The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Kristiania (Oslo), May 16, 1909

Today we shall stress more the occult side of yesterday's observation. The four post-Atlantean cultures somehow had to reflect the great cosmic events in the souls of human beings as they had happened in historical sequence. However, beginning with the thirteenth or fourteenth century of our cultural epoch, such a reflection no longer took place because the external events in human evolution must be traced to more profound reasons.

We know that the etheric bodies of the great Atlantean initiates had been preserved for the Seven Holy Rishis, and we also know how the etheric and astral body of Zarathustra had been woven into those of Moses and Hermes. At any time the possibility existed that such etheric bodies, which had been cultivated and prepared by the initiates, could be further used in the spiritual economy of the world. But other things took place as well. For especially important personalities, such etheric bodies are formed in the higher worlds. When somebody was especially important for the mission of humanity, an etheric body or an astral body was woven in the higher worlds and was then imprinted on this personality.

This is what happened in the case of Shem who indeed has something to do with the whole tribe of the Semites. A special etheric body was coined for such a tribal ancestor, and Shem became a sort of dual personality by this process. It may sound fantastic to the modern mind, but a clairvoyant would see a personality like Shem as he would see an ordinary human being with his or her aura; but then also in such a way as if a higher being that extends down from higher worlds completely filled his etheric body and as if the aura became a mediator between this personality and the higher world. Residing in a human being, such a divine being, however, has a very special power: it can multiply such an etheric body, and the multiplied etheric bodies then form a web that is continually woven into the descendants. Thus the descendants of Shem received an imprint of the copy of his etheric body. However, the Mystery Centers kept not only the multiplied copies but also the etheric body of Shem himself. Any personality that was meant to receive a special mission had to use this etheric body if it wanted to be able to communicate with the Semitic people, similar to the way in which a very educated European would have to learn the language of the Hottentots if he wanted to communicate with them. Therefore, the personality with a special mission had to bear within himself the real etheric body of Shem in order to be able to communicate with the Semitic people. Such a personality, for example, was Melchizedek: he could show himself to Abraham only in the etheric body of Shem.

We now have to ask ourselves something. If it is only now, in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, possible for us to develop an understanding for Christianity, what was the situation in the remainder of the Graeco-Latin era, which lasted into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? A mysterious, occult process took place. Christ lived only three years in the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth, who was such a sublime individuality that He was able to leave the physical world at the age of thirty when the dove appeared over His head so that He could enter the spiritual world. Since the Christ-Individuality lived in the physical body, it filled out the three highly developed bodies of Jesus. Invisible to the physical eye, they were now multiplied as had formerly been the case with the etheric body of Shem so that the copies of the etheric and astral bodies of Jesus of Nazareth were available from the time he died on the cross. This has nothing to do with His ego; it passed into the spiritual world and has repeatedly reincarnated itself afterward.

We see how Christian writers in the first few centuries after the Christ-Event still worked on the basis of an oral tradition that was transmitted by the disciples of the Apostles, who set great value on a direct, physical transmission of the Christ-Event. However, this would not have been a sufficient building block for later centuries, and that is why a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into especially eminent heralds of the Christian message beginning with the sixth and seventh centuries. One such herald was Augustine, who in his youth had to go through tremendous struggles. However, only when the impulse of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth came to work in him in a significant way did he begin to become engaged in Christian mysticism of his own initiative. His writings can be understood only in this light. Many other personalities in the world, such as Columban,⁴⁰ Gallus,⁴¹ and Patrick,⁴² carried within themselves such a copy of Jesus's etheric body and were therefore in a position to spread Christianity and built a bridge from the Christ-Event to the succeeding times.

By contrast, we see human beings whose astral body received the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Such a personality was Francis of Assisi. When we look at his life from this point of view, we will understand it in quite a few ways. His qualities of humility and Christian devotion will become especially clear to us when we tell ourselves that such a mystery lived in him. In the time from about the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries such human beings became the heralds of Christianity by the very fact that the astral body of Jesus was woven into their own astral body. Hence, they received Christianity by virtue of Grace.

Although the ego of Jesus of Nazareth left its three sheaths at the baptism of John, a copy of this ego remained in each of them similar to the imprint a seal leaves behind. The Christ-Being took possession of these three bodies and of that which remained as the imprint of the Jesus-Ego. Beginning with the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, something like an ego copy of Jesus was woven into human beings who began to speak of an “inner Christ.” Meister Eckhart and Tauler were individuals who spoke from their own experience like an ego copy of Jesus of Nazareth.

There are still many people present who carry within themselves something like the various bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, but these are now no longer the leading personalities. Increasingly we can see how there are human beings in the fifth epoch who must rely on themselves and on their own ego and how such inspired people have become a rarity. It was therefore necessary that a spiritual tendency develop in our fifth epoch to ensure that humanity would continue to be imbued with spiritual knowledge. Those individualities who were capable of looking into the future had to take care that human beings in the times to come would not be left simply to rely on their human ego only. The legend of the Holy Grail relates that the chalice from which the Christ Jesus took the Last Supper with his disciples was kept in a certain place. We see in the story of Parsifal the course of a young person's education typical for our fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Parsifal had been instructed not to ask too many questions, and his dilemma arose from his following those instructions. That is the important transition from the traditional to more modern times: in ancient India and later with Augustine and Francis of Assisi the student had to live in a state of the highest degree of passive devotion. All these humble people allowed themselves to be inspired by what was already alive in them and by what had been woven into them. But now things changed in that the ego became a questioning ego. Today, any soul that accepts passively what is given to it cannot transcend itself because it merely oberves the happenings in the physical world around it. In our times the soul has to ask questions; it has to rise above itself; it has to grow beyond its given form. It must raise questions, just as Parsifal ultimately learned to inquire after the mysteries of the Grail's Castle.⁴³

Spiritual investigation today begins only where there is questioning, and the souls today that are stimulated by external science to ask questions and to search are the Parsifal souls. And this has led to the introduction of Rosicrucian education—that much maligned mystery school of thought—that accepts tradition gratefully but does not accept traditional wisdom blindly. Yet that which today constitutes Rosicrucian spiritual orientation has been investigated in the higher worlds directly with the spiritual eye and with the means the student himself has been instructed to utilize This has not come about simply because this or that is written in old books or because certain people believed one thing or another. Rather, the Rosicrucian spiritual method proclaims wisdom that has been investigated today. It was gradually prepared in the Rosicrucian schools that were founded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a result of the work of an individuality by the name of Christian Rosenkreutz.

This accumulated wisdom can today be proclaimed as Spiritual Science. This is so because today it is no longer possible to instill in human beings what is to inspire them from the inside without their having a hand in the process. Today people who feel that Spiritual Science speaks to their hearts must approach it through their own free will, through their own free impulse, and through the fact that they feel enlivened by spiritual knowledge. Hence we need not attempt to stir up an interest in Spiritual Science.

Through this theosophical-Rosicrucian orientation of the spirit, we again bring close to ourselves what is still present in the copies of Jesus of Nazareth's ego. Those who prepare themselves in this manner will pull into their souls the copy of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth so that they become like imprints of a seal, and it is in this way that the Christ- Principle finds its way into the human soul. Rosicrucianism prepared something positive, and since anthroposophy is meant to become life, the souls that absorb and truly accept it will gradually undergo a metamorphosis. To accept anthroposophy within yourself means to change the soul in such a way that it is able to come to a true understanding of the Christ.

The anthroposophist makes himself or herself a living recipient of what was given to Moses and Paul in the JavehChrist-Revelation. It is written in the fifth letter of the Apocalypse that the people in the fifth cultural epoch are those who can really absorb the things that will be quite obvious for the cultural period of the Philadelphia community. The wisdom of the fifth cultural period will open as a flower of love in the sixth period.

Today mankind is called upon to accept into itself something new, something divine, and thereby to undertake again the ascent into the spiritual world. The Spiritual Scientific teaching of evolution is being imparted not because people are supposed to put their blind faith into it, but because mankind is supposed to reach an understanding of it through its own powers of judgment. This teaching is being directed to those who bear the core of the Parsifal nature within themselves. And it is not being proclaimed just in special places or to a special group of people, but human beings from all of humanity will come together to listen to the call of spiritual wisdom.

• 40. Columban (545–615) was an Irish missionary.
• 41. Gallus was a sixth-century Irish-Scotch missionary.
• 42. Patrick (c. 384–c. 460) was an English missionary.
• 43. Steiner is referring to the German courtly epic Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach (about 1200/10). The Frenchman Chretien de Troyes was the author of the first great artistic treatment of the theme; in his unfinished poem “Percivale” finds the Grail and heals the king. Wolfram's story is drawn from Chretien's model but is much more spiritualized in its triadic structure: innocence, fall, salvation. The Simpleton Parsifal is educated as a knight who knows proper courtly behavioral codes, one of them being not to ask too many questions. This attitude causes him to be expelled from the Grail's Castle, and only after he has undergone a second, Christian phase of education does he know how to express his charity by asking the appropriate question of the ailing king.

[ 1 ] Now, fifteen years after the first edition of this book, I may well be allowed to say something publicly about the state of soul out of which it arose.

[ 2 ] Originally, it was my plan to add its essential content as final chapters to my book Theosophy, which had been published previously. This proved to be impossible. At the time of the publication of Theosophy the subject matter of Occult Science did not yet live in me in its final form as was the case with Theosophy. In my imaginative perceptions the spiritual nature of individual man stood before my soul and I was able to describe it; the cosmic relationships, however, which had to be presented in Occult Science did not yet live in my consciousness in the same way. I perceived details, but not the complete picture.

[ 3 ] I, therefore, decided to publish Theosophy with the content I had seen as the nature of the life of individual man, and then to carry through Occult Science in the near future, without undue haste.

[ 4 ] The contents of this book had, in accordance with my soul mood at that time, to be given in thoughts that are further elaborations of the thoughts employed in natural science, suited for the presentation of the spiritual. In the preface to the first edition, reprinted in this book, it will be noted how strongly responsible I felt toward natural science in all that I wrote at that time about the science of the spirit.

[ 5 ] What reveals itself to spiritual perception as the world of spirit cannot, however, be presented in such thoughts alone. For this revelation does not fit into a mere thought content. He who has experienced the nature of such revelation knows that the thoughts of ordinary consciousness are only suited to express what is perceived by the senses, not what is seen by the spirit.

[ 6 ] The content of what is spiritually perceived can only be reproduced in pictures (imaginations) through which inspirations speak, which have their origin in spiritual entity intuitively perceived.¹

[ 7 ] But he who describes imaginations from the world of spirit cannot at present merely present these imaginations. For in doing so he would be presenting something that would stand as quite a different content of consciousness alongside the content of knowledge of our age, without any relationship whatsoever to it. He has to fill modern consciousness with what can be recognized by another consciousness that perceives the world of spirit. His presentation will then have this world of spirit as content, but this content will appear in the form of thoughts into which it flows. Through this it will be completely comprehensible to ordinary consciousness, which thinks in terms of the present day but does not yet behold the world of spirit.

[ 8 ] This comprehensibility will only then be lacking if we ourselves raise barriers against it, that is, if we labor under the prejudices that the age has produced regarding “the limits of knowledge” through an incorrectly conceived view of nature.

[ 9 ] In spiritual cognition everything is immersed in intimate soul experience, not only spiritual perception itself, but also the understanding with which the unseeing, ordinary consciousness meets the results of clairvoyant perception.

[ 10 ] Those who maintain that anyone who believes he understands is merely suggesting the understanding to himself have not the slightest inkling of this intimacy.

[ 11 ] But it is a fact that what expresses itself merely in concepts of truth and error within the scope of comprehension of the physical world becomes experience in regard to the spiritual world.

[ 12 ] Whoever permits his judgment to be influenced—be it ever so slightly—by the assertion that the spiritually perceived is incomprehensible to the everyday, still unperceiving consciousness—because of its limitations—will find his comprehension obscured by this judgment as though by a dark cloud, and he really cannot understand.

[ 13 ] What is spiritually perceived is fully comprehensible to the unprejudiced, unperceiving consciousness if the seer gives his perceptions thought form. It is just as comprehensible as the finished picture of the painter is to the man who does not paint. Moreover, the comprehension of the spirit world is not of the nature of artistic feeling employed in the comprehension of a work of art, but it bears the stamp of thought employed in natural science.

[ 14 ] In order, however, to make such a comprehension really possible, the one who presents what he perceives spiritually must bring his perceptions up to a point where he can pour them into thought form without loss of their imaginative character within this form.

[ 15 ] All this stood before my soul as I developed my Occult Science.

[ 16 ] In 1909 I felt that, under these premises, I might be able to produce a book which, in the first place, offered the content of my spiritual vision brought, to a sufficient degree, into thought form, and which, in the second place, could be understood by every thinking human being who allows no obstructions to interfere with his understanding.

[ 17 ] I say this today, stating at the same time that in 1909 the publication of this book appeared to be a risk. For I knew indeed that professional scientists are unable to call up in themselves the necessary impartiality, nor are the numerous personalities able to do so who are dependent on them for their judgment.

[ 18 ] But, before my soul there stood the very fact that at the time when the consciousness of mankind was furthest removed from the world of spirit, the communications from that world would answer a most urgent necessity.

[ 19 ] I counted upon the fact that there are human beings who feel, more or less desperately, the remoteness from all spirituality as a grave obstacle to life that causes them to seize upon the communications of the spiritual world with inner longing.

[ 20 ] During the subsequent years this has been completely confirmed. Theosophy and Occult Science, books that presume the goodwill of the reader in coping with a difficult style of writing, have been widely read.

[ 21 ] I have quite consciously endeavored not to offer a “popular” exposition, but an exposition that makes it necessary for the reader to study the content with strict effort of thought. The character I impressed upon my books is such that their very study is the beginning of spiritual training. For the calm, conscious effort of thought that this reading makes necessary strengthens the forces of the soul and through this makes them capable of approaching the spirit world.

[ 22 ] The fact that I have entitled this book Occult Science has immediately called forth misunderstandings. From many sides was heard, “What claims to be science must not be secret, occult.” How little thought was exercised in making such an objection! As though someone who reveals a subject matter would want to be secretive about it. This entire book shows that it was not the intention to designate anything “occult,” but to bring everything into a form that renders it as understandable as any science. Or do we not wish to say when we employ the term “natural science” that we are dealing with the knowledge of “nature”? Occult science is the science of what occurs occultly insofar as it is not perceived in external nature, but in that region toward which the soul turns when it directs its inner being toward the spirit.

[ 23 ] Occult Science is the antithesis of Natural Science.

[ 24 ] Objections have repeatedly been made to my perceptions of the spiritual world by maintaining that they are transformed reproductions of what, in the course of the ages, has appeared in human thought about the spirit world. It is said that I had read this or that, absorbed what I read into the unconscious, and then presented it in the belief that it originated in my own perception. I am said to have gained my expositions from the teachings of the Gnostics, from the poetic records of ancient oriental wisdom, and so on.

[ 25 ] These objections are superficial.

[ 26 ] My knowledge of things of the spirit is a direct result of my own perception, and I am fully conscious of this fact. In all details and in the larger surveys I had always examined myself carefully as to whether every step I took in the progress of my perception was accompanied by a fully awake consciousness. Just as the mathematician advances from thought to thought without the unconscious or autosuggestion playing a role, so—I told myself—spiritual perception must advance from objective imagination to objective imagination without anything living in the soul but the spiritual content of clear, discerning consciousness.

[ 27 ] The knowledge that an imagination is not a mere subjective picture, but a representation in picture form of an objective spiritual content is attained by means of healthy inner experience. This is achieved in a psycho-spiritual way, just as in the realm of sense-perception one is able with a healthy organism to distinguish properly between mere imaginings and objective perceptions. [ 28 ] Thus the results of my perception stood before me. They were, at the outset, “perceptions” without names. [ 29 ] Were I to communicate them, I needed verbal designations. I then sought later for such designations in older descriptions of the spiritual in order to be able to express in words what was still wordless. I employed these verbal designations freely, so that in my use of them scarcely one coincides with its ancient meaning.

[ 30 ] I sought, however, for such a possibility of expression in every case only after the content had arisen in my own perception.

[ 31 ] I knew how to exclude what had been previously read from my own perceptive research by means of the state of consciousness that I have just described.

[ 32 ] Now it was claimed that in my expressions reminiscences of ancient ideas were to be found. Without considering the content, attention was fixed on the expressions. If I spoke of “lotus flowers” in the astral body of man, that was a proof, to the critic, that I was repeating the teachings of ancient India in which the expression is to be found. Indeed, if I spoke of “astral body,” this was the result of my reading the literature of the Middle Ages. If I employed the expressions “Angeloi,” “Archangeloi,” and so forth, I was simply renewing the ideas of Christian Gnosis.

[ 33 ] I found such entirely superficial thinking constantly opposing me.

[ 34 ] I wanted to point to this fact, too, now that a new edition of Occult Science is to be published, for the book contains the outline of Anthroposophy as a whole. It will, therefore, be chiefly beset by the misunderstandings to which Anthroposophy is exposed. [ 35 ] Since the time when the imaginations that this book presents merged into a complete picture in my soul, I have advanced uninterruptedly in my ability to investigate, by means of soul and spirit perception, the historical evolution of mankind, the cosmos, and so forth. In the details I have continuously arrived at new results. But what I offered as an outline in Occult Science fifteen years ago remains for me basically undisturbed. Everything I have been able to say since then, if inserted in this book in the proper place, appears as an amplification of the outline given at that time.

Rudolf Steiner
January 10, 1925, Goetheanum
Dornach, Switzerland

• 1. All that it is necessary to know concerning the nature of imagination, inspiration, and intuition is to be found in this book, Occult Science, in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, also in The Stages of Higher Knowledge.

The time from Christmas until about now is actually an important, a significant time of the year, also in occult terms. It is called the time of the thirteen days. And the remarkable thing is that this period of thirteen days is sensed in its importance by those people who, in their entire soul disposition, have retained something of the old connection of the human soul with the spiritual world, of which we have often spoken. We know that more than the person of today's urban population has retained from the connection with the spiritual world that once existed in ancient times, the primitive person who lives out in the countryside or in a population that is even less affected by our urban culture. And there we find much that is related in folk poetry about the experiences of the soul, about experiences of the soul during the period from Christmas to Epiphany, January 6.

This is the time when, after the annual eclipse has most befallen the earth, immediately after the winter solstice, when the sun begins its victorious course again, with nature's deepest immersion and release and redemption, the human soul can also undergo very special experiences if it still has special connections with the spiritual world. Those people who no longer have the old clairvoyance but are still connected to the spiritual world in their soul feel a difference in the abnormal world of dreams at this time of year. What the soul can experience there becomes meaningful, because the soul, if it is still receptive, can really get most involved in the spiritual world then. For the modern man, the year really is such that he no longer particularly distinguishes the individual seasons, because while the snow storms outside, darkness already begins at four o'clock in the afternoon and it only gets light late, the city dweller feels the same as in the summer months, when the sun can unfold its full power. Man is torn out of the old connection with the cosmos in which he lived when he was outside in nature. But for those who have retained a connection with nature, it is not the same thing that falls during the Christmas season as what happens at another time, for example, at midsummer. While in midsummer the soul is most emancipated from what is connected with the spiritual world, in the time when nature is most dead, it is most connected with the spiritual world and used to experience special things during this time.

Now there is a beautiful folk tale in the old Norwegian language, a tale that was rediscovered only recently and has quickly become popular again due to the peculiar understanding of the Norwegian population. It is about a man who still had a connection to the spiritual world, about Olaf Åsteson. What Olaf Åsteson experiences in the time between Christmas and Epiphany is beautifully depicted in this poem.

At the New Year's celebration in Hannover in 1912, I first tried to put this folk tale of Olaf Åsteson into German lines so that it could also be performed before our souls. Tonight's program will begin with the Song of Olaf Åsteson, which contains Olaf Åsteson's experiences during the thirteen nights.

It was followed by a recitation by Marie von Sivers.

The poetry itself is old. But, as I said, it has recently been rediscovered by the Norwegian people as if by magic and is spreading rapidly. The fact that something like this is spreading will, among many facts prevailing at present, also be one that proves how it is pushing towards an understanding of the mysteries that anthroposophy can bring us today. For that something like what is described here is taking place in a soul, or at least could take place relatively recently, is not just a 'fiction'. This writing is not just fantasy, but reality, it is real. And with Olaf Åsteson, it is pointed out to people of those Nordic regions who, in the Middle Ages, around the middle of the Middle Ages, still had the opportunity, one might say, to literally experience something as it is expressed here.

When our Norwegian friends gave me this poem during my penultimate visit to Kristiania and wanted to hear something about it from me, it was initially this fact, interesting from a general spiritual scientific point of view, that was emphasized, that pushed itself into the soul. But what led to our wanting to include this poem in our spiritual scientific program, so to speak, is that one can also go into the details more and more. Through anthroposophical understanding, one finds oneself delving ever deeper into what comes to light in the poem. For example, it was significant to me that Olaf — which is an old Norwegian name — has the epithet Åsteson: Åsteson. The son of what? Of Äste. And I tried to find out what kind of mother this son actually is. Of course, one can argue about the meaning of the word “Äst” in many different ways, and there are also things that can be disputed. It is not possible today to sort out everything that comes into question. But if we take into account everything that is in question, then a name such as Olaf Åsteson means: he who is still a son of that soul that goes down from generation to generation and is connected with the blood that runs from generation to generation. But we have traced this name back to what we have so often discussed in the field of anthroposophy, that in ancient times, ancient clairvoyance was connected with the kinship of the blood that runs through the generations. And one would be able to translate Olaf Åsteson as: Olaf, born of many generations and still carrying the characters of many generations in his soul.

If we now go into the experiences, it is extremely interesting to see what the sleeping Olaf Åsteson goes through from Christmas Eve through thirteen days, during which he does not wake up, that is, is in a kind of psychic state. If one allows the individual verses to take effect, which allow the individual experiences to arise before the soul with a broad, folksy comfort, one is reminded of certain descriptions of the first stages of initiation, where it is said that such and such a one has been led to the threshold of death. The poem shows that Olaf Åsteson comes to the gates of death. And it will be particularly vivid when he feels like a corpse himself – except for the earth that he feels between his teeth. If we remember that the etheric body of the person to be initiated grows beyond the boundaries of the skin and the person becomes bigger and bigger, so that the person lives into wide cosmic spaces, then we are pointed to in this poem how the person descends deeply, empathizes with the depths of the earth and ascends to cloud heights. What a person has to go through after death, for example in the sphere of the moon, is also what Olaf Åsteson has to go through. It is poetically described how the moon shines brightly and how the paths stretch far and wide. Then the gulf that has to be crossed in the world is shown, the one that lies between the human and the one that leads out into the cosmic expanse. And the bridge of heaven connects what is human with what is cosmic. Then our attention is drawn to the interplay of the beings that find expression in the constellations of Taurus and Ophiuchus. But for those who can see into the world spiritually, the constellations are only the expression of what is present in the spiritual realm in the vastness of space. And then the world of Kamalokaw is depicted in the description of 'Brooksvalin'. It is shown how a kind of retribution takes place, how people there go through - but in a compensatory way - what they have not acquired here on earth. But one does not need to interpret all the details of this poetry, one should not do that at all with such poetry. But one should feel that they emerged from such an atmosphere, which is closely related to what was present in such a people for much longer than in peoples who lived more in the interior of the continents or came into contact with big city culture. The Norwegian people, who still have much in their vernacular that comes close to the boundary of occult secrets, had the possibility for longer to keep the souls connected with what lives and moves behind the outer material phenomena.

Do you remember how I have dealt with the way the course of the year has its spiritual parallel series of facts? How in spring, when plants sprout from the earth, when everything comes to life, when the days get lighter, we have to recognize what we can call a kind of falling asleep of the elementary and higher spirits that are connected to the earth. In spring, when the earth awakens outwardly, in spiritual contemplation we are dealing with a kind of falling asleep of the earth. When outer nature dies down again, we are dealing with the awakening of the spiritual nature of the earth. And when outer nature is asleep around Christmas time, then that is the time when the spiritual of the earth, which is connected with earthly existence both through elemental, less significant beings and through great, powerful beings, is most active. It only appears so when viewed superficially, as if we had to compare spring with the awakening of the earth and winter with its falling asleep. For occult observation, it is the other way around. The spirit of the earth, which consists of many spirits, awakens in winter and sleeps in summer. Just as in the human organism the organic and vegetative are most active during sleep, as the forces play up into the brain, and as the purely organic activity is killed off during waking, so it is with the earth. When the earth is most active, when everything has sprouted, when the sun is at its highest around Midsummer, the spirit of the earth sleeps. And it is not without connection to these occult truths that Christmas, the festival of the awakening of the spirit, has been moved to the winter season. The things that have come down to us as customs from ancient times correspond in many ways to these occult insights.

Those who know how to live with the spirits of the earth do not just celebrate Midsummer in the summer. For the celebration of St. John's Day in summer is already a kind of materialistic celebration. One celebrates what external materialistic revelation shows. But he who has the connection with the spirit of the earth, with that which lives spiritually in the earth, awakens to his inner self, that is, he sleeps for his outer self, like Olaf Åsteson, best at Christmas time during the thirteen days. This is also an occult fact, which means exactly the same for occultism as, for example, the fact of the external position of the sun for external materialistic science. Of course, materialistic science will take it for granted that within astronomy it describes the activity of the sun in summer and in winter in a certain purely external way; it will consider it foolishness what is a fact for the occultist that the spiritual position of the sun is most intense in the winter time and that therefore the conditions are most favorable for those who want to come close to a deepening of the soul, which is connected with the spirit of the earth and with all spiritual. Therefore, for someone who wants to seek a deepening of their soul, it may turn out that they can have the best experiences during the thirteen days of the Christmas season, when, without us realizing it, the experiences arise from the soul, although the modern person is already so emancipated from external events that the occult experiences can come at any time. But in so far as the external can nevertheless have an influence, the time between Christmas and New Year is the most important.

Thus we are reminded in a very natural way by this poem how much of what we could mention when discussing the time between death and the next birth was still quite close to certain areas of the world relatively recently, as some people still knew from direct experience.

by Marie Steiner

Rudolf Steiner's work ¹ points out that in ancient times there were mysteries, initiations through which human souls were elevated to participate in spiritual life. The impulses that originated there led to the great ancient cultures that are known to us today. There, secret knowledge was cultivated, the science of the spirit, which was in full bloom in those times and had the polytheistic religions as its outer expression. The advisors of the kings and the great leaders destined to form new cultures emerged from them. Within the becoming and passing away and clashing of peoples, their wisdom treasures formed the unifying bond. The results of each culture were guarded and preserved for the progress of humanity and passed on from generation to generation. They formed a second current alongside that which flowed directly from spiritual sources, but which faded from the consciousness of the majority of people to the same extent that knowledge of physical things gained in scope and precision. The soul lost the memory of its origin. There came a time when not only a single nation, but all of humanity would have fallen into decadence if the Christ event had not taken place.

Presenting the significance of the Christ event for the revival of humanity in its entirety is the task to which Rudolf Steiner dedicated his life. To do this, he had to draw on all the knowledge that human beings have acquired to date, and shine a light into all areas of this knowledge, the revealed and also the secret ones. The secret included the forgotten old mysteries: here, in a figurative sense, the debris under which they lay had to be cleared away, just as archaeologists do at the ancient buried temple sites. Above all, however, it was important to salvage the living substance that still permeated the mystery knowledge, which was based on ancient tradition but was increasingly ossifying or decaying in its human representatives. Ancient wisdom, without revival through the impact of Christianity, without an understanding of this greatest of mysteries, could only lead to aberrations over time.

Rudolf Steiner had a comprehensive insight into these interrelationships through the spiritual science he philosophically founded and organically developed. That is why he considered it his task in our time to make his knowledge accessible to them when he was approached by such circles, whether they are traditionally or newly inspired, who cultivate ancient secret science. He never sought out such circles, but where they asked for enlightenment and instruction, he did not refuse to give it to them. This was his service to humanity.

He initially rejected the efforts of representatives of the Theosophical Society, who would have liked to see him in their ranks, because the Theosophical Society worked in a one-sided orientalizing direction and in many cases in a scientifically dilettantish or psychically phenomenalist direction. In particular, however, it lacked the foundations for the knowledge of true Christian esotericism. It was only when the German Theosophists wanted to found an independent section under his leadership and thus also on the basis of Western Christian esotericism that he felt obliged not to withdraw this request.

When, after a number of years, Annie Besant, who later became president of the Theosophical Society, tried to prevent this work for a living Christianity, the Anthroposophical Society was founded and separated from the Theosophical Society. Rudolf Steiner describes the details of this process in his autobiography, “My Life Course”.

The other proposal came from the side that traditionally cultivates medieval Christian esotericism based on the ancient wisdom of the mysteries. It emphasizes the fact that its historical continuity goes back to the times when occult knowledge was cultivated in the ancient Egyptian temples. In the course of the centuries, these circles, with their many ramifications, took up whatever seemed spiritually appropriate and beneficial to them from the most diverse mystical currents, especially through the impulses of the Crusades, the masons' guilds, etc. They preserved themselves under various names as freemason federations, orders of illuminati, etc. But in the course of time the majority of them increasingly distanced themselves from their original knowledge and goals, then fell prey to rationalism and often to atheism, and gradually became associations that were partly political, partly commercial, and partly charitable. The disappointment grew ever greater for those who allowed themselves to be admitted to these associations in order to gain knowledge from the spirit there. Again and again, such disappointed people approached Rudolf Steiner to tell him that only now, through his publicly advocated spiritual science, had they found access to what was behind the symbols that no one understood. Many complained that they were serving falsehood by reciting traditional formulas that professed belief in a divine spirit, but were completely skeptical about their content. And one could encounter a great longing to experience something of the seriousness that must once have been associated with the old cultic customs. Freemasonry revealed itself as a declining tradition of the past, whose outer organism could be seized by opposing forces, and indeed had already been to a large extent.

But that which had remained true in these millennia-old endeavors, their spiritual content, which could not be killed, could and had to continue to serve the renewal of humanity in a transformed form. This was the task that Rudolf Steiner saw himself confronted with when a proposal was made to him from within those circles to found an independent organization by means of a historically and legally documented link. This proposal was made by a spiritually striving person who had come to believe that Rudolf Steiner knew more about spiritual matters than all of them put together. The proposal was then formalized by a party that was certainly more concerned with practical benefits and had a highly indifferent attitude towards spiritual matters. It was not Rudolf Steiner's task to snoop into this man's past, as it was not his intention to maintain relations with him. Not only the titled representatives of secret societies, but also those of ecclesiastical and other institutions often prove to be unworthy of their office. The fact that, as can now be seen from their writings, the various Masonic orders do not recognize each other is something that they probably have in common with other human institutions, and which requires a great deal of time and effort and also legal sophistry to investigate. Rudolf Steiner, however, had to take into account what is of decisive importance for every representative of spiritual truths: historical ties to an ancient and venerable spiritual current, even if its forms change over time, in order to protect it from decadence as far as possible. Its truth content could, if he agreed, be awakened to new life and, corresponding to the cognitive powers of the time, made subservient to the progress of humanity. In the language of the consciousness soul, the old symbols could revive and take hold of all of humanity in the possibilities of revelation through art.

Rudolf Steiner set one condition. He would carry out the historical-legal connection within the degree offered to him, through which he was allowed to continue the work independently, but that should exhaust the relationship. Not a single further claim could be made, neither in terms of collaboration nor in terms of human, social or organizational relationships. Nothing but an external, in no way binding formality should be carried out, not a single joint activity should take place! The newly founded and completely independent group, which was made up of those Theosophists who longed to approach this kind of Western esotericism, was introduced to the old symbols, first in their pictorial meaning, then more and more in their inner essence, until they had been digested in consciousness. In this way they were rescued from the mystical twilight and made accessible to artistic and scientific life. When war broke out in August 1914, Steiner dissolved the working group that had come together under the name Mystica Aeterna, and tore up the document that had been drawn up for it. ² They never met again in this way.

This is a precise explanation of the apparent contradiction that some people claim that Rudolf Steiner was a high-ranking Freemason, while others claim that he never belonged to the Freemasons at all. Rudolf Steiner never had any connection with the Freemasons. He is completely foreign to these communities and is even strongly opposed by them, because from the beginning of his theosophical-anthroposophical work, he had revealed in his teachings what they regard as their secrets, which give them weight and prestige. He reveals esoteric knowledge because humanity needs it, because it is a need of the time. But at the same time, he unlocks the understanding for it. In order to legitimately fill the old symbols with new life in a formally constituted working group that ties in with the historical current, he carried out an external contract and stood completely apart from any contact with Freemason brothers. Thus the term 'high-grade brother', which the enemies like to throw around, has been de facto misleading ever since it was no longer possible for them to make him a Jew. Since Rudolf Steiner had no connection whatsoever with any Masonic order, but this term is intended to create the impression that he belonged to these organizations, the aim is to create a misleading impression. The aim of this deception is to prevent people from engaging with the spiritual science founded and developed by Rudolf Steiner. If they were to do so, the contrast to Freemasonry would soon become apparent. Rudolf Steiner, realizing that the spiritual nature of today's human beings can no longer inwardly affirm the mystery and that the mystery must be revealed, set forth his spiritual science in full public view.

In it, he has made possible a true understanding of Christianity and provided the way and the method by which the human being of today can fulfill his life's duties through an understanding of spiritual facts. How this spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner, which is not cultivated in secret circles and from a power-political point of view, but in full public view, is received in the consciousness of the present, will be of decisive importance for the destiny of the next era.

Marie Steiner,
née v. Sivers

Three Additional Versions of the essay “Was Rudolf Steiner a Freemason?”

I

It is very difficult to assert that Dr. Steiner had nothing to do with the Masonic movement. Dr. Steiner himself says that on page... of his “Life Course”.

The Masonic movement itself is a movement that has splintered into many organizations and fallen into decadence. It originally emerged from those currents that were still connected to the ancient wisdom of the mysteries. The original stream has been diverted into many tributaries and canals. They have all undergone their various fates and have partly strayed quite far from their original goal, the pursuit of knowledge.

Dr. Steiner's endeavor has now been to uncover the pure sources of the esoteric teachings again, to let them flood before our soul's gaze in their historical course, to free them from the debris that has gradually settled in them, to show how, despite debris and periodic cloudiness, the pure original forces have again and again sought new paths to give their invigorating, progress-inducing effect to humanity. Rudolf Steiner places the Mystery of Golgotha at the center of humanity's spiritual-historical development, with the power that we know from his writings and lectures. All ancient mystery wisdom tended towards this climax; all subsequent mystery wisdom, revived and reborn through this power current, wrestled for the means, prepared the paths by which not only the yearning of the heart of humanity could be satisfied in a religious way, but also the understanding of the Christ impulse within humanity could gradually be developed.

Rudolf Steiner devoted his life to this task to the highest degree. He worked creatively and impulsively in all three areas, which used to be a unity in the time of the cultures inaugurated by the mysteries: the religious, the artistic, and the scientific. He gave advice and support to all people who sought it in these areas, without distinction of the social context from which they might have come. Many earnestly striving Freemasons were delighted to recognize that in the Anthroposophy represented by Rudolf Steiner a light was given that opened up an understanding for much of what was offered to them in their lodges in the form of images and signs as a traditionally adopted ritual. They began to understand better what might be meant by this. There were also those who suffered greatly from the temptations that some organizations had fallen into, to which their destiny had led them. They looked around for help. Out of such an impulse, a request was made to Rudolf Steiner to attempt to found an organization that could work out the pure basic principles of esoteric striving, free of all the accumulated confusion of the centuries. The way in which this came about resulted from the existing conditions, which were so very unsatisfactory. When organizations go to rack and ruin, the fault lies with the inadequacy of the people working in them, especially those placed at their head. This was the case here in a rather alarming way, and Rudolf Steiner wanted nothing to do with associations that were under such leadership.

That was the condition he set when he agreed to make a historically documented connection, by which he undertook to make financial contributions in return for absolute freedom and independence in the organization of a work that aimed to gradually lift the obscuring veils from the symbolic customs, which were now to be grasped by the forces of clear consciousness. Thus he did what he was constantly doing through his Anthroposophy: in the gradual removal of mystical veils and in the solid building up of the powers of the mind, which, through reason, increase to wisdom, he carried out the duty of the present-day human being to gain knowledge.

In doing so, he did something that he considered his duty to humanity. For him, it was a new burden, an offering. But every sacrifice also has its positive effect in the spiritual sense, in that new sources of knowledge open up to those who willingly take on the burden. And perhaps Rudolf Steiner would not have been able to utter many a word of warning, deeply rooted in truth, about the dangers of today's secret organizations if he had not included this, albeit from afar, in his general study of contemporary social phenomena. It led him to emphasize even more sharply and clearly than before that secret societies could no longer exist today, that the present state of development of humanity could no longer tolerate them.

Like every science, spiritual science also requires a gradual build-up, a step-by-step development of the powers of reason in order to lead to spiritual knowledge. In this sense, one cannot expect the beginner and the novice to have an understanding of the higher levels of knowledge. They must gradually open up to his consciousness, like the higher areas of mathematics, which are also still a secret to the beginner.

Rudolf Steiner's work is a public offering to humanity that leads step by step to higher knowledge. It lies spread out before us in his writings, lectures and artistic creations and has nothing to do with secret organizations, not even with masonic ones. The explanations he gave of time-honored signs and symbols have long since been superseded by the spiritual research results that he left behind in countless works for the human mind and for the human ego, which is called upon to be alert and wants to be alert.

II

Anyone who would take the trouble to study Rudolf Steiner's works without prejudice will soon see that here knowledge of spiritual things is being revealed that truly needs seek no other sources than those that open up to the inner self. He had assimilated school and university knowledge in a comprehensive way. Knowledge about the manifold conditions of life and its social interrelationships was brought by the alert eye for the things of life and the many relationships in which life placed him. They approached him, he did not seek them, did not need to seek them, because they were sought after him, because he had more to give than others, and because he gave with love, never with arrogance or reserve. He did not reject anything that approached him; even if it was inferior, “he alone weighed the good in souls and let evil find its atonement in the course of world justice”.¹ But he drew a sharp line at the effectiveness of evil and did not allow it to undermine the circles he was responsible for.

This attitude of mind explains, on the one hand, his tremendous forbearance and mildness, his willingness to help and his unconditional compassion, and, on the other hand, his ironclad rejection of all persistently harmful elements.

This is my attempt to explain why he did not immediately turn out anyone who was morally displeasing to him and did not allow any leeway for his influence. On the contrary, he tried to lead astray the erring and keep the right path by positive action. That was why he took upon himself the life of the Theosophical Society and why he did not reject the offer, made to him on the basis of his higher knowledge, to found an independent branch of high-grade Freemasonry. The Grand Master of that order made a thoroughly fatal impression; with him one could have nothing to do other than pay the usual fees in those circles. It was a short ceremony, after which the certificate was issued, which Rudolf Steiner tore up at the beginning of the war.

Perhaps this only paper connection gave him the opportunity to better understand many things inwardly, which he then repeatedly expressed in his lectures as a warning and to steer the formation of judgment in the right direction. Outwardly, he never had any connection with any order; there was never a joint meeting, never a joint discussion. Therefore, it is an objective untruth when, in a book such as... by Huber ², and in inflammatory writings of a lower caliber, the connection between Rudolf Steiner and Freemasonry is pointed out in a tendentious way. All the grand titles are listed. Well, he did not strive for them; it is the custom of masons to bestow the most supreme, most sovereign, most illustrious, etc. titles upon themselves; this is part of the tradition, the convention, and is in itself comical today, especially since for most only this empty shell remains. But that is precisely why a serious person and a person who knows is concerned about saving the core, which is being crushed and petrified by this shell. For Rudolf Steiner, only the core matter was important. That is why he was also completely indifferent to the extent to which the various orders recognized each other or not; whether the one offering him the certificate was a so-called secondary organization, a lodge in the shadows, or not. He wanted nothing to do with any organization. This was the strict condition to which Mr. Reuss, adorned with many titles, submitted. Rudolf Steiner knew before anyone else that the time of medieval and modern masonry had passed. He came before the world with the unveiling of occult truths because man needs them and because working in secret has led to abuses. But there is a power in the time-honored symbols, and they need not be abandoned because of outward decadent phenomena. They can be saved and preserved for humanity through art, for example. This is what Rudolf Steiner did. In his mystery poems, in his building, in some of the works of his students, this metamorphosis has become life and thus been made fruitful for humanity. This is the eternal value of the truths that must be saved from the decay of the outer form. Continuity in change. This is the justification for Rudolf Steiner's approach, which he faced as a duty.

The tendentious nature of the lies associated with this smear campaign is obvious. The Masons may have a legitimate reason from their point of view to fight against Dr. Steiner and have done so with all their might. The turning of the tables, perhaps also due to their hand, is a clever maneuver that may serve a variety of dark purposes. We do not need to shy away from the full light in this matter.

III

If anyone has recognized and stated at the right time that the time for Freemasonry is over, it is Rudolf Steiner. Not only does his life's work, Anthroposophy, bear witness to this, not only does he express it artistically in his drama (the representatives of the occult society hand over their symbols and step down),³ But in the first days after the outbreak of the world war, he tore up the preserved document as a sign and confirmation of his opinion that the days were over when Freemasonry could still be recognized. In order to be right in his conscience about such a rejection, he had a duty not to avoid contact with it. And how brief was this contact – soon dismissed when it revealed itself in all its hollowness. Such statements are not intended to affect the estimable members in the ranks, who – – – [the text breaks off here].

• 1. Published in “Anthroposophie. Zeitschrift für freies Geistesleben», 16th year, book 3, April-June 1934, Stuttgart, edited by C.S.Picht.
• 2. Anyone who delves into Masonic literature and is concerned with the truth should notice that Rudolf Steiner is never consulted at all (not to mention direct rejections), just as his writings are only represented by three random examples in Wolfstieg's large “Bibliography of Masonic Literature” 1911-1926, which, with 54,320 numbers, covers the entire holdings of the Masonic lodge libraries, only three random copies are represented (out of over 200 of his book-shaped publications!) - Likewise, an “expert” should be aware of how much such designations as Misraim, Memphis, O.T. O (Oriental Order of Templars) [see “Some Notes” under “Egyptian Masonry”] and the like, which the document mentioned and which were for Rudolf Steiner shells robbed of their essence, have long since become mere names.
• 1. Words of the Grand Master in Rudolf Steiner's second mystery drama “The Testing of the Soul” (1911).
• 2. Engelbert Huber, “Freimaurerei. Weltmacht hinter den Kulissen” (“Freemasonry. World Power Behind the Scenes”), Stuttgart 1934.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's third mystery drama “The Guardian of the Threshold”, 10th scene (1912).

Dr. Steiner: Before I leave, we need to discuss the fate of the fifth grade, and I would also like to hear about your experiences.

The teachers who went to England will tell you about their experiences themselves. Haven’t you already reported your successes? It is a fact that the teachers’ activities made a great impression; seen from behind the scenes, each Waldorf teacher is a person who made a great impression. Everyone did that individually.

Baravalle made an enormously deep impression with his presentation of the metamorphosis of surfaces, which merges into the Pythagorean theorem. Miss Lämmert’s presentation on teaching music also made a very deep impression. Dr. Schwebsch then made an impression through his knowledge and ability, and Dr. Schubert was very convincing about the truth of the Waldorf School as a whole. We must, of course, say the same about Dr. von Heydebrand, an impression so large that most people said they would like to have their children taught by such a person. That was the impression she made. Miss Röhrle was more active behind the scenes, and I think she could tell you about her success herself.

Is the last issue of The Goetheanum here? I would like to recommend that you all read the book by Miss MacMillan, Education through the Imagination. In my copy, I wrote something I did not include in my essay: “It is as though someone were very capable of describing the dishes on the table without knowing how they were prepared in the kitchen.” What is so interestingly described in the book is the surface, an analysis of the surface of the soul, at least to the extent that it develops imaginative forces, but she does not describe the work that gives rise to them. It is excellent as a description of the child’s soul, only she does not understand the forces that give rise to it. I think that if you apply the foundation anthroposophy offers, it would illuminate everything. Every anthroposophist can gain a great deal from that book because a great deal of anthroposophy can be read into it. It is a sketch everyone can develop wonderfully for themselves—it is a reason for working thoroughly with anthroposophy.

Miss MacMillan would like to come with some assistants at Christmas. I would ask that you treat her kindly. For some, she is one of the most important pedagogical reformers. If you go into her school, you will see a great deal, even if the children are not present. She is a pedagogical genius. She wants to arrange things so that she will see some of your teaching. I already told her that if she looks at our school without seeing the teaching, she will get nothing from it.

We had planned the Zurich course, but when Wachsmuth and I came back from England and heard that it was being seriously undertaken, we both nearly fainted. We will need to change it to Easter. We will also present an Easter play for the first time. I have already arranged for that. It will be at Easter. Perhaps the teachers who were in England would like to say something.

A teacher asks whether such things as sewing cards are proper to use at the age of twelve for developing the strengths of geometry.

Dr. Steiner: That is correct. After twelve, they would be too much like a game. I would never use things at school that do not exist in real life. The children cannot develop a relationship to life from things that contain nothing of life. The Fröbel things were created for school. We should create nothing for school alone. We should bring only things that exist in real life into school, but in an appropriate form.

Some teachers report about their impressions of England.

Dr. Steiner: You need to take into account that the English do not understand logic alone, even if it is poetic. They need everything to be presented in concrete pictures. As soon as you get into logic, English people cannot understand it. Their mentality is such that they understand only what is concrete.

A teacher thought that the people organized through improvisation. He had the impression they were at the limits of their capabilities.

Dr. Steiner: All the anthroposophists and a number of other guests drove from Wales to London. All of the participants were from Penmaenmawr. There was an extra train from Penmaenmawr. We had two passenger cars and a luggage car. The train left late so it could go quickly. The conductor came along, and the luggage was still outside. Wachsmuth said it needed to be put aboard. The passengers saw to it that the train waited. That is something that is not possible in Germany. At some stations there was a lot of disorder. Here, people don’t know what happens, and there you have to go to the luggage car yourself. In Manchester, two railway companies meet, and the officials there had a small war. One group did not want to take us aboard, and the other wanted to get rid of us. They often lose the luggage but then find it again. These private companies have some advantages, but also disadvantages. No trains leave from such stations on Sunday because the same people who own the hotels also own the railways. People have to stay over until Monday because there are no trains on Sunday. I discussed the inner aspects of Penmaenmawr in a lecture.

A teacher: In England they spoke about the position of women in ancient Greece and how women were not treated as human beings. Schuré describes the Mysteries in which women apparently played a major role.

Dr. Steiner: Women as such certainly played a role, particularly those chosen for the Mysteries. They were, however, women who did not have their own families. Women who had their own family were never brought into public life. Children were raised at home, so everyone assumed women would not participate in public life. Until the child was seven, he or she knew almost nothing of public life, and fathers saw their children only rarely. They hardly knew them.

It was a different way of life that was not seen as less valuable. The women chosen for the Mysteries often played a very important role. Then there were those like Aspasia.

We need to divide the fifth grade. I would have liked to have a male teacher, if for no other reason than that people say we are filling the faculty only with women. However, since we don’t have an overwhelming majority of women and the situation is still relatively in balance, and, in fact, I was unable to find a man, we can do nothing else. As I was looking around for someone capable, I put together some statistics. I looked at how things are. It is the case that in middle schools women have a greater capacity. Men are more capable only in the subjects that are absolutely essential, whereas women can teach throughout. Men are less capable. That is one of the terrible things of our times. Thus, there was nothing to do other than to hire this young woman. I think she will make a good teacher. She did her dissertation on a remark in one of my lectures about how Homer begins with “Sing me, Muse, of the man,” and on something from Klopstock, “Sing, undying soul!” The 5c class will thus be taken over by Dr. Martha Häbler. I think she is quite industrious. I want you, that is, the two fifth grade teachers, to make some proposals about which children we should move from the current classes into the new class. We will take children from both classes. Dr. Häbler will be visiting, and I will introduce her when I come on the tenth. She will immediately become part of the faculty and will participate in the meetings.

That leads me to a second question. I am going to ask Miss Klara Michels to take over the 3b class. I have asked Mrs. Plinke to go to Miss Cross’s school in Kings Langley.

The gardening teacher asks whether they should create class gardens.

Dr. Steiner: I have nothing against that. Until now the garden work has been more improvised. Write something up. It can go into the curriculum.

The science teacher: From teaching botany, I have the feeling that we should grow plants in the garden that we will study in botany.

Dr. Steiner: That is possible. In that way there will be more of a plan in the garden.

A teacher asks about handwork.

Dr. Steiner: Mrs. Molt can turn over her last two periods in handwork to Miss Christern.

Since we have let a number of things go, I would ask you to present them now.

I would like you to take a serious look at S.T. He is precocious. He is very talented and also quite reasonable, but you always have to keep him focused. I gave him a strong reminder that he needs to take an interest in his school subjects. He has read Plato, Kant, and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom. He pretty much has his mind made up. If you think he needs some extra help, he should receive it. He would prefer that you analyze esoteric science for him. He has gone from school to school and was in a cloister school first. He will be a hard nut to crack.

A teacher asks about a second conference for young people and also about lectures for anthroposophical teachers outside the Waldorf School.

Dr. Steiner: We are planning another conference for young people, but you will need to decide how you want it. It is all the same to me, as I can adjust my lectures accordingly.

It would be good if we arranged to have lectures just for the teachers of the Waldorf School during the school year. That would be good. But it does not appear possible during the holidays. I don’t know about such a conference when so many deadly thoughts fly around between such beautiful ones. Those four days were terrible. Such conferences are not very useful for what we need here at school.

It seems to me, and I think we should discuss this, as though a somewhat different impulse is living here. That is what I think. I believe that an entirely new feeling of responsibility will arise out of the seriousness with which the pedagogy was taken up in England. That clearly indicates that we must develop very strong forces. I certainly think we need something. From the perspective of the entirety of Waldorf pedagogy, it would be desirable for us to speak about the effects of moral and religious impulses upon other subjects. We should speak about direct teaching experience, which we could do more easily at a youth conference. The youth conference will have open meetings. I think that is easier than if we have a conference where people sit from morning until evening. I will be here again from the tenth to the fourteenth of October, so we can plan to speak about this question in more detail then. Other than your participation, you will not have much to do with that conference. Since today’s youth want to be let loose, I think I will not have very much to do with such a conference either. It might be possible to have no school during those days, so that it would be easy to give a lecture.

I cannot easily be here at any other time; I have too many things to do. If we are to build, I must be in Dornach. During the fall holidays, we can speak about higher pedagogical questions, but only Waldorf teachers can attend. The public could attend the conference. We could arrange things so that everyone gets something from the conference, the parents as well as the teachers, but what they receive would be different. If I can present everything I have to say as something living, it will be that way.

(Speaking about a newly hired teacher, X.) I was satisfied with the periods I observed. He is really serious about the work and has found his way into the material well. The students understand him, but he needs some guidance. I have not allowed him here today because I wanted to say that. He needs to feel that you are all behind him. He needs to remain enthusiastic, which he is very much so now.

The music teacher asks about presenting rhythms in music that are different from those in eurythmy. He uses the normal rhythms and would like to know whether only the two-, three-, and four-part rhythms are important, or whether he should go on to five- and seven-part.

Dr. Steiner: Use five- and seven-part rhythms only with the older children, not under fifteen years old. I think if you did it with children under fifteen, it would confuse their feeling for music. I can hardly imagine that those who do not have the talent to become musicians would learn it alone. It is sufficient to go only up to four-part rhythm. You need to be careful that their musical feeling remains transparent as long as possible, so that they can experience the differences. It will not be that way once they have learned seven-part rhythm. There are certainly pedagogical advantages when the children actively participate in conducting—they participate dynamically, but everyone should do that. You can use the standard conductor’s movements.

The music teacher: Until now, I have only done that with all of them together. Should I allow individuals to conduct in the lower grades?

Dr. Steiner: I think that could begin around age nine or ten. Much of what is decisive during that period comes out of the particular relationship that develops when one child stands as an individual before the group. That is also something we could do in other subjects; for example, in arithmetic one child could lead the others in certain things. That is something we could easily do there, but in music it becomes an actual part of the art itself. A teacher asks about the order of the eurythmy figures.

Dr. Steiner: I had them set up so that the vowels were together, then the consonants, and then a few others. There are twenty-two or twenty-three figures.

You could, of course, put the related consonants together, in other words, not just alphabetically. It would be best to feel the letter you are working with and not be completely dependent upon some order. You should perceive it more qualitatively, not simply as a series of one next to the other.

If this were not such a terribly difficult time, I believe there would be a great deal living here. The difficulties are now more subtle. Before the children have learned a specific gesture, they cannot connect any concept with the figure, but the moment they learn the gesture, you should relate it to the figure. They must recognize the relationship in such a way that they will understand the movement, not just the character and feeling. The feeling is expressed through the veils, but the children are too young for veils. Character is something you can gradually teach them after they have formed an inner relationship to the movement. When they understand what the principle behind the figures is, that will have a favorable effect upon the teaching of eurythmy. Over time, they will develop an artistic feeling; when you can help develop that, you should do so.

How is the situation in the 9b class?

A teacher: T.L. has left.

Dr. Steiner: That is too bad.

A teacher: L.A. in the fourth grade is stealing and lying. She also has a poor memory.

Dr. Steiner: She is lying because she wants to hide that. It would be good if, and this always helps, you could dictate a little story to her so that she would have to learn it very well. The story should be about a child who steals and then gets into an absurd situation. Earlier, I gave such stories to parents. Make up a little story in which a child ends up in an absurd situation due to the course of events, so that this child will no longer want to steal. You can make up various stories; they could be bizarre or even grotesque. Of course, this helps only when the child carries it in a living way, when she has to review it in her soul time and again. The child should commit the story to memory just as she knows the Lord’s Prayer, so that the story lives within her and she can always bring it forth from her memory. If you can do that, that would really help. If one story is not enough, you should do a second. This is also something you can do in class. It would hurt nothing if others also hear it. The child should repeat it again and again. Others can be around, but they do not need to memorize it. You should not say why you are doing it, don’t speak with the children about it at all. The mother should know only that it will help her child. The child should not know that, and the class, absolutely not. The child should learn in a very naïve way what the story presents. For her sister, you could shorten the story and tell it to her again and again. With L.A., you could do it in class, but the others do not need to memorize it.

A teacher asks whether an eighteen-year-old girl who is deaf and dumb can come to the Waldorf School.

Dr. Steiner: There is nothing to say against it. However, it would be good if she remained at the commercial art school and took some additional classes here, for instance, art or eurythmy. She is completely deaf. An association can develop just as well with the movements of the limbs as with the movements of the organ of speech.

A teacher asks about the groups of animals and whether that should be brought into connection with the various stages of life.

Dr. Steiner: The children first need to understand the aspects of the human being. What follows is secondary. You can do that after you tell them about the major divisions of the head, rhythmic, and metabolic animals, but you cannot do it completely systematically.

A teacher asks about Th.H. in the fifth grade, who is not doing well in writing.

Dr. Steiner: It is quite clear that with this child certain astral sections of the eye are placed too far forward. The astral body is enlarged, and she has astral nodules before her eyes. You can see that, and her writing shows it also. She transposes letters consistently. That is why she writes, for example, Gsier instead of Gries. I will have to think about the reason. When she is copying, she writes one letter for another. Children at this age do not normally do that, but she does it consistently. She sees incorrectly.

I will need to think about what we can do with this girl. We will need to do something, as she also does not see other things correctly. She sees many things incorrectly. This is in interesting case. It is possible, although we do not want to do an experiment in this direction, that she also confuses a man with a woman or a little boy with an older woman. If this confusion is caused by an incorrect development in the astral plane, then she will confuse only things somehow related, not things that are totally unrelated. If this continues, and we do nothing to help it, it can lead to grotesque forms of insanity. All this is possible only with a particularly strong development of the astral body, resulting in temporary animal forms that again disappear. She is not a particularly wideawake child, and you will notice that if you ask her something, she will make the same face as someone you awaken from sleep. She starts a little, just as someone you awaken does. She would never have been in a class elsewhere, that is something possible only here with us. She would have never made it beyond the first grade. She is a very interesting child.

A teacher: Someone wants to make a brochure with pictures of the Waldorf School.

Dr. Steiner: I haven’t the slightest interest in that. If we did that, we would have The Coming Day print it. If we wanted such a brochure, we would publish it ourselves. Aside from that, we cannot go so far as to create competition for our own companies. It would be an impossible situation to undermine our own publisher by having publications printed somewhere else. Under certain circumstances, it could cause quite a commotion. Considering the relationship between the Waldorf School and The Coming Day, it would not be very upright. If we were to make such a brochure, I see no reason why we should not have it published by The Coming Day. We would earn more that way. For now, though, it would not be right.

Did one of the classes go swimming? I am asking because that terrible M.K. who complains about everything also wrote me a letter complaining about the school. I didn’t read it all. He is one of those sneaky opponents we cannot keep out, who are always finding things out. He is the one I was speaking of when I said it is not possible to work bureaucratically in our circles as is normally done, by having a list and sending things to the people on it. The Anthroposophical Society needs to be more personal, and we do not need to send people like M.K. everything. We need to be more human in the Anthroposophical Society. I mean that in regard to how we proceed, whether we are bureaucratic about deciding whether to send something to someone or not. He just uses the information to create a stir and to complain. He complains with an ill intent, even though he is a member.

My dear friends!

This morning the anthroposophical movement has suffered a great loss and experienced a great pain. Our dear friend Georga Wiese from Norway has passed away from the physical plane. It can fill us with a deep sense of tragedy when we consider that Georga Wiese worked intensively at the Goetheanum for many years, even after it had been destroyed. Many of the forms of the old Goetheanum were created with her hands. She had come here again and again, becoming dear and beloved to many, and felt the Goetheanum as her second home alongside her beloved Nordic homeland. She came here for our Christmas Conference to share her enthusiasm and her inner devotion to the anthroposophical cause, always marked by a willingness to make sacrifices and by joy in making them. Before she was able to participate in the conference, before it began, she had an accident, broke her upper arm, and had to be taken to hospital. Due to complications that can easily arise at that age, she then developed lung damage. This morning, a pulmonary embolism ended this physical plan of this life, which was so valuable to us and to the entire anthroposophical movement. With a glimpse into the spiritual world, hoping to be able to participate in what was to happen in her heart, she could still be found on the day before last, as she was dying.

We, my dear friends, follow her soul, which remains united with us. We want to remain united with this soul and know that the gentleness, beauty and love of her spirit are truly present here in this hall, where she sat so often and devotedly cultivated anthroposophy with us.

When we are to accompany the dear soul on her ascent to the spiritual worlds, when we are to follow her on her last journey on earth, that has yet to be announced. First, arrangements will have to be made to either bring her relatives from Norway here or to follow their instructions.

But today, my dear friends, let us rise from our seats in faithful remembrance of our dear friend and in the knowledge that we want to follow her soul with our thoughts to those goals, which, according to her whole nature, will certainly be great and good, in order to honor her memory.

Reflections on the Michael Thought in its True Aspect—the Regeneration of the Michael Festival.

At Michaelmas, 1923, for the last time in his earthly life Rudolf Steiner was able to celebrate fully a Michaelmas festival, and this he did in Vienna, the capital city of his own homeland, where he had spent so many fruitful years in his youth. Much of Germany, including Berlin, was cut off from him in that year of uncontrolled inflation but here in Vienna he could feel himself truly at home, as he refounded the Anthroposophical Society in Austria and gave these wonderful lectures on the human Gemüt.

In his Christmas letter to the members that forms part of the Michael Mystery Rudolf Steiner in 1924 emphasized in a single marvelously compressed paragraph the task of man especially in the middle period of the age of the consciousness soul in which we are now living.

“In its essential nature the Spiritual Soul (Consciousness Soul) is not cold. It seems to be so only at the commencement of its unfolding, because at that stage it can only reveal the light-element in its nature, and not as yet the cosmic warmth in which it has indeed its origin.”

This cosmic warmth must now be breathed out by men into their observing of the external world. Not only must we understand the world objectively after the manner of the scientist, but we must enter into this understanding with our life of feeling, and thus wrest the world from Ahriman's clutches, filling it with the Christ forces working from within ourselves. In this short cycle, as also in the two public lectures (Supersensible Knowledge as a Demand of the Age, and Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life) Steiner describes just how it is possible to enter into the external world with love, endowing it with soul-warmth, in the process learning also to celebrate a new kind of autumn festival in which Michael can truly participate. As soon as he returned to Dornach from Vienna, Steiner gave the five Archangel lectures (The Four Seasons and the Archangels), to which these four are a soul-warming introduction that he could perhaps never have given elsewhere than in the gemütlich city of Vienna.

Stewart C. Easton

In the last lecture we dealt with the sense of speech, and today we will examine the sense of concept. The term “concept” is, of course, not intended here as pure concept, but in its everyday meaning. That is, I hear a word spoken and I visualize its meaning. This sense could also be called the sense of visualization.¹ In order to understand how this sense comes about we must glance back once more to the sense of tone or hearing and to the sense of speech or sound, asking ourselves what it means “to have a sense of speech.” How does the perception of sound² come about? What particular process takes place when we perceive a sound like “a” or “i”? To grasp this we must understand the apparatus of sound perception, and we will give a few indications that you will be able to substantiate later.

In music we distinguish between the single tone, the melody, and the harmony. Harmony implies perception of tones occurring simultaneously, melody calls for the mental co-ordination of a sequence of tones. The mechanism of sound perception can be comprehended by studying the relation between the tonal element in sound and sound itself.

Suppose we could raise into consciousness what we accomplish subconsciously in perceiving sound. We would then no longer be dealing merely with a sense perception but with a judgment, with the formation of a concept. If we were able, in hearing a melody, so to crowd the single tones in time as to perceive them simultaneously, to cause past and future to coincide; if in the middle of a melody we already knew what was to follow, knew this so vividly as to draw the future into the present, then we would have consciously converted the melody into a harmony. We are not able to do that, but what we cannot execute consciously actually takes place unconsciously in the sense of sound. When we hear an “a” or an “i” or other sounds, a subconscious activity momentarily transforms a melody into a harmony. That is the secret of sound; it is melody transformed into harmony. This marvelous subconscious activity proceeds in approximately the same way as the various refractions in the eye are carried out according to physical laws, which is another process we can call to consciousness after it has taken place.

But this subconscious activity that instantly converts a melody into a harmony is not enough; something more is needed if the sound is to come forth. A musical tone is not a simple thing. A tone is a musical tone only by virtue of its harmonics³ (overtones) that sound with it, however faintly, in contrast to noises, which have no harmonics. In a harmony, therefore, we hear not only the separate tones but the harmonics of each tone as well. Accordingly, if we crowd a melody into a harmony, we have not only the separate notes of the melody crowded into simultaneity, but the harmonics of each note as well. Now, the final step. Through the agency of that subconscious activity, the attention of the soul must be distracted from the fundamental tones of the melody. These must in a sense be aurally disregarded, and only the harmony created by the harmonics be comprehendingly heard. A sound comes into being when a melody is transformed into harmony and then the fundamentals disregarded, attention being directed exclusively to that harmony of the harmonics. What these harmonics then yield is the sound “a,” “i,” etc. In this way we have explained sound perception as taking place in the same way that sight does in the eye.

The next question is difficult but important. How does the perception of visualization come about? How does it happen that when we hear a word we understand its meaning by means of the word itself? That this is a question by itself can be seen from the fact that in different languages the same thing is designated by different sounds. While the sound we hear is a different one in every language (amor and Liebe), it nevertheless points the path to an identical underlying conception. Whether the word used is amor or Liebe, it appeals to the sense of visualization underlying it. This underlying sense of visualization is always uniform, regardless of all the differences in the sound formations. But now, how is this perceived?

In studying this process, the perception of visualizations or conceptions, we should keep in mind our premise that conceptions reach us by way of sounds. To enable a conception to come about, attention must be still further diverted; the whole harmonic series must be ignored. At the moment when the soul as well is unconsciously distracted from the harmonics, we perceive what has incorporated in the sounds, what pertains to them as conception or visualization. This implies that the visualization reaching us through sounds—the visualization that, as something universally human, pervades all sounds and languages—comes to us slightly colored, toned down.

Incorporated in this harmonic series, which creates the timbre and intensity and the various sounds in the different languages, which vibrates into the human organism, are the Folk Spirits. These manifest themselves through the sounds of the language. Language is the mysterious whispering of the Folk Spirits, the mysterious work upon the fluids, that vibrates into our organism through the harmonics. But what underlies the harmonic series is the universal human element, the common spirit of man that suffuses the whole earth. The universal spirit of man can be perceived only when each of us, from his own particular locality, ignoring the harmonics, listens for what is inaudible, for what belongs in the realm of conceptions.

In the course of historical evolution, men did not acquire the capacity to comprehend what is universally human until they learned to recognize common factors by disregarding, as it were, the shades of sounds. Only in our life of conceptions can we begin to grasp the Christ Spirit in His true being. The spiritual beings whose task it is to proclaim Him in manifold forms—His messengers to whom He has assigned their missions and tasks—are the Folk Spirits of the various folk individualities. This thought has found very beautiful expression in Goethe's fragment, Die Geheimnisse.

That will give a picture of what the sense of visualization is, bringing us to an important milestone. We have exhausted what we have in the way of ordinary senses, finally arriving at the study of the subconscious human activity that is able, through the force of the astral body, to push from consciousness even the harmonic series. It is the human astral body that pushes aside this harmonic series as though with tentacles. If we achieve this power over the harmonics, which means nothing else than the ability to ignore them, it signifies increased strength in our astral body.

But even this does not exhaust the capacity of the astral body; it is capable of still higher achievements. In the cases we have so far discussed, the appearance of a visualization has presupposed the overcoming of an outer resistance; something external had to be pushed back. Now we find the astral body to be endowed with still more power when we learn that its astral substance enables it not only to push back what is outside, but also, when there is no outer resistance, to stretch forth, to eject, its astral substance through its own inner strength. If one is able thus to stretch forth the astral tentacles, so to speak, with no resistance present, then there appears what is called spiritual activity; the so-called spiritual organs of perception come into being. When the astral substance is pushed out from a certain part of the head and forms something like two tentacles, man develops what is called the two-petaled lotus flower. That is the imaginative sense, the eleventh.

In proportion to his capacity for stretching out his astral tentacles, man develops other spiritual organs. As his ability to thrust out astral substance increases, he forms a second organ in the vicinity of the larynx, the sixteen-petal lotus flower, the inspirational sense, the twelfth. In the neighborhood of the heart the third organ develops, the twelve-petal lotus flower, the thirteenth, the intuitive sense. These three senses, the imaginative, the inspirational and the intuitive, are additional, astral senses, over and above the physical senses. Beyond these there are still higher, purely spiritual senses, but let them here be merely mentioned.

The question now arises as to whether these three astral senses are active only in more highly developed, clairvoyant people, or has the ordinary human being anything that can be called an activity of these senses? The answer is that everybody has them, but there is a difference. In clairvoyants these senses operate by stretching out like tentacles, while in ordinary people their effect is inward. At the top of the head, for instance, just where the two-petal lotus flower forms, there are tentacles of this kind that reach inward and cross in the brain. In other words, ordinary consciousness directs them inward instead of outward. All that is outside us we see, but not what is within us. Nobody has seen his own heart or brain, and it is the same with spiritual matters. Not only are these organs not seen, but they do not even enter consciousness. They can therefore not be consciously employed, but they function nevertheless; they are active. Here consciousness makes no decisions whatever regarding reality.

These senses, then, are active. They direct their activity inward, and this impulse directed inward is perceived. When the imaginative sense pours inward there arises what in ordinary life is called outer sensation,⁴ outer perception of something. We can have an outer perception only because what appears in the imaginative sense works its way into us. By means of this imaginative sense we are able to “sense” a color, and that is not synonymous with seeing a color, or analogous to hearing a tone. When we see a color, we say, for instance, it is red. But through the activity of the imaginative sense we can also have a sensation connected with it—that color is beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant.

The inspirational sense also directs its activity inward, and this produces a more complicated sensation: feeling. The entire life of feeling is an activity of the inspirational organ streaming inward.

When the intuitive sense pours inward, thinking proper arises, that is, thought forming. So the order of the processes is: We sense something, we have a feeling connected with it, and we form thoughts about it.

Thus we have ascended from the life of the senses to the soul life. Starting from without, from the sense world, we have seized hold on the soul of man himself in its activities of sentience, feeling and thought. Were we to continue along this path, examining the still higher senses that correspond to the other lotus flowers—they can hardly be called senses any more—the entire higher life of the soul would be revealed to us in their interplay. When, for example, the eight- or ten-petal lotus flower directs its psychic activity inward, a still more delicate soul activity is engendered, and at the end of the scale we find the most subtle one of all which we call pure, logical thought. All this is produced by the working of the various lotus flowers into the inner man. Now, when this inward motion is transformed into an outer motion, when the astral tentacles stretch outward and criss-cross, directing, as so-called lotus flowers, their activity outward, then that higher activity comes into being through which we rise from the soul to the spirit, where what normally appears as our inner life (thinking, feeling and willing) now makes its appearance in the outer world, borne by spiritual beings.

We have arrived at an understanding of the human being by ascending from the senses by way of the soul to what is no longer in him, to spirit acting from without, which belongs equally to man and to surrounding nature, to the whole world. We have ascended to the spirit. As far as we have gone, I have described the human being as an instrument for perceiving the world, experiencing it with his soul and grasping it spiritually. I have not described something finished, but something that is active in man. The whole interplay of forces and activities of the senses, the soul, and the spirit is what shapes the human being as he stands before us on earth. How does this come about? We can give but brief intimations, but such as we find substantiated on all sides.

What we see before us in observing a human being merely with our senses really does not exist at all; it is only an optical illusion. Spiritual-scientific observation actually perceives something quite different. Remember that sensibly we cannot perceive ourselves completely. We see but a part of our surface, never our back or the back of our head, for example. But we know, nevertheless, that we have a back, and we know it by means of the various senses, such as the sense of equilibrium or of motion. An inner consciousness tells us of the parts we cannot perceive externally. Indeed, there is a great deal of us that we cannot perceive unless the appropriate organs are developed.

Let us further consider the portion of the human being that he himself can perceive sensibly—with the eye, for instance—and let us delimit it. Through what agency is he to perceive it? Actually, all that we can see of ourselves with our eyes we perceive through the sentient soul; the sentient body would not be able to perceive it. It is the sentient soul that really comprehends. The portion of the human being that he sees with his eyes, which the sentient soul confronts, is nothing but the image of the sentient body, the outer illusion of the sentient body. We must, of course, extend the concept a bit to cover those portions of the body we can touch though not see, but there, too, we have the image of the sentient body. Perception comes about through other activities of the sentient soul. The latter extends to every point at which outer perception occurs, and what it perceives there is not the sentient soul but the illusion of the sentient body. Could we perceive this, we would see that astrally something endeavors to approach but is pushed back.

This image of the sentient body comes about as follows. From back to front there is co-operation of the sentient soul and the sentient body. When two currents meet, a damming up occurs, and thereby something is revealed. Imagine you see neither current, but only what results from the whirling together of the two. What shows as a result of this impact of the sentient soul thrusting outward and the sentient body pressing inward from without, is the portion of our external corporeality that the eye or other outer sense can perceive. We can actually determine the point on the skin where the meeting of the sentient soul and sentient body occurs. We see how the soul works at forming the body. We can put it this way. There is in the human being a cooperation of the current passing from back to front and the opposite one, resulting in an impact of sentient soul and sentient body.

In addition to these two currents there are those that come from the right and from the left. From the left comes the one pertaining to the physical body; from the right, the one pertaining to the etheric body. These flow into each other and intermingle to a certain extent, and what comes into being at this point is the sensibly perceptible human being, his sensibly perceptible exterior. A perfect illusion is brought about. From the left comes the current of the physical body, from the right that of the etheric body, and these form what appears to us as the sensibly perceptible human being.

In like manner we have in us currents running upward and downward. From below upward streams the main current of the astral body, and downward from above the main current of the ego. The characterization given of the sentient body as being bounded in front should be understood as meaning that it operates in a current upward from below, but that it is then seized by the current running forward from the rear, so that in a certain sense it is thereby bounded.

But the astral body contains not only the one current that runs upward from below as well as forward from the rear, but also the other one running backward from the front; so that the astral body courses in two currents, one upward from below and the other backward from the front. This gives us four intermingling currents in the human being.

What is brought about by the two vertical currents? We have one current running upward from below, and if it could discharge unobstructed we would draw it thus as in the diagram, but this it cannot do. The same is true of the other currents. Each is held up, and in the center, where they act upon each other, they form the image of the physical body.

Actually, it is due to the intersection and criss-crossing of the currents that the threefold organization of man comes into being. Thus the lower portion that we ourselves can see should be designated as the sentient body in the narrower sense. Higher up lies what in the narrower meaning we can call our senses. This portion we can no longer perceive ourselves, because it is the region where the senses themselves are located. You cannot look into your eyes but only out of them, into the world. Here the sentient soul, or its image, is active. The face is formed by the sentient soul. But the two currents must be properly differentiated. The lower currents, streaming from all sides, are held down from above, and this lower part we can designate the sentient body. Below, the impulses proceed largely from without; while above, it is principally the sentient soul that makes itself felt. From above there streams the ego, and at the point where this current is strongest, where it is least pushed back by the other currents, the intellectual soul forms its organ.

Now, in addition to this ego current we have one from left to right and one from right to left. Again the whole activity is intersected. There is further a current running through the longitudinal axis of the body, effecting a sort of split up above. At the upper boundary a portion of the intellectual soul is split off, and this is the form of the consciousness soul. There the consciousness soul is active, extending its formative work into the innermost man. Among other things, it forms the convolutions in the grey matter of the brain.

The nature of this spiritual being helps us to understand what exists in man as form. That is the way in which the spirit works on the form of the human body. It evokes all the organs plastically, as the artist chisels a figure out of stone. The structure of the brain can be comprehended only with the knowledge of how these separate currents interact in man; what we then see is the joint activity of the various principles of the human being.

Now we must go into a few details in order to show how these facts can be fruitful when they will have become the common property of a true science. We have learned that up above there came into being the organs of the consciousness soul, the intellectual soul, and the sentient soul. The ego acts downward from above; the main portion of the astral body, upward from below. In their mutual damming up, a reciprocal action takes place that extends along the whole line, so to speak; it forms the longitudinal axis of the body, and the effect of this will be a different one at every point of the line. When the ego, for instance, is called upon to perform a conscious act, this can only be done at the point where the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, and the consciousness soul have developed their organs. Through the intellectual soul, for example, reasoning comes about, and a judgment must be localized in the head because it is there that the appropriate human forces find expression.

Now let us assume that such an organ is to come into being, but one in which no reasoning takes place, in which the intellectual soul has no part, an organ independent of the work of sentient, intellectual and consciousness souls, in which only the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the ego have a part—an organ in which an impression received from the astral body is immediately followed by the reaction of the ego, without reasoning. Suppose that these four members of the human being—astral body and ego, etheric body and physical body—are to cooperate without any delicate activity such as reasoning or the like. What would be the nature of an organ in which these four currents work together? It would have to be an organ that would not reason. The reaction of the ego would follow directly, without reasoning, upon the impression received by the organ in question from the astral body. That would mean that the ego and the astral body act together. From the astral body a stimulus proceeds to the ego, the ego reacts upon the astral body.

If this is to be a physical organ it must be built up by the etheric body. From the left would come the current of the physical body, from the right, that of the etheric body. They would be dammed up in the middle and a condensation would result.

In addition, the currents of the ego and the astral body, from above and below respectively, would undergo the same process.

If we draw a diagram of such a structure, where in one organ the currents of the physical and etheric bodies are dammed up against those of the ego and astral body, the result is nothing less than the diagram of the human heart with its four chambers:

That is the way the human heart came into being. When we consider all that the human heart achieves—the co-operation of the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the ego—it will be borne in upon us that the spirit had to build the human heart in this way.

Here is another example. We have learned that in visual activity there is really a subconscious thought activity present. Conscious thought activity comes about only in the brain. Well, how must the brain be built in order to make conscious thought activity possible? In the brain we have the outer membrane, then a sort of blood vessel membrane, then the spinal cord fluid, and finally the brain proper. The latter is filled with nerve substance, and when sense impressions are communicated to this nerve substance through the senses, conscious thought activity arises. The nerve substance is the outer expression of conscious thought activity.

When an organ is to be created in which not a conscious but a subconscious reaction to an external impression is to take place, it would have to be built in a similar way. Again there must be a sheath and something like a blood vessel membrane against the back. The spinal cord fluid must dry up and the whole brain mass be pushed back to make room for a subconscious thought activity undisturbed by a nervous system. Were the nerve substance not pushed back, thinking would take place there; when it is pushed back, no thinking can take place. Thus an external impression is first digested by subconscious thinking on the part of those portions not interlaced by the nervous system, and only later does it penetrate to the instrumentality of sentience, feeling and conscious thought.

The result of this pushing back of the brain, so to speak, to the rear wall is that the brain has become an eye. The eye is a small brain so worked over by our spirit that the nerve substance proper is pushed back to the rear wall of the eye and becomes the retina. That is the way nature's architects work. A single plan governs in building really all of the sense organs; it is merely modified in the case of each organ as occasion demands. At bottom, all sense organs are small brains formed in different ways, and the brain is a sense organ of a higher order.

There is one more detail to be studied, but first we will interpolate a few elucidating remarks in the nature of theoretical cognition, which in turn will clarify the standpoint of anthroposophy.

We have said that the standpoint of anthropology lies below, among the details of the sense life, that theosophy stands upon the summit, and anthroposophy half-way between the two. In a general way, anyone can become convinced of the existence of the sense world by means of his senses, and with his mind understand the laws governing there. For this reason most people believe unhesitatingly anything resembling their sense experiences, which can be checked. It could easily be demonstrated that formally there is no difference whatever between the spiritual scientist's statements concerning the existence of spiritual worlds and the belief that there was such a person as Frederick the Great. Formally there is no difference between the belief that there are Spirits of Will and the belief that there was a Frederick the Great. When someone constructs for you the life of Frederick the Great from external data, you believe that there was a person with the attributes set forth. The human being gives credence to what is told him, provided it resembles what he finds in his own environment. The spiritual investigator is not in a position to deal with such things, but it is none the less true that there is no difference in the attitude assumed toward such communications. We have described the standpoints of anthropology and of theosophy. Ours is between the two. A feeling of confidence and faith in theosophy's message is fully justified by our sense of truth; there is such a thing as well-founded acceptance of theosophic truths.

Coming to the third possibility, the standpoint lying between the other two, we find that from this vantage point we can distinguish intelligently that there is a sense perception; I believe because I can see it. There is a spiritual perception; I believe because the spiritual scientist tells me it is there. But there is a third possibility. Here is a hammer; my hand grasps it, picks it up, and raises it from the horizontal to the vertical position. We then say that it was moved and raised by my will. That will not strike anybody as remarkable, for we see the underlying will embodied in the man that raises the hammer. But supposing the hammer were to raise itself up, without being touched by a visibly incorporated will. In that case it would be foolish to imagine such a hammer to be the same as other hammers. We would have to conclude that something invisible was at work in the hammer. What conclusion would we draw from this embodiment of a will or other spiritual force? When I see something in this world acting as it could not act according to our knowledge of the laws of outer form, I am forced to conclude that in this case I do not see the spirit in the hammer, but it is reasonable to believe in it; in fact, I should be a perfect fool not to believe in spiritual activity.

Suppose you are walking with a clairvoyant and encounter a human form lying motionless by the way. With the ordinary senses it might be impossible to determine whether it was a living being or a cardboard dummy, but the clairvoyant would know. He would see the etheric and astral bodies and could say that that is a living being. You would be justified in believing him, even though you could not perceive the etheric and astral bodies yourself. But now the figure stands up, and you see that the spiritual scientist was right. That is the third possibility.

Now I will tell you a case that you can observe and verify in ordinary life—close at hand in one sense, though not in another. We have considered the various currents in the human being and found them to run as follows:

From left to right, the currents of the physical body.
From right to left, those of the etheric body.
From the front backward, those of the sentient body.
From the rear forward, those of the sentient soul.
From above downward, those of the ego.
From below upward, those of the astral body.

The ego, then, acts downward from above; so how would its physical organ have to lie? The physical organ of the ego is the circulating blood; and the ego could not function downward from above without an organ running in the same direction in the human body. Where the main direction of the blood-stream is horizontal, not vertical, there can be no ego, as in men. The main direction of the blood-stream had to raise itself in man to the vertical in order to enable the ego to lay hold on the blood. No ego can intervene where the main blood-stream runs horizontally instead of vertically. The group ego of animals can find no organ in them, because the main blood-line runs horizontally. Through the erection of this line to the vertical in man, the group ego became an individual ego.

This difference between men and the animals shows how erroneous it is to set up a relationship inferred from purely external phenomena. That act of rising from the horizontal to the vertical is an historic incident, but it could no more have taken place without an underlying will, without the co-operation of spirit, than the raising of the hammer could have done. Only when a will, a spiritual force, courses through the blood can the horizontal line pass over into the vertical, can the upright position come about and the group soul rise to become the individual soul. It would be illogical to recognize the spiritual force in one case, that of the hammer, and not in the other, in man.

That is the third possibility, a middle way of conviction, as it were, through which we can verify all theosophic truths. The deeper we penetrate into these matters, the clearer it becomes that this middle path to conviction is universally applicable—this middle way that fructifies ordinary experience through spiritual science. External research will be stimulated by spiritual science. Comparing the results of genuine spiritual-scientific research with outer phenomena, we are forced to the conclusion that all external processes are really comprehensible only if we take into account, without prejudice, the experiences of spiritual science. Thus to observe the world without prejudice, that is the standpoint of anthroposophy. It receives fruitful impulses from above, from theosophy, and from below, from anthropology; it observes the facts of the spiritual world and the things of this world, and explains the latter by means of the former. The building of each of our organs can be explained through spiritual activity, just as we described the transformation of the brain into an eye, and the build of the heart.

By showing how spiritual facts and earthly things are interwoven, how spiritual truths are verified in outer phenomena, anthroposophy leads to the conviction that it is senseless not to acknowledge the higher truths that spiritual science is in a position to bring us.

• 1. The verb vorstellen means imagine, in the loose sense (“I can imagine”), but we have no noun in English that exactly reproduces Vorstellung. “Visualization” must serve, but the reader should understand that its application is not limited to the visible; it covers abstract ideas as well as concrete objects—anything we “call to mind.” The terms “visualization,” “conception” and “mental picture” are here used interchangeably.
• 2. Always the spoken sound is meant.
• 3. Dr. Steiner refers here to something much more definite than what is suggested by our “overtones,” a term that has almost lost its original significance. The harmonic series as it is known in the field of music is the series of intervals into which a vibrating body (a string, a column of air, etc.) divides itself unassisted by artificial means. Under favorable conditions some three to five of these harmonics can be detected by a keen ear. They come out most clearly in large church bells.
• 4. There is no wholly satisfactory English equivalent for the noun, Empfindung, though the adjective empflindlich is exactly “sensitive.” The term “sensation” is used in this translation (occasionally varied by “sentience”), but it should be understood that only the meaning it has, for example, in “a sensation of warmth” is here applicable, never that in “the news created a sensation.” In other words, it is the noun corresponding to the adjective “sentient,” not “sensational,” and to the verb “to sense.”

Translated by Steiner Online Library

One of the concepts which must occur to us when we speak of the relation of Christ to the human soul is undoubtedly that of sin and guilt. We know what an incisive significance it had in the Christianity of St. Paul. Our present age, however, is not well adapted for gaining a really deep inner understanding of the wider connections between the concepts “death and sin” and “death and immortality” which are to be found in Paul's writings. That cannot be expected in our materialistic times. Let us recall what I said in the first lecture of this course, that there can be no true immortality of the human soul without a continuation of consciousness after death. An ending of consciousness with death would be equivalent to the fact, which would then have to be accepted, that man is not immortal. An unconscious continuance of man's being after death would mean that the most important part of him, that which makes him a man, would not exist after death. An unconscious human soul surviving after death would not mean much more than the sum of atoms which, as materialism recognizes, remain even when the human body is destroyed.

For Paul, it was an unshakable conviction that it is possible to speak of immortality only if individual consciousness is maintained. And since he had to regard the individual consciousness as subject to sin and guilt, he would naturally think: If a man's consciousness is obscured or disturbed after death by sin and guilt, or by their results, this signifies that sin and guilt really kill man—they kill him as soul, as spirit. The materialistic consciousness of our time of course is remote from that. Many modern philosophical thinkers are content to speak of a continuance of the life of the human soul, whereas the immortality of man can be identified only with a continuing conscious existence of the human soul after death.

Here, certainly, a difficulty may easily arise, especially for the anthroposophical world-view. To approach this difficulty we need only look at the opposition between the concept of guilt and sin and the concept of Karma. Many anthroposophists get over this simply by saying: “We believe in Karma, meaning a debt which a man contracts in any one of his incarnations; he bears this debt with him, as part of his Karma, and discharges it later; so, in the course of incarnations, a compensation is brought about.” Here the difficulty begins. These people then easily say: “How can this be reconciled with the Christian acceptance of the forgiveness of sins through Christ?” and yet the idea of the forgiveness of sins is intimately bound up with true Christianity. We need think of one example: Christ on the Cross between the two malefactors. The malefactor on the left hand mocks at Christ: “If thou wilt be God, help thyself and us!” The malefactor on the right says that the other ought not to speak thus, for both had merited their fate of crucifixion, the just award of their deeds; whereas He was innocent and yet had to experience the same fate. And the malefactor on the right went on to say: “Think of me when thou art in thy kingdom.” And Christ answered him: “Verily I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”

It is not permissible merely to gainsay these words or to omit them from the Gospel, for they are very significant. The difficulty for anthroposophists arises from the question: If this malefactor on the right has to wash away the Karma he has incurred, what does it mean when Christ, as though pardoning and forgiving him, says: “Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise”? An objector may say that the malefactor on the right will have to wash away his Karmic debt, even as the one on the left. Why is a difference made by Christ between the malefactor on the right and the one on the left? There is no doubt at all that here the anthroposophical conception of Karma meets a difficulty that is not easy to solve. It can be solved, however, when we try to probe more deeply into Christianity by means of spiritual science. And now I shall approach the subject from quite another side, a side already known to you, but it can bring certain remarkable circumstances to light.

You know how often we speak of Lucifer and Ahriman, and how Lucifer and Ahriman are represented in my Mystery Plays. If one begins to consider the matter in a human-anthropomorphic sense and simply makes of Lucifer a kind of inner and Ahriman a kind of outer criminal, there will be difficulty in getting on; for we must not forget that Lucifer, besides being the bringer of evil into the world, the inner evil that arises through the passions, is also the bringer of freedom. Lucifer plays an important role in the universe, and so does Ahriman.

When we began to speak more of Lucifer and Ahriman, our experience was that many of those associated with us became uneasy; they still had a feeling of what people have always thought of Lucifer—that he is a fearful criminal to the world, against whom one must defend oneself. Naturally, an anthroposophist cannot go all the way with this feeling, for he has to assign to Lucifer an important role in the universe; and yet again, Lucifer must be regarded as an opponent of the progressive gods, as an enemy who crosses the creative plan of those gods to whom reverence is rightly due. Thus, when we speak of Lucifer in this way, we are ascribing an important role in the universe to an enemy of the gods. And we must do the same for Ahriman.

From this point of view it is easy to understand the human feeling that leads a person to ask: “What is the right attitude to adopt towards Lucifer and Ahriman; am I to love them or to hate them? I really don't know what to do about them.” How does all this come about? It should be quite clear from the way in which one speaks of Lucifer and Ahriman that they are Beings who by their whole nature do not belong to the physical plane but have their mission and task in the Cosmos outside the physical plane, in the spiritual worlds. In the lectures given in Munich in the summer of 1913 [Eight lectures with the title The Secrets of the Threshold], I laid particular emphasis on the fact that the progressive gods have assigned to Lucifer and Ahriman roles in the spiritual world; and that discrepancy and disharmony appear only when they bring down their activities into the physical plane and arrogate to themselves rights which are not allotted to them. But we must submit to one fact which the human soul does not readily accept when these matters are under consideration, and it is this: Our human judgment holds good only for the physical plane, and—right as it may be for the physical plane—it cannot be simply transferred to the higher worlds. We must therefore gradually accustom ourselves in Anthroposophy to widen our judgments and our world of concepts and ideas. It is because materialistically minded men of the present day do not want to widen their judgment, but instead prefer to keep to judgments which hold good for the physical plane, that they have such difficulty in understanding Anthroposophy, although it is all perfectly intelligible.

If we say, “one power is hostile to another”, then on the physical plane it is quite right to say, “enmity is improper, it ought not to exist”. But the same thing does not hold good for the higher planes. There, judgment must be widened. Just as in the realm of electricity positive and negative electricity are necessary, so is spiritual hostility necessary in order that the universe may exist in its entirety; it is necessary that the spirits should oppose one another. Here is the truth in the saying of Heracleitos, that strife as well as love constitutes the universe. It is only when Lucifer works upon the human soul, and when through the human soul strife is brought into the physical world, that strife is wrong. But this does not hold good for the higher worlds; there, the hostility of the spirits is an element that belongs to the whole structure, the whole evolution, of the universe. This implies that as soon as we come into the higher worlds we must adopt other standards, other colorings for our judgments. That is why there is often a feeling of shock when we speak of Lucifer and Ahriman on the one hand as the opponents of the gods, and on the other hand as being necessary for the whole course of the cosmic order. Hence we must, above all things, hold firmly in our minds that a man comes into collision with the cosmic order if he allows a judgment which holds good for the physical plane to hold good for the higher worlds also.

Now the root of the whole matter, which must again and again be emphasized, is that the Christ, as Christ, does not belong with the other beings of the physical plane. From the moment of the Baptism in the Jordan, a Being who had not previously existed on Earth, a Being who does not belong to the order of Earth-beings, entered into the corporeality of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus in Christ we are concerned with a Being who could truly say to the disciples: “I am from above, but ye are from below”, which means: “I am a Being of the kingdom of Heaven, ye are of the kingdom of Earth.”

And now let us consider the consequences of this. Must an earthly judgment that is entirely justifiable as such, and that everyone on Earth must maintain, be also the judgment of that Cosmic Being who, as Christ, entered the Jesus body? That Being who passed into the body of Jesus at the Baptism in the Jordan applies not an earthly but a heavenly judgment. He must judge differently from men.

And now let us consider the whole import of the words spoken on Golgotha. The malefactor on the left believes that in the Christ merely an earthly being is present, not a Being whose realm is beyond the earthly kingdom. But just before death there comes to the consciousness of the malefactor on the right: “Thy kingdom, O Christ, is another; think of me when thou art in Thy kingdom.” At this moment the malefactor on the right shows that he has a dim idea of the fact that Christ belongs to another kingdom, where a power of judgment quite different from that obtaining on the Earth holds sway. Then, out of the consciousness that He stands in His kingdom, Christ can answer: “Verily, because thou hast some dim foreboding of my kingdom, this day (that is, with death) thou shalt be with me in my kingdom.” This indicates the super-earthly Christ power that draws up the human individuality into a spiritual kingdom. Earthly judgment, human judgment, must of course say: “As regards the Karma, the right-hand malefactor will have to make compensation for his guilt, even as the one on the left.” For heavenly judgment, however, something else holds good. But that is only the beginning of the matter, for of course it might now be said: “Yes, then the judgment of Heaven contradicts that of the Earth. How can Christ forgive where earthly judgment demands karmic justice?”

This is indeed a difficult question, but we will try to approach it more closely in the course of this lecture. I lay special emphasis on the fact that we are touching here on one of the most difficult questions of occult science. We must make a distinction which the human soul does not willingly make, because it does not like following out the matter to its ultimate consequences, and there are indeed some difficulties in so doing. We shall find it, as I have said, a difficult subject, and you will perhaps have to turn the question over in your minds many times in order to get at its real essence.

To start with, we must make a distinction. We must first consider how, through Karma, objective justice is fulfilled. Here we must clearly understand that a man is certainly subject to his Karma; he has to make karmic compensation for unjust deeds, and if we think more deeply about it, we can see that he will not really wish it otherwise. For suppose a man has done another person wrong; in the moment of doing so he is further from fulfillment than he was before, and he can recover the lost ground only by making compensation for his unjust act. He must wish to make compensation, for only by so doing can he bring himself back to the stage he had reached before committing the act. Thus for the sake of our own progress we are bound to wish that Karma should be there as objective justice. When we grasp the true meaning of human freedom, we can have no wish that a sin should be so forgiven us that we would no longer need to pay it off in our Karma. For example, a man who puts out the eyes of another is more imperfect that one who does not, and in his later Karma it must come to pass that he does a correspondingly good deed, for only then will he be inwardly again the man he was before he committed the sin. So if we rightly consider the nature of man, we cannot suppose that when a man has put out the eyes of another it will be forgiven him, and that Karma will be in some way adjusted. Hence there is rightness in the fact that we are not excused a farthing of our Karma, but must pay our debts in full.

But something else comes in. The guilt, the sins, with which we are laden are not merely our own affair; they are an objective cosmic fact which means something for the universe also. That is where the distinction must be made. The crimes we have committed are compensated through our Karma, but the act of putting out another person's eyes is an accomplished fact. If we have, let us say, put out someone's eyes in a present incarnation, and then in the next incarnation we do something that makes compensation for this act, yet for the objective course of the universe the fact will remain that so many hundred years ago we put out someone's eyes. That is an objective fact in the universe. As far as we are concerned, we make compensation for it later. The stain that we have personally contracted is adjusted in our Karma, but the objective fact remains—we cannot efface that by removing our own imperfection. We must discriminate between the consequences of a sin for ourselves, and the consequences of a sin for the objective course of the world. It is highly important that we should make this distinction. And I may now perhaps introduce an occult observation that will make the matter clearer.

If one surveys the course of human evolution since the Mystery of Golgotha and approaches the Akashic Record without being permeated with the Christ Being, it is easy, very easy indeed, to be led into error, for one will find records which very often do not coincide with the karmic evolution of the individuals concerned. For example, let us suppose that in, say, the year 733 some man lived and incurred heavy guilt. The person now examining the Akashic Record may at first have no connection with the Christ Being. And behold—the man's guilt cannot be found in the Akashic Record. Examination of the Karma of this man in a later incarnation reveals that there is something still in his Karma which he has to wipe out. That must have existed in the Akashic Record at a certain point of time, but it is no longer there. A strange contradiction! This is an objective fact which may occur in many cases. I may meet a man today, and if through grace I am permitted to know something about his Karma, I may perhaps find that some misfortune or stroke of fate that has fallen on him stands in his Karma, that it is an adjustment of earlier guilt. If I turn to his earlier incarnations and examine what he did then, I do not find his guilty deed registered in the Akashic Record. How does this come about?

The reason is that Christ has taken upon Himself the objective debt. In the moment that I permeate myself with Christ, I discover the deed when I examine the Akashic Record. Christ has taken it into His kingdom and He bears it further, so that when I look away from Christ I cannot find it in the Akashic Record. This distinction must be kept clearly in mind: karmic justice remains, but Christ intervenes in the effects of the guilt in the spiritual world. He takes over the debt into His kingdom and bears it further. Christ is that Being who, because He is of another kingdom, is able to blot out in the world our debts and our sins, taking them upon Himself.

What is it that Christ on the Cross of Golgotha really conveys to the malefactor on the left? He does not utter it, but in the fact that He does not utter it, lies its essence. He conveys to the malefactor on the left: What thou has done will continue to work in the spiritual world, and not merely in the physical world. To the malefactor on the right He says: “Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” This means: “I am beside thine act; through thy Karma thou wilt have later on to do for thyself all that the act signifies for thee, but what the act signifies for the universe, that”—if I may use a trivial expression—“is my concern.” That is what Christ says. The distinction made here is certainly an important one, and significant not only for the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, but also for the time before the Mystery of Golgotha.

Some of our friends will remember that in earlier lectures I have called attention to the fact that Christ really did descend to the dead after His death; this is not a mere legend. He thereby accomplished something also for the souls who in previous ages had laden themselves with guilt and sins. Error now comes in if a man, without being permeated with Christ, investigates in the Akashic Record the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. He will continually make errors in his reading of the Akashic Record. Hence, for example, I was not at all surprised that Leadbeater, who in reality knows nothing about Christ, should have made the most abstruse statements concerning the evolution of the Earth in his book, Man: How, Whence and Whither. For only through permeation with the Christ Impulse is the soul capable of really seeing things as they are, and how they have been regulated in the evolution of the Earth on the basis of the Mystery of Golgotha, though they occurred before it.

Karma is an affair of the successive incarnations of man. The significance of karmic justice must be looked at with our earthly judgment. That which Christ does for humanity must be measured by a judgment that belongs to worlds other than this Earth-world. And suppose that were not so? Let us think of the end of the Earth, of the time when men will have passed through their earthly incarnations. Most certainly it will come to pass that all debts will have to be paid to the last farthing. Human souls will have had to balance their Karma in a certain way. But let us imagine that all guilt had continued to exist in the Earth-world, that all guilt would go on working there. Then at the end of the Earth period human beings would be there with their Karma balanced, but the Earth would not be ready to develop into the Jupiter condition; the whole of Earth humanity would be there without a dwelling place, without the possibility of developing onwards to Jupiter. The fact that the whole Earth develops along with man is a result of the Deed of Christ. All the guilt and debt that would otherwise have piled up would cast the Earth into darkness, and we should have no planet for our further evolution. In our Karma we can take care of ourselves, but not of humanity as a whole, and not of that which in Earth-evolution is connected with the whole evolution of humanity.

So let us realize that Karma will not be taken from us, but that our debts and sins will be wiped out from the Earth-evolution through what has come in with the Mystery of Golgotha. Now we must, of course, realize clearly that all this cannot be bestowed on man without his cooperation—i.e., cannot be his unless he does something. And that is clearly brought before us in the utterance from the Cross of Golgotha which I have quoted. It is very definitely shown to us how the soul of the malefactor on the right received a dim idea of a super-sensible kingdom wherein things proceed otherwise than in the mere earthly kingdom. Man must fill his soul with the substance of the Christ Being; he must, as it were, have taken something of the Christ into his soul, so that Christ is active in him and bears him into a kingdom where man has, indeed, no power to make his Karma ineffective, but where it comes to pass through Christ that our debts and sins are blotted out from our external world.

This has been wonderfully represented in painting. There is no one upon whom a picture such as “Christ as Judge at the Last Judgment”, by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, can fail to make a deep impression. What really underlies such a picture? Let us take, not the deep esoteric fact, but the picture that is here presented to our souls. We see the righteous and the sinners. It would have been possible to present this picture differently from the way in which Michelangelo, as a Christian, has painted it. There was the possibility that at the end of the Earth, men, seeing their Karma, might have said to themselves: “Yes, I have indeed wiped off my Karma, but everywhere in the spiritual, written on tablets of brass, are my guilt and my sins, and they weigh heavily on the Earth; they will destroy the Earth. As far as I am concerned I have made compensation, but there the guilt stands, everywhere.” That would not, however, be the truth. For through the fact of Christ's death upon Golgotha, men will not see the tablets of their guilt and sin, but they will see Him who has taken them upon himself; they will see, united with the Being of Christ, all that would otherwise be spread out in the Akashic Record. In place of the Akashic Record, the Christ stands before them, having taken all upon Himself.

We are looking into deep secrets of the Earth's existence. But what is necessary in order to fathom the true state of things in this domain? It is this: that men, no matter whether they are righteous or sinful, should have the possibility of looking upon Christ, that they should not look upon an empty place where the Christ should stand. The connection with Christ is necessary, and the malefactor on the right shows us his connection with Christ by what he says. And although the Christ has given to those who work in His spirit the behest to forgive sins, this never means encroaching upon Karma. What it does mean is that the earthly kingdom will be rescued for those who stand in relationship to Christ, rescued from the spiritual consequences of guilt and sin, which are objective facts even when a later Karma has made compensation for them.

What does it signify for the human soul when one who may so speak says in the name of Christ: “Thy sins are forgiven thee?” It means that he is able to assert: “Thou hast indeed to await thy karmic settlement; but Christ has transformed thy guilt and sin so that later thou mayest not have the terrible sorrow of looking back upon thy guilt and seeing that through it thou hast destroyed a part of the Earth's existence.” Christ blots it out. But a certain consciousness is necessary, and those who would forgive sins may rightly demand it—a consciousness of the guilt, and consciousness that Christ has the power to take it upon Himself. For the saying: “Thy sins are forgiven thee” denotes a cosmic fact and not a karmic fact.

Christ shows His relation to this so wonderfully in a certain passage—so wonderfully that it penetrates deep, deep into our hearts. Let us call up in our souls the scene where the woman taken in adultery comes before Him, with those who were condemning her. They bring the woman before Him and in two different ways Christ meets them. He writes in the Earth; and He forgives, He does not judge; He does not condemn. Why does He write in the Earth? Because Karma works, because Karma is objective justice. For the adulteress, her act cannot be obliterated. Christ writes it in the Earth.

But with the spiritual, the not-earthly consequence, it is otherwise. Christ takes upon Himself the spiritual consequence. “He forgives” does not mean that He blots out in the absolute sense, but that He takes upon Himself the consequences of the objective act.

Now let us think of all that it signifies when the human soul is able to say to itself: “Yes, I have done this or that in the world. It does not impair my evolution, for I do not remain as imperfect as I was when I committed the deed; I am permitted to overcome that imperfection in the further course of my Karma by making compensation for the deed. But I cannot undo it for the Earth-evolution.” Man would have to bear unspeakable suffering if a Being had not united Himself with the Earth, a Being who undoes for the Earth that which we cannot change. This Being is the Christ. He takes away from us, not subjective Karma, but the objective spiritual effects of the acts, the guilt. That is what we must follow up in our hearts, and then for the first time we shall understand that Christ is in truth that Being who is bound up with the whole of Earth-humanity. For the Earth is there for the sake of mankind, and so Christ is connected also with the whole Earth. It is a weakness of man, as a consequence of the Luciferic temptation, that although he is indeed able to redeem himself subjectively through Karma, he cannot redeem the Earth at the same time. That is accomplished by the Cosmic Being, the Christ.

And now we understand why many anthroposophists cannot realize that Christianity is in full accord with the idea of Karma. They are people who bring into Anthroposophy the most intense egoism, a super-egoism; certainly they do not put it into words, but still they really think and feel: “If I can only redeem myself through my Karma, what does the world matter to me? Let it do what it will!” These anthroposophists are quite satisfied if they can speak of karmic adjustment. But there is a great deal more to be done. Man would be a purely Luciferic being if he were to think only of himself. Man is a member of the whole world, and he must think about it in the sense that he can indeed be egotistically redeemed through his Karma, but is not able to redeem the whole Earth-existence. Here the Christ enters. At the moment when we decide not to think only of our ego, we must think about something other than our ego. Of what must we think? Of the “Christ in me”, as Paul says; then indeed we are united with Him in the whole Earth-existence. We do not then think of our self-redemption, but we say: “Not I and my own redemption—not I, but the Christ in me and the redemption of the Earth.”

Many believe they may call themselves true Christians, and yet they speak of others—anthroposophical Christians, for instance—as heretics. There is very little true Christian feeling here. The question may perhaps be permitted: “Is it really Christian to think that I may do whatever I like and that Christ came into the world in order to take it all away from me and to forgive my sins, so that I need have nothing more to do with my Karma, with my sins?” I think there is another word more applicable to such a way of thinking than the word “Christian”; perhaps the word “convenient” would be better. “Convenient” it would certainly be if a man had only to repent, and then all the sins he had committed in the world were obliterated from the whole of his later Karma. The sin is not blotted out from Karma; but it can be blotted out from the Earth-evolution, and this it is that man cannot do because of the human weakness that results from the Luciferic temptation. Christ accomplishes this. With the remission of sins we are saved from the pain of having added an objective debt to the Earth-evolution for all eternity. Only, of course, we must have a serious interest in this. When we have this true understanding of Christ, a greater earnestness will manifest itself in many other ways as well. Many elements will fall away from those conceptions of Christ which may well seem full of triviality and cynicism to the man whose soul has absorbed the Christ-conception in all seriousness. For all that has been said today, and it can be proved point by point from the most significant passages of the New Testament, tells us that everything Christ is for us derives from the fact that He is not a Being like other men, but a Being who, from above—that is, from out of the Cosmos—entered into Earth-evolution at the baptism by John in Jordan. Everything speaks for the cosmic nature of Christ. And he who deeply grasps Christ's attitude towards sin and debt may speak thus: “Because man in the course of the Earth's existence could not blot out his guilt for the whole Earth, a Cosmic Being had to descend in order that the Earth's debt might be discharged.”

True Christianity must needs regard Christ as a Cosmic Being. It cannot do otherwise. Then, however, our soul will be deeply permeated by what is meant in the words, “Not I, but Christ in me.” For then from this knowledge there radiates into our soul something that I can express only in these words: “When I am able to say, ‘Not I, but Christ in me’, in that moment I acknowledge that I shall be raised from the Earth-sphere, that in me there lives something that has significance to the Cosmos, and that I am counted worthy, as man, to bear a super-earthly element in my soul, just as I bear within me a super-earthly being in all that has entered into me from Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions.”

The consciousness of being permeated with Christ will become of immense importance. And with St. Paul's saying, “Not I, but Christ in me”, a man will connect the feeling that his inner responsibility to Christ must be taken in deep, deep earnestness. Anthroposophy will bring into the Christ-consciousness this feeling of responsibility in such a way that we shall not presume on every occasion to say: “I thought so, and because I thought so, I had a right to say it.” Our materialistic age is carrying this further and further. “I was convinced of this, and therefore I had a right to say it.” But is it not a profanation of the Christ in us, a fresh crucifixion of the Christ in us, that at any moment when we believe something or other, we cry it out to the world, or send it out into the world in writing, without having investigated it?

When the full significance of Christ comes home to mankind, the individual will feel that he must be more and more conscientious, must prove himself worthy of Christ, this Cosmic Principle, within him.

It may be readily believed that those who do not want to receive Christ as a Cosmic Principle, but are ready at every opportunity to repent an offence, will first tell all kinds of lies about their fellow men and will then want to wipe out the lies. Anyone who wishes to give worthy proof of the Christ in his soul will first ask himself whether he ought to say a certain thing, even though he may for the moment be convinced of it.

Many things will be changed when a true conception of Christ comes into the world. All those countless people today who write, or disfigure paper with printer's ink, because they briskly write down things of which they have no knowledge, will come to realize that by so doing they are putting the Christ in the human soul to shame. And then the excuse will cease: “Well, I thought it was so, I said it in good faith.” Christ wants more than “good faith”; Christ would fain lead men to the truth. He Himself has said, “The truth will make you free.” But where has Christ ever said that it is possible for anyone who is thinking in His sense to shout out or put forth in writing something or other of which he really knows nothing? Much indeed will be changed! A great deal of modern writing will be ruled out when people proceed from the principle of proving themselves worthy of the saying: “Not I, but Christ in me.” The cancer of our decadent civilization will be rooted out when silence falls on those voices which, without real conviction, cry everything out into the world, or cover paper with printer's ink irresponsibly, without being first convinced that they are speaking the truth.

The “Christian conscience”, as we may call it in a certain sense, will arise in increasing measure as human souls become more and more conscious of the presence of Christ, and the saying of Paul becomes true: “Not I, but Christ in me!”

More and more will souls be imbued with the consciousness that a man ought not to say merely what he “thinks”, but must prove the objective truth of what he says.

Christ will be for the soul a teacher of truth, a teacher of the highest sense of responsibility. In these ways He will permeate souls when they come to experience the whole import of the saying: “Not I, but Christ in me.”