can take into ourselves only through the forces of the Moon. What until now was but the “memory” of our own Karmic entity, we now take in as real effective forces, right into our ether-body. Therefore we afterwards appear on Earth in such a way that we of ourselves bring about the unfoldment of our destiny, our Karma. It is while passing through the Lunar forces that we conceive the longing thus to live and fulfil our Karma upon Earth.

Such, my dear friends, is the cycle through which man lives from death till birth. First he experiences the ascent to independent consciousness within the spirit-sphere. Thereafter, this consciousness is gradually steeped again in twilight; the Spirit-sphere remains with him in pictures only, and he receives into himself the will to Karma. He comes back to Earth, to work once more in a physical body. So he goes on, till through a sequence of such Earth-lives he shall become capable of yet another metamorphosis, another mode of being.

In present earthly time it is as I have been relating. In his descent from the starry spheres, man has the memory of his former Earth-existence and from this memory he now takes his start. Having prepared it for himself within the starry spheres, at his descent he now unites with his own physical body. But we are living now in a very important period of Earth-existence, the significance of which we can understand only if we first know what has just been related—how in the starry spheres we prepare and work and win for ourselves the physical body which we eventually put on when we come down again to Earth. For at this very point something of great significance is about to happen in our epoch. I will say more of it in the third part of the lecture.

*

I have often drawn attention to the fact that in the last third of the 19th century changes whose origin is in the spiritual world began to affect the whole course of human earthly life. The gates of knowledge were in a way opened to the spiritual world. If man is duly active on his own part he can now reach into the spiritual world with true cognition, whereas for many centuries before, while material knowledge was developing, this possibility had not been given.

The change took place to begin with in the spiritual world, in that the Beings who had been leading hitherto were replaced by that spiritual Being who for his likeness in character to what is traditionally known by this name may be described as the Being of Michael. Michael, we may truly say, has taken over the Spiritual guidance of mankind. The fact that Michael is now entering the soul-life and spiritual life of mankind has its visible counterpart on Earth. An ever growing number of people begin to realize that man is livingly and constantly connected, not only through his physical body with the Earth, but through his soul and spirit with the spiritual world.

Man is thus growing into conscious spiritual knowledge. This is the one aspect of the leadership of Michael, but there is also another. To be sincerely filled with spiritual knowledge also affects the human heart, the human soul. The more the light of Spiritual Science spreads, the less will it remain a mere theory; it will pour out into human feeling,—it will be present in the form of true human love, in ever widening circles.

What, in effect, is the relation to the human being of all the learning and information accumulated in the last few centuries? It lives as knowledge in the human head; it does not reach the entire man,—it fails to flow from the head into the human being as a whole. Knowledge of this sort then becomes a kind of tumour in the soul. Failing to receive the proper forces from the rest of the human being, it gradually hardens. This is what happens when we merely grow more clever in our head, and the appropriate feelings, springing from the rest of our human being, no longer permeate our increasing cleverness. A kind of cancerous growth becomes established in our soul and spiritual life. The head itself cannot truly thrive if the whole human being is not living in the world with heartfelt love, and also willing what he loves.

Yet man will never understand what the leadership of Michael intends unless he goes out to meet it with his own active contribution—unless he opens out his mind to spiritual enlightenment and becomes filled with the human love which springs from such enlightenment. When he does this, then also will he realize with ever growing comprehension the significance of Michael's leadership and guidance.

The people of the Old Testament,—they too spoke of a leadership of Michael, and in so speaking they conceived Michael to be the servant of Jahve. Michael therefore, in the Old Testament times, worked with those spiritual forces which are the forces of Jahve. He was the minister of Jahve. He helped in the inexorable fight of which I spoke before—the fight with the Ahrimanic powers. In our age, on the other hand, Michael's leadership now begins to help regulate the historic destinies of mankind, it also is signifying that the word shall presently come true: the leadership of Christ will spread over the Earth. It is as though Michael goes before, bearing the light of spiritual knowledge, while after Him there comes the Christ, calling man to universal, all-embracing love. Now this entails a change not only for the Earth; it involves changes also for the life man undergoes between death and a new birth.

Since ancient times of earthly evolution it has been as I today described it. The human being prepares the spiritual seed of his own physical body, which he takes over when he steps forth into his new life on Earth. Now however, since the Christ-Michael-leadership has begun, men will be able ever increasingly to make another important decision before they come down to Earth. Today as yet only a few will do so; a growing number will as time goes on. For spiritual knowledge sheds its light not only on the Earth, but out into the higher realms as well. Through the present leadership of Michael man will now learn to make a very significant decision at the moment when he has already taken on his Karma—taken it into his new ether-body—but is still only setting out upon the way into the physical. With the increasing spread of spiritual knowledge on the Earth and with man’s growing experience within himself of universal human love, the following possibility will arise for mankind in coming time. When at the point of descending into a next earthly life, man will be able to say to himself: ‘This is the body I have been preparing; yet, having sent it down to Earth and having now received my Karma into the ether-body which I have drawn together from the Cosmos, I see how it is with this Karma. Through something that I did in former lives I see that I have gravely hurt some other human being.’ For we are always in the danger of hurting others through the things we do. The light of judgment as to what we have done to another man will be particularly vivid at this moment when we are still living only in our ether-body, having not yet put on the physical. Here too in future time the light of Michael will be working, and the love of Christ. And we shall then be enabled to bring about a change in our decision,—namely to give to the other man the body we have been preparing, while we ourselves take on the body he prepared, whom we have injured.

Such is the mighty transition which will be taking place from now onward in the spiritual life of men. It will be possible for us of our own decision to enter into the body prepared perforce by another human soul to whom we once did grievous harm; he on the other hand will be enabled to enter into the body we prepared. What we are able to achieve on Earth will thus bring about Karmic compensation in quite another way than heretofore. We human beings shall be able even to exchange our physical bodies. Indeed, the Earth could never reach her goal if this did not take place; mankind would never grow into a single whole. In preparation for future planetary embodiments of the Earth, a time must come in earthly evolution when it will be impossible for one individual to enjoy things on the Earth at the expense of another. As in a plant the single leaf or petal feels itself a member of the whole and shares—pictorially speaking—in the weal and woe of the whole plant, so must a future come for the planet Earth when one human being will not want to enjoy happiness at the expense of the whole, but man will feel a member of mankind. And it will be the true spiritual counterpart of this when we shall learn to prepare the physical body even for one another.

We are in fact emerging from the epoch when each of us had so to speak, his own continuation to himself as to the physical body. In the new epoch that is now beginning—brought on by the present leadership of Michael—we shall work at the spirit-seeds of the physical bodies of men in such a way that one works for another. Moreover, as our incarnations of the Earth go on, this will lead even further. For in thus working for one another in the spirit, we shall prepare for a yet later time, to tell the character of which will sound completely strange and paradoxical, yet it is true. For in that more distant future, human souls even while on Earth will be able to go across into the bodies of those to whom they have done some special hurt and to receive the other soul into their own body. That will be when the Earth herself will have passed into quite new conditions. Yet it is also being prepared for by the actual and impending change of which I have been telling, and which is coming about in the spiritual world through the leadership of Michael.

From this example you can see most vividly the essence of “ideal magic”. If while on Earth you are receptive to the illumination that comes from Spiritual Science, then you are truly helping on the leadership of Michael. Then you are helping on those spiritual forces which will enable men so to live for one another, that even in deciding upon the physical body they are to take, they will consider what is best for all mankind. When we are choosing our physical body, this will determine our decision. If you prepare for this event even now on Earth—prepare for it by the Wisdom-of-Man and by the Love-of-Man—what you are doing will have reality in the spiritual world. And this is true “ideal magic”. It is the true “white magic” as it was called in olden times, and into it mankind is now about to enter.

I wanted to tell you of this most vital factor which has now come into the evolutionary pathway of mankind. We must not shrink for want of courage when it is needful to unveil facts of the spiritual world entering deep into the life of man. For the whole future of mankind depends on man's learning really to live with the spiritual world as naturally as on the Earth he lives with the physical. Mankind must learn to be at home again in the spiritual world as it was in the beginning, in primeval time. Only by doing so shall we be helping mankind's future. In the true sense we must understand the word of Christ: “My Kingdom is not of this world”. How then shall we understand it? Did He not after all come down to Earth? Should He not therefore have said: "My kingdom is of this world?" No, He did not say that, for He intended gradually to transform the Earth into a Kingdom that should not be utterly absorbed in earthly things, but should pass over, ever more and more, into a spiritual state. Christ's Kingdom is not as the Earth was until the Mystery of Golgotha, nor as it still continued, running on in the old lines as if by dint of inertia. The Spirit shall prevail upon the Earth,—such is His Kingdom! And this will come to pass when mankind truly comprehends the leadership of Michael. Nor is true comprehension proved in any other way than by the quest I have now indicated—the quest of spiritual illumination and of human, Christ-filled love.

Let us start from the fact that the human being is a many-part, a multi-part being, that is, from a fact that is quite familiar to us. We want to assume that within the anthroposophical movement there is always an effort to understand how the human being is composed of members, each of which requires a certain understanding, so that the understanding of the whole human being is only possible if one is able to unite the understanding that one has brought to the individual members into a whole. If we disregard everything else for the moment, we know that this human being is divided into the physical body, the etheric body or formative forces, the astral body and that which we call the I. Now this is not — or at least should not be — a mere classification of the human being and his essence, but what is listed as the four members of the human being actually comes from very different worlds and can only be understood from the inner conditions of these worlds. And only when one has understood how the physical body, the etheric body, the body of formative forces, the astral body and the I are formed out of their corresponding worlds, then one is able to gain an understanding of the entire human being from the resonance of the understanding of these individual human limbs. The human being's physical body must be understood from the standpoint of the physical world, but the etheric body or formative forces must be understood from the standpoint of the etheric world, and so on. If we are not extremely precise in this area, if we do not accept that things are exactly as I have just indicated, then we cannot come to an understanding of the human being as a whole.

Let us turn our attention away from the physical body of the human being. We can do this because all of today's education and science is based on understanding the physical body of the human being. But today there is no similar endeavor to understand the etheric body or the body of formative forces. At most, it is imagined that this etheric body or body of formative forces perhaps consists of a finer substance than the dense physical body and that this finer etheric substance is mixed with the physical body. But things are not like that; the situation is essentially different. Someone who has grasped everything that can be grasped from the standpoint of physical science in order to form an idea about the workings of the physical body could completely ignorant about the etheric or formative forces, because when we look at the human being, it is impossible to find the laws of the etheric or formative forces near the earth. We cannot look for the laws of the etheric or formative body in the vicinity of the earth itself. Just as we say, when a stone falls in a vertical direction: gravity is at work, the stone moves in the direction of the center of the earth - just as we look for the causes of the stone's fall in the vicinity of the earth or in the earth look for the causes of the stone's fall, we proceed correctly when we remain close to the earth, we proceed wrongly when we ask about the causes of the event in the etheric or formative forces. Rather, we must look for that which is at work in our etheric or formative body not on earth at all, but in the vastness of the universe, in a sphere that is, an indeterminate distance away from us. There the forces are at work from all sides. Just as physical forces work out from the center of the earth, so the forces from all sides work in and condition our etheric body.

Recall what I told you about the transition of a person from his pre-earthly existence to his earthly existence. He comes down and has already sent the laws for his physical body to earth. Then, I said, he collects his etheric body from the vastness of the cosmic ether. So there he is, before he moves into what he has sent ahead: his physical body, I, astral body and etheric body. But the ether body is not formed by the earth in terms of its laws, but, as we say, representatively: from the four quarters of the world; but this only means that it is drawn together from all sides. So the laws are effective from all sides of the world periphery, the surrounding area, when the human ether body is formed.

What we are now going to discuss may come as something of a shock to the modern reader, and will be extremely surprising. You will agree with me when I say that if we light a flame, however strong, the intensity of the light will mean less and less to us the further we move away from the source of the light. Eventually, at a certain distance, where this light source is hardly taken into account, where it has become so weak that we can no longer read; where, if there is a light somewhere in the distance, we can say for all practical purposes that there is no light. Everyone will admit that. Likewise, today's science admits that the force of gravity decreases with the square of the distance, becoming weaker and weaker the further you get into the surrounding area. But what people today do not consider at all is the following. We on earth express in our words the laws that apply on earth. The law that we express as earthlings also decreases, becomes weaker and weaker and is finally practically no longer there for a certain distance. No matter how cleverly you formulate natural laws for earthly conditions, no matter how cleverly you formulate historical sentences for what happens on earth, these laws, the laws of nature and historical laws, are no longer valid in a certain radius, just as the strength of gravity or the intensity of light has no further significance. Therefore, it is naive if someone were to claim that the same natural laws apply to a star that is so many light-years away as they do to us. For the validity of our natural laws exists only for earthly conditions and ceases when we venture out into space. But the laws of the ether come from the vastness of space. If we expect the same laws from them as the natural laws of the earth are, then we will never understand the etheric existence. Even as we speak of the etheric body of man, we must speak of something that follows quite different laws from the natural laws of the earth.

There lies that which is astonishing and shocking for today's humanity, but which must be gradually grasped. Otherwise, today's humanity will simply spin itself into earthly conditions and not get beyond these earthly conditions with its soul condition. I will now tell you this in a form in which one can say it – or at least should be able to say it – after having discussed anthroposophical truths within a circle for some time. For if one were to say what is about to be said today in front of an otherwise different circle, people would think one was not quite of sound mind. But that is not a criticism at all. Because as long as one is of sound mind, one retains the spiritual science. So basically, because the genius of language works quite correctly, one must be able to take it seriously with such things. At most, one should reproach someone who presents spiritual science for not being of sound mind. That is not a reproach at all! He is not of sound mind. One must only be with spirit with full consciousness, that is what matters. But if one says that one only has a justified consciousness when one is of sound mind, then one must renounce spiritual science.

People everywhere are declaiming: There are certain tremendously simple laws that one comes upon last. — People call them axioms or something, it does not depend on the names. I will call such axioms. The first axiom is: The whole is always greater than one of its parts. That is a matter of course, people say, and whoever sins against such axioms is not quite of sound mind, because the whole is greater than one of its parts. Or: The straight line is the shortest path between two points. For earthly conditions and for the world of the senses, this applies to the fullest extent. If we go to the most extreme abstractions, we come to such sentences: the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and: the straight line is the shortest way between two points.

But if you sail into the ether, then you really have to break through from the sensory world into another world, where precisely the most trivial laws of the sensory world no longer apply. As soon as you enter the etheric world, the law no longer applies that the whole is greater than one of its parts. Because in the etheric world, for example, it is like this for a human being: If you look at what is etherically behind the part of the whole human being, you look at the liver, lungs and search for their etheric correlates, then each individual part of the human being is considerably greater than the whole human being on earth. And if you ever believed that a person is greater than his liver, you would never be able to penetrate into the spiritual. For in the spiritual, a whole is created by the larger parts working together to form a smaller one, by the whole being created precisely through the interaction of the larger parts.

This may become even clearer to you for the other example, that a straight line is the shortest way between two points. Yes, that applies in the physical world. If you have one point here and a second point there, the straight line is the shortest. But if you enter the ether world, then every path that is taken is easy, every crooked one, every winding one, and if you want to take the straight path, it will get in the way. It forks at every point, it is just the longest way to get from one point to another. Therefore, in relation to the ether world, such a sentence: the straight line is the shortest way between two points - a sentence that spins you into the physical, that makes you not get out of the crust in which you are locked at all. As long as one does not take seriously the fact that even in the world of ether everything is different and even opposite to that in the physical world, one does not come to an understanding of the spiritual world.

People would like to know the members of the human nature: physical body, etheric body, astral body, I. But now they would like to have it so that they apply the same kind of thinking to the etheric body that they have applied to the physical body. But that is precisely what cannot be done, because to the same extent that one moves away from the physical world - but this is identical with the earthly world - the validity of natural laws diminishes, and quite different laws take their place. I am merely pointing out to you all how, when one comes to this second link in human nature, the necessity arises to engage in a completely different way of thinking.

But as soon as you enter this other thinking, you have to take this other thinking very seriously. You can go around in the physical world as much as you like and find all kinds of things, not atoms, but you can find cells and the like. But it would never occur to anyone to think that they would find thoughts under a microscope or in a telescope. They must be found in some other way. You can examine the brain under the microscope until the end of time, but you will not find thoughts in it, they do not go into the microscope. But that is precisely the proof that you only find the physical world in the microscope and in general in the whole view, because the ether world consists of nothing but thoughts. The etheric world is the activity of thoughts as forces. And as soon as one penetrates from the physical body to the etheric body in the case of man, this etheric body consists of thoughts throughout, but thoughts work as forces. We are completely permeated by thoughts, interwoven with thoughts everywhere, but thoughts work as forces.

This now has a very important consequence for the view of the human being. Because now imagine you are going to sleep. There in bed lies the physical body and the etheric body. The etheric body is full of thoughts. It is a kind of excerpt, a kind of extract from the ether of the world, and the ether of the world is an active world of thought. And therefore it is true that the etheric body of a person is something extraordinarily clever, if I may express it that way, full of thoughts full of light and without contradictions. And when a person leaves his physical body and etheric body with his I and his astral body, he actually leaves a very clever entity. The only thing that is fatal is that when a person sleeps, he is not aware of how clever he is, while he remains in bed. The fact that we are not so clever during the day is because during the day we and our astral body submerge into the very clever etheric body and constantly dull it. The fact that we are imperfect as human beings stems from our ego and our astral body. Our astral body and our ego are incapable of rising to the inner solidity, clarity and worldliness of the etheric body. If only we could make the etheric body speak and then write down in shorthand, just as faithfully or unfaithfully, what it has to say all night about the secrets of the universe, then it would be something tremendously clever, even more clever than what is written here.

So, world thoughts as forces work in this ethereal body of man, and we are only ever able to use something - it is always very little - of what is spread out in our ethereal body, in proportion to what we have in our astral body.

And yet, what are we as physical and etheric bodies when we remain in bed when we sleep and have withdrawn our ego and our astral body? We are then in bed a being of physical body and etheric body, and thus we carry within us only the laws of the plant kingdom. And the same thing that we can observe in ourselves, when we look back, as it were, and see the wisdom of the whole world radiating from our sleeping etheric body, in what we could observe in a backward glance in a human being, we basically have before us on a small scale everything that we also have before us when we look at the earth, in that it exists as a physical sphere, but out of itself lets the plant world sprout and has sprouted, and this plant world is ethereally stimulated on all sides by the world thoughts that are weaving in the world ether. This is the infinitely sublime image of the cosmos; of the cosmos that lies before us when we are only able to look at everything that springs from every single plant on our earth as if, I would like to say, from spiritual flames of fire, drawing lines and waves into the farthest reaches of space. So that we actually have before us the globe, the forces that bring vegetation out of the earth, sprouting from the farthest point in space and repeating this earth formation in every single sleeping human being.

When we visualize this image, we have to exclude everything that is in our ego and in our astral body, and we have to think of the image of animals with their astral body instead of the cosmic image. That which is in our astral body does not belong to that which is earthly on the one hand or etheric on the other, but rather belongs to a completely different world altogether. However, we do not seek this world in the same way that we seek the ether. If one describes it pictorially, and these things can only be described pictorially, because otherwise one comes into earthly ideas, one would have to say: How does one get an idea of the world ether? One comes to an idea of the world ether when one simply follows that which is here on earth outwards, when one swings further and further outwards - one must do this spiritually, of course. Here on earth, the effect of the ether is actually hardly noticeable, because it is weakest there. Just as the earthly effects of illumination, for example, are weakest far out in space, so the effect of the cosmic ether is weakest in the vicinity of the earth. As soon as we go out into the far reaches of the world, the actual nature of the etheric effect becomes more and more apparent. When we go out into the wide world, we begin to see how the physical of the earth is woven into the etheric according to very different laws than those found on the earth. But if one could go all the way out to the boundaries where the ether sprays in its effects from the outside, one would experience something curious. The superficial physical thinkers say: If you move out from the earth in a radial manner into the world, then you can go away into infinity. At most, those who know a little newer geometry will say: If you go out into infinity, you will come back on the other side, it will just take a little while. But that is what they think; in reality it is not so. In reality, you really do come to an end, even if the path can be called infinite by earthly standards, superficially speaking. The world has a transition from earthly lawfulness to cosmic lawfulness, which radiates in. The world is a closed whole, and if you come to the end - you only have to imagine it figuratively - then you will encounter the inside of a spherical surface everywhere. The astral then radiates inwards. The astral begins to work in from the outside by taking possession of the etheric.

But you still do not come to something that is the I. If you follow the world, you first come to nature, to physical nature, to earthly nature, from there to the etheric, and at the end of the etheric to the astral. But you do not yet enter the world to which the human ego belongs. It is initially not present at all in this area of the cosmos, which can be found even for the astral senses, but the ego still belongs to a further world, which in turn has its own laws. So when speaking of the human being, one must be clear about the fact that the different members belong to completely different worlds. We are not dealing with a mere classification, but with the presentation of the fact that the human beingness is a confluence of the beingnesses of radically different worlds. And now, at the moment when you want to think at all about the differentiation between waking and sleeping, you must also think about this differentiation of the different worlds. Because what we actually have in our I and in our astral body does not belong to the same world as the two members of human nature that lie in bed. What we left in bed, we have conveyed to the mineral and plant world for the time of sleep. What we carry with us as I and astral body, we have taken out of the plant and mineral world, we have raised it up into another world, which is not the plant and not the mineral world.

And what happens now while we sleep? While we sleep, exactly the same thing happens in what lies in bed as goes on outside in the world in the mineral and plant kingdoms, as long as the plants are not eaten by animals. For then the astral world of the animal world comes into play. But if we disregard humans and animals and consider only the earth with the plants, we have the world to which we surrender our physical and etheric bodies during sleep, and everything that happens in the mineral and plant kingdoms then also happens in our physical and etheric bodies.

Let us assume that we could not sleep. I have said before that people sometimes claim that they cannot sleep, but they do sleep, even if they interrupt their sleep and often wake up. Because the time that some people claim they have not slept is so great that they would have been dead long ago if it were true. So sleeping is necessary for the entire being of a person. But if we did not sleep – let us assume that – then we would continually work in our physical and etheric bodies with our astral body and our ego. But the physical body and etheric body cannot stand that at all. The physical body follows the laws of the earth. The astral body does not belong to the earth at all, it continually works on the physical body in opposition to the laws of the earth. The physical body would become quite unsuitable if a person could not sleep, because it is constantly being worked on by extraterrestrial laws. Just as if someone were to continually work a field of the mineral kingdom with hoes and spades and thereby pulverize it completely, so our astral body begins to work on the physical body. The physical body must again assert the earthly laws within itself so that it is strengthened in a certain way. And the etheric body is dulled by the astral body. I do not mean it is so bad, there are also clever people, one need not always reproach people for being clever; but in fact, seen cosmically, it has this effect. Then the etheric body must once again be exposed to the cosmos, so that it gets rid of this dulling influence for a while. And so the human being must become mineral and vegetable cosmos, so that that which is in him can flourish, so that a certain state is established when we wake up. I am now talking about normal life. In the case of abnormal phenomena, the human being naturally sleeps and wakes as well.

What is the condition that is brought about when we wake up? The condition that is brought about is that our soul, namely the astral body and the ego, cannot initially enter the physical body and etheric body completely. They can never enter completely. Oh, how clever we would be if we could enter our etheric body completely. But that would also exhaust us, we could not bear it. It is really true, this astral body is basically terribly selfish. The etheric body, which is actually identical in nature to the cosmos, is not selfish. It is also not envious, it has no need of it. But the astral body is subconsciously terribly envious of the etheric body, which is so wise, which contains the thoughts of the whole world in itself, - is terribly envious. And now it is already ensured that the senses remain independent, the I and the astral body remain independent during the day. Then gradually the I and the astral body are increasingly able to sink deeper into the physical body and the etheric body. But this only makes them imbued with the longing to go out again. They then want to sleep, and so the I and the astral body become tired. For the human being is only able to prove himself as an independent being because he is not absorbed by the physical and etheric bodies during waking. If the human being were absorbed by the ego and the astral body, then we would know nothing of ourselves and of the world, but we would find ourselves in the interior of our physical organism, which would go up to the skin, would follow the processes in our physical physical organism, would only know something about our inner being, and then we would still know that magnificent thoughts imbued with wisdom are sprayed into our inner being, but we would not go beyond these thoughts either. We would know nothing at all about any other human being, about animals on earth, about other beings on earth, if we were completely absorbed in our physical and etheric bodies. If we did not retain our independence, so that we did not enter completely into our physical body and etheric body, we could never establish relationships with the world, we could only know something of our physical body and our own etheric body.

People reflect on this: how is it that one says the table is outside of us? — One would not arrive at this statement: the table is outside of us — if we were to completely immerse ourselves in our physical and etheric bodies. We would never come to the realization that the table is outside of us — we would only experience what is within us, namely within the skin of our body. And there would shine in an internally closed universe, which is etheric, full of wisdom. But the idea that there is something outside of us comes from the fact that we ourselves are outside of ourselves when we are asleep. When the I is outside of the physical body, it gets used to being outside of the physical body. When the I slips back into it, it has an understanding of the outside world. We can thank the fact that we can sleep for the possibility of accepting things outside of us. We become accustomed to being outside of ourselves by placing ourselves outside of ourselves in our sleep.

Philosophers reflect on what guarantees existence; on why I say at all: something is – or: I am. If I were completely absorbed by my physical and etheric bodies, I would never come to say: I am. But by being able to make myself independent of the physical and etheric bodies between falling asleep and waking up, I get into the habit of living with the outside world as well. Just as one consciously has a memory, as I consciously remember yesterday when I saw someone today and ascribe a reality to this memory, so out of habit I ascribe an external reality to what is outside of me, because I am also sometimes outside myself when I sleep.

We must therefore think about things from completely different angles than we do today. But then we will really come to understand how much depends on the human being not being absorbed by his physical and etheric bodies. Only then can one really understand how the sense of freedom is essentially conditioned by the fact that one can also be outside one's physical and etheric body. People as naturalists, who do not reflect at all on the independence of an ego and an astral body in sleep, can never come to an understanding of freedom, because man would not be free if he were united all the time only with his physical and his ether body. How could they know about freedom if they know nothing of the times when man makes his astral body and his ego independent of his physical and ether bodies! If we could not sleep, we could not be free. Only what we bring with us from sleep into wakefulness makes us free.

Modern man has no conception at all of the world in which the I and the astral body find themselves during sleep. But if we know that everything that modern man can imagine lies in the realm of the mineral and the vegetable, then we know that modern science actually has only to decide about the sleeping person and not about the waking one; and about the sleeping person only if one has such ideas about the ether as I have mentioned today. If one knows this, then one will say to oneself: Now, however, I must also be able to arrive at ideas about the ego and the astral body. Today, as I already indicated the other day, one only has words from these things.

How can we get an idea of the ego and the astral body? Let me use a trivial example. Firstly, your thoughts can rest a little during the trivial comparison and secondly, we will understand each other better if I use this example. Imagine that some being, a human being or any other being that needs food, does not feed itself but completely refuses food. It becomes increasingly emaciated, until it is nothing but skin and bones. This is beautifully symbolized in a story: there was a farmer who had decided to wean his ox from eating. And now he had come quite a way with this weaning cure. He gave him less and less every day and was confident that he would be able to get to the point of giving him just a straw a day. He would have succeeded, but the ox died first, so he could not carry the experiment to the end. In the end, the being simply stops needing the extra nourishment.

But that is what has happened to the human soul in the course of historical development - or as we call the soul: I and the astral body. Gradually, people have lost any concepts that they can apply to the soul. Thus, the soul has become a mere word. I already told you last time: Mauthner, who wrote the “Criticism of Language,” no longer wanted to use the word soul at all. He wanted to say “Geseel” (to nourish the soul).

Now we recall times when there was still a living awareness that the concept of the soul needs nourishment if it is to be present; that for the soul one needs something to give to it, just as one needs nourishment for a living being. The concept of the soul has indeed died altogether, because in the end there was no more nourishment in the content of people's concepts. Let us look back at such times. I recall to you a saying of St. Paul's that is familiar to everyone: “If Christ is not risen, our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” because people - and this is the basis - would have to die spiritually if the power that lies in the resurrection of Christ had not come into the world. But this power is a spiritual power that is given to the souls. And if one comes from such ideas, one will say: What then should the concept of the soul be, in order for it to become a living concept, so to speak, as food? It must be given that on earth which is not earthly, the ethical-religious content, the moral content. These are what keeps the soul alive, just as the body receives nourishment.

How far is today's humanity from saying to itself: If the soul does not receive spiritual nourishment, it dies with the body! In Paul's time, there was still a vivid idea that not receiving spiritual nourishment means death for the soul. This must come to the world again through anthroposophy. For you can believe that if someone today is looking for proof of the immortality of the soul, he is looking for it in a similar way to the way science does. It does not occur to him to say: In the course of earthly life, the soul becomes more and more similar to the physical and etheric bodies; in order for it to sustain itself, it must receive spiritual nourishment, that is, moral and religious content, then it conquers the transience of the physical and etheric bodies. That the spiritual, the moral and religious in the spiritual has something to do with the life of the soul must first be understood by mankind. Then one also comes to attach reality and reality to the moral and religious.

You can see from this what the age of intellectualism has actually done. What has the age of intellectualism done? You see, before the age of intellectualism, people still immersed themselves a little in their physical and etheric bodies. The fact that people no longer immerse themselves at all is only an achievement of the intellectual age. Since that time, they have only had reflections in their thoughts. The nature of abstract, intellectual thought is that it contains nothing in itself, because it is a reflection. People's earlier thoughts still had power. That is when people developed myth. The myth still penetrated down into reality. With abstract, intellectualistic thinking, one can think everything exactly, but it does not acquire any content; it is merely a drawing of the world, which one has with intellectualistic thinking. So it is that the intellectualistic age has brought man completely out of himself, leaving him to experience only mirror images of reality. The moral-religious world is not experienced at all if one wants to experience it intellectually, because the moral-religious things must indeed be done by man. No mirror images are experienced if they are not done, the moral-religious things. So it is a matter of the human being having to rise above the intellectualistic in order to experience the reality of the moral-religious in reality, to a real inner experience. This can only be done if one faces the will of spiritual science with full clarity.

What I have already been obliged to say elsewhere, I would also like to repeat here. In certain areas of the world, people are finally realizing that there is a difference between today and a hundred years ago. People talk about Goethe as he lived, say, in 1823, without emphasizing one thing that is only now beginning to emerge as an inkling in America, where it is even more pronounced than in Europe. Do you think that in the Weimar where Goethe walked around – or anywhere else, for that matter, where Goethe walked around – there were no telegraph wires, no telephone lines and so on? The air was not permeated by telegraph lines, by electrical lines. Now just imagine how fine the instruments are, where the effect of electricity is sent. But man has nothing but such devices before and around him. People over there in America are beginning to suspect that this has an influence on the physical human being, that he is surrounded by electrical lines and the like. Goethe walked the world without his body having induction currents in it. Today you can go far enough anywhere and the electrical lines will follow. This continuously induces currents in us. Goethe was not in such currents. All this takes away the physical body from humanity, makes the physical body so that the soul cannot enter it at all. We must be clear about this: in the time when there were no electric currents, when the air was not buzzing with electrical lines, it was easier to be human. Because there were not constantly these ahrimanic forces present, which take away one's body even when one is watching. It was also not necessary for people to exert themselves so much to come to the spirit. Because when we enter into ourselves, we actually only come to the spirit. Therefore, it is necessary today to apply much greater spiritual capacity to be human at all than it was a hundred years ago.

It does not occur to me to be reactionary and say, “So get rid of all that stuff, the modern cultural achievements!” That is not the intention. But modern man needs this direct access to the spirit, as spiritual science gives it to him, so that through this strong experience of the spirit he may indeed be the stronger in the face of those forces that are emerging with modern culture to solidify our physical body and take it away from us. Otherwise it will come to the point that people, I would say, miss the boat in the evolution of humanity.

This intellectual age has emerged for the benefit of humanity at a time when people could still immerse themselves somewhat in their physical body. If we had remained as people were in the 13th or 14th century, with the state of mind of those people, we would not be able to grasp intellectual thoughts at all. Then we would no longer have the older, but we would not even come to abstract intellectual thoughts; they would evaporate. The old would be alienated from us, we would not be able to think, and so we would go around as dreaming beings in the world, so reeling in the face of the most important world affairs. We would go around like reeling dreamers. But that is also what would happen to humanity if it does not sharpen and strengthen its inner spiritual abilities. Humanity would suffer so much from progress that it would be like hurting a person if they were to think. In the 16th century, people were still inwardly robust enough to think sharply in an intellectual way. They still took great pleasure in thinking intellectually. Today, we are already very close to people saying: Oh, thinking is so hard, film the whole story for me so that I don't have to think and can watch it in its various stages! — Strange things could come of that. I don't mean that in a humorous way. This is something, as you will see in a moment, that is very much within the realm of possibility. Just imagine if you could film the whole multiplication table, then a person could always carry a camera in front of him and, by making the calculation, the correct answer would be triggered by the specific sound, and he would have the whole story filmed in front of him. Gradually, man no longer wants to think because it starts to become unpleasant. Thinking becomes unpleasant. Man much prefers dreaming to thinking. And if those outer things, the outer cultural development, were to continue forever and a strong inner spiritual element were not to arise in the development, then it would actually be the case that all people would become reeling dreamers. This is meant very seriously; such a thing is in store for humanity. And this can only be counteracted by really getting involved in it, courageously and boldly tackling the spiritual world in the way spiritual science wants it and can do it. Today it is still quite possible for us to pull ourselves together so strongly inwardly as humanity, that we can achieve inner activity. But all those who understand this must work in earnest with all means at their disposal.

Please do not take the things I say in a negative sense negatively. I do not want to take anything away from modern culture. The more things are developed, the more I am enthusiastic about them. I do not want to abolish the telegraph or the film, that does not occur to me at all. But it is really necessary in the world to take into account that everywhere two things are juxtaposed. The world is completely dominated by externalization. The counterbalance: just as one must dry oneself after bathing, so one must delve inward in spirit, when on the other hand the culture of external observation is becoming ever greater and greater. This in particular calls upon us to become inwardly more and more active when we are outwardly absorbed in that which no longer works through us but works on us, so that we literally switch off as soul and spirit.

We can best find these thoughts, which we need, by realizing that This human being is such a complicated creature because the entities of the most diverse worlds flow together in him to form a total being. When I had written my “Outline of Esoteric Science”, a quite important contemporary philosopher sent me – I have already mentioned this – a long treatise about this “esoteric science”. And when I began to read it, I came across clever things like: Yes, that is an abstract division of the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and so on. Now that is just as clever as saying: It is abstract to say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. One need not be surprised if one has to say: It is impossible to discuss with someone like that. We must always distinguish between the impossibility of discussing the subject matter with our contemporaries. Such discussions are fruitless discussions. They are, of course, also the rarer ones. The more frequent cases are where opponents come forward with personal slander and lies. In such cases, the lie must be exposed as a lie, the slander as slander, before the world. But discussions alone achieve very little. For it is precisely the nature of anthroposophy and the nature of what its opponents have to present that they somehow want to discuss: that no bridge can be built; that anthroposophy must emerge through its own efforts in all areas. We must be just as vigilant in repudiating calumny and falsehood as we must realize that Anthroposophy can only make its way in the world by working with all the intensity that its inner strength can give it. So, dealing with opponents means: be vigilant where the fight is being waged with dishonest means. On the other hand, it may certainly be necessary for reasons of expediency to point out how justified one or the other is; one can do that when one is merely dealing with a fictitious opponent. Some people have liked to copy the refutations that are in my writings and have left out only what was positive. So it is indeed the case that one can extract factual refutations from my writings oneself. It is necessary to see clearly in these matters and not to start dreaming in this area.

Please forgive me for having to end almost every reflection with such a request, even if it attempts to introduce more remote areas. The most harmful thing for the Anthroposophical Society to do is to develop too great an inclination to sleep; it must be awake. Man becomes a plant when he sleeps. But the Anthroposophical Society also takes on a plant-like existence when its actual affairs are neglected. Just as a human being cannot always be a plant, cannot sleep through his whole life, so the Anthroposophical Society cannot always be asleep. Vigilance must also be developed. And I would like to recommend this to both the Anthroposophical Society and the Free Anthroposophical Society without distinction. Otherwise it could come about that the two societies developed only alongside each other because, if they had remained together, the members of one or the other would have disturbed each other's sleep too much. But when one is independent, the others disturb one's sleep less, and one can sleep all the better.

It is therefore important that both societies come to realize that both are now awake and not happy due to their own internal forces, and that the other should no longer disturb their sleep. Of course, I do not want to be insinuating, but sometimes one has to say such things and even has to say them to the Free Anthroposophical Society. If neither is to be the pet project of the other, then both should be treated quite humanely. So I would like this to be taken into account a little. I think one or the other already knows what I actually mean. People often say they don't know what I mean, but I still believe that if you want to, you can know what I mean, and even when I call for awakening, you can know what I mean, even if it sounds unpleasant.

So, my dear friends, send your delegates to the General Assembly of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach from July 20 to 22. Send them well awake. Because we need wakefulness in the future, full wakefulness in the whole Anthroposophical Society.

[ 1 ] From the spiritual sphere new light on the evolution of humanity sought to break through in the knowledge acquired during the last third of the nineteenth century. But the spiritual sleep in which this acquired knowledge was given its materialistic interpretation prevented even a notion of the new light, much less any proper attention to it.

[ 2 ] So that time arrived which ought by its own nature to have evolved in the direction of the spirit, but which belied its own being – the time wherein it began to be impossible for life to make itself real.

[ 3 ] I wish to set down here certain sentences taken from articles which I wrote in March 1898 for the Dramaturgische Blätter (which had become a supplement of the Magazine at the beginning of 1898). Referring to the art of lecturing, I said: “In this field more than in any other is the learner left wholly to himself and to chance ... Because of the form which our public life has taken on, almost everybody nowadays has frequent need to speak in public ... The elevation of ordinary speech to a work of art is a rarity. We lack almost wholly the feeling for the beauty of speaking, and still more for speaking that is characteristic ... To no one devoid of all knowledge of correct singing would the right be granted to discuss a singer ... In the case of dramatic art the requirements imposed are far slighter ... Persons who know whether or not a verse is properly spoken become steadily scarcer ... People nowadays often look upon artistic speaking as ineffective idealism. We could never have come to this had we been more aware of the educative possibilities of speech ...”

[ 4 ] What then hovered before me could come to a form of realization only much later, within the Anthroposophical Society. Marie von Sievers (Marie Steiner), who was enthusiastic on behalf of the art of speech, first dedicated herself to genuinely artistic speaking; and then for the first time it became possible with her help to work for the elevation of speech to a true art by means of courses in speaking and dramatic representations.

[ 5 ] I venture to introduce this subject just here in order to show how certain ideals have sought their unfolding all through my life, though many persons have tried to find contradictions in my evolution.

[ 6 ] To this period belongs my friendship with the young poet, now dead, Ludwig Jacobowski. He was a personality whose dominant mood of soul breathed the breath of inner tragedy. It was hard for him to bear the fate that made him a Jew. He represented a bureau which, under the guidance of a liberal deputy, directed the union “Defence against Anti-Semitism” and published its organ. An excessive burden in connection with this work rested upon Ludwig Jacobowski. And a sort of work which renewed every day a burning pain; for it brought home to him daily the realization of the feeling against his people which caused him so much suffering.

[ 7 ] Along with this he developed a fruitful activity in the field of folk-lore. He collected everything obtainable as the basis for a work on the evolution of the peoples from primitive times. Individual papers of his, based upon his rich fund of knowledge in this field, are very interesting. They were at first written in the materialistic spirit of the time; but, had Jacobowski lived longer, he would certainly have been open to a spiritualizing of his research.

[ 8] Out of this activity streamed the poetry of Ludwig Jacobowski. Not wholly original; and yet born of deeply human feeling and filled with an experience of the powers of the soul. Leuchtende Tage¹ he called his lyrical poems. These, when the mood bestowed them upon him, were in his life-tragedy really something that affected him like days of spiritual sunlight. Besides, he wrote novels. In Werther der Jude² there lived all the inner tragedy of Ludwig Jacobowski. In Loki, Roman eines Gottes,³ he produced a work born of German mythology. The soulful quality which speaks from this novel is a beautiful reflection of the poet's love of the mythological element in a folk.

[ 9 ] A survey of what Ludwig Jacobowski achieved leaves one astonished at its fulness in the most divers fields. Yet he associated with many persons and enjoyed social life. More over, he was then editing the monthly Die Gesellschaft,⁴ which meant for him an enormous burden of work.

[ 10 ] He had a consuming passion for life, whose essence he craved to know in order that he might mould this into artistic form.

[ 11 ] He founded a society, Die Kommenden,⁵ consisting of writers, artists, scientists, and persons interested in the arts. The meetings there were weekly. Poets read their poems; lectures were given in the most divers fields of knowledge and life. The evening ended in an informal social gathering. Ludwig Jacobowski was the central point of his ever growing circle. Everybody was attached to the lovable personality, so full of ideas, who, moreover, developed in this club a fine and noble sense of humour.

[ 12 ] Away from all this he was snatched by an early death, when he had just reached thirty years. He was taken off by an inflammation of the brain, caused by his unceasing labours.

[ 13 ] There remained to me only the duty of giving the funeral address for my friend and editing his literary remains.

[ 14 ] A beautiful memorial of him was made by his friend, Marie Stona, in the form of a book consisting of papers by friends of his.

[ 15 ] Everything about Ludwig Jacobowski was lovable: his inner tragedy, his striving outward from this to his “luminous days,” his absorption in the life of movement. I keep always alive in my heart thoughts of our friendship, and look back upon our brief association with an inner devotion to my friend.

[ 16 ] Another friend with whom I came to be associated at that time was Martha Asmers, a woman philosophically thoughtful but strongly inclined to materialism. This tendency, however, was modified through the fact that Martha Asmers kept intensely alive the memory of her brother Paul Asmers, who had died early, and who was a decided idealist.

During the last third of the nineteenth century Paul Asmers had lived, like a philosophical hermit, in the idealism of the time of Hegel. He wrote a paper on the ego, and a similar one on the Indo-Germanic religion – both characteristically Hegelian in form, but both thoroughly independent.

[ 17 ] This interesting personality, who had then long been dead, was brought really close to me through the sister Martha Asmers. It seemed to me that in him the spirit-tending philosophy of the beginning of the century flamed forth like a meteor toward its end.

[ 18 ] Less intimate, but of constant significance for a long time thereafter, were the relationships which came about between the “Friedrich Hageners” – Bruno Wille and Wilhelm Bölsche – and myself. Bruno Wille is the author of a work entitled Philosophie der Befreiung* durch das reine Mittel.⁶ Only the title coincides with my Philosophie der Freiheit. The content moves in an entirely different sphere. Bruno Wille became very widely known through his important Offenbarungen des Wachholderbaumes,⁷ a philosophical book written out of the most beautiful feeling for nature, permeated by the conviction that spirit speaks from every material existence. Wilhelm Bölsche is known through numerous popular writings on the natural sciences which are extraordinarily popular among the widest circles of readers.

[ 19 ] From this side came the founding of a Free Higher Institute, into which I was drawn. I was entrusted with the teaching of history. Bruno Wille took charge of philosophy, Bölsche of natural sciences, and Theodor Kappstein, a liberally minded theologian, the science of religion.

[ 20 ] A second foundation was the Giordano Bruno Union. In this the idea was to bring together such persons as were sympathetic toward a spiritual-monistic philosophy. Emphasis was placed upon the idea that there are not two world-principles – matter and spirit – but that spirit constitutes the sole principle of all existence. Bruno Wille inaugurated the Union with a very brilliant lecture based upon the saying of Goethe: “Never matter without spirit.” Unfortunately a slight misunderstanding arose between Wille and me after this lecture. My words following the lecture – that long after Goethe had coined this beautiful expression, he had supplemented it in impressive fashion, in that he had seen polarity and ascent as the concrete spiritual shapings in the actual spiritual activity in existence, and that in this way the general saying first received its full content – this remark of mine was interpreted as a reflection upon Wille's lecture, which, however, I had fully accepted in the sense he himself intended.

[ 21 ] But I brought upon myself the direct opposition of the leadership of the Giordano Bruno Union when I read a paper on monism. In this I laid stress upon the fact that the crude dualistic conception, “matter and spirit,” is really a creation of the most recent times, and that likewise only during the most recent centuries were spirit and nature brought into the opposition which the Giordano Bruno Union would oppose. Then I indicated how this dualism is opposed by scholastic monism. Even though scholasticism withdrew from human knowledge a part of existence and assigned this part to “faith,” yet scholasticism set up a world-system marked by a unified (monistic) constitution, from the Godhead and the divine all the way to the details of nature. I thus set even scholasticism higher than Kantianism.

[ 22 ] This paper of mine aroused the greatest excitement. It was supposed that I wished to open the road for Catholicism into the Union. Of the leading personalities, only Wolfgang Kirchbach and Martha Asmers stood by me. The rest could form no notion as to what I really meant to do with the “misunderstood scholasticism.” In any case, they were convinced that I was likely to bring the greatest confusion into the Giordano Bruno Union.

[ 23 ] I must call attention to this paper because it belongs to a time during which, according to the later views of many persons, I was a materialist. But at that time this materialist passed with many persons as the one who would swear afresh by medieval scholasticism.

[ 24 ] In spite of all this I was able later to deliver before the Giordano Bruno Union my basic anthroposophic lecture, which became the point of departure for my anthroposophic activity.

[ 25 ] In imparting to the public that which anthroposophy contains as knowledge of the spiritual world, decisions are necessary which are not altogether easy. The character of these decisions can best be understood if one glances at a single historical fact.

[ 26 ] In accordance with the quite differently constituted temper of mind of an earlier humanity, there has always been a knowledge of the spiritual world up to the beginning of the modern age, approximately until the fourteenth century. This knowledge, however, was quite different from anthroposophy, which is adapted to the conditions of cognition characterizing the present day.

[ 27 ] After the period mentioned, humanity could at first bring forth no knowledge of the spiritual world. Men could only confirm the “ancient knowledge,” which the mind had beheld in the form of pictures, and which was also available later only in symbolic-picture form.

[ 28 ] This “ancient knowledge” was practised in remote times only within the “mysteries.” It was imparted to those who had first been made ripe for it, the “initiates.” It was not to reach the public because there the tendency was too strong to use it in an unworthy manner. This practice has been maintained only by those later personalities who received the lore of the “ancient knowledge” and continued to foster it. They did this in the most restricted circles with men whom they had previously prepared.

[ 29 ] And thus it has continued even to the present time.

[ 30 ] Of the persons maintaining such a position in relation to spiritual knowledge whom I have encountered, I may select one who was active within the Viennese circle of Frau Lang to which I have referred but whom I met also in other circles with which I was associated in Vienna. This was Friedrich Eckstein, the distinguished expert in the “ancient knowledge.” While I was associated with Friedrich Eckstein, he had not written much. But what he did write was filled with the spirit. No one, however, sensed from his essays the intimate expert in the “ancient knowledge.” This was active in the background of his spiritual work. Long after life had removed me from this friend also, I read in a collection of his writings a very significant paper on the Bohemian Brothers.

[ 31 ] Friedrich Eckstein represented the earnest conviction that esoteric spiritual knowledge should not be publicly propagated like ordinary knowledge. He was not alone in this conviction; it was and is that of almost all experts in the “ancient wisdom.” To what extent this conviction of the guardians of the “ancient wisdom,” strongly enforced as a rule, was broken through in the Theosophical Society founded by H. P. Blavatsky – of this I shall have occasion to speak later.

[ 32 ] Friedrich Eckstein wished that, as “initiate in the ancient knowledge,” one should clothe what one treats publicly in the force which comes from this “initiation,” but that one should separate the exoteric strictly from the esoteric, which should remain within the most restricted circles of those who fully understood how to honour it.

[ 33 ] If I was to develop a public activity on behalf of spiritual knowledge, I had to determine to break with this tradition. I found myself faced by the requirements of the contemporary intellectual life. In the presence of these the preservation of mysteries such as were inevitable in ancient times was an impossibility. We live in the time which demands publicity wherever any sort of knowledge appears. The point of view favouring the preservation of mysteries is an anachronism. The sole and only possibility is that persons should be taught spiritual knowledge by stages, and that no one should be admitted to a stage at which the higher portions of this knowledge are to be imparted until he knows the lower. This, indeed, corresponds with the practice in lower and higher schools even of an ordinary sort.

[ 34 ] Moreover, I was under no obligation to anyone to guard mysteries, for I received nothing from the “ancient wisdom”; what I possess of spiritual knowledge is entirely the result of my own researches. When any knowledge has come to me, only then I set beside it whatever of the “ancient knowledge” has already been made public from any side, in order to point out the harmony in mood and, at the same time, the advance which is possible to contemporary research.

[ 35 ] So, after a certain point of time, it was quite clear to me that in coming before the public with spiritual knowledge I should be doing the right thing.

• 1. Luminous Days.
• 2. Werther the Jew.
• 3. Philosophy of Freedom through the Pure Means.
• 4. Society
• 5. The Coming Ones
• 6. Philosophy of Freedom through the Pure Means.
• 7. Revelations of the Juniper Tree.

These lectures are volume two of the Cosmosophy lecture course and the 8th volume in a series of lecture courses Rudolf Steiner gave under the general title “Man and his relationship to the cosmos” for members of the Anthroposophical Society in 1920 and 1921, published in nine volumes in GA (German Gesamtausgabe or collected works) 201-209.

The first 11 lectures (Cosmosophy vol. 1, GA 207) have been translated by A. Wulsin and M. Kirkcaldy and published by Anthroposophic Press, New York 1985.

This volume will easily stand on its own, but readers will need to have some knowledge of Rudolf Steiner’s science of the spirit and are advised to read the basic works first, e.g. Occult Science and Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The Cosmosophy lectures are not easy, with very close reasoning at times, and would be hard to understand without such basic knowledge.

Over the years these lectures have come to be very dear to my heart. They really demand us to become active and mobile in both heart and mind, which is something Rudolf Steiner often asked of the members of the Society. The first lecture immediately turns one inside out and upside down, as it were. I have sometimes found it useful to enter almost physically into the movements described, something that may also be helpful on other occasions when studying the works of Rudolf Steiner.

The drawings in the text have been taken from the German edition, with only the labelling put into English. They were produced for that edition by Assia Turgenieff and Hedwig Frey.

I have numbered them through, as this makes it easier to refer to them. Readers may find it helpful, if they do not have a copy of the original drawings, to remember that the images would have remained on the board for the rest of the lecture. In some text passages one gets an indication that Rudolf Steiner would point again to a drawing made earlier. It may be a good idea to make copies if one does not want to keep turning back the pages. If one did them oneself, perhaps also colouring them up, this may also contribute to better understanding. It has to be remembered that these were blackboard drawings, with white chalk also used.

The original blackboard drawings of the figures in this volume are now available in volume VIII of Rudolf Steiner, Wandtafelzeichnungen zum Vortragswerk, published by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. They are in colour and add something to one’s reading, though not essential. Study groups may be able to buy them together or borrow them from a library.

These lectures were given 76 years ago and readers may find it helpful to have a little background information. Rudolf Steiner always spoke out of the situation that existed at the time.

In 1921, three years after World War I, with democracy and social ideals trying to win through in the Weimar Republic, and financial collapse just round the corner, Rudolf Steiner mainly concentrated his efforts on cultural renewal in Europe, especially in economics, education, medicine, theology, the sciences and the arts. Two publications that continue to this day first appeared in 1921, the monthly journal Die Drei in February, and the weekly paper Das Goetheanum in August. Two clinics opened that year, the Institute of Clinical Medicine in Arlesheim and another in Stuttgart. Within the Society, local groups had often slid into comfortable complacency, and Rudolf Steiner sought to shake them out of this. With anthroposophy gaining a higher profile with all this activity, opposition also grew stronger and more organized, not only in Germany but also in other countries. Apart from Germany and Switzerland, Rudolf Steiner also lectured in Amsterdam and The Hague that year, and in November and December in Oslo. More than 380 of the lectures he gave that year have been published from shorthand records in German. He would often give two, sometimes three, and occasionally even four lectures a day!

Anna R. Meuss
Surbiton, July 1997

It is a matter of deep satisfaction to me, as I think you know, to be with you again for a while, for this is the place where we are able to create a visible sign of our intentions and of the will to come closer and closer to a true knowledge of the spirit in our studies and in our work in spiritual science.

The quest for knowledge is intimately bound up with the most inward aspect of the human being, and every now and then we must therefore enquire into the essential nature of our will and intent. In the light of the present situation, woeful as it is, it seems the answer to this question must be a negative one. For more than three years we have seen something spread across the world that I need not discuss in detail, at least to begin with, for we are all aware of it and feel it deeply. The events now taking place are the opposite of our own intentions, which have come to expression in this very building.¹

Again and again we must try to see clearly which stream of spiritual development we wish to see taken up by humanity, and today we have to say it is the opposite of the stream which has led to the terrible tragedy of these last years. This is something we may call to mind again and again when we give deep and full consideration to the events now raging all over the world. We may say to ourselves that it appears as if time were drawn out and had become elastic, as if the things we remember from before this madness took hold of the world happened not just years but centuries ago.

There will, of course, be many today—as there always have been—who may be said to sleep through the events of the day, people who are not fully awake to what is going on today. But when those who are awake look back on what went through their minds four or five years ago and left an impression, they will feel more or the less the way one does when one lets the mind dwell on an old book or a work of art that was created hundreds of years ago. Events which meant something to us before this madness came on the world now seem to have happened an infinitely long time ago.

Anyone who was awake—through the science of the spirit—was, of course, able to appreciate what was coming even before these events developed. Many of our friends will remember the almost routine answer I gave to questions asked over and over again after my public lectures from the beginning of this century. The question, you may remember, was: “According to the statistics, the world population is increasing; how does this relate to the idea of repeated earth lives? The increase in population is rapid. How can one reconcile this with the spiritual scientific finding that these are always the same souls?” My answer always had to be: It does look as if the statisticians are right and the world population is increasing; but we have to take a longer view and consider much longer time-spans if we are to do justice to the question. And I would always go on to say that a time may well come, sooner than we may expect, when people discover to their horror that the population can also decrease.

I t is not always possible to give plain and simple answers in anthroposophy. People have not yet reached the point where they are able to take truths in the right way and some things can only be hinted at. Read through the lectures given in Vienna not long before this catastrophe came on our world and you will find the passage where I spoke of the social cancer that is gnawing away at the evolution of humanity.² This and other things were said in order to indicate what was going to happen in human evolution and to challenge people to reflect. For we need to reflect on these things if we are really and truly to wake up. We need to be awake and alive for the sake of humanity. If anthroposophy is to fulfil its purpose, its prime task must be to rouse people and make them really wake up. Merely knowing what is going on in the physical world, and knowing the laws that human minds are able to perceive as operative in this world, is no more than being asleep in a higher sense. Humanity is only fully awake when people are able to develop notions and ideas of the world of the spirit. This is all around us, just as air and water, the stars, the sun and the moon are all around us. When we are physically asleep we are wholly given up to the internal processes that go on in the body during the night and have no idea of anything in the physical world around us. We are asleep in exactly the same way when we are wholly given up to the physical environment, and to the world and the laws of the intellect, and have no idea of the world of the spirit that is all around us.

Humanity has made great play of its intellectual progress and scientific achievements in the last few centuries and has been particularly insistent on this at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Yet, strangely enough, the unconscious and instinctive life was never more to the fore than it is at this time. Up to the present time this instinctive and unconscious element has increasingly taken hold of the human race. Failure to see the spiritual reality and take account of the element of the spirit is ultimately the cause of this terrible world war. Nor can it be said that through these years—years which have turned into centuries for anyone who is awake in them, as I have said—humanity has learned an adequate lesson from the terrible events around us. Sadly, it has to be said that the opposite is the case.

What is the characteristic element to be found day by day, hour by hour, when we take note of what people think, or rather pretend to think and pretend to want? It is that, fundamentally speaking, no one in the world knows what they want, and no one realizes that people's perfectly justifiable aims, whichever form they may take in the minds of individual nations, would be achieved so much better if they did away with these terrible wars in which so much blood is shed. People do not realize that these terrible events with their bloodshed are really not necessary as a means of helping them to achieve their aims.

These events have a mysterious background, but if you consider some of the things said in our anthroposophical lectures over the years, even if they have only been touched on lightly, you will find perfectly clear statements, also with reference to the most significant of recent events. Consider also what has been said in these very rooms, especially in the last few years, on the character of the Russian people and the difference between the Russians and the peoples of Western and Central Europe.³ You will find that you need the things which have been said here to gain understanding of an event that appears to have come in with such vehemence. It has burst forth as though it were a karmic vengeance, the inner meaning of which is quite clear, though the word ‘vengeance’ must be taken as a technical term and not at all in a moral sense.

Not only the Russian people, but those of Europe and the whole world, will have to reflect for a long time to come on the events in Eastern Europe, events much more mysterious than we are inclined to think. Something has come to the surface which has been preparing for centuries. The new element wanting to take shape is something completely different from what is actually taking shape. Later generations will be able to use the events which will be taking shape in Eastern Europe over the next decades to demonstrate the difference between maya and reality. For you see, the generations of today are taking what is happening now for the real thing, when this is in fact still waiting in the wings, and they are wrong in taking it for real, for something quite different wants to make its appearance.

The people in the West are ill-equipped to understand what wants to come to the surface. Why are they so ill-equipped? Strange as it may seem to people today—not to you but to the ordinary, average individual; being anthroposophists, you are not ordinary, average people of today—the present age is more than any other age demanding the one thing people least want to have: understanding based on the science of the spirit. Strange as it may sound to the ordinary, average people of today—order will not be created from the chaos of the present time until a sufficiently large number of people are prepared to recognize the truths of that science. Such will be the karma of world history.

If people insist that this war is just like the wars of the past and that we'll be making peace just as peace has been made before—let them talk. They are the people who love maya and do not distinguish between truth and deception. Let them make what may seem like ‘peace’—order will only arise from the chaos that fills the world today when insight based on the science of the spirit dawns in human minds. You may feel in your hearts that it will be a long time before such order comes; you may think it will be a long time before people are prepared to let the dawn of such a science arise, and you will be right. You have to accept that it will be a long time before order arises from the chaos. For it will not come until human hearts understand the realm of the spirit. Order can only come when it is understood how this chaos has arisen.

Chaos has arisen because the reality is considered in an unspiritual way and the world of the spirit cannot be ignored with impunity. You may think it is enough to live with thoughts and ideas that are wholly derived from the physical world. It is what people generally think today, though this does not make it true. The most completely and utterly wrong idea humanity has ever had is—to put it simply—that the spirits will put up with being ignored. You may consider it egotistical and selfish on their part, but the terminology is different in their world. Egotism or not, the spirits take their revenge if they are ignored here on earth. This is a law, an iron necessity. One way to characterize the present time is to say that the present human chaos is the revenge of the spirits who have been ignored for too long.

I have often said, both here and elsewhere: A mysterious connection exists between human consciousness and the destructive powers of decline and fall in the universe. Each can, or indeed must, take the place of the other in the following way.

Let us assume there was a time, say during the last twenty or thirty years of the nineteenth century, when people put the same effort into their quest for the things of the spirit as they have put into achieving material knowledge and material actions during those twenty or thirty years. What would have happened if they had endeavoured to recognize the world of the spirit and used this to give a character, a foundation, to the physical world, rather than follow mere instinct and chase after more and more knowledge of a kind that has seen its ultimate triumph in the creation of instruments of murder and found its be-all and end-all in people enriching themselves with nothing but material goods? What would have happened if people had sought to gain spiritual knowledge and spiritual impulses for their activities in the social sphere? It would have meant that the powers of destruction were paid off! If people had been more awake and not asleep in the last decades of the nineteenth century there would have been greater awareness and therefore no need for destruction in the first decades of the twentieth century. Spiritual awareness simply has to be greater than purely sensual and material awareness. If this had been the case during the last decades of the nineteenth century, the powers of destruction would not have had to intervene in the early decades of the twentieth century.

This is brought to realization most insistently, and perhaps most cruelly, to the perceptive mind when you meet many of the dead who have entered the world of the spirit either during the last decades of the nineteenth or the first decades of the twentieth century. Many of them have been caught up in the hustle and bustle and search for material values here on earth and never had the opportunity to let spiritual impulses arouse awareness. Many have gone through the gate of death without even a notion of the thoughts and ideas that point to spiritual impulses. If they had had the opportunity to take in spiritual thoughts and ideas before they went through the gate of death they could have taken these with them. It would have been something they needed after death, but they were not in a position to have it.

Anyone who knows the history of ideas of the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century also knows that people actually no longer knew how to use the term ‘spirit’. It has been used to describe all kinds of things, but not the true spirit. Those souls therefore had no opportunity of knowing the spirit whilst here on earth and they have to take the consequences. Having gone through the gate of death and entered the world of the spirit, they are thirsting for—well, what are they thirsting for, these souls who lived in materialism here? They are thirsting for destructive powers in the physical world! Those are the dues and they must be paid.

There is no easy way of dealing with these things. If we want to know the realities in this sphere, we must acquire a feeling for what the ancient Egyptians called ‘iron necessity’. Terrible as it may be, it was necessary that destruction should spread, for those who had gone through the gate of death were longing for the destructive powers in which they are able to live, seeing they did not receive what was due to them and had been deprived of spiritual impulses while on earth.

Order cannot arise from the chaos until people are ready to give room to such grave truths in their souls and also let these truths enter into the ideas that apply in the world of politics today. And if these truths sound pessimistic to you and make you think that humanity is still a long way from achieving all that is demanded, as I have indicated, you are indeed right. But let this justifiable pessimism become a challenge to be awake and to try, whatever your place in life may be, to awaken souls so that the science of the spirit can send out its impulses. It cannot yet be done to any great extent, but we must have the real, honest desire to make people consciously aware in such a way that they are able to understand this concrete fact: Longings have arisen in the dead in recent times, and those longings are being met with events which are truly horrifying for those of us who are alive here on the physical plane.

Just think how easy it is for some people to present their friends with an image of the region into which human beings enter when they have gone through the gate of death. Consider the unctuous sermons preached in the churches—with politicians now actually following the example of these sermonizers—and the facile notions people have of the world of the spirit, and you simply cannot help realizing how far removed from reality is the facile vanity of many of today's leading figures. Compare the speeches of such leading figures—their lives show that they do anything but lead and that they are guided by all kinds of forces of which they are completely unconscious and which are not the right forces—compare this with what is really needed at the present time, and you will realize the immense gravity of the present situation.

Right next to our physical world lies another, non-physical or spiritual world, and this has never before influenced our world as intensely as it is doing at the present time. People are not aware of this, however; they do not even notice when things get heart-stoppingly fearsome and terrible. Intensely illuminating words are heard in the world today; they should set vast numbers of people thinking. But people never notice, or at least they do not show it if they do.

Some of you will remember that on a number of occasions in the last three years⁴ I have said that when the history of this ‘world war’ will be written in the future—unfortunately present-day critics have not done so, though it could be done fairly easily—it will be impossible to use the method which has produced the legend, the fairy-tale, or call it what you will, which currently goes by the name of ‘history’. This was produced by ‘scholars’—as the world calls them—sitting in libraries for months, years and decades and studying diplomatic records in order to write their histories. Inevitably a time will come when most of these histories will have to be pulped. In fact, no one will be able to write the history of these last years by such a method unless they are literally off their heads.

The causes of the chaos will not be apparent to the people who have been writing histories until now, but only to people who have a real feeling for what it means when a miserable individual of our time has to face a court and is forced to sum up the condition he was in at the time by flinging down before the world the lamentable statement: ‘First one thing happened, then another, and that was the moment when I went out of my mind!’ It was Suchomlinov who spoke these pitiful words.⁵

Many people had gone out of their minds at that time, not only Suchomlinov. What kind of moments are these in world events when the only way of describing them is by confessing that one has gone out of one's mind? They are moments when Ahriman and his cohorts gain access to the human race and to human thoughts. For as long as people watch over their conscious minds and their consciousness is not in any way clouded or inactive, neither Ahriman nor Lucifer have access to it. But when it is not fully active and one needs to use the phrase ‘I have gone out of my mind’, that is the moment when Ahriman and his cohorts enter the stage. The things that happen then will not appear in diplomatic records—little of what it says in those records in recent decades makes real sense, by the way. Leaving this aside, the things that have happened in our time and have led to chaos are not merely human actions, but above all the actions of ahrimanic spirits seeking to gain access by reducing human awareness. Some of you know very well that soon after the present catastrophe broke on the world I pointed out that when we speak of the origins of this catastrophe in time to come, we must not do so on the basis of written records; instead we shall have to point to real facts through which ahrimanic spirits gained access to the stage of human events.

These things must be taken in all seriousness; they have to be seen as concrete realities and not merely as abstract formulations. People who do not know anything about it may well laugh when one says that Ahriman gained access to human evolution. They may well laugh at people who say this, but the day will come when world history laughs them to scorn for having laughed at others today.

We certainly cannot say that the judgments, ideas and notions to be found on the surface in recent years show any degree of maturity. People even failed to understand when eighteen months ago it was pointed out somewhere that something might soon happen of which due note should be taken; it should not be taken lightly. Concrete examples given as an indication of what was likely to happen were never taken in the right way; people were not sufficiently awake in their minds to do so. Now the event has come. And people fail to realize that something is taking root deeply in a certain soil. People are taking it as something which—well, because a certain number of statements take up so many lines, people accept they have a number of statements made in that particular number of lines. They are not at all interested in looking for the roots of such statements, but simply take things at their face value.

I think you know what I mean. You know I am referring to the Papal Note¹ as something I had seen coming for eighteen months. I have looked around a great deal to see if I might not find someone who has expressed their views on this Note, or asked the kind of question that should have come to mind.

Let us remember that the idea of the state as we know it today has been dawning since the sixteenth century. In some parts of the world peculiar people known as ‘historians’ are speaking of states as something which have existed for I do not know how long. But they know little about real history. The present-day idea of a state is no more than four or five hundred years old and something entirely different existed in earlier times. It is important to know this and be really clear about it. The priestly element, which is to be found in Rome, is indeed older than our modern states. It had its justification in its own day, when it brought about many things in the world. I have tried to find out if people are asking themselves the question: What does it really mean that the modern structures which have developed over four or five centuries cannot find a way of achieving order out of their own resources, and look back to the old priestly element as something to be discussed in the way people generally discuss things today?

It would interest me to know if anyone faced with the question as to whether it is a good idea to skate on ice when it is only one millimetre thick would actually answer in the affirmative. Relative to what we are really dealing with, the concepts on which people base their opinions when a priestly element brings impulses into modern life today are like a one- millimetre layer of ice covering the water. The things people write and say today are like someone skating on ice that is not more than one millimetre in thickness. No one is trying to understand what is happening, no one is prepared to see that what matters is not to take a document and look at the statements it contains, but to know that a statement can mean something totally different, depending on the source from which it comes.

Everywhere today we are faced with the need to warn people in all seriousness to look to the origins, to see how things are related, to look for realities and not to the way things look on the surface. Surely it cannot be that difficult for anyone to admit: I see the way things are, but I do not yet understand them and therefore I will not say anything to interfere. Considering the incredibly superficial level of education, it is not at all surprising when people are able to understand and have an opinion on everything. People find it really difficult to admit that they cannot judge an issue and need to get a basis for their judgement before they give an opinion. In fact, it hardly ever comes to their minds that one has to have a basis on which to form an opinion.

Infinitely much depends on real insight into the driving forces, especially for the immediate future. It has to be realized that the chaos will certainly not be reduced if—speaking hypothetically—the churches were to succeed in establishing even the initial stages of apparent order. The worst error we can fall into would be to say: It does not matter where peace comes from, even if it is from the Pope. The point is, it may actually cause no harm at all to have peace initiated by the Pope; the question is how those who are involved see the issue.

Again and again we need to be really clear in our minds that the present time is literally challenging us every hour, indeed every minute, to wake up. Anthroposophy as a science of the spirit can only be understood by those who are able to grasp that humanity is being asked to make a clear decision. Either the spirit is understood or the chaos continues. A papered-over chaos would be no better than the carnage we have today. If we are unable to come up with anything better than materialism and again materialism, even a heightened materialism, in the next few years, and if it were to happen that the events of the last three years, to which humanity has failed to wake up and take notice, were to lead to a new rush for material goods—many people are longing for this as something that comes with peace—then souls would once again go through the gate of death and thirst for destruction here on earth. There would be no end to the destruction.

All it needs is to get an idea, a feeling, an inner impulse for the need to turn to the things of the spirit! Then we shall progress, depending on the extent to which this is achieved. Anyone who wants to gain a little understanding of the present position, and looks at our time in the light of the serious truths we have been considering, must develop a reasonable degree of feeling for all the terrible, hopelessly commonplace and superficial things that are now being written and said in this world.

Imagine a band of children smashing up all the pots and plates, glasses and everything in the house. The adults who see this happening are considering how to stop it, for the children keep running to the larder and all over the house to find more things to smash. Finally the adults have an idea as to how they can stop it. A number of people who are watching, people who actually consider themselves to be the teachers of these children, find a solution: They take care that everything breakable is collected and smashed to pieces—and that, they think, should put an end to it all! I do not know how many people would not consider those teachers to be fools. This is the kind of situation where people would see the truth. Yet there are people who consider themselves to be wise and who say to the whole world: Carnage must continue until peace comes; everything has to be broken, so there will be nothing left to smash in the world. This is considered wisdom. Go on murdering people for as long as you can and you will stop the murder. This is wisdom!

For anyone who has even a spark of logic it is no longer wisdom when the teacher says to a band of children: To make sure nothing else gets smashed up, I will quickly get people to collect all other breakable objects and smash them; I reckon nothing else will get smashed after that. Why do people call this foolishness and the other thing political foresight? Because people's thinking stops at the very point where it should be most intense, which is where their thoughts relate to great questions of destiny.

We shall continue with this tomorrow, and consider some serious spiritual truths.

• 1. The ‘visible sign’ was the First Goetheanum, built from 1913 onwards and destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922/23. See H. Biesantz, A. Klingborg, et al., The Goetheanum: Rudolf Steiner's Architectural Impulse. Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth. Trans. by A. Meuss. Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol 1993 (GA 153). The passage referred to is in the lecture given on 14 April 1914.
• 3. Lectures given by Rudolf Steiner on 7, 14 and 15 October 1916, also on 24 September 1916, published in Inner Impulses of Human Evolution (GA 171), trans. revised by G. Church, F. Kozlik and S.C. Easton, Antroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1984.
• 4. For example, in The Karma of Materialism. Trans. by R. Everett. Anthroposophie Press, Hudson, NY, and Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1985.
• 5. Vladimir Alexandrovitch Suchomlinov, 1848–1926, Minister for War at the time when the First World War broke out. Together with Janushkievitch, Chief of General Staff, and Sasonov, Foreign Minister, Suchomlinov played a key role in the fateful mobilization of the Russian army on 29 July 1914, ignoring a direct order from the Tsar to countermand the mobilization at the last minute. After the deposition of the Tsar, Suchomlinov was questioned in court. According to the paper Novoie Vremia, the words he said in court were: ‘On that day I almost went out of my mind.’ Quoted from Suchomlinov, die russische Mobilmachung im Lichte amtlicher Urkunden und der Entlillungen des Prozesses, Berne 1917.
• 1. On 1 August 1917 Pope Benedict XV issued a Peace Note to the governments of the belligerent nations.