The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the lecture yesterday we heard that man spends the first period of his life between death and a new birth in the Moon sphere, preparing the forces that will eventually take effect in his karma. In the Moon sphere he encounters Beings who were once together with him on the Earth as the great primeval Teachers of humanity. These are the Beings with whom he comes into contact almost immediately after death; he also comes into contact with the Hierarchy of Beings to whom the book Occult Science: An Outline refers as the Angeloi. The Angeloi have never been inhabitants of the Earth in the literal sense; they have never borne earthly bodies, nor even etheric bodies resembling those of men. The etheric bodies of the other Moon Beings of whom I spoke were not altogether dissimilar from those of men, but those Beings did not incarnate in physical bodies.

The Angeloi are the Beings who in the present period of our cosmic evolution guide us from one earthly life to another, and it is from the Moon sphere that they guide us. We have heard how in this same sphere the human being lays the foundations of his karma, gathers into himself the impulses which will bring about its ultimate fulfilment. But whatever has passed with a man through the gate of death as the result of unrighteous deeds, deeds which cannot be tolerated by the spiritual worlds—all this ‘bad’ karma, if I may so express it, must be left behind in the Moon sphere. For as he moves onwards through his life between death and a new birth, a man could not be encumbered with the consequences and effects of his unrighteous deeds. When he passes beyond the Moon sphere his inner life has expanded into a still wider region of the Cosmos, and he enters the Mercury sphere. Here he lives, primarily, in communion with the Beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi. In all these realms, of course, he is in contact with human souls who have also passed through the gate of death. In the Moon sphere, these are the third class of beings among whom he lives—they are disembodied human souls who, like himself, have passed through the gate of death. We shall presently see why the spiritual effects of the bad karma must remain behind in the Moon sphere. For the moment, the fact itself will suffice.

When man enters the Mercury sphere, he undergoes further purification. Even when he has laid aside in the Moon sphere those moral attributes which are unfit for the Cosmos, the spiritual counterparts of his physical weaknesses, of his physical infirmities, still remain with him, as do the tendencies to illness and the effects of the illnesses from which he suffered here on Earth. Surprising as it may seem, it is the case that in the life between death and a new birth, man lays aside his moral failings first and his physical infirmities only later, when he enters the Mercury sphere. In the Mercury sphere his soul is purged of the inner effects of those morbid processes which came to expression in illness during his life on Earth and in his soul he becomes completely healthy. You must remember that man is a single whole. From the occult standpoint it is erroneous to speak of him as a compound of spirit, soul and body. He is not a compound of these three constituents, but when we observe him he is revealed on the one side as body, on the other as spirit, and between body and spirit, as soul. In reality, man is one whole, a self-contained unity. The soul and the spirit too are involved in the conditions which prevail in illness. And when man has laid aside the physical body at death, the effects of the experiences resulting from the disease-processes are, to begin with, still present in his soul. But in the Mercury sphere these effects are obliterated under the influences of the Beings we know as the Archangeloi.

You see, therefore, that having passed stage by stage through the Moon sphere and the Mercury sphere, man becomes a being from whom moral and physical weaknesses have been removed. Then—after the lapse of many decades—he enters the Venus sphere and there, as one who has lived through the spheres of Moon and Mercury, he is ready to pass from the Venus sphere into the Sun sphere where the longest period of life between death and a new birth is spent. The indications I am giving will show you how well-founded were the practices of those ancient Mysteries where men acted out of wisdom which, although it was an instinctive wisdom, was the outcome of wonderful powers of clairvoyance. In those olden times it would have been unthinkable to study medicine, for example, in the way that is customary nowadays. What happens now is that the purely physical symptoms of disease are observed and efforts are made to discover ameliorative measures by dissecting the corpse and observing the changes in evidence there, as compared with those which take place in the normal, living organism—and so forth. Such procedure would have been regarded as futile in the days of the ancient Mystery-wisdom when it was known that illumination leading to the healing of illness must come from the Beings of the Mercury sphere. For it was known that only if illumination proceeds from the whole nexus of cosmic processes can a man be healed fundamentally. The description of the Oracle of the Mercury Mysteries given from a different point of view in the book Occult Science indicates the nature of the practices in these Mysteries which were dedicated primarily to the ancient Art of Healing.

In the lecture yesterday we heard of the great primeval Teachers who were once together with men on Earth; wherever human beings dwelt, these Teachers were among them, peopling the etheric sphere of the Earth as a kind of second race. But in their dim, dreamlike consciousness men were aware that other Beings too came down among them, Beings whose abode has never been on the Earth. What has to be said about these things will of course seem not only paradoxical but sheer nonsense to the modern mind with its devotion to materialistic science. Nevertheless this ‘nonsense’ is the truth. The sages in the ancient Mysteries knew well that illumination on the processes of healing can be given only by the super-sensible Mercury Beings. And so through the sacred rites enacted in these Mysteries, spiritual Beings were able to come down from the Mercury sphere to the altars in the sanctuaries where the priests of the Mysteries conversed with them. The Beings who thus descended to the altars were known in the Mysteries simply as the God Mercury. The influence was the same, although it was not necessarily the same Being who descended on every occasion. Men's attitude to this sacred medicine in olden times was such that they said: the Art of Healing has been imparted by the God Mercury to his priest-healers.

Even to-day it cannot be said that Spiritual Science does not depend upon the help of Beings of the Cosmos who, when the necessary preparation has been made by Initiates, are able to come down to the Earth. Initiates of the Mystery-wisdom belonging to the modern age know well how much depends upon the possibility of conversing with Beings of the Cosmos. But the mentality prevailing to-day is utterly different from that of olden times. A doctor nowadays is one upon whom some University has conferred a medical degree, whereas in days of antiquity a doctor was one who had conversed with the God Mercury. But as time went on this converse took place no longer and only traditions remained of what was once achieved in the Mysteries when the priest-healers had conversed with the God.

In the Venus sphere it is a matter of leading over into the Sun sphere whatever still remains of the human being when his tendencies to unrighteousness and to illness have been eliminated. To understand this we must think of something that is characteristic of man. Here on Earth a man is always one whole, one undivided whole. Only if he is executed for some terrible crime is he no longer a single whole in respect of the physical body. However severe the punishment he may receive for lesser transgressions, he is still one whole. But this is not the case with the soul-and-spiritual counterpart which has passed through the Moon sphere and the Mercury sphere. When as a being still possessed of soul and spirit in the super-sensible world after death, man has cast off the weaknesses due to the wrongdoings and to illnesses, he is in a certain sense no longer whole. For a man is one with his wrongdoings; his sinfulness is part of him. If someone were so utterly villainous as to possess no good qualities at all, his whole being would have to remain in the Moon sphere and he could make no further progress; for to the extent to which we are evil, to that extent we leave our own being behind in the Moon sphere. We are one with, identical with, what is evil in us according to the standards of the spiritual world. Therefore when we arrive in the Venus sphere, we have been mutilated in a certain respect. In the Venus sphere the element of purest Love prevails—purest Love in the spiritual sense; and it is this Cosmic Love that bears what now remains of the human being from the Venus sphere into the Sun existence.

There, in the Sun existence, man has to work in a very real way at the moulding and shaping of his karma. Now if our physicists were ever to reach the Sun they would be astonished, to say the least of it! For everything that men claim to have discovered about the Sun is at variance with the facts. The Sun is supposed to be a kind of globe filled with incandescent gas—but that is far from the truth. Let us take a rather commonplace illustration. If you have some Seltzer water in a glass you will have to look carefully if you want to see the actual water, for what you see are the bubbles in the water. These bubbles are less dense than the water itself and you see what is the less dense. And now, what about the Sun? When you look at the Sun you do not see it because it is a globe of densified, incandescent gas in empty space, as science alleges, but you see it because just at that place there is a condition of utmost rarefication.—And now you must get accustomed to an idea that is far from familiar.-

You look out into space—I am not going to speak now about the nature of space. Here, when you look into the water, there are bubbles everywhere—bubbles which are thinner, less dense than the water. Where the Sun stands in the sky, conditions are less dense even than space. You will say: ‘but space itself is void, it is nullity.’ Nevertheless at the place where the Sun is situated there is actually less than nullity. It should not be difficult, especially in these days, for people to think of something else that is less than nothing. If there were originally five shillings in my pocket and I spend them one by one, in the end I have nothing. But when I get into debt I have less than nothing—which is the plight of a good many people to-day! Very well, then: where there is space, space alone, there is nothing; but where the Sun is there is less than nothing, there is a lacuna in space—and there dwell the spiritual Beings referred to in the book Occult Science as the Exousiai, the Dynamis, the Kyriotetes. There they have their abode, sending their own essence and power through all creation. Among them man spends the greater part of his life between death and a new birth. In association with the Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, with human souls karmically connected with him who have also passed through the gate of death, and with yet other Beings whose existence is hardly even conjectured, the karma for the next earthly life is worked out and formulated. Conditions in this Sun region are not as they are on Earth. Why do our clever scientists—and clever they certainly are—picture the Sun as a globe of incandescent gas? It is because a certain illusory, materialistic instinct makes them want to detect physical processes in the Sun. But there is nothing physical in the Sun. One may at most speak of physical processes in the Sun's corona, but certainly not in the Sun itself. In the Sun there is nothing like natural law, for it is a world of purest spirit. Materialists would like to insist that the Sun too is under the sway of natural law, but it is not so. The only laws prevailing in the Sun are those which give effect to the karmic consequences of the Good and which operate in restoring the mutilation man has undergone as the result of his ‘bad’ karma when he has been transported by the Love of the Venus Beings into the Sun sphere. When the life of man between death and a new birth is described many will wonder how this very lengthy period is spent. Many things that happen on the Earth command admiration and awe, but the most sublime achievements of earthly civilisation are puny and insignificant in comparison with what is accomplished in a purely spiritual way during this Sun existence, when mighty Powers are all around and within us, working to the end that our karma shall take effect in the next earthly life.

The elaboration of part of man's karma is completed in the Venus sphere, and some part even in the Mercury sphere. Later on we shall hear of a certain well-known historical personality whose destiny in his incarnation in the nineteenth century was due to the fact that his karma was very largely wrought out in the spheres of Venus and Mercury. Souls who begin to give shape to their karma in these spheres often become personalities of outstanding significance in the subsequent incarnation. But in the great majority of cases the main part of the karma for the following earthly life is worked out in the Sun sphere, where the longest period is spent. We will speak in greater detail later on but to-day I will give an outline of how the foundations of karma are laid, stage by stage, in the various spheres. In order not to be confused by other descriptions I have given of the life between death and a new birth, you must be clear that in moving through these spheres man enters into entirely different conditions of cosmic existence. When the time comes for him to enter the Mars sphere, he is still not altogether outside the Sun sphere, for the influences of the Sun are still active in this part of the Cosmos which was once cast off by the Earth. In the Sun sphere, man is concerned only with his moral qualities and with those attributes of his being which have remained healthy; the rest has been laid aside. It persists in him as a kind of incompleteness but this is made good in the Sun sphere. During the first half of existence in the Sun sphere we are engaged in making preparation for the appropriate physical organisation of the next earthly body. During the second half of the Sun existence, in union with the Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, and with human souls karmically connected with us, we are concerned with the preparation of the moral side of karma, the moral qualities which will then be present in the next life. But this moral part and the spiritual part of karma—for example, specific talents in one direction or another—are then further elaborated in the Mars sphere, in the Jupiter sphere and in the Saturn sphere. And in passing through these spheres we come to know what the ‘physical’ stars are in reality.

To speak of a ‘physical’ star is not really correct. For what is a star? Physicists imagine that combustion of gas or some process of the kind is taking place in the sky. But as I said, if they could actually get there they would be amazed to find no burning gas in the Sun but actually a lacuna, a gap in space, in a condition infinitely more rarefied than any particles of earthly matter could ever be. Everything is Spirit, pure Spirit. Nor are the other stars so many bodies of incandescent, burning gas, but something entirely different. Bordering on this Earth with its physical substances and physical forces, is the universal Cosmic Ether. We are able to perceive the Cosmic Ether because, as we gaze into it, our field of vision is circumscribed and the surrounding ether appears blue. But to believe as materialistic thinkers do, that physical substances are roaming around up there in the Cosmos is just childish fancy. No physical substances are moving around, for at the place where a star is seen, there is something altogether different. The farthest reaches of the etheric would lead out of and beyond space, into the spheres where the Gods have their abode. And now picture to yourselves a certain inner relationship which may exist between one person and another and comes to physical expression. Picture it quite graphically. You are caressed by someone who loves you. You feel the caress but it would be childish to associate it in any way with physical matter. The caress is not matter at all, it is a process, and you experience it inwardly, in your soul. So it is when we look outwards into the spheres of the Ether. The Gods in their love caress the world. But the caress lasts long, because the life of the Gods spans immense reaches of time. In very truth the stars are the expression of love in the Cosmic Ether; there is nothing physical about them. And from the cosmic aspect, to see a star means to feel a caress that has been prompted by love. To gaze at the stars is to become aware of the love proceeding from the divine-spiritual Beings. What we must learn to realise is that the stars are only the signs and tokens of the presence of the Gods in the Universe. Physical science has much to learn on its path from illusion to truth! But men will not achieve self-knowledge nor will they understand their own true being until this physical science has been transformed into a spiritual science of the worlds beyond the Earth. Science in its present form has meaning only for the Earth, for physical matter in the real sense [The difference between physical and mineral matter must be remembered here.] exists only on the Earth. And so when we depart from the Earth at death, we enter more and more into a life of purely spiritual experiences. The reason why our physical life presents an entirely different aspect in these backward-streaming experiences which continue for a third of the length of earthly existence, is that we have been permeated with the essence and substance of the Moon sphere. The preparation of karma is one of the many things that have to be accomplished in the worlds of the stars.

In order that one set of facts may be supported by others, let me explain how such observations are made by one who is versed in modern Initiation Science. For some time now, even in public lectures, I have been describing how when a man develops the faculty of genuine super-sensible perception through the methods indicated in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, he looks back over his earthly life, seeing it as a kind of tableau. Everything is present simultaneously, in a mighty panorama of the whole of life since the birth of the ‘I’; but the several epochs are in a certain respect distinct from each other. We survey our experiences from birth until the change of teeth, then again, as one complete series, the experiences occurring between the time of the change of teeth and puberty, then the experiences of the period from puberty until the beginning of the twenties, and so forth. Further concentration and application of the methods for the attainment of spiritual knowledge enable us, as we survey this tableau, to observe, firstly, our life from birth to the seventh year. But later on these pictures are allowed to fade away and we see right through our life; when the consciousness has been emptied of all pictorial impressions and we have achieved Inspiration, we behold the living, weaving activity of the Moon sphere in place of the tableau of early childhood from birth until the seventh year. We behold this living, weaving activity. And so Initiation in the form that is normal and right for this present age brings us knowledge of the secrets of the Moon sphere, when the pictures of our own life up to the seventh year are obliterated in the consciousness of Inspiration and we perceive what now flashes up in their place.

Then, if we observe the tableau of life between the seventh and fourteenth years and again obliterate the pictures in the consciousness of Inspiration, we gaze into the Mercury sphere. Everything has to do with the being of man, for man is an integral part of the whole Universe. If he learns to know himself as he really is, in the innermost core of his being, he learns to know the whole Universe. And now I would ask you to pay attention to the following.—Deepest respect arises in us for the old, instinctive Initiation Science which gave things that have remained in existence to this day, their true and proper names. Designations that are coined nowadays result in nothing but confusion, for modern scholarship is incapable of naming things in accordance with reality. An unprejudiced observation of life will fill us with reverence for the achievements of ancient Initiation Science. Ancient Initiation Science knew by instinct something that is confirmed to-day by statistics, namely, that the illnesses of childhood occur most frequently in the first period of life; it is then that the human being is most prone to illness, and even to death; after puberty this tendency abates, but the healthiest period of all, the period when mortality is at its lowest, is between the ages of seven and fourteen. The wise men of old knew that this is due to the influences of the Mercury sphere and again to-day we may make the same discovery when through modern Initiation Science we penetrate the secrets of existence. Such things fill us with reverence for these sacred traditions of humanity.

By looking back into our experiences from the fourteenth to the twenty-first years and obliterating the pictures in the consciousness of Inspiration, we are led to the secrets of the Venus sphere. Here again the wonderful wisdom of ancient Initiation Science comes into evidence. The human being reaches puberty; love is born. When the pictures of this period of life are illumined by Initiation Science, the secrets of the Venus sphere are disclosed. Everything I am now describing is part of the true self-knowledge which unfolds in this way.

When the pictures of experiences occurring between the twenty-first and forty-second years of life are eliminated in the consciousness of Inspiration, we are led to the Sun sphere. Through deepened self-knowledge the secrets of the Sun sphere can be experienced in this retrospective contemplation of the events of our life between the twenty-first and forty-second years. To acquire knowledge of the Sun existence our vision must cover a period three times longer than that of the periods connected with the other planetary bodies.

I told you that the karma of a certain well-known personality in history had taken shape paramountly in the spheres of Mercury and Venus, and you will now understand how such things are investigated. We look back, firstly, into the period of our own life between the seventh and fourteenth years, and then into the period between the fourteenth and twenty-first years; when the pictures have been eliminated in the consciousness of Inspiration, light is shed upon the secrets of the Mercury sphere and the Venus sphere. Through this illumination we perceive how such an individuality worked together with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies and with other human souls, and how his subsequent earthly incarnation in the nineteenth century took shape.

Now if the elaboration of karma has taken place mainly in the Mars sphere, investigation is more difficult. For if a man attains Initiation before the age of 49, it is not possible for him to look back into the period of life which here comes into question, namely, the period between the forty-second and forty-ninth years. He must have passed his forty-ninth year if he is to be able to eliminate the pictures of this particular set of experiences and penetrate the secrets of the Mars sphere. If Initiation is attained after the age of fifty-six it is possible to look back into the period between the forty-ninth and fifty-sixth years of life, when karma that is connected with the Jupiter sphere takes shape. And now we are at the point where the various sets of events come together in one connected whole.

It is not until the period between the fifty-sixth and sixty-third years can be included in this retrospective vision that we are able to survey the whole range of experiences and to speak out of our own inner knowledge. For then we can gaze into the profoundly significant secrets of the Saturn sphere. Karmas that were wrought out mainly in the Saturn sphere operate in mysterious ways to bring men together again in the world. In order to perceive all these connections in the light of Initiation Science itself—they can of course be explained and so become intelligible—but in order to perceive with independent vision and be able to judge them, we must ourselves have reached the age of sixty-three. A human being appears in some earthly life—thus for example there is a certain great poet of whom I shall speak later—and we find that through his faculties, through his literary creations, he was giving expression to that in his karma which could have been wrought out only in the Saturn sphere.

When we look up to the Sun, to the planetary system—and the same applies to the rest of the starry heavens for they are connected in a very real way with the being of man—we can witness how human karma takes shape in the Cosmos. The Moon, the planets Venus, Jupiter—verily these heavenly bodies are not as physical astronomy describes them. In their constellations, in their mutual relationships, in their radiance, in their whole existence, they are the builders and ¹ shapers of human destinies, they are the cosmic timepiece according to which we live out our karma. As they shine downwards from the heavens their influences have real power. This was known in the days of the ancient Mystery-wisdom but the old Astrology—which was a purely spiritual science, concerned with the spiritual foundations of existence—has come down to posterity in a degraded, amateurish form. Anthroposophy alone can contribute something that will enable us to perceive the spiritual connections as they truly are and to understand how through the great timepiece of destiny, human life on Earth is shaped according to law.

From this point of view let us think of the human being and his karma. Those who with the help of Anthroposophy evolve a healthy conception of the world as against the unsound views prevailing to-day, will unfold not only quite different concepts and ideas but also quite different feelings and perceptions. For you see, if we really understand the destiny of a man, we also learn to understand the secrets of the world of stars, the secrets of the Cosmos. But nowadays people write biographies without the faintest inkling that something is really being profaned by the way in which they write. In times when knowledge was held to be sacred because it issued from the Mysteries, nobody would have written biographies in the way that is customary to-day. Every ancient ‘biography’ contained indications of the influences and secrets of the world of stars. In human destiny we can perceive, firstly, the working of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai; then of still loftier Sun Beings, Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes; then of the Thrones who are concerned mainly with the elaboration of karma in the Mars sphere; then of the Cherubim who elaborate the karma belonging to the Jupiter sphere; and then of the Seraphim who work together with man at the elaboration of karma in the Saturn sphere—Saturn karma. In a man's destiny, in his karma, we behold the working of the higher Hierarchies. This karma, at first, is like a veil, a curtain. If we look behind this veil we gaze at the weaving deeds and influences of Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. Every human destiny is like script on a sheet of paper. Just imagine that someone looking at the writing on the paper were to say that he can see signs - K - E - I, and so forth, but he is quite unable to combine these letters into words! As there are some twenty-two to twenty-eight letters (to be exact, about thirty to thirty-four in all) such a man could only conceive that the whole of Goethe's Faust is made up entirely of those thirty-four letters. He cannot read, therefore he sees only the different letters. When someone else finds a great deal more in Faust because he can combine the letters into the words of which this wonderful work is composed, an out-and-out illiterate with no notion of how to read may say with horror: Here is someone who actually thinks that all kinds of things are contained in Faust—but he is an utter fool! Yet the whole of Faust does actually consists of these letters. Similarly, when we observe the karma of a human being in the ordinary way, we see letters only; but the moment we begin to read this karma we behold the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and their mutual, interrelated deeds. The destiny of an individual human life becomes the richer, the more we get beyond the thirty-four letters and find in them—Faust! And the picture of a human destiny is enriched beyond measure when earthly ignorance is transformed into knowledge of the Cosmic Alphabet, when we realise that the letters of that script are the signs and tokens of the deeds of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies.

To a man who beholds it, the vista of karma as the shape taken by destiny in life is so overwhelming, so sublime and majestic that simply by understanding how karma is related to the spiritual Cosmos he will unfold quite different qualities of feeling and discernment. It will not remain so much theoretical knowledge. What we acquire through Anthroposophy should not be a mere accumulation of theoretical information but should work more and more upon our life of thought and feeling, in that it rids us of the notion that we live an earthworm's existence and makes us aware that we belong to the land of Spirits. Verily, we are citizens not of the Earth alone but of the land of Spirits. The whole existence we have spent between death and a new birth converges in that which, on Earth, is enclosed within our skin. The secrets of worlds are contained in a particular form within this encircling skin.

Self-knowledge is by no means the trivial sentimentality of which there is so much talk nowadays. Human self-knowledge is world-knowledge. And so when friends have given me an opportunity, I have often written down for them the following lines:

If thou would'st know thy Self,
Look out into the Cosmic Spaces.
thou would'st fathom the Cosmic Spaces,
Look inwards, into thine own Self.

Willst Du Dein Selbst erkennen,
Schaue hinaus in die Weltenweiten.
Willst Du die Weltenweiten durchschauen,
Blicke hinein in das eigene Selbst.

You will have gathered from the foregoing descriptions that man's relation to his environment is very different from what modern ideas often conceive. It is so easy to think that what exists in man's surroundings, what belongs to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms and is then taken into the body, that these external material processes which are investigated by the physicist, the chemist and so on, simply continue on in the same way within man himself. There can, however, be no question of this, for one must be clear that within the human skin-processes everything is different from outside it, that the world within differs entirely from the world without. As long as one is not aware of this one will ever and again reach the conclusion that what is examined in a retort, or investigated in some other way, is continued on inside the human organism, and the human organism itself will simply be regarded as a more complicated system of retorts.

You need only recall what I said in yesterday's lecture, that everything mineral within man must be transformed until it reaches the condition of warmth-ether. This means that everything of a mineral nature which enters into the human organism must be so far metamorphosed, so far changed, that at least for a certain period of time, it becomes pure warmth, becomes one with the warmth which man develops as his own individual temperature independent of the warmth of his environment. No matter whether it is salt or something else that we absorb, in one way or another it must assume the form of warmth-ether, and it must do this before it is made use of in the upbuilding of the living organism.

But something quite different is also connected with this: solid substance loses its solid form, when it is changed in the mouth into fluid, and is further transformed into the condition of warmth-ether. It loses weight when it gradually passes over into the fluid form, becomes more and more estranged from the earthly, but only when it has ascended to the warmth-etheric form is it fully prepared to absorb into itself the spiritual which comes from above, which comes from world-spaces.

Thus, if you would gain an idea of how a mineral substance functions in man, you must say the following: There is the mineral substance; this mineral substance enters into man. Within man, passing through the fluid conditions, and so on, it is transformed into warmth-ether. Now it is warmth-ether. This warmth-ether has a strong disposition to absorb into itself what radiates inwards, what streams inwards, as forces from world-spaces. Thus it takes into itself the forces of the universe. And these forces of the universe now form themselves as the spiritual forces which here imbue the warmth-etherized earth-matter with spirit. And only then, with the help of the warmth-etherized earth-substance, does there enter into the body what the body needs for its formation.

So you see—if in the old sense we designate warmth as fire—we can say: What man absorbs in the way of mineral substance is carried upwards within him until it becomes of the nature of fire. And what is of the nature of fire has the disposition to take up into itself the influences of the higher Hierarchies; and then this fire streams back again into all man's internal regions, and builds up, in that it re-solidifies, the material basis of the separate organs. Nothing that man takes into himself remains as it is; nothing remains earthly. Everything, for example, that comes from the mineral kingdom is so far transformed that it can take into itself the spiritual-cosmic, and only then, with the help of what comes from the spiritual cosmos, does it become re-solidified into the earthly condition.

Take from a bone, for instance, a fragment of calcium phosphate. This is in no way the calcium phosphate which you find outside in nature, or which, let us say, you introduce into the laboratory. It is the calcium phosphate which, while it arose from what was absorbed from outside, could only take part in building the human physical form, with the help of the forces which penetrated it during the time when it was changed into the warmth-ether condition.

This, you see, is why man needs substances of the most diverse kinds during the course of his life in order to be able, in accordance with the way he is organized at his particular age, to transform what is lifeless into the condition of warmth-ether. A child is as yet quite unable to change what is lifeless into the warmth-etheric condition; he has not enough strength in his organism. He must drink the milk which is still so nearly akin to the human organism in order to bring it into the condition of warmth-ether, and apply its forces to carrying out the full diffusion of plastic activity which is necessary during the years of childhood for the processes of bodily formation. One only gains insight into the nature of man when one knows that everything which is taken in from outside must be worked upon and basically transformed. Thus, if you take some external substance and wish to test its value for human life you simply cannot do this by means of ordinary chemistry. You must know how much force the human organism must exert in order to bring some external mineral substance, for example, to the fleeting condition of warmth-ether. If it is unable to do this, the external mineral substance is deposited, becoming heavy earth-matter before it has passed over into warmth, and penetrates into the human organism as inorganic matter which remains alien to human tissues.

An example of this kind can appear when the human being is not in a position to bring a substance, in its origin organic but appearing in him mineralized, namely sugar, to the tenuous condition of warmth-ether. Then arises the condition which must result when the whole organism has to share in the assimilation of what is thus present within it, the very serious condition of sugar diabetes. In the case of every substance one must therefore bear in mind to what degree the human organism can be in a position to transmute lifeless substance—whether its nature is already lifeless as when we eat cooking salt, or whether it becomes so as with sugar—into warmth-substance, whereby the organism which is rooted in the earth finds its union with the spiritual cosmos.

Every such deposit in man which remains untransmuted—as in diabetes—signifies that the human being does not find a union of the matter present within him and the spiritual of the cosmos. This is only a specific application of the general axiom that whatever approaches man from outside must be entirely worked over and transformed within him. And if we wish to look after a person's health it is of paramount importance to see to it that nothing enters into him which remains as it was, nothing which cannot be dealt with by the human organism until the least of its particles is transformed. This is not only the case in regard to substances; it is also the case, for instance, in regard to forces.

External warmth—the warmth we feel when we grasp things, the external warmth in the air—this, when taken up by the human organism, must become so transformed that the inner warmth is on a different level from the warmth outside. The external warmth must be transformed within us, so that this external warmth, in which we are not present, is laid hold of by the human organism even down to the very smallest quantity.

Now imagine that I go somewhere where it is cold, and because the cold is too intense, or, because of moving air or draught, the temperature fluctuates, I am not in a position to change the world warmth into my own individual warmth quickly enough. Through this I run the danger of being warmed by the world-warmth from outside like a piece of wood, or a stone. This should not be. I should not be exposed to the danger of external warmth flowing into me as though I were merely some object. At every moment, from the boundary of my skin inwards, I must be able to lay hold of the warmth and make it my own. If I am not in a position to do this I catch cold.

This is the inner process of catching cold. To catch cold is a poisoning by external warmth which is not taken possession of by the organism.

You see, everything in the external world is poison for man, actual poison, and it only becomes of service to him when, through his individual forces, he lays hold of it and makes it his own. For only from man himself do forces go up to the higher hierarchies in a human way; whereas outside man they remain with the elemental nature-beings, with the elemental spirits. In the case of man this wonderful transformation must happen so that within the human organism the elemental spirits may give over their work to the higher hierarchies. For the mineral in man this can only occur when it is absolutely and entirely transformed into warmth-ether.

Let us look at the plant world. Truly this plant world possesses something which bewitches man in the most varied ways when he begins to contemplate the plant covering of the earth with the eye of the spirit. We go out into a meadow or a wood. We dig up, let us say, a plant with its root. If we regard what we have dug up with the eye of the spirit we find a wonderfully magical complex. The root shows itself as something of which we can say that it came into existence entirely in the sphere of the earthly. Yes, a plant root—the more so, the coarser it appears—is really something terribly earthly. It always reminds one—especially a root like a turnip, for instance—of a particularly well-fed alderman. O, yes, it is so; the root of a plant is extremely smug, and self-satisfied. It has absorbed the salts of the earth into itself, and feels a deep sense of gratification at having soaked up the earth. In the whole sphere of the earthly there exists no more absolute expression of satisfaction than such a turnip-root; it is the representative of root-nature.

On the other hand let us look at the blossom. When we observe the blossom with the eye of the spirit we only experience it as our own soul, when it cherishes the tenderest desires.

Only look at a spring flower; it is a sigh of longing, the embodiment of a wish. And something wonderful streams forth over the flower world which surrounds us, if only our soul-perception is delicate enough to be open to it. In spring we see the violet, maybe the daffodil, the lily-of-the-valley, or many little plants with yellow flowers, and we are seized by the feeling that these blossoming plants of spring would say to us: O Man, how pure and innocent can be the desires which you direct towards the spiritual! Spiritual desire-nature, desire-nature bathed, as it were, in piety, breathes from every blossom of spring.

And when the later flowers appear—let us at once take the other extreme, let us take the autumn crocus—can one behold the autumn crocus with soul-perception without having a slight feeling of shame? Does it not warn us that our desires can tend downwards, that our desires can be imbued with every kind of impurity? It is as though the autumn crocuses spoke to us from all sides, as if they would continually whisper to its: Consider the world of thy desires, O Man; how easily you can become a sinner!

Looked at thus, the plant-world is the mirror of human conscience in external nature. Nothing more poetical can be imagined than the thought of this voice of conscience coming forth from some point within us and being distributed over the myriad forms of the blossoming plants which speak to the soul, during the season of the year, in the most manifold ways. The plant-world reveals itself as the wide-spread mirror of conscience if we know how to look at it aright.

If we bear this in mind it becomes of special significance for us to look at the flowering plants and picture how the blossom is really a longing for the light-being of the universe, and how the form of the blossom grows upwards in order to enable the desires of the earth to stream towards this light-being of the universe, and how on the other hand the substantial root fetters the plant to the earth, how it is the root which continually wrests the plant away from its celestial desires, wishing to re-establish it in the substantiality of the earth.

And we learn to understand why this is so when, in the evolutionary history of the earth, we meet the fact that what is present in the root of a plant has invariably been laid down in the time when the moon was still together with the earth.

In the time when the moon was still together with the earth the forces anchored in the moon within the body of the earth worked so strongly that they hardly allowed the plant to become anything but root. When the moon was still with the earth and the earth still had quite another substance, the root element spread itself out and worked downwards with great power. This can be pictured in such a way that one says: The downward thrust of the plant's root-nature spread out powerfully, while up above the plant only peeped out into the cosmos. We could say that the plants sent their shoots out into the cosmos like delicate little hairs. We feel that, while the moon was still with the earth, this moon element, these moon-forces, contained in the earth-body itself, fettered plant-nature to the earthly. And what was then transmitted to the being of the plant remains on as predisposition in the nature of the root.

After the moon left the earth, however, there unfolded in what had previously existed only as tiny little shoots peeping out into the world a longing for the wide light-filled spaces of the cosmos; and now the blossom-nature arose. So that the departure of the moon was a kind of liberation, a real liberation for the plants.

But here we must also bear in mind that everything earthly was grounded in the spiritual. During the old Saturn period—you need only take the description which I gave in my “Occult Science”—the earth was entirely spiritual; it existed only in the warmth-etheric element, it was entirely spiritual. It was out of the spiritual that the earthly was first formed.

And now let us contemplate the plant. In its form it bears the living memory of evolution. It bears in its root-nature the process of becoming earthly, of assuming the physical-material. If we look at the root of a plant we discern that it says something further to us, namely that its existence only became possible because the earthly-material evolved out of the spiritual. Scarcely, however, was the earth relieved of its moon-element than the plant again strove back to the spaces of the light.

And when we consume the plant as nourishment we give it the opportunity of carrying further in the right way what it began outside in nature, the striving back not only to the light-spaces, but to the spirit-spaces of the cosmos. This is why, as I have already said, we must deal with the plant-substance within us until it becomes aeriform, or gaseous, so that the plant may follow its longing for the wide spaces of light and spirit.

I go out into a meadow. I see how the flowers, the blossoms of the plants, strive towards the light. Man consumes the plant, but within him he has a world entirely different from the one outside. Within him he can bring to fulfillment the longing which, outside, the plant expresses in its blossoms. Spread abroad in nature we see the desire-world of the plants. We eat the plants. Within ourselves we drive this longing towards the spiritual world. We must therefore raise the plants into the sphere of the air so that in this lighter realm they may be enabled to strive towards the spiritual.

The plant here undergoes a remarkable process. When man eats plant food the following occurs: If we depict the root below, and above what strives through the leaf to the blossom, then, in this inner transference to the airy condition, we have to experience a total reversal of the plant. The root, which is fettered to the earth, just for the very reason that it is so rooted, strives upwards; it strives upwards towards the spiritual with such power that it leaves the striving of the blossom behind it. It is actually as if you were to picture the plant unfolding in such a way that the upper is pushed down below and the lower up above. The plant reverses itself completely. The part which has already won its way to the blossom has had enjoyment in its material striving towards the light, has brought the material up into the sphere of the light. For this it must now suffer the punishment of remaining below. The root has been the slave of the earthly; but, as you can see from Goethe's theory of the metamorphosis of plants, it bears the whole plant-nature within it. It now strives upwards.

If a man is a really stiff-necked sinner, he is likely to remain so. But the root of a plant, which as long as it is earth-bound makes the impression of a well-fed alderman, immediately it has been eaten by man becomes transformed and strives upwards; whereas that which has brought the material into the sphere of the light, the blossom, must remain down below. Hence in what belongs to the root-element of the plant we have something which, when it is eaten, strives upwards towards man's head out of its inherent nature, while what lies in the direction of the blossom remains in the lower regions, and, in the general process of digestion, does not reach up to forming the head.

Thus we have the remarkable, the wonderful drama that when man consumes something of plant-nature—he need not eat the whole plant, because in each single part the whole plant is inherent (I refer you again to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis)—when man consumes a plant, it transforms itself within him into air, into air which develops plant-wise from above downwards, which grows and blossoms in a downward direction.

In times when such things were known through instinctive clairvoyance, people looked at the external constitution of plants in order to see whether they were such as could be beneficial to man's head, whether they showed a strong root-development, and in consequence a longing for the spiritual. For, when digestion is completed, what we have eaten of such a plant will seek out the head and penetrate it, so that it may there strive upwards towards the spiritual cosmos and enter into the necessary connection with it.

In the case of plants which are strongly imbued with astrality, for example, in the pod-bearing plants, their products remain in man's lower organism, and are unwilling to rise up to the head, with the result that they produce a heavy sleep, and dull the brain on waking. The Pythagoreans wished to be clear thinkers and not introduce digestion into the functions of the head. This is why they forbade the eating of beans.

You see, therefore, that from what happens in nature we can divine something of nature's relation to man, and to what happens in man. If one possesses spiritual initiation-science, one simply cannot imagine how materialistic science comes to grips with human digestion. (Certainly matters are different in regard to a cow's digestion; about this, too, we shall have something further to say later.) Materialistic science states that plants are assimilated just as they are. They are not assimilated just as they are, but are completely spiritualized. The plant is so constituted in itself that in digestion the lower turns into the upper and the upper into the lower. No greater transposition can be imagined. And man immediately becomes ill if he eats even the smallest quantity of a plant where the lowest is not changed into the uppermost, and the uppermost into the lowest.

From this you will realize that man bears nothing in himself which is not produced by the spirit; he must first give to what he assimilates as substance a form which will enable the spirit to influence it.

Turning now to the animal world, we must be clear that the animal has a digestion, and mostly consumes plants. Let us take the herbivorous animal. The animal world takes the plant world into itself. This again is a very complicated process, for when the animal eats the plant it does not possess human processes to set against the plant. Within the animal the plant cannot turn the above into the below and the below into the above. The animal has its vertebral column parallel with the surface of the earth. This means that in the case of the animal what should happen in digestion is brought into complete disorder. What is below strives upwards, and what is above strives downwards, but the whole process gets dammed up in itself, so that animal digestion is something essentially different from human digestion. In animal digestion, what lives in the plant dams itself up. And the result of this is that with the animal the being of the plant is given the promise: “Thou mayest indulge thy longing for world-spaces”—but the promise is not kept. The plant is thrown back again to earth.

Through the fact, however, that in the animal organism the plant is thrown back to earth, there immediately penetrate into the plant—not, as with man in whom the reversal takes place, cosmic spirits with their forces, but certain elemental spirits in their place. And these elemental spirits are fear-spirits, bearers of fear. Thus spiritual perception can follow this remarkable process: The animal itself enjoys its nourishment, enjoys it with inner satisfaction; and while the stream of nourishment goes in one direction, a stream of fear from elemental spirits of fear goes in the other. Through the animal's digestive tract there continually flows along the path of digestion the satisfaction felt in the assimilation of nourishment, and in opposition to this there flows a terrible stream of elemental spirits of fear.

This is what animals leave behind them when they die. When animals die—not those species, perhaps, which I have already described in another way, but including such as belong, for instance, to the four-footed mammals—when these animals die there also dies, or rather comes to life in their dying, a being which is entirely composed of the element of fear. With the animal's death, fear dies, that is to say fear comes to life. In the case of beasts of prey this fear is actually assimilated with their food. The beast of prey, which tears its booty to pieces, devours the flesh with satisfaction. And towards this satisfaction in the consumption of flesh there streams fear, the fear which the plant-eating animal only gives off from itself when it dies, but which already streams out from the beast of prey during its life-time. Through this the astral bodies of such animals as lions and tigers are riddled with fear which they do not as yet detect during their lifetime, but which after death these animals drive back because it goes in opposition to their feeling of satisfaction. Thus carnivorous animals really have an after life in their group soul, an after life which must be said to present a much more terrible Kamaloka than anything which can be experienced by man, and this simply on account of their essential nature.

Naturally you must regard these things as being experienced in quite a different consciousness. If you were suddenly to become materialistic, and began to imagine what the beast of prey must experience by putting yourself in its place, thinking: What would such a Kamaloka be like for me? and were then to judge the beast of prey according to what such a Kamaloka might be for you, then certainly you are materialistic, indeed animalistic, for you transpose yourself into animal nature. These things must of course be understood if one is to comprehend the world; but we must not put ourselves into their category, as when the materialistic puts the whole world into the category of lifeless matter.

Now we come to a subject about which I can only speak on a soul level; for anthroposophy should never come forward to agitate for anything, should never advocate either one thing or another, but should only put forward the truth. The consequences which a person attracts to himself by his manner of living, this is his personal affair. Anthroposophy presents no dogmas, but puts forward truths. For this reason I shall never, even for fanatics, lay down any kind of law as to the consequences of what an animal makes of its plant nourishment. No dogmatic rulings shall be given in regard to vegetarianism, meat-eating and so on, for these things must be relegated to the sphere of individual judgment and it is really only in the sphere of individual experience that they have value. I mention this in order to avoid giving rise to the opinion that anthroposophy entails standing for this or that kind of diet, whereas what it actually does is to make every diet comprehensible.

What I really wished to say was that we must work upon the mineral until it becomes warmth-ether in order that it may absorb the spiritual; then, after the mineral has absorbed the spiritual, man can be built up by it. I mentioned that when the human being is still quite young he has not as yet the strength to work upon what is entirely mineral until it becomes warmth-ether. It has already been worked upon for him in that he drinks milk. Milk has already undergone a preliminary change, whereby the process of transformation to warmth-ether has become easier. Hence in a child the milk with its forces flows up quickly into the head, and can there develop the form-building forces in the way in which the child needs them. For the whole organization of the child proceeds from the head.

If at a later age man wishes to receive these form-building forces, it is not good to promote them by the drinking of milk. In the case of the child what ascends into the head, and is able by means of the forces of the head, which are present until the change of teeth, to ray out formatively into the whole body—this is no longer present in an older person. In later age the whole of the rest of the organism must ray out the formative forces. And these formative forces for the whole organism are particularly strengthened in their impulses when one eats something which works in quite another way than is the case with the head.

You see, the head is entirely enclosed. Within this head are the impulses used in childhood for the formation of the body. In the rest of the body we have bones within, and the formative forces outside. Here, then, the form-building forces must be stimulated from outside. While we are children these form-building forces are stimulated when we bring milk into the head. When we are no longer children these forces are no longer there. What should we now do in order that these formative forces may be stimulated more from outside?

It would obviously be a good thing to be able to have in outer form what is accomplished within by the head, enclosed as it is inside skull. It would be good if what the head does inside itself could somehow be accomplished in outer form from outside. The forces which are there within the head are suited to the consumption of milk; when the milk is there in its etheric transformation it provides a good basis for the development of these head forces. We must, therefore, have something which acts like milk, which, however, is not fabricated within the human being, but is fabricated in outer nature.

Well, there is something existing outside in nature which is a head without an enclosing skull, and which therefore activates from outside those very forces which work inside the head in children who need the milk, and must indeed create it anew; for the child must first bring the milk into the warmth-etheric condition and so create it anew.

Now a stock of bees is really a head which is open on all sides. What the bees carry out is actually the same as what the head carries out within itself. The hive we give them is at most a support. The bees activity, however, is not enclosed, but produced from outside. In a stock of bees, under external spiritual influence, we have the same thing as we have under spiritual influence inside the head. The stock of bees produces its honey, and when we eat and enjoy honey it gives us the up-building forces, which must now be provided more from outside, with the same strength and power which milk gives us for our head during the years of childhood.

Thus, while we are still children we strengthen through the consumption of milk the formative forces working from the head outwards; if at a later age we still need formative forces we must eat honey. Nor do we need to eat it in tremendous quantities—it is only a question of absorbing its forces.

Thus one learns from external nature how strengthening forces must be brought into human life, if only this external nature is fully understood. And if we would conceive a land where there are beautiful children and beautiful old people, what kind of a land would this be? It would be “a land flowing with milk and honey”. So you see ancient instinctive vision was in no way wrong when it said about lands of promise that they are such as flow with milk and honey.

Many such simple sayings contain the profoundest wisdom, and there is really no more beautiful experience than first to make every possible effort to experience the truth, and then to find some ancient holy saying abounding in deep wisdom such as “a land flowing with milk and honey”. That is indeed a rare land, for in it there are only beautiful children and beautiful old people.

You see, to understand man presupposes the understanding of nature. To understand nature provides the basis for the understanding of man. And here the lowest spheres of the material always lead up to the highest spheres of the spiritual: the kingdoms of nature—mineral, animal, vegetable—at the one, the lowest pole; above, at the other pole, the hierarchies themselves.

Yesterday we had to speak of the path pursued by man between death and a new birth; and the whole gist of my remarks will have shown you that every night during sleep we must return to the starting-point of our earth-life.

We can indeed gain insight into these significant matters if we realize that on sinking into slumber we do not stand still at the date reached in the course of our earthly existence (as was already explained in the previous lectures), but that we actually go back to our starting-point. Every time, during sleep, we are carried back to our childhood, and even to the state before our childhood, before our arrival on earth. Hence, while we are asleep, our ego and our astral body return to the spiritual world, to the world of our origin which we left in order to become earth men.

At this point of our discourse, it becomes necessary to let pass before our soul in greater detail what the human being undergoes while asleep; undergoes unconsciously, but, nonetheless, most vividly.

The duration of our sleep does not really matter. Although it is difficult for our ordinary consciousness to conceive of the fact that time and space conditions are utterly different in the spiritual world, we must learn to form conceptions of such a kind.

I have already said that the human being, when suddenly awakened after he has fallen asleep and hence lost consciousness, experiences during that brief moment whatever he would have experienced, had his sleep continued for a long time. In measuring the length of our sleep according to its physical duration, we take into account only our physical body and our etheric body. Utterly different time-conditions prevail for that which is undergone by our ego and astral body. Hence the things that I shall presently explain to you are valid for either a long or a short sleep.

When the human personality enters the realm of sleep with his soul, the first state experienced by him—all this takes place in the unconscious, yet with great vividness—engenders a feeling in him of dwelling, as it were, in a general world ether. (In speaking of feeling, I mean an unconscious feeling. It is impossible to express these matters otherwise than by terms used in ordinary conscious life.) The person feels himself, as it were, disseminated into the whole cosmos. We cease to have the definite perceptions, which formerly connected us with all the things surrounding us in our earthly existence. At first, we take part in the general weaving and surging of the cosmos. And this is accompanied by the feeling that our souls have their being in a bottomless element. Hence the soul, while existing in this bottomless element, has an ardent desire for divine support. Thus we experience every evening, when falling asleep, the religious need of having the whole world permeated by an all-encompassing divine-spiritual element. This is our real experience when falling asleep.

Our whole constitution as human beings enables us to transfer this desire for the divine into our waking life. Day in and day out, we are indebted to our nightly experiences for renewing our religious needs.

Thus only a contemplation of our entire being enables us to gain insight into the various life-experiences undergone by us. Fundamentally, we live very thoughtlessly if we take into account only the conscious life passed between morning and evening; for many night experiences are interwoven with this. The human being does not always realize whence he derives his living religious need. He derives it from the general experiences undergone by him every night just after having fallen asleep—and also, although perhaps less intensively, during an afternoon nap.

Then, in our sleep, another stage sets in—all this, as was said before, being passed through unconsciously, but nonetheless vividly. Now it does not seem to the sleeper that his soul is, as it were, disseminated into the general cosmos, but it seems as if the single parts of his entity were divided. Were our experiences to become conscious, we would feel as though we were being disjointed. And, from the bottom of our soul, an unconscious fear rises up. Every night, while asleep, we experience the fear of being divided up into the whole universe.

Now you might say: What does all this matter, as long as we know nothing about it? Well, it matters a great deal. I should like to explain, by means of a comparison, how much it matters.

Suppose that we become frightened in ordinary daily life. We turn pale. The emotion of fear is consciously felt by the soul. A definite change in our organism makes us turn pale. The blood streams back into the body's interior. This is an objective process. We can describe the emotion of fear in connection with an objective process taking place, in daily conscious life, within the physical body. What we experience in our soul is, as it were, a mirrored image reflecting this streaming away of the blood from the body's surface to its inner parts. Thus an objective process corresponds, in the waking state, to the emotion of fear. When we are asleep, a similar objective process, wholly independent of our consciousness, occurs in our astral body.

Anyone able to form imaginative and inspired conceptions will experience this objective process in the astral body as an emotion of fear. The objective element in fear, however, is actually experienced by man every night, because he feels himself being divided into parts inside his soul. And how is he being divided? Every night he is divided among the universe of stars. One part of his soul substance is striving towards Mercury, another part towards Jupiter, and so forth. Yet this process can only be correctly characterized by saying: During ordinary sleep, we do not actually penetrate the worlds of stars, as is the case on the path between death and a new birth. What we really undergo every night is not an actual division among the stars, but only among the counterparts of the stars which we carry within us during our entire earth life. While asleep, we are divided among the counterparts of Mercury, Venus, Moon, Sun, and so forth. Thus we are concerned here not with the original stars themselves, but with their counterparts in us.

This emotion of fear, experienced by us relatively soon after falling asleep, can be removed only from that human being who feels a genuine kinship to the Christ. At this point, we become aware how much the human being needs this kinship with the Christ. In speaking of this kinship, it is necessary to envisage man's evolution on earth. Mankind's evolution on earth can be comprehended only by someone having real insight into the significant turning point brought to human evolution by the Mystery of Golgotha. It is a fact that the human beings before the Mystery of Golgotha were different with regard to soul and spirit from the human beings after the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred on earth. This must be taken into account, if man's soul is to be viewed in its true light.

When the human beings who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha—and these human beings were actually we ourselves in a former life—fell asleep and experienced the fear of which I have just spoken, then the counterpart of the Christ in the world of stars existed for the human beings of that time as much as did the counterparts of the other heavenly bodies. And as the Christ approached the sleeping human being, He came as a helper to dissipate fear, to destroy fear. People of earlier ages, still gifted with instinctive clairvoyance, remembered after awaking, in a dream-like consciousness, that the Christ had been with them in their sleep. Only they did not call Him the Christ. They called Him the Sun-spirit. Yet these people, who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha, avowed from their innermost depth that the great Sun-spirit was also the great guide and helper of the human being, who approached him every night in sleep and relieved him of the fear of being disseminated into the universe. The Christ appeared as a spirit strengthening mankind and consolidating its inner life.

Who binds together man's forces during his life? asked the followers of ancient religions. It is the great Sun-spirit, who firmly binds together man's single elements and combines them into one personality. And this avowal was uttered by the followers of ancient religions, because their consciousness was pervaded by the memory that the Christ approached man every night.

We do not need to be amazed at these things. In those ancient times when the human being was still capable of instinctive clairvoyance, he could look back at significant moments of his life into the period passed through by him before his soul and spirit descended to earth and was clothed in a physical body. Thus it seemed quite natural to the human being that he could look upward into a pre-earthly existence.

But is it not a fact that—as we explained before—every period of sleep carries us back into pre-earthly existence, into an existence preceding the stage before we became a truly conscious child? This question must be answered in the affirmative. And just as human beings knew that they had been together, in their pre-earthly existence, with the exalted Sun-spirit who had given them the strength to pass through death as immortal beings, so they also consciously remembered after every sleep that the exalted Sun-spirit had stood at their side, helping them to become real human beings, integrated personalities.

The human soul, while acquainting itself with the world of planets, passes through this stage during sleep. It is as if the soul were first dispersed among the counterparts of the planets, and then united and held together by the Christ.

Consider that this whole soul-experience during sleep has changed, with regard to the human being, since the Mystery of Golgotha. For the Mystery of Golgotha has originated the unfolding of a vigorous human ego-consciousness. This ego-consciousness, pervading human culture only gradually after the Mystery of Golgotha, became especially apparent after the first third of the fifteenth century. And the same vigorous ego-consciousness, which enables the human being to place himself as a free, fully self-conscious being into the sense world, this same consciousness—as though trying to maintain equilibrium—also darkens his retrospect into pre-earthly existence; darkens his conscious memory of the helping Christ, Who stood at his side during sleep.

It is remarkable that, since the Mystery of Golgotha, human evolution has taken the following course: On the one hand, man acquired a vigorous ego-consciousness in his waking state; on the other hand, utter darkness gradually overlaid that which had formerly radiated out of sleep-consciousness. Therefore human beings are obliged, since the Mystery of Golgotha, to establish a conscious relationship to Christ Jesus while they are awake. They must acquire, in a conscious way, a comprehension of what the Mystery of Golgotha really signifies: That, by means of the Mystery of Golgotha, the exalted Sun-spirit, Christ, descended to earth, became a human being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, passed through earth-life and death, and, after death, still taught His disciples who were permitted to behold Him in His etheric body after death.

Those personalities who acquire, in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, a waking consciousness of their kinship with the Christ, and gain a living conception of what took place through the Mystery of Golgotha: to these the possibility will be given of being helped by the Christ impulse, as it is carried from their waking state into their sleep.

This shows us how differently human sleep was constituted before and after the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ invariably appeared as Helper while the human being slept. Man could remember even after awaking that the Christ had been with him during his sleep. After the Mystery of Golgotha, however, he would be utterly bereft of the Christ's help, if he were not to establish a conscious relation with the Christ during the day while awake and carry its echo, its after-effect, into his sleep. Only in this way can the Christ help him to maintain his personality while asleep.

What the human being had received unconsciously from the wide heavenly reaches before the Mystery of Golgotha: the help of the Christ, the human soul must now acquire gradually by establishing a conscious relation with the Mystery of Golgotha. This inner soul-responsibility has been laid upon the human being since the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus we are unable to study the nature of human sleep, unless we are able to envisage the immense transformation undergone by human sleep since the Mystery of Golgotha.

When we enter the realm of sleep, our whole world becomes different from that experienced in the waking state. How do we live as physical men while awake? We are confined, through our physical body, by natural laws. The laws working outside in nature are also working within us. That which we recognize as moral responsibilities and impulses, as moral world order, stands like an abstract world amidst the laws of nature. And because present-day natural science takes into account only the waking world, it is completely ignorant of the moral world.

Thus natural science tells us—although hypothetically, yet in conformity with its principles—that the Kant-Laplace primeval fog marked the starting-point of world evolution; and that this world evolution will be terminated through a state of heat which will kill all living things and bury them, as it were, in a huge cosmic cemetery. (These conceptions have been modified, but still prevail among natural scientists.) Natural science, in describing the evolution of the cosmos, begins and ends with a physical state. Here the moral world order appears as a stranger. The human being, however, would not be aware of his dignity, would not even experience himself as a human being, unless he experienced himself as a moral being. But what moral impulses could be found in the Kant-Laplace primeval fog? Here were nothing but physical laws. Will there be moral impulses when the earth shall perish from heat? Then, also, nothing but physical laws will prevail. Thus speaks natural science. And out of the natural process germinate all living things, and out of living things the human soul-element. The human being forms certain conceptions: One should act in a certain way; or one should not act in that way. He experiences a moral world order. But this cannot be nurtured by natural law. To the waking human being, the moral world order appears like a merely abstract world amidst the rigid, massive world of natural laws.

It is entirely different when imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive consciousness passes through that which the human being, between falling asleep and awaking, experiences in his ego and astral body. Here the moral world order appears real, whereas the natural order below appears like something abstract, something dream-like. Although it is difficult to conceive of these things, they are nonetheless true. The whole world has been turned upside down. To the sleeper acquiring clairvoyance in his sleep, the moral world order would seem something real, something secure; and the physical world order of natural laws would seem to sink below, not rise above, the moral world order. And if the sleeper possessed consciousness, he would not place the Kant-Laplace theory at the starting-point of world evolution, and the death through heat at its end. At the starting-point, he would recognize the world of spiritual hierarchies—all the spirit and soul beings who lead man into existence. At the end of world evolution, he would again recognize the spirit and soul beings who extend to man who has passed through the course of evolution a welcome to enter their community. And below, as an illusion, the abstract physical world order would have its welling and streaming existence. If you were gifted with clairvoyance in the very midst between falling asleep and awaking, you would view all the natural laws of which you have learned during the day as a mirage of dreams, dreamed by the earth. And it would be the moral world order which would give you a firm ground. And this moral world order could be experienced by us if we worked our way—after having received the help of the Christ—into the peace of the fixed stars in the firmament, seen by us again, during nightly sleep, in the form of their counterparts. Soaring upward to the fixed stars, to their counterparts, we look down into the physical realm of natural law.

This is the wholly divergent form of the experiences undergone by the human being between falling asleep and awaking, and leading his soul every night into the image of the cosmos. And just as the human being is led at a certain moment between death and a new birth, as I explained yesterday, by the moon forces into earthly existence and is beset by a sort of longing for earthly existence, so is he beset by the longing, after experiencing heavenly existence in his sleep, to immerse himself again into his physical body and etheric body.

While we get accustomed to earth-life after our birth, we live in a sort of sleep and dream state. If we, disregarding our dreams, look back in the morning, after being awake for an hour, to the moment of awaking, our consciousness is halted abruptly and we see behind us the darkness of slumber. It is similar when we look back into our childhood. In our fourth or the fifth year, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, our consciousness comes to a stop. Beyond the last stage that we can still remember lies something which is as deeply immersed in the darkness of the sleep and dream life of early childhood as is the life of the human soul immersed every night in the darkness of sleep. Yet the child is not wholly asleep, but is wrapt in a sort of waking dream. During this waking dream occur the three important phases of human life which I indicated yesterday. As they occur in the sequence characterized by me, we can see in them echoes and after-effects of the life between death and a new birth. First the child learns, out of a life wrapt in dream and sleep, what we call simply learning how to walk.

Something all-encompassing happens when a child learns how to walk, something which appears as a grandiose and overwhelming process to anyone able to perceive how the subtlest parts of the human body are changed at this time. The child, by adapting himself to the relationships of gravity, learns how to attain equilibrium. The child no longer falls down. By unfolding inner forces, he conforms to spatial directions.

What if we had to do all this consciously: overcome the lack of equilibrium that pulled us to the ground, adapt our organism to a firm state of equilibrium with regard to the three spatial directions, and even maintain this state of equilibrium by swinging our legs like pendulums as we learn how to walk? The child, in performing such a grandiose mechanical task, performs it as an echo of what he experienced while dwelling among spirits between death and a new birth. Here we encounter something so comprehensive, so marvelous, that the most eminent engineer, with all his earthly scientific equipment, could not calculate how the child's human forces adapt themselves to the world's spatial connections. What we, as a child, attain unconsciously is the most miraculous unfolding of mathematical-mechanical, physical forces. We call it simply learning how to walk. Yet in this learning how to walk lies an element of utmost grandeur.

Simultaneously, the correct use of arms and hands is attained. And by placing himself, as physical being, within the three spatial directions, the human being receives the foundation for all that is called learning how to talk.

The only thing known to physiology about the connection between man's dynamics of walking and standing and the faculty of speech is the fact that the speech-center of right-handed persons lies in the left portion of the brain. The gestures of the right hand, vigorously executed by means of man's willpower, are led, by some mysterious process, into the interior of the brain whence the faculty of speech is brought to the human being.

More, however, exists than this connection between the right hand and the third convolution at the left, the so-called Broca cerebral convolution. The whole mobility of arms and fingers; the human being's whole ability to move and maintain equilibrium reaches up into the brain, becomes part of the brain, and thence reaches down into the larynx. Language develops out of walking, out of the grasping of objects, out of gestures flowing from the organs of movement.

Anyone viewing these things correctly will know that a child with the tendency to walk on his toes speaks differently from a child walking on his heels; employs different shadings of sound. The organism of speaking develops from the organism of walking and moving. And speech is again a counterpart of that which I described yesterday as the outpouring of revelation upon the human being passing through the stage between death and a new birth. The child, when learning how to speak, does not grasp the words with his thoughts, but alone with his emotions. He lives in the language as if it were an emotional element; and a child of normal development learns conceptual thinking only after acquiring the faculty of speech. A child's thoughts actually develop out of the words. Just as walking and the grasping of objects, the gestures of legs and hands, reach up into the speech organism, so all that lives in the speech organism and is gained through adaptation to the language of the surrounding world, reaches up into the thought-organs. In the third stage, the child learns how to think.

While encompassed by this dream and sleep state, the child passes through three stages: walking, speaking, and thinking. These are the three terrestrial counterparts of that which we experienced between death and a new birth: living contact with the spiritual world, revelation of the spiritual world, and the gathering of the world ether in order to form our etheric body.

The child's development during these three stages can be correctly estimated only by someone observing the adult human being during his sleep. Here we can observe how we, when sleep puts a stop to our thoughts—for our thoughts are silenced by sleep—let our thought-forces be nurtured, between falling asleep and awaking, by those beings known to us as angels, as Angeloi. These beings, approaching us during sleep, nurture our thought-forces while we cannot do so ourselves.

During sleep, the human being also ceases to talk. Only in abnormal cases, which could be explained, does he talk in his sleep. At present, however, we may disregard these things. The normal human being ceases to talk after going to sleep. Would it not be altogether too dreadful, did people keep on chattering while asleep? Hence speech ceases at that time. And what makes us speak is nurtured during the time between falling asleep and awaking by beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Archangeloi.

If we disregard the sleep-walker, who is also in an abnormal condition, human beings are quiet while asleep. They do not walk, they grasp no objects, they do not move. That which pertains to man's waking life as forces which call forth the movements out of his will is nurtured, between going to sleep and awaking, by beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Archai.

By comprehending the manner in which the hierarchical beings above the human kingdom—Angels, Archangels, Archai—approach the ego and astral body, approach the entire human being during sleep, we can also understand how the little child masters the three activities of walking, speaking, and thinking. We recognize how it is the work of the Archai that brings to the little child, as he masters the dynamics of life, as he masters the faculty of walking and handling objects, what the human being has experienced, between death and a new birth, by coming into contact with spirit and soul beings. Now, the counterpart of these experiences comes forth with the learning to walk of the little child. It is the Archai, the primeval powers, who transmit to the child that learns how to walk the counterpart of all the spiritual movements emanating, between death and a new birth, from spirit and soul beings.

And it is the Archangels that transmit what the human being experiences, between death and a new birth, by means of revelation; they are at work when the child masters speech. And the Angels carry down the forces developed by the human being when, out of the whole world ether, he gathered the substance for his etheric body. The angels, bringing down these forces, mold their counterparts within the thought-organs, which are plastically formed in order that the child may learn thinking by means of language.

You must keep in mind that Anthroposophy does more than look at the physical world and say: It is based on something spiritual. This would be much too easy. By such a way of thinking, we could acquire no real conception of the spiritual world. Someone who is determined to repeat in philosophic terms that the physical world rests on a spiritual foundation, would be like a man who when walking across a meadow is told by his companion: Look, this flower is a dandelion, these are daisies, and so forth. The first man, however, might reply: Indeed, I am not interested in these names. Here I see flowers, just flowers in the abstract. Such a person would be like a philosopher who recognizes only the pantheistic-spiritual element, but refuses to discuss the concrete facts, the particular formations of the spiritual.

What we are given by Anthroposophy shows us how the divine spiritual dwells everywhere in life's single formations. We look at the way in which the child passes from the clumsy stage of crawling to that of walking. Looking in admiration and reverence at this grandiose world phenomenon, we see in it the work of the Archai, who are active when the experiences we undergo between death and a new birth are transformed into their earthly shape.

We follow the process through which the child produces speech out of his inner self; we follow the activity of the Archangels; and, when the child begins to think, the activity of the Angels. And all this has a deeply significant, practical side. In our materialistic age, many people have ceased to regard words as something genuinely spiritual. More and more, people use words only for the purpose of naming physical objects in the outer world. Think how many people in the world are unable to form the slightest conception of spiritual things; this is because the words have no spiritual significance for them and are used merely in connection with physical objects.

For many people, speech itself has assumed a materialistic character. It can be used only in connection with physical things. Undeniably, we live within a civilization making language, more and more, into an instrument of materialism. And what will be the consequence?

The consequence will become apparent to us if we look, with regard to language, at the connection between the waking and the sleeping state. While we remain awake during the day, we talk with others. We make the air vibrate. The way in which the air vibrates transmits the soul content which we wish to convey. The soul impulses of our words, however, live in our inner being. Every word corresponds to a soul impulse, which is the more powerful, the more our words are imbued with idealism; the more we are conscious of the spiritual significance contained in our words. Anyone aware of these facts will clearly recognize what lies behind them. Think of a person who uses words in a merely materialistic sense. During the day, he will not differ greatly from others whose words contain an idealistic, spiritual element, who know that words must be given wings by the spirit. At night, however, the human being takes the soul and spirit element of language, together with his ego and astral body, into the spiritual world. He returns again to his spiritual origin.

Those possessing only a materialistic speech cannot establish a connection with the world of the Archangels. Those still possessing an idealistic speech are able to establish this connection with the world of the Archangels.

The tragedy inherent in a civilization whose materialism is expressed even by its language has the consequence that the human being, by letting his language become wholly materialistic, may lose the nightly connection with the world of the Archangels. For the genuine spiritual scientist, there lies indeed something heart-breaking in present-day civilization. People who forget more and more to invest their words with a spiritual content lose their rightful connection with the spiritual world; with the Archangels. And this terrifying fact can be perceived only by someone envisaging the true nature of the sleeping state.

It is impossible to become a real anthroposophist without rising above mere theory. We may remain perfectly indifferent while developing theories on June bugs, earth worms, and cells. Such theories shall certainly break nobody's heart. For the way in which June bugs and earthworms grow out of a cell is not apt to break our heart. But if we acquire anthroposophical knowledge in all its fullness, we look into the depths of man's being, of man's evolution, of man's destiny. Thus our heart will ever be interlinked with this knowledge. The sum of this knowledge will be deposited in the life of our feelings, our emotions. Hence we partake of the whole world's feelings, and also of the whole world's volition.

The essence of Anthroposophy consists in the fact that it grasps not only the human intellect but the whole human being. Thereby it illuminates, with the forces of feeling and sentiment, the destinies of culture and civilization, as well as the destinies of single persons.

We cannot take part genuinely in human experiences on earth, unless looking also at the other side, the spiritual side, as it is unveiled to us through our knowledge of the sleeping state that leads us back into the spiritual world. Thus spiritual science can be truly at one with human life, understood in its spiritual and ultimately its social, religious, and ethical significance.

This spiritual science is to become real science which leads to wisdom. Such life giving science is greatly needed by mankind, lest it fall into deeper and deeper decline, instead of making a new beginning.

If we look back on the descriptions given yesterday, we shall be aware that man, living through successive times after death—and we have to use the word “time” in relation to physical conditions—comes first of all to the realm of the Moon Beings, and then passes on to that of the Sun Beings. The Moon Beings still belong to earthly-existence in a certain sense and the experiences a man goes through under their influence in the soul-world are indeed cosmic memories of earthly existence. He has experiences also of his own earthly life, though now in a backwards direction, and these are united with the judgments of the Cosmos, as I called them yesterday. These cosmic judgments are made known to men after death through the Moon Beings. We then come under the influence of these Beings, and it is they who cause the judgments to flow into us, in the same way as those that flow into us, here on Earth, from minerals, plants and animals. So we can say: On entering spiritual-cosmic existence after death, a man gains his first glimpse into such cosmic perceptions as still proceed from Beings once connected with the Earth. We have already had occasion to speak of how these Beings, before taking up their abode in the cosmic stronghold of the Moon, were Teachers of human beings in the ancient Mysteries. Hence, what a man once experienced on Earth, in primeval times, he now experiences when journeying through the soul-world, under the influence of those Beings who have been raised—we might perhaps say—to become inhabitants of the Moon. We can truly speak of them in this way if sufficient consideration is given to what was said in my last lecture. These inhabitants of the Moon, under the leadership of the one-time Teachers of mankind, judge quite differently from the way things are judged by people on Earth. For people on Earth, in their life between birth and death, are now approaching a stage completed by the Moon-dwellers in long past ages.

Reckoning by earthly years, we must say that the inhabitants of the Moon, when on Earth, accomplished quite 15,000 years ago what human beings still have to do. More than 15,000 years have passed since these Moon inhabitants acquired the power of making judgments which bring together the naturalistic and the moral.

We on Earth keep our naturalistic judgments separate, and when giving an opinion about a stone or an animal we leave morality aside. We say: “Nature follows only an amoral necessity.” But this is not true of the world as a whole. Even though we may consider that moral judgments are not applicable to individual animals, or to plants, or to minerals above all, in their separate forms of existence, yet the very fact of their creation, of their being in the world at all, is entirely the result of cosmic moral judgment.

Now these Moon-dwellers already judge in terms of cosmic morality. Therefore, when we have passed through the gate of death and are together with them, we must listen to all the Cosmos has to say about what we have thought, wished, felt, willed and done on Earth. Our entire earthly life is exposed to the light of cosmic judgment, and we learn the value our deeds have for the whole great universe.

From these lessons we develop the impulse to complete, to correct, or in some way to set right, during our next life on Earth, whatever we have done either to help or to hinder the evolution of the world. And so, while thus under the influence of the Moon Beings, we take up the impulses for our future destiny—for our karma, as oriental wisdom has always called it. These impulses are thus absorbed while the human being is still under the influence of dwellers in the Moon, who are able to tell him how much his earthly deeds and thoughts are worth for the Cosmos.

The spiritual Beings of the higher world, in whose neighbourhood a man lives while under the influence of the Moon-dwellers, are those grouped together in my Occult Science as the Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels, Archai. Of the ranks of Beings whose realm a man enters after death, they are the first who do not have to live through a phase of earthly embodiment. On their side, they stand in close connection with the Beings of the still higher Hierarchies. But it is with this Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels and Archai that a man is essentially concerned during his Moon existence after death, while the higher Hierarchies are still beyond his ken.

The judgments of the Angels are especially important for the deeds of individual men, and it is thus from the Angels that a man learns the value his deeds have in the Cosmos as a whole. From the Archangels he learns more about the value of what he has done in connection with the language he speaks, with the people to whom he belongs, and from this source also come impulses which work into his further destiny, his karma. From the Archai he learns what value his actions during a given period on Earth will have for the time when he has to descend once more from spiritual heights into earthly existence.

By means of all that a man can achieve in this way if—and I beg you to bear the following in mind—he has rightly prepared himself for life after death through the impulses he is able to receive on Earth, and particularly (as we shall see later) through his attitude towards the great leaders of mankind, he can then find the way over from the sphere of the Moon-dwellers to the sphere of the Sun-dwellers.

The inhabitants of the Moon we already know as those Beings who once dwelt on Earth and were in close connection with it. In a very, very much earlier age this was true also of the inhabitants of the Sun; they, too, participated in earthly affairs.

On coming to the realm of the Moon-dwellers it is quite clear to a man that he is meeting Beings who once dwelt with him on Earth. And when he enters the realm of the Sun Beings, something like a powerful cosmic memory of a primeval age comes over him—an age which in Occult Science you will find described from another point of view. He is taken possession of by something like a memory of an infinitely ancient time, when the Sun, with its inhabitants, was still one with the Earth. After death, therefore, we make our way through the spiritual Cosmos by growing into, as it were, two spiritual cosmic regions where we meet those Beings with whom, at one time, when we lived on Earth as quite different beings, we were closely associated.

So it is that by going through these experiences between death and a new birth we look back in grand, mighty memories on the evolution of the Earth in the Cosmos. Whereas a man, while here on Earth, goes through only part of human evolution, between death and rebirth he goes through part of cosmic evolution, part of the evolution of the universe. Those Beings who inhabit the Sun are such that in far distant times they had already risen above the experiences possible for earthly beings, and above those possible for the Beings of the Moon.

On reaching the realm of the Sun Beings, a man enters a sphere of the highest wisdom, where he can live only if on Earth he has prepared himself sufficiently for it.

Now I said yesterday that on passing from the soul-world into the land of spirit, or, as we must express it to-day, from the sphere of the Moon-dwellers to that of the Sun-dwellers, a man proceeds more slowly in his journeyings through the Cosmos. Whereas the circling of the Moon takes about a third of his earthly lifetime, the next rounds, the circling of Mars, of Jupiter, and of Saturn—I mentioned yesterday how these rounds are not completed—takes a more leisurely course, twelve times slower than the circling of the Moon.

If now we reckon up the actual time, we arrive at the following result. We must start from the original plan decreed for human beings by the Cosmos. Then we find that a man goes through the Moon period in a third of the time he has spent on Earth. If we allow for the fact that at the beginning of life more time is spent in sleep, and add on the time given to sleep in later life, we find that a man needs approximately thirty years to accomplish the first cycle, that of the Moon. Each of the following cycles takes twelve times as long, or 36o years for each cycle. If we follow a man in his further journeying through the worlds, we find him going through three cycles. He does not reach Saturn, but has to go through the cycles in the way originally decided. He then has to go backwards through the three again. Thus he completes three cycles in an outward direction and, on returning towards his next earthly life, another three backwards, making six in all. We then have the time originally intended for man. I shall still have to speak of how things are different for human beings to-day; but according to the original cosmic decrees, the time was 2,160 years.

What do these 2,160 years signify? You have only to recall that the position of the Sun at the vernal equinox moves forward year by year. In recent centuries it has advanced from the Ram to the Fishes, and approximately in 25,920 years—or close on 26,000 years—the Sun travels round the whole zodiacal circle, and the twelfth part of this is 2,160 years. In 2,160 years the Sun progresses from one sign of the Zodiac to the next. It was originally decreed that a man should return to Earth when the Sun had thus moved on.

When we consider the inner reasons for this number, and compare it with what from I said from another point of view in Occult Science, those who have read the book will remember that the time taken by the Sun to pass from one sign of the Zodiac to the next was given there as the original length of the interval between a man's incarnations. If we look at this from two sides—more outwardly, from the cosmic aspect, as in Occult Science, and then from the side of man's inner life that we are dealing with to-day—the two numbers are identical. Such things should be noticed; and it will be found that whenever in Spiritual Science a correct judgment is made from one point of view, and then another correct judgment from a quite different point of view, the two judgments are inwardly in agreement.

Anyone judging Spiritual Science from the ordinary standpoint of to-day will quite possibly ask: “What is there to support this Spiritual Science of yours? Our natural science rests upon observation, experiment; that is the firm ground from which we start.” But one might just as well say: “As earthly man I stand on firm ground, and a rock, too, has solid ground beneath it—like everything else on Earth. As for you astronomers—it is really fantastic for you to tell us that the Earth is floating freely in celestial space. If you want to be reasonable, you must say that the Earth, like any great mass of rock, is somewhere resting on firm ground.” That is virtually the same as accusing Anthroposophy of having no firm ground to stand on. Naturally, people would appear foolish, even to themselves, were they to say that the Earth has something to rest on, but they do not see how foolish it is not to realise that Spiritual Science, which is carried by its own inner resources, just as the heavenly bodies move by their own impulses, cannot rest on the ground of experiment and explanation. Were they only to be consistent in their judgments, they would see how, in the Spiritual Science intended here, every step is made with the utmost exactitude, and full accountability is taken for every statement concerning the world and the beings of the world.

Thus, after death, a man enters a world which he at first experiences in common with souls who, like himself, have entered the spiritual worlds through the gate of death after an earthly life. A man thus grows familiar with the sphere of disembodied human beings and continues with them the earthly relations experienced spiritually at night.

But we have also seen how a man finds himself in the company of other spiritual Beings, the inhabitants of the Moon who were once dwelling with him on the Earth, and how, afterwards, he ascends to the community on the Sun. These Sun-dwellers also were once inhabitants of the Earth together with human beings, though in times far more remote. Here a man's first meeting is with the Beings who constitute the second Hierarchy, described in my Occult Science as Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. These are the Beings with whom he has to work in order that he may be able to manifest in his next earthly life the cosmically elaborated karma derived from his earlier lives on Earth.

Having passed through the realm of the Moon-dwellers, a man knows—not with earthly thoughts but with cosmic ones—what in a cosmic sense he has done wrong; he realises the worth for cosmic evolution as a whole of all he has done, thought and felt. But he cannot prepare his new earthly life with cosmic thoughts alone. Therefore in the Moon-sphere he comes to know what he is destined to be in his next earthly existence, though the actual preparations for it cannot be made at that stage. For this, he has to rise to the sphere of the Sun, where live the Beings who, no longer having to concern themselves with earthly existence, are occupied with the affairs of our whole planetary system.

So a man's experience of the Cosmos embraces two spiritual regions, together with the spiritual Beings dwelling in them. It embraces the soul-world of the Moon-dwellers, and the more extensive population of the spirit region. Whereas the Moon-dwellers, because they were closely connected with the Earth in comparatively recent times, have united their interests with the peoples of the Earth, and while the Moon is in a sense only a cosmic colony, occupied with and orientated towards earthly affairs, the Sun-sphere, whose dwellers live under the leadership of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, is a cosmic whole, concerned with the affairs of the entire planetary system—Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and so on, including the Earth and the Moon.

On coming into this vast sphere of the Sun, where our interests are substantially widened, we are able to work with the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes on preparing the spirit-germ of a physical body which can then be born for us from human parents. No parents could ever produce a suitable physical body were it not prepared during long periods through work carried out in co-operation with the highest, most sublime spiritual Beings in the spiritual Cosmos. Our essential work there—a work far greater and more comprehensive than anything achieved during our little life on Earth—is to concern ourselves, together with Beings of a higher degree, with all that takes place among these Beings as spiritual events, just as here there are natural events; with all that takes place in them as art of the spirit, just as here we have the art of nature. All this finally enables us to bring together what has thus been worked upon into a great, spiritual, archetypal picture which is the spirit-germ—as it were the fore-shadowing—of what will later be born on Earth as our physical body.

When a man, having completed the three circles, starts on the return journey, his interest in earthly affairs revives. Then—still many years before birth—he looks down on the successive generations in earthly evolution, at the end of which will stand his father and his mother. As soon as he makes this complete change of direction in the Cosmos, he begins to focus his attention upon the Earth. He watches many preceding generations of his ancestry, one after another, until, centuries later, his parents are born. To them he can send down the potent, far-reaching spirit-germ, diminished in size, of his future physical body, so that this spirit-germ can be united with the physical embryo in the body of the mother.

The spirit-germ is at first majestic and great, like the Cosmos itself. While a man is making his return journey to the physical world, and watching the generations through which his parents descend, and while from the spiritual world he is actively concerned with this sequence of generations, the germ becomes smaller and smaller—until at last it arrives back in the Mars-sphere, the actual sphere of the Sun, and then, passing quickly through the Moon-sphere, it descends to its next life on Earth.

Some time before the man himself descends as a being of soul, he sends down in advance this spirit-germ, so that what he has prepared for his physical body enters the physical world before him. On completing his work for the new earthly life, he is able to enter into a different relation with the cosmos—a relation indeed to the whole cosmic ether. And, as the final act in his descent, he draws from spiritual worlds, out of the whole world-ether, the forces to form his etheric body.

When a man has already sent down the spirit-germ for his physical body—that is, when the spirit-germ has at last descended to the parents at the end of its long journey down from the spiritual world—the man himself, still in the spiritual world, gathers ether around him there, and for a short time becomes a being of Ego, astral body and ether, the ether having been drawn together from the world-ether. It is not until after conception, during the third or fourth week of the embryonic period, that the human being unites himself with the organism that has been formed by combining the spirit-germ with the physical germ, and bestows upon it the etheric body drawn from the world-ether. Man then becomes a being composed of physical body, an etheric body drawn together in the last moments of his cosmic existence, and the astral body and Ego which have gone through the life between death and rebirth.

Thus, after experiencing the purely spiritual, a man descends to yet another existence in the physical world.

From what has been said you will have gathered that while passing through life in the world between death and a new birth, we experience in memory past ages of the Earth's evolution—the evolution of worlds, one might call it. The world-memories thus lived through become a man's deeds, for he does something with these memories, in cooperation with the higher Beings of whom I have already spoken and will speak further. What he carries out, while active in memory and remembering in activity, gives a significant perspective into the past of the Earth and of the world.

The experiences he goes through while in connection with the inhabitants of the Moon conjures up in his soul a time during which he passed through earlier lives on Earth in a similar relation to them as now. He surveys a series of earthly lives resembling those of the present. He then looks further back to a time when, even while on Earth, he was more closely connected with the present dwellers on the Moon; to a time from which he is separated by what geologists call the Ice Age. He looks back to a phase in earthly evolution you will find described in my books as the Atlantean age. But he penetrates still further back to what is called the age of Lemuria, when man is still to be found on Earth, though under quite different conditions. He was not yet so closely bound to the Earth that he trod it with his feet; he lived more as an etheric being in the environment of the Earth, in its atmosphere. This he could do because at that time the atmosphere consisted mainly of a watery solution that has now been distributed between seas and continents, together with solutions of other substances that have since become the solid earth of to-day. Hence he lived more in the Earth's circumference during the age—here again names are unimportant—called the Lemurian, which corresponds to what natural scientists call, with some justification, the oldest period of the Earth.

We then look back to an age when man was still associated with the Sun Beings, with the inhabitants of the Sun, before in the course of cosmic evolution the Sun separated from the Earth. This does not mean looking back to an age when, as described in Occult Science, the Earth itself went through its Sun period—the second age in the evolution of the Earth—but to the recapitulation in earthly existence of that cosmic age. But this recapitulation does come into view. And so a man's knowledge, when supplemented by what he is able to experience between death and a new birth, becomes cosmological knowledge. Earth-evolution advances through repeated stages, in conjunction with the results of human deeds carried out together with higher Beings. The Earth's past, in its connection with the whole planetary system—Sun, Moon, and all the planets dependent on them—becomes apparent in the deeds of men. Out of it a man shapes the part of the future for which he is responsible—his next earthly life. At the same time, however, he is involved in the preparation of future worlds, the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan existences, for into each of these in turn the Earth existence will eventually be transformed.

If we look deeply into such matters, we can understand how ancient cosmic times were part of the world-evolution of the Earth. We look back indeed into an age when the Moon-dwellers of to-day provided the instructors of mankind. Then, together with the latest great instructors, they withdrew into the cosmic stronghold of the Moon.

Over and over again on Earth, however, men were born with the capacity to remain throughout their karmic life in close connection with the experiences of those who now dwell on the Moon. Born again and again in the course of world-evolution, they were like ambassadors of the great community within the Moon. They appeared among the people of the Earth during the first, second and third postAtlantean culture-epochs and in the East they developed a lofty civilisation. These ambassadors of the Moon were called Bodhisattvas. They dwelt on Earth as men, but in them lived on the spiritual teaching that had been given directly by the great Moon teachers on Earth.

Now there are often times in the universe when the inhabitants of the Moon, because they are more nearly connected with the inhabitants of the Sun than with those of the Earth, develop a particularly intimate relation with these Sun-dwellers, so that, indirectly, through the Moon ambassadors—called in the East the Bodhisattvas—the wisdom of the Sun was able to reach men on Earth in the older oriental civilisations. Because of the progress made in the evolution of the Earth, it then became necessary that earthly civilisation should no longer be nourished, as it were, by the Moon Beings only. The whole evolution of the Earth would have had to take a course different from the one prescribed by cosmic wisdom, if only the Moon ambassadors had figured in it. For this reason there came about the great, momentous event we call the Mystery of Golgotha.

Whereas in more ancient times it was the Moon ambassadors who, to a certain extent, brought the Sun wisdom to Earth, it was the Leader of the Sun Beings Himself, foremost in the ranks of Sun Spirits, who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came down to Earth into the body of the man Jesus. Through this, quite different conditions arose for the evolution of the Earth. The wisdom of the Sun-dwellers was brought into it as impulse by Christ Jesus; and under this impulse the further course of Earth-evolution must therefore proceed.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so much Moon wisdom was still spread over the whole Earth that as Gnosis, as Pistis Sophia—which was old Moon wisdom—it was able to understand the nature of the Christ. Gnosis was essentially an endeavour to grasp His whole spiritual significance. But Gnosis has been entirely rooted out. In the phase of evolution which led to a temporary lack of understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, the first act was the rooting out of the Gnosis—down, almost, to the very writings of its opponents.

Imagine that nothing were left of our present Anthroposophy except what its opponents have written about it, and this will give you some idea of what people know of Gnosis from external sources. Their knowledge is limited to the opinions of its opponents, perhaps to some acquaintance with the Pistis Sophia and so on, which they don't understand. That is all they know of the Gnosis, which is indeed a gift of the Moon, out of the past, to the first centuries of Christianity—particularly the first four centuries, for after that it was no longer understood. It was what could be said out of the old Moon wisdom, out of the Moon Logos, to the Sun Logos who had come to Earth—said, that is, to the Christ. Anyone aware of this can really understand the Gnosis, which has been greatly misjudged, and of which such strange things are said to-day.

It is not possible, however, for matters to remain thus, for the evolution of the Earth must continue. We have to progress from the old wisdom of the Moon to a new Sun wisdom, for which we must learn to have an immediate understanding. To-morrow I shall have to describe how it was essentially the old Moon wisdom—after it had come virtually to an end—which still spoke to human beings through a form of Yoga breathing, through a changed breathing process. It was a striving after the old wisdom of the Moon.

This Yoga cult is no longer suitable for Western people; they must attain to Imagination. For civilisation in general, that is the necessary next step—the endeavour to come to Imagination. But there are all sorts of obstacles, and this means that the evolution of human civilisation can advance only if a new impulse from the spirit is accepted. This depends on intimate human destinies. When Bodhisattvas appeared, they never found people generally hostile. Those ancient times may often appear to us outwardly as gruesome and terrible, but it was always possible to meet with good will when bringing impulses from the spiritual worlds. Hence the Bodhisattvas found men ready to receive the old Moon Logos—the reflection, that is, of the Sun Logos. But it will never again be possible to speak to mankind in that old way.

The old Moon wisdom, the old Moon Logos, however, cannot cease—like everything else, it has to progress. But it will have to be understood through the Sun Word, which, having lost its last legacy in the Gnosis, must be re-discovered. It will be impossible to speak to people in the true language of the Sun until they bring good will to meet it. Until they do so, they will wait in vain for the coming of a successor to the Bodhisattvas of old, for that depends upon whether human beings welcome him with understanding.

To-day there is a deep rift between the humanity of the East and the humanity of the West. And those who do not go deeply enough into these matters cannot see how East and West are divided, and how the East is waiting for the new Bodhisattva to bring them in his own way something of which the West has only the vaguest idea. The nationalistic struggles of to-day have not yet been sufficiently overcome throughout the Earth by the universal consciousness which must flow essentially from the Christ impulse. Men will never discover how to rise to this common humanity, this genuine Christ impulse, and will never be able to understand what a potential Bodhisattva would have to say, until they have developed enough spiritual longing in them to create a bridge for a world-wide understanding between East and West.

I am touching here on a theme we must go further into tomorrow—a theme that will show how different the present time is from the days when man waited expectantly for the coming of a Bodhisattva. Now, before the Bodhisattva can speak to men, he has himself to wait until they are ready to understand the words he will use, for men have now entered the epoch of freedom.

This entry into the epoch of freedom, in relation to our present theme, will be a subject for tomorrow. But all that mankind has to go through, in order to find the innermost impulse in the spiritual world above, is connected with many apparently insignificant cultural systems and symptoms of our civilisation.

Forgive me for intermingling the great with the trivial, but trivial symptoms can sometimes throw light on the great. A few days ago I said that in this region, where Imaginations take so firm a hold on the spirit, we get the disturbance of motor-cars. I added that I was not saying anything against motor-cars, for in Anthroposophy we cannot express reactionary views, and when necessary I am obviously very fond of travelling by car myself. One must take the world as it is. But anything one-sided must always be balanced by its opposite. Thus there is no harm in motoring—provided we take it, and everything of that kind, with a heart attuned to the spiritual world. Then, if other things besides cars come to disturb us, we shall be able to press on by dint of our own strength and freedom, for freedom had to come, and it must lead us back to the Bodhisattva.

Human beings will be able to help themselves, where things are concerned that do us good service mechanically. It can truly be said that men will be able to help themselves in face of what comes upon them in the way of cars, typewriters, and so on.

With gramophones, however, it is different—forgive me for concluding on such an apparently trivial note. With gramophones, art is being thrust down into a machine. When people develop a passion for such a thing—which is really a mechanising of what comes down to us as a shadow of the spiritual—when they show enthusiasm for the kind of thing represented by gramophones, then in this connection they no longer have the power to help themselves. At this point the Gods have to help.

Now the Gods are merciful, and to-day our hope for the future progress of human civilisation must be that the Gods in their mercy will themselves come to the rescue where—as in the case of the gramophone—men's taste has gone astray.

I have often referred to the fact that since about the first third of the fifteenth century, human evolution has entered upon a special epoch. It can be said that the age which began approximately in the eighth century B.C. and continued into the first third of the fifteenth century was the age of Græco-Latin culture and that the most recent phase of time in which we are still living today, began at the point I have indicated. Today we will consider the tasks of present-day humanity in connection with this fact.

We know—particularly from the lectures given here lately—that between birth and death man bears in his physical, psychical and spiritual development on Earth the heritage of what he has experienced in pre-earthly existence. And recently we heard in what sense social and moral life is the heritage of that condition between death and rebirth when man lives in intimate communion with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. From this communion—it is experienced, as I have described, in rhythmic alternation with another condition—man brings with him the power of love, and this power of love is the foundation of morality on Earth. The other condition is the one in which man withdraws into himself, when, as it were, he lifts himself out of this communion with the Beings of the Hierarchies. And as the heritage of this condition he brings with him to Earth the power of memory, the power of remembrance, which on the one side comes to expression in his egoism, but on the other side predisposes him for freedom, for everything that makes for inner strength and independence.

Until the Graeco-Latin epoch, the faculties that enabled man to shape his civilization from within were in a certain respect still a heritage of pre-earthly existence.

If we go back to still earlier times in the evolution of humanity, to the Old Indian, the Old Persian and the Egyptian epochs, we find evidence everywhere of knowledge, of ideas, which flow as it were out of man's inner being but are also connected with the life between death and rebirth. In the Old Indian epoch man has a clear consciousness that he belongs to the same ‘race’ to which the divine-spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies belong. A man of knowledge in ancient Indian civilization feels himself less a citizen of the Earth than of the world to which these divine-spiritual Beings belong. He feels that he has been sent down to the Earth from the ranks of these divine-spiritual Beings. And he considers that the civilization he spreads over the Earth is there in order that the earthly deeds of man and even the objects and beings of the Earth may conform with the nature of the divine-spiritual Beings to whom he feels himself related.

In the man of ancient Persia this feeling of kinship has already lost some of its former intensity but he too still feels his real home to be what he called the Kingdom of Light, the Kingdom to which he belongs between death and rebirth, and he desires to be a warrior on the side of the spirits of this Kingdom of Light. He wishes to fight against those beings who come from the darkness of the Earth so that the spirits of the Kingdom of Light may not be hampered by these dark beings; he dedicates all his activity to the service of the spirits of the Kingdom of Light. And if we then pass on to the Egyptian and Chaldaean peoples we see how their science is full of knowledge relating to the movements of the stars. The destinies of men are read from what the stars reveal. Before anything is done on Earth, the stars are asked whether it would or would not be justified. This science, according to which all earthly life is regulated, is likewise felt to be a heritage of man's existence between death and rebirth, when his experiences are of a kind that make him one with the movements and laws of the stars, just as here on Earth between birth and death he is one with the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms.

In the fourth post-Atlantean, the Graeco-Latin epoch, beginning in the eighth century B.C. and lasting until the fifteenth century A.D., men already feel themselves to be true citizens of the Earth. They feel that in their world of ideas between birth and death there are no longer very distinct echoes of experiences in pre-earthly existence. They strive to be at home on the Earth. And yet, if we penetrate deeply into the spirit of Greek and even of early Roman civilization we can say something like the following. The men who are founding science in that age are intent upon learning to know all that goes on in the three kingdoms of Nature upon Earth, but to know it in such a way that this knowledge also has some relation to extra-terrestrial existence. Among the Greeks there is a strong feeling that through the knowledge applied by man on the Earth and in the light of which he regulates his earthly deeds, he should at the same time have a dim remembrance of the divine-spiritual world. The Greek knows that he can gain his knowledge only from observation of the earthly world; but he has a clear feeling that what he perceives in the minerals, in the plants, in the animals, stars, mountains, rivers, and so forth, must be a reflection of the Divine-Spiritual which he can experience in a world other than the world of the senses.

This is the case because in that epoch man still feels that with the best part of his being he belongs to a supersensible world. This supersensible world has, to be sure, become darkened for human observation—that is how man puts it to himself—but during earthly existence too he must strive to illumine it. True, in the Graeco-Latin epoch men can no longer regulate the ordinary deeds of humanity in accordance with the courses of the stars, since their mastery of the science of the stars is not on a par with that of the Chaldaean and the Egyptians; but at all events they still endeavor, rather gropingly, through studying expressions of the will of the divine-spiritual Beings, to bring something of the Divine-Spiritual into the earthly world.

In places of the Oracles and in Temples, men sought to ascertain the will of the Gods from priestesses and prophetesses, as you know from history. And we see how these endeavors to ascertain the will of the divine-spiritual Beings with whom man himself is one during pre-earthly existence, were also customary in other regions of Europe at the time when Graeco-Roman culture was in its prime in the South. In the Germanic regions of Middle Europe, for example, priestesses and prophetesses were highly venerated; pilgrimages were made to them and in ecstatic states of consciousness, the will of the Gods was made known to men so that their deeds on Earth might be in conformity with this will. We can see quite clearly how up to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—although the urge is by then less intense—man strives to formulate the knowledge he seeks in such a way that it contains within it the will of the divine-spiritual world. Through these centuries of the Middle Ages, right up to the twelfth and thirteenth, we can find places which at that time were still considered sacred and later became our laboratories—we can find places where the so-called alchemists were investigating the forces of substances and of Nature-processes; we can peruse writings which still give a faint picture of the kind of thinking that was applied in those old centres of research and we shall everywhere discover evidence of the striving to bring the substances themselves into such combinations or mutual interaction that the Divine-Spiritual can work in the phial, in the retort.

In Goethe's Faust there is an echo of this attitude of soul, in the scene where Wagner is working in his laboratory to produce Homunculus. It is really not until the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Western civilization that the desire arises in man to lay the foundations of a science in complete independence, without bringing his ideas into any direct connection with a divine-spiritual will by which the world is ruled. A purely human form of knowledge arises for the first time during this period; it is knowledge that is emancipated from the divine-spiritual will. And it is this purely human knowledge, emancipated from the divine will of which the science of Galileo and Copernicus is composed. It is science through which the universe is presented to man in the abstract picture current today, the picture of a vault—as Giordano Bruno was the first to envisage—with the stars circling in it as purely material bodies, or even in a condition of rest taking their share in cosmic happenings. This picture of the universe makes us imagine that a vast mechanism works in upon the Earth from cosmic space. And even in the investigation of earthly things people confine themselves fundamentally to what can be calculated and measured and so be part of an abstract mechanism. This, however, is a world of conceptions and ideas which man can spin out of himself with the help of external observation and experiment, where the physical substances alone are believed to affect each other, the Nature-processes to become manifest and where the Divine-Spiritual is no longer sought in the world of Nature.

There is a vast difference between this conceptual world and the kind of thought that preceded it in human evolution. It is only since the first third of the fifteenth century that man's concepts and ideas have become purely human. And it is the spatial with which man has mainly concerned himself since this period began.

If you go back still farther to the times of the Old Indian, the Old Persian, the Egypto-Chaldaean culture, everywhere you will find that world-conceptions refer to World Ages. They point back to an ancient epoch when mankind still had intercourse with the Gods, to a Golden Age. They point back to another epoch when man still experienced on Earth at least the sun-reflection of the Divine—a Silver Age, and so on. Time and the course of Time play a conspicuous role in the world-pictures of early evolutionary phases. Likewise, when you consider the Greek epoch, and indeed the world-picture that was current at the same time in the more Northerly and Middle European regions, you will find that everywhere the idea of Time plays an essential part. The Greek points back to that primeval Age when cosmic happenings are the outcome of interaction between Uranus and Gaia. He points to the next Age, to Chronos and Rhea, then to the Age when Zeus and the other Gods known in Greek Mythology rule the Cosmos and the Earth. And it is the same in Germanic Mythology. Time plays the most essential role in all these world-pictures.

A much less important part is played by Space. The spatial element is still obscure in the Norse and Germanic world-pictures with the World Ash, the Giant Ymir and so forth. That something is taking place in Time is quite clear, but the idea of Space is only dimly dawning; it is a factor of no great significance. It is not until the age of Galileo, of Copernicus, of Giordano Bruno, that Space actually begins to play its great role in the picture of the universe. Even in the Ptolemaic system which admittedly is concerned with Space, Time is a more essential factor than it is in the world-picture familiar to us since the fifteenth century, in which Time actually plays a secondary part. The present distribution of the stars in cosmic space is taken as the starting-point and through calculation conclusions are reached as to what the world-picture was like in earlier times. But the conception of Space, the spatial world-picture, becomes of chief importance. And the result is that all human judgments are based on the principle of Space. Modern man has elaborated this element of Space in his external world-picture, elaborated it too in all his thinking. And today this thinking in terms of Space has reached its zenith.

Think how difficult it is for a man of the present day to follow an exposition purely of Time. He is happy if Space is brought in at least to the extent of drawing something on the blackboard. But if the feeling of Space is conveyed by means of photographs, then the modern man is verily in his element! “Illustration”—and by this he means expression in terms of Space—is what man of today strives to achieve in every exposition. Time, inasmuch as it is in perpetual flow, has become something that causes him discomfort. He still attaches value to it in music; but even there the tendency towards the spatial is quite evident.

We need only consider something that has become a definite feature of modern life and this mania of modern man to cleave to the spatial is at once apparent. In the cinema he is utterly indifferent to the element of Time in the picture. He is content with the merest fraction of the Time element and is entirely given up to the element of Space.

This orientation of the soul to the spatial is very characteristic of the present time and whoever observes modern culture and civilization with open eyes will find it everywhere.

On the other hand, in anthroposophical Spiritual Science we are striving, as you know, to get away from the spatial. To be sure, we meet the desire for it in that we too try to give tangible form to the spiritual, and that is justifiable in order to strengthen the faculty of ideation. Only we must always be conscious that this is purely a means of illustration and that what is essential is to strive, at least to strive, to transcend the spatial.

Space ‘devotees’ among us often cause difficulties by making diagrams of the consecutive epochs of Time, writing “First Epoch with Sub-Epochs,” and so on. Then follow a great many captions and what is sequential in Time is dragged into a spatial picture.

Our aim, however, is to transcend the spatial. We are striving to penetrate into the temporal and also into the super-temporal, into the element that leads beyond what is physically perceptible. The physically perceptible exists in its crudest form in the world of Space and there thought is led in a certain direction. I have often spoken of the real intentions of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It certainly does not belittle, let alone reject, the mode of thinking engendered in the age of Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno. The validity of this mode of thinking in which, as you know, Space is the essential element, is fully recognized by anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Therefore it ought to be able to shed light into every domain of scientific thought. It must not adopt an amateurish attitude to these domains of scientific thought but must shed light into them by its way of looking at things.

But over and over again it must be stressed that anthroposophical Spiritual Science is endeavoring to guide back again to the Divine-Spiritual this purely human knowledge that is based almost entirely on the element of Space and is emancipated from the Divine-Spiritual. We do not hark back to ancient conditions but we desire to guide the modern attitude of soul into the spiritual, away from its preoccupation with what is purely spatial and material. In other words, we want to learn to talk about spiritual things, as people in the Galileo-Copernican age grew accustomed to talk about substances, about forces. With its methods of study and observation, this Spiritual Science is to be a match for the kind of knowledge that has been developing in connection with the things and processes of the material world since the first third of the fifteenth century. Its aim is the attainment of spiritual knowledge that is related to this Nature-knowledge, although since the former is concerned with the supersensible, the contrast is very apparent.

Inwardly considered, what is it that we are seeking to achieve? If we transfer ourselves in thought into the position of the divine-spiritual Beings in whose ranks we live between death and rebirth, and discern how they direct their gaze downwards, and through the various means I have described observe the course of events on Earth, then we find that these Beings looked down to the Earth in the earlier ages of human evolution—in the Old Indian, Old Persian, Old Chaldaean-Egyptian epochs—and beheld what men were doing, what views they held of Nature and of their own social life. And then—if I may put it so—the Gods were able to say to themselves concerning the deeds and thoughts of men: Their deeds and their thoughts are a result of their memory of, or are an echo of, what they experienced among us in our world.—In the case of the Chaldaeans or Egyptians it was still quite evident that the primary wish of men below on the Earth was to carry out what the Gods above had thought or were thinking. When the Gods looked down to the Earth they beheld happenings that were in keeping with their intentions; and it was the same when they looked into the thoughts of men—as Gods are able to do. Since the first third of the fifteenth century this has changed. Since then, the divine-spiritual Beings have looked down to the Earth, and especially when they look down at the present time, they find that things everywhere are fundamentally alien to them, that men are doing things on the Earth which they themselves have planned in accordance with the phenomena and processes of earthly existence. And to the Gods with whom men live between death and rebirth, this is an entirely alien attitude.

When an alchemist in his laboratory was endeavoring to ascertain the divine-spiritual will through the combination and separation of the Elements, a God would have beheld something akin to his own nature in what the alchemist was doing. If a God were to look into a modern laboratory, the methods and procedure adopted there would be intensely alien to him. It can be said with absolute truth that since the first third of the fifteenth century, the Gods have felt as if the whole human race had fallen away from them in a certain respect, as if men down on the Earth were engaged in self-made trivialities, in things which the Gods are unable to understand,—certainly not the Gods who still guided the hands and minds of men in their scientific pursuits in Graeco-Latin times. These divine-spiritual Beings have no active interest in what is done in modern laboratories, let alone in modern hospitals. I was obliged on a previous occasion to say that when the Gods look down through windows, as I called them, what interests them least of all on Earth is the kind of work carried out by professors. What goes to the very heart of one who has genuine insight into modern Initiation Science is that he is obliged to say to himself: In recent times we men have become estranged from the Gods; we must seek again for bridges to connect us with the divine-spiritual world.—And it is this that quickens the impulse for anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Its desire is to transform the scientific ideas and concepts that are unintelligible to the Gods in such a way that they are spiritualized and are thus able to provide a bridge to the Divine-Spiritual.

It should be realized that light, for example, is something in which divinity is present. This was strongly felt in ancient Persian culture, but today when, for example, attempts are made to indicate by all sorts of lines how the rays from a lens are broken, this is a language that the Gods do not understand; it means nothing at all to them. All these things must be approached by an attitude of soul that enables the bridge to the Divine to be found once again. To realize this means a great deepening of insight into the kind of task that is incumbent upon the present age in the matter of transforming and metamorphosing our unspiritual ideas.

A cosmic truth of deep significance underlies these things. The conception of Space is an entirely human conception. The Gods with whom man lives together in the most important period of his life between death and a new birth have a vivid conception of Time but no conception of Space such as man acquires on Earth. This conception of Space is entirely human. Man really enters into Space for the first time when he descends from the divine-spiritual world into the physical world of the Earth. True, as seen from here, every thing appears in spatial perspective. But thinking in dimensions, if I may put it so, is something that belongs entirely to the Earth.

In Western civilization this conception of Space has become ingrained in man since the fifteenth century. But when through the spiritualizing of purely spatial knowledge, bridges to the divine world have been found again, then what man has gained from the science of Space—in the very period when he has emancipated his thought most drastically from the divine world, i.e. since the fifteenth century—all the spatial knowledge he has gained will become important for the divine-spiritual world as well. And man can conquer a new portion of the universe for the Gods if he will but bring the spirit again into the conception of Space.

You see, what I have described in the book Occult Science—the periods of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, Earth and the future periods of Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan—is only present to the Gods in the sequence of Time. Here on Earth, however, it all lives itself out in terms of Space. We are living today in the Earth period proper but in happenings on the Earth there still linger the echoes of the periods of Old Moon, Old Sun and Old Saturn.

If you will steep yourselves in the description of the Old Saturn period given in Occult Science, you will say: The Saturn period is past but the effects of its warmth are still present in our earthly existence. Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth are within one another; they exist simultaneously. The Gods see them in the sequence of Time. Although in earlier ages, even during Chaldaean times they were seen in their succession, now we see them within one another, spatially within one another. Indeed this leads very much farther and if we study these things in detail, we shall discover what really lies behind them.

Imagine that you stretch out your left hand. The Divine lives in everything terrestrial. In your muscles, in your nerves, lives the Divine. Now with the fingers of your left hand you touch the fingers of your right hand—this can only be done in Space. The fact that you feel your right hand with your left, your left hand with your right—this is something which the divine-spiritual Beings do not follow. They follow the left hand and right hand up to the point of contact, but the feeling that arises between the two is an experience which the faculties possessed by the Gods do not make possible; it is something that arises only in Space. Just as little as the Gods behold Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth simultaneously but only in succession, in Time, so they have none of the purely spatial experiences known to man. When you look with your left and right eyes and have the lines of vision from right and from left, the activity of the Gods is present in the vision from the right eye and again in the vision from the left eye, but in the meeting of the two lines of vision lies the purely human element. Thus we experience as men, because we have been placed into the world of Space, something that is experienced in a state of emancipation from the activity of the Gods.

You need only extend this imagery of the right and left hands to other domains in the life of earthly man, and you will find a great many human experiences that fall right away from the Gods' field of vision. It is really only since the first third of the fifteenth century that man has brought ideas of a purely human kind into these domains. Hence human thinking has become less and less intelligible to the Gods when they look down to the Earth. And with this in mind we must turn our attention to that most important event in the last third of the nineteenth century which may be characterized by saying that the rulership of the Spiritual Being known as Gabriel was succeeded by the rulership of that other Spiritual Being known as Michael.

In the last third of the nineteenth century the Spiritual Being we call Michael became the Ruler, as it were, of everything of a spiritual character in human events on the Earth. Whereas Gabriel is a Being orientated more to the passive qualities of man, Michael is the active Being, the Being who as it were pulses through our breath, our veins, our nerves, to the end that we may actively develop all that belongs to our full humanity in connection with the Cosmos. What stands before us as a challenge of Michael is that we become active in our very thoughts, working out our view of the world through our own inner activity. We only belong to the Michael Age when we do not sit down inactively and desire to let enlightenment from within and from without come to us, but when we co-operate actively in what the world offers us in the way of experiences and opportunities for observation. If a man carries out some experiment, it does not fundamentally involve activity; there is not necessarily any activity on his part; it is just an event like any other event in Nature, except that it is directed by human intelligence. But all happenings in Nature have also been directed by intelligence! How is man's mental life nowadays affected by experiments? There is no active participation, for he simply looks on and tries to eliminate activity as much as possible; he wants to let the experiment tell him everything and regards as fanciful anything that is the outcome of his own inner activity. It is precisely in their scientific ideas that men are least of all in the Michael Age.

But humanity must enter into the Michael Age. If we put the question to ourselves: What does it actually mean in the whole cosmic setting that Gabriel should have passed on the sceptre to Michael?—then we must answer: It means that of all the Beings who spiritually guide humanity, Michael is the Spirit who is the first to draw near to what men here on Earth are doing as the result of this emancipation of knowledge since the first third of the fifteenth century. Gabriel stands in utter perplexity before the ideas and notions of a cultured man of the modern age. Michael, who is closely connected with the forces of the Sun, can at least instil his activity into such thoughts of man as can be impulses for his free deeds. Michael can work, for instance, into what I have called in Occult Science, free, pure thinking, which must be the true impulse for the individual will of man acting in freedom in the new age. And with the deeds of man which spring from the impulse of love, Michael has his own particular relationship.

Hence he is the messenger whom the Gods have sent down so that he may receive what is now being led over from knowledge emancipated from spirit into spiritualized knowledge. The science which as anthroposophical Spiritual Science again spiritualizes spatial thinking, lifts it again into the supersensible—this Spiritual Science works from below upwards, stretches out its hands as it were from below upwards to grasp the hands of Michael stretching down from above. It is then that the bridge can be created between man and the Gods. Michael has become the Regent of this Age because he is to receive what the Gods wish to receive from what man can add to the Time-concept through the Space-concept—for this augments the knowledge possessed by the Gods.

The Gods picture Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, in the succession of Time. If man rightly develops the latest phase of his life of thought, he sees this in terms of Space. The Gods can picture the outstretching of the left and of the right hand, but the actual contact is a purely human matter. The Gods can live in the line of vision of the left eye, in the line of vision of the right eye. Man envisages in terms of Space how the vision of the left eye meets that of the right eye. Michael directs his gaze down upon the Earth. He is able, by entering into connection with what men develop in pure thought and objectify in pure will, to take cognisance of what is acquired by the citizens of Earth, by men, as the fruit of thinking in terms of Space, and to carry it up into divine worlds.

If men were merely to develop Space-knowledge and not spiritualize it, if they were to stop short at Anthropology and were not willing to advance to Anthroposophy, then the Michael Age would go by. Michael would retire from his rulership and would bring this message to the Gods: Humanity desires to separate itself from the Gods.—If Michael is to bring back the right message to the world of the Gods, he must speak to this effect: During my Age, men have raised to the Supersensible what they have already developed in the way of thinking purely in terms of Space; and we can therefore accept men again, for they have united their thought with ours.—If human evolution proceeds in the right way, Michael will not have to say to the Gods: Men have become accustomed to stare at everything spatially; they have learnt to despise what lives only in Time.—If human beings are resolved to achieve their earthly goal, Michael will say: Men have made efforts to bring Time and the Supersensible again into the Spatial; therefore those who are not content merely to stare at the Spatial, who are not content to accept everything in such a material form as was customary at the beginning of the twentieth century, can be regarded as having linked their lives directly to the life of the Gods.—

If we genuinely pursue Anthroposophy in the light of Initiation Science, it means that we concern ourselves with cosmic affairs, with affairs which humanity has to work out in harmony with the world of the Gods. And in the present age very much is at stake; it is a matter of whether we shall or shall not sow the seed for true communion in the future with the divine-spiritual world.

When you realize the tremendous significance of this issue, you will be able to measure the earnestness and inner steadfastness needed by the soul if Anthroposophy is to be the content of its life of thought.

One of the repeated objections to the search for spiritual knowledge, in the last third of the nineteenth century, is this: when a man has passed through the gates of death he will see the nature of the spiritual life as lived without the physical body, but while here in the physical body attention must be paid to earthly life; here man should live as if the earth were his sole sphere of activity. A deeper study of Spiritual Science shows us increasingly what a superficial grasp of spiritual life is contained in such a statement. It teaches us that things are not really as though life in a physical body before death were entirely separate from life in the spiritual world after death, as if the one did not contact the other. We shall best come to a common understanding for study, if we consider what we already know of the connection of the spiritual life with physical life. Let us begin by reminding ourselves of what we have learnt from Spiritual Science about the alternating life of man between sleeping and waking. We speak of this rightly when we say: The Ego and astral body are outside the physical body during sleep. This is a sufficient answer for the immediate demand for knowledge, but only one aspect of the full truth; it is as though we were to say: the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, and is not there in the interval. We know that for the earth this is not the case; we know that during the time the sun is not shining for us it is shining elsewhere, giving its light to other inhabitants of the earth when it is dark for us. It is much the same with the life of the Ego and astral body in. relation to that of the physical and etheric bodies, if we take a wide view of it. True, the Ego and astral body are outside the physical body during sleep, but only partially they are outside the blood and nerve-systems. When we all asleep the sun of our Ego and astral body sets in this way for the blood and nerve-systems; yet from the Ego and astral body outside, the forces radiate while we are sleeping into those organs not connected with the blood and nerves. Our body lives in two spheres. We live in one while awake, when we are ensouled by our Ego and astral body; and in the other when we sleep, in the sphere from which the radiations and force of our Ego and astral body pour into the activities of our body-with the exception of the functions connected with the blood and nerves. Actually during sleep we are in the spiritual world with our Ego and astral body—as it were inserted into it—and just those forces of the astral body and Ego of which man is unconscious in normal human life, stream into his bodily organs when he is asleep. Thus we see the enormous significance of sleep for healthy human life on earth. I will make this clear by a little diagram. Let us take (a) for the sphere of the spiritual world, and (b) our body on earth. I will then shade the part connected with the blood and nerves; the other contains the organs apart from the system of blood and nerves. This cannot really be so sharply divided, for in a certain sense the nerve and blood systems are themselves organs with activities of their own like the other organs; but in so far as they are instruments for the conscious soul-life they may be considered as ensouled and inspired by the Ego and astral body.

This same Ego and astral body are taken into the sphere of spiritual life during the night and they thence radiate their forces into the other organs of the body. Thus we may say: There is in our physical body something that is strengthened and revived by what our soul in its sleeping condition draws into itself from the spiritual world and with which it is permeated by the spiritual world. The sun of our Ego and astral body sets for the nerves and blood, in so far as the Ego is connected with the blood, and the latter is not merely bodily life. It sets for the blood and nerves when the human being sleeps, and shines into the other organs functioning in our body. From this fact we can easily understand that sleep is an important Healer, and that unhealthy sleep may be regarded as one of the most deep-seated causes of illness, especially in relation to certain inner functions of our bodily life. Spiritual Science shows us that the way in which our Ego and astral body leave the blood and nerve-systems during sleep and enter spiritual life, is a matter of great consequence. Such things as I am about to discuss can apparently be refuted easily by so-called external experience, but the Spiritual Scientist must become accustomed to the fact that these refutations are only apparent, and that what is actually derived from the observations of inward processes is true. If the outer facts seem contradictory, we must search and see in how far they are illusion. I will now give a concrete instance, verified by Spiritual Science, which has an important bearing on this point.

Human life changes with respect to many things, but certain fundamental facts of life remain constant for long periods. In the Middle Ages there existed a certain fear, the so-called fear of spirits, of all sorts of elemental beings and ghosts; this we now call mediaeval superstition. In our day the object has changed, but not the fear; for just as the people of the Middle Ages were afraid of ghosts-—those of the present time are afraid of bacilli and similar things. It might be said that ghosts are more respectable and more to be feared than bacilli. The change has come about through the fact that formerly people were of a more spiritual disposition; they were afraid of the elemental spirit-beings; while now as the disposition is more materialistic, the spirits must be of a physical nature. This corresponds better with the age of materialism. What I wanted to say, however, is that Occult Science reveals the fact that bacilli are nourished in the human body if they are to thrive. Human beings do cultivate them. Of course everyone in the present time will say that it would be silly to breed bacilli. This is not a question of principle of any kind, but of looking at things from the right standpoint. It cannot be denied that, as Spiritual Science teaches, an Ego and astral body which have been fed on materialistic ideas alone, and have rejected all spiritual conceptions and wished to have nothing to do with them, when they leave the body during sleep, send into the bodily organs forces from the spiritual spheres which are just what the bacilli need. Nothing better can be done for the rearing of bacilli than to carry crude material ideas into sleep-life; thereby calling forth Ahrimanic forces which stream into the body and become the cultivators of bacilli.

To form a proper judgment of all this, we must understand clearly that the moment we turn to the study of spiritual life, we immediately have to consider what is called human fellowship. For a common co-operation in fellowship is effectual in a far greater measure when working at spiritual matters than when only concerned with the physical plane. We might say that in order to have no harmful bacilli in our bodies, it is best to apply the remedy of falling asleep with spiritual thoughts in our minds. Perhaps that might become a remedy, if it were to be medically proved, so that the most materialistic people in times to come would allow spiritual thoughts to be prescribed for them; and something contributing to spiritual life might be hoped for in this way. But the matter is not so simple, for the importance of communal life really begins when we touch spiritual matters, and there we can say: it is perhaps of no advantage to the individual to cherish spiritual ideas if all those around him are breeding bacilli by their materialistic thinking; here the one breeds for the other. This is an important fact and we must bear it in mind. Therefore I must again emphasize what I have already told you, that Spiritual Science can only be fruitful in its service to humanity when it does not merely serve the individual. It is not enough for the individual to accept it; Spiritual Science must patiently wait until it can become a factor in civilization, until it grips the heart and soul of the many; then we shall see what it can do for man.

There is, however, something which affects the Ahrimanic beings in the bacilli just as strongly. I say Ahrimanic beings, for I can easily show you the difference between Ahrimanic and other beings—and even externally it can be easily seen. Around us we see Nature with her many creatures; all that lives outside in Nature draws its life from the good, wise and progressive beings. Everything having its existence in other organisms and preferring to thrive therein belongs to the creatures of a Luciferic or Ahrimanic order. All parasites are of Luciferic or Ahrimanic origin; if we remember this we can easily distinguish the differences in the nature-kingdoms. There is something, as I said, very helpful for Ahrimanic creatures when they infest the human body. Suppose we are living at the time of an epidemic or plague. Naturally at such a time we must look after others, and a strong human fellowship or co-operation comes into being, for the karmic conditions may actually be such that the one who in his individual life seems least likely to have the illness, falls a prey to it. Nevertheless—we must not be deceived by appearances—what I am going to say is generally true. If we are living among the sick or dying and have to absorb these pictures that are around us and then fall asleep with these pictures in our minds and if nothing is linked with them but selfish fear, the imaginations arising from these pictures in the soul during sleep become filled with this selfish fear, and that enables injurious forces to enter the human body. Imaginations of fear are really the fostering forces for the Ahrimanic enemies of man. When a noble disposition is present, so that egotistic fear retires and loving help for others prevails, and we pass into the sleep life, not with fearful imaginations but with the effects produced by loving help, this means destruction for the Ahrimanic enemies of humanity. It is quite true that by the encouragement of such an attitude we could put an end to epidemics, if we regulated our conduct accordingly.

Here I may indicate how some day (but it cannot be yet) the results of knowledge of spiritual life will be seen in the social life of humanity: human souls will become strong through spiritual knowledge, and those whose disposition is to accept spiritual Knowledge will work healingly on material life on earth.

Hence we see how unjustifiable the objection is, that while living on earth we need not bother about spiritual life. A great deal depends upon the kind of spiritual life we take with us into sleep while here on earth, for by it we mold our souls into good or bad instruments for the sending forth of forces from the spiritual world into those organs of the body which are not used as instruments by the soul in the day consciousness, but which function physically and chemically beneath the threshold of consciousness. Those functions which do not belong to the activity of nerves and blood in the human being but are simply of an organic nature-physical and chemical activity—those are not life functions such as obtain in the plant and mineral kingdoms, but functions into which the forces of the spiritual world flow during sleep. Therefore we see the importance of being able to carry spiritual knowledge into sleep life, and we realize the attitude of mind it creates. If there still is doubt as to the inter-working of the spiritual and physical worlds, we may, among other things, make the following remarks.

Let us imagine that some sort of climatic change were to corrupt the whole ground of the earth, so that nothing good for food could grow on it; we should then discover how important the earth's mineral and plant kingdoms are for man. If the earth were to decay under our feet, we should realize how much we need the lower kingdoms of earth, that human life may be sustained. What the ground and fruits are for our physical life that we are, as living beings with the activities of our souls, for those who have passed through the gates of death. It is a fact that the dead living in their sphere have need of a ground from which they may gather fruits. The following illustration will give an idea of this: Let us think of a crowd of people asleep, all filled with conceptions belonging to earthly life alone, materialistic ideas. This ground which they form for the dead, is just as sterile for them as waste, corrupt ground would be to us. The dead feel this as a region in which they starve.

Every spiritual conception which we take into our soul and carry into sleep helps, while we sleep, to create part of the ground needed by the dead, even as the mineral and plant kingdoms are needed by us. In a certain sense souls filled with spiritual ideas during sleep, form the fruitful spiritual basis for the nourishing of the dead; and we take away the nutriment which the dead need and which must be gathered on our earth, if we allow our souls to become desolate, i.e., empty of spiritual ideas—and conceptions. Here we see still more clearly the importance of cosmic spiritual knowledge, and its fruitfulness for the spiritual world itself. Just as our sleeping souls provide the ground from which the dead draw their sustenance, so, if we knowingly cause spiritual concepts to pass through our souls that helps the dead in their power of perception. For this reason I have advised those who have been bereaved to read to their dead. If we call them to mind, and read in thought something from Spiritual Science, or cause any other spiritual thoughts quietly to pass through our souls, our dead will perceive these. They observe them and are nourished by the unconscious after-effects of the spiritual ideas. Their own consciousness is refreshed or revived by means of what has been read to them. Here again we see constant intercourse between the physical and spiritual worlds. It may easily be suggested that the dead are in the spiritual world and that this method of reading can be of no use to them. Yes! They are in the spiritual world, but the concepts of Spiritual Science have to be formed on earth, and nowhere can they be conceived except in the minds of men on earth: the dead are indeed in a spiritual world and precisely there can these conceptions reach them and sustain them, and we enhance their consciousness if from earth we send these to them. As the most intimate connections exist between the dead and those amongst whom they have lived, the best persons to read to them are those who were friends and helpers before they died, or who have been closely related to them. If you cultivate such thoughts about the connections of the physical with the spiritual world, you will actually experience a new disposition, which truly in the greatest sense of the word must be called the religious disposition of the future. From such spiritual-scientific studies as have just been given, a disposition will be developed which in the highest sense deserves to be called religious, for he who thus acknowledges the spiritual world will build upon the foundations of the Divine Wisdom streaming through the Cosmos.

It is tremendously important that we should acquire this feeling of the ruling Wisdom in the Cosmos and that we should fill ourselves with it. When humanity is permeated by this feeling, it will, with a deep genuine confidence in the wise ruling Wisdom of the Universe, accept its destiny and all the strokes of destiny which are so hard to bear. When we observe the spiritual worlds in which the dead live, we can often see how much easier it is for the dead when the friends they left behind on earth are permeated with this ruling Wisdom of the Universe. Weeping over the dead is, of course, quite natural; but if we cannot put an end to our weeping it looks as though we doubted the ruling Wisdom of the Universe; and he who can look into spiritual worlds knows, that those who long for their dead to be here and not in the spiritual world, are doing the greatest harm to them. We very much help the dead in their life after death if we accept our destiny, and think of the dead as having been taken from us at the right moment by a good ruling Wisdom, because they were needed for other spheres of existence beyond earth. In the future much will depend on people helping more (not less) in all that touches the sorrows of humanity, having a clear knowledge that destiny is ever at work, and that if through Karma even death has befallen those who belong to them, this had to be. This must not prevent us, as long as a person is living, from doing all that is possible to help him when he is ill if he is amenable to treatment, but as human beings, we may not presume to go beyond what is allotted to us as such. We must be sure that the ruling Wisdom of the Universe is wiser than we are. This is all commonplace and trivial, but it is too little spoken of to-day. Great happiness would come to both the living and dead, if this knowledge were more generally circulated; if it could enter as a conviction into men's souls, if they could think of the dead as living, as having experienced a transformation of life, and not think of them as having been taken from them.

If we only observed a little of this connection between the physical and spiritual worlds, we should see the manifold ways in which the one world is intimately linked with the other, and that the affairs of the physical world only become clear when observed in the light of the spiritual world. If with reference to anything that happens to us in the physical world we could but succeed in finding the spiritual causes of some stroke of fate or misfortune, we should look beyond it, and understand that what seems supremely sad may be understood at the fount of Cosmic Wisdom. We must emphasize this over and over again. It does not alter the fact that much suffering may come to us; but it does alter our attitude to it, we do not sink under it and shut ourselves egotistically in our sorrow, or withdraw from the world's life, which we certainly ought not to do. Many other things are similarly linked together and precisely these significant incidents teach us the falsity of the saying that we need not trouble about the spiritual life during our physical life on earth. For the bringing of spiritual ideas, feelings and convictions into physical earth-life is of great importance. Let me now add some examples to what I have told you to-day. Examples will show us clearly the truth of what I have been saying.

A person well-known to some of the members of our Society died before attaining middle age. If a person dies early in life, about the beginning of the thirties, it is often asked: What is the meaning of this? Why should a person be cut off from earth life in the first third of his physical life on earth? When we traced this person back, to describe what she was as an individual, we came to an earlier incarnation about the third or fourth century after Christ, in which she had acquired certain forces, of which we may say that, civilization being as it was at that time, these and similar soul-capacities did not really belong to that period. The time had not arrived when the talents then acquired by the soul of this individual could be used. She was born again in a new life, became one of our members and died before the first half of her life, the ascending part, had been completed. In this case we could immediately see, on studying the whole connection of the physical with the spiritual, that this person was one of the most important and significant workers with us in all our Cosmic work.

Materialism is rampant in our times, it puts its stamp on earth-life more than we realize. In our day particularly, materialism is so strong that those beings of the higher Hierarchies whose task it is to carry on the progress of Cosmic evolution actually cannot rescue all the souls who have to-day become materialistic. These must not be left behind, they must be saved; yet their salvation can only be accomplished by the death of certain souls at an early age, who take with them into the spiritual world the forces which would otherwise have been used in the course of their earth-life, and which they then transmute so that they may help the beings of the higher Hierarchies who are working for the redemption of the materialistically-minded souls. Persons who have thus died early in life, are a wonderful help to the higher beings. Now in the case of the soul to which I am referring, something special resulted. She brought with her into her latest incarnation the powers which could not be fully used in her earlier life, poured them as it were into her body, which became weak and ill because of the penetration of these forces. The soul was too powerful for the body; it really contained very great powers. This person died at the above mentioned early age, and, with the forces which instead of being weakened by age remained at their youthful strength, she passed through the gates of death into the spiritual world, still possessing the fund of strength which would have served a long life in that incarnation, and filled to overflowing with earthly force would have so poured itself into the body, as to bring the same into relationship with the external world. Instead she was able to take up spiritual ideas enthusiastically and thus to bring a great supply into the spiritual world. When we trace this individual, who was dear to a large number of our friends, we may learn a great deal from her. What we see in her is, that at a definite time (in this case about the Third or Fourth Century A.D.) certain forces appeared on the path of human evolution which could not be brought to fulfillment then, and that the work to be done through these forces must be taken up later—we have to look back to what belongs to an earlier period and is preserved by certain individuals for a later life. Now when we look for this individual during her life after death we observe direct results—we see that the powers which have lain dormant for a time, reserved for a coming period, now burst forth and are preparing for humanity's future. Thus we see how a later life must be linked with an earlier one, when talking of human evolution. We could not know certain things, of which it may be said that what had existed in the third and fourth epochs had to be revived in the fifth post Atlantean times, unless we could see into the spiritual worlds and say: ‘There we see an individuality who, by means of a short life on earth, acquired faculties which shine forth like a revival of something that has been lost to human life.’ A great inflow of strength comes to the spiritual investigator on observing such individuals in their life after death.

If the time of physical life on earth were ever so bad, if ever so many enemies were to arise against Spiritual Science, and if danger threatened on all sides, it would certainly be a sad and desperate outlook; but there is one thing which may always be a comfort for the future of Anthroposophy, that is, that in those who have died, in such a way as the person above mentioned, we have the best helpers for our earth, the most powerful fellow-workers. This is a case in which a short life on earth served for the gathering of strength with which to take possession of certain fruitful forces requisite for a later period on the path of human evolution. The wise ruling Cosmic powers far surpass in Wisdom all that we, with our merely earthly wisdom, can comprehend. Naturally such fruits of a shortened earth-life can only result when life is shortened in a purely natural way. In anthroposophical circles it should not be necessary to mention that such results do not occur in cases of suicides, and would be quite impossible.

Now, having said all this, I shall give you another concrete example in reference to a member who has not long since passed from our midst, who had a very long illness, which was connected in a remarkable way with his condition of soul, a lively intellectual person, a renowned poet in his earth life and as we can clearly see, a much more important individual than we had deemed while observing his life on earth. After a life lived in sickness of body and long years of suffering, how strangely the fruits of his suffering on earth, after a relatively short period, reveal themselves in the spiritual world; though only in their beginning. That I may make you understand what I want to say, I should like to lead up to the right concept by means of a comparison.

With deep feeling we can admire nature—a scene in nature or a group of people-but we do not on that account lose anything when a clever artist comes along and depicts the scene as his own soul sees it. We then find in the picture created by the artist something which he has placed alongside nature. We know that we have gained by having looked at Nature through another's soul as well, if we can observe nature side by side with it. Why do I say this? To make use of an illustration: we can go into the spiritual world, we can observe things there; yet it is of great importance to observe something else besides. The person to whom I am referring, who died after a life of much suffering on earth, had during his long illness formed for himself a world of Cosmic imaginations, as it were lifting them up out of a sick body gradually approaching death. In the measure in which the body became more sick and incapacitated, there arose from it this world of Cosmic imaginations. That person then passed through the gates of death, and his imaginations are beginning to shine out in wondrous beauty so that in the spiritual world they can be perceived as a wonderful spiritual work of art, as if created out of the Cosmos. They had their origin in the sick body, and were carried from the sick body into the spiritual world; and for those who are able to see the spiritual worlds in other ways they provide a far richer gain in spiritual knowledge than can be acquired by direct spiritual observation; as in a work of art one sees the world as another soul sees it, side by side with what one sees oneself. The above-mentioned person absorbed spiritual conceptions with great devotion, and was even able to put into his poems much of that which comes to the human soul when it grasps the Mystery of Golgotha in a truly Anthroposophical way, when we allow ourselves to be permeated with the thought of the Christ Whom we have learnt to know through Anthroposophy. For we then so recognize Him in our nature, that we really live according to the Pauline saying ‘Not I, but Christ in me contemplates the Universe.’

These truly Rosicrucian Christian thoughts flowed into the later poems of this personality. While his conscious earth-life was occupied with such poetry and creating these poems, his subconscious powers were molding this world of Cosmic imaginations which really consumed the body by the strength of their inner life, but which so worked that to this person in the spiritual world is probably allotted a task about which I will not speak further now. In any case it must be said that behind this conscious life lies another which passes through the gates of death and so manifests that we know it had already been prepared during earth-life through the disposition which is the result of Spiritual Science, and which has turned into beautiful tableaux of Cosmic imaginations which radiate toward the exploring spiritual investigator, and explain much that perhaps would not otherwise have been so easy to discover, but which will continue to work in the tasks which will be allotted to such an individual.

We must regard such results of Spiritual Science with awe and deep reverence. For if in past times the religious sense of the soul had to be aroused through feeling, in the times in which we now live spirituality must be kindled more and more in man through the inter-working of the physical and spiritual worlds, we must become more and more concrete in our spiritual life. In the future, humanity cannot be prevented from seeking the spiritual in a concrete way, and from thinking about how a human individual continues to work on after death with the forces which, as in this case, were prepared before he had passed through the gates of death.

What depths will be found in human life, how noble will be the feelings with which one human being confronts another I They will in the true sense of the word be moral, and filled with the Divine essence which will then be weaving and working in human life, when the thoughts which speak of the dead in as concrete a way as we now speak of the living, find a home in the hearts of men.

We must think of all this, that we may gain in our hearts and souls a proper sense of the mission and work of Anthroposophy in the future.

I should like you to ponder over the things I have said in the last part of this lecture, regarding them as really springing from that attitude towards Spiritual Science which can only speak of such matters in sacred modesty and with deep reverence, and with this feeling I should like to leave in your souls what I have said.

Tomorrow I shall tell you of other facts, for the stimulation of Spiritual Science in your hearts.

Dr. Steiner: Well, gentlemen, perhaps one of you has a question you would like to ask me today.

Question: I would like to know why people with blond hair are becoming increasingly scarce. Formerly, there were many fair-haired people in the region where I was born, but now there are far fewer. Why is this so?

Dr. Steiner: Your question fits quite well into our discussions, and I can consider it after I describe the human eye for you, as I promised to do earlier. We have already studied the ear; now we shall look at the eye. You may have noticed that blond hair is closely linked with blue eyes; as a rule, blonds have blue eyes. Your question relates to this matter, which you will understand fully when we examine the eye.

Eyes have great significance, indeed, for the human being. It might be assumed that people born blind do not benefit at all from the eyes; nevertheless, they are still part of them, and they have the function not only of seeing but also of influencing the entire nervous system, inasmuch as this originates in the brain. The eyes are still there in one who is born blind even though they cannot see. It is placed in the socket but something is wrong internally, especially with the optic nerve. In addition, the muscles that control eye movements exist also in a blind person, and actually continuously influence the nervous system. Thus, the eye is, indeed, one of the most important organs of our body.

The eye, which is really like a miniature world, is placed in a cavity formed by the skull bones. You might tell yourself that it is something like a tiny world. The optic nerve fills out the retina and terminates in the brain, which I shall outline here (sketching). So, if this is the eye seen in profile and sitting in the eye-socket, then here on the right is a canal through which the optic nerve passes. The eyeball lies buried in fatty tissue and is surrounded by bony walls. Attached to it are six ocular muscles that extend back into the bony walls of the socket. These bones are directly behind the upper jawbone.

In the anterior part of the eye is a completely transparent, clear tissue through which light passes. That the tissue looks black is an illusion; in reality, you see through the eye to its rear wall; you are looking through the transparent skin all the way to the back of the eye. The round blackness you see is the pupil, which looks black because the back of the eyeball is that colour. It is like looking through the window of a dark room; if you think the window itself is black, you are mistaken. The interior of the eye is completely transparent. This tissue is tough and opaque here and transparent in front. Within it and toward the rear is another layer of tissue possessing a network of fine, delicate blood vessels, which thicken here. Around the pupil is the iris, which in some people is blue and in others gray, green, brown or black.

Between the iris and the transparent tissue is a transparent fluid. Where you see the round blackness is the transparent skin, the cornea; behind that is the anterior chamber. It consists of living fluid and is shaped somewhat like a little glass lens. The actual lens of the eye is located here, where these delicate blood vessels come together and where the iris is formed. This structure, called the crystalline lens, also contains a living fluid. Its outer cover is transparent, permitting you to see the blackness behind it. Unlike a glass lens, it is mobile; it moves especially when you need to focus on something nearby. In that event, it is shaped like this (sketching), thick in the middle. When you need to look into the distance, it is bent like this, thin in the middle.

Next to the iris are delicate little muscles, which we tense to make the lens thicker when looking at something close up, or relax to make the lens thinner. A person's living habits also affect the lenses. If you often use your eyes for close work, like reading or writing, gradually the lenses become permanently thick in the middle, and you become near-sighted. If you are a hunter, however, frequently looking into the distance, then the lenses become thin in the middle and you will become far-sighted. Another thing to consider is that in youth the tiny muscles located in and around the iris are still strong and elastic, and we can accommodate to our field of vision. In old age they become slack. This explains why many people become far-sighted with age, but this problem can be corrected. If a person's lenses are too thick in the middle, glasses are prescribed with lenses that are concave. These will compensate for the thickness of the eye's lenses. Some people even have a twofold problem, needing one set of glasses for clear distance vision and another set for close up. If the lenses of the eyes are too thin, the glasses will have convex lenses. Their thickness is added to the lens of the eye and compensates for the defect. You could say that we are able to see because we can correct the defect of the lens. The lens in our eye is like that of our glasses: near- and far-sighted. But the lens in our glasses stays the same, while that in the eye is living and can adjust and accommodate itself.

Behind the lens is also something like a living fluid. It, too, is completely transparent, permitting light to pass through everywhere. This gelatinous and crystalline substance completely fills the interior of the eyeball. So here in front is something like transparent “hard water,” the aqueous humour; next comes the transparent lens, and then comes the vitreous humour, which is also transparent. The optic nerve enters the eye here, and reaches approximately to here.

This optic nerve is extremely complicated. I have drawn it as if the main nerve fibre simply divides here, but there's more to it than this. There are actually four layers of nerves surrounding the vitreous humour. This is the outer layer of the nerve (sketching), which acts like a strong mirror. When light enters the eye and hits the layers of the retina, it is reflected everywhere. It does not go into this (probably referring to the nerve canal) but stays in the eye. The outer layer acts like the wall of a mirror and reflects the light. A second layer of nerves intensifies this reflecting capacity. As we have said, the nerve that lines our eyeball consists of four layers. The outermost layer and the second outer layer reflect back all the light into the interior sphere. Thus, within the vitreous humour we have actually only reflected light. A third layer of nerves consists of the same substance that makes up the gray matter of our brain. The outer parts of our brain are gray matter, not white. Another “skin” constitutes the fourth layer. You see, the vitreous humour is placed within a complicated “sack.” This enables all the light that penetrates into the interior of the eyeball to be reflected within the vitreous humour and to live therein.

What we have in our eye is something that looks like a complicated physical apparatus. What is it for? Well, imagine that a man is standing somewhere. When you look at him, an inverted picture is produced in your eye because of the lens and vitreous humour. So, if a man stands there (sketching), you have a small image of him in the eye, but owing to this apparatus, it is an image that stands on its head. The eye is just like a camera in this respect; it is much like a photographic apparatus in which the object photographed appears in an image upside down. That also happens in the eye; since it is a mirroring device, when light enters, it is reflected. Thus, in the eye we have the image of a little man. Even with all our modern sophisticated machinery, something like the human eye can certainly not be manufactured. We must admit that it is altogether extraordinary and marvellous.

Now, picture to yourselves the starry heaven; form an image of the light-filled sphere around the earth, and then reduce this picture until it is quite small. What you then have is the interior of the human eye. The human eye is actually a world in miniature, and the reflections in the eye resemble myriad surrounding stars. You see, these outer walls do not reflect evenly. There are many tiny bodies, which, like miniature stars, radiate light toward the centre. If we were as small as the image of the human being in the eye and could examine it from inside, its interior would seem infinitely large. Our impression would be the same as when on earth we look up to the glittering stars at night. It is indeed so. It is interesting that the eye is like a miniature world and that the tiny human image produced in the eye by reflections would have the same feeling, if it were conscious, we have at night under a starry sky. It is really quite interesting!

Well, I said, “... if that image possessed consciousness.” But if we did not possess our eyes, we would not be able to view the starry night. We see the night sky and its brilliant stars only because we have eyes; if we close them, we do not see the stars. Nor could we see the starry firmament if the eye did not already contain within it a miniature world. We say to ourselves that this miniature universe really signifies a big world. This is something that must be clearly understood.

Imagine that a man shows you a small photograph of himself or another person. You will realize that even though it is small it was taken of a regular-sized man. You are not encountering the actual person in this picture and, likewise in the eye; in reality you have only this tiny miniature starry sky within you. You then say to yourself, “What I have here before me is the `photograph' of the immense starry sky.” You do this all the time. You have within you the little starry sky of the eye, and then you tell yourself, “This is the photograph of the great starry sky.” You actually always picture the real starry sky from the miniature firmament in your eye; you conceive of the universe by means of this picture within. What you really experience is the infinitesimal firmament in the eye.

Now you might say, “Yes, but this would be true only if we possessed just one eye like the cyclops, whereas we have two eyes.” Well, why do we have two? Try this: Look at something with only one eye. It will appear to be painted on a backdrop. We do not have two images of an object, which we see in proportion and in the right dimensions only because we possess two eyes. Seeing with both eyes is like grabbing your right hand with your left. We are conscious of ourselves because from childhood we have been used to saying “I” to ourselves. The little word, “I,” would not be in the language if our right side were not aware of our left. We would not be conscious of ourselves. We become so accustomed to the most important things that we take them as a matter of course. A hidebound philistine would say, “The question of why one says “I” to oneself does not interest me. It goes without saying that one says “I” to oneself!” Well, he is a narrow-minded and prosaic person. He does not realize that most subtle matters are based on the most complicated processes. He does not know that he became used to touching himself as a child, that is, touching his left hand with his right, and thus grew accustomed to saying “I” to himself.

This fact can be traced in human culture. If we go back to ancient times, to the days of the Old Testament, for instance, we find priests who—excuse me for voicing such a heretical opinion—often knew much more than the priests nowadays and who said, “We want to teach man self-awareness.” So they taught people to fold their hands. This is the origin of folding your hands. Man touched himself in order to find the strong ego within him and to develop his will. Things like this are not said today because they are not understood. Priests today simply tell members of the congregation to fold their hands in prayer; they do not give the meaning of this gesture because they themselves do not know it anymore.

When we see with our two eyes, we feel that what is there in the light is in fact spatial. If we had only one eye, everything would appear as if painted on the firmament. Our two eyes enable us to see things in three dimensions and to experience ourselves as standing within the centre of the world. In a good or bad sense, every man considers himself to be the centre of the world. Therefore, it is of great importance that we have two eyes.

Now, since it is so important for man to use his eyes for seeing, we overlook something else about them. We are not so ignorant in the case of the ear. I believe I have mentioned already that when we hear we also speak; that is, we ourselves produce what we hear. We can understand a spoken language only because of the Eustachian tube, which runs from the mouth into the ear. You surely know that children born deaf cannot speak either, and that people who are not taught to speak a language cannot understand it either. Special means must be used to gain an understanding of what has been heard.

It does indeed appear that seeing is the only purpose of the eye, but a child learns not only to see with its eyes but also to speak with them, even if we don't pay much attention to it. The language of the eyes is not as suitable for everyday use as is the language directed to the ears, but with it you can discover whether a person is telling a lie or the truth. If you are the least bit sensitive, you can discover in the way he looks at you whether or not he is telling you the truth. The eyes do speak, and the child learns to speak with them just as it does with its mouth.

In the language of the ear the larynx, with its function of uttering sounds is separated from it, and thus there are here two separate aspects. In the case of the language of the eye, there are muscles right within the organ and also around it. It is the muscles that make the eye into a kind of visible organ of speech. Whether we look somebody straight in the eye, or have a shifty look, depends on the muscles that surround the eyeball. In the case of the ear, it is as if it were contained within the larynx, as in fishes. In man the ear is separated from the larynx, but in fishes they are joined to form one organ. The act of speaking is separated from hearing, but with the eye it is as if the larynx with its muscles surrounded the ear. The eye is situated within its speech organ as if the ear were placed within the larynx. In humans it is like this (sketching). Here we have the larynx, the voice box, which goes down through the windpipe into the lungs and up into the palate. It enables us to speak. From the mouth we have a connection with the ear.

Now imagine that the larynx is not like it is in humans but that it spreads out much wider. Then we would have the broad larynx that Lucifer possesses in my wooden statue. The larynx is so large that the head fits in between, and it reaches up on both sides to surround the ear. With this organ we would both speak and hear. With the eye we do just that; we speak through the muscles that surround the eyeball, and through the eye we simultaneously see. So in some respects the eye is conceived like the ear, but in other respects it is, of course, quite different. This, then, is the purpose of the muscles I have drawn here.

We can say that we speak of what we know, and we consider those who say things of which they know nothing to be more or less fools. We say of such people that they are talking to themselves, shooting off their mouths. As a rule, however, sensible and rational people express what they know. We do not speak consciously with the eye, however, for we would have to be shrewd fellows, indeed, if we could consciously speak the language of the eyes. This process is unconscious and accompanies our other behaviour. The people in Southern Italy, for example, still speak of an “evil eye.” They still know that a person who has a certain look about him is false. They talk of an evil eye because they sense that the eye expresses the whole nature of a man without his being aware of it. This superstition in Southern Italy goes so far that some hang little charms or religious medals around their necks as protection from it.

So you see how marvellously the eye is formed. A person who studies the eye in this way simply cannot say that there is nothing of the soul in it. It is simply stupid and philistine to say that the eye has no element of the soul. People say that light penetrates through the pupil into the eye, passes through the lens into the vitreous humour, produces an image here on the retina, and then is transmitted into the brain. Modern science stops right there, or it might state further that the light in the brain is used to produce thoughts. This description gives rise to all sorts of nonsensical statements that lead to nothing.

In reality, the light does not reach the brain. I have explained how it is reflected in the eyeball as in a mirror. The light remains in the eye, and it is important to know that it stays there. The interior of the eyeball is like the illuminated starry expanse. The light remains within the eye and does not penetrate directly into the brain. If the light did enter the brain, we would not be able to see anything at all. We can see because it does not do so. Just imagine, gentlemen, that you are standing here in this room all by yourselves; there are no chairs, nothing but the walls. The room is completely illuminated within, but you see nothing. You know only that it is illuminated, but you can see no objects of any kind. If the brain were only filled with light, we would see nothing because it is not solely on account of light that we see. Everywhere the light is kept in the eye and illumines its interior. What does this mean? Well, imagine that we have a little box. I stand with my back to it; I have not seen it before. I must reach behind myself to be able to know that it is there. Likewise, when the eye is illuminated from within, I must first feel the light to know that it is there. I must first feel the light, and this is done with the soul. In other words, the apparatus of the eye produces something we can feel. The soul passes through the muscles and feels or senses the little man I have mentioned within the eye.

Every organ within the human being shows us that here we must say that the soul observes, feels or senses what is within. If we examine everything carefully, we discover the soul and the spirit everywhere, especially in the eye. After a while, we can get the feeling that we are sitting in front of a peephole here (referring to his eye). When I look at you, you appear within, but I form the conception that the image within is the person outside. This is how the eye works. Just imagine that it is a little peephole through which the soul forms the idea that what it observes is the vast world. We simply must recognize the soul's existence when we actually examine the matter.

Now, I said that here is the choroid (referring to his sketch of the eyeball). It contains tiny blood vessels and lies under the optic nerve and its network. The optic nerve does not reach all the way to the front of the eyeball but the choroid, with its muscles, does. It extends to the lens and actually holds it in place. Here, as I have mentioned, is the iris surrounding the black pupil, which is nothing but an aperture. The iris is quite complicated. I will draw it a little larger, as seen from the side. So here is the iris, attached to the ciliary muscle. The choroid and lens sit within, held in place by the iris. Seen from the front, the iris has a front wall and a back wall. On the back wall are little coloured granules, which are microscopically small sacks. In everyone they are filled with a blue substance, and this is what one sees in blue-eyed people. In their case, the front layer is transparent, so you see the back layer of the iris, which is filled with this blue substance. In a blue-eyed person you are really seeing the back wall of the iris; the front part is transparent. Brown-eyed people have the same blue substance in the back layer of their iris, but they possess also brown granules in front of it. These cover up the blue ones so that all you see are the brown. A black-eyed person has black granules. You see not the blue but the little black sacks. It is the iris that causes a person's eyes to be blue, brown or black. The iris is always blue in back, and in blue-eyed persons it possesses no coloured substance at all in front; in brown-eyed and black-eyed people, it contains coloured granules in front that obscure the blue granules in back. Why is that? Well, you see, these tiny little sacks are constantly being filled with blood and then emptied. The blood penetrates the tiny granules in minute amounts. In a blue-eyed person, they are constantly being filled with and emptied of a little blood. The same thing happens with brown- and black-eyed persons. The blood enters, deposits blue or black coloured substance, then leaves again and takes the coloured substance with it. This is a continual process.

Now, some people have a strong force in their blood that drives the substances from food all the way into the eyes. This gives them brown or black granules. Those with black granules are people whose organisms can drive the blood most strongly into the eyes; the substances from nourishment easily reach into the eyes. This is less the case with brown-eyed people. Their eyes are not so well-nourished, and a blue-eyed person's organism does not drive the nourishing substances far enough into the eyes to fill the front part of the iris with them. It remains transparent and all we can see is the back part. Thus, a person is blue-eyed because of the way all the substances circulate through his organism. If you observe such a blue-eyed person, you can say that he has less driving force in his circulation than one who is black-eyed.

Consider the Scandinavians. Much of the nourishment must be utilized in fighting off the surrounding cold. A Nordic man does not have enough energy left to drive the nourishment all the way into the eyes; his energy is needed to ward off the cold. Hence, he is blue-eyed. A man who is born in a warm, tropical climate has in his blood the driving force to push the nourishing substances into his eyes. In the temperate zones it is an individual matter whether a man possesses more or less inner energy.

This also affects the colour of hair. A person with strong forces drives food substances all the way into his hair, making it brown or black. A person with less driving force does not push these substances all the way into the hair, and thus it remains light. So we see that blue eyes and blond hair are related. The one who drives the food substances forcefully through his body gets dark hair and eyes; the one who does it less vigorously gets light hair and eyes. This can be understood from what I have told you.

When you take into consideration the most important aspects, you can find meaning for everything. The earth on which we live was young when it brought forth those giant megatheria and ichthyosauria that I have described for you. The earth was once young. Now it is past its prime; it is growing older and some day will perish from old age, though not in the way described by the materialists. We are already faced with some of the signs of the earth's old age. Therefore, the entire human race has been weakened in regard to the driving force that moves the food substances through the body. So what part of the population is going to be the first to disappear from the earth? Dark people can last longer, for they possess greater driving force; blonds have less and become extinct sooner. The earth is indeed already into its old age. The gentleman who asked the question pointed out that there are fewer blonds around than in his youth. Because the earth has less vitality, only the black and brown peoples attain sufficient driving force; blonds and blue-eyed people are already marked for extinction because they can no longer drive nourishment with the necessary force through their bodies.

We can say that fair people were actually always weaker physically and that they were only mentally stronger. In former times many people were blond, but they were strong in spirit and knew much of what many today can no longer know. This is why I called your attention to how much people knew in olden days. Look at ancient India, five thousand years before the birth of Christ. The original inhabitants were black; they were quite dark. Then people with blond hair migrated from the north to the south. The Brahmans descended from those who were especially revered, the fair Brahmans. In time, however, blondness will disappear because the human race is becoming weaker. In the end, only brown- and black-haired people will be able to survive if nothing is done to keep them from being bound to matter. The stronger the body's forces, the weaker the soul's. When fair people become extinct, the human race will face the danger of becoming dense if a spiritual science like anthroposophy is not accepted. Anthroposophy does not have to take the body into consideration but can bring forth intelligence from spiritual investigation itself.

You see, when we really study science and history, we must conclude that if people become increasingly strong, they will also become increasingly stupid. If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense if men do not arrive at a form of intelligence that is independent of blondness. Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. In the case of fair people, less nourishment is driven into the eyes and hair; it remains instead in the brain and endows it with intelligence. Brown- and dark-haired people drive the substances into their eyes and hair that the fair people retain in their brains. They then become materialistic and observe only what can immediately be seen. Spiritual science must compensate for this; we must have a spiritual science to the same degree that humanity loses its intelligence along with its fair people. We have not built the Goetheanum as a joke, for no reason at all; we have built it because we anticipated what would happen to the human race if there were not spiritual compensation for what will disappear from the natural world. The matter is so serious that we can say that mankind on this earth must once again attain something fruitful, though in a different form from what was produced in ancient times. It is indeed true that the more the fair individuals die out the more will the instinctive wisdom of humans vanish. Human beings are becoming denser, and they can regain a new wisdom only if they do not have to depend on their bodies, but possess, instead, a true spiritual science. It is really so, and if people today want to laugh about it, let them. But then they have always laughed about things that have brought about some great change.

In the age when those giant beasts existed that I have described—the ichthyosauria, plesiosauria and megatheria—cows certainly did not yet exist, cows from whom milk is taken for human consumption. Of course, neither did human beings exist then who would have required such milk. But just yesterday I read a statement by somebody who is really afraid of progress. He thinks people who express ideas today that should be formulated only after many centuries have passed ought to be persecuted, because the time is not ripe for their utterances. Gentlemen, it seems to me that if this had been the case in the period when cows were supposed to come into existence, no creature would have had the courage to become a cow! It is like saying, “What is taught today as anthroposophy should emerge only after many centuries.” Well, then it wouldn't appear at all, just as no cows would have come into being. In effect, it is like saying, “I would rather remain an old primeval hog than transform myself into a cow!”

The situation on earth is such that we must have the courage to change and to ascend from those periods when mankind knew things instinctively, to one in which everything is known consciously. This is why I present everything to you here in such a way that you can comprehend fully what is really going on and know in what direction the wind is blowing. When you read a book nowadays, or when you hear about what goes on in the great wide world, you cannot actually get to the bottom of what makes everything tick. But people don't know that. You can understand a phenomenon like the gradual extinction of blonds if you comprehend how nourishing substances penetrate into both the eyes and hair, the colouring of which is closely related.

If you go to Milan, you will find that the head of the lion there is depicted in such a way that its mane, that is, the largest accumulation of hair the lion possesses, looks like rays of light. This rendering is based on an ancient wisdom in which it was known that both the eyes and hair are related to light and its rays.

Hair is indeed like plants, which are placed in the ground and whose growth is subject to light. If light is unable to draw the nourishing substances all the way into the hair, it remains blond. If a person is more closely tied to matter, the food substances penetrate the hair completely and counteract the light; then he gets black hair. Sages of old were still aware of this, just as were men even a few centuries ago. Thus, they did not depict the lion's mane as being curly but instead they gave it a radiating, straight form, as if the sun had placed its beams right into the lion's head. It is most interesting to observe such things.

Gentlemen, I said last time that we have several matters still to discuss. I would like to consider them today. Maybe during the Christmas holidays you could confer among yourselves and decide what should be brought up during the next lecture hour.

The human being has his senses for perceiving the world. We have examined the eye and the ear, considered the sense of touch, which is spread out over the whole organism, and have discussed the senses of taste and smell. All these senses are significant only for man's becoming acquainted with his surroundings and, as I have already explained, for enabling him to shape his body. But man does not live by virtue of the senses; he lives through the process of breathing. If you ask why he is an erect being, why his nose is in the middle of his face, for example, you have to answer that it is because of his senses. But if you look for the reason why he is alive, you have to consider his breathing, because the breath is related to all aspects of life. In one respect, human beings breathe just as the higher animals do, although many animals do breathe differently. A fish, for instance, breathes while swimming and living under water.

If we now look at human breathing we have first to consider the process of inhalation. The breathing process is initially one of inhalation. From the air around us we inhale the oxygen that is required for our existence. This then permeates our whole body, in which carbon in minute particles is deposited; or rather, in which it swims or floats. The carbon that we contain in our bodies is also found elsewhere in nature. As a matter of fact, carbon exists in a great many forms. For instance, carbon is found in coal and in every plant, which consists of carbon, mixed with water and so on, but carbon is the main component of the plant. The graphite in a pencil contains carbon, and the diamond, which is a valuable gem, is also carbon. The diamond is transparent carbon; hard coal is opaque carbon. It is rather interesting that something like coal exists in nature. It is certainly not elegant or attractive, yet is of the same substance as a valuable gem, which, depending on its size, for example, is fit for a crown. Coal and diamonds have the same substance in different forms. We, too, have in ourselves carbon of various forms.

When we breathe in oxygen it spreads out everywhere in our body and combines with the carbon. When oxygen combines with solid coal, a new gas, carbon dioxide, arises. This is a combination of oxygen and carbon, and it is this gas that we then exhale. Our life involves incorporating our body into the rest of the world by inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.

If we inhaled only pure oxygen, however, we would have to contain an immense amount of carbon, and the carbon dioxide would have to remain in us. Yes, we would be forever expanding, finally becoming gigantic, as big as the earth itself. Then we could always be inhaling. But we do not possess that much carbon; it must be constantly renewed. We could not survive if we only inhaled. We have to exhale to acquire carbon anew, and the carbon dioxide we produce is lethal. Indeed, if oxygen is life for us, carbon dioxide is death. If this room were now filled with carbon dioxide, we would all perish. Our life alternates between the life-giving air of inhalation and the deadly air of exhalation. Life and death are constantly within us, and it is interesting to see how they initially enter into the human being.

To comprehend this you must realize that bacteria and bacilli—microscopically small living beings—exist everywhere in nature. Whenever we move, multitudes of these little bacteria fly about us in the air. Countless tiny living beings exist within the muscles of animals. As I have already mentioned, they can rapidly increase in numbers. No sooner does one appear—particularly one of the smallest kind—then the next moment there are millions. The infectious diseases are based on their capacity for tremendous multiplication. These minute beings do not actually cause the illness, but a feeling of well-being is engendered in them when something is ailing in us. Like the plant in manure, these little beings feel well in the stricken organs of our body and like to remain there. Anyone who claims that they themselves cause disease is just as clever as one who states that rain comes from croaking frogs. Frogs croak when a rain shower comes because they feel it and stay in water that is stimulated by what is active in the rain, but they certainly do not cause the rain. Likewise, bacilli do not bring about a disease like the flu; they only appear whenever the flu appears, just as frogs mysteriously emerge whenever it rains.

One must not say, however, that research with bacilli has no use. It is useful to know that man is exposed to a certain illness, just as one knows that frogs croak when it rains. One cannot pour the baby out with the bathwater and say that it is unnecessary to examine the bacilli, yet one must realize that they do not cause the illness. One never gives a proper explanation by merely stating that for cholera there are these bacilli, for flu there exist these other bacilli, and so on. That is only a lazy way out for people who do not want to examine the actual causes of illnesses.

Now, if you take these infinitesimally small living creatures away from their habitat, they cannot continue to live. For example, cholera bacilli taken out of the human intestines die. This bacillus can survive only in the intestines of men or of animals like rats. All these microscopic creatures can live only in specific environments. Why? That these tiny beings need a specific environment is an important factor. You see, if you consider the cholera bacillus at the moment when it is within the human intestines, the force of gravity does not have as strong an effect on it as when it is outside. The force of gravity immediately ruins it when it is out of its element. Man, too, was initially a tiny living being just like these countless little creatures. As an egg, an ovum, the human being also was such a microscopic living being, such a miniature living creature. With this, gentlemen, we come to an important chapter.

Compare a cholera bacillus, which can exist only in the human intestines, with the human being. All these bacilli need to live in a place where they are protected from the earth. What does this imply? It means that an effect other than that of the earth influences them. The moonlight that shines sometimes in one way, sometimes in another has its effects on the earth, and it is indeed so that the moon influences all these living creatures. It can be seen that these creatures must be protected from the earth so that they can surrender themselves to the cosmos, especially to the influence of the moon. Now, in its earliest stage the human egg also surrenders to the moon's influence. It gives itself up to the moon just before fertilization. Just as the cholera bacillus exists in the intestines, so this tiny human egg exists in the female and is initially protected there. The female organism is so constituted, however, that the human egg is protected only in the beginning. The moment it passes too far out of the body it becomes vulnerable; then the earth begins to affect it.

Women discharge such human eggs every four weeks. At first they are given up to the moon's influence for a short time and are protected. But when the female organism dispatches the human egg during the course of the monthly period, it comes under the influence of the earth and is destroyed.

The human organization is so marvellously arranged that it represents an opposite to the bacilli. Cholera bacilli, for example, remain in the intestines and are careful not to venture too far out. Left to their own devices, they remain where they can be protected from the earth's influence. The human egg also is initially protected from the earth's influence in the mother's body, but then it moves outward because of the blood circulation of the mother, and comes under the influence of the earth's gravity. With the occurrence of the monthly period, which is connected with the moon's course and influence, an ovum is destroyed; the human ovum is really destroyed. It is not an actual human egg yet, however, for it has not been protected from destruction through fertilization.

What really happens through fertilization? If left only to the earth's influence, this human egg would perish. Through fertilization it is enfolded in a delicate, etheric substance and is protected from the earth. It is thus able to mature in the mother's body. Fertilization signifies the protection of the human egg from destruction by the earth's forces. What is destroyed in the infertile egg passes over into the environment; it does not just disappear. It dissolves in the totality of the earth's environment. Eggs that cannot be utilized for the earth disseminate in its atmosphere. This is a continual process.

We can now look at something that people rarely consider. Let us draw our attention to the herrings in the ocean. They lay millions upon millions of eggs, but only a few are ever fertilized. Those that are fertilized become protected from the influence of the earth. It is a little different in man's case, because he isn't a herring—at least not always [Play on words. In German, “Hering” is a very skinny person.]—but all these herring eggs that are not fertilized and are cast off in the ocean extricate themselves from the earth's influence by evaporation. If you consider the herrings and all the other fishes, all the other animals and also human beings, you can say to yourselves, “My attention is directed to something that continually arises from the earth into cosmic space.” Gentlemen, not only does water evaporate, but also such infertile eggs are always volatilized upward from the earth. Much more happens in cosmic space than materialistic science assumes.

If someone were sitting up there on Venus, for example, the vapours that arise and condense again as rain would hold little interest for him, but what I have just described to you, rising constantly into cosmic space, would be perceived up there as a greenish-yellow light. From this we may conclude that light emerges from the life of any given cosmic body. We will also be led to the realization that the sun, too, is not the physical body materialistic science pictures it to be but is rather the bearer of even greater, mightier life. It is as I have explained earlier; something that radiates light must be fertilized, just as the sun must be fertilized in order to radiate light through life. So then we have this difference: When a human egg is not fertilized it goes out, it evaporates into cosmic space; when it is fertilized it remains for awhile on the earth.

What happens is like inhalation and exhalation. If I only exhaled, I would give my being up to cosmic space as does the infertile human egg. Consider how interesting it is that you exhale, and the air that you have exhaled contains your own carbon. It is a delicate process. Just imagine that today you have a tiny bit of carbon in your big toe. You inhale, and oxygen spreads out. The small amount of carbon that today is in your big toe combines with the oxygen, and tomorrow this little particle of carbon is somewhere out there in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That is really what happens. During his lifetime man constantly has in himself the same substance that the human egg contains when it is fertilized. If we only exhaled and never inhaled we would always be dying; we would continually be dissolving into the atmosphere. By inhaling we guard ourselves against death. Every time we inhale we protect ourselves from death.

The child that is still maturing in the mother's womb has come into being from the fertilized human egg and is protected from disintegration. The child takes its first breath only at the moment of birth when it comes into the world. Before that it must be supplied with oxygen from the mother's body. But now with birth something quite significant happens. At birth man for the first time receives from the outer world the capability to live. After all, man cannot live without oxygen. Although in the mother's womb he exists without oxygen from the outer air, he does get it from the body of the mother.

Thus, one can say that when man emerges from his mother's body and comes into the world, he actually changes his whole life process. Something radically different happens to it. He now receives oxygen from outside, whereas before he was able to assimilate it in the body of his mother. Just ask yourselves if there is a machine anywhere in the world that can supply itself with heat first in one way and then in another? For nine or ten months man lives in the body of his mother before he appears in the external world. In the womb he is supplied with what life gives him in a completely different manner from the way he does after he has taken his first breath.

Let us examine something else connected with this. Imagine that your sleep has been somewhat disturbed. You are awakened from a fitful sleep by a quite frightening dream in which you perhaps experience that you came home to a locked house and cannot get in. Someone in the house is expecting you so you struggle to unlock the door. You may have experienced something like this. In dreams we do indeed experience such conditions of anxiety.

Now, if you examine what actually happens when the human being has such nightmares, you always discover that something is amiss with the breathing. You can even experimentally produce such nightmares. If you take a handkerchief and plug up your mouth or cover your nose, you will dream the nicest nightmares as nightmares go because you cannot inhale properly.

It is rather strange that our having such conditions of anxiety depends simply on inhalation and exhalation, in other words, on oxygen and carbon. We can deduce from this that we live in the air with our soul element. We do not live in our muscles or in our bones with our soul element but rather in the air. It is really the case that our soul moves along with the air during inhalation and exhalation. Thus, we can say that the soul element seeks out the air in which it floats after the child has taken its first breath. Earlier, it had absorbed oxygen in a completely different way.

Where does the human being get oxygen prior to birth? In the prenatal state an actual breathing process does not yet exist. There is no breathing while the human being is in the mother's womb; everything takes place through the circulation. Various vessels that are torn away at birth pass into the embryo from the mother's body, and with the blood and fluids oxygen also passes into the embryo. With birth man carries his basic life principle out of the watery element into the air. When he is born he transposes the life principle from the fluid element in which it existed before birth out into the air.

From this you can conclude that before conception the human being is first an entity that, like the bacilli, is not fit for the earth at all. Initially he is a being alien to the earth. Later on, he is shielded from the earth's forces and can develop in the mother's body, but when he is actually born and emerges from the surroundings of the maternal womb, he is exposed to the forces of the earth. Then he becomes capable of life only by becoming accustomed to an activity that enables him to live in the air. Throughout his earthly life man protects himself against the forces of the earth by living not with the earth at all but by living with the air.

Just imagine how hard it would be if you had to live with the earth! A man who steps on a scale finds that he weighs a certain amount—a thin one less, a fat one more. Now imagine that you had to grab yourself by the hair and carry your whole body all the time, constantly carry your own weight. Wouldn't that be an exhausting chore! Yet, although you do indeed carry it around with you, you do not feel this weight at all, nor are you aware of it. Why? Your breathing protects you from the heaviness of the earth. In fact, with your soul you do not live in the body at all but rather in the breathing process.

You can now easily comprehend why materialistic science does not find the soul. Materialistic science looks for the soul in the body, which is heavy. In its research it dissects a dead body that no longer breathes. Well, science cannot discover the soul there, because the soul is not to be found in such a body. Materialistic science could find the soul only if our constitution were such that in walking around everywhere we would have to carry our own bodies, sweating profusely

from the effort. Then it would make sense to seek for the soul with materialistic means. But the way things really stand, it makes no sense at all. We sweat for other reasons. When we emerge from the maternal womb, we do not live within our solid substances. As it is, we are only ten percent solid substance. Nor do we live in our fluid element, to which we bestow life. With our soul we actually live in our breathing.

Gentlemen, please follow me now in a train of thought that belongs to the most significant matters of the present time. Let us picture to ourselves a human fetus. Through birth it emerges into the outside world and becomes a full-fledged human being who now inhales air with his lungs and exhales again through his nose. It should be quite self-evident to you that when a person is born, he actually lives with his soul in the breathing process. As long as he exists in the mother's womb, he lives in a watery element. In a sense, he emerges from the water into the air when he is born. As earthly man you can live only in the air, not in water. But before birth you lived in water, and up until the third week you were even shaped like a little fish to enable you to live there. You lived in water up to the time of birth, but the earth does not allow you to live in that element. What does it signify that before birth you lived in water? It means that your life cannot derive from the earth at all, that it must originate from beyond the earth because the earth does not permit you to live. We must lift ourselves up from the earth into the air to live.

Because we have lived in water up to the moment of birth, we may conclude that our life is not bestowed by the earth. Our life of soul is not given us by the earth. It is impossible for the earth to bestow this life of the soul on you. Hence we may understand that it comes from beyond the earth. When we comprehend how life is actually contained in the breathing process, and how life already exists in the embryo but in a fluid element, we immediately realize that this life has descended from a spiritual world into the mother's ovum.

People will frequently call such statements unscientific. Nevertheless, we can study a lot of science and reach the conclusion that what the illustrious scientists do in their science is much less logical than what I have just told you. What I have now told you is absolutely logical. Unfortunately, things are such in our age that children are already drilled in school to turn a deaf ear to something like this; or if they happen to hear it, they will say at most, “He's crazy. We've learned that everything grows out of the human egg.” Well, it is just as ridiculous as learning that the human head grows from a head of cabbage. A human head can grow from a cabbage no more than the human element, the whole human activity during life, can be derived from the human egg. But children are already taught these completely nonsensical things in school.

I have already given you an example of this. Even the smallest children are told that once the earth, along with the whole planetary system, was one huge primeval nebula. Of course, the nebula does nothing when it is still, and so it is made to rotate. It starts to revolve quickly, and as it turns it becomes thinner and thinner. Eventually individual bodies split off, and a round one remains in the middle. The children are shown with a demonstration how this can be imitated. The teacher takes a piece of cardboard, sticks a needle through it, and puts a small drop of oil into a glass of water. He now turns the piece of cardboard and the oil drop, which floats on top of the water, begins to move. It starts to rotate, and tiny oil drops split off. A large drop of oil remains in the middle. This is a little planetary system with its sun. You see, children—so he says—we can do it on a small scale. So it is quite plausible that there once existed a nebula that revolved, and from this nebula celestial bodies gradually split off, leaving the large star remaining the middle.

But now, gentlemen, what is the most important factor in this experiment? Why does the drop of oil rotate in the glass of water? Because the teacher turns the piece of cardboard. Likewise, a great cosmic teacher had to sit somewhere out there in the universe to turn things around, spinning off celestial bodies! Gentlemen, when from the beginning someone teaches children such things, they become “clever” as adults. When someone wants to be logical and expresses doubt, they call him a dreamer because they know how the world began!

You see, such thoughts contain absolutely no reality. This rotating, primeval nebula thought up by Kant and Laplace has no reality at all; it is really quite foolish. To postulate such rotating nebulas is really rather stupid. The only grounds for it are the supposedly spiral nebulas observed through telescopes. Out in the wide cosmic spaces there are indeed such spiral nebulas; that is correct. But if by looking out there with a telescope and seeing these spiral nebula, a man should say, “Well, yes, our whole solar system was once such a nebula too,” then he is about as clever as one who takes a swarm of insects in the distance for a dust cloud. This can happen, but the swarm of gnats is alive while the dust cloud is lifeless. The spiral nebula out in space is alive; it has life within it. Likewise, the whole solar system had its own life and spirituality in earlier times, and this spirituality continues to work today.

When the human egg is shielded in the body of the mother by fertilization, it can unite with the human spirit. When we gradually grow old, the heaviness slowly makes itself felt by the fact that our substances are seized by the earth's gravity. Suppose a person's digestion is amiss and, as a result, the life forces do not properly pass through it. Then all kinds of tiny solid particles form in the muscles. They become filled up with these small solid bodies, which are minute uric acid stones, and then we have gout. We begin to be conscious of heaviness, of gravity.

When we are healthy and oxygen invigorates us through our breathing, such uric acid deposits are not formed, and we do not become afflicted with gout. Gout occurs only if oxygen does not pass through our body in a truly invigorating manner and does not assimilate carbon correctly. If oxygen does not pass through our organism in the right way, carbon will cause all kinds of problems; then there will be present everywhere such minute particles in our blood vessels. We feel that as an effect of the earth in moving around. In fact, we have to be shielded from the earth. We remain alive only because we are constantly protected from the earth and its influences by the breathing process. The earth is not damaging for us only because we are constantly being shielded from it. We would always be sick if we were always exposed to the earth.

You see, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when natural science had its greatest materialistic successes, people were completely stunned by its accomplishments and scientists wanted to explain everything by way of what happens on the earth. These scientists were extremely clever, and they liberated man from much that had encumbered him. Nothing is to be said against them; they can even be praised but they were utterly stupefied by scientific progress and tried to explain the whole human being in such a way as if only the earth had an influence on him. They did not realize that when the earth's influences begin to take effect on man, he first becomes nervous and then becomes ill in some way. He is well only by virtue of being constantly shielded from earthly influences.

Eventually, however, man is overcome by these earthly influences. How do they make themselves felt? The earthly influences assert themselves because man gradually loses the art of breathing. When he cannot breathe properly anymore, he returns to his condition before conception. He dissolves into the cosmic ether and returns to the world from which he came. With his last breath, man sinks back into the world from which he emerged. When we correctly understand breathing, we also comprehend birth and death. But nowhere in modern science do we find the right understanding of breathing.

In sum, man first learns to live with the world through the female ovum, then learns to exist independently on the earth for a certain length of time by virtue of the male fertilization, and finally returns to the condition where he again can live on his own outside the earth. Gradually one learns to comprehend birth and death, and only then can one begin to have the right concept of what man is regarding his soul, of what is not born and does not die but comes from without, unites itself with the ovum in the mother, and eventually returns to the spiritual world.

The situation today is such that we must comprehend the immortal soul element, which is not subject to birth and death. This applies especially to those who are active in science. This, indeed, is necessary for mankind today. For hundreds and thousands of years, men have had a faith in immortality that they cannot possibly retain today because they are told all kinds of things that actually are nothing and fall apart in the face of science. Everything that a man is asked to believe today must also be a matter of knowledge. We must learn to comprehend the spiritual out of science itself, the way we have done here in these lectures. That is the task of the Goetheanum and of anthroposophy in general: to correctly understand the spiritual out of natural science.

You see, it is difficult to get people somehow to comprehend something new. It is Christmastime now, and people could say to themselves, “Well, we must find a new way to understand how the spirit lives in the human race.” If people would stop to think how the spirit lives in mankind, and if they would try to arrive at this understanding through real knowledge, we would find everything renewed. We could even celebrate Christmas anew, because we would observe this holiday in a manner appropriate for the modern age. Instead, on one hand, people continue to observe only what is dead in science and, on the other, they perpetuate the old traditions to which they can no longer attach any meaning. I would like to know what meaning those people who exchange gifts can still see in Christmas. None at all! They do it merely from an old custom. Side by side with this, a science is taught that is everywhere filled with contradictions. Nowhere does anyone wish to consider the fact that science presents something that can lead to the realization of the spiritual.

Today, one can say that if Christianity is to have any meaning at all, one must once again embark on attaining a real knowledge of the spirit. This is the only thing possible; it is not enough just to perpetuate the old. For what does it imply to read the Bible to people on festive occasions, or even to children in school, if along with this one tells the child that there was once a primeval nebula that rotated? The head and the heart come completely to oppose one another. Then man forgets how to be a human being on the earth because he no longer even knows himself.

Anyone is a fool who thinks that as human beings on the earth we consist only of what is heavy, of the body that is put on the scale and weighed. This part we do not need at all. It is nonsense to think that we consist of these material substances that can be weighed. In reality, we do not become aware of the body at all, because we shield ourselves from it in order to stay well. The curing of illness consists in expelling the earthly influences that are affecting the sick person. All healing is actually based on removing the human being from the earth's influence. If we cannot remove man from the earth and its influences, we cannot cure him. He then lies down in bed, allows himself to be supported by the bed and gives himself up to weight. When one lies down one does not carry one's own self.

So we have the old customs on one hand and, on the other, a science that does not enlighten man as to what he really is as a human being. Nothing positive can come from all this. It is true that the World War, with all the consequences that still afflict us today, would not have occurred if human beings had known something of the inhumanity beforehand. Even now, they do not want to know. Even now, they still want to get together at congresses without any new thoughts and just repeat the same old things. Nowhere are they able to conceive new thoughts. What at first existed in mankind as confused ideas became a habit and then became our social order today. We are not going to get anywhere in the world again until from within we really feel what in fact the human being is.

This is really what those who understand the aims of anthroposophy conceive of as Christmas. Christmas should remind us that once again a science of the spirit must be born. Anthroposophy is the best spiritual being that can be born. Mankind is much in need of a Christmas festival. Otherwise, it does away with the living Christ and retains only the cross of Christ. Ordinary science is only the cross, but once again we must arrive at what is living. We must strive for that.

Well, gentlemen, that is what I wanted to mention on this particular day in addition to the other things. With this, I wish you all pleasant holidays!

Preliminary discussion in the glass house

Friedrich Rittelmeyer greets Rudolf Steiner: We have come here to ask you to help us so that we can help humanity in the right way. We come to you with complete trust, with as much trust as one can have in a person. This trust is not based on some kind of romanticized feelings, but on the clear experience that we ourselves have already had with what has been spiritually revealed through you, an experience that deeply obliges us, since it has become our duty not to withhold it from humanity and to do as much as is within our weak powers to pass it on, because we expect a great deal from it for humanity.

The group that is coming to you today is smaller, much smaller than the group that was here a year ago. Hardly a third of those who were here then have returned. A few new people have joined us. Some have left, and their departure is particularly painful for us. But in us who are here, there lives the most urgent desire and the firm resolve to do as much as we can to move our cause forward quickly and powerfully.

Some of our friends, many of those you see here, have already sought to work during the summer months, and some of them have succeeded in getting together a group of sixty to eighty people, whom they can hope to form the core of the future community. It has already been said of some of us that we can look to the future without too much concern.

We have just returned from a conference in Breitbrunn, where we discussed a number of issues on the basis of the pointers you gave us. And we can say that there is hardly one among us for whom this conference did not bring great satisfaction. We closed the conference by joining hands as a circle of people determined to step into the world, who have decided to use their lives and their full strength for the cause we represent together, and who want to work together to realize what we want to bring into the world: a real Christian community. We have pledged ourselves to accept the decision in Dornach and to continue to place the cause above our personal needs in the future.

And so we come before you and ask you with all our hearts: Please bless us inwardly and outwardly, so that in view of the seriousness of the world situation and in view of the great spiritual that wants to enter the world through you, a community of people may come into the world that will truly be able to help humanity.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear Dr. Rittelmeyer, dear friends! In response to the words that have just been addressed to me regarding the great cause for which you are gathering here in Dornach and for which you wish to work, I would like to begin by warmly replying with the following: From the very beginning, when this movement of yours revealed itself to me, I was keenly aware of the seriousness with which this movement of yours must proceed. Now I could say, my dear friends, thank you for the trust you have just expressed. But I think that at this moment that would not be the right word at all. I would like to say something else. I would like to say this: that in the face of such facts, which perhaps include what you now want to bring into the world, personal trust is obviously not really necessary. Personal trust would be a relatively weak basis. What must come to humanity is trust in the cause in which you now want to help, and this cause is an extraordinarily decisive one for the development of humanity.

You see, my dear friends, I am now coming from Oxford, which, I might say, gives a very definite aspect to the present spiritual situation of humanity. When one lives in Oxford for a while, one has the feeling that one is in a world surrounded by a kind of wall. Within this wall there is a lively spiritual life, but it is closed off to a certain extent from the actual present by this wall. The young people who are educated there are then sent out into the world with an education that has a strong religious slant; they are sent out into the world with an education that, I might say, is not of this time, that actually still incorporates religious impulses of the past into a world that needs new religious impulses. At Oxford I had to speak about completely different topics, but I had to use an image that simply came to me through life itself on an insignificant occasion. A friend was showing us around the various colleges, a friend who is a Fellow of Oxford. It is customary there that on such occasions people have to put on their robes and their berets; all those who have once graduated from Oxford have to do so for the rest of their lives. Afterwards, we met our friend on the street; he was still wearing his robe and beret. In my next lecture, I had to use an image to explain something about public education. This image came to me all by itself: What would be – I said this in the lecture, as I say it now – what would be if I had wanted to write a letter to him immediately after I had met our friend in his Oxford gown and with his Oxford beret? If I wanted to be true to myself, I would not have known whether to write 750 BC or 1250 AD. In any case, it would not have occurred to me to write the date of the present day if I wanted to remain true to myself. But that is precisely the case with Oxford intellectual life; Oxford intellectual life is an extraordinarily serious one, but one that sometimes actually reminds one of medieval intellectual life or even of the time before Christ's birth.

Here on the continent, or even in Central Europe, to mention just one example, it would take an extraordinarily difficult decision to give a lecture in a church. In Oxford, when I was invited to give a lecture in the chapel [of Manchester College] on a Sunday, it was quite natural for me that it should be given inside the church. Through direct experience, one gets a strong impression of how serious English intellectual life once was, when one sees how these things, even today, are still inspiring, and have been preserved, albeit in a transformed form, into the present day. On the other hand, one also gets the strong impression of how necessary a new impulse is, because the old impulses have indeed been exhausted. In Central Europe in particular, the old impulses have basically not found such an intensive continuation as in England, for example, where there is still a strong religious influence in the whole culture. In Central Europe, of course, intellectual life has been 'de-religiousized' among those who, as people of the present, feel imbued with the culture of the time. It is more difficult to take for granted than it seems today that a book like Mauthner's “History of Atheism” could be published in the immediate present. I would consider it possible that a similar book would be published in France, but I consider it out of the question that someone in England would write such a book about the history of atheism, because the old traditions still live on there.

I just want to say that it is a serious matter to start the renewal of religious life in Central Europe. Especially in countries where traditions are still more alive - in the whole of the West, probably as far as America - this necessity will not be felt so keenly. Only here, where we are standing on soil that is truly religious, can the need for a new impulse be felt intensely enough. This illustrates my statement that from the very beginning I have felt the seriousness of your aims bearing, as it were, upon me also. And now that we are coming to some kind of conclusion regarding the immediate beginning of your work, we must all imbue ourselves with this consciousness.

First of all, we really must work towards completely getting away from this trust, for which I am indeed very grateful to you, but which is a personal trust, and towards developing a real trust in the matter. As theologians, you all have more opportunity to do this than other people in the present day who are involved in intellectual life. After all, a theologian must have some feeling for intellectual life, otherwise he would be a personification of untruth. If one has some feeling for intellectual life as such, then one must also find the bridge over to what must arise in the immediate present as intellectual life. It is a sum total of perceptions and feelings and attitudes from which we must now begin our work, and it is these feelings and perceptions and attitudes that I wanted to point out to you first. We must indeed begin our work in all modesty, because at first it will be a much-challenged work, we must be aware of that. And the less you have the faith to go about this work unimpeded, the better it will be in the end. The more you prepare for obstacles and hurdles, the better it will be. And so, in response to the kind words just spoken by Dr. Rittelmeyer, I can only say: I will do everything in my power to ensure that our meeting here can be the starting point for the active engagement demanded by the spirit of the times by all of you who have decided to do so.

I think we should organize things so that we have a kind of preliminary discussion today and start our actual work tomorrow. Now, in connection with the words spoken by Dr. Rittelmeyer and in view of what I myself have said, I feel obliged to mention as the first point that which, in my opinion, has changed our situation extremely drastically: the resignation of Dr. Geyer from our movement. Dr. Geyer addressed a letter to me in which he first explained his intentions in more personal terms and also described his personal relationship with me. I would like to mention from the outset that I naturally take every word Dr. Geyer has spoken as something that is received with all love and respect and that, for my part, not the slightest change can occur in the personal relationship with him. So I would like to say that all of this personal stuff is something we really don't need to talk about, because I want to feel the nuance he mentions in his letter as my own too. But with regard to the movement, the situation changes in such a drastic way that we must be aware of this fact. Isn't it true that the mere fact that Dr. Geyer's name has been mentioned many times when this religious renewal movement has become known, not least in the sense that he, who does not belong to the Anthroposophical Society, has entered has come out in favor of this religious revival, was precisely the circumstance that in many places a certain degree of trust had been placed in this religious revival movement, and because Dr. Geyer, in his old age, has decided to join this movement. All this, together with the fact that this fact of the resignation will now be spread everywhere in the most active way, will present us with a very serious situation. At the beginning of such a movement, this means something. Dr. Rittelmeyer also spoke of other people who resigned. That may be very painful, but it does not mean the same, since Dr. Geyer was on the Central Committee for all the preparatory work. This does mean, however, that each of you must ask yourselves the question in your hearts: what is it, objectively speaking, that has prevented Pastor Geyer – leaving aside all personal reasons – from abandoning his decision to go with this movement once he had made it?

It is important for you to consider the degree of objectivity of such a decision. Your own sense of security within the movement will depend on the thoughts you entertain and the feelings you develop in the wake of the fact that one of the movement's leaders has just resigned at the decisive moment. This says nothing about personal matters, nothing about the fact that someone may now love Dr. Geyer less than before and the like. Apart from all personal considerations, however, it is important to realize: what can dissuade a determined man from his decision at this decisive moment? Because answering this question is at the same time an inner experience that must occupy us on the way to the goal that you have set yourself, my dear friends. You will have to mature your own certainty by addressing this question with all your strength and objectivity.

Perhaps it would be necessary to say a few words today about why some of the personalities who were there at the beginning of the movement are not here today. That will be part of the preliminary discussions, along with everything that is on your minds. Now, perhaps, we want to agree on the things to be discussed so that we can really start work tomorrow.

Emil Bock briefly reports on the activities of the individual members of the circle. [His remarks were not stenographed.]

Rudolf Steiner: We only need guidelines so that you call to mind that which should really stand before your consciousness.

A participant: {Remarks not recorded in shorthand.]

Rudolf Steiner: Can one also speak of spiritual failures? I do not mean so much failures that the friends themselves accuse themselves of in their work, but rather the failures that would lie in a lack of receptivity.

Various participants report on the situation in Duisburg and Erfurt, in particular.

Rudolf Steiner: What considerations governed the selection in Breitbrunn?

Friedrich Rittelmeyer answers. (The stenographer did not write down the answer.)

Rudolf Steiner: Is there nothing to say about Dr. Geyer's resignation?

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: I expect that Dr. Geyer will continue to work for the movement even if someone from our circle approaches him in this regard. We would still benefit from him even in this form, provided that Dr. Steiner has no decisive objections.

Rudolf Steiner: I have no decisive objections, because I really do not want to exert any decisive influence on such decisions in this area either, but rather to maintain the position I have had in relation to the movement from the very beginning: to give what can be given from the spiritual world and not to influence the constitution in any other way than by advising. That is the best thing for the cause itself. But even if one can certainly agree that such a letter could be addressed to Dr. Geyer, the important question remains as to what objective obstacles there could be for Dr. Geyer, apart from these subjective personal ones, which one can certainly understand. These subjective obstacles, that he cannot make himself a cultural authority and the like, are not so extraordinarily important; one can cope with such things if one looks at the movement with the intensity and seriousness that is necessary for it. But what is important is the objective inner position on the question: What can prevent him, in your opinion?

Friedrich Rittelmeyer suspects that what is keeping Dr. Geyer from coming with us lies in the current of the times and will confront us from many sides in the near future. Rudolf Steiner: You are touching on the objective side, which is important for the impulse. When you say that we will encounter this in various people, that is important, and it is all the more important to be very clear about it.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer and Emil Bock report on their recent perceptions regarding Dr. Geyer. [The remarks were not written down in shorthand.]

Rudolf Steiner: What is necessary for all of you is to realize – this may sound trivial compared to what you have made your motto – that a renewal of religious life as such is necessary. A renewal of religious life! If religious life is to be renewed, then it is first and foremost necessary to realize the source of the irreligiousness of many contemporary religious denominations. When these two gentlemen came to see me at the very beginning of this movement, there was an undertone that we do not actually have a religious life among those on whom you rely first, that religious life is no longer a reality. |

It is first and foremost necessary for religious life to enter into the inner being of the human personality. As you can see now with Pastor Geyer, this awareness is no longer present. Overcoming this state of mind, which you find in Pastor Geyer, that means the first step in religious life. If someone cannot rise above the point where he comes to terms with this personal impossibility of representing the spiritual, then this is a degree of irreligiousness that is precisely an important factor in our present spiritual life. Then, in the case of those personalities to whom you have referred, there is such animosity against religious life as such. What you said about this longing to experience the spiritual as something non-sensuous, but not wanting to express it in the garments - whereby the practical can still be discussed - that is actually not a representation of the spiritual, but a fight against it. That is basically what has most strongly diverted mankind from the spiritual, that gradually the representation of the spiritual has become only an abstraction, a matter of doctrine, a matter of theory, a matter in which one shrinks from having more than a few symbols at most. As soon as one comes to the realization that this is still a representation of the spiritual that wants to reveal itself, and takes offense at the fact that the spirit, when it comes to light, wants to be creative, we are dealing with an irreligious element.

Theology does not have to deal with religion at all. It can be a theory about God and everything that is associated with God; it can also appear extremely hearty, but it is not religion. Theology can be very irreligious; and that is what I mean, and that must be said clearly and without fear, that Dr. Geyer is resigning from this movement because he did not take everything as seriously as religion, as is necessary for all of you to take the matter seriously. That is the objective element, quite apart from his personality. He cannot give himself up; that is the objective reason why he cannot go along with the movement. If you look at it that way, it becomes extraordinarily characteristic when he talks about the ten years] that he is older than Dr. Rittelmeyer. Because if you have a religious feeling, you don't say, these ten years make up what prevents me from participating in the movement, but you say: I know better that this movement is necessary, because I am ten years older; I am the oldest, therefore I also know best what is necessary. - That would be said religiously. I would like us to get the matter completely away from the person. Quite apart from the fact that Dr. Geyer is someone we all love and will continue to love, it is necessary to feel that we take religious life as such very seriously today, that we take it as a substance, that we grasp religious life within its substance. I would appreciate it if you would speak up to clarify. Various people present express their views on what they think may have led Dr. Geyer to take this step. Among other things, the following is said:

Perhaps in what led Dr. Geyer to his decision there is something of a conception of the freedom of the human personality that has not penetrated into the religious sphere. If one orients oneself more according to the intellect, one believes that one is not free in relation to that in which one engages, that one accomplishes, while clothed in cultic garments.

Rudolf Steiner: To pick out just one thing: if you look at it objectively, the matter of vestments is quite unrelated to the sense of freedom. Both the vestment question and the other matters of ritual are intimately connected with the way in which the human being grows into the spiritual and with the revelation of the spiritual in the world. Now, apart from the fact that, with regard to the robes that Pastor Geyer will wear in church in the future, he cannot say that he is free in them either. There is no question of that. We are not at all free with regard to our robes. But we can disregard that entirely, because it is insignificant.

Of course, one can err in the details, but on the whole, the aim is to give the cultus those contents that are as closely related to the human being as the human skin is to the physical body. After all, nothing imaginary is worn, but rather what the person has on him anyway when he acts in the right feeling. What I mean is, the astral body has very specific figures and colorations when a person is in the mood to perform a religious sacrifice, and this is expressed in the vestments. So to rebel against the garb would be the same as saying, I want a blue skin instead of the flesh. This has nothing to do with personal freedom. If one understands the cultic properly, one must think quite differently about these things at all, and one cannot have a subjective aversion. That one prefers to wear a tailcoat rather than a surplice, one cannot assert, because that makes no sense.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We have spoken in Breitbrunn about the fact that we have the feeling that everything so far that has not worked as a cult in the world was a kind of religious game compared to what strives to work with the spirit into the outer world.

Rudolf Steiner: It is important to create a real religious feeling, in contrast to those who talk a lot in passive performances, but who do not lead a religious life. What you said is correct, but it must be said in the form: absorbing and teaching anthroposophy can be completely irreligious. Finding anthroposophy in the soul already has a religious character. One can take in anthroposophy with one's intellect, one can certainly do that, but it does not need to be a religion. What many theologians today take in and teach, in whatever color, has nothing to do with religion. I think we can calmly regard this as an objective difficulty. I believe that we will have to experience these difficulties in some form. One can have the feeling that as soon as one goes to people, one stands outside the fruit, one points to the shell of a nut, but one does not stand inside the kernel of the nut. One cannot properly pass on what one has found within oneself as religious. I hope that we here in Dornach will finally break through the shell of the nut and get to the kernel, otherwise everything will die down again.

Then we may discuss a few external matters. When would you prefer me to speak to you in your meetings?

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We are entirely at your disposal.

Rudolf Steiner: Then perhaps it would be best to decide from day to day, so let us say tomorrow at four or half past three. Tomorrow morning we have a reception over in the big building, so it would be less easy in the morning. We could consider the morning for the other days. The main thing would be to be clear about the time. Perhaps there are other things to be decided?

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: Do you have any further questions or suggestions for us?

Rudolf Steiner: I would have preferred it if you would tell me what you expect.

Emil Bock: I would like to say first of all that our group is actually very keen to really achieve a constitution for our cause, to be allowed to make a start on our work. So that we actually do not have the expectation in the foreground, as far as we can see, that we get a lot of theory, but that we are all attuned to the fact that the first deed happens to us from the whole course of events that we have to bring into the world. And then, after the conversations that we were recently able to have, we have already made some preparations. We have tried to prepare things and have found that we still need a lot more detailed information so that things can be done right. We want to accept from you, with heartfelt gratitude, whatever theory and support we can get, as far as we are allowed to. If I may say something about this, it is that in our work we are confronted with completely new fields of science everywhere. For example, we have come to the conclusion that in order to truly understand what we see on the garment, we need a whole cultic chemistry that will enlighten us about the nature of matter and how it is transformed. The meaning of the cultic colors... [gap in the stenographer's text]. A cultic physics will have to tell us what happens through the transformation in the course of the year. This has become clear to us from the question of clothing, that we still have a great deal to work through and that we have to say how cultic is actually present throughout the history of civilization. So that we are actually hungry for a great deal of material that brings us close to history, religious history, and the history of civilization, which has a cultic and imaginative relationship to the question of clothing.

In their pastoral work, all our friends have certainly thought about what we were told last fall in very brief references to pastoral psychiatry. We are facing very difficult challenges that we are not up to because we still lack this very new kind of theology. We still understand the Bible too poorly, and we would like to hear as much as possible and get advice on how we can develop these large areas of theology. That is what goes into the theoretical. First of all, it is important to us that we start practically. If the doctor has time, we would like him to tell us everything that can serve as an incentive and a tool for our own work. A myriad of questions have been raised that we would like to ask.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, these questions must of course be dealt with. The first thing I have to do, what I would like to do with you tomorrow, is to first of all establish the spiritual constitution of your community as such. I do not mean what the community is in the broader sense, but the community of priests. I must speak to you about what this community of priests will mean, how it should be constituted, how it should give itself self-awareness, because the reality depends on this community of priests being self-aware, in order to truly become the bearer of a spiritual consciousness of the present. Without this, a renewal of religious life will not be possible. This is lacking in all newer spiritual movements, which are aggregates that live on earth and are not constituted by the spiritual world. This will be the first thing we will talk about tomorrow in terms of what should actually happen. We do not need to talk about these things theoretically; you have to understand them in a very practical way. It will be a matter of awakening the spirit within us to a ritual act, I would like to say, if I may use the prosaic expression, that we demonstrate how a ritual act should take place. We want to start in this direction.

On the other hand, the external organization of the community, which is also necessary for us, will have to take the form of a discussion, because here we are dealing with extremely important and decisive matters. But the point is that we can only move forward or backward with human reasons, for example, what could still be done to really preserve the community, that would be the dry prose. Because now the house in Stuttgart has been started to be built and yet the possibility of continuing the construction is lacking.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: The money is there. The house in Stuttgart is paid for, as far as it is built. What is still needed will come.

Rudolf Steiner: Others, such as Mr. Leinhas, will also have a say in this. It is only so far as it goes to a certain point, but no further.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: The question of how to obtain the vestments and implements is a very tricky one. We all want to get to the cult as soon as possible. We have been pushing for it since the summer, so that it does not come to that only in the last few days. If we have to approach the matter, it is our wish that we do so as soon as possible, because only then will we feel fully immersed in it.

Rudolf Steiner: It will be done. Of course, you only have to take up the cult in the way it can only be meant: with complete seriousness.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We celebrated the sacrifice together every day in Breitbrunn. There is a great desire among us that it could also be done every day here. And if it could be done in a better form.

Rudolf Steiner: You mean that someone celebrated the service?

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: Read it, that's all we could do.

Rudolf Steiner: We will gather here at half past three.

Today, I would like to precede the reflections of these three days with an introduction that will initially provide orientation from a certain point of view regarding the relationship between the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science movement and older spiritual research movements. You have noticed, and I have often mentioned and characterized, how it has become necessary due to the conditions of our time to treat the knowledge and cognition of supersensible things, which we speak of within our spiritual scientific movement, differently than the knowledge and cognition that was brought to people in the old mysteries. You are also aware that the comparison of this spiritual-scientific knowledge of the present with the initiatory knowledge of the ancient mysteries is justified, despite the differences between the two. It is true that the ancient mystery teaching imparted knowledge that was based on an atavistic, one might say half-dream-like state of consciousness of the person seeking knowledge. The modern spiritual knowledge we are speaking of here is such that everything in it, down to the smallest detail, must be attained with full consciousness, with a consciousness that is completely equal to the consciousness we have, for example, when we absorb and process geometrically or mathematically comprehensible truths. Thus, the fully awakened spiritual experience is attained through this modern spiritual movement in a soul life that must be completely illuminated with the same light that also illuminates our waking day life when we are truly awake. But this knowledge, like the instinctive, half-dreamlike knowledge of the ancient mysteries, is meant to lead to the higher supersensible forms of existence.

We have often spoken of the special character of this ancient mystery knowledge. We have pointed out that it goes back to an original knowledge, to an original wisdom of humanity. It is only obscured by the prejudices of the modern materialistic-Darwinian view that humanity did not start its development from animal-like conditions, but from conditions for which there is no analogue at all in the present-day physical world, but which so encompassed the life of the soul that knowledge of the spiritual was instinctively acquired and was present throughout the inhabited earth of that time. We must, however, bear in mind when considering this fact of supersensible original knowledge that in that primeval time mankind had a more naive, more elementary, one might say more innocent, view of life. In a sense, those impulses which the divine-spiritual beings themselves laid into the souls were in that primeval mankind. So that one can say: In the sphere which we might today call the moral, the beings of primitive times were simply the instruments for the deeds of the divine spiritual beings, so that one cannot speak of any personal responsibility of these human beings, of the possibility of personally sinning, for that time, nor of an actual straying from the will of that Divine-Spiritual from which, after all, the human soul-life has emerged. But this also includes the reason why it was possible in those older times to spread the means in humanity, to keep spread in humanity a knowledge of supersensible things. This knowledge, if it is true knowledge, even in its atavistic state of primeval times, is in reality connected with the control of certain forces of material existence. Today we are proud of the fact that we have formed our technology out of our few scientific ideas, that in this sense we control nature to a certain extent through our knowledge of nature. In a completely different way, however, prehistoric man was able to control the various natural forces of material existence by virtue of the knowledge that was his in his innocent state of mind. This state of mind prevented him from using the supersensible knowledge given to him by the gods to harm humanity.

From my descriptions you know that this early humanity was not as dense as the later humanity and that in some respects it was much less material. This also meant that the impulses of divine-spiritual existence could express themselves in a much more direct way than was later the case. What gradually occurred in the development of humanity is, of course, the connection of the spiritual-soul-like with the physical-material. In a sense, man descended deeper and deeper into matter. But with this descent into matter, there also arose what might be called the possibility of sinning, the possibility of deviating from the paths that came from the impulses of the divine-spiritual beings themselves, thus the possibility of doing evil, and therefore also the possibility of applying supersensible knowledge in an evil sense. This possibility only arose at a certain point in human evolution. At this point, however, something very special occurred. It was only then that the most important mystery being actually concentrated in the oracle sites, in the mysteries, in the true sense of the word. You know this from the description of the Atlantean world that I gave in my book “Occult Science”. There, so to speak, the knowledge of the supersensible worlds was withdrawn from the broad masses of humanity, and this knowledge became the property of those initiated into the mysteries. So that the development goes so that actually more and more the supersensible knowledge fades from the great mass of people and is preserved in its actual form in the mysteries. But these mysteries, as you know, still contained a great deal of ancient wisdom and preserved it until almost Christian times, some of them until much later. But various mysteries with the very deepest knowledge, such as one, or rather two, in the area of present-day France, were wiped out by the Romans in the century before the emergence of Christianity, as I recently hinted to you, wiped out root and branch, even in a terribly bloody way. And in these places, which must be pointed out, a wonderful, penetrating knowledge still flowed within Europe in the last pre-Christian centuries, which has since completely disappeared for Europe. This also happened in other places in Europe.

Then, only in very narrow circles could the wisdom of the ancient world be preserved. In these circles, where one very rarely found people who could penetrate into the supersensible worlds from their own experience, it was also the case that knowledge of the supersensible worlds was then applied in the worst , in the national-socialistic sense, which even today comes to light in the cases that I have been characterizing here for years, namely as the work of certain secret societies of the English-speaking population.

Now, there is a certain way in which those people who actually think entirely in the spirit of ancient times about the knowledge of supersensible worlds still present the reasons why the mystery knowledge was so carefully withheld from the masses by the bearers of the mysteries. The obedient representatives of secret societies, who preserve this knowledge with greater or lesser justification, in a better or also in a very questionable way, still speak today of the fact that a certain kind of knowledge, the highest kind of knowledge about the supersensible, cannot be delivered to the masses, because today the masses are absolutely not ripe for certain contents of this knowledge. These things are said, and the way it is substantiated from certain quarters is always significant. It is necessary that we talk about this a little today in the introduction, because I have all sorts of important things to talk to you about tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. We have to do this because the principle is being followed from here, with regard to the dissemination of knowledge of the supersensible worlds, to put it bluntly, from the point of view of the democratic being.

You know that I have not held back, at least to a certain extent, even from the broadest public, certain supersensible insights. And insights of the kind that I present today in public lectures, although they are little understood, are considered by very worthy representatives of today's mystery teachings to be insights that should not be communicated to the public in this way. One cannot go as far as certain peaks of knowledge, but these insights must be presented to the public at a certain level, if only for the reason that, as I have often emphasized, they must be incorporated into the social impulses that are most urgently needed by present-day humanity and humanity in the near future. And so it has come about that I have continued with the communication of such insights, which, as I said, are unfortunately very little understood. The most important things, which are already being incorporated into public lectures and which one would often think have a deeply moving effect, are actually received in such a way that one can see that the souls that receive them are actually sleeping a very healthy sleep as these things resonate in their ears. But nevertheless, these things must be communicated to the public today, and in a certain form I have repeatedly tried to bring them forward to an even higher level within the Anthroposophical Society, although not the best experiences have been made in the process.

Everyone will see it as ridiculous to hand over higher geometry to someone who does not know elementary geometry. The comparison is misleading, like all comparisons, because what is given as a certain higher knowledge in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not quite the same as elementary geometry, although it only appears to be so. The fact is this: if you do not know elementary geometry, you will reject higher geometry when it is presented to you because you are aware that you do not understand it. But if you present the higher knowledge of anthroposophy to someone who does not yet have the elementary knowledge of anthroposophy, they will accept it. He understands them just as little as the other person understands higher geometry, but since the insights have to be clothed in popular words that can be understood, he believes he understands them, scoffs at them or talks about them like Pastor Kully, and then we have the impossible situation of the higher insights being brought to humanity in a completely distorted form, in a dishonest form. But to bring true knowledge to people in a false form means to contribute to the destruction of humanity. Therefore, it would be necessary to assume an understanding of such things, to assume that this higher knowledge should be preserved from those who do not already have the lower knowledge. But for decades now, quite bad experiences have been made within the Anthroposophical Society, which could actually urge one to stop the whole proclamation of the supersensible world system, if, for example, one had the old ideas about secrecy regarding supersensible knowledge. For, what one does experience! The gossip, the inner and outer gossip, has indeed been no small thing over the decades; and even in recent times we have had to experience it, when we were obliged, to our great regret, to protect our writings from a possible false understanding of certain facts, that from a certain side a naive and foolish revolt has arisen. It is of no use to leave these things unspoken because there is no complete and thorough understanding of them, especially of their sacredness. If there were an awareness of the place of supersensible knowledge in the whole social life of man, it would never have been possible for those things which belong to the most sacred matters of humanity to have been carried out into the world in such a distorted, lying form, where they have been stripped bare in such a way. But despite all this, even if a large number of people treat what should be treated with the utmost seriousness as a light-hearted game, it is still necessary, urgently necessary, that these things be brought to humanity today. The duty towards the spiritual world, the duty towards the spiritual guiding powers of humanity, must be considered higher today than that which can be observed from the outside in the manner just described. The time has come when a certain sum of supersensible knowledge must be handed down to the world.

As a rule, supersensible knowledge remains harmless when it is expressed in abstract terms about spiritual things; but seriousness is immediately called for – if seriousness is called for at all – when it is a matter of supersensible knowledge of the older initiates. Such things are indeed completely comprehensible only to him who can now in turn find the wisdom of the old initiates through his own researches. The old initiate said: If one imparts occult truths only in groups of three, then as a rule one can indeed cause all kinds of social harm; one can stultify people, one can lull people to sleep, one can befuddle them, and so on; but when one imparts all sevenfold forms of the secrets of the supersensible worlds, then one imparts to people something that, if they are maliciously inclined, must lead to evil. The initiate says: To impart the supersensible knowledge in a threefold form may possibly only cause external social harm; to impart it in a sevenfold form means danger at the moment when people who are capable of evil in some direction approach these sacred secrets. What does that mean?

You see, there is a kind of harmless mysticism. Such harmless mysticism is practised when people sit together in small circles in a sectarian way and make all kinds of statements to a number, let us say seven, eight or a hundred people, about the etheric body, the astral body, about re-embodiment, about karma and so on, in short, when one speaks in abstract sentences about these things in much the same way as one speaks about the things of ordinary life, without being in a different state of mind than in ordinary life, at most in a mystical devotion of a nebulous kind and the like. Of course, what stands out as bad is that ultimately the people who sit down together in this way do, let's say, steal a little from the dear Lord, when it would be much wiser if they would sew or knit or cook or wash or do something similar in the same hour in which they make such mystical communications to others. In fact, such abstract dabbling in supersensory truths is basically no better than the other activities that are now being organized through numerous channels with so-called world views. But you know: we, on our anthroposophical ground, have never got involved with such abstract stuff where it was taken seriously. We have, of course, always emphasized that one must have certain substantial insights into the human being, into the nature of the universe, and so on, if one really wants to form ideas about the supersensible. The aim of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has always been to bring spiritual-scientific knowledge into real life, into medical life, into social life, into the life of scientific experiment and other areas where, above all, it is necessary to bring in supersensible knowledge before one can think of achieving a social recovery from our catastrophic conditions. But if, let us say, we apply supersensible knowledge to medicine, then we immediately enter the field of which the true initiates know that it can cause evil in the hands of evil people. For when we exert our soul powers, thinking, feeling, and willing, as we initially carry them in their abstractness in our soul, then these soul powers are very, very strong mere images, applied to ordinary consciousness mere images, very shadowed images. There is only a very low intensity of reality in it (triangle). What people can think is, I would say, an image of an image; what they can feel even more so; and they do not descend into their will at all, they only see it in images of external events that take place on the physical plane as a result of this will. Since what a person experiences is so little connected with reality, not much harm can be done. One does indeed enter into the realm of abstract concepts. One can speak very beautifully about Atma, Buddhi, Manas and so on, but one is actually speaking of abstract words, of words that are far removed from really drilling into reality.

With our instincts, that is, with all that underlies our being, we say our temperament, and with what else underlies our instinctive being, we are already more in reality. With what, for example, our hunger is, what becomes of our hunger as a result of our will instincts, we are very much in our reality; and if it were not for hunger and the will instincts connected with hunger, which are often perverted today, there would be no Russian Bolshevism and the like. Reality is more closely connected with this life (square), out of which thinking, feeling and willing (triangle) rises only like a shadow, with this life of our instincts, our drives, our temperaments. This reality is just as threefold as our soul life is threefold; this reality is also fourfold and has always been represented as such by the initiates. And if we look at the human being as a whole, we see a sevenfold being. But the lower members, those in which the human being repeats the animal in a certain way, are present with a much more intense reality than the shadowy, distilled abstraction of thinking, feeling and willing.

But now, when we grasp the supersensible worlds, if only in the abstract, our knowledge does reach into our instinctual life, into our temperament, into our life of drives, and with that it reaches into the world of real facts, into reality. One would like to say: If one draws this world of the soul, as it exists today in the human being, very thinly, one would like to draw the world of the instinctive, the impulsive, the temperamental, very thickly and realistically, and supersensible knowledge plays into this world (see drawing). But this world must only be ennobled, otherwise it becomes an evil world. Therefore supersensible knowledge can only have an ennobling effect on this world, so that at the moment when one approaches realities with supersensible knowledge, when one plunges into material things, it depends entirely on whether it is done in a pure, ethical, free spirit or whether it is done in an impure, immoral, unfree, that is, emotional, instinctive, animalistic spirit.

These things have been seen through by the keepers of the original human world wisdom, who have locked away the higher knowledge in the mysteries for those prepared for it. But this secrecy is not something that can be asserted today as an absolute necessity, and those people who today, for example, belong to secret societies and in the abstract sense want to assert the necessity of secrecy about the higher knowledge are completely wrong. They are wrong because such people do not understand the signs of the times at all. They preserve old traditions, they still say today what the great teachers of mystery wisdom said thousands of years ago. It is interesting, for example, that in the books of Aelena Petrovna Blavatsky, precisely where Blavatsky speaks most ingeniously about occult things, you will find attitudes towards the concealment of occult knowledge occult knowledge, opinions that are no longer valid today, which Blavatsky held because she had learned them from those who had no idea of the actual necessities of the present time. And so Blavatsky behaved like a personality who might just as well have lived thousands of years ago; she had no idea of the necessities of present-day life, talked about the necessary concealment of certain mystery truths, just as the mystery priests talked thousands of years ago. As a result, even if one does not want to, one becomes untruthful to one's fellow human beings in the present. And certain supersensible currents become untruthful to their fellow human beings in the present in the most eminent sense precisely from this point of view, because the times in which we live today speak a clear and distinct language, and this language proclaims an extraordinary aberration in the spiritual and soul realms among people.

Only recently I called your attention to a literary phenomenon of the most significant kind, namely, to the book The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler. I told you that this book has a profound influence on young people, especially on the student youth of Central Europe, and that when I recently had to speak to the students of the Stuttgart Technical University about the significance and nature of of spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical research, I went into this lecture with the impression that Spengler's ideas about the decline of the Occident make on today's youth, especially on academic youth. You will perhaps have noticed how justified it is to speak today of the profound impact of Spengler's ideas, because far beyond the borders of Central Europe, everywhere where literary phenomena are observed today, Spengler's book is taken into account. The Times has even repeatedly published detailed reviews of the book.

What is the strange theory that comes to light in this Spengler book? We find it set forth in a thick volume by a man who, as I have already mentioned, has a genius for mastering any of a dozen or fifteen sciences, and who presents his arguments in the manner in which arguments are presented in science today. The fact that Benedetto Croce, who has since attained great eminence, has said foolish things about this book, although he has otherwise said sensible things, need not mislead us. that it is shown how the whole of the Western world, with its American offspring, is growing old and becoming senile, how death at the beginning of the third millennium is imminent for Western culture, how barbarism must break in, how, roughly around the year 2200, what is now Western civilization must be replaced by barbarism. We find this, as I said, substantiated with all the tools of today's science, and we have to recognize that only spiritual scientific deepening can arise against such a terrible view, terrible above all because of the scientific tools with which it appears, that only spiritual scientific deepening is capable of showing the point where in the human soul itself arises that which must replace what is today Western civilization, and that only spiritual scientific deepening is capable of showing how this must happen, approximately around the year 2200. can only arise from spiritual-scientific deepening, and that only spiritual-scientific deepening is capable of showing the point where, in the human soul itself, that which the West in turn drives out of ruin wells up. If the Occident only retained what is now being taught at universities, grammar schools, secondary schools, and primary schools, and what is being taught through our newspaper literature and our popular scientific literature, Spengler's calculation that barbarism would sweep over this Occident in 2200 would be justified. Only an appeal to the will of the human soul, as can be made by spiritual science, because it ignites spiritual forces in this human soul, because it opposes the external forces that are everywhere pushing towards decline today with the force that man must oppose out of his will, only spiritual science has the right to rebel today against such scientific armament as presented by Oswald Spengler. Ordinary, profane refutations of Spengler's book are a mockery.

But what do we learn from Spengler's book in particular? From the way it is conceived as a whole, from the way the research is processed in it, we see that Spengler's thinking has emerged entirely from the thinking of the broad masses of today's educated humanity, only that Spengler is immensely more clever and ingenious than the average person today. Therefore, he says the opposite of what the average person of today says about many things, but what he says is only a straightforward continuation of what the average person of today thinks, what the average person of today considers to be right. But how does this book strike us, which makes a harrowing impression on thousands and thousands of souls today, when we look at it with the unbiased gaze that comes from the wisdom of initiation? It throws almost complete light on the innermost structure of the traditional world-view of today, on the current current thinking. The remarkable thing about Spengler's book is that one can be ingenious — Spengler is ingenious, extraordinarily ingenious — and yet say the greatest follies; for his book also contains the greatest follies, but follies that only an ingenious person can actually find today. Other people are not capable of finding such great follies as Spengler has found. Now imagine the confusion that a book must cause in the mind, where on every page one can admire both genius and folly at the same time!

Today, extremes collide in a way that one might not have dreamed of a hundred or a hundred and twenty years ago. And if today's philistines reproach me for calling someone both a genius and a fool, I have to say that I reserve the right to do so today. Perhaps I shall make the mistake of calling Oswald Spengler a genius and a fool at the same time, because he is both at once. But that is what one is when one outgrows the strange configuration of today's literature. One must be as clever as Spengler, as fundamentally clever, to think up such idiotic nonsense as Spengler has thought up. A person of little intelligence would not arrive at Spengler's fascinating and dazzling assertions, for example, that the right, the true socialism is Prussianism, and that Western civilization, which will decline and fall by the year 2200, has no other way out than to become completely Prussian, that is, completely socialist in Spengler's sense. And a brochure that is considered a supplement to the book “The Decline of the West,” “Prussianism and Socialism,” is full on every page of the most ingenious insights that can be gained into individual details of the intellectual and social essence of today. What Spengler says, for example, about Russianity sometimes reminds me – although I must always take into account everything I have just said about Oswald Spengler – of many things I myself said many years ago about Russianity, about the future of Russianity and about the nature of the Russian people. And since Spengler declares that he will expand on what he says about Russianness, especially in terms of its scientific justification, in his second volume of “The Decline of the West,” I have to say: I look forward to that “brilliant cabbage” that will be said about the future of Europe under the influence of the further development of Russianness in this second volume.

You see, today you have to be paradoxical if you want to describe truthfully what is actually around us, and you can't get by without describing in such a paradoxical way what is beneath us. A third thing that can also be found in Oswald Spengler: he describes pessimism all the way. For it is pessimistic to say that in the year 2200 all Western civilization will have been replaced by barbarism. And it is particularly pessimistic when you prove this with twelve to fifteen sciences as rigorously as Spengler does. But Spengler worships this pessimism in a certain way, with religious humility. He indulges in this pessimism, I might say he glorifies this pessimism, this socialism or this Prussianism, which will take hold of the whole world, because only through organization and saturation of society in the Prussian spirit can the necessary downfall be postponed until the year 2200. That is pessimism, isn't it? But the whole thing that Oswald Spengler has before him as this socially Prussianized world, this Western world that will still be alive until the year 2200 and then dying, is still glorified by him, so to speak. He describes it with inner fire, but it is not a lasting fire, it is a theatrical fire, if you watch closely.

I don't like to talk abstractly, I prefer to talk in facts. And if you were to ask why: why does a brilliant man, just because he has a keen eye for certain details of contemporary civilization, have to be so foolish at the same time? Why does such a fundamentally clever man have to claim such stupid things at the same time? Why must such a man, who paints pessimism, paint this pessimism with a theatrical fire that makes this pessimism, if one can forget that it leads to destruction, appear like a grandiose optimism, like an invitation to admire this catastrophic downfall? Why is that all?

I would like to answer with a very specific sentence: Oswald Spengler, while thinking entirely in terms of natural science, demands psychology for the 20th century, but he has not the slightest idea about the human soul. Why? Because the moment he utters the words “theosophy” or “occultism” – he seems to be unaware of anthroposophy – he turns red and becomes quite angry. This is why his brilliant approach can only be devoted to the shell, not to the inwardness through which the soul must be sought. Therefore, his fire cannot be that which arises from the elemental primal forces of man, but is basically only a theatrical fire. Oswald Spengler turns red when he mentions the words “theosophy” and “occultism,” and it seems that he can hardly find any other purpose for occultism and theosophy than to use them to foster Bolshevism and Spartacism into a kind of parlor socialism. This is again the grandiose stupidity of a man whose genius is born of the intellectual substance of the present. But at the same time it testifies that where there is no idea, but only a red head in the face of intellectual deepening, that is precisely where the most confusing cultural phenomena of the present must come to light, even if they appear in a genial way.

That is what I wanted to say today by way of an introduction to the important considerations that I will present to you tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.