The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! Of the two areas that you yourselves also spoke about yesterday, it seems to me necessary that we deal first with the one that will have to provide the foundation for all our work. Of course, we must first prepare the real ground, and in our time that can be nothing other than community building. We will be able to deal with what is to develop on this real ground all the better in our discussions if we first talk about this community building.

On the one hand, it is undoubtedly the most difficult of your tasks, although it is easy to underestimate, but on the other hand, it is also the most urgent. You can see this from the form that the youth movement has taken. This youth movement, as it lives today in its most diverse forms, has a clear religious background, and this religious background is also always emphasized by the understanding members of the youth movement. And if you look at this youth movement with an open mind, what you notice about it is what is intimately connected with the building of community.

Consider the following phenomenon of this youth movement: it emerged some time ago, years ago. How did it emerge? Initially with the express aim of joining one group with another. It emerged explicitly under the motto of union, of group formation; and the significant thing is that in recent years this youth movement has undergone a metamorphosis into its opposite in many circles. Even those who may have taken it most seriously in those days now advocate isolation and a hermit-like existence. They emphasize the impossibility of joining forces with others. And why is that so?

Perhaps it is, when viewed symptomatically, something that is one of the most significant social phenomena of our time, particularly in central, southern and eastern Europe, that the striving to be a spiritual hermit has emerged so rapidly from the striving for community building in the youth movement, and that there is actually a certain fear of union. If you are familiar with the youth movement, you may find something different here and there, but if you look at it impartially, you will see that the decisive impulses of this youth movement will have to be characterized as I have done.

Now, what is the underlying reason for all this? The underlying reason for all this is that the religious communities have not been able to hold this youth within themselves. It is quite obvious that this youth movement does contain a clear religious impulse. Originally, if we may say so, it was a rebellion against the principle of authoritative life, of paternal life, of looking up to the experience of older people, that gave rise to this youth movement; it was a shaking of the human, paternal principle of authority. The times developed in such a way that people simply no longer believed in their fathers, that they simply no longer had any inner, subconscious trust in their fathers. But man needs man, especially when it comes to action and work. People sought unification, but they could only seek this unification with spiritual life, which is anchored in the hearts of people today when they live and are raised in our ordinary schools, under our religious impulses and so on. Of course, religious longing stirs in young people precisely when something is not right in the external religious life, but it stirs as an indefinite, abstract feeling; as something nebulous, it stirs. On the other hand, it is precisely in connection with this religious urge that the longing for community life arises. But from all that young people could receive, from all that is available, the possibility of real community building does not arise, but rather – if I may express myself somewhat radically – only the possibility of clique formation. That is, after all, the characteristic of our time: that wherever the desire for community arises, what actually arises everywhere is not a real inner sense of community, but the sense of forming cliques, that is, of joining together through the accidental community and feelings of community for what is nearest at hand. What leads one person to another by the accident of place, the accident of circumstances, and so on, leads to the formation of cliques. But these cliques, because they are not based on a solid spiritual foundation, all have the seed of dissolution within them. Cliques dissolve. Cliques are not lasting communities.

Lasting communities do not exist under any other condition than that they are based on a genuine shared commitment in communal life. And for anyone who is familiar with the history of social life, there was nothing surprising in the fact that what only contained the beginnings of cliquish behavior could not develop into community life, and that therefore these young souls became reclusive, received the urge within themselves not to join, and even developed a certain fear of joining. Everyone goes more or less their own way, I would say, who has fully participated in the youth movement. But since this youth movement emerged from a shock to the paternal authority principle, it must be said that this historical life of more recent times does not contain the seeds for real community building.

What you must seek first and foremost is the formation of a community. And if you want to arrive at a goal that is true and rooted in reality, you will have no other choice than to practice threefolding, to be truly aware of how to practice threefolding. In your profession, you absolutely do not need to agitate for threefolding in the abstract. In your profession, it is particularly possible to work very practically for threefolding. But there is no other way than to seek out the way to those to whom you want to speak. A real way must be found to found communities.

Now one need not believe that by doing something like this, one must become a revolutionary in a certain radical sense. There is no need for that at all. It may happen in one case that you get into some kind of regular ministry, into a preaching job, in the completely regular way. It may also happen that you succeed in directing the external material conditions here or there in such a way that you found a completely free community. But such free communities and those in which one strives to bring freedom into religious life must belong together; and that can only be the case if, in a certain way, what you strive for – please do not misunderstand me here to misunderstand me, it is not to preach the pure power principle, but the justified power principle —, if what you strive for becomes a power, that is, if you have a certain number of like-minded people. Nothing else will make an impression on the world. You must actually have the possibility of having people as preachers over a large territory who are from your very own circles. To do this, it will be necessary to make the circle you have now at least ten times larger. That will be your first task, so to speak: to seek out such a large circle of like-minded people, initially in the way that the smaller circle came about. Only when people in the most distant places – relatively distant places, of course – see the same aspiration emerging, when there is cohesion with you over a larger territory, will you be able to proceed to such a community formation, regardless of whether you have come to the ministry of preaching by a path recognized today or otherwise.

You will be able to work in such a way that you can truly bind your parishioners to you inwardly, emotionally. When I say “bind,” it does not mean to put on slave chains. To do that, however, the parishioners must gain the awareness through you that they live in a certain brotherhood. The communities must have concrete fraternal feelings within them and they must recognize their preacher-leader as a self-evident authority to whom they can also turn in specific questions. That means that you must first of all establish a self-evident authority in these communities, which you do not need to call fraternal communities or the like in an agitative way, especially with regard to economic life, however strange it may seem at first. It must be possible for advice to be sought from you in economic matters and in all matters related to economic affairs, based on the personal insight of the community members. It must be possible for people to feel that they are receiving a kind of directive from the spiritual world when they ask the preacher.

You see, when you can look at life, then what should actually be giving direction to it comes to you in seemingly small symptoms. I was once walking down a street in Berlin and met a preacher I had known for a long time. He was carrying a travel bag. I wanted to be polite and asked him some question. The next thing, of course, was that I asked him the question that arose from the situation: “Are you going on a trip?” — “No,” he answered me, “I'm just going on an official act.” — Now you may see something extraordinarily insignificant in it; but from the whole context, the matter seemed extraordinarily significant to me. The pastor in question was more of a theologian than a preacher, but he was a very earnest man. He had the things he needed for a baptism in his traveling bag and yet he spoke and felt in such a way that he could say to someone whom he could reasonably expect to understand a different turn of phrase: “I'm going to an official function.” — That is something like a policeman, when a thief is to be sought, he also goes to an official act.

It should disappear completely from the preacher's work that the connection with the external state or other life should somehow emerge in his consciousness. The whole emotional tenor of the words must express the fact that what is being done is being done by a personality who acts out of the consciousness of her God, out of the free impulse of her human personality. The consciousness must be present: I am not doing this as an official act, I am doing it naturally out of my innermost being, because the divine power leads me to do so.

You may consider this a minor matter. But it is precisely this tendency to regard such facts as unimportant that is perhaps the most important factor in the decline of religious activity today. When, on the other hand, such things are regarded as the main thing, when a person is imbued with the direct presence of the Divine in the physical, right down to the most minute sensation, and when the preacher feels such authority that he knows he am bringing divine life into it, I am not performing an official act in the modern sense, but am carrying out a commission from God – only then will he transmit to his parishioners that which must be transmitted as imponderables.

This seems to be quite far removed from economic life. And yet, as things stand today, we must not consider the things we are striving for here in Stuttgart in the field of threefolding to be decisive for other areas of life. We are working out threefolding from the totality of the social organism. But for your profession, it is a different matter. For your profession, it is a matter of permeating each of the three limbs — which, even if they are not properly organized, are in fact still there — with religious life; so that, although complete freedom of action prevails within the communities, within which, of course, economic life also takes place - it must, so to speak, be a self-evident prerequisite that in economic matters, where it is a matter of spiritual life flowing into the community, the decision is made by the preacher, by the pastor. There must be such harmony, and above all, the pastor must live in intimate connection with the entire charitable life of his community. To some extent, he must be aware of the balance of social inequalities. This must be striven for in the community. One must actually be the advisor of the men, and one must also be, to some extent, the helping advisor of the women; one must help the women's charity, and so on.

Both men and women must, when it comes to organizing their economic affairs, economic aid, and economic cooperation in a higher sense, unquestionably have the natural feeling that the preacher has something to say. Without an interest in economic life, a participatory interest, religious communities cannot be established, especially not in today's difficult economic times.

Is that not right? We can initially present such things as an ideal, but in one area or another we will have the opportunity to approach the ideal to a greater or lesser extent. Of course, you will face endless resistance if you strive for something like this. You will be rejected, but you must make your parishioners aware of this, and through their desire, the necessity to achieve this guiding influence of the preacher in economic life will become apparent.

At this point, I must say that much must remain an ideal. Above all, what must be the part of the one who lives as a preacher in a community in terms of legal and state life must still remain an ideal in many cases today. I will give a specific example. The fact that religious life has increasingly lost its real foundation has led to things that seem extraordinarily enlightened to today's people, but that have thoroughly undermined religious life from within social life. One example is the view that is held today about marriage legislation. There is no doubt that marriage legislation — whether conceived in strict or less strict terms, depending on other circumstances — is necessary. But it is necessary, under all circumstances, that this marriage legislation be integrated into the threefold social organism. For this, however, it is of course necessary to have a clear sense of marriage as a distinct institution that represents the threefold social organism. It is, first of all, an economic community and must be integrated into the social organism in so far as it has an economic part. Thus, a connection must be sought between the economic community that marriage represents and the associations. Today, little more can be thought of this, but this awareness must arise from within the communities, that above all the economic side of marriage must be supported by the measures of the associations, by the measures of economic life.

The second thing is that the legal relationship is clearly perceived as a relationship in itself, and that the state has only to intervene in the legal relationship of marriage, so that marriage between a man and a woman is only of concern to the state insofar as it is a matter of law, which originates from the state.

On the other hand, you will have to claim the spiritual blessing of marriage as your very own within the religious community in a completely free way based on your decision. So you will have to strive for the ideal that the religious blessing of marriage is placed within the freedom of religious decision and that this decision is fully respected, so that it is seen as a basis for the other, so that the trust that exists in the community is actually sought first for the marriage decision of the pastor or the preacher. Of course I know that such a thing is perhaps even regarded by many Protestant people today as something quite out of date, but again I can only say: that such things are regarded as out of date shows the damage of civilization, which inevitably undermines religious life.

So you will have to make your parishioners aware that the actual inner spiritual core of marriage has to do with religious life and that threefolding must certainly be practised in this area, that is, all three parts of marriage must gradually find their expression in social life, that is, all three things must be included. One should not imagine threefolding in such a way that one draws up a utopian program and says that one should threefold things. One threefolds them in the best way when one grasps that threefolding is implicitly contained in every institution of life and how one can shape the individual things in such a way that threefolding underlies them. Perhaps in your profession, in particular, it is not necessary to place too much emphasis on representing the threefold social order in the abstract; but one must understand how life demands that this threefold order comes about, that is, that each of the individual limbs of the social organism is a truly concrete, existing reality.

Of course you will meet with great resistance to this today, but it is precisely in such matters that you can, if you start by educating your community, best develop the relationship between the free spiritual life – in which, above all, the religious element must be included – which is to be, not in, I might say, benevolent mutual addresses, that one tolerates each other, but by actually presenting what is demanded by the matter as one's ideal. Of course, you must be prepared for the greatest resistance.

And thirdly, you must have the opportunity to develop what the free spiritual life should mean in the threefold social organism. Today, in the general social organism, we no longer have a spiritual life at all; we have an intellectual life, but we have no spiritual life. I would say that we have no dealings between gods and humans. We do not have the awareness that in everything that happens externally in the physical world, the divine work should be there through ourselves, and that the real, true spirit should be carried into the world, that therefore both the actions that take place within economic life, as well as the legal determinations that take place within state life, and in particular that the education of youth and also the instruction of old age must be the free deed of the people participating in this spiritual life. — That is what must be understood.

Therefore, you will have no choice but to fight for your complete individual authority for the free will. Of course, this is something that our time demands: that the individual who preaches preaches under his own authority. You see, in this area, one simply has to look at the tremendous clash of contradictions that prevails in our time.

When I go to a Catholic church today and come to the sermon, I know that the preacher is wearing the stole. I know that when he is wearing the stole, the person standing in the pulpit and preaching is not at all relevant to me as a human being. This is also really in the consciousness [of the Catholic priest]. As a human being, he does not feel responsible for any of his words, because the moment he crosses his chest with the stole, the Church speaks. And since the declaration of infallibility, the Roman Pope speaks ex cathedra for all things to be proclaimed by the Catholic Church. So, in [the Catholic preacher], I have a person in front of me who, at the moment [of the sermon], completely empties himself and doesn't even think about somehow representing his opinion, who is absolutely of the opinion that he can have a personal opinion that he keeps to himself, that doesn't even have to agree with what he speaks from the pulpit, because a personal opinion is out of the question there. The moment he crosses his stole over his chest, he is the representative of the church.

You see, that is one extreme. But it is there, and it will play a major role in the cultural movement that is just around the corner. Because as corrupting as we have to regard this power, it is a power, an immense power; and you cannot approach it otherwise than by becoming fully aware of it. They will have no other way of fighting. You will encounter this power at every turn in your life. It is spreading in an immeasurable way today, while humanity sleeps and does not notice.

On the other hand, the task of the time is to trust in – if I may call it that – divine harmony. And that, my dear friends, has absolutely not been understood in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. But it is something that should be understood in the most urgent sense in the present. In my “Philosophy of Freedom”, the legal system is also based on the individual human being acting entirely out of himself. One of the first and most brilliant critics to write about my Philosophy of Freedom in the English Athenaeum simply said that this whole view leads to a theoretical anarchism. This is, of course, the belief of today's people. Why? Because modern man actually lacks any truly divine social trust, because people cannot grasp the following, which is most important for our time: When you really get people to speak from their innermost being, then harmony comes about among people, not through their will, but through the divine order of the world. Disharmony comes from the fact that people do not speak from their innermost being. Harmony cannot be created directly, but only indirectly, by truly reaching people at their core. Then each person will automatically do what is beneficial for the other, and also speak what is beneficial for the other. People only talk and act at cross purposes as long as they have not found themselves.

If you understand this as a mystery of life, then you say to yourself: I seek the source of my actions within myself and have the confidence that the path that leads me inwardly will also connect me to the divine world order outwardly and that I will thus work in harmony with others. This brings, firstly, trust in the human heart and, secondly, trust in external social harmony. There is no other way than this to bring people together. Therefore, what you must achieve if you really want to have a social effect through your profession, a divine social effect, a spiritual social effect, is the possibility to really work from within, that is, everyone for himself, because he has found himself, has the possibility to be an authority.

The Catholic preacher acts without individuality, crosses the stole and is no longer himself, he is the Church. The Catholic Church has the magical means to powerfully influence social life without trust [in individual strength], through external symbolic soul activity. This was necessary to establish social communities towards the end of the 2nd millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha and was most ideally developed in ancient Egypt. In a roundabout way, which can be traced exactly historically, this has become the inner essence of the Catholic Church. The essence of the Catholic Church is that it still stands today at the point of view of the Egyptian priests and their social life in about the second millennium BC. The Catholic is an influence of the old into our time.

In contrast to this, there is a need today to really stand on the standpoint of our time, not to feel that we are anything other than the bearers of divine life within ourselves, which has become intellect. You have to fight for the freedom of speech so that no one can tell you what to preach, and that there is no norm for the content of the sermon. That is what you have to fight for. Otherwise you will not be able to found communities unless you make it a principle to fight for the freedom of preaching.

With this, I have first outlined in some detail what must, so to speak, lead to the formation of a community from within. If you are able to realize these things, then you will also, in turn, encourage young people to form a real community, whereas young people have only been able to form cliques out of themselves. I am convinced and have full confidence that if such communities can be brought into existence, then the young people will gather in such communities and something useful can come out of it, whereas perhaps 15 to 20 years ago the young people sought union in the so-called youth movement, but were leaderless because they no longer believed in their fathers and thus strove towards community building without any real inner impulse. All that came of it was the formation of cliques. Today, people's souls are hermits. But if there were a possibility of coming together, they would join immediately, and where truly free communities arise, that is, communities with inner freedom, young people in particular would flock to them.

You see, in such matters we naturally have a difficult time with our anthroposophical movement. Because of its inner nature, this anthroposophical movement today can be nothing other than a completely universal movement. It must, so to speak, extend itself to all areas of life, and we are in an extraordinarily difficult situation with regard to the anthroposophical movement. We are in the difficult situation that on the one hand a certain anthroposophical good must be communicated to the world today - it must go out into the world, because the world lacks the opportunity to receive spiritual content - on the other hand, the desire to form communities, to form anthroposophical communities, is arising everywhere. Call them branches, call them what you will, the endeavour is there to found anthroposophical branches. And because the anthroposophical movement today still has to be something universal, these anthroposophical branches cannot really come to a real life, because they oscillate back and forth between the religious element and the spiritual element, which is more directed towards all branches of life. Naturally, they do not develop a true sense of brotherhood; they do not even grasp their social task, which consists in founding small communities as models of what is to spread throughout humanity. But either they degenerate into a mere transmission of the teachings, or they feel the human resistance to unification and split into opinions, quarrel and the like. But if we ask ourselves where the fault lies, we find it not in these communities but in the fact that today one cannot really find a true connection to religious life by penetrating the spiritual world with insight. Among all the denominations that exist today, anthroposophists cannot find a religious life. These communities must first come into existence. They cannot come into being in any other way than by people seriously considering all the things that can lead to the founding of such communities. I believe that the external possibilities, the possibilities for establishing institutions, will not be so difficult to find if the attitude that I have tried to characterize for you today really takes hold, provided there are enough of you. If you have ten times as many people who are preparing to fulfill the preaching profession throughout Germany, over a larger territory, then you will also have the opportunity to come to community building out of this attitude. But community building is the foundation. Only when we have become clear about this can we talk further about worship and preaching.

Now I would like to ask you to speak up and ask questions about your own specific thoughts, desires, and so on. Perhaps you have had concerns about some of the things I have mentioned, or you feel that one or the other question has not been fully addressed, that you need more practical information.

A participant: Even if the practical side comes about easily, it may be that this or that practical matter is of the greatest importance to us now, especially since some of us are already in certain practical situations. Therefore, I would ask you to perhaps tell us something about the possibilities for connecting. Initially, there are two possibilities for connecting, either perhaps from the church or from the existing anthroposophical communities. Is it at all possible to connect from church work afterwards? This fear that it cannot be found still holds back many of us, although they could already enter into church service. What should happen then? The question of practical matters is perhaps already included, but the fundamental question of the possibility of making contact is already contained in it, because there is simply no clarity in our own movement about where we can make a practical connection right now. Would we be wasting an opportunity if we entered the church service now in the hope of being able to make a connection later? Should we not rather do something else, because we have to make a connection somewhere.

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is such that the answer to this must be a manifold one. It cannot be given in the same way because, despite the difficulties that the church presents today, there are still possibilities to work from within the church that should perhaps not be left untapped. If you take into account the particular circumstances here or there, you will be able to say that, given the nature of the community as a whole, you can found your community yourself, if you seek out the existing forms of the ministry, but then gradually lead the community out of the current church circumstances, while you would not be able to get the community members together if you placed yourself outside the church and simply tried to gather them. On the other hand, in certain fields it will no longer be possible to work outside the Church at all. In such cases it is of course absolutely necessary to try to found free communities. But I would recommend under all circumstances not to approach the matter with the aim of forming a union with the anthroposophical branches and so on, and not to aim at working out of anthroposophy itself, because in that case you would be pulled down before you got anywhere. Anthroposophy as such will simply be attacked in the most outrageous way from all possible sides in the near future; and in order to arrive at the formation of a quiet community within this battle, you see, the strength that you have today, even if you were ten times as numerous, is not yet sufficient. We do not yet live in social conditions that would make it possible to develop religious communities from anthroposophy itself. They have to form religious communities for themselves and then seek union with the anthroposophical movement. The anthroposophical movement – I can say this quite openly – will never fail to support this union, of course; but it would not be good to form ecclesiastical communities out of the anthroposophical 'communities', so to speak.

You see, when we founded the Waldorf School - it is not an example, but there is at least a similarity - we did not set out to found a school of world view, a school of anthroposophy, but merely to bring into pedagogy and didactics what can be brought in through anthroposophy. I was quite insistent that Catholic children should be taught by Catholic priests and Protestant children by Protestant priests. Now, however, it has become clear that, because the first core of the Waldorf School was working-class children, a great many children would have had no religious instruction at all. And so it became necessary to provide an independent anthroposophical religious education. But I am very particular, especially in my own behavior in this matter, that this anthroposophical religious education does not fall into the constitution of this school, but that it comes from outside in the same way as Catholic and Protestant religious education, so that the school as such gives this religious instruction out of itself, but simply allows the Anthroposophical community to give this Anthroposophical religious instruction to those children for whom the parents want it, just as Protestant religious instruction is given to Protestant children and Catholic religious instruction to Catholic children. In this area, we must be serious about the fact that the spiritual works only through the spiritual. As soon as we would make a school constitution to incorporate religious education into the school curriculum, we would probably achieve more at first than we are achieving now, but slowly dismantling it. We must have faith in the spirit to work through itself. And that is why we in the anthroposophical movement face the great difficulty that as soon as we establish a branch, we do so in the physical world; and there, of course, people always strive to work through external means. But anthroposophy cannot work through external means today; it can only work through that which is in it as spiritual content that works on people. These two things are always in conflict with each other: external branching out – internal effectiveness. This fights terribly with each other. And that would even change into a healthy one at the moment when a community could really be formed out of the religious spirit. Now, of course, it is a matter of overcoming, I would say, higher inconveniences, so to speak.

You see, when I speak to Swiss teachers about the liberation of intellectual life, the liberation of the teaching profession, even the best of them usually reply: Yes, in Switzerland we are actually quite free, we can do what we want at school. — But no one does anything other than what the state wants. In terms of freedom, they are basically as unfree as possible; they just don't feel their unfreedom, they feel their unfreedom as freedom because they have grown so inwardly together with it. We, in turn, must first learn to feel the unfreedom. I was once able to feel it in a very strange way at a threefolding meeting I had held in Switzerland; I would say it was more in a humorous way. During the discussion, someone had become extremely heated in a certain fanatical way about the fact that in Germany, laws and police measures were used to command everyone to behave loyally, to worship the monarchy loyally, and so on, that all this was a commandment. He became so terribly heated about it. I said to him: It may well be that Republicans get worked up in such a way against the monarchy, but I remember that when the German Kaiser was in Switzerland a few years ago, the people behaved in an extremely devotional manner, so that at that time in Zurich the image of devotion far surpassed what people were used to in Germany. — To which he replied: Yes, that is precisely the difference between Germany and Switzerland: in Germany, it is all compulsory, the people have to do it, but we do it voluntarily. —- That is the difference between free people and those who are unfree.

Well, it is not true that we have to, and that all people have to – it is completely international in our time – we actually have to learn what it means to be a free person. And that is why I believe that it must actually be possible to tie in with where some freedom is still possible within the church, to found these free communities from within the church itself.

I am not unaware of the difficulties, but it is true that you only have to consider the real cultural conditions, especially in Central Europe. A certain kind of community was formed at the time – and we really must learn from history – when Old Catholicism emerged after the proclamation of the dogma of infallibility. Now, if you take Old Catholicism in terms of its content, it can be said to have the same in terms of doctrine and priestly behavior as the Protestant pastorate. It is already inherent in Old Catholicism, which has only preserved in a popular way a cultus that we will talk about later. One can say that Old Catholicism, precisely because it arose as a reaction, already contained within it that which, by itself, could have led to the free formation of congregations outside the Church. Now you will know, of course, that Old Catholicism in Germany was received with great enthusiasm. Parishes were formed here and there, but they could not live, could not die. Of course, at that time, because one could not form such parishes within the Catholic Church, they had to form themselves. There was no other way. In Switzerland, where much more of the Old Catholicism has been preserved – because there are many Old Catholic communities there – it has recently become quite blatantly clear that these communities are continuing a conservative life, but are no longer growing, but rather remaining small, even shrinking, so that they are already on the ground of a descending development. This is the difficulty of forming free communities today.

Therefore, it will be necessary to save as many people as you can – not from the church, but from those people who have not yet been able to decide to leave the church in order to found free communities with you – to really grasp them in the church and bring them out. If things develop in this way, you can be quite sure that the connection with the anthroposophical movement will be achieved. For the anthroposophical movement, although it will have to fight terrible battles, will nevertheless establish its validity, even if it is only possible with many sacrifices on the part of those working in it, with great sacrifices. It will establish its validity , but it will hardly be in a position today to found a branch of religious life out of itself — that is why I always spoke today of the special nature of your profession — it will hardly be in a position to shape communities in a particular religious sense. It will be necessary for what I always emphasize to become truth: The Anthroposophical Society as such cannot found new religious communities and so on, but one must somehow form the religious community out of oneself, or - as far as one can - form it with the human material that today, purely out of prejudice, still stands within the old church. But perhaps you can formulate the question further so that we can talk about it in more detail.

Dr. Rittelmeyer – he just got sick – would have had the opportunity, given the way he had behaved towards his parishioners, to found a completely free parish in the middle of Berlin. And once it has a certain power, a certain standing, is it large, then you don't dare approach the pastor in any way. Is it actually your opinion that one should not have this last remnant of consideration for the church?

A participant: I think it will be especially difficult to work in the church, and I don't yet see clearly to what extent we could do that even now. We will have to wait until we can go out together to do the actual work. Would it perhaps be possible to look for points of contact in the church now? But then we would already be scattered until we are ready to go out together.

Rudolf Steiner: As long as you do not have a preaching ministry, you cannot seek such connections now. You must seek what is the preparation for religious work, of course independently of the church, at least inwardly independently. As long as you are, so to speak, students, you cannot seek union with the church. You can only look around to see where it would be possible to pull such congregations out of the church. And if you should find that this is impossible in Central Europe, then you should still proceed to the free formation of congregations, and you should seek the means and ways to proceed to this free formation of congregations.

Now, of course, I would only have two objections to an absolutely free establishment of a congregation, that is, one of you goes to place X and the other to place Y and simply, by preaching first for five and then for ten or twenty people for my sake, gradually creates a free congregation. The only difficulty I can see is that this path is, first of all, a slow one – you will see that it is a slow one – it is the safest, but a slow one. And the second is the material question. Because, isn't it true that if things were to be done this way, it would be necessary for this matter to be financed in the broadest sense, to be properly financed, so that a community would simply be established by you yourselves, and that the financing of this community would be sought.

Now I must say that this would, of course, be the best way; even if it has to be fought for with external material means, it would naturally be the best way. But I must tell you quite frankly that all these paths require great courage on your part. It takes great courage for you to join in the struggle that naturally arises, to join in the difficulties, in the struggle, for the financial foundation as well. It would, of course, be best if we could raise sufficient funds to make you completely independent, so that you could simply choose whether to collect here or there, even if it is only from the smallest circle, my community. It will come about. It takes courage to believe that it will come about. It will come about, but of course you need the financial basis, and there are extraordinary difficulties standing in the way of this today. The community of all today's positive confessions will soon be there, which most strenuously opposes the fact that something like this is done. And you cannot do it in detail, you have to organize it as a large movement. You actually have to establish a community out of all of you who set themselves this goal in life and for whom a financial foundation is then sought.

Now, you can do the math. It would be enough, if, let us say, there were two hundred of you, because this way is, so to speak, a very safe one and does not depend on such speed. Now you can calculate for yourselves what is needed annually. As soon as you have the means to do it, you can do it. Then it is the safest way. But then it is also the most visible way, and that would actually be the more natural one. But in today's social and economic conditions, raising these funds in Central Europe – and that is what it could be about – is extremely difficult. Because you won't find any possibility to do something like this in another empire, in another country. So in both Eastern and Western Europe it is absolutely out of the question; in Central Europe it could be done for internal reasons, and a great thing would be done with it.

Werner Klein: I must say in this regard that I have so far only seen this path, the latter, and actually still consider it the only viable one. We have major difficulties with financing, of course, but we could work to eliminate them. I also believe that you can keep your head above water with your own resources if you create your own field of activity in a city, perhaps try to get money from lectures. You will be able to make friends who will help you. But you can also get into a profession – after all, we live in the age of reduced working hours – so you will be able to fill a less significant position at the town hall or somewhere where you can make a living if necessary, in order to gain the time to pursue what is on your mind. I believe that you will be able to survive. But alongside that, a generous organization would have to be set up and an attempt would have to be made to at least obtain funds. And according to what lives in all of us in Germany, this general yearning for something new and strong, I believe that many things will be found. That will depend on us. — But now, for the first time today, I see the second way in connection with the church and I believe that one can go hand in hand there. The path of the free community requires a completely different tactic, a joint approach to the goal, and a joint approach at a joint point in time, but still each for himself when one emerges as a larger movement; while the other tactic is that everyone starts working on their own and tries to create a new community from the church. The one will not interfere with the other. At the moment when we are perhaps so far along on this safe but also more difficult path that we can, to put it bluntly, get started, then those who have so far taken the other path will join us in our work and then, with can support us with fruits that have already shown themselves to be real and positive, while, if we succeed in one area or another in following up the successes in one or the other area, that would only be to be welcomed and regarded as a factor in itself. If we really want to achieve something socially in view of the social and religious hardship today, then only this first, sure way seems to be available. We must try it in any case. If we fail, we will still take the other path, and if it is taken simultaneously by those who already want to work in order to fill the interim period, it is to be welcomed. If we want great things, we must also strive for the great and try.

Rudolf Steiner: It is indeed the case that here in Stuttgart we have had some experiences with the difficulties that confront something like the surest way that has been characterized here. Of course, I am entirely of the opinion that this path can be taken if sufficient effort is put into it. But please also be aware of the difficulties that are encountered in all areas today. There is an extraordinary amount of goodwill in saying that one can also take on some position and work alongside it in the way that is desirable. But it is an open secret that students at German universities will face terrible financial difficulties in the coming years. People have thought of all kinds of impractical things; even a professor came to me and said that we should think about setting up printing presses because students will no longer be able to afford to print their dissertations, and they should print them themselves there. Of course, I do not have the slightest sympathy for such material inbreeding; because I do not know how the students should earn anything by printing their own dissertations. I thought it would be more rational to abolish the forced printing of dissertations altogether – for the time of need. – So, one thinks of all kinds of impractical things, but the matter is a very serious one. For example, it would be an extremely appealing idea to me if the “Kommende Tag” were able to provide a certain material basis for at least a number of students, that is, it would have to, let's say, take on a group of students in its enterprises for three months on a rotating basis, while employing others for the next three months. Then the latter could go back to university and study. So that would be a nice idea to implement, if it were possible. But in our own company, the moment we tried to implement something like that, i.e. hire a number of students, we would immediately have a revolution by the trade union workers, who would tell us: that's not on. They would throw us out. And, wouldn't you agree, something similar would happen, even if it wasn't exactly in the form of being thrown out, but probably in the form of not being let in. Besides, I don't see any real possibility of being able to pursue such a profession alongside a job, even with today's shorter working hours, where you can give yourself completely, because it requires complete devotion to really fulfill such a profession, which you want to pursue. I don't see any real possibility.

You see, we are simply faced with the fact that today, due to the difficult living conditions, people are actually not as strong as they should be. So I fear that such a path, where the person in question would have to rely on himself in financial terms, would at least lead to a slight neurasthenia. It also seems rather unlikely to me that under present-day conditions it is possible to earn a living by lecturing and working independently in this way. You see, intellectual services are paid for in the old currency, and one has to eat in the new currency. If you take the payment for intellectual performance, then in the old currency you get 30 marks, and in the new currency you would have to spend 300 marks. So this matter would of course be difficult. On the other hand, it would be really worth working for a financing in the broadest sense.

I also think that working together with the church, which seems to be more appealing to Mr. Klein than to some of you, is not a lost cause. Because combining this work with the church would, I believe, have advantages.

You can do both. I still think that experience today suggests that if you first succeed in creating free congregations from within the church, you will find followers simply by your approach. You will find followers. Because it is no exaggeration to say that there are many pastors and priests in the Protestant religious communities today who would like to get out of their jobs and just need a nudge. If you succeed in drawing these people out of their communities, then you will find that some of the pastors currently in office will follow you. That would be a good addition. It would enable the movement to grow rapidly. You would find support from those who, on their own, simply cannot muster the initiative. If the impetus were provided from outside, you would find support.

That would, of course, be extremely desirable if we could somehow at least tackle the question of financing. I deliberately say “tackle it somehow”, because if this financing question is properly tackled, then it is likely to succeed. Tackling it is much more difficult than succeeding once it has been properly tackled. For what is lacking today in the broadest sense is the active cooperation of people in the great tasks of life. People everywhere have become so accustomed to routines that one does not really gain sufficiently active collaborators for the most important tasks.

I believe that we should perhaps make use of our time, and because we have now come directly to the practical issues, which should be discussed preliminarily, I would ask you to come at half past six this evening for the continuation.

During the year 1924, before his last illness in September, Rudolf Steiner gave over eighty lectures on Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies to Members of the Anthroposophical Society in the following places: Dornach, Berne, Zurich, Stuttgart, Prague, Paris, Breslau, Torquay and London.

All these lectures were intended to be material for study by those already familiar with the teachings and terminology of Anthroposophy. The following extract from the lecture of 22nd June, 1924, calls attention to the need for exactitude when passing on such contents:

"The study of problems connected with karma is by no means easy and discussion of anything that has to do with the subject entails—or ought at any rate to entail—a sense of deep responsibility. Such study is in truth a matter of penetrating into the most profound mysteries of existence, for within the sphere of karma and the course it takes lie those processes which are the basis of the other phenomena of world-existence, even of the phenomena of nature ... These difficulty and weighty matters entail grave consideration of every word and every sentence spoken here, in order that the limits within which the statements are made shall be absolutely clear ..."

A list of relevant literature will be found at the end of the volume, together with a summarised plan of the Complete Edition of Rudolf Steiner's works in the original German.

Yesterday we drew attention to the existence of great leaders of mankind as far back as the epoch we call the Atlantean period of human evolution. We know from what was brought forth yesterday that this epoch ran its course on a continent we call the Old Atlantis, lying between Europe-Africa, and America; we also mentioned that human life at that time was very different from what it is today, particularly with regard to the nature of human consciousness. Our scrutiny disclosed the fact that the consciousness with which man is endowed today developed only gradually, and that he started from a sort of dim clairvoyance. We know further that the human physical bodies of the Atlantean period consisted of a substance far softer, more flexible, more plastic, than at present; and clairvoyant consciousness reveals the fact that at that time men were not yet able, for example, to perceive solid objects such as our eyes see today in sharp outline. The Atlantean could distinguish the objects of the outer world—the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms—but only indistinctly, blurred. Just as nowadays in a foggy autumn evening the street lights show a fringe of color, so people of that time saw objects surrounded by a colored border—an aura, as the term is. The auras were the indication of the spiritual beings belonging to the objects. At certain times in the course of the day the perception of these spiritual beings was very indistinct, but at others very clear, especially in the intermediate states between waking and sleeping.

If we wish vividly to imagine the consciousness of an ancient Atlantean, we must think of it as follows: He did not see a rose, for example, so sharply outlined as we do today. It was blurred, hazy and surrounded by colored borders. Even by day it was indistinct, but it became more so and disappeared entirely in the interval between waking and sleeping. On the other hand, however, he discerned quite clearly what we must term the rose spirit, the rose soul. And the same was true of all other objects in his environment. In the progress of evolution outer objects became ever clearer, while perception of the spiritual beings associated with them grew dimmer. But in compensation man kept developing his self consciousness: he learned to be aware of himself.

Yesterday we mentioned the period in which a distinct sense of the ego emerged, adding that the etheric body came to coincide with the physical body as the last third of the Atlantean age approached. You can imagine that previously the nature of leadership as well was quite different, for at that time there existed nothing like a mutual understanding among men resting on an appeal to reason. In those days of dim clairvoyance mutual understanding was based upon a subconscious influence passing from one to the other. Especially was there still present to a high degree something we know today only in its last misinterpreted and misunderstood survival, namely, a kind of suggestion, a subconscious reciprocal influence, invoking but little the collaboration of the other's soul. Looking back to early Atlantean times we see that a powerful effect was exercized on the other's soul the moment any image, any sensation, arose in the soul, and the will was directed upon the other. All influences were powerful, as was also the will to receive them. Only scraps of all this have survived.

Picture to yourself a man of that time passing another while executing certain gestures. If the observer were even slightly the weaker of the two he would have felt impelled to imitate and mimic all the gestures. The only surviving remnant of this sort of thing is our inclination to yawn when we see another person yawning. Formerly a far closer tie prevailed between human beings, based on the fact that they lived in an atmosphere totally different from that of today. Only during a heavy rain do we nowadays live in water-soaked air, whereas at the time of which we speak the air was constantly saturated with dense moisture; and in the early Atlantean epoch man was composed of a substance no more dense than that of certain jellyfish now living in the sea and scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding water. That was the way man was constituted at that time, and he solidified only gradually. Nevertheless we know that even then he was exposed to influences not only of the regular guiding higher spiritual beings who either dwelt on the sun or were distributed among the various planets of our solar system, but also of the Luciferic spirits that influenced his astral body; and we have learned, too, in what manner these influences took effect. But we found further that those who were to be the leaders of the Atlantean people had to combat these Luciferic influences in their own astral body. By reason of the spiritual and clairvoyant nature of their consciousness all men of that time could perceive whatever spiritual influences were exerted on them.—Nowadays one who knows nothing of spiritual science laughs when you tell him his astral body shows the effects of Luciferic spirits; but then, he does not know that the influence of these spirits is far stronger than it would be if he took note of them.

“The Devil your good-folk ne'er scent,
E'en though he have them by the collar.”

That is a very profound utterance in Goethe's Faust; and many a materialistic influence of today would not exist if people knew that we are by no means rid of all the Luciferic influences as yet.

In Atlantis the leaders and their disciples kept a careful watch for everything that excited passions, instincts, and desires, for everything emanating from that quarter which aroused in man a deeper interest in his physical-sensible surroundings than was beneficial for his progressive development in the cosmic scheme. The first duty of one who aspired to become a leader was to practice this self-knowledge, to guard carefully against anything that might arise in him through Lucifer's influence. He had to study these Luciferic spiritual beings in his own astral body most accurately, for by so doing he could keep them at a distance. This also enabled him to perceive the other divine-spiritual beings, the higher, guiding ones, and particularly those that had transferred their own sphere of action from the earth to the sun, or to other planets; and the regions beheld by men corresponded to that from which they had descended. There were human souls, for instance, that had come down from Mars; and when these, in keeping with their development, combatted the Luciferic influences in their own astral body, they attained to a higher degree of clairvoyance, to a pure and good seership, and they beheld the higher spiritual beings of the region from which they themselves had descended, from the Mars region. Souls that had come down from Saturn learned to see the Saturn beings, those from Jupiter or Venus, the Jupiter or Venus beings: each beheld his own region.

But the most advanced among men, those who had survived the moon crisis, were able gradually to prepare themselves to envision not only the spiritual beings of Mars, Jupiter, or Venus, but those of the sun itself, the exalted sun beings. Having come down from the various planets the initiates were again able to behold the spirituality of these planets. From this it is clear why in ancient Atlantis there were institutions, schools, where those who had descended, for example, from Mars were accepted, when sufficiently mature, for the purpose of studying the mysteries of Mars; and that there were other sanctuaries where those who had come from other planets could learn their mysteries. Applying the later term “oracle” to these institutions, we have in Atlantis a Mars Oracle, where the mysteries of Mars were studied, a Saturn Oracle, a Jupiter Oracle, a Venus Oracle, and so on. The highest was the Sun Oracle; and the loftiest of all the initiates was the ranking initiate of the Sun Oracle.

Because suggestion and the influences of will played so important a part, the whole method of instruction was very different. Let us try to imagine the nature of the intercourse between teacher and pupil. Assuming the presence of spiritual teachers who had achieved initiation as by an act of grace, we ask, How did the later neophytes arrive at initiation in the Atlantean age? Here we must imagine first of all the mighty impression exercized by those already initiated—through their whole conduct, their mere presence—upon those predestined to become their pupils. The very sight of an Atlantean initiate was enough to start a sympathetic vibration in the soul of the neophyte, thus disclosing his fitness for the discipleship. The influences that passed between men at that time were entirely remote from objective day-consciousness, and the type of instruction we know today was then unnecessary. All intercourse with the teacher, everything the teacher did, worked hand in hand with men's imitative faculty. A great deal passed unconsciously from teacher to pupil; hence the most important factor, for those sufficiently matured through their previous life conditions, was that in the beginning they should merely be admitted to the sanctuaries and remain in contact with their teachers. Then, by observing what the teachers did and by impressions made on their feelings and sensations, they were trained—prepared, indeed, over a very long period of time. Eventually the harmonious accord between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the pupil reached the point where everything the teacher possessed in the way of deeper spiritual secrets passed over of itself to the disciple.—Such were the conditions in those ancient times.

Now, what was the situation after the union of the etheric and physical bodies had become established? Although the two bodies had come to cover completely during the Atlantean epoch, the union was as yet not very firm, so that by an effort of will the teacher could, in a certain sense, withdraw the pupil's etheric body from the physical. It was no longer possible, even when the right moment had come, for the teacher's wisdom to pass over into the pupil as of its own accord; but the teacher could easily withdraw the pupil's etheric body and then the pupil could see whatever the teacher saw. So the slight or loose connection between the etheric and physical bodies made it possible to release the former, and the wisdom, the clairvoyant vision, of the master passed over into the disciple.

Then there occurred the great cataclysm that swept away the Atlantean Continent. Mighty elemental disturbances in air and water, terrific upheavals in the earth, gradually altered the entire face of the globe. Europe, Asia, and Africa, which had been dry land only to a very slight extent, arose out of the water, as did likewise America. Atlantis disappeared. Men migrated eastward and westward, and a great variety of settlements came into being. But after the mighty catastrophe mankind had advanced another step. Again a change had taken place in the connection between the etheric and physical bodies: in the post-Atlantean time the union of the two became much firmer. The teacher could now no longer detach the pupil's etheric body by an impulse of will and thereby transmit his power of vision as he had formerly done. Hence initiation, leading to vision of the spiritual world, had to take another form which can be described somewhat as follows:

The instruction which had been based largely upon direct psychic influence from teacher to pupil had gradually to be superseded by a form slowly approaching what we know as instruction today; and the farther the post-Atlantean age advanced, the greater grew the resemblance to our modern method of instruction. Corresponding to the Atlantean oracles, institutions were now established by the great leaders of mankind exhibiting similarities to the old Atlantean oracles: Mysteries, initiation temples, came into being in the post-Atlantean epoch; and just as formerly those fitted for it were received into the oracles, so now they were admitted to the Mysteries. There the neophytes were carefully trained by means of exacting instruction, because they could no longer be influenced as they were formerly. In all civilizations over a long period of time we find such Mysteries. Whether you seek in the culture we knew as the first post-Atlantean, which ran its course in ancient India, or in that of Zarathustra, or among the Egyptians or Chaldeans, you will invariably find neophytes being admitted to the Mysteries which were something part-way between church and school; and there they underwent a severe training calculated to promote thinking and feeling as these apply to events of the invisible, spiritual world—not merely as related to things of the sense world.

And what was taught there can now be accurately defined: to a great extent it was the same as what we have come to know today as anthroposophy. That was the subject of study in the Mysteries; and it differed only in that it was adapted to the customs of that time and was imparted according to strict rules. Today people who in a certain sense are ripe can be told of the mysteries of the higher worlds in a more or less free way and comparatively rapidly. Of old, however, the instruction was strictly regulated. In the first grade, for instance, only a certain sum of knowledge was imparted and all else kept completely secret. Not until the pupil had digested this was he apprised of anything pertaining to a higher grade. Through this sort of preparation, concepts, ideas, sensations, and feelings referring to the spiritual world were implanted in his astral body, a procedure tending at the same time to combat the influences of Lucifer; for all that is imparted in the way of spiritual-scientific concepts refers to the higher worlds, not to the world in which Lucifer aims to stimulate man's interest, not to the sense world alone.

Eventually, when the neophyte had been prepared in this way, the time approached for him to be guided to independent vision, when he himself should see in the spiritual world. This implied the ability to reflect in his etheric body everything he had accumulated in his astral body; for vision of the spiritual world is achieved only when the fruits of study stored in the astral body are experienced so intensely, through certain feelings and sensations connected with the knowledge acquired, that not only the astral body, but the denser etheric body as well, is thereby influenced. If the pupil was to rise from learning to seeing, all that had been taught him must have borne fruit.

That is why, throughout the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and Greek epochs the training period closed with the following act. First the pupil was again prepared for a long time—now not through learning, but by means of what we call meditation and other exercises designed to develop inner concentration, inner tranquility, inner equanimity. He was trained to make his astral body in every respect a citizen of the spiritual worlds; and when the right time had come the conclusion of this development consisted in his being placed in a deathlike state lasting three and a half days. While in Atlantean times the etheric and physical bodies were so loosely joined that the former could be withdrawn more easily than in later periods, it had now become necessary in the Mysteries to throw the neophyte into a deathlike sleep. While this lasted he was either placed in a coffinlike box or bound to a sort of cross—something of that sort. The initiator, known as the hierophant, possessed the power to work upon the astral, and particularly upon the etheric body—for during this procedure the etheric left the physical body. That is something different from sleep: in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed while the astral body and ego withdraw; but in this final act of initiation only the physical body remained in place. The etheric body was simply withdrawn from the greater part, at least, of the physical body—from the whole upper portion; and this left the candidate in a deathlike state. Everything that had been learned through meditation and other exercises was now impressed into the etheric body while in this condition. During these three and a half days the neophyte really moved about in the spiritual worlds wherein the higher beings dwell. Finally the hierophant called him back, meaning that he had the power to awaken him; and the candidate brought with him a knowledge of the spiritual world. Now he could see into this spiritual world and could proclaim its truths to his fellow men who were not yet ready to envision it themselves.

Thus the ancient teachers of pre-Christian time had been initiated into the profound secrets of the Mysteries. There they had been guided by the hierophant during the three-and-a-half-day period; they were living witnesses to the existence of a spiritual life and to the fact that behind the physical there is a spiritual world to which man belongs with his higher principles and into which he must find his way. But evolution proceeded. What I have just described to you as an initiation existed most intensively in the first epoch after the Atlantean catastrophe; but the union of the etheric and physical bodies grew ever firmer, hence the procedure became more and more dangerous, because man's whole consciousness accustomed itself increasingly to the physical sense world. You see, that was the import of human evolution: men were to become used to living in this physical world with all their inclinations and propensities. This learning to love the physical world was a great step forward for mankind.

In the early part of the post-Atlantean civilization there still remained a living recollection of the existence of a spiritual world. People said: We, the late descendants, can still see into the spiritual world of our ancestors.—They still retained the dim, dull, clairvoyant consciousness and they knew where lay the world which was their true home. They said, All that surrounds us in our day-consciousness is like a veil spread over truth: it hides the spiritual world from us; it is maya, illusion.—They did not accustom themselves at once to what they now could see, nor could they readily understand that it was intended that they lose their awareness of the old spiritual world. That was the characteristic feature of the first post-Atlantean civilization; hence that was the time in which men could most easily be guided to the spirit: they still felt a lively interest in the spiritual world. Naturally matters could not remain thus, because the Earth's mission consists in man's becoming fond of the forces of the earth and conquering the physical plane. Were you able to envision ancient India, you would discover the spiritual life to be on a tremendously lofty level.

A comprehension of what the original teachers revealed to mankind is possible in this day and age only after a study of spiritual science. For others, the teaching of the great holy Rishis is nonsense, foolishness, for they can make no sense out of what is told them there about the mysteries of the spiritual world. From their standpoint they are naturally quite right: everyone is always right from his own standpoint.

In ancient India spiritual vision was enormously extensive, but the use of even the simplest implements was non-existent. People provided for themselves in the most primitive ways. There was nothing like a natural science of any kind—or what is so called today—because everything that could be observed on the physical plane was looked upon as maya, the great illusion; and only by uplift to the great Sun Being or similar beings was the real, the true, to be found. But again, matters could not stop there: among the post-Atlanteans there had to be those as well with the will to conquer the kingdom of earth; and the first attempt to this end was made in the time of Zarathustra. In the transition from the old Indians to the ancient Persians we see a mighty step forwards. In Zarathustra's view the outer world ceased to be mere maya or illusion: he showed men that what surrounds them is of value, though he emphasized the presence of spirit underlying all. While the ancient Indian saw a flower as maya and sought the spirit behind it, Zarathustra said, The flower is something we must value, for it is an integral part of the universal spirit existing in all things; matter grows out of spirit.

We have already mentioned that Zarathustra drew attention to the physical sun as the field of action of spiritual beings. But initiation was difficult; and for those who wanted not merely to be told of the spiritual world by the initiates but to see for themselves into the great sun aura, more drastic measures were called for in connection with their initiation. Furthermore, all human life gradually changed; and in the next cultural epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, the physical world was conquered to a still greater extent. Man was no longer bent upon a purely spiritual science which studies the realm that underlies the physical: he observed the course of the stars; and in their position and movement, in what is outwardly visible, he sought the language of divine-spiritual beings. In this script co-ordinating visible objects he recognized the will of the Gods. That is the way cosmic interrelationships were studied in the Egypto-Chaldean time. And in Egypt we see arising a geometry applied to external things. Such is the story of man's conquest of the outer world.

In Greece even greater progress was made in this direction. There we see come about the union of soul experiences and external matter. In a Pallas Athene or a Zeus we sense that into the material substance has streamed what first lived in a human soul. It is as though everything which man had made his very own had flowed out into the sense world. But as man became ever more powerful in the sense world and his soul grew more and more attached to it, his alienation from the spiritual world increased correspondingly in the life between death and a new birth. When the soul left an ancient Indian body and entered the spiritual world, there to pass through the requisite development before the next birth, it retained a feeling for the living spirit. Through his whole life the man of that time yearned for a spiritual environment; and all his sensations were kindled by the revelations he had heard concerning life in the spiritual world, even though he was not an initiate himself. So when he passed the portal of death the spiritual world lay open before him, as it were, in light and radiance.

But as the physical world became more and more congenial and men adapted themselves to it ever more readily, the periods between death and birth were proportionately obscured. In the Egyptian epoch this had gone so far, as can be established by clairvoyant consciousness, that in passing from the body into the spiritual world the soul was enveloped in darkness and gloom, in a sense of loneliness, of segregation from other souls; and when a soul feels loneliness and can hold no converse with other souls it experiences a frosty chill. And while the Greeks lived in an age in which, by means of such glorious external beauty, men had made the earth into something quite special, this period was darkest, gloomiest, most chilling, for the souls living between death and rebirth. A noble Greek, questioned as to his sojourn in the nether world, replied, “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shades”. That is not a legend but an utterance actually in accord with the attitude of that time.

It can therefore be said that with the advance of civilization men became more and more alienated from the spiritual world. The initiates who could see into the higher regions of the spiritual world became increasingly rare because of the growing dangers connected with the initiation procedure: it became more and more difficult to preserve life for three and a half days in a cataleptic state, with the etheric body withdrawn.

Then there intervened a regeneration of the whole life of humanity through the impulse already mentioned in the foregoing lectures, the Christ-Impulse. We have described how Christ, the exalted Sun Spirit, gradually approached the earth; we have learned how in Zarathustra's time He still had to be sought in the sun as Ahura Mazdao, and how Moses beheld Him closer by—in the burning bush and in the fire on Mount Sinai. Gradually He entered the sphere of the earth in which a great change was thereby destined to be wrought. The first concern of this Spirit was that men should come to recognize Him when He appeared on this earth.

The salient feature of all the old initiations was the necessity for withdrawing the etheric out of the physical body. Even in the postAtlantean initiations the candidate had to be reduced to a deathlike state of sleep, that is, a state in which he was devoid of physical consciousness. This implied coming under the control of another ego: it was invariably thus. The candidate's ego was wholly controlled by his initiator, his hierophant. He quitted his physical body completely: he did not dwell in it, nor did his own ego exercize any influence upon it. But the great aim of the Christ-Impulse is that man shall undergo a wholly self-contained ego development and not descend to a state of consciousness beneath that of the ego in order to attain to the higher worlds: and in order to achieve this, someone had first to offer himself in sacrifice so that the Christ Spirit itself might be received into a human body. We have already pointed out that a certain Initiate Who had prepared Himself through a great many incarnations had become able, beginning with a definite period in His life, to yield up His own ego and receive the Christ within Himself. This is indicated by the Baptism in the Jordan, as told in the Gospel of St. John.

Here we must ask, What was the real import of this Baptism? We know that John the Baptist, the Forerunner who told of the coming of Christ Jesus, carried it out among those whom he had prepared to receive the Christ in the right way. We will understand what the St. John Gospel tells us of the Baptism only if we bear in mind that John's purpose in baptizing was the true preparation for the coming of Christ. A modern baptism, which is but an imitation of the original symbol, provides no understanding of the question. It was not a mere sprinkling with water, but a complete immersion: the candidate lived under water for a certain length of time, varying according to circumstances. What this signified we shall now learn by delving into the mystery of the being of man.

Recall to mind that the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. In the waking state during the daytime these four principles are firmly knit together, but in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while the astral body and the ego are outside. In death, on the other hand, the physical body remains as a corpse: the etheric body withdraws, and for a short time the ego, the astral body, and the etheric body remain united. And to those of you who have heard even a few of my lectures it must be clear that in this moment a quite definite experience appears first: the deceased sees his past life spread out before him like a magnificent tableau; spatially side by side, all the situations of his life surround him. That is because one of the functions of the etheric body is that of memory bearer, and even during life nothing but the physical body prevents all this from appearing before him. After death, with the physical body laid aside, everything the man had experienced during his lifetime can enter his consciousness.

Now, I have mentioned as well that a retrospect of that sort also results from being in peril of death, or from any severe fright or shock. You know, of course, from reports that when a man is in danger of drowning or of falling from a mountain height, he experiences his whole past life as in a great tableau—provided he does not lose consciousness. Well, what a man thus experiences as the result of some danger, such as drowning, was experienced by nearly all who were baptized by John. The baptism consisted in keeping people under water until they had experienced their past life. But what they experienced in this way was, of course, experienced as a spiritual picture; and here it became apparent that in this abnormal state the spiritual experiences linked up, in a way, with the spiritual world in general, so that after being lifted out of the water again, after the baptism by John, a man knew: There is a spiritual world! In truth, what I bear within myself is something that can live without the body.—After baptism a man was convinced of the existence of a world to which he belonged in respect of his spirit.

What, then, had John the Baptist brought about by baptizing in this way? People had become more and more attached to the physical world as a means of mutual contact, and believed the physical element to be the true reality. But those who came to the Baptist experienced their own lives as spiritual: after being baptized they knew that they were something over and above what their physical body made them. Human interest had gradually developed in the direction of the physical world; but John evoked in those he baptized the awareness of the existence of a spiritual world to which their higher selves belonged. You need only clothe this utterance in other words and you have: “Transform your interest that is now directed toward the physical world.” And that is what they did—those who received the baptism in the right way. They knew, then, that spirit dwelt in them, that their ego belonged to the spiritual world.

It was in the physical body that this conviction was gained. No special procedure was involved, as formerly in the initiations: what occurred was experienced in the physical body. And in addition, the experience of the baptism, as carried out by John, acquired a special meaning as a consequence of the manner in which the whole doctrine of the time was received and merged with the soul—the doctrine established by Moses' revelation. After baptism, a man not only was aware of his oneness with the spiritual world, but he recognized the particular spiritual world which was approaching the earth. He knew that what now pervaded the earth was identical with what had revealed itself to Moses as ehjeh asher ehjeh in the burning bush and in the fire on Sinai; and he knew that the word Jahve or Jehovah, or ehjeh asher ehjeh, or I am the I AM, was the true expression of that spiritual world. So through the baptism by John men knew not only that they were one with the spiritual world, but that in this spiritual world there dwelt the I AM out of which the spirit in them was born. That was the preparation John imparted through his baptisms; that was the feeling, the sensation, he aroused in those whom he baptized. Their number, of course, was necessarily small, since few of them were ripe enough to experience all this when submerged; but some discerned the approach of the Spirit later to be called the Christ.

Try now to compare all this with what was set forth yesterday. What the ancient spiritual beings had brought about was love based on blood ties, on physical communion, whereas the aim of the Luciferic spirits was to render each individual dependent solely upon his own personality, his own individuality. Lucifer and the lofty spiritual beings had been working simultaneously. Gradually the old blood ties had loosened, as can be established even historically. Think of the conglomeration of peoples in the great Roman Empire! That was a result of the loosening of the blood ties and of the universal desire, in varying degrees, to find the center of gravity in personality. But another result was that people had lost contact with the spiritual world: they had identified themselves with the physical world and developed a love for the physical plane. As the ego-consciousness had increased through Lucifer's agency, man had proportionately coalesced with the physical world and rendered barren his life between death and a new birth.

Now, the Baptist had indeed prepared something that was of great significance for mankind: he had prepared the way for man to remain within his personality and at the same time find there, after the submersion, exactly what once he had experienced as “gods” at the time when he himself still lived in water, when the atmosphere was saturated with moisture and fog. That experience in the divine worlds was now repeated. In spite of being an ego, man, as a human being, could now be reunited with his fellows, could be led back to love, a love that was now spiritualized.

That is the mainspring of the Christ event characterized from another aspect. Christ represents the descent to our earth of the spiritual power of love, though even today its mission is only beginning to take effect. If we trace this idea by means of the John and the Luke Gospels we find spiritual love to be the very core of the Christ impulse through which the egos that had been sundered are increasingly brought together again—but now in respect of their innermost souls. From the beginning, men have been able to surmise but dimly what Christ had come to mean for the world; and today very little of it has been realized because the sundering force, the after-effect of the Luciferic powers, is still present and the Christ principle has been active only for a short time. And though nowadays people seek to co-operate in certain external activities, they have not so much as an inkling of what is meant by harmony and accord between souls where the most intimate and important matters are concerned—or at best they vaguely sense it with their thoughts, their intellect, which counts for little.

Truly, Christianity is only at the beginning of its activity: it will penetrate ever deeper into the souls of men, will increasingly ennoble their ego. This has been felt particularly strongly by people of the younger nations: they feel the need of identifying themselves with the Christ force, to steep themselves in it, if they are to get on. One of our contemporaries in eastern Europe, the executor of the great Russian philosopher Solovyev, once said: “Christianity must unite us as a nation, otherwise we shall lose our ego, and with it, all possibility of being a people.” A mighty utterance, emanating as from an intensive intellect for Christianity. But that again proves the need for Christianity to penetrate into the depths of the human soul.

Let us examine a certain very radical case. It will show us that precisely in respect of the innermost life of the soul even the most high-minded and noble men are still far from possessing what will one day lay hold on them, when Christianity shall have filled man's innermost thoughts, his innermost ideas and feelings. Think of Tolstoi and of his work during the last decades which seeks to reveal in its own way the true meaning of Christianity. A thinker of his caliber should arouse enormous respect, especially in the West where whole libraries are cluttered up with lengthy philosophical manglings of the same thing that a Tolstoi can say in great and powerful words in a book like On Life. There are pages in Tolstoi's writings in which a certain extensive understanding of theosophical truths is expounded with elemental grandeur, truths, to be sure, which a philosopher of western Europe cannot hit upon so accurately—or at best he must write volumes about them, because what they reveal is mighty. It can be said that in Tolstoi's works there is an undertone we can call the Christ impulse. Engross yourselves in his books, and you will see that what pervades him is the Christ impulse.

Now turn to Tolstoi's great contemporary, interesting if for no other reason than that from a comprehensive philosophical Weltanschauung he attained to the very gates of a life of such genuine vision as enabled him to survey an epoch in full perspective—apocalyptically, so to speak. While his visions themselves are distorted, due to an inadequate background, Solovyev nevertheless rises to clairvoyant perception of the future: he places before us a forecast of the 20th Century. And if we read his writings with sympathetic understanding we find there much that is great and high-minded, especially in connection with Christianity. Yet he speaks of Tolstoi as of an enemy of Christianity, as of the Antichrist! This goes to show that two men today can be profoundly convinced they are giving their epoch the best there is, can act out of the very depths of their souls, and yet fail to understand each other: for each of them the other is “anti”. Nowadays people do not reflect that if outer harmony, a life permeated by love, is to become a possibility, the Christ impulse must first have penetrated to the profoundest depths: love of mankind must be something very different from what it is today, even in the noblest spirits.

The impulse that was foretold and then entered the world is only at the beginning of its work, and it must be ever better understood. What is it that is lacking, particularly in our time, among all those who cry for Christianity and declare it a necessity, yet cannot bring it within reach? Anthroposophy, spiritual science, that is what they lack: the present-day way of understanding Christ. For Christ is so great that each successive epoch will have to find new means of comprehending Him. In former centuries other ways and forms were employed in the search for wisdom. Today we need anthroposophy; and what anthroposophy offers today for an understanding of Christ will hold good through long ages to come, because anthroposophy will prove to be something capable of stimulating every human capacity for knowledge. Humanity will in time grow into a comprehension of the Christ.

But even the anthroposophical conception is a transient one—we are aware of this; and the time will come when so great a subject, now framed in ephemeral terms, will call for still vaster conceptions.

In the autumn of this present year Nuremberg can celebrate an important centenary, for it was in 1808 that this city received one of the greatest German spirits within her walls. He was one of those spirits of whom we hear little to-day and whose works are understood still less; but he will signify very much for man's intellectual life in the future when he is once understood. He is doubtless difficult to understated and it may be some time before people grasp him again. In the autumn of 1808 Hegel became Director of the Royal Grammar School in Nuremberg.

Hegel made a statement that we may perhaps take as foundation for what we are going to study. He said: The most profound thought is connected with the figure of Christ, with the outer historical figure. And it is the greatness of the Christian religion that every grade of consciousness can grasp the historical external figure, while at the same time it is a challenge to the most earnest labours of the mind and the deepest penetration. The Christian religion is comprehensible at every stage of culture and yet at the same time it challenges the deepest wisdom.—These are the words of Hegel, the German philosopher.

That the Christian faith, the message of the Gospel, can be understood at every stage of consciousness has been taught for a period to be reckoned almost in millennia. To show that it is a summons to the deepest thought, to a penetration into humanity's whole fund of wisdom, will be one of the tasks of Spiritual Science, if this is understood in its true sense and inmost impulse and made the guide of human life. What we are to consider to-day will be misunderstood if it is thought that Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science is in any way a new religion or desires to establish a new religious faith in place of an old one. One might say, not to be misunderstood, if Spiritual Science is grasped aright, it will be clear that though it is a sure and firm supporter of religious life, in itself it is no religion, nor will it ever contradict any religion as such. It is another matter, however, for it to be the instrument to explain the profoundest truths and the most earnest and vital secrets of religions and show how they may be understood.

It may seem somewhat far-fetched if we make the following comparison in order to show the relation of Theosophy or Anthroposophy to religious documents (and to-day we shall be concerned with the religious documents of Christianity). Anthroposophy is related to the religious documents as mathematical instruction is related to the books on mathematics which have appeared in the course of mankind's history. We have an old work which is really of interest only to students of history versed in mathematics, namely, the geometry of Euclid. It contains for the first time in a scholastic form the mathematical and geometrical facts that are now taught to children in school. How few of the children are aware, however, that all that they learn about parallel lines, triangles, angles, etc., stands in that old book, that it was given to humanity then for the first time. It is quite right to make the child conscious that one can realize these things in oneself, that if the human spirit sets its forces in motion and applies them to the forms of space it is able to realize these forms without reference to that ancient book. Yet someone who has never heard of the book and has been taught mathematics and geometry will value and understand it in the right sense if he one day comes across it. He will know how to prize what was given to mankind by the one who set this work for the first time before the human spirit. In this way one might characterize the relation of Spiritual Science to religious documents.

The sources of Spiritual Science are of such a nature that if it is understood in its true impulse it is not to be referred to any kind of document or tradition. Just as knowledge of the surrounding sense-world is given us by the free use of our forces, so can the knowledge of the super-sensible, the invisible lying behind the visible, be given us by the deep-lying spiritual forces and faculties slumbering within the human soul. When man uses the instruments of his senses he can perceive things lying before him and combine them with his intellect. In the same way someone using the means given him through Spiritual Science can look behind the veils of sense-existence to the spiritual causes, to where beings weave and work which are imperceptible to the physical eye and ear. Thus it is in the free use of man's forces, though they are still slumbering as super-sensible forces in the majority of men, that we have the independent source of spiritual knowledge, just as the source of external knowledge lies in the free use of forces directed to the sense-world. And when man possesses the knowledge which introduces him into the super-sensible behind the sensible, the invisible behind the visible, a knowledge as definite as his knowledge of outer objects and events, then he may go to the traditional books and records. Furnished with super-sensible knowledge he may approach the records through which, during the course of evolution, tidings have reached man of the super-sensible world, just as the geometrician approaches the geometry of Euclid. And then he tests them as the modern geometrician tests the geometry of Euclid; he can prize and recognize these documents at their true value. Nor does one who approaches the records of Christianity equipped with knowledge of the super-sensible world find that they lose in value; indeed on the contrary, they appear in a more brilliant light than they showed first to the mere believer, they prove to contain deeper wisdom than had been dreamt of earlier, before the possession of anthroposophical knowledge.

But we must be clear on another point before we can realize the right relation of Anthroposophy to the religious documents. Let us ask ourselves who is better able to judge the geometry of Euclid—one who can translate the words and give the contents without having first penetrated into the spirit of geometry, or one who already understands geometry and is therefore able to discover it in the book? Let us think of a mere philologist, one who knows nothing of geometry, how many incorrect statements would appear if he tried to convey the meaning of the contents. Many have done this with the records of religion, even those who are supposed to be chosen to fathom their true sense. They have gone to these records without first having any independent knowledge of super-sensible facts. And so we have to-day most careful explanations of religious documents, explanations that explore the history of the time and show how the documents originated, and so on. But the explanations resemble explanations of Euclid's geometry by a non-geometrician. Religion—and this we will hold fast—can only be found if one is aided by spiritual-scientific knowledge, although Spiritual Science can only be an instrument of the religious life, never a religion itself. Religion is best characterized through the content of the human heart, that sum of feelings and emotions through which man's sensitive soul sends up all that is best in it to the super-sensible beings and powers. The character of a man's religion depends on the fire of these feelings, the strength of his sensitivity, just as it depends on the warm pulse-beat in the breast and on the feeling for beauty how a man will stand before a picture. True it is that the contents of the religious life is what we call the spiritual or super-sensible world. But just as little as an aesthetic feeling for art is the same as an inner grasp of its laws—though it may assist understanding just as little are the wisdom, the science, that lead into the spiritual worlds the same as religion. This science will make religious feeling more earnest, worthier, broader, but it will not be religion itself. Grasped in its true sense it may lead to religion.

If we wish to understand the force and significance, the real spirit of the Christian religion we must penetrate far into spiritual life. We must look back into times of a primeval past, the pre-religious age of mankind, and try to envisage the origin of religion. Is there a pre-religious age of humanity? Yes, a time existed on earth when there was no religion; this is acknowledged by Spiritual Science though in a very different sense from the assertions of materialistic civilization. What does religion signify for mankind? It was and for a long time will still be that which the word itself signifies. The word “religion” means the uniting of man with his divine element, with the world of the spirit. The religious ages are essentially those in which man has longed for union with the divine, be it out of the sources of knowledge, or from a certain feeling, or because he felt that his will could only be strong if it were permeated by divine forces. Ages in which man had an inner premonition rather than definite vision, in which he rather sensed that a spiritual world was around him, than saw it—these are the religious ages of our earth. And before these ages were others when man did not need such a sense of longing for union with the super-sensible spiritual world, because he knew that world, as to-day he knows things of the sense world. Does man need to be convinced of the existence of stones, plants, animals? Does he need documents or doctrines to prove to him or let him surmise that there are rocks, plants, animals? No, for he sees them round him and needs therefore no religion of the sense-perceptible world. Let us imagine someone from quite another world, possessing quite different senses and organs of knowledge, one who would not see the stones, plants and animals because to him they were invisible. Let us imagine that he was informed through writings or in some other way of their existence, which to you is a matter of direct sight and knowledge. What would that be for him? It would be religion. If he were informed through some book of the existence of stones and plants and animals it would be religion to him, for he has never seen them. There was a time in which humanity lived amongst those spiritual beings and deeds that are recorded in the religious teachings and teachings of wisdom.

The word “evolution” has become a magic word in many fields of thought to-day, but it has been applied by science solely to outer sense-perceptible facts. To one who regards the world from the standpoint of Spiritual Science everything is in process of evolution, and most of all the human consciousness. The state of consciousness in which man lives to-day, through which when he wakes in the morning he is able to grasp the world with his senses, this state has evolved from a different one. We call the present consciousness the clear day-consciousness. But this has evolved from an ancient state which we call the dull picture-consciousness of mankind. There, however, we reach back to humanity's early evolutionary stages of which anthropology tells nothing, since it uses only the instruments of the senses and methods of the intellect. It believes that man has gone through stages in the far past which are the same as the animal creation passes through to-day. We have seen in earlier lectures how the relation of man to the animal is to be understood. Man was never such a being as the present animal, nor is he descended from beings like them. If we were to describe the forms out of which man has evolved they would prove very different in appearance from the present-day animal. These are creatures which have stayed behind at earlier stages of evolution, con-served these stages and hardened them. The human being has grown beyond his earlier evolutionary stages, the animal has gone down below them. So in the animal world we see some-thing like laggard brothers of humanity, who no longer, however, bear the form of those earlier stages.

The earlier stages of evolution took their course when there were different conditions of life on the earth, when the elements were not distributed as they are to-day, when the human being was not encumbered with the kind of body he now bears, and yet was man. He was able to wait, figuratively speaking, within the course of evolution for his entry into the flesh, was able to wait until the fleshly materiality had reached a condition in which he could develop the forces of the present spirit. The animals were not able to wait, they became hardened at an earlier stage, took on flesh earlier than was right. They were therefore obliged to stay behind. We can thus picture that the human being has lived under other conditions and other forms of consciousness. If we follow these back for thousands and thousands of years we shall always find different ones. What to-day we call logical thought, intellect, understanding, has only evolved late in man's history. Much stronger were certain forces in him which are already beginning to decline, such, for instance, as memory. In an earlier age memory was far more developed than it is now. With the growth of the intellect in mankind, memory has stepped essentially into the background. If one uses some measure of practical observation one can recognize that what Spiritual Science relates is not said without foundation. People might assert that if that were true about memory, then a person remaining backward in development by some accident, should be backward least of all in memory. It could also be claimed that if intellectuality were fostered in a person artificially kept back, then his memory would suffer. Here in this city a characteristic case of this very nature is to be found.

Professor Daumer, whom one must hold in the highest esteem, observed this case very thoroughly. It was the case of that human being, so enigmatic for many people, who was once placed into this city in a mysterious way, and who in just as mysterious a way met his death in Ansbach. An author, in order to indicate the mystery of his life, wrote that as he was carried out to burial the sun was setting on the one horizon and the moon was rising on the other. I speak, as you know, of Caspar Hauser. If you disregard all the pros and cons that have been asserted, if you look only at what has been fully verified, you will know that this foundling—who was one day simply there in the street, and who since he did not know whence he came, was called the Child of Europe—could neither read nor write when he was found. At an age of twenty years he possessed nothing of what is gained through the intellect but he had a remarkable memory. As they began to instruct him, as logic entered his soul, his memory disappeared. This transition in consciousness was accompanied by something else. He possessed at first an incredible, an entirely inborn truthfulness and it was precisely in this truthfulness that he went more and more astray. The more he nibbled, so to say, at intellectuality, the more it vanished. There would be many things to study were we to enter deeply into this human soul which had been artificially held back. It is not difficult for the student of Spiritual Science to credit the popular tradition, so unacceptable to the learned people of to-day, which relates that while Caspar Hauser still knew nothing, while he still had no idea that there were beings besides himself of different form, he exercised a remarkable effect upon quite savage creatures. Savage animals humbled themselves and became mild, something streamed from him that made such beasts gentle, although they savagely attacked anyone else. We could in fact penetrate deeply into the soul of this remarkable personality, so enigmatic to many, and you would see how things that cannot be explained from ordinary life are led back through Spiritual Science to spiritual facts. Such facts cannot be learnt by speculation but only by spiritual observation, though they are comprehensible to an unbiased and logical thinking.

All this has only been said in order to show you that the modern consciousness has evolved from another, an age-old-state when man was not in direct touch with outer objects in the modern sense, but on the other hand was in connection with facts and beings of the spiritual world. A human being did not see another's physical form—nor did this form resemble that of to-day. When another being approached him a sort of dream-picture arose and by its shape and colouring he knew whether the other was antagonistic to him or sympathetic. Such a consciousness perceived spiritual facts and the spiritual world. To-day man is among beings of flesh and blood, at that time, when he turned his gaze to himself and himself was soul and spirit, he lived among spiritual beings. They were present to him, he was a spirit among spirits. Although his consciousness was only dreamlike, yet the pictures that arose in him were in living relation to his environment. That was the far distant age when man still lived in a spiritual world. Later he descended from it in order to take on a corporeal nature suited to his present consciousness. Animals already existed as physical creatures while man still perceived in spiritual realms. He lived at that time among spiritual beings, and just as you need no proof to be convinced of the presence of stones, plants and animals, so man in those primeval times needed no testimony in order to be convinced of the existence of spiritual beings. He lived among spirits and divine beings and therefore needed no religion. That was the pre-religious age.

Then man descended, the earlier form of consciousness changed into the modern. Colours and forms are no longer perceived as floating in space, colour is laid upon the surfaces of sense-objects. In the same measure as man learnt to direct his senses to the outer world, did this outer world draw itself like a veil, like the great Maja, over the world of spirit. And humanity had to receive tidings of the spiritual world through this sheath, religion became necessary.

There is also a state, however, between the time preceding a religious consciousness and the time of actual religion: there is an intermediate condition. Thence are derived the mythologies, sagas, folk-stories of the spiritual worlds. It is a dreary arid learning that has no inkling of real spiritual events and asserts that all the figures of Nordic or German mythology, of Greek mythology with its accounts of the deeds of the gods are merely inventions of popular fantasy. They are not inventions, the peasant folk do not indulge in such fancies and if they see a few clouds stretched across the sky, say that they are little sheep. That the people have such fantasies is a fiction of our modern learnedness which abounds in lively fantasy about such things. The truth of the matter is quite different. The old saga and stories of the gods are the last relics, the last memories of the pre-religious consciousness. They are records of what men themselves have seen. Those who described Wotan, Thor, Zeus, etc., did so because they remembered that such things had been experienced once upon a time. Mythologies are fragments, broken pieces of what had once been experienced. The intermediate stage was shown in another way as well. Even when clever men had already—let us say—become very clever, there were still persons who under exceptional conditions (call them states of insanity or being carried away, as you will) could see into the spiritual worlds, who could still be aware of what in earlier times was seen by all. They recounted that they themselves still saw something of the spiritual world. This was linked with the memories and led to a living faith among the people. That was a state transitional to the state of actual religion.

We may ask: what paved the way in mankind to an actual religion? It was because men found a means of so developing their inner being that they were once more able to behold the worlds from which they had sprung, which they used to see in a dull consciousness. And here we touch upon a chapter which to many modern minds contains but little probability, the question of initiation. What are initiates? They were those who so developed their inner nature of soul and spirit through certain methods that they grew again into the spiritual world. There is initiation! In every soul super-sensible forces and faculties lie dormant. There is, or at least there can be, a great and mighty moment when these forces awaken. We can gain some idea of this moment if we picture the general course of human evolution. To speak in the words of Goethe we can say that we look back into the far past when the human body had no such physical eye or physical ear as exist to-day. We look back to times when there were undifferentiated organs, able neither to see nor to hear, at the places where these organs are now situated. A time came for physical humanity when such blind organs evolved to radiant points, gradually evolved until light itself dawned upon them. In the same way a time came when the human ear had developed to such a stage that the former silent world revealed itself in tones and harmonies. The sun's forces worked upon the formation of the human eye. And to-day man can live the life of spirit and thus develop the organs of soul and spirit which are largely undeveloped in present mankind.

The moment is possible and for many has already dawned when the soul and spirit are transformed just as once the external physical organism was transformed. New eyes and ears arise through which the light shines and tones resound out of the spiritually dark and silent world. Development is possible, even to the point of living into the higher worlds. That is initiation. And the Mystery Schools provided methods of initiation as in ordinary life the methods of the chemical laboratory or of biological research are made available. The difference is only this—official science has to prepare instruments and other apparatus for its use, while he who would become an initiate has but one instrument to perfect, namely, himself in all his forces just as the force of magnetism can lie dormant in iron, so there slumbers in the human soul the power to penetrate into the spiritual world of light and sound. And so the time came when normal humanity saw only physical sense-existence and when the leaders were initiates. These could see into the spiritual worlds and give information and explanation of the facts of that world in which man had earlier lived.

To what does the first stage of initiation lead? How does it appear to the human soul? Do not imagine that this development is merely a matter of philosophic speculation, a spinning out, a refinement of ideas. The ideas man has about the sense-world are transformed when he grows into the spiritual world. No longer does he apprehend things through sharply outlined concepts, but through pictures, through Imaginations. For the human being grows into the spiritual process of world creation. The firm definite contours of the physical material world exist, in fact, nowhere else. In the world creative process the animal does not appear with clear outline. One has there something like a basic idea of the animal from which the diverse external forms can originate, a living reality, membered in itself. One must take one's stand strictly on the basis of Goethe's words: “All things corruptible are but a semblance.” The initiate learns at first to know and grasp in pictures, he learns to ascend into the spiritual world. There his consciousness must be more mobile than that which serves us for apprehending the surrounding sense-world. Hence this stage of development is called the Imaginative Consciousness. It leads man again into the spiritual world, but not in a dull twilight state. The initiate consciousness to be gained is clear and bright, as clear as man's consciousness by day. There is thus an enrichment, the spiritual consciousness is added to the day-consciousness. In the first stage of initiation man lives in the imaginative consciousness. The documents of humanity record what the initiates experienced in the spiritual world just as information with regard to the science of geometry was imparted to mankind through Euclid. We recognize what stands in these records when we go back to the sources—the spiritual vision of the initiates.

Those were the conditions prevailing among men up to the appearance of the greatest Being who has trodden upon the earth, Christ Jesus. With his appearance anew element entered evolution. If we would understand the essential nature of the new element bestowed on mankind through Christ Jesus, we must realize that in all pre-Christian initiation the candidate was completely withdrawn from ordinary life, he must work upon his soul in centres of profoundest secrecy. Above all we must realize that when man raised himself again into the spiritual world something of that merely dreamlike picture-consciousness still remained. Man had to retreat from this sense-world to be able to enter the spiritual world. That this is no longer necessary to-day has been brought about through the appearing of Christ Jesus on earth. Through the fact that the Christ-principle has entered humanity, the Central Being, the very Centre of the spiritual world, has once existed historically in a human being on this earth. It is the same Being for whom all these have longed who have developed a religious life, who have beheld in the Mystery Centres, who have left the sense-world in order to enter the spiritual world. The Being of whom it has been proclaimed that man confronts it as his highest nature, this has entered humanity's evolution with Christ Jesus. One who understands something of genuine spiritual science knows that all religious proclamation before the coming of Christ Jesus is a prophecy of him.

When the ancient initiates wished to speak of the highest that was accessible to them in the spiritual world, of that which they were able to see as the origin of all things, then under the most diverse names it was of Christ Jesus that they spoke. We need only remember the Old Testament, itself a prophecy. We remember how when Moses was to lead his people he received the command: “Say to thy people that the Lord God has said unto thee what thou shalt do.” Then Moses asks: “How will the people believe me, how can I convince them? What shall I say when they ask who has sent me?” And he was commanded: “Say the ‘I-am’ has sent thee.” Read it again and compare as exactly as you can with the original text and you will see its significance. The “I-Am,” what does that mean? The “I-Am” is the name for the divine Being, the Christ-principle of man—the Being of whom man feels like a drop, a spark, when he can say “I am.” The stone, the plant, the animal cannot say “I am.” Man is the crown of creation inasmuch as he can say “I am” to himself, he can utter a name which does not hold good for anyone but the one who utters it. You alone can call yourself “I”; no one else can call you “I.” Here the soul speaks within itself in a word to which none other has entrance except a Being which comes to the soul through no external sense, on no outer path. Here Divinity speaks. Hence the name “I-Am” was given to the Godhead whose being fills the world. “Say that the ‘I-am’ has told thee !” Thus was Moses to speak to his people.

Men learn only gradually to understand the true, deep meaning of this “I-am.” Human beings did not feel themselves as individuals at once. You can still find this in the Old Testament, these men did not as yet feel individual. Even the members of the German tribes, right into the time of the Christian Church, did not feel themselves to be individualities. Think back to the Cherusci, the Teutons, etc., the German tribes in whose land modern Germany now lies. The separate members felt the tribal ego, and themselves as a part of it. A man would not have said “I am” in the clear, definite way it is said to-day; he felt himself part of an organism composed of those who were related by blood. This blood-relationship assumes the greatest proportions among the followers of the Old Testament religion. The individual felt himself sheltered in the whole folk which for him was ruled by one Ego. He knew the meaning of “I and the Father Abraham are one,” for he traced the blood-relationship back through the generations to Abraham. If he wished to go beyond his single ego he knew himself to be sheltered in the Father Abraham, from whom flows all the blood through the generations, which is the external bearer of the common Folk-Ego.

Now if this expression, which signified the highest they knew to the people of the Old Testament is compared with what has been brought through Christ Jesus then a lightning-flash illumines the whole advance that has come about through Christian evolution. “Before Abraham was, was the ‘I-am.’” What does this mean? “Before Abraham was the ‘I-am.’” (That is the right rendering of the biblical passage.) It means: Go back through all generations, and you find something in yourself, in your own individuality which is even more eternal than what flows through all blood-related generations. Before the ancestors were, was the “I-am,” that Being which draws into every human being, of which each human soul can directly feel something in itself. Not “I and the Father Abraham,” not I and a temporal Father, but I and a spiritual Father, who has no part in anything perishable, we are one! I and the Father are one. The Father dwells in each separate individual, the Divine Principle lives in him, something which was, which is, and which is to be.

Men have actually only begun after 2,000 years to feel the force of this world-impulse; in future ages, however, they will realize the significance for mankind of this forward step in the remission and evolution of the earth. What the ancient initiates tried to reach could only be realized if one went beyond the individual human being and grasped the spirit of a whole people. If the normal man heard that he would say: That is a transient entity which begins with birth and ends with death. But if he were initiated in the secrets of the Mysteries, he saw as the Folk Spirit, as the actual Being who flows through the blood of the generations, that which was only dimly sensed by the others. He could see what can be reached only in the spiritual realm and not in external reality. He could see a divine Being who flows through the blood of the generations. To stand face to face in the spirit before this God could only take place in the Mysteries.

Those who were round Christ Jesus with full understanding as his intimate pupils were conscious that a Being of divine spiritual nature stood outwardly before them, clothed in the flesh as human personality. They were sensible of Christ Jesus as the first human being to bear a Spirit who otherwise was felt only by interrelated groups, and who could only be seen in the spiritual world by initiates. He was the Firstborn among men.

The more individualized a man becomes the more he can become a bearer of Love. Where the blood links men together they love because they are led to what they should love. When man is granted individuality, when he tends and nurtures the divine spark within him then the impulses of love, the waves of love, pass from man to man out of the free heart. And thus with this new impulse man has enriched the old bond of love that is bound to the blood-tie. Love passes over gradually into spiritual love which flows from soul to soul and which will ultimately encompass all humanity in a common bond of brother-love. But Christ Jesus is the Force, the living Force, once historically and externally present, through whom for the first time mankind has been brought to the bond of brother-love. Men will learn to understand this bond of brother-love as the perfected spiritualized Christianity.

People say very lightly to-day that theosophy should seek the common kernel of truth in all religions, for the contents of all religions are the same. People who talk like that and only compare religions in order to note the abstract resemblance have no understanding of the principle of evolution. World evolution is not without meaning. All religions undoubtedly contain the truth, but inasmuch as they evolve from form to form they evolve to higher forms. It is true that if you search deeply enough you can find teachings in other religions that are also to be found in Christianity. Christianity has not brought new doctrine. The essential element of Christianity does not lie in its teachings. Take the founders of pre-Christian religions, in their case it was a matter of what they taught. If they themselves had remained unknown, their teaching would have been preserved and this would have been enough. But with Christ Jesus that is not the point. What matters is that he was there, that he has lived here on this earth in a physical body. Not belief in his teaching but in his Person—that is the essential thing. The point is that he has been beheld among mortals as the Firstborn; whom one asks: if Thou wert in the position in which I find myself, wouldst Thou feel as I do? Wouldst Thou think as I am now thinking? Will, as I am willing? That is the important thing, that he is the greatest example as Personality, with whom it is not a matter of listening to his teaching, but of looking at him himself, and seeing how he acted. And so the intimate pupils of Christ Jesus speak quite differently from the pupils and disciples of other religious founders. It is said of those: The Master has taught this or taught that. The disciples of Christ Jesus say: We are not telling you invented myths and doctrines; we say to you what our eyes have seen, our ears heard. We have heard his voice, our hands have touched the Source of Life whereby we have community with you. And Christ Jesus himself said: “You shall bear witness for me in Jerusalem, in Judea to the end of the world.” These words contain a very great significance; testimony shall you bear for unto the end of the world. That means that there will at all times be those who, just as the men in Judea and Galilee, could say out of direct knowledge who Christ was, in the sense of the Gospel.

“In the sense of the Gospel”—what does that mean? Nothing less than that he was from the beginning the Principle that lived in all creation. He says, “If you do not believe in me, believe at least in Moses, for if you believe in Moses, then you believe in me, for Moses has spoken of me.” We have to-day seen this. Moses has spoken of him by saying: The “I-Am” has said it to me; the “I-am,” who up to then was only perceptible in the spirit. The fact that the Christ has entered visibly into the world, appearing as man among men, is what distinguishes the Christ-gospel from the divine proclamations of other religions. In all of these religions spiritual wisdom was directed to something which was outside the world. Now, with Christ Jesus, something entered the world which was to be grasped as the sense-perceptible itself. What did the first disciples experience as the ideal of their wisdom? No longer merely to understand the life of the spirits in spirit-land, but how the Highest Principle could have been present on the earth in the historical Personality of Christ Jesus. It is much easier to deny divinity to this Personality than to acknowledge it. Here lies the distinction between a certain doctrine of early Christian times and what we may call inner Christianity—the distinction between Gnosis and esoteric Christianity. The Gnosis certainly recognizes Christ in his divinity, but it could not raise itself to the conception that the Word has become flesh and dwelt among us, as the writer of the John Gospel emphasizes. He says: You shall look upon Christ Jesus; not as something to be grasped purely in the invisible, but as the Word which has become flesh and dwelt among us. You must know that with this human personality a force has appeared which will work into the farthest future, which will encircle the earth with the true spiritual love as a force that lives and works in all that lives into the future.

And if man gives himself up to this force he grows into the spiritual world from which he has descended. He will ascend again to where the initiate's vision can already reach to-day. Man will divest himself of what belongs to the senses when he penetrates into the spiritual world. The candidate who was initiated in ancient times could see in retrospect the far past of spirit-life; those who are initiated in the Christian sense through receiving the impulse of Christ Jesus are enabled to see what becomes of this earthly world of ours when humanity acts in the sense of the Christ Impulse. As one can look back to earlier conditions, so, starting from the coming of Christ, one can look into the farthest future. Consciousness will alter again, there will be a new relation of the spiritual to the sense-world. Earlier initiation was directed to time past, to age-old wisdom; Christian initiation reveals the future to one who is to be initiated. That is a necessity; man is to be initiated not only in wisdom, or in feelings but in his will. For then he knows what he is to do, he can set himself a goal for the future. Ordinary everyday people set themselves aims for the afternoon, for the evening or the morning; the spiritual man is able, out of spiritual principles, to set himself distant aims which pulse through his will and make his forces quicken. To set goals before humanity means in the true, highest sense, in the sense of the original Christ principle, to grasp Christianity esoterically. In this way it was grasped by the one who has written the great principle of the initiation of the will—the writer of the Apocalypse. We misunderstand the Apocalypse, if we do not understand it as the impulse given for the future, for action and deed.

Everything that we have let pass before us to-day can be understood out of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. I have been unable to give more than a slight sketch. When through Spiritual Science one grasps what lies behind the sense-world, one can look with understanding at all that has been given in the Gospels, at what has been proclaimed in the Apocalypse. And the more deeply penetrating is one's approach to the super-sensible worlds, the more profound is what one will find in the Christian documents. The records of Christianity will appear in higher brilliance, with deeper truths when one goes to them strengthened with the spiritual vision that may be gained by the help of Anthroposophy. True it is that the simplest heart can have some feeling of what truths lie hidden in Christianity. But man's consciousness will not be satisfied for ever with a dim sensing, it will evolve higher and wish to have knowledge and under-standing. Yet even when it mounts to the highest teachings of wisdom, there will always be mysteries in Christianity still more profound. It is for the simplest heart but also for the most developed intellectuality. The initiate experiences it again as pictures, and so the naive consciousness may divine what truths are slumbering there. Man, however, will demand knowledge and not faith—and even then he will find satisfaction in Christianity. If the explanations of the Gospels are given him through Spiritual Science he will be able to find the fully satisfying content in Christianity. Hence Spiritual Science will take the place of the highest philosophies of the past. It will bear testimony to the beautiful words of Hegel quoted at the beginning: “Profoundest thought is linked with the historical external figure of Christ Jesus, and every degree of consciousness—therein lies the greatness of Christianity—can grasp it externally. At the same time, however, Christianity demands the deepest and most penetrating wisdom. Christianity is for every stage of culture, but it can meet and satisfy the highest demands.”

If we look back over the evolution of mankind since the Mystery of Golgotha, we get the impression that Christianity, the Christ Impulse, has only been able to live on within the European and American civilisations in the face of definite obstacles and in association with other streams of spiritual life. And a study of the growth and gradual development of Christianity reveals many remarkable facts.

To-day I want to describe in broad outlines the growth and development of Christianity in connection with what ought to live within the Anthroposophical Society: and not only ought to, but can live, because those persons who feel an honest and sincere urge towards Anthroposophy, have this urge from the very depths of their being.

If we take the facts of repeated earthly lives in all seriousness, we shall say: This inner urge to get away from the conceptions and habits of thought of those among whom life, education and social relationships have placed us, this urge that we feel to enter a stream of thought which really makes claims upon our life of soul, must have its origin in karma, in the karma coming from earlier lives on earth.

Now if we study the question of karma in connection with those personalities who find themselves together in the Anthroposophical Movement, it transpires that, without exception, before their present earthly life they have had one other important incarnation since the Mystery of Golgotha. They were already on earth once since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and are now there for the second time since that Event.

And then the great question arises: How has the previous earthly life, with respect to the Mystery of Golgotha, worked upon these personalities who now, out of their karma, feel the urge to enter the Anthroposophical Movement?

Even from exoteric study we find that men standing as firmly within the stream of Christianity itself as St. Augustine, have said: “Christianity did not begin with Christ; there were Christians before Christ, only they were not so called.” This is what St. Augustine says.

Those who penetrate more deeply into the spiritual mysteries of human evolution and can study these spiritual mysteries with Initiation Science, will strongly confirm such a view as is expressed by St. Augustine, for it is a fact. But it becomes necessary, then, to know in what form that which through the Mystery of Golgotha became the historical Christ Impulse upon the earth, existed in earlier times.

To-day I can speak of this earlier form of Christianity by starting from impressions which came in a place not far distant from Torquay (where our Summer Course has been held), in Tintagel, whence proceeded the spiritual stream connected with King Arthur. It was possible to receive the impressions which can still come to-day at the spot where King Arthur's castle with its Round Table stood—impressions which come above all from the magnificent natural surroundings of this castle.

At this place where nothing but ruins remain of the old citadel of King Arthur, where we look back as if in memory across the centuries that have elapsed since the Arthur stream went out from thence, we realise how stone after stone has so crumbled away that there is hardly anything to be recognised of the old castles which once were inhabited by King Arthur and those around him. But when with the eye of spirit we look out from the place where the castle once stood, over the sea with its iridescent colours and breaking waves, the impression we get is that we are able at this place to penetrate deeply into the elemental secrets of nature and of the cosmos.

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And if we look back with occult sight, if we can visualise the point of time which lies a few thousand years ago, when the Arthur stream had its beginning, then we see that those who lived on Arthur's Mount had, as is the case with all such occult centres, chosen this spot because the impulses necessary for the tasks they had set themselves, for their mission in the world, needed the play of those forces which nature there displayed before them.

I cannot say whether it is always so, but when I saw the view there was a most wonderful play of waves surging and rippling up from the depths—in itself one of the most beautiful sights in all nature. These waves hurl themselves against the walls of rock and as they fall back again in seething foam the elementary spirits are able to rise up from below and come to living expression. From above, the sunlight is reflected in manifold forms in the waves of the air. This interplay of elemental nature from above and from below reveals the full power of the Sun and displays it in such a way that man is able to receive it into his being. Those who can imbibe what is given by this interplay of the beings born of the light above and the beings born in the depths below, receive the power of the Sun, the impulse of the Sun. It is a moment in which man can unfold what I will call “piety”—piety in the pagan sense. Christian piety is not the same as pagan piety which means inner surrender to the gods of nature working and weaving everywhere in the play of nature.

Those who lived around King Arthur absorbed this play of weaving, working nature into their very being. And most significant of all was what they were able to receive in the first centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha.

I want to tell you to-day about the character of this spiritual life that was connected with such centres as that of King Arthur's Round Table. And I must begin by speaking of something that is known to you all.

When a human being dies, he leaves his physical body and still has his etheric body around him for a few days. After these few days have elapsed he lays aside his etheric body and lives on then in his astral body and Ego. What happens thus to the man who has passed through the gate of death, appears to the eye of vision as if the etheric being were dissolving. After death the etheric human being expands and expands, his actual form becoming more and more indefinite as he weaves himself into the cosmos.

A remarkable phenomenon, and the exact opposite of this other, occurred in the world-historic sense when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. What was it that happened then? Up to that time Christ had been a Sun Being, had belonged to the Sun. Before the Mystery of Golgotha had come to pass, the Knights of King Arthur's Round Table stood on these rocks, gazed at the play between the Sun-born spirits and the Earth-born spirits, and felt that the forces living in this play of nature-spirits poured into their hearts and above all through their etheric bodies. Therewith they received into themselves the Christ Impulse which was then streaming away from the Sun and was living in everything that is brought into being by the Sun-forces.

And so, before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Knights of King Arthur received into themselves the Sun-Spirit, that is to say, the Christ as He was in pre-Christian times. And they sent their messengers out into all Europe to subdue the wild savagery of the astral bodies of the peoples of Europe, to purify and to civilise, for such was their mission. We see such men as these Knights of King Arthur's Round Table starting from this point in the West of England to bear to the peoples of Europe as they were at that time, what they had received from the Sun, purifying the astral forces of the then barbarous European population—barbarous at all events in Central and Northern Europe.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha. What happened in Asia? Over yonder in Asia, the sublime Sun Being, Who was later known as the Christ, left the Sun. This betokened a kind of death for the Christ Being. He went forth from the Sun as we human beings go forth from the earth when we die. And as a man who dies leaves his physical body behind on the earth and his etheric body which is laid aside after three days is visible to the seer, so Christ left behind Him in the Sun that which in my book Theosophy is called “Spirit-Man,” the seventh member of the human being.

Christ died to the Sun. He died cosmically, from the Sun to the earth. He came down to the earth. From the moment of Golgotha onwards His Life-Spirit was to be seen around the earth. We ourselves leave behind at death the Life-Ether, the etheric body, the life-body. After this cosmic Death, Christ left His Spirit-Man on the Sun, and around the earth, His Life-Spirit. So that after the Mystery of Golgotha the earth was swathed as it were by the Life-Spirit of the Christ.

Now the connections between places are not the same in the spiritual life as they are in physical life. The Life-Spirit of the Christ was perceived in the Irish Mysteries, in the Mysteries of Hibernia; and above all by the Knights of King Arthur's Round Table. So, up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ Impulse belonging to the Sun actually went out from this place where the impulses were received from the Sun. Afterwards the power of the Knights diminished but they lived at the time within this Life-Spirit which encircled the earth and in which there was this constant interplay of light and air, of the Spirits in the Elements from above and from below.

Try to picture to yourselves the cliff with King Arthur's castle upon it and from above the Sun-forces playing down in the light and air, and pouring upwards from below the elementary beings of the earth. There is a living interplay between Sun and earth.

In the centuries which followed the Mystery of Golgotha this all took place within the Life-Spirit of the Christ. So that in the play of nature between sea and rock, air and light, there was revealed, as it were in spiritual light, the Event of Golgotha.

Understand me rightly, my dear friends. If in the first five centuries of our era men looked out over the sea, and had been prepared by the exercises practised by the twelve who were around King Arthur and who were concerned above all with the Mysteries of the Zodiac, if they looked out over the sea they could see not merely the play of nature but they could begin to read a meaning in it just as one reads a book instead of merely staring at it. And as they looked and saw, here a gleam of light, there a curling wave, here the sun mirrored on a rocky cliff, there the sea dashing against the rocks, it all became a flowing, weaving picture—a truth whose meaning could be deciphered. And when they deciphered it they knew of the spiritual Fact of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha was revealed to them because the picture was all irradiated by the Life-Spirit of Christ presented to them by nature.

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Yonder in Asia the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place and its impulse had penetrated deeply into the hearts and souls of men. We need only think of those who became the first Christians to realise what a change had come about in their souls. While all this of which I have been telling you was happening in the West, the Christ Himself, the Christ Who had come down to earth leaving His Spirit-Man on the Sun and His Life-Spirit in the atmosphere around the earth, bringing down His Ego and His Spirit-Self to the earth—the Christ was moving from East to West in the hearts of men, through Greece, Northern Africa, Italy, Spain, across Europe. The Christ worked here in the hearts of men, while over in the West He was working through nature.

And so on the one hand we have the story of the Mystery of Golgotha, legible in the Book of Nature for those who were able to read it, working from West to East. It represented, as it were, the science of the higher graduates of King Arthur's Round Table. And on the other hand we have a stream flowing from East to West, not in wind and wave, in air and water, not over hills or in the rays of the Sun, but flowing through the blood, laying hold of the hearts of men on its course from Palestine through Greece into Italy and Spain.

The one stream flows through nature; the other through the blood and the hearts of men. These two streams flow to meet one another. The pagan stream is still working, even to-day. It bears the pre-Christian Christ, the Christ Who was proclaimed as a Sun Being by those who were Knights of the Round Table, but also by many others before the Mystery of Golgotha actually took place. The pre-Christian Christ was carried through the world by this stream even in the age of the Mystery of Golgotha. And a great deal of this wisdom was carried forth into the world by the stream known as that of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It is possible, even to-day, to discover these things. There is a pagan Christianity, a Christianity that is not directly bound up with the actual historical Event of Golgotha.

And coming upwards to meet this stream there is the form of Christianity that is connected directly with the Mystery of Golgotha, flowing through the blood, through the hearts and souls of men. Two streams come to meet one another—the pre-Christian Christ stream, etherealised as it were, and the Christian Christ stream. The one is known, subsequently, as the Arthur stream; the other as the Grail stream. Later on they came together; they came together in Europe, above all in the spiritual world.

How can we describe this movement? The Christ Who descended through the Mystery of Golgotha drew into the hearts of men. In the hearts of men He passed from East to West, from Palestine, through Greece, across Italy and Spain. The Christianity of the Grail spread through the blood and the hearts of men. The Christ took His way from East to West.

And to meet Him from the West there came the spiritual etheric Image of the Christ—the Image evoked by the Mystery of Golgotha, but still picturing the Christ of the Sun Mysteries.

Behind the scenes of world-history, sublime and wonderful events were taking place. From the West came pagan Christianity, the Arthur-Christianity, also under other names and in another form. From the East came the Christ in the hearts of men. And then the meeting takes place—the meeting between the Christ Who had Himself come down to earth and His Own Image which is brought to Him from West to East. This meeting took place in the year 869 A.D. Up to that year we have two streams, clearly distinct from one another. The one stream, more in the North, passed across Central Europe and bore the Christ as a Sun Hero, whether the name were Baldur or some other. And under the banner of Christ, the Sun Hero, the Knights of Arthur spread their culture abroad.

The other stream, rooted inwardly in the hearts of men, which later on became the Grail stream, is to be perceived more in the South, coming from the East. It bears the real Christ, Christ Himself. The other stream brings to meet it from the West a cosmic Image of the Christ. This meeting of Christ with Himself, of Christ the Brother of Humanity with Christ the Sun Hero Who is there only as it were in an Image—this meeting of Christ with His own Image took place in the 9th century.

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I have given you here, my dear friends, an idea of the inner happenings during the first centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, when, as I have already said, the souls were living who are now again upon earth, and who have carried with them from their previous earthly lives the urge to come in sincerity into the Anthroposophical Movement.¹

When we consider this significant Arthur stream from West to East, it appears to us as the stream which brings the Impulse of the Sun into earthly civilisation. In this Arthur stream is working and weaving the Michael stream as we may call it in Christian terminology, the stream in the spiritual life of humanity in which we have been living since the end of the seventies of last century. The Ruling Power, known by the name of Gabriel, who had held sway for three or four centuries in European civilisation, was succeeded at the end of the seventies of last century by Michael. And the Rulership of Michael will last for three to four centuries, weaving and working in the spiritual life of mankind. And so we have good cause at the present time to speak of the Michael streams, for we ourselves are living once again in an Age of Michael.

We find one of these Michael streams if we look back to the period immediately preceding that of the Mystery of Golgotha, to the Arthur Impulse going out from the West, from England, an Impulse which was kindled originally by the Hibernian Mysteries. And we find a still more ancient form of this Michael stream if we look back to what happened centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, when, taking its start from Northern Greece, in Macedonia, the international, cosmopolitan stream connected with the name of Alexander the Great arose under the influence of the conception of the world that is known as the Aristotelian. What was achieved through Aristotle and Alexander in that pre-Christian age took place under the Rulership of Michael, just as now once again we are living under his Rulership. The Michael Impulse was there in the spiritual life at the time of Alexander the Great, just as it is there now, in our own time. Whenever a Michael Impulse is at work in humanity upon the earth it is always a time when that which has been founded in a centre of spiritual culture spreads abroad among many peoples of the earth and is carried into many regions, wherever it is possible to carry it.

This came to pass in pre-Christian times through the campaigns of Alexander. The achievements of Greek culture were spread among men wherever this became possible. If one had asked Alexander and Aristotle: Whence comes your impulse to spread abroad the spiritual culture of your age?—they would have spoken, though under a different name, of that same Being, Michael, who works from the Sun as the Servant of Christ. For among the Archangels who in turn rule over civilisation, Michael belongs to the Sun. Michael was Ruler in the time of Alexander and is Ruler again in our own time. The next Ruling Archangel was Oriphiel, who belongs to Saturn. His successor, the Archangel Anael, belongs to Venus. While Zachariel, the Archangel who ruled civilisation in the 4th and 5th centuries, belongs to the sphere of Jupiter. Then came Raphael, from the Mercury sphere, at the time when a form of thought connected with medicine and healing lived in the background of European civilisation. After Raphael came Samael, whose Rulership extended a little beyond the 12th century. And then came the Age of Gabriel. Samael belongs to Mars, Gabriel to the Moon. And Gabriel was once again succeeded by Michael, who belongs to the Sun sphere, in the seventies of the 19th century. Thus in rhythmic succession these seven Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archangels rule over the spiritual life of the earth.

And so as we look back—when was the last Rulership of Michael? It was in the Alexander period. It prevailed during that period when Greek civilisation was carried across to Asia and Africa, and finally concentrated in the great and influential city of Alexandria with its mighty heroes of the spiritual life.

It is a strange vista that presents itself to occult sight. In the age which lies a few centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, we see, going Eastwards from Macedonia—that is to say, once more from West to East but this time farther to the East—we see the same stream which proceeds from the English and Irish souls in the West and which also flows from West to East. During the Alexander period, Michael was the Ruling Archangel on the earth. During the Arthur period, when Michael was working from the Sun, the influences I have described were sent down from the Sun. But what happened later on, after the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place? What happened to the kind of thought that had been carried by Alexander the Great over to Asia?

At the time when Charlemagne, in his own way, was establishing a certain form of Christian culture in Europe, Haroun al Raschid was living over yonder in Asia Minor. All the oriental wisdom and spirituality to be found at that time in architecture, in art, in science, in religion, in literature, in poetry—it was all gathered at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. And at his side there was a Counsellor, a man who was not initiated in all these arts and sciences at that time, but who had been an Initiate in earlier times, in a former life. Around these two men, Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor, we find that all the wisdom which had been carried by Alexander into Asia, all the teachings which had been drawn from the old nature-wisdom and were imparted by Aristotle to those he was able to instruct—all this was changed. Alexandrianism and Aristotelianism were permeated and impregnated at the Court of Haroun al Raschid with Arabism, with Mohammedanism.

And then, all the learning thus permeated with Arabism was carried over into the stream of Christianity by way of Greece, but especially by way of Northern Africa, Italy and Spain. It was carried over, inculcated as it were into the world of Christendom.

But before this, Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor had passed through the gate of death, and from that life which leads from death to a new birth they looked down on what was taking place on earth in the expeditions of the Mohammedan Moors to Spain. From the spiritual world they watched the form of culture which they themselves had promoted and which had been spread by their successors. Haroun al Raschid concentrated his attention from the spiritual world more on the regions of Greece, Italy and Spain; his Counsellor more on the stream going out from the East across the regions to the North of the Black Sea, through Russia and into Central Europe.

And now the question arises: What was the destiny of Alexander and Aristotle themselves? They were deeply bound up with the Rulership of Michael but they were not incarnated on the earth at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

We must try to get a clear conception of the two contrasting pictures. On the earth are those who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ comes down through the Mystery of Golgotha, becomes Man, and from then on lives in the earth-sphere. And what is happening on the Sun? On the Sun there are the souls who at that time belonged to Michael, who were living in his sphere. These souls witnessed, from the Sun, the departure of Christ from the Sun and His descent to earth. On the earth there were those who witnessed His arrival. That is the difference. The experience of those who were on earth during the Michael Rulership at the time of Alexander, was that they saw as it were the other direction of the Christ Event, namely, the departure of the Christ from the Sun. They live on—I will not now mention unimportant incarnations—and they experience, in the spiritual world, that significant point of time in the 9th century, about the year 869, when there took place the meeting of the Christ with His own Image, with His own Life-Spirit brought over from pagan, pre-Christian Christianity.

Another meeting also took place in the spiritual world, a meeting of the individualities living in Alexander the Great and in Aristotle with the individualities who had lived in Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor. The wisdom from Asia, in a Mohammedanised form, living in Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor after their death, came into contact, in the spiritual world, with Alexander and Aristotle. On the one side Aristotelianism and Alexandrianism, but impregnated with Mohammedanism, and on the other, the real Aristotle and the real Alexander—not a weakened form of their teachings. Alexander and Aristotle had witnessed the Mystery of Golgotha from the Sun.

Then a great spiritual exchange, a great heavenly Council, if one may call it so, took place in the spiritual world between Mohammedanised Aristotelianism and Christianised Aristotelianism which had, however, been imbued in the spiritual world with the Christian Impulse.

In the spiritual world which borders on our physical earth—it was here that Alexander and Aristotle met with Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor and consulted together as to the further progress of Christianity in Europe, with an eye to what should come at the end of the 19th century and in the 20th century, when Michael would again have the Rulership on earth. This all took place in the light raying from that other event, namely, the meeting of Christ with His own Image. That heavenly Council was permeated by the influence of this meeting. And the lines, the threads of the spiritual life of humanity were projected with great intensity in the spiritual world which borders on the physical earth.

Below, on the earth itself, the Church Fathers gathered together in Constantinople at the Eighth Ecumenical Council, where they formulated the dogma that man does not consist of body, soul and Spirit, but only of body and soul, the soul possessing certain spiritual attributes. Trichotomy—the definition of man as body, soul and Spirit—was done away with and anyone who persisted in believing it was declared to be a heretic. The Christian Fathers in Europe never spoke of body, soul and Spirit, but only of body and soul.

The decisive event which took place in the year 869 in the super-sensible worlds as I have described it, cast its shadows down into the earthly world. The Dark Age, the Kali Yuga, received a special impetus, while what I have just described was taking place above, in the spiritual world.

Such was the real course of events. In the physical world the Council of Constantinople which eliminated the Spirit, and in the world immediately bordering on the physical, a heavenly Council such as I have described—coinciding with the meeting of Christ Himself with His own Image.

But it was known that it was a question of waiting until the new Michael Age had dawned on earth. There were, none the less, always a few Teachers who knew, even though in a somewhat decadent way, something of what takes place behind the veils of existence. There were always Teachers who knew how to present, if not always in very apt pictures, the spiritual content of the world, who could speak of what was happening in the spiritual world that is so near to the earth. And here and there these Teachers found ears willing to listen to them. Their listeners were men who learned something of true Christianity by catching here and there fragmentary words as to what would come in the 20th century after the Michael Rulership had begun once again.

In you yourselves, my dear friends, are the souls who were in incarnation at that time and listened to those who spoke of the coming Age of Michael and whose speech was influenced by impulses coming down from the heavenly Council of which I have told you.

From these experiences of a previous life in the early Christian centuries—not precisely the 9th century but before and after, chiefly before—arose the subconscious urge, when the Michael Rulership should be there once more, from the end of the 19th century onwards, to look for centres where the spiritual life is again cultivated under the influence of Michael. This impulse was rooted in the souls of those who had once heard of the teachings, who knew something of the mysteries of which we have spoken to-day.

And so the karmic urge lives in souls to find their way to that form of Christianity which was to be spread by Anthroposophy under the influence of Michael at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. What these souls had experienced in earlier times expresses itself in this incarnation in the fact that certain of them find their way to the Anthroposophical Movement.

Knowledge resulting from a converging of old pre-Christian, cosmic Christianity with inward Christian doctrines, teachings which were connected with the spiritual workings of nature and yet also with the Mystery of Golgotha, continued to be taught on earth at the time when those souls who now in this later incarnation feel themselves drawn to Anthroposophy had passed through the gates of death and were living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Some of them indeed came down to incarnation on the earth. The ancient teachings, with their cosmic view of Christianity, lived on, propagating traditions of the Mysteries of antiquity. This knowledge lived on in Schools in Europe like that of Chartres in the 12th century, with its great Teachers—Bernardus Sylvestris, Alanus ab Insulis and others. And the teachings lived and worked too in the great teacher of Dante, Brunetto Latini, of whom I spoke to you in the last lecture. In this way we see how there is a continuation of the knowledge in which there was still connection between cosmic Christianity and the purely human, earthly Christianity which more and more gained the supremacy on earth.

The Council held in Constantinople was an earthly, shadow-image of something that took place in the spiritual world. A constant connection was maintained between what was proceeding in the physical world and in the immediately adjacent spiritual world. And because of this, the most illustrious Teachers of Chartres felt themselves inspired by the true Alexander and the true Aristotle, although in a still stronger way by Plato and by the Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought which prevailed in the mysticism of the Middle Ages.

Something of great significance now took place. Those who had grouped themselves around Michael, and who had for the most part been incarnated at the time of Alexander, were now living in the spiritual world. Looking down from thence they saw how Christianity was evolving under the Teachers of Chartres. But they waited until these Teachers—who were the last who taught of Christianity in its cosmic aspect—they waited until these Teachers of Chartres had come up into the spiritual world. And at a certain point of time, at the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th centuries, there gathered together in the spiritual sphere bordering on cur earth, the more definitely Platonic Teachers of Chartres and those who had in some way taken part in the heavenly Council in the year 869. There took place—if I may use trivial words of earth to describe such a sublime event—a kind of conference between the Teachers of Chartres who had just ascended into the spiritual world and were now to continue their existence there, and those who were on the point of descending to earth, among them the individualities of Alexander and Aristotle, who immediately afterwards incarnated in the Dominican Order. And then, in a body of teaching that is so misunderstood to-day but the deep significance of which ought to be realised, in Scholasticism, preparation was made for all that was to come later on in the next Age of Michael.

And now, in order that they might enter right into the heart of Christianity, the souls who belonged to the sphere of Michael, who had lived in the old Alexander time, who had not lived on earth during the first Christian centuries, or at least only in unimportant incarnations—these souls now came into incarnation in order to imbibe Christianity in the Dominican or other Orders, but mainly in the Dominican Order. Again they passed through the gate of death and continued their existence in the spiritual world.

In the 15th century and lasting on into the 16th—and it must be remembered that time-relationships are quite different in the spiritual world—there took place in the super-sensible world the great process of instruction instituted by Michael himself for those who belonged to him. A great super-sensible School was founded, a School in which Michael himself was the Teacher and in which those souls took part who had been inspired by the impulses of the Alexander Age and had later steeped themselves in Christianity in the manner described. All the discarnate souls who belonged to Michael took part in this great School in the super-sensible world during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. All the Beings of the Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels and Archai who belonged to the Michael stream, as well as many elementary beings, also took part in it.

In this super-sensible School, a wonderful review was given of the wisdom of the ancient Mysteries. Detailed knowledge in regard to the ancient Mysteries was imparted to the souls partaking in this School. They looked back to the Sun Mysteries, to the Mysteries of the other planets. But a vista of the future was given too, a vista of what should begin at the end of the 19th century in the new Age of Michael. All this passed through these souls who now, in the present Michael Age, feel drawn to the Anthroposophical Movement.

Meanwhile, on earth, the last bout of the struggle was taking place. Haroun al Raschid had incarnated again as Lord Bacon of Verulam and in this new incarnation had set the impulse of materialism on foot. The universality in the teachings of Bacon, but also his materialism, came from his incarnation as Haroun al Raschid. Bacon was the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid. The Counsellor, who had taken the other path, incarnated in the same epoch, as Amos Comenius.

And so while Christianity illumined by Aristotelian and Alexandrian thought was going through its most important phase of development in the super-sensible worlds during the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries—during this very same period we find materialism being established on earth in the minds of men, established in science by Bacon, the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid, and in the realm of education by Amos Comenius, the reincarnated Counsellor of Haroun al Raschid. The two souls worked together.

When Amos Comenius and Bacon had once again passed through the gate of death, a remarkable thing came to pass in the spiritual world. After Bacon had passed through the gate of death, it happened that because of the particular mode of thinking he had adopted in his incarnation as Bacon, a whole world of “idols,” demonic idols, went forth from his etheric body, and spread themselves out in the spiritual world which was peopled by those who were the pupils of Michael.

As I have shown in my first Mystery Play, things that happen on earth work powerfully into the spiritual world. Bacon's mode of thinking on the earth worked so shatteringly into the spiritual world that it was flooded by a whole host of “idols.”

And the materialistic form of educational science inaugurated by Amos Comenius provided the sphere, the cosmic atmosphere, as it were, for the idols of Bacon. Bacon provided the idols; and just as we human beings have around us the mineral and plant kingdoms, so these idols of Bacon were surrounded by other kingdoms which were necessary to their existence. And these were provided by what Amos Comenius had instituted on earth.

The individualities who had once lived on the earth as Alexander and Aristotle set themselves to fight these demonic idols. And the conflict continued until the time when the French Revolution broke out on the earth.

The idols, the demonic idols which it had not been possible to overcome, which had as it were escaped from the fight, descended to earth and became the inspiring forces of the materialism of the 19th century with its many consequences. These forces are the inspirers of the materialism of the 19th century.

The souls who had remained behind, who with the assistance of the individualities of Aristotle and Alexander had profited by the teaching of Michael, came back to earth, bearing the impulses I have described, towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. And many of these souls can be recognised in those who come to the Anthroposophical Movement. Such is the karma of those who come to the Movement with inner sincerity.

It is a shattering experience to hear of what is happening immediately behind the events in the outer world at the present time. But it is something which, under the impulse of the Christmas Foundation at the Goetheanum must be implanted in the hearts and souls of those who call themselves Anthroposophists. It must live in their hearts and souls, and it will give them the strength to work on, for those who are Anthroposophists to-day in the true sense will feel a strong urge to come down again to the earth very soon. And with a faculty of prophecy connected with the Michael Impulse, it can be foreseen that many anthroposophical souls will come again to the earth at the end of the 20th century in order to bring to full realisation the Anthroposophical Movement which must now be established on a firm and sure foundation.

Every Anthroposophist should be moved by this knowledge: “I have in me the impulse of Anthroposophy. I recognise it as the Michael Impulse. I wait and am strengthened in my waiting by true activity in Anthroposophy at the present time in order that after the short interval allotted in the 20th century to anthroposophical souls between death and a new birth, I may come again at the end of the century to promote the Movement with much more spiritual power. I am preparing for the new Age leading from the 20th into the 21st century” ... It is thus that a true Anthroposophist speaks. Many forces of destruction are at work upon the earth! All culture, all civilised life must fall into decadence if the spirituality of the Michael Impulse does not so lay hold of men that they are capable of bringing upliftment to the civilisation that is hurrying downhill.

If there are to be found truly anthroposophical souls, willing to bring this spirituality into earthly life, then there will be a movement leading upwards. If such souls are not found, decadence will continue to spread. The great War, with all its attendant evils, will be merely the beginning of still worse evils.

Human beings to-day are facing a great crisis. Either they must see civilisation going down into the abyss, or they must raise it by spirituality and promote it in the sense of the Michael Impulse.

That, my dear friends, is what I had to say to you on this occasion and my desire is that it shall work on and bear fruit in your souls. For as I have often said at the conclusion of a happy and satisfying visit, when we have worked together for a time, we know, as Anthroposophists, that it is our karma to have been able to do so. We know too that we still remain united, even when divided in physical space. We shall remain united in the signs that can reveal themselves to the eyes of spirit and to the ears of soul if what I have said in these lectures has been received in full earnestness and has been understood.

• 1. See: Karmic Relationships, Vol. III.

If we look back over the evolution of mankind since the Mystery of Golgotha, we get the impression that Christianity, the Christ Impulse, has only been able to live on within the European and American civilisations in the face of definite obstacles and in association with other streams of spiritual life. And a study of the growth and gradual development of Christianity reveals many remarkable facts.

To-day I want to describe in broad outlines the growth and development of Christianity in connection with what ought to live within the Anthroposophical Society: and not only ought to, but can live, because those persons who feel an honest and sincere urge towards Anthroposophy, have this urge from the very depths of their being.

If we take the facts of repeated earthly lives in all seriousness, we shall say: This inner urge to get away from the conceptions and habits of thought of those among whom life, education and social relationships have placed us, this urge that we feel to enter a stream of thought which really makes claims upon our life of soul, must have its origin in karma, in the karma coming from earlier lives on earth.

Now if we study the question of karma in connection with those personalities who find themselves together in the Anthroposophical Movement, it transpires that, without exception, before their present earthly life they have had one other important incarnation since the Mystery of Golgotha. They were already on earth once since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and are now there for the second time since that Event.

And then the great question arises: How has the previous earthly life, with respect to the Mystery of Golgotha, worked upon these personalities who now, out of their karma, feel the urge to enter the Anthroposophical Movement?

Even from exoteric study we find that men standing as firmly within the stream of Christianity itself as St. Augustine, have said: “Christianity did not begin with Christ; there were Christians before Christ, only they were not so called.” This is what St. Augustine says.

Those who penetrate more deeply into the spiritual mysteries of human evolution and can study these spiritual mysteries with Initiation Science, will strongly confirm such a view as is expressed by St. Augustine, for it is a fact. But it becomes necessary, then, to know in what form that which through the Mystery of Golgotha became the historical Christ Impulse upon the earth, existed in earlier times.

To-day I can speak of this earlier form of Christianity by starting from impressions which came in a place not far distant from Torquay (where our Summer Course has been held), in Tintagel, whence proceeded the spiritual stream connected with King Arthur. It was possible to receive the impressions which can still come to-day at the spot where King Arthur's castle with its Round Table stood—impressions which come above all from the magnificent natural surroundings of this castle.

At this place where nothing but ruins remain of the old citadel of King Arthur, where we look back as if in memory across the centuries that have elapsed since the Arthur stream went out from thence, we realise how stone after stone has so crumbled away that there is hardly anything to be recognised of the old castles which once were inhabited by King Arthur and those around him. But when with the eye of spirit we look out from the place where the castle once stood, over the sea with its iridescent colours and breaking waves, the impression we get is that we are able at this place to penetrate deeply into the elemental secrets of nature and of the cosmos.

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And if we look back with occult sight, if we can visualise the point of time which lies a few thousand years ago, when the Arthur stream had its beginning, then we see that those who lived on Arthur's Mount had, as is the case with all such occult centres, chosen this spot because the impulses necessary for the tasks they had set themselves, for their mission in the world, needed the play of those forces which nature there displayed before them.

I cannot say whether it is always so, but when I saw the view there was a most wonderful play of waves surging and rippling up from the depths—in itself one of the most beautiful sights in all nature. These waves hurl themselves against the walls of rock and as they fall back again in seething foam the elementary spirits are able to rise up from below and come to living expression. From above, the sunlight is reflected in manifold forms in the waves of the air. This interplay of elemental nature from above and from below reveals the full power of the Sun and displays it in such a way that man is able to receive it into his being. Those who can imbibe what is given by this interplay of the beings born of the light above and the beings born in the depths below, receive the power of the Sun, the impulse of the Sun. It is a moment in which man can unfold what I will call “piety”—piety in the pagan sense. Christian piety is not the same as pagan piety which means inner surrender to the gods of nature working and weaving everywhere in the play of nature.

Those who lived around King Arthur absorbed this play of weaving, working nature into their very being. And most significant of all was what they were able to receive in the first centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha.

I want to tell you to-day about the character of this spiritual life that was connected with such centres as that of King Arthur's Round Table. And I must begin by speaking of something that is known to you all.

When a human being dies, he leaves his physical body and still has his etheric body around him for a few days. After these few days have elapsed he lays aside his etheric body and lives on then in his astral body and Ego. What happens thus to the man who has passed through the gate of death, appears to the eye of vision as if the etheric being were dissolving. After death the etheric human being expands and expands, his actual form becoming more and more indefinite as he weaves himself into the cosmos.

A remarkable phenomenon, and the exact opposite of this other, occurred in the world-historic sense when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. What was it that happened then? Up to that time Christ had been a Sun Being, had belonged to the Sun. Before the Mystery of Golgotha had come to pass, the Knights of King Arthur's Round Table stood on these rocks, gazed at the play between the Sun-born spirits and the Earth-born spirits, and felt that the forces living in this play of nature-spirits poured into their hearts and above all through their etheric bodies. Therewith they received into themselves the Christ Impulse which was then streaming away from the Sun and was living in everything that is brought into being by the Sun-forces.

And so, before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Knights of King Arthur received into themselves the Sun-Spirit, that is to say, the Christ as He was in pre-Christian times. And they sent their messengers out into all Europe to subdue the wild savagery of the astral bodies of the peoples of Europe, to purify and to civilise, for such was their mission. We see such men as these Knights of King Arthur's Round Table starting from this point in the West of England to bear to the peoples of Europe as they were at that time, what they had received from the Sun, purifying the astral forces of the then barbarous European population—barbarous at all events in Central and Northern Europe.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha. What happened in Asia? Over yonder in Asia, the sublime Sun Being, Who was later known as the Christ, left the Sun. This betokened a kind of death for the Christ Being. He went forth from the Sun as we human beings go forth from the earth when we die. And as a man who dies leaves his physical body behind on the earth and his etheric body which is laid aside after three days is visible to the seer, so Christ left behind Him in the Sun that which in my book Theosophy is called “Spirit-Man,” the seventh member of the human being.

Christ died to the Sun. He died cosmically, from the Sun to the earth. He came down to the earth. From the moment of Golgotha onwards His Life-Spirit was to be seen around the earth. We ourselves leave behind at death the Life-Ether, the etheric body, the life-body. After this cosmic Death, Christ left His Spirit-Man on the Sun, and around the earth, His Life-Spirit. So that after the Mystery of Golgotha the earth was swathed as it were by the Life-Spirit of the Christ.

Now the connections between places are not the same in the spiritual life as they are in physical life. The Life-Spirit of the Christ was perceived in the Irish Mysteries, in the Mysteries of Hibernia; and above all by the Knights of King Arthur's Round Table. So, up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ Impulse belonging to the Sun actually went out from this place where the impulses were received from the Sun. Afterwards the power of the Knights diminished but they lived at the time within this Life-Spirit which encircled the earth and in which there was this constant interplay of light and air, of the Spirits in the Elements from above and from below.

Try to picture to yourselves the cliff with King Arthur's castle upon it and from above the Sun-forces playing down in the light and air, and pouring upwards from below the elementary beings of the earth. There is a living interplay between Sun and earth.

In the centuries which followed the Mystery of Golgotha this all took place within the Life-Spirit of the Christ. So that in the play of nature between sea and rock, air and light, there was revealed, as it were in spiritual light, the Event of Golgotha.

Understand me rightly, my dear friends. If in the first five centuries of our era men looked out over the sea, and had been prepared by the exercises practised by the twelve who were around King Arthur and who were concerned above all with the Mysteries of the Zodiac, if they looked out over the sea they could see not merely the play of nature but they could begin to read a meaning in it just as one reads a book instead of merely staring at it. And as they looked and saw, here a gleam of light, there a curling wave, here the sun mirrored on a rocky cliff, there the sea dashing against the rocks, it all became a flowing, weaving picture—a truth whose meaning could be deciphered. And when they deciphered it they knew of the spiritual Fact of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha was revealed to them because the picture was all irradiated by the Life-Spirit of Christ presented to them by nature.

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Yonder in Asia the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place and its impulse had penetrated deeply into the hearts and souls of men. We need only think of those who became the first Christians to realise what a change had come about in their souls. While all this of which I have been telling you was happening in the West, the Christ Himself, the Christ Who had come down to earth leaving His Spirit-Man on the Sun and His Life-Spirit in the atmosphere around the earth, bringing down His Ego and His Spirit-Self to the earth—the Christ was moving from East to West in the hearts of men, through Greece, Northern Africa, Italy, Spain, across Europe. The Christ worked here in the hearts of men, while over in the West He was working through nature.

And so on the one hand we have the story of the Mystery of Golgotha, legible in the Book of Nature for those who were able to read it, working from West to East. It represented, as it were, the science of the higher graduates of King Arthur's Round Table. And on the other hand we have a stream flowing from East to West, not in wind and wave, in air and water, not over hills or in the rays of the Sun, but flowing through the blood, laying hold of the hearts of men on its course from Palestine through Greece into Italy and Spain.

The one stream flows through nature; the other through the blood and the hearts of men. These two streams flow to meet one another. The pagan stream is still working, even to-day. It bears the pre-Christian Christ, the Christ Who was proclaimed as a Sun Being by those who were Knights of the Round Table, but also by many others before the Mystery of Golgotha actually took place. The pre-Christian Christ was carried through the world by this stream even in the age of the Mystery of Golgotha. And a great deal of this wisdom was carried forth into the world by the stream known as that of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It is possible, even to-day, to discover these things. There is a pagan Christianity, a Christianity that is not directly bound up with the actual historical Event of Golgotha.

And coming upwards to meet this stream there is the form of Christianity that is connected directly with the Mystery of Golgotha, flowing through the blood, through the hearts and souls of men. Two streams come to meet one another—the pre-Christian Christ stream, etherealised as it were, and the Christian Christ stream. The one is known, subsequently, as the Arthur stream; the other as the Grail stream. Later on they came together; they came together in Europe, above all in the spiritual world.

How can we describe this movement? The Christ Who descended through the Mystery of Golgotha drew into the hearts of men. In the hearts of men He passed from East to West, from Palestine, through Greece, across Italy and Spain. The Christianity of the Grail spread through the blood and the hearts of men. The Christ took His way from East to West.

And to meet Him from the West there came the spiritual etheric Image of the Christ—the Image evoked by the Mystery of Golgotha, but still picturing the Christ of the Sun Mysteries.

Behind the scenes of world-history, sublime and wonderful events were taking place. From the West came pagan Christianity, the Arthur-Christianity, also under other names and in another form. From the East came the Christ in the hearts of men. And then the meeting takes place—the meeting between the Christ Who had Himself come down to earth and His Own Image which is brought to Him from West to East. This meeting took place in the year 869 A.D. Up to that year we have two streams, clearly distinct from one another. The one stream, more in the North, passed across Central Europe and bore the Christ as a Sun Hero, whether the name were Baldur or some other. And under the banner of Christ, the Sun Hero, the Knights of Arthur spread their culture abroad.

The other stream, rooted inwardly in the hearts of men, which later on became the Grail stream, is to be perceived more in the South, coming from the East. It bears the real Christ, Christ Himself. The other stream brings to meet it from the West a cosmic Image of the Christ. This meeting of Christ with Himself, of Christ the Brother of Humanity with Christ the Sun Hero Who is there only as it were in an Image—this meeting of Christ with His own Image took place in the 9th century.

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I have given you here, my dear friends, an idea of the inner happenings during the first centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, when, as I have already said, the souls were living who are now again upon earth, and who have carried with them from their previous earthly lives the urge to come in sincerity into the Anthroposophical Movement.²

When we consider this significant Arthur stream from West to East, it appears to us as the stream which brings the Impulse of the Sun into earthly civilisation. In this Arthur stream is working and weaving the Michael stream as we may call it in Christian terminology, the stream in the spiritual life of humanity in which we have been living since the end of the seventies of last century. The Ruling Power, known by the name of Gabriel, who had held sway for three or four centuries in European civilisation, was succeeded at the end of the seventies of last century by Michael. And the Rulership of Michael will last for three to four centuries, weaving and working in the spiritual life of mankind. And so we have good cause at the present time to speak of the Michael streams, for we ourselves are living once again in an Age of Michael.

We find one of these Michael streams if we look back to the period immediately preceding that of the Mystery of Golgotha, to the Arthur Impulse going out from the West, from England, an Impulse which was kindled originally by the Hibernian Mysteries. And we find a still more ancient form of this Michael stream if we look back to what happened centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, when, taking its start from Northern Greece, in Macedonia, the international, cosmopolitan stream connected with the name of Alexander the Great arose under the influence of the conception of the world that is known as the Aristotelian. What was achieved through Aristotle and Alexander in that pre-Christian age took place under the Rulership of Michael, just as now once again we are living under his Rulership. The Michael Impulse was there in the spiritual life at the time of Alexander the Great, just as it is there now, in our own time. Whenever a Michael Impulse is at work in humanity upon the earth it is always a time when that which has been founded in a centre of spiritual culture spreads abroad among many peoples of the earth and is carried into many regions, wherever it is possible to carry it.

This came to pass in pre-Christian times through the campaigns of Alexander. The achievements of Greek culture were spread among men wherever this became possible. If one had asked Alexander and Aristotle: Whence comes your impulse to spread abroad the spiritual culture of your age?—they would have spoken, though under a different name, of that same Being, Michael, who works from the Sun as the Servant of Christ. For among the Archangels who in turn rule over civilisation, Michael belongs to the Sun. Michael was Ruler in the time of Alexander and is Ruler again in our own time. The next Ruling Archangel was Oriphiel, who belongs to Saturn. His successor, the Archangel Anael, belongs to Venus. While Zachariel, the Archangel who ruled civilisation in the 4th and 5th centuries, belongs to the sphere of Jupiter. Then came Raphael, from the Mercury sphere, at the time when a form of thought connected with medicine and healing lived in the background of European civilisation. After Raphael came Samael, whose Rulership extended a little beyond the 12th century. And then came the Age of Gabriel. Samael belongs to Mars, Gabriel to the Moon. And Gabriel was once again succeeded by Michael, who belongs to the Sun sphere, in the seventies of the 19th century. Thus in rhythmic succession these seven Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archangels rule over the spiritual life of the earth.

And so as we look back—when was the last Rulership of Michael? It was in the Alexander period. It prevailed during that period when Greek civilisation was carried across to Asia and Africa, and finally concentrated in the great and influential city of Alexandria with its mighty heroes of the spiritual life.

It is a strange vista that presents itself to occult sight. In the age which lies a few centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, we see, going Eastwards from Macedonia—that is to say, once more from West to East but this time farther to the East—we see the same stream which proceeds from the English and Irish souls in the West and which also flows from West to East. During the Alexander period, Michael was the Ruling Archangel on the earth. During the Arthur period, when Michael was working from the Sun, the influences I have described were sent down from the Sun. But what happened later on, after the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place? What happened to the kind of thought that had been carried by Alexander the Great over to Asia?

At the time when Charlemagne, in his own way, was establishing a certain form of Christian culture in Europe, Haroun al Raschid was living over yonder in Asia Minor. All the oriental wisdom and spirituality to be found at that time in architecture, in art, in science, in religion, in literature, in poetry—it was all gathered at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. And at his side there was a Counsellor, a man who was not initiated in all these arts and sciences at that time, but who had been an Initiate in earlier times, in a former life. Around these two men, Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor, we find that all the wisdom which had been carried by Alexander into Asia, all the teachings which had been drawn from the old nature-wisdom and were imparted by Aristotle to those he was able to instruct—all this was changed. Alexandrianism and Aristotelianism were permeated and impregnated at the Court of Haroun al Raschid with Arabism, with Mohammedanism.

And then, all the learning thus permeated with Arabism was carried over into the stream of Christianity by way of Greece, but especially by way of Northern Africa, Italy and Spain. It was carried over, inculcated as it were into the world of Christendom.

But before this, Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor had passed through the gate of death, and from that life which leads from death to a new birth they looked down on what was taking place on earth in the expeditions of the Mohammedan Moors to Spain. From the spiritual world they watched the form of culture which they themselves had promoted and which had been spread by their successors. Haroun al Raschid concentrated his attention from the spiritual world more on the regions of Greece, Italy and Spain; his Counsellor more on the stream going out from the East across the regions to the North of the Black Sea, through Russia and into Central Europe.

And now the question arises: What was the destiny of Alexander and Aristotle themselves? They were deeply bound up with the Rulership of Michael but they were not incarnated on the earth at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

We must try to get a clear conception of the two contrasting pictures. On the earth are those who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ comes down through the Mystery of Golgotha, becomes Man, and from then on lives in the earth-sphere. And what is happening on the Sun? On the Sun there are the souls who at that time belonged to Michael, who were living in his sphere. These souls witnessed, from the Sun, the departure of Christ from the Sun and His descent to earth. On the earth there were those who witnessed His arrival. That is the difference. The experience of those who were on earth during the Michael Rulership at the time of Alexander, was that they saw as it were the other direction of the Christ Event, namely, the departure of the Christ from the Sun. They live on—I will not now mention unimportant incarnations—and they experience, in the spiritual world, that significant point of time in the 9th century, about the year 869, when there took place the meeting of the Christ with His own Image, with His own Life-Spirit brought over from pagan, pre-Christian Christianity.

Another meeting also took place in the spiritual world, a meeting of the individualities living in Alexander the Great and in Aristotle with the individualities who had lived in Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor. The wisdom from Asia, in a Mohammedanised form, living in Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor after their death, came into contact, in the spiritual world, with Alexander and Aristotle. On the one side Aristotelianism and Alexandrianism, but impregnated with Mohammedanism, and on the other, the real Aristotle and the real Alexander—not a weakened form of their teachings. Alexander and Aristotle had witnessed the Mystery of Golgotha from the Sun.

Then a great spiritual exchange, a great heavenly Council, if one may call it so, took place in the spiritual world between Mohammedanised Aristotelianism and Christianised Aristotelianism which had, however, been imbued in the spiritual world with the Christian Impulse.

In the spiritual world which borders on our physical earth—it was here that Alexander and Aristotle met with Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor and consulted together as to the further progress of Christianity in Europe, with an eye to what should come at the end of the 19th century and in the 20th century, when Michael would again have the Rulership on earth. This all took place in the light raying from that other event, namely, the meeting of Christ with His own Image. That heavenly Council was permeated by the influence of this meeting. And the lines, the threads of the spiritual life of humanity were projected with great intensity in the spiritual world which borders on the physical earth.

Below, on the earth itself, the Church Fathers gathered together in Constantinople at the Eighth Ecumenical Council, where they formulated the dogma that man does not consist of body, soul and Spirit, but only of body and soul, the soul possessing certain spiritual attributes. Trichotomy—the definition of man as body, soul and Spirit—was done away with and anyone who persisted in believing it was declared to be a heretic. The Christian Fathers in Europe never spoke of body, soul and Spirit, but only of body and soul.

The decisive event which took place in the year 869 in the super-sensible worlds as I have described it, cast its shadows down into the earthly world. The Dark Age, the Kali Yuga, received a special impetus, while what I have just described was taking place above, in the spiritual world.

Such was the real course of events. In the physical world the Council of Constantinople which eliminated the Spirit, and in the world immediately bordering on the physical, a heavenly Council such as I have described—coinciding with the meeting of Christ Himself with His own Image.

But it was known that it was a question of waiting until the new Michael Age had dawned on earth. There were, none the less, always a few Teachers who knew, even though in a somewhat decadent way, something of what takes place behind the veils of existence. There were always Teachers who knew how to present, if not always in very apt pictures, the spiritual content of the world, who could speak of what was happening in the spiritual world that is so near to the earth. And here and there these Teachers found ears willing to listen to them. Their listeners were men who learned something of true Christianity by catching here and there fragmentary words as to what would come in the 20th century after the Michael Rulership had begun once again.

In you yourselves, my dear friends, are the souls who were in incarnation at that time and listened to those who spoke of the coming Age of Michael and whose speech was influenced by impulses coming down from the heavenly Council of which I have told you.

From these experiences of a previous life in the early Christian centuries—not precisely the 9th century but before and after, chiefly before—arose the subconscious urge, when the Michael Rulership should be there once more, from the end of the 19th century onwards, to look for centres where the spiritual life is again cultivated under the influence of Michael. This impulse was rooted in the souls of those who had once heard of the teachings, who knew something of the mysteries of which we have spoken to-day.

And so the karmic urge lives in souls to find their way to that form of Christianity which was to be spread by Anthroposophy under the influence of Michael at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. What these souls had experienced in earlier times expresses itself in this incarnation in the fact that certain of them find their way to the Anthroposophical Movement.

Knowledge resulting from a converging of old pre-Christian, cosmic Christianity with inward Christian doctrines, teachings which were connected with the spiritual workings of nature and yet also with the Mystery of Golgotha, continued to be taught on earth at the time when those souls who now in this later incarnation feel themselves drawn to Anthroposophy had passed through the gates of death and were living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Some of them indeed came down to incarnation on the earth. The ancient teachings, with their cosmic view of Christianity, lived on, propagating traditions of the Mysteries of antiquity. This knowledge lived on in Schools in Europe like that of Chartres in the 12th century, with its great Teachers—Bernardus Sylvestris, Alanus ab Insulis and others. And the teachings lived and worked too in the great teacher of Dante, Brunetto Latini, of whom I spoke to you in the last lecture. In this way we see how there is a continuation of the knowledge in which there was still connection between cosmic Christianity and the purely human, earthly Christianity which more and more gained the supremacy on earth.

The Council held in Constantinople was an earthly, shadow-image of something that took place in the spiritual world. A constant connection was maintained between what was proceeding in the physical world and in the immediately adjacent spiritual world. And because of this, the most illustrious Teachers of Chartres felt themselves inspired by the true Alexander and the true Aristotle, although in a still stronger way by Plato and by the Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought which prevailed in the mysticism of the Middle Ages.

Something of great significance now took place. Those who had grouped themselves around Michael, and who had for the most part been incarnated at the time of Alexander, were now living in the spiritual world. Looking down from thence they saw how Christianity was evolving under the Teachers of Chartres. But they waited until these Teachers—who were the last who taught of Christianity in its cosmic aspect—they waited until these Teachers of Chartres had come up into the spiritual world. And at a certain point of time, at the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th centuries, there gathered together in the spiritual sphere bordering on cur earth, the more definitely Platonic Teachers of Chartres and those who had in some way taken part in the heavenly Council in the year 869. There took place—if I may use trivial words of earth to describe such a sublime event—a kind of conference between the Teachers of Chartres who had just ascended into the spiritual world and were now to continue their existence there, and those who were on the point of descending to earth, among them the individualities of Alexander and Aristotle, who immediately afterwards incarnated in the Dominican Order. And then, in a body of teaching that is so misunderstood to-day but the deep significance of which ought to be realised, in Scholasticism, preparation was made for all that was to come later on in the next Age of Michael.

And now, in order that they might enter right into the heart of Christianity, the souls who belonged to the sphere of Michael, who had lived in the old Alexander time, who had not lived on earth during the first Christian centuries, or at least only in unimportant incarnations—these souls now came into incarnation in order to imbibe Christianity in the Dominican or other Orders, but mainly in the Dominican Order. Again they passed through the gate of death and continued their existence in the spiritual world.

In the 15th century and lasting on into the 16th—and it must be remembered that time-relationships are quite different in the spiritual world—there took place in the super-sensible world the great process of instruction instituted by Michael himself for those who belonged to him. A great super-sensible School was founded, a School in which Michael himself was the Teacher and in which those souls took part who had been inspired by the impulses of the Alexander Age and had later steeped themselves in Christianity in the manner described. All the discarnate souls who belonged to Michael took part in this great School in the super-sensible world during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. All the Beings of the Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels and Archai who belonged to the Michael stream, as well as many elementary beings, also took part in it.

In this super-sensible School, a wonderful review was given of the wisdom of the ancient Mysteries. Detailed knowledge in regard to the ancient Mysteries was imparted to the souls partaking in this School. They looked back to the Sun Mysteries, to the Mysteries of the other planets. But a vista of the future was given too, a vista of what should begin at the end of the 19th century in the new Age of Michael. All this passed through these souls who now, in the present Michael Age, feel drawn to the Anthroposophical Movement.

Meanwhile, on earth, the last bout of the struggle was taking place. Haroun al Raschid had incarnated again as Lord Bacon of Verulam and in this new incarnation had set the impulse of materialism on foot. The universality in the teachings of Bacon, but also his materialism, came from his incarnation as Haroun al Raschid. Bacon was the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid. The Counsellor, who had taken the other path, incarnated in the same epoch, as Amos Comenius.

And so while Christianity illumined by Aristotelian and Alexandrian thought was going through its most important phase of development in the super-sensible worlds during the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries—during this very same period we find materialism being established on earth in the minds of men, established in science by Bacon, the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid, and in the realm of education by Amos Comenius, the reincarnated Counsellor of Haroun al Raschid. The two souls worked together.

When Amos Comenius and Bacon had once again passed through the gate of death, a remarkable thing came to pass in the spiritual world. After Bacon had passed through the gate of death, it happened that because of the particular mode of thinking he had adopted in his incarnation as Bacon, a whole world of “idols,” demonic idols, went forth from his etheric body, and spread themselves out in the spiritual world which was peopled by those who were the pupils of Michael.

As I have shown in my first Mystery Play, things that happen on earth work powerfully into the spiritual world. Bacon's mode of thinking on the earth worked so shatteringly into the spiritual world that it was flooded by a whole host of “idols.”

And the materialistic form of educational science inaugurated by Amos Comenius provided the sphere, the cosmic atmosphere, as it were, for the idols of Bacon. Bacon provided the idols; and just as we human beings have around us the mineral and plant kingdoms, so these idols of Bacon were surrounded by other kingdoms which were necessary to their existence. And these were provided by what Amos Comenius had instituted on earth.

The individualities who had once lived on the earth as Alexander and Aristotle set themselves to fight these demonic idols. And the conflict continued until the time when the French Revolution broke out on the earth.

The idols, the demonic idols which it had not been possible to overcome, which had as it were escaped from the fight, descended to earth and became the inspiring forces of the materialism of the 19th century with its many consequences. These forces are the inspirers of the materialism of the 19th century.

The souls who had remained behind, who with the assistance of the individualities of Aristotle and Alexander had profited by the teaching of Michael, came back to earth, bearing the impulses I have described, towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. And many of these souls can be recognised in those who come to the Anthroposophical Movement. Such is the karma of those who come to the Movement with inner sincerity.

It is a shattering experience to hear of what is happening immediately behind the events in the outer world at the present time. But it is something which, under the impulse of the Christmas Foundation at the Goetheanum must be implanted in the hearts and souls of those who call themselves Anthroposophists. It must live in their hearts and souls, and it will give them the strength to work on, for those who are Anthroposophists to-day in the true sense will feel a strong urge to come down again to the earth very soon. And with a faculty of prophecy connected with the Michael Impulse, it can be foreseen that many anthroposophical souls will come again to the earth at the end of the 20th century in order to bring to full realisation the Anthroposophical Movement which must now be established on a firm and sure foundation.

Every Anthroposophist should be moved by this knowledge: “I have in me the impulse of Anthroposophy. I recognise it as the Michael Impulse. I wait and am strengthened in my waiting by true activity in Anthroposophy at the present time in order that after the short interval allotted in the 20th century to anthroposophical souls between death and a new birth, I may come again at the end of the century to promote the Movement with much more spiritual power. I am preparing for the new Age leading from the 20th into the 21st century” ... It is thus that a true Anthroposophist speaks. Many forces of destruction are at work upon the earth! All culture, all civilised life must fall into decadence if the spirituality of the Michael Impulse does not so lay hold of men that they are capable of bringing upliftment to the civilisation that is hurrying downhill.

If there are to be found truly anthroposophical souls, willing to bring this spirituality into earthly life, then there will be a movement leading upwards. If such souls are not found, decadence will continue to spread. The great War, with all its attendant evils, will be merely the beginning of still worse evils.

Human beings to-day are facing a great crisis. Either they must see civilisation going down into the abyss, or they must raise it by spirituality and promote it in the sense of the Michael Impulse.

That, my dear friends, is what I had to say to you on this occasion and my desire is that it shall work on and bear fruit in your souls. For as I have often said at the conclusion of a happy and satisfying visit, when we have worked together for a time, we know, as Anthroposophists, that it is our karma to have been able to do so. We know too that we still remain united, even when divided in physical space. We shall remain united in the signs that can reveal themselves to the eyes of spirit and to the ears of soul if what I have said in these lectures has been received in full earnestness and has been understood.

• 2. See: Karmic Relationships, Vol. III.

Today I would like to address myself to a subject specifically requested by our friends here, a subject having great significance for modern spiritual life. It shall be considered from the standpoint I have often taken when speaking of things of the spirit. As a rule, it is difficult to speak of such a unique and deeply significant subject unless it be assumed that the audience keep in mind various things explained in other lectures given on the foundations of spiritual science. This science is neither widely recognized nor popular; in fact, it is a most unpopular and much misunderstood spiritual stream of our day. Misunderstandings can easily arise especially with a subject like the one chosen today, because the opinion is far too widespread that anthroposophy might undermine this or that religious creed, thereby interfering with what someone may hold precious. Anyone willing to go into anthroposophy in any depth sees that this opinion is completely false. In one sense, spiritual science aims to develop further the way of thinking that entered human evolution through natural science. By strengthening the human soul, it seeks to make this kind of thinking fruitful. The way spiritual science must proceed differs significantly, however, from the way taken by natural science. Anthroposophy takes its start, not from the world perceived by the external senses, but from the world of the spirit. Questions pertaining to the spiritual life of the soul must therefore be considered from the standpoint of spiritual science. Undoubtedly for many in our time the most important question in the spiritual life of humanity pertains to the subject of today's lecture, that is, Christ Jesus.

To ensure that we shall understand each other at least to some extent, I would like to make a few preliminary observations before moving on to any specific questions. Spiritual science, though it is the continuation of natural science, makes entirely different demands on the human soul. This fact accounts for the misunderstanding and opposition spiritual science encounters. The kind of thinking derived from natural science is tied up with a problem that more or less concerns human souls today when they consider higher aspects of life. This is the problem of the limits to knowledge. Spiritual science in no way belittles the most admirable attempt of philosophers to ascertain the extent of human thought and knowledge. Thinkers who judge on the basis of what can ordinarily be observed in the soul easily conclude that human knowledge can go so far and no farther. It is commonly said, “This fact can be known; that other cannot.”

On this issue spiritual science takes a completely different stand because it takes into consideration the development of the human soul. Granted, in ordinary life and science the soul does indeed confront certain limits of knowledge. The soul, however, may take itself in hand, transform itself and thereby acquire the possibility of penetrating into spheres of existence radically unlike those usually experienced.

Here I can only indicate what in earlier lectures and in such books as An Outline of Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have already explained, namely, that the soul can completely change itself. Through practicing certain exercises, the soul may bring about an infinite enhancement of its inherent forces of attention and devotion. Ordinarily, the soul-spiritual life uses the human body like an instrument. Just as hydrogen is bound to oxygen in water, so is this life closely connected with the body, within which it works. Now, just as hydrogen may be separated from oxygen and shown to have completely different qualities from water, so may the soul, through the exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, separate itself from the body. By thus turning away from and lifting itself out of the body, the soul acquires an inner life of its own.

Not by speculation or philosophy but by devoted discipline can the soul emancipate itself from the body. To live as a soul-spiritual being, apart from the body is the great experience of the spiritual investigator. Here I can only indicate things I have elaborated elsewhere.

Today my task is to show how the spiritual investigator must regard the Christ Jesus Event. Statements of religious creeds concerning this event are derived from experiences of the soul in its life within the body. The statements of the spiritual investigator come from clairvoyant experiences of the soul as it lives independently of the body in the spiritual world. In this condition the soul can survey the whole course of mankind's evolution.

What the spiritual investigator thereby learns of Christ Jesus calls for a certain way of speaking, because the investigator acquires his knowledge in immediate spiritual vision while living separated from his body. Yet he can communicate this knowledge only indirectly by turning his attention to the things of this world. His description, however, must convey what he has experienced in spiritual vision. Thus, what follows in way of explanation of certain processes in man's external life is not meant to be taken metaphorically. It is intended rather to express something in which spiritual science must come to an understanding with natural science. In respect to one point in particular it is most important to come to terms with present-day thought.

In natural science it is admitted that a mere descriptive enumeration of single events in nature is inadequate. It is recognized that the scientist must proceed from a description of natural phenomena to the laws invisibly animating them. These laws we perceive when we relate phenomena with each other, or when we immerse ourselves in them. In this way they reveal their inner laws. In the treatment of historical facts, however, this natural scientific method is not easily applied.

Now, as a rule, I am disinclined to speak of personal matters, but in the following case I can speak of something objective. The title of my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, which was first published many years ago, was not chosen without due reflection. It was selected to indicate a certain way of observing things. It was not entitled The Mysticism of Christianity because I did not intend to deal with this topic, nor was it entitled Christian Mysticism because I did not intend to write on that theme, the mystical life of the Christian, either. What I sought to show was that the Christ impulse, the entrance of Christianity into mankind's development, can be comprehended only by perceiving how the super-sensible plays into the development ordinarily described in history. As these facts are accessible only to spiritual vision, they can be called mystical. They are mystical while at the same time having occurred on earth.

The origin and development of Christianity can be understood only when we realize that facts in history arrange themselves as do facts in our solar system, where the sun has the major role and the other planets less important parts. This arrangement can be recognized when facts are seen from a natural scientific standpoint. In the field of history, however, facts are rarely so viewed. Here, the succession of facts is easily described, but the fact that the way of contemplating the historical facts differs from the way of contemplating scientific facts is lost sight of.

There is a law in natural science whose validity is more or less acknowledged by all, despite this or that detail of it being open to dispute. This law, first formulated by Ernst Haeckel, has become fundamental to biology. It states that a living being recapitulates in its embryonic life, passes through stages of development that resemble those of the lower animals such as the fishes. This is a law recognized in science.

Now there is another law, which can be discovered by spiritual vision, that is of great importance in mankind's development. Because it is valid only in the sphere of spiritual life it presents a rather different aspect than the law just mentioned, but it is as true as any in natural science. It enables us to say what is undoubtedly true, that humanity has passed through many stages in its development, and that as it has passed from one epoch to another, from one century to another, it has taken on various forms. We need only assume that the epochs known to history were preceded by primeval ones. At this point we may ask if the life of humanity as a whole can be compared with anything else. Of course, any comparison concerning mankind's development must be the outcome of spiritual-scientific observation. External facts must be used as a language, as a means of communication, to express what the spiritual investigator perceives. What he perceives is that mankind's development as a whole may be compared with the life of a single man.

The experiences of mankind in ancient cultures—in those of Egypt and China, Persia and India, Greece and Rome—were different from those of our time. In those ancient epochs man's soul lived in conditions different from those of today. Just as in the individual human life the experiences of childhood are not the same as those of youth or old age, so in these cultures mankind's experiences were not the same as ours are today. Human development passes through various forms in the various ages of life.

The following question now arises. What stage in the individual life of man may be compared with the present epoch of humanity? This question can be answered only by spiritual science. Anthroposophy stands upon such a foundation that it can say that when man enters his life on earth he does not inherit everything from his mother and father that belongs to his being. We can say that man descends from a life in the spirit to an existence on earth, and that the spiritual part of his being follows certain laws whereby it connects itself with what is inherited from the parents. Further, we can say that the spiritual part helps in the whole growth and development of the human body. We see how the soul and spirit takes hold of and works upon physical substance. The wonderful mystery of man's gradual development, the emergence of definite traits from indefinite, capacities from incapacities, all bear witness to the sculpting power of these spiritual forces. Through spiritual science we are lead to look back from this present life to former lives on earth. We see that the way our soul-spiritual being prepares the bodily organization and the course our destiny takes depend[s] upon what we have elaborated and gained for ourselves in former lives.

Exact spiritual-scientific investigation shows that during the whole ascending course of our lives, up to our thirties, the fruits won from former lives on earth and brought with us from the spiritual world still exercise an immediate influence upon our physical existence and destiny. Our soul, being connected with the external world, progresses as we experience life on earth. From these experiences a soul-spiritual kernel forms itself within us. Up until our thirtieth to thirty-fifth years we arrange our lives in accordance with the spiritual forces we have brought with us from the spiritual world. From the middle of our lives onward the forces of our soul-spiritual kernel begin to work. This seed, containing what we have already elaborated, continues to work within us for the rest of our lives.

Even after a plant has faded away, the forces capable of producing a new one survive. These forces are like the soul-spiritual forces we gain for ourselves in the first half of life and that predominate in the second. When, in this second period of life, our senses weaken, our hair turns gray and our skin becomes wrinkled, our external life may be compared with a dying plant. Yet, in this period what we have prepared since our birth, what we have not brought with us from a preceding life but have rather elaborated in this life, grows ever stronger and more powerful. It is the part in us that passes through the portal of death, that casts off life as something faded. It is that part in us that passes over into the spiritual world. At an important moment in our life, when the fresh forces of our youth start to wane, we begin to cultivate something new on earth, that is, a soul-spiritual seed that passes through death.

We may now ask ourselves what period in human life can be compared with the present epoch, considering the whole development of humanity. Can our present age be compared with the first part of human life, with the first thirty to thirty-five years, or with the latter part. Spiritual-scientific observation of the present age reveals that our existence in the external world can in fact be compared only with the period of human life lying beyond the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years. Human development on earth has already passed the middle part of life. We need only compare the experiences of mankind in our present culture with experiences undergone in the Egyptian-Babylonian or Greco-Roman cultures. We need only point to our mighty and admirable technical and industrial achievements to show that man has now severed himself from what is directly and instinctively connected with his body.

Men in ancient cultures faced the world as a child does. The child's life is an ascending one, completely dependent upon the body. Mankind's life today, in contrast, is mechanical, cut off from the body. History, science, philosophy and religion all show that mankind in its evolution has reached a point lying beyond the middle of life. Modern pedagogy, with its efforts to be established on rational lines, especially bears out this fact. Modern pedagogy differs markedly from ancient pedagogy. Children growing up under our artificial education become severed from the direct impulses of humanity. An earlier education, one in an epoch lying before mankind's middle life, was derived from intuition and instinct. Observation of the riddles of education strongly confirms the fact that humanity has now passed beyond the point of maturity. We may now ask ourselves what point in humanity's evolution corresponds to the point in the individual life of man that lies between the thirtieth and thirty-fifth years.

When the spiritual investigator, objectively observing the evolution of humanity, turns his gaze on ancient times, he finds a trend that culminates in the Greco-Roman epoch. He finds that then humanity as a whole reached that age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of an individual man. The individual man may use a surplus of vital forces in his body to live beyond the descending point in his life and to cultivate up until his death a soul-spiritual kernel. In the life of humanity as a whole, however, things take a different course. When the youthful forces of humanity cease to flow, as it were, a new impulse is needed for its further development, an impulse not lying within humanity itself. Even if we know nothing whatsoever of the Gospels or of tradition, we need only look at mankind's historical development to discover in the Greco-Roman epoch the entrance of such an impulse. There, at a certain moment, the turning point of man's whole earthly development occurred. A completely new impulse entered the course of man's evolution, when its youthful forces were on the wane. An examination of the ancient mysteries will throw more light on this historical fact.

These mysteries, which existed in every culture and which to some extent have reached our knowledge through literature, were functions performed at centers that served both as schools and churches. Through cultic rites intended to transform the everyday life of soul, these functions enabled men to attain to higher knowledge. These mystery schools took different forms in different countries, but at all centers those souls whom the leaders of the schools believed capable of development received training.

In the mysteries man's soul life was not regarded as it is today. In this ancient viewpoint, which anthroposophy must renew, the soul was deemed unfit in its ordinary state to penetrate into those spheres where its inmost being flows together with the very source of life. The ancients felt that the human soul had to prepare itself for knowledge by undergoing a certain moral and esthetic training. They thought that through this inner training the soul could transform itself and thereby acquire forces of knowledge surpassing those of ordinary life. The soul then became capable of perceiving those mysteries that lie behind external phenomena.

There were basically two kinds of center[s] where pupils were trained to acquire spiritual wisdom and a vision of life's mysteries. Pupils of the first kind, under the guidance of the centers' leaders, especially developed the psychic life. During spiritual vision they could free themselves from the body. The Egyptian and Greek mysteries offered this kind of training. The other kind existed in the Persian mysteries of Asia Minor.

Pupils of these Egyptian and Greek mysteries were trained to turn their senses away from the external world and thus eventually to enter the condition man ordinarily falls into unawares when he is overcome by sleep, when sense impressions cease. The soul of the pupil was led completely into his inner self, and his inner life was given a strength and intensity far surpassing that required to receive merely sense impressions. After pursuing his exercises for a long time, the pupil reached a certain stage in his inner life when he could say to himself, “Man learns to know his real being only when he has torn himself away from his body.” The strange but distinct mood evoked in the pupil's soul gave rise to an experience he could characterize with the words, “In everyday life, when I use my body to connect myself with the world of the senses, I do not really live within my full human nature. Only when I have a deeper experience of myself within my own being am I a man in the fullest meaning of the word.” This experience impressed on him that man can know his spiritual essence by penetrating into his innermost soul. He thereby could draw near to God, the primeval source of his being. Within himself he could feel that point where his soul life united with the divine source of existence.

It must be added that this type of training resulted in an increase of egotism, not a decrease. The leaders of the mysteries thus set great store upon a schooling in human love and unselfishness. They knew that through the wisdom of the mysteries a pupil could indeed unite with his god even though he were insufficiently prepared, but they realized that he could do so only at the price of increased egotism. By withdrawing from the sense world and entering the spiritual world he could experience the human self, the human ego, far more strongly than is usually the case. The men in these mysteries who, by strengthening their inner lives perceived God, remained useful members of human society only if they had first passed through a spiritual development grounded in a sound preparation of the moral life. This, the Dionysian initiation, led man to experience within himself what lies at the base of all human nature, that is, Dionysos.

In the other type of initiation, practiced mainly in Asia Minor and Central Asia, man was led to the secrets of life by an opposite method. He had to subdue all his inner soul experiences, to free himself of the cares and troubles, the passions and instincts of his personal existence. He could then experience the outer course of nature far more intensely than is normally done. Whereas we normally experience only winter and summer, the disciples of these initiation centers had to experience, in a special way, the change from one season to another. Even as our hands share in the life of our bodies, so did the disciple have to share in the life of the earth. When the earth grew cold, when its plant covering began to fade, he had to feel within his soul its life of sadness and desolation. He had to share in these experiences as a member of the whole organism of the earth. Too, he could share in the rising life of spring and of the earth's awakening at midsummer, when the sun stands at its highest point on the horizon. He felt those forces of the sun in union with the whole earth.

In this kind of initiation the disciple's soul was drawn out of his inner being, whereby he could participate in the events of the cosmos and raise himself to the soul-spiritual essence permeating the universe. His experience differed markedly from ordinary contemplation of nature because he felt he lived within the very soul of the universe. In not a bad but a good sense, he was beside himself. He was, though one hesitates to use this word because it has taken on an unpleasant connotation, in ecstasy. Upon achieving this union with the cosmos he could say to himself that through living in the universe and through experiencing its most intimate soul-spiritual forces, he had come to realize that everywhere the final goal of the cosmos is the creation of man. Did man not exist, the whole creation could not fulfill its end, because he was the meaning of the cosmos.

It is one thing to say this; it is quite another to experience it. The disciples of the mysteries felt this fact because they entered into the life of the universe with an enhanced selfconsciousness. Indeed, this proud sense of self was indispensable to their experience of the cosmos. Whereas egotism resided in man's penetration into his spiritual being, pride lay in his union with the soul-spiritual essence of the world. Therefore, those who prepared the disciples for such an experience took care that they did not completely fall prey to pride.

In ancient times, all the truths constituting man's knowledge were acquired through the mysteries on the one or the other path. Humanity's course of development was then on the ascent. Man was unfolding fresh forces and lived in the stage of childhood, as it were. He had to learn through the mysteries how to reach the spiritual worlds. Ancient civilizations always revealed one of these two sides: that derived from man's strengthening his inner life, and that derived from his surveying the whole universe, which enabled him to say that all this pointed to the human being, to the soul-spiritual part he bears within him. Such a disciple of the second kind of initiation could also say when he looked out into the world's spaces, “There, in the wide reaches of the universe, something lives that must enter into me if I am to fully know myself as a human being. But when I live on the earth, unable to look out into the wide world, the spirit cannot come to me, and I cannot really know myself as man.”

Humanity then entered an epoch in which its youthful forces became exhausted. The whole human race reached an age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of the individual man. In this epoch the ancient mysteries, which existed to help humanity in its youth, had lost their meaning. Furthermore, something happened that is most difficult to understand even now. When man attempted to rise to the soul-spiritual essence of the cosmos, this essence no longer drew near him; he could no longer experience the god within himself.

When the ancient Persian surpassed his ordinary state of consciousness, he could feel how God descended upon his soul, how his soul became permeated by the God of the universe. Humanity always had this possibility so long as it possessed its youthful forces. But in the Greco-Roman epoch this possibility ended. Then, everything prescribed in the ancient mysteries to bring inspiration to man became ineffectual, because humanity was receptive to this inspiration only in the time of its youth. Something else now arose. What man could no longer receive because individual human nature had lost the capacity of receiving it even with the help of the mysteries, now entered into the whole evolution of humanity. One human being had to come who could directly unite the two initiation paths.

Purely from the standpoint of spiritual science, apart from all the Gospels, we now see Christ Jesus entering the evolution of the world. Let us imagine someone who knows nothing whatsoever of the Gospels, knows nothing of traditions, but who has entered modern civilization with a soul permeated by spiritual science. Such a person would have to say to himself, “There came a time in the evolution of the world and in the history of humanity when man's receptivity for spiritual life ceased.” But humanity has preserved its soul-spiritual life. How can this be? The soul-spiritual essence that man once took into himself must have entered the evolution of the earth in some other way, independently of man. A Being must have taken into himself what the mystery disciples once received through the power of a most highly developed soul life. In sum, a human being must have appeared who inwardly possessed what the one mystery path enabled the soul to experience directly, namely, the spiritual essence of the external world, the spirit of the universe.

Spiritual science thus regards Christ Jesus as one who inherently possessed those strengthened powers of soul formerly acquired by disciples of the one mystery path. With these powers of soul he could take into himself from the cosmos what the disciples of the other mystery path had once received. From the standpoint of spiritual science we can say that what the disciples of the ancient mysteries once sought through an external connection with the Godhead came to expression in immediate form and as historical fact in Christ Jesus. When did this happen? It happened in that age when the forces that were already exhausted in humanity as a whole were also exhausted in the life of the individual human being. In his thirtieth year of life Jesus had reached the age humanity as a whole had then attained. It was in this year that he received the Christ. Into his fully developed, inwardly strengthened soul he received the spirit of the cosmos. At the turning point of human evolution we discover that a man has taken into his soul the divine-spiritual essence of the universe. What was striven for in the ancient mysteries has now become an historical event.

Let us proceed, bearing in mind indications of the Gospels concerning the life of Christ Jesus from the Baptism in the Jordan to His Resurrection. Spiritual science enables us to say that in this period something completely new entered the evolution of humanity. In the past, man made a real contact with the divine essence only through the mysteries. What was thus experienced in the mysteries went out into the world as revelations, to be accepted in faith. In the event we are now considering, the contact with the spiritual-divine essence of the cosmos happened in such a way that within the man Jesus, Christ entered the stream of earthly life for a period of three years. Then, at the Mystery of Golgotha, a force that formerly lived outside the earth poured itself out into the world. All the events through which Christ passed while living in the body of Jesus brought about the existence of this power in the earthly world, in the earthly part of the cosmos. Ever since that time this power lives in the same atmosphere in which our souls live.

We may term one of the two types of initiation sub-earthly and designate the other, in which man took up the spirit of the cosmos, super-earthly. In either case, man had to abandon his human essence to make contact with the divine essence. The Mystery of Golgotha, however, concerns not only the individual human being but the whole history of man on earth as well. Through this event humanity received something completely new. With the Baptism in the river Jordan something formerly experienced by every disciple of the mysteries entered a single human being, and from this single human being something streamed out into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, enabling every soul that would do so to live and be immersed in it. This new impulse entered the earthly sphere through the death and resurrection of Christ. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha man lives in a spiritual environment, an environment that has been Christianized because it has absorbed the Christ impulse. Ever since the time when human evolution entered upon its descent, the human soul can revive itself; it can establish a connection with Christ. Man can grow beyond the forces of death that he bears within him. The spiritual source of man's origin can no longer be found on the old path; it must be found on a new path, by seeking a connection with Christ within the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

The Christ Event appears to the spiritual investigator in a special light. It may be of interest to describe what he can actually experience after he has so changed his soul that he can perceive the spiritual world. The spiritual investigator can behold a variety of spiritual processes and beings, but he sees them in a special way, depending upon whether or not he has experienced the Christ impulse during his physical existence. Even today one may be a spiritual investigator without having made any inner connection with the Christ impulse. One who has passed through a certain soul development and attained to spiritual vision may thereby investigate many mysteries of the world, mysteries lying at the foundation of the universe; yet even with this vision, it is possible that he still cannot learn anything of the Christ impulse and of the Being of Christ. If we establish a connection with Christ while in the physical body, however, before the attainment of spiritual vision, if this connection is established through feeling, then this experience of Christ that we have gained while in the body remains with us like a memory when we enter the spiritual world. We perceive that even while we lived in the body we had a connection with the spiritual world.

The Christ impulse thus appears to us as the spiritual essence given to man at a time when the ancient inheritance no longer existed in human evolution. What the individual human being experiences after his thirtieth to thirty-fifth years, the whole of humanity experienced at the beginning of our era. Humanity, which unlike the individual human being does not possess a body, would have lost its connection with the divine-spiritual world had not a superearthly Being, a Being who descended to the earth from the cosmos, poured out his essence into the earth's evolution. This act enabled man to restore his connection with the spiritual world.

I realize that I am presenting things that are even less popular with the public than are the principles of spiritual science. Today I can give but a few indications, which in themselves cannot produce any kind of conviction. In regard to the Christ impulse I can only point out the direction taken by spiritual science, which seeks to be a continuation of natural science. The thoughts I have just presented must gradually enter into human evolution, which they will the more spiritual science enters into it. Unlike many other things being advanced today, spiritual science is not easy. It assumes that before attaining to certain definite experiences the soul must first transform itself.

In respect to the Christ experience in particular, spiritual science points out the significant fact that in the ancient mysteries man could find a connection with the divine essence only by going out of his own being. To experience the divine essence he had to abandon his humanity, become something no longer human. After the turning point of human evolution, however, the wonderful and significant possibility arose that man no longer needed to go out of himself in the one direction or the other. Indeed, man lacked the strength to do so. Nor could he in his youth anticipate a time when this would be possible since humanity had already reached a definite age.

The Mystery of Golgotha enabled man to transcend his ordinary human essence while still retaining his humanity. He could now find Christ by remaining man, not by increasing his egotism or pride. It now became possible for man to find Christ by deepening and strengthening himself in his own being. With Christianity something entered human evolution that enabled man to say to himself, “You must remain a human being; you must remain man in your inmost self. As a human being you will find within yourself that element in which your soul is immersed ever since the Mystery of Golgotha. You need not abandon your human essence by descending into egotism or by rising into pride.”

Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha the quality that each human soul now needs, the quality that in past epochs could be found only outside humanity, must be found in humanity itself, within the evolution of the earth. This deepest and most significant human quality is love. Man in his development must no longer follow the course of strengthening his soul on the one mystery path that leads to egotism, because ever since the Mystery of Golgotha it is essential that man acquire the capacity of transcending egotism, of conquering egotism and pride. Having done this, he can experience the higher self within him. A path of development must now be followed that does not lead us into egotism and pride but that remains within the element of love. This truth lies at the foundation of St. Paul's significant words, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

Only after the Mystery of Golgotha did it become possible to objectively experience Christ as that element enabling man to unite with the divine essence. A pupil of the ancient mysteries may indeed have anticipated St. Paul's words, but he could not have experienced their fulfillment. The mystery disciples and their followers could say, “Outside my own being is a god who pours his essence into me.” Or else they could say, “When I strengthen my inner being, I learn to know God in the depths of my own soul.” Today, however, each human being can say, “The love that passes over into other souls and into other beings cannot be found outside my own being; it can be found only by continuing along the paths of my own soul.”

When we immerse ourselves lovingly into other beings, our souls remain the same; man remains human even when he goes beyond himself and discovers Christ within him. That He can be thus found was made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. The soul remains within the human sphere when it attains to that experience expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” We then have the mystical experience of feeling that a higher human essence lives in us, an essence that enwraps us in the same element that bears the soul from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. This is the mystical experience of Christ, which we can have only through a training in love.

Spiritual science shows how it became possible for the human being to have this inner, mystical experience of Christ. By way of comparison, we find in Western philosophy the thought expressed that had we no eyes we could not see colors. Our eyes must be so built that they can perceive colors; there must be an inner predisposition to colors in our eyes, so to speak. Had we no eyes, the world would be colorless and dark for us. The same reasoning applies to the other senses. They too must be predisposed for the perception of the external world. From this argument Schopenhauer and other philosophers have concluded that the external world is a world of our representations. Goethe has coined the fine motto, “Were the eye not sun-like it could never perceive the sun.” We might say further, “The human soul could never understand Christ were it not able so to transform itself that it could inwardly experience the words, ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’”

Goethe had something else in mind when he expressed the truth that were the eye not sun-like it could not see the sun, namely, that our eyes could not exist had there been no light to form them from the sightless human being. The one thought is as true as the other: There could be no perception without eyes and also no eyes without light.

Similarly, it can be said that did the soul not inwardly experience Christ, did it not identify itself with the power of Christ, Christ would be non-existent for the soul. How can the human soul perceive Christ unless it identifies itself with Him? Yet the opposite thought is just as true, that is, man can experience Christ within himself only because at a definite moment in history the Christ impulse entered the evolution of humanity. Without the historical Christ there could be no mystical Christ. The assertion that the human soul could experience Christ even if Christ had never entered the evolution of mankind is a mere abstraction. Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha it was impossible to have a mystical experience of Christ. Any other argument is based on a misunderstanding. Just as it would be impossible for us to have the mystical experience of Christ without the historical Christ, even though the historical Christ can be discovered only by those who have experienced the mystical Christ.

Through spiritual science we are thus led to a vision of Christ not based upon the Gospels. Through spiritual science we can perceive that in the course of history Christ entered the evolution of humanity, and we know that He had once to live in a human being so that He could find a path leading through a human being into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

Spiritual research thus leads us to Christ, and through Christ to the historical Jesus. It does this at a time when external investigation, based upon external documents, so often questions the historical existence of Jesus.

The thoughts I have here presented may of course meet with opposition, but I can fully understand it if some say my statements appear to them like a fantastic dream.

From a spiritual contemplation of the whole evolution of humanity we can, through spiritual science, come to a recognition of Christ, and through Christ's own nature we can recognize that He once must have lived in a human body. Spiritual-scientific investigation necessarily leads to the historical Jesus. Indeed, it is possible to indicate with mathematical precision when Christ must have lived in the man Jesus, in the historical Jesus. Just as it is possible to understand external mechanical forces through mathematics, so is it possible to understand Jesus by regarding history with a spiritual vision that encompasses Christ. That Being Who lived in Jesus from his thirtieth to thirty-third years gave the impulse humanity needed for its development at a time when its youthful forces were beginning to decline.

In recapitulation, I can say that a new understanding of Christ is a necessity today. Spiritual science not only tries to lead us to Christ; it must do so. All the truths it advances must lead from a spiritual contemplation of man's development to a comprehension of Christ. Men will experience Christ in ever greater measure, and through Christ they will discover Jesus.

Thus, I have tried to day to take my start from the evolution of humanity, directing your gaze from Jesus, upon whom many look with skepticism, to Christ. In future, Jesus will be found on that path we may characterize with the words, “Through a spiritual knowledge of Christ to an historical knowledge of Jesus.”

From our last lectures you will have seen how man comes to a kind of illusory idea of the outer world; but as a matter of fact, what are usually understood as the connections of nature are inwardly dependent on humanity itself; and we can only gain a true view of the world when we consider the earth and indeed the universe, in its entirety—which means when we regard man as being part of the world—and visualise the interchange, the inter-relation between man and the world. Otherwise we always come to an unreal, a mere abstract grasp of the mineral kingdom; at most understanding something of the plant and animal worlds, which no longer play any strong part in the present concept of nature.

When one speaks of the connections of nature, it is, as a rule, merely the mineral connections in nature to which one refers. To these, if one so desires, that short episode which one calls History, is added; but as a truth of quite a different nature.

From this view, which does not extend to man in his real being, humanity in our present age has to come right away. From diverse points of view we have brought forward the reason why humanity must abandon this view of things, a view which, as you know, has in a sense been necessarily developed in the last three or four centuries.

To-day I will only mention that human beings, with reference to their external knowledge, their external cognition, will become more and more dependent on the physical body with its necessities, unless they can rise in their own evolution to the production of a higher knowledge, through the very effort of their own Will. And in the future it is a question of this:- either humanity will simply succumb to a view of the world gained by remaining just as one was at birth, acquiring no other concepts than those one has already through being placed on the earth through birth, and by means of the ordinary education customary to-day.

That is the one possibility. The other is this: That humanity will cease to believe that, simply from being Born as human beings on earth, they can judge of everything real; and they will then be able to build up a real evolution of man, such as is indicated by Spiritual Science. That is the other path; humanity will have to traverse this latter path, otherwise the earth simply faces its downfall.

What I have just said, can also be observed geographically, when it acquires a quite special significance for the present.

If we only go far enough back in the evolution of the earth, we find man is not rooted in earthly existence itself; for before the evolution of the earth, he had already undergone a long previous development. You find this evolution described In my Outline of Occult Science. You know that man was, in a sense taken back again into a pure Spiritual existence, and from this pure Spiritual existence, he has descended to earthly existence. Now it is a fact that, because of this descent of man into earthly existence, there has been taken away from humanity, a comprehensive, one might call it—an inherited Wisdom—a primeval Wisdom, which was of such a nature that it was one and the same, uniform, for the whole of humanity. You will find such things described in more detail in those lectures which I have called The Folk-Souls, a course given in Christiania. So this inherited Wisdom was a uniform thing. When I naw speak of knowledge, I mean not merely that which is usually called knowledge in Science to-day, but everything which man can absorb in his soul life as a view of his cosmic environment and of his own life.

Now this primeval knowledge specialised itself in such a way that it became different according to the different territories of the earth. You will see this better if you go into those chapters in Occult Science dealing with this matter. But even externally, if you just look at what we call the civilisation of the different earthly races, you may say: That what the human beings of the different races upon earth have known, differed from the beginning. One can distinguish an Indian civilisation, a Chinese civilisation, a Japanese civilisation, a European civilisation. And again, in this European civilisation there is a special culture of its own for each of the various European territories. Then we have an American civilisation and so on. But if we ask: How it it that this primeval or inherited wisdom became specialised, how did it become ever more and more differentiated? We must answer: The inner relationships, the inner dispositions of these races were to blame for this. Indeed we find that there is always an adaptation of the inner relationship of the different races to the external conditions of the earth. We can to some extent get an idea of this differentiation if we try to find out the connection between, let us say, what forms the Indian civilisation and the climatic geographical conditions of the land of India. In the same way we can get an idea of the special nature of the Russian culture, if we consider the relationship between the Russian and his earth. Now we must say, in reference to these relationships, that humanity to-day—as indeed in many other connections—has arrived at a kind of crisis. This dependence of man on his territory gradually, in the course of the 19th century, increased to the utmost conceivable extent. Of course, it is true that human beings have emancipated themselves from their territories. That is true. they consciously have emancipated themselves from their territories; but they are nevertheless dependent in a certain way upon these territories. Te can see that if we compare, let us say, the attitude of a Greek to ancient Greece, and say that of a modern Englishman or German to their countries. The Greeks still had much of the ancient wisdom in their civilisation and education, they were perhaps more physically dependent upon their land of Greece than the modern human being on his country. But this stronger dependence was modified, because the Greeks were inwardly filled with this ancient wisdom. This wisdom has however gradually faded away from humanity, and we can point almost exactly to the time in the middle of the 15th century when the direct understanding for certain treasures of wisdom ceases, and how even the traditions of such treasures gradually faded away in the 19th century. Artificially, as I might say, like plants in a forcing house, certain of these treasures were still preserved in all sorts of secret societies, which sometimes pursued very evil practices with them. But such societies still preserved a primeval wisdom even in the 19th century. (In the 19th century it was somewhat different), but in the 19th century they still preserved some things of which one can say: They are like plants in a forcing house. What have the symbols of the Freemasons to do with the ancient wisdom from which they originated? They are like plants raised in the forcing house, compared with plants growing freely in nature. Not even so much likeness still remains between the masonic symbols and that ancient wisdom!

Just because humanity is losing that inner permeation with this old wisdom, men are really becoming all the more dependent upon their territories and unless they can again acquire a treasure of Spiritual Science which can develop freely, they will be differentiated all over the earth according to their territories.

As a matter of fact, we can distinguish three types which we have studied already from other points of view. To-day we can say that unless the impulses of Spiritual Science are spread abroad in the world, from the West there will come none but economic truths, which can indeed produce many other things out of their bosom; none but economic thought and ideas would prevail in the West. From the East there would come over what once were essentially Spiritual truths; Asia,, even if in very decadent ways, would confine itself more and more to Spiritual truths.

Central Europe would cultivate the more intellectual sphere; and this would make itself specially felt in the uniting of something of the traditions of ancient times with what streams over from the West as economic truths, and with what streams over from the East as Spiritual truths. Human beings living in these three main types of earthly division, would specialise more and more in this direction.

The tendency of our present age tends absolutely towards making this specialisation of humanity a really dominant principle. We can say, my dear friends—and I beg you to take this very seriously, that unless a Spiritual Scientific impulse permeates the world, the East will gradually become absolutely incapable of managing its own Economic Life, of developing its own economic thinking. The East would come into a position of being able to produce only; that means, of actually cultivating the soil, of working upon the immediate products of nature with the instruments transmitted from the West. But all that has to be administered by human reason, would develop in the West.

From this point of view the catastrophe of the World War which has just run its course, is nothing but the beginning of the tendency: (I will express it in popular phraseology)—to permeate the East by the West in an economic way. That means making the East a sphere in which people work, and the West a sphere in which economic use is made of what is derived from nature in the East. The boundary between the East and the West need not be a fixed one; it is moveable.

If this tendency which is dominant to-day, goes further, if it is not permeated Spiritually, then without any doubt at all the following would have to arise. One need simply utter it hypothetically. The entire East would economically be an object of booty for the West; and man would regard this course of development as the proper course laid down for earthly humanity. It would be regarded as quite justifiable and obvious. There exists no other means of introducing into this tendency that which does not make half of humanity slaves and the other half employers of these slaves, than by permeating the earth with a common Spirituality which man must acquire once more.

If one utters these things to-day most people prefer to reject them. The man of to-day is only too inclined to wave these things aside with a movement of his hand, for the simple reason that it is externally uncomfortable for him to face the true reality. He says to himself: “Well, even if this economic permeation of the East does come about, it will not take place yet awhile, not in my lifetime.” Certainly those who have children, do think a little more earnestly, because of their children; but then they like to fog themselves a little in the hope that better times may come, and so forth.

But to realise in their inner being that there exists no other means of fashioning the future of humanity into a form worthy of human beings, than by not permeating merely the earth economically, but also Spiritually is a thought very few people pursue for themselves to-day, because of a certain love of ease.

We may say that humanity has received the present configuration of its life of civilisation from three sides, and it is extremely interesting to fix one's mind on these three sides of this earthly life of civilisation, especially for the task we have set ourselves in these lectures.

If one surveys the whole earth-sphere from East to West, one must say: “Everything which man possesses in the way of ethical truths, of moral truths, has come from the East”. One can say that the form in which the East, with its general view of the Cosmos, has developed its ethical truths, the form of its general cosmology, and so on, has now been lost; but certain Ethics have remained over as relics of oriental thought and feeling.

It is infinitely interesting from this point of view to read the speeches which Rabindranath Tagore held, which are collected under the title of Nationalism. You will see if you read these speeches that there is hardly anything now to be found in them of that great Cosmic Wisdom teaching, which at one time, lived in the feelings of men in the East. But one who can read with understanding these speeches of Tagore collected under the title Nationalism will say: the moral pathos which lives in them and which indeed is the chief essence of these speeches, the ethical will which lives in them, that bitter moral criticism which exercised against the individual mechanism of the West, and against all the still more evil political mechanism of the West, lives as Ethos in these speeches of Tagore, could not have been uttered unless there stood behind them the ancient primeval wisdom of Asia; even though it no longer lives externally in men's consciousness. With that wisdom, created out of the stars, the moral truths were permeated which resound from out of the East, and this comes to us when such people as Rabindranath Tagore speak.

If, without prejudice, one investigates everything which has developed in this way of culture in the West, in Central Europe, one must say: What lives there, whether it be in philosophers or non-philosophers, in the simple or most educated—that which ethically and morally permeates the humanity of the West has all trickled over from the East, from Asia. The East is the real home of Ethos, of ethics.

If we now Look towards the West, the civilisation of which has transpired before the eye of history, we see how muck enters into the consideration of the reasoning, intellectual working-man, of world phenomena. There what rests an the principle of utility comes into consideration.

There is a great contrast, of which humanity should become aware, between what lives as pathos in the speeches of Tagore, and everything which develops in the West as the stand-point of utility.

To speak radically, one might say, that the sort of thing we meet with in philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, or in national economists such as Adam Smith or intellectual philosophers such as Bergson, anything of this nature remains for the Asiatic, even if he tries to understand it, something which lies completely outside his being. He can grasp as an interesting fact that such things are said by human beings, but he will never be tempted to produce things which relate simply to external human utility, from out of his own nature.

The Asiatic thoroughly despises the European and American nature, because it always refers him to the standpoint of utility, which can only be dominated with the intellect, with the understanding. So it has come about that this way of thinking, which is connected with the idea of utility, is above all the product of the West.

As I have previously drawn your attention to the fact that over the earth the ancient wisdom, has specialised itself according to Races, so we can now distinguish these great types. The ethical type in the Orient, in the East; the intellectual utilitarian type in the West, the Occident, while in between there is, always trying to press forward, what I want to call the third type, the Aesthetic, which is just as much characteristic of Central Europe, as the ethical type is of the East and the utilitarian type of the West.

We need merely remind ourselves of a certain phenomenon, in order to be able to bring forward a proof drawn from external facts: how it is that just in Central Europe this Aesthetic type seeks to make itself felt. While in the West the French Revolution partially raged and partially bore its consequences, and the East was still immersed in Spiritual dreams, we see e.g. Schiller writing his letters concerning the aesthetic education of man. These are directly concerned with the French Revolution, but they seek to solve the problem thrown up politically by the French Revolution, they seek to solve it humanistically, in a purely human way. They seek to make man inwardly a free human being. It is interesting to note that the whole method of observation of Schiller in those Aesthetic letters rests an this: that on the one side he rejects the pure utilitarian intellectual standpoint, and an the other he rejects the merely ethical standpoint. You see, this ethical standpoint had once already been rationalised, intellectualised. Everything in the world goes through different metamorphosis and then reappears in another form. And so although this ethical standpoint of the East is certainly not intellectual, yet one can grasp it with one's intellect, one can intellectualise it, one can (Königsbergerise) it, and it then becomes Kantian. That happened; and from Kant there comes this beautiful saying: “Duty, thou mighty, exalted name, thou hast nothing within thee of an attractive or insinuating nature, but requirest solely and simply the subjection of man to morality”.

Schiller an the other hand, said, “I gladly serve my friends, yet unfortunately I do so with inclination. Therefore I reproach myself that I am not virtuous”. Schiller as a real Central-European man, could not take into himself this Kantian, this Königsbergian intellectualising of ethics. For him no man was a complete human being who had first to subject himself to duty in order to fulfil his duty. For Schiller a man was only a complete human being who felt in himself the desire to do what was of moral value. Therefore Schiller rejected the ethical rigourism of a Kant. But he also rejected the purely intellectual principle of authority, and he saw in the production and enjoyment of Beauty, (thus in the Aesthetic behavior of man), the highest, free expression of human nature. He wrote his Aesthetic letters, one might say, as a personal description of Goethe. Schiller had only with difficulty struggled to acquire an appreciation of Goethe. He had started with jealousy, with inner antipathy to Goethe; and one may say that there was a time in Schiller's youth when any talk of Goethe left a bitter taste in his mouth. Then they became acquainted; and they learnt not only to honour each other, but to understand each other. Then Schiller wrote one might say as a kind of Spiritual biography, a Spiritual description of Goethe, his letters upon the Aesthetic education of man. Nothing which stands in these Aesthetic letters could have been written unless Goethe had previously lived a life which was to Schiller an example of what stands in them. Schiller wrote a letter to Goethe at the beginning of their friendship which I have often quoted: “For a long time I have followed the path of your life, although from a far distance.” And now he described Goethe, according to his spirit, which was really that of a reincarnated Greek; and we see how the first dawn of the Aesthetic spirit of Central Europe is united with Greece.

And now as regards Goethe, we see how he works his way up from an intellectual element, to a recognition of truth, which can be just as well understood through art as through science. If you follow how Goethe with Herder studied the Ethics of Spinoza, how Goethe then went to Italy and wrote home that, in the works of art which he sees proceeding out of the Greek spirit, he sees Necessity, he sees God.—then one must say, the intellectualism of Spinoza becomes Aesthetic in Goethe, on his Italian journey, in the contemplation of those works of art. Goethe bears testimony that the Greeks created their works of art according to the same laws which nature herself follows, laws which Goethe believed he was now on the track of. That means, Goethe is not of the opinion that when a man creates a work of art he is merely creating a thing of phantasy. Science is strictly true. No, Goethe was of the opinion that what lies in a true work of art absolutely gives the deeper, true, content of the life of Nature. Now that is an Aesthetic view of the world, and so we must say: Occident, West—intellectualistic utilitarian; Central earth-regions—Aesthetic; the East—ethical, moral. It is absolutely true, my dear friends, that wherever it be, whether in the past or in the Centre or in the lest, wherever ethical truths have appeared—they have originally sprung up from the East. It is no matter whether utilitarian truths spring up in the Centre, or in the East they all originally spring from the West. Beauty arises from the Central region.

One can follow everywhere the path of these three elements in the life of man in this way, down to the very details.

You see, my dear friends, when through one's karma one is destined to found Anthroposophy in Central Europe, then in this Anthroposophy something must live of that Goethe-faith, which is after all, the same element that lives in art; that is, the element of truth. That same element which is expressed in painting, in sculpture, and even in architecture must live also in the thought structure of truth. One must come to say, what I attempted to say in the first chapter of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—that the philosopher, the man who founds a World-conception, must be an artist in ideas. One usually rejects the concepts of an artist of ideas. In that book I had to accept it; it all sprang from one and the same spirit.

When one produces something of this kind, all the ideas one expresses have a definite character, which bear the colourings of what I have just described. Books are written, form instance, much as that bit Aime Blech, which recently appeared as a Pamphlet, containing all kinds of evil, consciously evil calumnies. Books are written in which, for instance, it is stated that in what is brought forward from this side as Anthroposophy, there are, of course many beautiful things, but they are opposed to the clarity of the French mind!

Certainly Anthroposophy contradicts intellectuality, the barren, rhetorical grasp of ideas; such minds would much prefer the coarse, material ideas which can be grasped in sharp outlines, so as one can follow these things down to the minutest details. I could bring forward many an example, entering into details which would make clear what I have shown you in general outline; but I will rest content with the example I have already given you, which is a very interesting one.

Now the point in question is that we should clearly realise that e.g. in the West morality, art and intellectualism are simply not being produced. No! Art, is taken over from the Central regions, and Ethics, from the East; and they are then inserted into the intellectual-utility-element, just as in the Centre a kind of ethical element is cultivated, and everything which has been taken up, especially in the 19th century into the Aesthetic element has come over from the West. It would be interesting to follow for once the path of biology from this point of view. If you read Goethe's Theory of Metamorphosis to-day, you can find in that a grand theory of evolution, but the West would always consider that theory spoilt by its Aestheticism. In the 19th century, over the entire earth which is dependent an the West, the Darwinistic element penetrated into the theory of evolution, and brought in the Utilitarian-standpoint, the doctrine of purpose, of aim. You find that doctrine of “purpose” entirely excluded in Goethe, because he is everywhere permeated by Aestheticism.

It must not be the case in the future, that men are thus economically differentiated, as it were, to such an extreme degree that they will not learn from each other. Because that would mean that there would gradually spread over Asia a certain Ethos, such as one finds advocated in the fire-sounding words of Rabindranath Tagore. In Central Europe there would sp read in another form—that which certain Nietzsche-fops have already advocated—a certain “Beyond-ness” of good and evil, a certain Aestheticism, even in moral ideas. We see here the triumphant march of this Aestheticising making itself felt, especially towards the end of the 19th century. And then the merely utilitarian standpoint would pour out over the West, cleverness in the utilitarian standpoint, a caricature of the Spiritual element from the utilitarian standpoint, etc., etc.

The permeation of humanity by a real Spiritual element can alone help mankind. We assume, of course, that this Spiritual element shall be taken in full earnestness—that men shall develop the will to regard things as they present themselves to-day to one who is really prepared to be unprejudiced. This War-Catastrophe has brought many extraordinary things to the surface, amongst which are phenomena, which are in part uncomfortable to the highest degree, but which can teach us much, I will mention one such phenomenon.

In the German literature of the day there appear—one simply cannot keep pace with what comes out in this way—but almost every week there appear slimy excretions, as I must call them—the explanations of different men concerning their share in the course of the War and of political events—and we can read what such heads—I say expressly such heads—as Iagow Bethmann (Michaelis has, I think, still spared us), Tirpitz, Ludendorf, and a whole row of others which one can name. It is unpleasant, in one way,to read this stuff, but from another point of view, it is interesting to the highest degree.

You see, one can read such books as those written by Bethmann or Tirpitz, from quite opposite points of view. But their points of view depend very often an whether the author has been treated with the toe or the heel of the boot for a certain time. Bethmann was favoured for a time by the “All Highest”, whereas Tirpitz was treated with the heel of the boot. Hence their different points of view!

And so we will enter further into the view-point; it is not so much a question of that, but of seeing what spirit lives in the writings.

Now one can experience the following: I once made the following experiment. After allowing myself to be saturated with the dreamy writings of Bethmann and Tirpitz, I turned back to certain utterances (very dear to me;, of Herman Grimm, which indeed have been found chauvinistic by non-Germans. But again that is just a point of view. It is simply a question with me of the spirit which lives in them.

At the first view one can put this question: How does the spirit, the way of thinking, the inner soul-constitution of the Bethmann and Tirpitz writings compare with what lives in Herman Grimm's political observations? Here we must say: Herman Grimm felt that Goethe had lived and had not lived in vain; to him he was a living presence. To, Bethmann and Tirpitz Goethe was not there. I will not say they had not read him, it might have been better if they had left him unread; but as far as they were concerned he was not there. And at first I had to say to myself; what stands in these books sounds as if it were written by a medieval serf—with the logic of a medieval Serf.

Especially interesting, for instance, is the logic of Ludendorf. He is the one who was so greatly praised for the idea of having Lenin transported in a sealed wagon, through Germany to Russia! Ludendorf is the real importer of Bolehevism into Russia! Now he simply had not the cheek to deny that in his book, although he had cheek enough for many things. So he says, that to send Lenin to Russia was a military necessity, and that the political government should have avoided the evil consequences, but did not do so. Such is the logic of these gentlemen. But I do not wish to assert that Clemenceau has better logic; and I beg you not to think that I take sides with any Party. Neither Lloyd George nor Wilson have any better logic. This, however, is not so easy to substantiate.

One may say that at first sight, but the matter goes further. One finds on comparing things that one must go further back still. An extraordinary similarity exists between the Tirpitz and Ludendorf way of thinking, and those human beings who guided the so-called civilisation of Rome in the 1st and 2nd pre-Christian centuries. And if we wish to establish an intimate community of soul between these, we may say that it is as if the old method of thought of the ancient pre-Christian Rome again appeared, and as if everything which has happened since then, including Christianity itself, (even if these gentlemen externally speak of Christ, and so on), had never taken place.

You see, it is often supposed, when one says of the Luciferic that it remained behind in humanity—that one means something only external to the world. But this principle of remaining behind, expresses itself quite strongly within the world. One can say the pre-Caesar greatness of old Rome has re-arisen in such people, and everything which has happened in Europe since that time is really non-existent for them.

My dear friends, this phenomenon must be observed in an unprejudiced way to-day. It must be kept in mind; because only by so doing can one win a strong standpoint for judging the present. This present age makes great demands on man's capacity for judgment. All this must be said, if one speaks of how necessary it is that the present age should be permeated by Spiritual impulses. Superficially considered it is easy to say the present age must be permeated Spiritually; but, my dear friends, the matter is not quite so simple as this. You need only investigate where Spiritual Impulses found their way to some extent into humanity to see whether they have always borne the right fruit. One must in conclusion also say the following. Let us consider certain brochures, certain pamphlets which have been written, some written indeed by members of long standing. There are such written, wherein what figures here as Spiritual Science, is really placed before the world, but inverted, turned upside down, as it were. These are plants which have grown on the soil on which we attempt to give Spiritual treasure to humanity to-day. And anyone who thinks that this process, has run its course—of our so-called followers into its opposite what is transmitted as Spiritual Science to-day, must be a simpleton. For it most certainly is not yet finished. It is by no means so easy to reckon with this fact, that Spiritual truths must be brought to humanity, because as humanity is to-day it tends above all to differentiate into the three types which I have characterised: the Ethical, the Aesthetic, the intellectual; and further differentiations again within these.

Now Spiritual truths are not adapted to be taken up in their purity by human beings who approach them with such differentiations. Just think how on all sides to-day human beings tend to shut themselves off in their national chauvinism, and if you try to take up generally human and spiritual truths with national chauvinism, you transform them thereby into the opposite. It is impossible simply to impart what is now desirable from a certain point of view, for human beings tend to such differentiations as I have described. Therefore it is necessary above all that the interest of man should be awakened from the side which already exists. It is necessary that, in a certain sense, one should link on to what is already there, continually bearing in mind the tendency men have to turn away from that ancient treasure of wisdom and put nothing else in its place except the territorial differentiation on this earth. It does not do to spread Spiritual truths among humanity, without also spreading a certain Ethos.

Many people have read How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. These books have been read considerably for some time. They have objected that the first counsels given there are ethical, and that they must be in ethical agreement with them. They are right. right The first counsels given must be ethical and form an extract of the best Ethos of earthly civilisation. But, on the other hand, it is also necessary to cultivate a certain artistic element, and that has made quite special difficulties in the Anthroposophical Movement; for without the Anthroposophical Movement there existed a certain disinclination at first towards artistic things. An abstract, Aesthetically indifferent, symbolism was striven for. There still exists to-day, movements which call themselves Theosophical which rejects everything artistic. Therefore it was a good fate, a good Karma, of our Movement that we were able to make artistic experiments here in Dornach, and that we could work them out away from the abstract symbolic element. Perhaps if things had gone according to the desires of many, we should see many a black cross with red roses or something like roses, as the deep symbol of our building. We have of course, to beware of this symbolism, and strive to create from out of the artistic element. That had to be linked an to the best traditions, of human civilisation—if I may call impulses traditions. Above all one thing must be considered, that these are deep and earnest truths, and they must run somewhat as follows: whoever wishes to attain true knowledge must cultivate in himself a sense for truth! When one speaks radically about this question, my dear friends, one comes in touch with something which sounds repellent to many to-day, because this rigorous striving everywhere for the truth is something which is extraordinarily unpleasant to many people to-day, truth being something which they want at least to touch-up in life. But untruth, even if untrue from sentimentality, does not go with that strong sense for truth, demanded e.g. by a real devotion to these truths which Anthroposophy wishes
to place in the world.

My dear friends, in this connection the religious confessions have sinned especially, because they have inserted something which can no longer be united with a pure sense for truth. Certain kinds of piety are carried out into the world which satisfy human egoism far more than human feeling for truth. Therefore it is quite specially necessary that real attention should be paid to the cultivation of inner truthfulness, as is so often pointed out in our Anthroposophical writings. As you know, life itself demands from human beings to-day many untrue things, and we may say there exists to-day two distinct tendencies, which evoke in man a certain disinclination to look at facts in their true light. To-day the tendency exists to characterise things from personal preference and not according to the facts. To-day a man is called practical who is in a certain sense a man of routine; one who with a certain brute force works within his own sphere regardless of any consideration, and puts aside everything which does not serve to promote his own particular objects. From this standpoint one distinguishes “practical” men and “visionaries”; and with a certain world-historic untruth, the consequences of these things have shown themselves in a terrible way, in the course of the 19th century, and up to our own day. Indeed it was difficult before this great testing came over humanity through the catastrophe of the World War, to say something of what ruthlessly characterises these things. I am shortly publishing a collection of a few of my more important early writings—articles written in the eighties and nineties, in order to show how, as it were through small slits, I even then attempted to utter many truths. Among these articles there is one on Bismarck, the Man of Political Successes, in which I attempted to show that the success of this personality depended upon the fact that he could never see much further than his nose! But, as you know, it is no use to cast these things in the face of the world if no one is there who can take them up. Now, however, we must start from this basis, that the World-War Catastrophe can teach us many things. Of course, for most men, nothing is to be learnt from these facts. They have a certain fund of opinions, and do not alter them. They are not able to understand what underlies the statement that we must learn from the facts.

I always tell each person whom I conduct round the Goetheanum, that if I had to design such a building a second time, I would do so quite differently. I would certainly never make it in the same way again. There is nothing, of course, against the present building, but I myself would not make it in the same way again, because obviously, one has learnt something from what one has made, and which stands there as an accomplished fact.

To-day I read with astonishment that Field-Marshal Hindenburg said, if he had to conduct the World-War over again he would do it in exactly the same way.

Indeed these things are read, but they are read carelessly; and people do not notice that one must gain an understanding of the age from the teachings which are given in such a bitter way through this world catastrophe. Whatever one reads and what constantly resounds in one's ears from the world to-day, should be taken with the corresponding background, and one should always be able to say: In important things a revision of judgment is essentially and constantly necessary. It was right as far as could be seen externally, to call Bismarck a practical man, until the World-Catastrophe came. Hermann Grimm regarded Bismarck as a tower of practical excellence. But the World War catastrophe has taught us that Bismarck was a visionary, and the opinions of his judgment have had to be altered; for his idea of the creation of an Empire was naturally only a phantasy.

You see, I just want to make you see clearly that it is life itself, and must be life, which teaches us to discover illusions, even in the sphere of moral history. I have shown you how one must substantiate these illusions in the sphere of natural connections, noting how in nature things stand side by side, and that is how natural investigators describe them. Thus we must say that humanity shares in the occurrences of nature, and that what natural science says about this is simply a web of illusions.

To-day I wanted to make comprehensible to you how we must learn the very facts of history and of life to correct things; because, often for long periods, they only show themselves outwardly as illusion. Men who were naturally regarded by many as practical, must now of necessity be regarded as visionaries. One must accustom oneself to-day to revise one's judgment in this manner. At each step in life, there is not only opportunity enough but also a necessity for revising one's judgment. And one is only in the right mood, the mood the Anthroposophical Movement seeks to acquire, when one says to oneself: “I must revise my opinions, perhaps even about the most important things in life.” Opinions about natural connections, can as a rule, be revised through the study of Spiritual Science. Judgments about life one can only revise when one really develops in oneself the mood necessary for the Anthroposophical Movement.

Some time has passed since we met here, and the opportunity to discuss a number of things with you after such a long while gives me the profoundest pleasure. Behind, us lie extremely grave times, difficult times, of which the gravity is certainly felt, though in wider circles it is still insufficiently understood. It is true to say that people who have experienced the second decade of the twentieth century have gone through more than is otherwise experienced over a span of centuries. We are asleep in our souls if we fail to notice how everything to do with human evolution is different now than it was ten years ago. The whole great turnabout that has taken place will no doubt only be fully realized by mankind at large after some time has passed. Then we shall come to see how the events that took place so catastrophically at the surface of life reach deep down into the roots of human souls, and how what has happened came about in the first instance as errors of soul affecting the widest circles of mankind. Not until the decision is made to seek in human souls the true reasons for this great human misfortune will it be possible to reach a real understanding of this time of trial undergone by mankind. Then also an attitude will develop towards a spiritual stream such as Anthroposophy which will differ from that prevailing at present.

This anthroposophical spiritual stream wants to give to mankind the very thing that has been lacking over the last three, four, five hundred years, the thing whose lack is so intimately bound up with the wretchedness of culture and civilization we have experienced and are experiencing. Both the greatest and the smallest matters and events in the world come out of the spiritual realm, out of life in the spirit. Universal questions face mankind today, questions which can only be tackled out of the depths of spiritual life, yet they are being dealt with in the most superficial manner all over the world. There is no possibility of seeing what it is that is struggling to rise up from the depths of human soul- and spiritual life. Yet it is just this possibility which Anthroposophy wants to bring to mankind.

Today I shall speak out of the realm of the anthroposophical world view about some intimate aspects of human soul- and spiritual life. Then, from the point of view this will give us, perhaps we shall be able to conclude with a brief consideration of some recent historical events.¹ Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to speak about those worlds which for the moment are hidden from external sense perceptions and also from the intellect which is attached to these sense perceptions. It wants to speak primarily about everything connected with the eternal aspect of the human soul. We say of the realms into which this anthroposophical world view wishes to penetrate that they can only be reached if human beings step over the threshold of consciousness. What is meant is that the step over the threshold must be taken consciously, if knowledge about these super-sensible realms is to be gained. For human beings step unconsciously over the threshold every time they go to sleep. We say of the threshold we cross daily, in connection with going to sleep and waking up, that it is guarded by the Guardian of the Threshold. In doing so we speak of a spiritual force known by the spiritual researcher to be as real as are the human beings we meet. We speak of the Guardian of the Threshold because in the present phase of mankind's development human beings really do need to be protected in their consciousness from crossing unprepared into the spiritual realms.

It is quite remarkable that something which human beings have to value above all else, something to which they belong with the deepest roots of their existence and without which they would lack true human worth, namely the spiritual world, has to be hidden from them at the moment. This is profoundly linked to the whole purpose of human evolution. Human beings would not be able to achieve their true nature during the course of evolution if they did not themselves have to work for and win the strength with which to approach the spiritual world. If unearned grace alone were to allow them to step over the threshold, then perhaps they would be lofty spiritual beings, but they would not be human beings in the true sense of the word. They would not be beings who win their way towards their own value. For to be a true human being in the universe means to be the instigator of one's own worth. To step over the threshold unprepared would lead to a kind of burning up of the human being, a kind of extinguishing of the human being. However, what spiritual science has to say about man's relationship to the spiritual world can certainly be grasped by normal understanding. It is quite possible to understand what has to be said about this out of the foundations of spiritual science.

Observe how someone sinks into a kind of unconscious state on going to sleep. Out of this unconscious state individual waves rise up into the world of dreams as though from the depths of the ocean. Even for those who are free of any kind of superstition or nebulous mysticism, this dream world is mysterious, enigmatic, and it has to be sensed as belonging to the inmost being both of the world and of man's existence. So the period human beings spend between going to sleep and waking up is a kind of lowered consciousness out of which is revealed the picture world of dreams. And even if we only follow the dreams in an external manner, we still have to say: They contain picture echoes of that life which is not only given to us through our sense perceptions by way of our intellect, but also through our feelings. But they contain that otherwise familiar world in a way that is different. On the whole, they do not contain any abstract thoughts; they change everything into pictures. While the sense-perceptible world we know has a certain coherence and order which satisfies our understanding, so that everything has its place in space and time, dreams appear to shake everything up. Events which took place yesterday are mingled with others which happened decades ago. Dreams impose an order on things that differs from the order of space and time into which we look with our daytime consciousness.

Examining dreams more closely, we find that what is missing in them is our power of thinking. On waking up we feel that we step from dreamless sleep into the world in which human ideas and thoughts arise. We feel that we pour the picture world of dreams into our bodily nature. And as we do so our body sends out the power of thought which once more brings order into what the dreams have jumbled up. Our body takes us in hand when we wake up; our body gives us the power of ideas, and in dealing with this power we become fully awake. Then the world of dreams fades and its place is taken by the world of thoughts and ideas in the normal order of place and time.

Those who pay attention to these phenomena can observe in ordinary life how something, at first indeterminate, slips into our bodily nature. They can also understand this to the point where they can say: The power of thoughts is given to me by my body when I plunge down into it with my soul- and spirit-being. This everyday observation will bear out what Anthroposophy has to say: The ideas and thoughts we know in ordinary daily life are bound to our external physical body, which remains in bed at night when our being of spirit and soul steps over the threshold into another world. As consciousness is extinguished it leaves behind at the threshold the power and capacity to form a world of thoughts in the ordinary way. What steps over the threshold is whatever the human soul contains by way of feeling and will.

This content of feeling and will resembles the sleeping state even during ordinary day consciousness. We are properly awake only in our thoughts and ideas. Just think how dark is all that lives in our feelings, and how utterly obscure is everything living in our impulses of will. If we try to gain an idea of how we accomplish even the simplest decision of will, then what takes place in our muscles and bones when we put an idea into realization remains as obscure as our sleeping state. First we think: I lift my arm. Then we see our arm rising up. Nothing but impressions. The mysterious processes that take place remain as hidden from our consciousness as sleep itself. What we take with us across the threshold is, basically, something that is asleep and dreaming, even in our waking state. The dream pictures are no clearer than the feelings which attach to our world of thoughts and ideas. The forms in which soul life expresses itself—in the waking state through feelings and in the sleeping state through dreams—differ, but our life of feeling is no clearer than the pictures of our dreams. If it were clearer, we would lead an extraordinarily abstract life. Consider how we speak quite rightly of cold, sober thoughts and glowing feelings! But what lives in our feelings remains in a kind of darkness similar to that of our dream pictures.

When we go to sleep we carry our feelings over the threshold, and it is our feelings which, in a way, even light up to some extent in our dream pictures. We also carry our will into that world; it is as deeply asleep during our daytime as it is when we sleep. So we can say that what carries human beings through the threshold of consciousness is the feeling and will element of their soul being. Feeling and will belong to sleep consciousness. The life of thoughts and ideas and also a part of the life of feelings—because dreams light up—belong to the waking consciousness of daytime; they lie on this side of the threshold. We speak of the Guardian of the Threshold because it is necessary, at their present stage of consciousness, that human beings do not step consciously but unprepared over the threshold which they cross unconsciously every time they fall asleep. When we come to recognize the forces within which human beings find themselves on the other side of the threshold, we also learn to experience why they have to be guarded—prevented by a Guardian, by something which watches over them—from stepping unprepared over the threshold into the spiritual world.

When we enter the world beyond the threshold it certainly looks very different at first glance from what we have been in the habit of expecting. However, if we enter after having undergone sufficient preparation, it gradually changes and we come to new experiences, different from those we encountered initially, which are bewildering even for those who enter the spiritual world after some preparation. For what is it that appears to us first in the spiritual world? Forces, beings, are what first appear to us. And they behave—I cannot express it otherwise—in a very inimical manner towards the ordinary world of sense perceptions. As we step over the threshold into the spiritual world we are met with a burning, scalding fire which seeks to devour everything the world of sense perceptions has to offer. We enter, without a doubt, the world of destructive forces. This is the first sight that meets us on the other side. From the facts as they are I want to give you an idea of what it is like when we first step over.

Look at the human physical body which clothes us from birth to death. Now look, first with regard to the physical body, at the moment in which the human being approaches death and steps across the threshold. Looking simply at the world of space we find that, after the individual has crossed the threshold, the physical body appears externally much the same as it did before. But very soon we notice that this physical body, which has maintained its natural form for decades, is dissolved, destroyed by the forces of the external world, the external cosmos. It is the destiny of this body that it should be dissolved, destroyed by the forces of the cosmos. Simply by looking without prejudice at the fact, once the soul has departed, the body is destroyed and dissolved by the forces of nature, we must become convinced that between birth and death something not belonging to the world of sense perception lives in it which prevents its destruction. For if it belonged to this same world it would destroy the body instead of preserving it. If people would only take account of this obvious fact they would not find it so difficult to enter into anthroposophical spiritual science. There is the corpse; the external forces of nature destroy it. If what we bear within us were of a kind with the forces of nature it would destroy this body all the time. These simple thoughts are for ever disregarded.

Now bear in mind that we are permanently surrounded by a world which destroys our physical body. The moment our body is deserted by our soul it is destroyed. When we leave this body on going to sleep, we enter the world which destroys our corpse. This we have to come to recognize [Gaps in the shorthand report.]. We enter the world of destructive forces when we go to sleep, and yet this is the spiritual world. Why? Those who expect to find something beyond the threshold which resembles what is to befound here in the physical world of the senses are simply expecting to find another physical world beyond the threshold. But if spirit is to be found there, then the physical world of sense perceptions cannot also be there. What we experience there will have to be forces which have the inclination to destroy the physical world of the senses. This we experience in full force when we cross the threshold consciously. We experience with full force that in this spiritual world we find what is for ever inclined to destroy the physical world.

Now if we were to cross the threshold unprepared and unguarded, we should like it very much in that world—if I may put it simply. Especially would our lower instincts be most satisfied, and we would grow into this world we immediately meet, this world of destructive forces; we would become the allies of these destructive forces. We would no longer want to share in the work of maintaining the physical world which surrounds us. We have to learn to love this physical world as one which is filled with wisdom, in order to be well prepared to enter into the spiritual world. Before taking up our place, so to speak, at the side of the creators, we have to learn to love their creation and thoroughly understand that the world as it has been created has not been brought forth meaninglessly by divine, creative forces. In order to enter well prepared into the spiritual world we must first have thoroughly understood the meaning of earthly life. Otherwise on waking up every morning we would return to the world of sense perceptions filled with a terrible hate for this world and with an urge to destroy it. Simply out of the necessity of human existence we would wake up full of hate and anger if we spent the time between going to sleep and waking up in a state of consciousness such as that.

You can pursue this train of investigation further by looking at dreams in an unprejudiced way. Dreams are filled with terribly destructive forces. What comes to the surface in the form of dream pictures destroys every shred of logic. Dreams say: That's it, logic is finished, I don't want any logic! Logic is for the external world of sense perceptions; there it dogmatically arranges everything. Away with logic—a different world order is what is required! That is what dreams say. And if they were not only strong enough to caress our brain but were also able to submerge themselves into our whole body, then they would seize not only our logical instincts but also all our other instincts and our emotional life. Just as they destroy logic, so would they also destroy the whole life of physical human beings. We should be reluctant to enter once more into our physical body, and in doing so we would gradually destroy it. Because what lives in dreams is overcome by what meets it from the body, it comes about that logic is only destroyed momentarily. This can be observed in every detail. What continues during sleep are the forces which belong to our rhythmic system. Breathing continues, heartbeat and pulse continue. But thoughts cease, the will ceases. What belongs to our middle region continues, though in a subdued form. The moment the pulse grows a little weaker in the brain, dreams rush in and set about destroying the forces of the body—of logic—until these forces of the body once more overcome the dreams as the pulse gains in strength.

When it is a matter of really understanding these forces Anthroposophy knows very well how to be materialistic. Materialists do not really know how to be materialistic because they do not know how the spiritual realm works together with the physical. They fail to notice how the spirit enters into the physical and there continues to work. It is most interesting to observe how the spirit enters in and first wants to make itself felt and destroy logic. For then the forces of the physical body, its powers of thought and ideas, enter the fray and overcome it again. Dreams are rendered harmless to physical, earthly life. If you consider this properly you will gain deep insight into the relationship between waking and sleeping, for it shows that we have to remain aware of our spiritual origin, that we have to sink down again and again into sleep, but that on the other hand, in the present stage of our evolution, we have to be prevented from following in full consciousness what takes place in the state we enter between going to sleep and waking up.

We live on our earth. It is, in the first instance, a physical and a cosmic creation. A time will come when this earth will suffer death by fire. It will go through actual physical fire when the forces of destruction will seize hold of every earthly form, not only the corpses. Spiritual forces are leading this earth towards this death by fire, spiritual forces which are connected with the earth and which we meet in the first stage into which we enter when we step past the Guardian of the Threshold into the spiritual world.

Let us consider what we have gained with regard to stepping through the portal of death. Our physical body is entirely discarded. Our spirit and soul element now enters the spiritual world in such a way that it straight away develops the wish to return to the physical body. The element of spirit and soul, once it has laid down the physical body, can now begin to form a thought life without the physical body. While it lived in the body it was too weak to endure the forces of destruction. Now, as it passes through the portal of death, it has to be strong enough not to yearn for a return to the physical body. Since it no longer remains unconscious but, instead, enters a genuine consciousness as it passes through the portal of death it has to take up a certain kind of thought life, for only in the life of thoughts is it possible to become really conscious. This is the tremendous difference between crossing the threshold on going to sleep and passing through the portal of death. When we go to sleep our thought world is merely damped down until it returns when we re-enter our physical body on waking up. When we die we take up the thought life with our soul and spirit element without the mediation of our physical body. What does this mean?

Human beings would never return to their physical body in the morning if they knew the spiritual world, if they had grown to be part of it and did not have the wish, which is in them unconsciously, to return to their physical body, that is, to the physical world. Wishes, however, are something which is not connected with clear consciousness but which damp down this clear consciousness into a twilight. Human beings return to their body in the morning because of a wish, but it is these very wishes, pulling towards the physical body, which damp down their thought world. So they only find their thought life once again when they have returned to their body. But, in death, wishes have also died. Human beings enter the world-thoughts. As beings of spirit and soul they now have a thought life, but if they were to enter death entirely unprepared they would enter the same world as the one we enter when we go to sleep in the evening. To express this in extreme terms we have to say: If human beings enter death unprepared they find themselves in a terrible situation; for they have to watch what happens to their physical body. Their physical body is pulverized in the world-all, for if we do not cremate the body then it is cremated by the cosmos. And human beings would have to watch this happening if they were unprepared.

What is the consequence of this, and what has to happen so that human beings see not only destruction after death, so that they live not only in the midst of destructive forces? By absorbing spiritual content, by developing a world view which is consistent with the spirit, they must carry an inward relationship with the divine, spiritual world through the portal of death. If they are aware solely of a physical, material world, then they certainly enter after death in a state of terrible unpreparedness into the world of destructive forces as though into a world of scorching flames. But if they fill themselves with ideas and thoughts about the spiritual world, then the flames become the birthplace of the spirit after death so that they see not destruction alone; in the falling away of earthly dust from their human orbit they see the spirit rising up. No one should say what ordinary materialistic ideas are so prone to saying: I can wait until death comes to me! No, we must bear our consciousness of the spiritual world with us through the portal of death. Then with our soul and spirit we can overcome the destructive cosmic forces which take over our body, so that our element of spirit and soul rises up with new creativity above the destruction.

I am telling you this on the basis of anthroposophical spiritual science, but you have all, surely, heard of the fear experienced in former times in a sense of doom with regard to death, a sense of doom about which the Apostle Paul² taught when he spoke about man's soul being saved from falling a prey to death. In former times people knew that they could not only die physically with their corpse, but also spiritually with their soul. Human beings dislike speaking about the possible death of their soul. When speaking of death Paul does not mean physical death. He means something that can happen because physical death wants to lead on to the death of soul and spirit. Human beings must become aware once more that they have to do something during their physical earthly life in order to join their consciousness to their soul and spirit, so that these may carry something through death, in order that the spirit may arise for them out of the devouring flames which are always present after death.

Considerations like this must make it clear that to live within the whole universal order is an immensely serious matter. No view of the world is worthy of the human being if it does not lead through inner strength to a world of moral values, if it does not put before our souls the utter seriousness of life. To speak of physical and chemical forces building up the earth and of living creatures and, finally, man developing along the way, is not merely a one-sided world view; it is a world view which ignores the seriousness of life and which arises, actually, simply out of human laziness. A world view, on the other hand, which achieves a proper attitude to the spirit, leads to a seriousness about life because it puts before the soul the possibility that on passing through the gate of death the human being might become united with the forces of destruction. Throughout their physical life human beings are given the opportunity to prepare themselves suitably, because every evening as they go to sleep they are shielded from seeing the world of destructive forces to which they are related. They are given time to take in something that can guide them through the portal of death in a manner which enables them to discern the spirit within the forces of destruction. It is impossible to overemphasize the fact that feelings and perceptions about life must follow as a matter of course from a world view, and that a world view must not be allowed to remain mere abstract theory but must become something living, something which seizes hold of feelings and will. Civilized mankind must wrestle again for a world view such as this. Then, once more, what is imperishable will be seen within everything perishable; and, furthermore, out of everything that does not pursue its course egoistically within man it will be possible to push forward to eternity and immortality.

From this point of view look at life as it is carried on today. And do not take offence when someone who has to speak honestly is forced to say such disagreeable things. Look, for instance, at religious education. What is it built on? On egoism! Because people want to live beyond death, immortality—the possibility of going through death consciously—is spoken about. People long for this, and so to satisfy them—because it is disagreeable to appeal to knowledge—knowledge is omitted and mere belief is called into play. In this way, human egoism alone is approached, human egoism that wants to see what it will be like after death, instead of waiting till it happens. What it is like before birth is not found to be interesting. This can only be learnt through knowledge. Indeed, eternity—what comes after death and what stretches back beyond conception—can only be found through knowledge.

Even our language shows that we only have a half knowledge about the eternity of man. We speak only about immortality, ‘undyingness’. What we need in addition is a word denoting ‘unbornness’. Only when we can grasp both will we finally understand the eternity of the human being. Right down into language, human beings of our time have abjured their links with the spiritual world. These links must be found once more. If they cannot be found it will betotally impossible to carry on living in a proper way, and today's culture and civilization could fall into absolute decline.

In Stuttgart we have founded the Waldorf school³ and Waldorf education. All sorts of things are said about this. Recently somebody said: Why does Waldorf education take so little account of fatigue in the children? Fatigue ought to be carefully studied nowadays. In so-called experimental psychology it is pointed out with pride how children tire after repeating unconnected words or following lessons about a sequence of subjects. And then it is said: Waldorf education is not up to date because it does not take the fatigue of the children into account. Why is this? The Waldorf school does not speak much about fatigue. But it does speak about how children ought to be tended and educated after the change of teeth, namely by basing the education mainly on the rhythmic system—which means that the artistic element is cultivated, since this is what stimulates the rhythmic system. Abstract writing comes later, and abstract reading later still. Demands are made, not of the head but of the artistic realm. But those who work with children only at those things which make demands on the head will, of course, have to reckon with fatigue. When, however, we make claims on the rhythmic system, on the artistic element, then we are justified in asking: Does our heart tire throughout life? It has to go on beating, and we have to go on breathing. So Waldorf education need not concern itself too much with fatigue because it aims to educate children in a way which tires them very little. Experimental education has arrived at a system which tires the children dreadfully; by its very method it brings about this tiredness. [Gaps in the shorthand report.] Waldorf education is concerned with body, soul and spirit, and account is taken of what comes from the spiritual and soul worlds to unite with the body and what departs again at death. Anthroposophy is the very thing which can help us to understand the material, physical realm.

What is most lively of all in the child? Its brain activity! From the brain the forces which mould the whole body stream out. These are most lively until the change of teeth. At the change of teeth this moulding capacity is transferred to the system of breathing and heart, and until puberty this is what we have to work with, which means that artistic work, not theoretical work, is what is required. Between the seventh and the fourteenth year the muscles are formed inwardly in a way which is adapted to the rhythmic system. Not until the fourteenth year approaches do soul and spirit take hold of the whole human being, and it is interesting to observe how until this moment the muscles have taken their cue from heartbeat, pulse and breathing. Now, through the sinews, they begin to make friends with the bones, with the skeleton, and to adapt themselves to external movements. You should learn to observe how young people change at this age. [Gaps in the shorthand report.] The process starts from the head; the soul element grows further and further towards the surface of the human being and takes hold of the bones last of all; it fills the whole human being and uses him up, making friends ever more closely with the forces of death, until these forces of death win through to victory at the moment of death.

Anthroposophical spiritual science follows up the spiritual processes right into the minutest detail, showing how they become immersed in material life and how they take hold of the whole human being, starting with the head. Not until knowledge such as this is taken into account, will it become possible to educate people properly once again. We need intellect and understanding so that we may find freedom, but they drive away the certainty of our instincts. A friend of mine was quite a nice person when we were young. Later in life he invited me to visit him. I had never partaken of a midday meal with scales and weights on the table. My friend first weighed everything he ate! By his intellect he had discovered how much he needed in order to maintain his body, and this exact amount was what he ate. Intellect drives out instincts in small things, but also on a larger scale. Now it is necessary for us to find our way back to them. A sure sense for life, a firm stand in life, is needed once more. This is found by seeking our eternal element within the temporal sphere; we need to understand how the eternal finds its place in the temporal. This is what our contemporary civilization needs.

Such things must be treated on a global scale. No account is taken these days of the contrasts that exist between people of the West and people of the East. External matters are broached in an external manner; congresses are called to discuss ways of balancing out the world's difficult situation, but no account is taken of the fact that East and West can only achieve economic balance if they have trust in one another. Asians will never be able to work together properly with the West if they cannot understand each other. But understanding can only come about through the soul. Understanding out of the soul is needed for the economic realm in the world; and understanding out of the soul can only be achieved through a deepening of soul life.

This is why today the most intimate matters of individual soul life are at the same time matters of worldwide import. Comprehension of what the world today needs, in external public matters too, will not be achieved unless an effort is made to listen to what the science of the super-sensible has to say, for the world has changed during the course of evolution. The human race, in particular, has changed.

Looking at the span of human evolution, let us turn to that event without which the whole of human and earth evolution would have no meaning: the Mystery of Golgotha. In this Mystery of Golgotha something divine entered into the conditions of the earth by means of an earthly body. Christ entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth in order from then on to work with the earth. The earth would have perished, would have decayed in the world order, if a new fructification had not been brought about by the entering-in of the Christ. You know also that in the distant past an instinctive knowledge, a primeval wisdom, existed, of which only remnants remained in western civilization at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Enough remained, however, to make it possible for the Mystery of Golgotha to be at least instinctively comprehended for four centuries. In the early centuries of Christianity the understanding of the super-sensible significance of the Mystery of Golgotha was such that the leading Christian teachers knew about the entering-in of Christ, the Sun Spirit, into the human being, Jesus of Nazareth.

Who today has a living awareness of what it means to ask whether the human being Jesus of Nazareth bore two natures, a human one and a divine one, or only one? Yet in the early Christian centuries this was a vital question, a question which had a bearing on life. There was a vivid awareness of how, coming from the cosmos, the Christ Spirit had united with Jesus; two natures in one personality; God in man.

You have often heard that the fourth post-Atlantean period lasted from 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha to about 1413 after the Mystery of Golgotha. In the first third of the fifteenth century intellectualism proper began. Now, we look at physical forces, we calculate, we study physics, but we no longer know that spiritual forces are at work out there, that the spirit which was known in earlier times really exists out there. Look at this fourth post-Atlantean, period lasting from 747 BC until 1413 AD. If you halve this period you come to a point that lies in the fourth century AD, the point when the wisdom which still contained a spiritual comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha finally faded away. From then on, intellectual discussion was all that took place. And finally, as the fifteenth century approached, the human intellect became the sole ruler of human civilization. Because of this, anything that represented a living connection between the human being and the Christ was drawn more and more into merely materialistic human thinking. In the most advanced theology in the nineteenth century the Christ was entirely lost, and the most enlightened view was taken to be that of Christ as nothing more than the ‘man of Nazareth’. If we can really feel this in all its gravity, we cannot but develop a yearning to find the Christ Being once again. And this yearning to find Christ once more is what the anthroposophical world view wants to satisfy with regard to the major global questions. In Central Europe people are particularly well prepared for this, as all kinds of symptoms show.

One of Western Europe's great thinkers, Herbert Spencer,⁴ wrote about education in a way which pleases materialists very much. He said that all education is useless if it does not educate human beings to educate others. On what does he base this? He says: The greatest achievement in a human being's life is to beget other human beings. So therefore education must also be greatly important. From one point of view western thinking is correct. But what does an eastern thinker say? Out of the eastern spirit, something very ancient still lives in Vladimir Soloviev.⁵ For western culture, primeval wisdom has disappeared. In the East it remains as a feeling. Soloviev still bears something of true Christian wisdom. Here in Central and Western Europe we have only a God-consciousness. There is virtually no knowledge of the Son. Harnack,⁶ for instance, speaks of God in a way which makes it seem as though Christ, the Son, has no place in the Gospels. Consciousness of the Father, consciousness of God, is all that is left. What is said of the Son must also be said of the Father. But Soloviev still has something of the Christ-consciousness, and when he speaks it can sometimes be felt as if we were listening to the old Church Fathers from before the time of the Council of Nicaea.⁷ Even the titles of his works are quite different. For instance there is a treatise on ‘Freedom, Necessity, Grace and Sin’. You would be unlikely to find a treatise on grace or sin written by one of the western philosophers—Spencer, for instance, or Mill, or Bergson, or Wundt! No such thing exists in the West; it would be quite unthinkable and indeed is not to be found.

The eastern philosopher, though, still speaks like that, saying: Alife given to man on earth, a life in which there was no striving for perfection in truth, would not be a genuinely human life. It would be valueless, as indeed would the striving for perfection in truth, if human beings had no part in immortality. Such a life would be a fraud on a global scale. Thus speaks Soloviev, the eastern philosopher. And he goes on: The spiritual task of man only starts when he reaches puberty. This is the very opposite of what Spencer says! Spencer makes the begetting of offspring the goal of development. For the eastern philosopher, development only begins at that point. It is the same with every matter, including questions of economic life. This is how the western economist speaks today, without having any sense for what eastern people feel about economic life. Today's major questions require consideration on a historical scale, and we ought to realize that the great misfortune of mankind in the second decade of the twentieth century, the great challenge and the great trial, is that involving considerations of this kind. An entirely different treatment of life must rise up out of the depths of the soul. The great questions of life, those that lie beyond birth and death, must come to play a part in ordinary human life. The questions of the present time must be illumined by the light of eternity, otherwise people will hasten from congress to congress and sink ever further and further into misfortune.

• 1 . There are numerous gaps in the shorthand report of this lecture. The conclusion has been omitted. It deals with contemporary questions and covers virtually the same ground as Lecture One (Soloviev, Bismarck, Robespierre).
• 2 . For example: 1 Corinthians, 15.
• 3 . The Free Waldorf School, Stuttgart, was founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1919. The education of the children was to be in harmony with the knowledge of the human being as revealed by anthroposophical spiritual science.
• 4 . Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903. Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical, 1861.
• 5 . Lecture Two, Note 1
• 6 . Adolf von Hamack, 1851-1930. Theologian and historian.
• 7 . 19 June 325. Establishment of the creed of identity of Son (Jesus Christ) and Father.