The Rudolf Steiner Archive

You will have observed from our various studies that a connection exists, even though an inner connection, between a principal being inhabiting a planetary body at a certain period and this celestial body itself. One can consider this link between the human being and all that belongs to the whole earth from most varied aspects. We will study the subject today from a single aspect and thence again form ideas about the actual being of man.

We know, of course, that man goes through his earthly life in successive incarnations, and that these bring him into a more intimate relation with the actual planet Earth than the periods which lie between death and a new birth. The periods that man lives through between death and a new birth represent for him more of a spiritual existence; at such times, he is more withdrawn from the Earth itself than in the time between birth and death.

To be more withdrawn from the Earth or to be more closely connected with it, means, however, from time to time to stand in a certain relationship to other beings. For what we call the regions of the world outwardly perceptible to the senses is, after all, only the expression for certain connections between spiritual beings. Though our Earth may look to physical sight what the geologists imagine, may seem to be only a mineral mass surrounded by a sheath of air, yet in the last resort that is only the outer semblance. What actually appears as this mineral mass is nevertheless the bodily nature of certain spiritual beings. And again what we behold beyond the Earth, shining down as the world of stars, that too as we see it is only the outer sense expression for a certain association of Spiritual Beings, of Hierarchies. It is by virtue of the solid Earth, the firm ground upon which we live between birth and death, this physical external earth, it is through this that in the main we develop our life between birth and death. Through all that shines down to us from cosmic space, that sparkles to us as the star-world and that seems to concern us so little, with this we have a greater connection between death and a new birth. It is more than a picture, it is a reality of deepest significance if one says: Man descends from star- worlds to physical birth that he may pass through his existence between birth and death. We must not think, however, that the appearance of the universe which we have here on earth when we talk of the star-world is the same as what meets our spiritual vision in the period between death and a new birth. That which appears externally to man living upon earth as the star-world is then displayed in its inner being, its spirit-nature. There we have to do with the inner nature of what is outer nature for our earthly existence here. In fact we must say to ourselves: Whether we look down to the earth or up to the cosmos, what meets our sense-perception is always but a kind of illusory picture, and we only reach the truth if we go back to the Beings who underlie this semblance with the different grades of cosmic self-consciousness.

Thus it is semblance, illusion, whether one looks upwards or down: the truth, the essentiality, lies behind the semblance. That illusion meets us above end beneath is connected with the fact that our life between birth and death, on the one hand, and between death and a new birth, on the other hand, is always threatened with the possibility of leaving the path of full humanity. Here on earth between birth and death we can become too closely related to the earth, can unfold an urge to find too great an affinity with the earthly powers. And likewise between death and a new birth we can develop an urge to become too closely allied to the cosmic powers outside the earth. For here on earth we stand too near the external symbolic expression, to what is clothed in physical materiality, we stand here, as it were, estranged from the inner spirituality. When we evolve between death and a new birth we stand fully within the spirituality, we live with it, and again we are threatened with the possibility of being swallowed up, of being dissolved in it. Whereas here on earth we are exposed to the threat of growing hardened in physical existence, between death and a new birth we are exposed to the possibility of drowning in spiritual existence.

These two possibilities are due to the fact that besides those powers that are meant when speaking of the normal orders of the Hierarchies, other beings are also in existence. Just as the elemental beings are to be found in the three kingdoms of nature, just as man exists, as the nearer hierarchies exist of whom a genuine spiritual science says that they are there “according to their cosmic time,” so there exist other beings, who, as it were, unfold their nature at the wrong time. They are the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings of whom we have often spoken. You will have already realised that the Luciferic beings are essentially those who as they now present themselves should have lived in an earlier cosmic epoch. On the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings as they now present themselves should live in a later cosmic epoch. Retarded cosmic beings are the Luciferic beings, premature cosmic beings are the Ahrimanic beings. The Luciferic beings disdained to take part with others in the age that was appointed to them; they are retarded, because they scorned to take full part in evolution. When they manifest themselves today, therefore, they are revealed as having stayed behind at earlier stages of existence.

The Ahrimanic beings cannot, so to say, wait till a later age in cosmic evolution to develop the qualities implanted in them. They want to forestall the time. And so they harden in their present existence and reveal themselves to us now in the form they should reach only in a later development of cosmic life.

When we look out into cosmic space and behold the totality of the stars—what is this sight? Why do we have this view? We have this special sight, the appearance of the Milky Way, the appearance of the rest of the star-strewn heavens, because it is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world. All that surrounds us shining and radiating is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world, it appears as it does because it has remained behind at an earlier stage of its existence. And when we walk over the solid ground of the earth it is hard and solid because conglomerated within it are the Ahrimanic beings, beings which should only possess at a later time of their evolution the stage that they now provide for themselves artificially.

Thus it is possible that if we surrender ourselves to the sense world by gazing at the aspect of the sky, we make ourselves more and more Luciferic. When in the life between birth and death we have this inclination to gaze upon the heaven, this means nothing actually immediate and direct; it means a sort of instinct that has remained in us from the time before birth or conception when we were in the spiritual world and lived with the stars. We have entered then into too close a relationship with the cosmic worlds and we have retained this inclination—though indeed to surrender oneself to gazing at the physical star-world is not a particularly noticeable tendency of mankind. We develop this tendency when through our karma—which we always draw to us between birth and death—we have too deeply slept away the time between death and a new birth, when we have developed too little inclination to live there in full consciousness.

If we immerse ourselves in the earthly life, on the other hand, that is directly developed here between birth and death. That is the actual Ahrimanic possibility in man's life. The Luciferic possibility is connected with what we acquire through our relationship to the illusory spirit-world; the Ahrimanic relationship which we form is due to our developing too great an inclination between birth and death towards the surrounding physical external world.

If we grow too strongly into a connection with the earth, so strongly that we never turn our thoughts to the super-sensible that lies beyond the merely terrestrial, then the Ahrimanic affinity appears in us.

Now all this has a deeper significance for the whole development of man's being. If between death and a new birth we are swallowed up, as it were, in the spiritual world and then later do not find the right balance between the spiritual and the material world, evolving with too strong an affinity to the extra-earthly, we can gradually come to an earth existence—can come even in the next incarnation to an existence in which we cannot grow old. Such things are now, in this age, reaching a critical point. That is the one possibility that confronts us as a danger—the not being able to age. We can be reborn and the Luciferic powers con hold us back at the stage of childhood, they can condemn us in some way not to become mature. Those people who give themselves up all too easily to an ardent enthusiasm, a nebulous mysticism, who have a disinclination for severely contoured thinking and scorn to form clear concepts of the world, those people, that is to say, who scorn to develop inner activity of soul and go through life more or less in dream—they are exposing themselves to the danger in their next incarnation of not being able to grow old, of remaining childish in the bad sense of the word. It is a Luciferic attack that will break into humanity in this way.

Such human beings would then not descend rightly into earthly life in the next incarnation, they would not leave the spiritual world sufficiently in order to enter earthly life. The Luciferic powers, who at one time formed a connection with our earth, endeavour to unfold instincts in man that would make his earthly evolution come to a stage where men remain children, where they do not grow old. The Luciferic powers would like to bring about a condition where no aged people walked about on earth but only those who spent their life in a sort of illusory youth. In this way, the Luciferic powers would gradually bring the earth planet to the point of becoming one body with one common soul, in which the separate souls, so to say, were swimming. A common soul-nature of the earth, and a common bodily-nature of the earth, that is Lucifer's aim for humanity's evolution. He would make of the earth a great organic being with a common soul in which the single souls would lose their individuality,

I have often explained that the course of earthly evolution does not depend on the mineral, plant, animal kingdoms, which are all, in fact, waste products of evolution, but on what takes place within the boundary of the human skin. The evolutionary forces of our planet lie within the organisation of man. If you remember this you will understand that what finally becomes of the earth cannot be learnt by forming physical concepts, such concepts have only a narrow, limited interest for us. In order to realise what will become of the earth we must know the human being itself. But the human being can enter into a union, a relation of forces with the Luciferic power that has united itself with the earth, and then the earth can carry too few individualised beings; it can become a collective being with a common soul-nature. That is what the Luciferic powers are striving for. If you take the picture that many nebulous mystics describe ns a desirable future state, where they want to merge into the ALL, to vanish in some kind of pantheistic Whole, you will be able to see how this Luciferic tendency is already living in many human souls.

On the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings have also entered into a connection with our earth. They have the opposite tendency. They act above all through the forces that drew our organism, into itself between birth and death, that permeate our organism through and through with spirituality, that is, make us more and more intellectual, imbue us increasingly with reasoning and intelligence. Our waking intelligence depends on the connection of the soul with the physical body, and when this is exaggerated and becomes too strong, then we become too similar to physical existence and likewise lose the balance. The inclination then arises which hinders man in future from alternating in the right way between earthly life and the spiritual life that lies between death and a new birth.

That is the goal for which Ahriman strives; he would hold men back in the coming earthly age from passing in the right way through earthly life and super-earthly life. Ahriman wishes to hold man back from going through future incarnations. He would like even now, in this incarnation, to cause man to live through everything that he can live through on earth. But that can only be done intellectually, one cannot do that in full humanity. It is, however, possible for man to become so clever that in his cleverness he can conceive of all that still may be on earth. In fact, many men have just such an ideal, that is, to form an intellectual concept of all that may yet come about on earth, But one cannot acquire the experiences that are still to be passed through in future lives. In this life, one can only acquire the pictures, the intellectual pictures, and these then become hardened in the physical body. And then man reaches a profound disinclination to go through future incarnations. He positively sees a sort of blessedness in not wanting to appear on earth again.

I have often pointed out that oriental culture has fallen into decadence and Ahriman is particularly able to create this deviation in the decadent East. While the Orientals are inwardly under the influence of Lucifer, Ahriman can approach their nature and implant in them the inclination in a definite incarnation to wish to have done with earth existence and not appear again in a physical body. The Ahrimanic approach is the more easily accomplished since the Oriental is already under the power of Lucifer. It can then even be placed before men as an ideal by certain teachers, who are in the service of Ahriman, that in a certain incarnation, before the earth itself has reached its goal, they should have finished with physical existence on earth.

Certain theosophical teachings have slavishly borrowed various things from the modern decadent Orient. Among these tenets appears one which has never in any way been taken over into our anthroposophical conception, namely, that it even denotes a special grade of perfection for a human being to appear no more in an earthly life. That is an Ahrimanic impulse and one in fact, that can also bring about something of a terrible nature. The earth could reach the point not, as desired by Lucifer of becoming a great unitary organisation with a unitary soul-nature, but of becoming over-individualised. Men would someday reach a stage of Ahrimanic development where they would. certainly die, but the terrible part would be that, after they had died, they would become as like the earth as possible, would continue to cling to the earth, so that the earth itself would become merely an expression of separate individual human beings. The earth would become a sort of colony of the single individual human souls.

This is what Ahriman strives to do with the earth: to make it entirely an expression of intellectuality, to intellectualise it completely. It is absolutely essential for mankind to realise today that earthly destiny depends on man's own will. The Earth will become what the human being makes of it. It will not be what physical forces make of it. These physical forces will die out and have no significance for the Earth's future. The Earth will be what man makes of it.

We are living in a decisive hour of earthly evolution in which humanity can choose one of three paths. One can live in nebulous mysticism, in dreaming, in an infatuation for things of the physical, senses, that is, in going along in a muse—for life in material nature is indeed only musing and brooding—in a sleep condition in which one passes through life without clear ideas. That is one of the tendencies to which man may incline.

A second tendency would be for men to permeate themselves entirely with intellect and intelligence, to gather together as it were everything that intellect can gather together, to scorn all that poetry and phantasy can spread over earthly existence, to turn everywhere to the mechanical and to dried-up pedantry. Men stand today before the decision either to become spiritual voluptuaries entirely sunk in their own existence—for whether one submerges in one's own existence through nebulous mysticism or material desolation is ultimately only two sides of the same thing—or else to consider everything prosaically, to bring everything into a routine scheme, to classify and correlate everything. Those are two of the possibilities.

The third possibility is to seek for the balance, the equilibrium between the two. One cannot speak of the equilibrium in so definite a way as of the two extremes. One must strive for equilibrium by not being too strongly attracted by either, but pass through the two in a proper balance of life, letting the one be regulated and ordered by the other.

This cosmic hour of decision stands before the human soul today. Man can decide to follow the Luciferic temptation and not let the earth complete its evolution, to let the earth resemble the Old Moon, or rather make it a caricature of the Old Moon, a great organism with an individualised dreamy soul, in which the human beings are contained as in a common Nirvana. Or man can become over-intellectualised, give up the common possession of the earth, desire to have nothing in common, but ossify the body and make it sclerotic by permeating it with too much intellect. Man can decide whether to make the body a sponge through nebulous mysticism and sensuality, or make it a stone through over-intellectuality, over-self-sufficiency. And modern humanity looks as if it did not desire the balance between the two alternatives, but wanted the one or the other.

We see on the one hand an ever-increasing expansion of the Western instincts which aim at intellectuality, self-sufficiency, pedantry, and form opinions in such a way that intellectualism is pressed too strongly into the body. On the other hand, we see the danger threaten from the East that men burn up and consume the body. We see it in the conceptions of the decadent Orient and we see it—only another aspect—in the frightful social developments arising in Eastern Europe. The hour of decision has already arrived. Mankind must decide today to find the equilibrium. And the actual task set before man can only be recognised from the depths of spiritual-scientific knowledge. One must study those ideas that can show what possibilities of evolution lie before mankind in two directions, On the one hand we have the merging in Nirvana which has in fact become a “sacred doctrine of the Orient”—though far removed from the ancient conception of Nirvana which meant a striving for equilibrium out of the old clairvoyance. The Nirvana as now conceived by the decadent Oriental is the world of Lucifer. On the other hand, what the modern Western civilisation is striving for—in so far as it does not fill itself with the knowledge of Spiritual Science—is the mechanising of the world, a continuous striving to make the processes of human existence mechanical. Ahrimanising on the one hand—Luciferising on the other hand.

I described lately from a certain aspect the chaotic, unorientated life of recent times and if this should continue then undoubtedly humanity would become Ahrimanised. This process can only be checked if the conception of the spiritual world is brought into the over-intellectual life, the over-individualised human existence completely saturated with egoism. This concept of the spiritual world is needed everywhere, but above all it is necessary for a spiritual impulse to enter the different sciences. Otherwise it will gradually come to the point where the various sciences rule mankind like some abstract authority. Humanity will become totally Ahrimanised by these different sciences which encircle man with authoritative power. It is especially important at the present day when social life problems are so thrusting at human evolution to lift up the gaze to the connection of man with his planetary life.

Within the old religious Faiths man's conception of this connection with the spiritual world is outworn and stunted. It is stunted to a merely abstract intellectual acknowledgment as, for instance, the evangelical Confession threatens to become, or stunted to an external power-principle as the Roman Faith. Those are in fact only other expressions for what is drawing near man to seduce him. It is essential, however, for man to find his inner orientation and to acquire an inner impulse so that the view may be unimpeded of what links him to his planet and through his planet to the whole cosmos. Men must feel again that Geology is not knowledge of the earth. A colossal mineral mass on which are watery oceans and which is surrounded by air is not the earth, and what surrounds us as Milky Way and suns, that is not the universe, The universe is Ahrimanic beings beneath, Luciferic beings above, which appear through the outer sense-illusion, and Beings of the normal Hierarchies to whom man raises himself when through both sense-illusions he comes to the truth; for the actual Beings do not appear in the external sense-illusion, they only manifest themselves through it.

The man of today must recognise this: I can consider the earth. If I am able to interpret what appears on the earth below as the emanation of Spiritual Beings then I perceive what lives in Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones. But if I am unable to form a spiritual picture of what lives on the earth, if I surrender myself to the illusion of its material appearance, then I remain geologist. I cannot swing myself up to geosophist, then my being becomes Ahrimanised. And if I gaze up to the star-worlds and only form concepts of what I see physically, then I make myself Luciferic. If I am able to read the Spirit in what appears to me in outer semblance. if I can say to myself: Yes, I behold stars, I behold a Milky Way and suns, they inform me of Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis—Spirits of Wisdom. Powers, Mights—then I find the equilibrium.

It is not a question of talking of cosmic beings as superior to earthly beings, the point is everywhere to penetrate the sense-appearance to the genuine essentiality, to that essentiality with which we as men are really connected. Sense-appearance of itself does not deceive us. If we interpret sense-appearance in the right way, then the Spiritual Beings are there, then we have them. Sense-appearance as such is not deceptive, it is our concept of it that can be deceptive, through our too close relationship with the earthly between birth and death on the one hand, through our too close relationship on the other hand with the extra-earthly while we dwell there between death and new birth.

If man confines himself to what has gradually formed within our civilisation he experiences hardly anything of such views. And our civilisation has totally forgotten that it was once different. People read today even with a certain eagerness what was written about Nature in the twelfth, thirteenth centuries but they do not read it with enough discernment. If they read with discernment they would realise that the time in which man thinks as he does now is only a few centuries old. They would see that people thought differently about things of the outer world in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth centuries, even in the fourteenth century; that in the stone, in the earth, they did not see stone, earth, but the body of the divine-spiritual. And in the stars they certainly did not see what one sees today but the revelation of the divine-spiritual. It is only in recent centuries that man has merely a geology and a cosmology but not a geosophy and a cosmosophy! Under the cosmology he would become Luciferised, under the geology he would become Ahrimanised, unless he saved himself by finding the equilibrium through a geosophy and a cosmosophy, And, in fact, since man is born out of the whole universe all this together is needed to give Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy consists of these different “sophies,” cosmosophy, geosophy, and so on. We only understand man aright when we know how to bring him into a spiritual connection with the universe. Then we shall not look for him in a one-sided way in his relationship with light, levity, which would mean servitude to Lucifer, nor one-sidedly in his relationship with gravity, a servitude to the Ahrimanic powers, but endeavour to pour into his will the impulse to find the equilibrium between levity and gravity, between inclining to the earthly and inclining to the Luciferic. Man must reach this balance and he can do so only by again acquiring the super-sensible in addition to his sense-concepts.

Now, still something of a complete paradox: Bring before your soul what has just been said, and how man must know of it so that he can come to a decision in this world-age; assume that one must actually speak of a possible Ahrimanising and Luciferising of the world. Bring this before your soul as a weighty matter for humanity. Then take what you read today in popular literature, what reaches your mind from lecture rooms and other educational institutions, and observe the immense disparity, then you will see what is required if men are to come out of the present decadent life to what is of urgent importance. Serious work in spiritual fields is urgently necessary and this can only be accomplished if one resolves to take earnestly such ideas as we have again discussed today.

Tomorrow we will continue further.

With his ordinary consciousness man knows only a fragment of all that is bound up with his existence. Looking out into the world with our ordinary consciousness we get pictures and images of the outer world through our senses. And when we proceed to think about what the senses have thus given us, when we form thoughts about what we have perceived, memory-pictures of these thoughts remain. Our life of soul is such that we perceive and live with the outer world and bear within us memory-pictures of what is past.

The process of memory, however, is not rightly understood by the ordinary consciousness of man. He thinks that he has known and perceived certain things in the outer world, that pictures have remained somewhere in the background of his being and that he can call them up again in his soul as memory-pictures. But the process is by no means so simple. Consider for a moment what goes on in man, step by step. You are certainly familiar with the ‘after-images’ that arise from what is perceived by the senses, by the eye, for example. As a rule we do not stop to think about them, but they are aptly described by Goethe in his Theory of Colours. He speaks of them as ‘vanishing after-images.’ We look intently at some object and then close the eyes. Different images or pictures linger for a while on the retina and then die away like an echo. In ordinary life we pay little heed to these images because we set up a more forceful activity than that of mere perception. We begin to think. If our thought-activity is weak when some object in the outer world is perceived, an after-image remains on the retina. But if we really think, we take the outer stimulus further inwards, as it were, and a thought-image lingers on as a kind of echo.

A thought-image is stronger and its ‘echoing’ more intense than that of an after-image produced by one of the senses, but it is really only a higher development of the same process. And yet these after-images of thought would also fade away, just as an after-image fades away from the eye, if they came into being merely as thought ¬pictures – which, however, they do not. Man has a head, but as well as this the rest of his organism, which is of quite a different nature. The head is pre-eminently an after-image of what happens before the human being descends from the spiritual to the physical world through birth, or rather, through conception. The head is much more physical than the rest of the organism. The rest of the organism is less developed, so far as the Physical is concerned, than the head. Let me put it thus: In the human head the Spiritual is present only as an image; in the rest of the organism the Spiritual works strongly as spirit. The head is intensely physical; it contains little of the spirit as being spirit. The physical substance of which the rest of the organism is composed is not a faithful after-image of what the human being was before his descent to birth. The Physical is more highly developed in the head of man, the Spiritual in the other parts of his organism.

Now our thoughts would fade away just as visual after-images fade away, if they were not taken over and worked upon by our spiritual organism. But the spiritual organism could not do much with these images if something else as well were not taking place. For something else is taking place while we are perceiving these images of which we then make the fleeting thoughts that really only reside in our head. Through the eye we receive the pictures which we then work up into thoughts. We receive these visual images from the physical and etheric universe. But at the same time, in addition to the pictures, we absorb into us the Spiritual from the remain¬ing universe. We do not only bear the spirit within us, but the spirit of the remaining universe is constantly pouring into us. We may therefore say that with the eye we perceive something or other in the physical and etheric universe and it remains within us as an image. But behind this an absolutely real spiritual process is working, although we are unconscious of it. In the act of memory, this is what happens: We look inwards and become aware of the spiritual process which worked in our inner being during the act of perception.

I will make this clearer by a concrete example. We look at some object in the outer world – a machine, perhaps. We then have the image of the machine. As Goethe described it, an after-image lingers for a short time and then ‘echoes’ away. The thought of the machine arises and this thought remains a little longer, although it too would ultimately fade away if something else were not taking place. The fact is that the machine sends something else into our spiritual organism – (nothing very beautiful when the object is a machine, far more beautiful if the object is a plant, for instance). And now – perhaps after the lapse of a month – we look inwards and a memory arises because, although we were entirely unconscious of it, something else passed into us together with the perception of the object which stimulated the thought. This thought has not been wandering around somewhere in the depths of our being. A spiritual process has been at work and later on we become aware of it. Memory is observation, later observation of the spiritual process which ran parallel with the act of physical perception.

In his onward-flowing stream of existence man is contained within the ocean of the spiritual world. During the period between death and a new birth his existence continues within this spiritual world. But there are times when with his head he comes forth from the spiritual world. In other words, with a part of his being he leaves the spiritual world like a fish that tosses itself above the water. This is earthly life. Then he plunges once more back into the ocean of spirit and later on again returns to an earthly life. Man never leaves this ocean of spiritual existence with the whole of his being but only with his head. The lower part of him remains always in the spiritual world, although in his ordinary conscious¬ness he has no knowledge of what is really going on. Spiritual insight, then, tells us the following: Between death and a new birth man lives in the spiritual world. At birth he peeps out with his head, as it were, into a physical existence, but the greater part of his being remains in the spiritual world, even between birth and death. And it is well that this is so, for otherwise we should have no memories. Memories are only possible because the spiritual world is working in us. An act of memory is a spiritual process appertaining to an objective and not merely to a subjective world.

In his ordinary consciousness man does not regard memory as being a real process, but here he is in error. It is as though he were looking at a castle on a mountain just in front of him and seeing it actually there, believes in its reality. Then he moves away a certain distance, sees the castle in greater perspective, and says to himself: Now I have nothing but a picture, there is no longer any reality. And so it is in ordinary life. In the stream of time we imagine that we get further and further away from reality. But the reality of the castle in space does not change because our picture of it changes, any more than does the reality of that which has given rise to our memory-picture. It remains, just as the castle remains. Our explanation of memory is erroneous because we cannot rightly estimate the perspective of time. Consciousness which flows with the stream of time is able to open up a vista of the past in perspective. The past does not disappear; it remains. But our pictures of it arise in the Perspective of time.

Man’s relation to the more spiritual processes in his being between birth and death has undergone a fundamental change in the course of earthly existence. If we were to regard man as a being consisting merely of physical body and etheric body, this would be only the part of him which remains lying there in bed when he is asleep at night. By day, the astral body and Ego come down into the physical and etheric bodies. The Ego of those men who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha – and in earlier incarnations we ourselves were they – began to fade in a certain sense as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha drew near. After the Mystery of Golgotha there was something different about the process of waking. The astral body always comes right down into the etheric body and in earlier times the Ego penetrated far down into the etheric body. In our modern age it is not so.

In our age the Ego only comes down into the head-region of the etheric body. In men of olden times the Ego came right down and penetrated into the lower parts of the etheric body as well. Today it only comes down into the head. The outcome of this is man’s faculty of intellectual thinking. If the Ego were at any moment to descend lower, instinctive pictures would arise within us. The Ego of modern man is quite definitely outside his physical body. Indeed his intellectual nature is due to the fact that the Ego no longer comes down into the whole of his etheric body. If such were the case he would have instinctive clairvoyance. But instead of this, modern man has a clear-cut vision of the outer world, albeit he perceives it only with his head. In ancient times man saw and perceived with his whole being – nowadays only with his head. And between birth and death the head is the most physical part of his being. That is why in the age of intellectualism man knows only what he perceives with his physical head and the thoughts he can unfold within his etheric head. Even the process of memory eludes his consciousness and, as I said, is interpreted falsely.

In days of old, man saw the physical world and behind it a world of spirit. Objects in the physical world were less clear-cut, far more shadowy than they are to the sight of modern man. Behind the physical world, divine-spiritual beings of a lower and also of a higher order were perceived. To state that ancient descriptions of the Gods in Nature are nothing but the weavings of phantasy is just as childish as to say that a man merely imagines something he has actually seen in waking life. It was no mere phantasy on the part of man in olden days when he spoke of spiritual beings behind the world of sense. He actually saw these beings and against this background of the spiritual world, objects in the physical world were much less clearly defined. Thus the man of antiquity had a very different picture of the world. When he awoke from sleep his Ego penetrated more deeply into his etheric body and divine-spiritual beings were revealed to him.

He gazed into those spiritual worlds which had been the forerunners of his own world. The Gods revealed their destinies to him and he was able to say: ‘I know from whence I come, I know the divine world with which I am connected.’ This was because he had the starting-point of his perspective within him. He made his etheric body an organ to perceive the world of the Gods. Modern man cannot do so. He has no other starting-point for his perspective than in his head and the head is outside the most spiritual part of the etheric body. The etheric counterpart of the head is somewhat chaotic, not so highly organised as the other parts of the etheric body, and that is why modern man has a more defined vision of the physical world, although he no longer sees the Gods behind it. But the present epoch is one of preparation for what lies in the future. Man is gradually progressing to the stage where the centre of his perspective will be outside his physical being. Nowadays, when he is really only living in his head, he can have nothing but abstract thoughts about the world. It may seem rather extreme to say that man lives in his head, for the head can only make him aware of earthly, physical existence. But it is none the less a fact that as he ‘goes out of his head’ he will begin to know what he is as a human being. When he lived in his whole being he had knowledge of the destinies of the Gods. As he gradually passes out of himself he can have knowledge of his own destiny in the cosmos. He can look back into his own being. If men would only make more strenuous efforts in this direction, the head would not hinder them so much from seeing their own destinies. The obstacle in the way of this is that everyone is so intent upon living only in the head. It is simply an unwillingness to look beyond what the head produces that makes people loath to admit that the wisdom which Anthroposophy has to offer in regard to the being of man is something that can be understood by ordinary, healthy intelligence.

And so man is on the way to a knowledge of his own being, because he will gradually begin to focus his perspective from a point that lies, not inside, but outside himself. It is the destiny of man to pass out of his etheric body and so, finally, to attain to knowledge of himself as a human being. But obviously there is a certain danger here. It is possible for man to lose connection with his etheric body. This danger was mitigated by the Mystery of Golgotha. Whereas before the Mystery of Golgotha man was able to look out and see the destinies of the Gods, after that Event it became possible for him to see his own world-destiny. In the course of his evolution, man’s tendency is more and more to ‘go out of himself ‘ in the sense described above. But if, as he does so, he understands the words of Paul: “Not I but Christ in me” in their true meaning, his connection with the Christ will bring him back again into the realm of the human. His link with the Christ sets up a counter¬balance to the process which gradually takes him ‘out of himself.’ This experience must deepen and intensify. In the course of world-destiny the outer Gods passed into twilight, but just because of this it was possible for a God to work out His destiny on the Earth itself and thus be wholly united with mankind.

Think, then, of the man of olden times. He looked around him, perceived the Gods who arose before him in pictures, and he then embodied these pictures in his myths. Today, man’s vision of the Gods has faded. He sees only the physical world around him. But as a compensation he can now be united in his inner life with the destiny of a God, with the death and resurrection of a God. Looking out with their clairvoyant faculties in days of yore, men saw the destinies of Gods in fleeting pictures upon which they then based their myths. The difference in the myths is due to the fact that experience of the spiritual world varied according to men’s capabilities of beholding it. Perceived by this instinctive clairvoyance the world of the Gods was dim and shadowy – hence the diversity in the myths of the various peoples. It was a real world that was seen but it arose in a kind of dream-consciousness. The figures of the Gods were sometimes more and sometimes less distinct, but never distinct enough to guarantee absolute uniformity in the different myths.

And then it happened that a God worked out His destiny on the Earth itself. The destinies of the other Gods were more remote from man in his earthly life. He saw them in perspective and for that reason less distinctly. The Christ-Event is quite near to men—too near, indeed, to be seen aright. The old Gods arose before men’s vision in the perspective of distance and for this reason somewhat indistinctly. If it had been otherwise, the myths would have been all alike. The Mystery of Golgotha is too near to man, too intimately part of him. He must first find the perspective in which to behold the destiny of a God on Earth and therewith the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who lived in the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place could behold with spiritual vision and so understand the Christ. They could readily understand Him for they had seen the world of the Gods. So now they knew: Christ has gone forth from the world of the Gods. He has come to this Earth for His further destiny beginning with the Mystery of Golgotha. As a matter of fact they no longer saw the Mystery of Golgotha itself in clear outline but until this moment they could see the Christ Himself quite well. Therefore they had very much to say of the Christ as a God. They only began to discuss what had become of this God at the moment when he came down into a human being at the Baptism of John in Jordan. Hence in the earliest time of Christianity we have a strongly developed Christology but no ‘Jesuology’.

It was because the whole world of the Gods was no longer within man’s ken that Christology afterwards became transformed into mere Jesuology—which grew stronger and stronger until the nineteenth century, when Christ was no longer understood even with the intellect and modern Theology was very proud of understanding Jesus in the most human way and letting the Christ go altogether.

Precisely through spiritual knowledge the perspective must be found once more to recognise what is the most important of all—the Christ in Jesus. For otherwise we should no longer remain united with the human being at all. Increasingly we should only be looking at him from outside. But now, by recognising Christ in Jesus, through our union with the Christ we shall be able to partake once more with living sympathy in man and in humanity—precisely through our understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus we may say: In going more and more out of himself, man is on the way by-and-by to transform all spiritual reality into mere abstract concepts and ideas. Mankind has already gone very far in this direction and such might be its impending fate already at this moment. Men would go farther and farther in their abstract, intellectual capacity and would develop within them a kind of faith whereby they would say to themselves: Yes, now we experience the Spiritual, but this Spiritual is a Fata Morgana. It has no weight. It consists of so many ideas.

Man must find the possibility once more to replenish these ideas with spiritual substance. This he will do inasmuch as he takes the Christ with him and experiences the Christ as he passes over into the intellectual life. Modern intelligence must grow together with the consciousness of Christ.

In olden times man spoke of the Fall into Sin. He spoke of this picture of the Fall as though with his own being he had belonged to a higher world and had fallen down into a lower, into a deeper world. Take it in a pictorial sense and it is quite true to the reality. We can in a very real sense speak of a Fall into Sin. But just as the man of olden times felt truly when he said to himself: ‘I am fallen from a spiritual height and have united myself with something lower’—so should man of modern time discover how his increasingly abstract thoughts are also bringing him into a kind of Fall. But this is another kind of Fall. It is a Fall that goes upwards. Man as it were falls upward, that is to say he ascends, but he ascends to his own detriment just as the man of olden times felt himself fall to his detriment. The man of old who still understood the Fall into Sin in the old sense could recognise in Christ Him Who had brought the human being into the right relation to this Sin, that is to say, into the possibility of a salvation. The man of old, when he developed the right consciousness, could recognise in Christ the Being Who had lifted him again out of the Fall. So should the man of modern time as he goes on into intellectualism see the Christ as the one who gives him weight so that he shall not spiritually fly away from the Earth or from the world in which he should be.

The man of old perceived the Christ Event paramountly in relation to the unfolding of the will which is, of course, connected with the Fall into Sin. So should the man of modern time learn to recognise the Christ in relation to thought—thought which must lose all reality if man were unable to give it weight. For only so will reality again be found in the life of thought.

Mankind indeed is going through an evolution. And as Paul might speak of the old Adam and of the new Adam, of the Christ, so too may the modern man in a certain sense. Only the modern man must realise it clearly. He must perceive that the man of old who still had the old consciousness within him, felt himself lifted up by the Christ. The man of the new age, on the other hand, should feel himself protected by the Christ from rushing forth into the spiritual emptiness of mere abstraction, mere intellectualism.

The modern man needs Christ to transform within him this sin of going out into the void, to make it good again. Thought becomes good by uniting itself once more with the true reality, that is, the spiritual reality. Therefore, for a man who can see through the secrets of the universe there is the fullest possibility to place the Christ into the very centre even of the most modern evolution of human consciousness.

And now go back to the image with which we began. I began by speaking of the faculty of memory in man. We human beings live on and on in the spiritual world. We only lift ourselves out of the spiritual world inasmuch as with our heads we peer forth into the physical. But we never emerge from the spiritual world altogether. We only emerge with our head. So much do we remain in the spiritual world that even our memory processes are constantly taking place within it. Our world of memories remains beneath, in the ocean of the spiritual world.

Now so long as we are between birth and death and are not strong enough in our Ego to perceive all that is going on down there even with our memories—so long are we quite unaware of how it is with us as humanity in modern time. But when we die, then it becomes a very serious matter, this spiritual world from out of which we lift ourselves in physical existence, like a fish that gasps at air. Then we no longer look back on our life imagining that we perceive unreal memory-pictures, giving ourselves up to the illusion that the perspective of time kills the reality. For that is how man lives in relation to time when he gives himself up to his memory. He is like one who would consider what he perceives in the distance, in the perspective of space, as unreality, as a mere picture. He is like one who would say: ‘When I go far away from it, the castle there in the distance is so small, so tiny that it can have no reality, for surely no men could live in so tiny a castle. Therefore the castle can have no reality.’ Such, more or less, is the conclusion he draws in time. When he looks back in time he does not think his memory-pictures realities, for he leaves out of account the perspective of time. But this attitude ceases when all perspective ceases, that is to say when we are out of space and time. When we are dead it ceases. Then that which lives in the perspective of times emerges as a very strong reality.

Now it is possible that we had brought into our consciousness that which I call the consciousness of Christ. If we did so, then as we look back after our death we see that in life we united ourselves with reality, that we did not live in a mere abstract way. The perspective ceases and the reality is there. If in life we remained at the mere abstract experience, then too, of course, the reality is there. But we find that in earthly life we were building castles in the air. What we were building has no firmness in itself. With our intellectual knowledge and cognition we can indeed build, but our building is frail, it has no firmness. Therefore the modern man needs to be penetrated with the consciousness of Christ, to the end that by uniting himself with realities he may not build castles in the air but castles in the spirit. For earthly life, a castle in the air is something which in itself lies beneath the spirit. The castles in the air are always at their place, only for earthly life they are too thin and for the spiritual life too physically dense. Such human beings cannot free themselves from the dense physical, which in relation to the Spiritual, after all, has a far lesser reality. They remain earthbound. They get into no free relation to earthly life if in this life they build mere castles in the air through intellectualism.

So you see, precisely for intellectualism the Christ consciousness has a very real significance. And this significance is in the sense of a true doctrine of salvation—salvation from the building of castles in the air, salvation for our existence as it will be when we have passed through the gate of death.

For Anthroposophy these things are no articles of faith. They are clear knowledge which can be gained as clearly as mathematical knowledge can be gained by those who are able to manipulate the mathematical methods.

Countless numbers of human beings have felt the Festival of Easter to be something that is related on one side to the profoundest feelings of the human soul and on the other to very profound cosmic mysteries. Our attention is attracted to the connection of this festival with the mysteries of the universe by the fact that it is what is called a moveable feast and has to be regulated year by year according to those constellations of which we propose to speak more exactly during the next few days. When it is noted how all through the centuries religious customs and ceremonies having an intimate connection with humanity have been associated with the festival of Easter, we realise the very special value that has gradually come to be placed on it in the course of man's historical development.

From early Christian centuries—not indeed from the immediate foundation of Christianity, but from its early centuries—this has been a festival of the greatest importance, one associated with the fundamental idea and the fundamental impulse of Christianity, as revealed to Christian consciousness in the fact of the resurrection of Christ.

The Festival of Easter is the festival of resurrection, but points to times even before Christianity. It points to festivals connected with the period of the Spring equinox, which have certainly had something to do with the fixing of Easter, a festival that was associated with the re-awakening of Nature and the reviving life of the earth.

With this we have reached the point where we will at once speak of “Easter as a page from the History of the Mysteries,” in so far as the subject is one that can be dealt with in words. As a Christian festival Easter is a festival of resurrection. The corresponding heathen festival, which took place approximately at the same time, was a kind of resurrection-festival of Nature, a re-awakening of the objects of Nature, which had slumbered, if I may so express it, during the winter. Here I must explain that the Christian festival of Easter is absolutely not a festival that, according to its inner meaning and nature, is comparable with the heathen festival held at the time of the Spring equinox; but if we think of it as a Christian festival, it coincides absolutely with very ancient heathen festivals that had their source in the Mysteries and occurred in the Autumn. The strangest thing regarding the fixing of Easter, which quite obviously, according to its whole content, is connected with certain procedures in the Mysteries, is that it directs our attention to a radical and profound misunderstanding that has come to pass in the general acceptance of one of the most important facts concerning our human evolution. This is nothing less than that the Festival of Easter has been confused, in the course of the early Christian centuries, with an entirely different festival, and has on this account been changed from an Autumn to a Spring festival. This fact indicates something prodigious in human evolution. But let us consider for a moment the content of the Easter festival. What is most essential in it? The most essential thing in it is: that the Being who stands in the centre of Christian consciousness, Christ Jesus, passed through death; of this Good Friday reminds us. Christ Jesus then rested in the grave during the period of three days; this represents the union of Christ with earthly existence. The time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is held by Christians as a solemn festival of mourning. Then Easter Sunday is the day on which the central figure for all Christendom rose from the grave, the day on which this fact is held in remembrance. The essential content of the Easter festival is: the death, burial, the repose in the tomb (Grabes-ruhe), and resurrection of Christ Jesus.

Let us now consider some of the features of the corresponding ancient heathen festival. Only by doing this can we arrive at an inner comprehension of the connection between the Festival of Easter and the living content of the Mysteries (Mysterien-wesen). In many places, among many people we find ancient heathen festivals which in outward form and ceremonial resemble absolutely the main features of those of the Christian Easter. From among numerous ancient feasts let us take that of Adonis. This was met with among certain peoples, and over long periods of the past, in Asia-Minor. A statue provided its central point. This statue represented Adonis the spiritual prototype of all youthful growing forces, all the beauty of man.

It is true that ancient peoples have in many respects confused the image with what it represented. In this way these old religions have frequently acquired a fetishlike character. Many people saw in the statue the actual god of beauty—the youthful forces of man, the evolving germinal powers revealing in splendid life all that was glorious in existence, all that man possessed or could possess of inner worth and inner greatness.

With mournful singing and ceremonies expressive of the profoundest human grief and woe the divine image was on this day (if the sea happened to be near) sunk beneath the waves, where it remained for three days; otherwise an artificial tank was constructed so that it could be lowered into it. During these three days profound quiet and sorrow lay upon the whole community of those who followed this religion. When the three days were over the image was raised again from the water. The earlier songs of sorrow were turned into songs of joy, into hymns about the risen god, the god who had come back to life.

This was an outward ceremony, one that deeply stirred the hearts of wide circles of people. It recalled, by means of an outward act, what happened to every one attaining to initiation in the Holy Mysteries. Every man attaining initiation in these ancient times was conducted into a special chamber. The walls were black; the whole room, in which was nothing but a coffin, was dark and gloomy. The aspirant for initiation was then laid in the coffin by those who had conducted him there with solemn dirges, and was treated as one about to die. He was made to realise that, now he was placed in the coffin, he had to pass through what a man experiences when going through the gates of death, and during the three days following. The arrangements were carried out in such a way that he who was in the act of being initiated reached full inner comprehension of what a man experiences in the first three days after death.

On the third day there rose in a particular place before the eyes of him who lay in the coffin a budding branch representing springing life. The former songs of woe turned into hymns of joy. The neophyte, who had experienced all this, now rose from the grave with a changed consciousness. A new language had been imparted to him and a new writing: the language and the writing of the spirit.

If what took place in the depths of the Mysteries to those about to experience initiation were to be compared with the religious ceremony performed outside, this would have to be done in a figurative way, though similar in form, to that which was experienced by carefully selected individuals in the Mysteries. And the ceremony—take that of the cult of Adonis, for instance—was explained to those participating in it in an appropriate way. It was a religious act that took place in the Autumn, and those who took part in it were instructed as follows: Behold it is Autumn; the earth now loses its green plants, all its leafy covering. Everything withers. Instead of the fresh, green, sprouting life which arose to deck the earth in Spring, all is now bleak and bare, or perhaps covered with snow. Nature is dying. But when all around you dies, you must experience that which in man resembles to some degree the death you see in surrounding Nature. Man also dies, Autumn comes to him also. When life draws to an end it is well that the human heart and soul of those who survive should be filled with deepest sorrow. And in order that the full seriousness of the passage through the gates of death should rise before your souls, that you not only experience death when it comes but that you are reminded of it again and again each year, for this reason you are shown every Autumn how that Divine Being who represents the beauty, youth, and greatness of man dies, how he goes the way of all natural things. But just at the moment when Nature is most desolate and dreary, when death is near, you have to remember something else. You have to remember that though man passes through the gates of death, though here in earthly existence he only experiences things of a nature similar to that which perishes in Autumn, that so long as he lives on earth he only experiences temporal things, when once he is withdrawn from earth his life will continue on into the wide spaces of universal ether. There he sees himself grow ever larger and larger—he becomes one with the whole world. During the three days his life expands to the confines of the universe. While here, earthly eyes are directed to the image of death, to that which is mortal and perishable; out there, after three days, the immortal soul awakens. About three days after death it rises again; it is born anew in the land of the spirit.

All this was brought about in the depths of the Mysteries through an impressive inner transformation of the body of the neophyte who had presented himself for initiation. The notable impression, the tremendous forward push that human life received in this ancient form of initiation, was the awakening of the inner soul-forces, the waking of sight. This brought to him the knowledge that henceforth he lives not merely in the world of the senses but in the world of the spirit.

The teaching that from this time onwards was given on suitable occasions to the pupils of the Mysteries I can describe somewhat as follows:—They were told: what takes place in the Mysteries is a picture of what takes place in the spiritual world, and what takes place in the cosmos is a model for that which takes place in the Mysteries. What everyone who was admitted to the Mysteries had to realise was: the mysteries veil in earthly acts performed by men, what is experienced by them in other states of existence, and in the wide astro-spiritual spaces of the cosmos.

Those who in olden times were not admitted to the Mysteries, who on account of the degree of ripeness they had acquired in life were not fitted to receive direct vision of the spiritual world, had communicated to them in the ceremonies carried on in the Mysteries—that is in pictures—what was suited to them. So the purpose of the Mystery-Festival, which we have come to know as the one corresponding to the festival of Adonis, was for the purpose of arousing in the consciousness of men, or at least for placing before their eyes in pictures, the certainty that at the time of autumnal decay, when death overtakes everything in Nature, it also overwhelms Adonis, the representative of all youth and beauty, all the grandeur of the human soul. The god Adonis dies also. He passes into the water, into the earthly representative of the cosmic ether. But just as after three days he rises out of the water, or is taken from it, so the human soul is raised out of the water of the world; or in other words, out of the cosmic ether, some three days after passing through the gates of death. The secret of death is what these Ancient Mysteries sought to reveal, aided by the appropriate Autumn festival. It was clearly demonstrated and made obvious through the fact that the first half—the one side of the religious ceremony—accorded with dying Nature, but the other half with its opposite, with what is most essential to man's own existence. It was intended that man should look upon dying Nature so as to realise that, though to outward seeming he dies, according to inner reality he rises again in the spiritual world. The meaning of these old heathen festivals that were associated with the Mysteries was to reveal the truth concerning death.

In the course of human evolution a most important thing now took place, which was, that what the pupil passed through on a certain plane in regard to the death and resurrection of the soul when preparing himself for initiation into the Mysteries was consummated by Christ Jesus down to the physical body (bis zum Leibe). For how did the Mystery of Golgotha appear to one who was an adept in the Mysteries? Such an adept gazed into the ancient Mysteries. He saw how anyone preparing for initiation was led according to the state of his soul through death to resurrection, which meant to the awakening of the higher consciousness of his soul. The soul dies so that it may rise again in a higher state of consciousness. What has to be firmly maintained here is that the body does not die, but that the soul dies so that it may be awakened to a higher consciousness.

What the soul of every man experienced who passed through initiation was experienced by Christ Jesus as far as to the body; that simply means, it was experienced on a different plane, for Christ was no earthly man, but a Sun-being within the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and could experience in every part of his human nature what the ancient Initiate of the Mysteries experienced in his soul. Those who still existed as “Knowers” of the ancient Mysteries, who were conversant with the ceremony of initiation, were such men as have even to this day a deep understanding of what happened on Golgotha. What could such men say of it? They could say: Through thousands of years men have been brought to the secrets of the spiritual world through the death and resurrection of their souls. The soul was separated from the body during the ceremony of initiation. Through death it was led to everlasting life. What was experienced there by a few exceptional men has been experienced in the body by a Being who came down from the Sun at the baptism in Jordan and entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That which for long thousands of years had been an ever-recurring procedure of the Mysteries had now become an historic fact. The most essential fact for men to know was this: that because the Being who entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth was a Sun-being, that which could only take place as regards the souls, and in the soul-experiences of those presenting themselves for initiation, could now take place as far as bodily existence. In spite of the death of the body, in spite of the dissolving of the body of Jesus of Nazareth in the mortal earth, a resurrection of Christ could take place, because the Christ rose higher than the souls of those seeking initiation. Such men could not take their bodies into the deep regions of sub-material existence (tiefe Regionen des Untersinnlichen) as Christ Jesus did; and for this reason they could not rise so high at resurrection as the Christ did; to make the infinite difference of this apparent, the ancient ceremony of initiation was enacted as an historic fact for all the world to see on the place of consecration—on Golgotha.

In the early Christian centuries only a few people were aware that a Sun-Being—a Cosmic Being—had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, and that the earth had thereby been fructified (befruchtet); that a Being had actually descended to earth from the sun—a Being such as until then it had been possible to see only in the sun from the earth, through methods employed in the centres of initiation. The most essential fact regarding Christianity as accepted by those who had a real knowledge of the ancient mysteries was expressed as follows: The Christ to whom we could rise through initiation, the Christ we could find when we rose to the Sun in the ancient Mysteries, has descended into a mortal body, the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He has come down to earth. At first it was more what might be described as a holy attitude of mind—a solemn feeling of reverence, experienced in mind and soul, that made some understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha possible at the time. What formed the living content of human consciousness at that time gradually became, through events we shall learn of later, a festival of remembrance recalling the historical event of Golgotha.

As this memory developed, people lost the consciousness, more and more, of Christ as a Sun-Being.

Adepts in the wisdom of the Mysteries could not be in any uncertainty as to the nature of Christ. They knew well that true Initiates, those who had been initiated and had therefore become free from their physical bodies and had experienced death in their souls, rose as far as the Sun-sphere, and that there they found the Christ, that from Him, the Christ in the Sun, their souls received the impulse to resurrection; they knew who the Christ was, because they had raised themselves up to Him. These ancient Initiates, who understood what took place during initiation, knew from what took place on Golgotha that the same Being who formerly had to be sought in the Sun had now come down to men on earth. How did they know this? Because the proceedings in the Mysteries, undergone by the neophyte that he might rise to Christ in the sun, could no longer be carried out in the same way as before, for the simple reason that human nature had in the course of time become different. The ancient ceremony of initiation had become impossible because of the way in which the being of man had evolved. The Christ could no longer be sought in the Sun according to the methods of ancient initiation. He therefore came down to earth, there to accomplish a deed through which men might now find Him. That which is contained in this Mystery (Geheimnis) belongs to the most sacred things that can be spoken of on earth.

For how actually did the Mystery of Golgotha appear to men living in the centuries immediately following it? In ancient places of initiation men looked up towards existence on the Sun (Sonnendasein) and became aware, through initiation, of the Christ in the Sun. They looked out into space in order to draw near to Christ.

If I represent diagrammatically how evolution progresses in the ensuing years, I must represent it in time; that means I must represent the earth—in one year, in another, in a third year, as progressing in time. Spatially, the earth is always there, but the passage of time must be represented thus. (A diagram was shown).

The Mystery of Golgotha then took place. Let us suppose that a man who lived in the 8th century, instead of looking out from the Mysteries to the Sun in order to find Christ, looked to the turning-point of time at the beginning of the Christian era, looked to the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, he was then able to see the Christ in an earthly happening—in the Mystery of Golgotha. What had previously been perceived spatially had now, because of the Mystery of Golgotha, to be seen in time. (Sollte nun zeitliche Anschauung werden.) This was the fact of greatest importance.

It is especially when our souls are affected by all the things which took place in the Mysteries, and which were an image of the death of man, and the resurrection that followed, and when added to these we consider the form of the religious procedure, more especially at the festival of Adonis (which was again an image of what took place in the Mysteries), that we realise how these three things, united and raised to their highest aspect, were concentrated within the historic deed on Golgotha.

There now was seen on the outward plane of history what formerly had been enacted in deep inwardness in the sacred precincts of the Mysteries; what formerly had only been for Initiates was now there for all mankind to see. No longer was an image required that had to be sunk symbolically in the sea and raised from it again. Instead, men were to have the memory of what had actually happened on Golgotha. Instead of the outward symbol connected with an event that was experienced in space, inward, intangible, formless thoughts were to arise—thoughts that lived only in the soul, thoughts of the historical deed done on Golgotha.

In the centuries that followed we now become aware of an extraordinary development in humanity. The penetration of mankind into what was spiritual declined more and more. The spiritual content of the Mystery of Golgotha could no longer find a place in the souls of men. Evolution tended towards the training of a materialistic intelligence. Men lost the inward emotional understanding of such things as, for instance, that where the transitory quality of external Nature is revealed—at the moment when the life of Nature is seen to be most desolate and as if dying—is exactly the moment when the vitality of the spirit becomes most apparent. Mankind also lost understanding of the external festivals of the year: understanding that the coming of Autumn, bringing as it does death to the outward things of Nature, is the time when it is most easy to realize that the death of all these things is connected with the resurrection of what is spiritual.

Along with this, Autumn lost the possibility of being the season of resurrection; it lost the possibility of directing the mind, by way of the fleeting things of Nature, to the everlasting quality of the spirit. Man has need of the support of substance. He needs the support of that which does not die in Nature but springs again, the germinating power of seeds which fall to the ground in Autumn but rise again. Man accepts substance as a symbol of what is spiritual, because he is no longer capable of being stirred by substance to perceive spirit in its reality. Autumn has no longer power to demonstrate the immortality of spiritual things, as compared to the mortality of natural things, through the inner force of the human soul. Man has need of the support of Nature, of external resurrection. He likes to see how plants spring from the earth, how the strength of the sun increases, and the coming of light and warmth; he needs the resurrection of Nature in order to cultivate thoughts of resurrection.

But with this the direct connection linking it with the festival of Adonis disappears, as also that which can link it with the Mystery of Golgotha. That inner experience that comes to every one at earthly death loses power when the soul knows: man passes through earthly death, and during the three days that follow undergoes certain experiences of a very solemn nature; but later the soul is filled with inner joy and happiness, because it knows that after these three days it rises from death to spiritual immortality.

The power contained in the festival of Adonis was lost. Humanity was so organised at one time that this power could be developed with the greatest intensity. When looking on the death of the god, men saw the death of all that was beautiful in humanity, the death of all its splendour and youthful powers. With great sadness the god was laid beneath the waves on a day of mourning—Good Friday (Char-Freitag, Day of Mourning). People felt the deep solemnity of this, because it was intended to evoke in them realization of the frailty of all natural things. But it was intended that this feeling regarding the mortality of natural things should then be changed into a feeling concerning the super-sensible resurrection of the human soul after three days. As the god, or rather the likeness of the god, was raised from the water, the well-instructed believer saw in this image the representative of the human soul a few days after death. Behold! they said to him, what happens in spirit to those who die. What happens is brought before your soul in the likeness of the risen god—the god of beauty and of youthful vigour.

This outlook, which was bound up so deeply with the destiny of humanity, was brought directly before the human spirit every Autumn. It would not have been thought possible at that time to associate this with external Nature. What could be experienced in spirit was represented symbolically in ceremonial acts. But the image of a former time had to be effaced, it had to emerge again as memory—as formless, inward, soul-felt memory of the Mystery of Golgotha, which represented the same thing; at first men had not the power to carry out this change, because the spirit had passed into the subconscious part of human souls (in die Untergründe der Seele des Menschen ging). So things remained until our day; men had need of the support of external nature. But external nature provides no image—no complete image of the destiny of man after death. Thoughts about death persisted. Thoughts about resurrection faded more and more. Even if people spoke of resurrection as part of their belief it was not a vital fact in the lives of the men of later times. But it must become so once more; it must become so, because the Anthroposophical outlook stirs men's minds to true thoughts concerning resurrection.

If on one side it is said, at the appropriate season, thoughts on Michael are precious to the soul of the Anthroposophist as bringing thoughts of annunciation, if thoughts concerning Christmas give depth to his soul, those on Easter must be specially thoughts of joy. For Anthroposophy must add to the thought of death the thought of resurrection. She must herself become like a festival of resurrection within the souls of men, bringing an Easter spirit into their whole outlook on life. This Anthroposophy will do, when people have realised how the old thoughts of the Mysteries can live on in rightly conceived thoughts of Easter; when they have acquired a right understanding of the body, soul, and spirit of man, and of the destiny of these in the physical, psychic, and spiritual heavenly worlds.

To-day I would like first to remind you how events which take place behind the veil of appearance, outside the physical, sense-perceptible world, can be described in pictorial terms. One has to speak in this way of these events, but the pictures correspond throughout with reality.

With regard to sense-perceptible events, we are living in a time of hard tests for humanity, and these tests will become harder still. Many old forms of civilisation, to which people still mistakenly cling, will sink into the abyss, and there will be an insistent demand that man must find his way to something new. In speaking of the course that the external life of humanity will take in the early future, we cannot—as I have often said—arouse any kind of optimistic hopes. But a valid judgment as to the significance of external events cannot be formed unless we consider also the determining, directing cosmic events which occur behind the veil of the senses.

When a man looks out attentively with his physical eyes and his other senses at his surroundings, he perceives the physical environment of the earth, and the various kingdoms of nature within it. This is the milieu in which comes to pass all that manifests as wind and weather in the course of the year. When we direct our senses towards the external world, we have all this before us: these are the external facts. But behind the atmosphere, the sun-illumined atmosphere, there lies another world, perceptible by spiritual organs, as we may call them. Compared with the sense-world, this other world is a higher world, a world wherein a kind of light, a kind of spiritual light or astral light, spiritual existence and spiritual deeds shine out and run their course. And they are in truth no less significant for the whole development of the world and of man than the historical events in the external environment of the earth and on its surface.

If anyone to-day is able to penetrate into these astral realms, wandering through them as one may wander among woods and mountains and find signposts at cross roads, he may find “signposts” there in the astral light, inscribed in spiritual script. But these signposts have a quite special characteristic: they are not comprehensible without further explanation, even for someone who can “read” in the astral light. In the spiritual world and in its communications, things are not made as convenient as possible: anything one encounters there presents itself as a riddle to be solved. Only through inner investigation, through experiencing inwardly the riddle and much else, can one discover what the inscription on a spiritual signpost signifies.

And so at this time—indeed for some decades now, but particularly at this time of hard trials for mankind—one can read in the astral light, as one goes about spiritually in these realms, a remarkable saying. It sounds like a prosaic comparison, but in this case, because of its inner significance, the prosaic does not remain prosaic. Just as we find notices to help us find our way—and we find signposts even in poetical landscapes—so we encounter an important spiritual signpost in the astral light. Time and time again, exactly repeated, we find there to-day the following saying, inscribed in highly significant spiritual script:

O Man,
You mould it to your service,
You reveal it according to the value of its substance
In many of your works.
Yet it will bring you healing
Only when it reveals to you
The lofty power of its spirit.

Injunctions of this kind, pointing to facts significant for man, are inscribed, as I have said, in the astral light, presenting themselves first as a kind of riddle to be solved, so that men may bring their soul-forces into activity.

Now, during our days here, we will contribute something to the solving of this saying—really a simple saying, but important for mankind to-day.

Let us recall how in many of our studies here the course of the year has been brought before our souls. A man first observes it quite externally: when spring comes he sees nature sprouting and budding; he sees how the plants grow and come to flower, how life everywhere springs up out of the soil. All this is enhanced as summer draws on; in summer it rises to its highest level. And then, when autumn comes, it withers and fades away; and when winter comes it dies into the lap of the earth.

This cycle of the year—which in earlier times, when a more instinctive consciousness prevailed, was celebrated with festivals—has another side, also mentioned here. During winter the earth is united with the elemental spirits. They withdraw into the interior of the earth and live there among the plant-roots that are preparing for new growth, and among the other nature-beings who spend the winter there. Then, when spring comes, the earth breathes out, as it were, its elemental being. The elemental spirits rise up as though from a tomb and ascend into the atmosphere. During winter they accepted the inner order of the earth, but now, as spring advances and especially when summer comes on, they receive more and more into their being and activity the order which is imposed upon them by the stars and the movements of the stars. When high summer has come, then out there in the periphery of the earth there is a surging of life among the elemental beings who had spent the winter in quiet and silence under the earth's mantle of snow. In the swirling and whirling of their dance they are governed by the reciprocal laws of planetary movement, by the pattern of the fixed stars, and so on. When autumn comes, they turn towards the earth. As they approach the earth, they become subject more and more to the laws of earth, so that in winter they may be breathed in again by the earth, once more to rest there in quietude.

Anyone who can thus experience the cycle of the year feels that his whole human life is wonderfully enriched. To-day—and it has been so for some time past—a man normally experiences, and then but dimly, half-consciously, only the physical-etheric processes of the body which occur within his skin. He experiences his breathing, the circulation of his blood. Everything that takes its course outside, in wind and weather, during the year; all that lives in the sprouting of the seed-forces, the fruiting of the earth-forces—all this is no less significant and decisive for the whole life of man, even though he is not conscious of it, than the breathing and blood-circulation which go on inside his skin.

When the sun rises over any region of the earth, we share in the effects of its warmth and light. But when a man accepts Anthroposophy in the right sense, not reading it like a sensational novel but so that what it imparts becomes the content of his mind, then he gradually educates his heart and soul to experience all that goes on outside in the course of the year. Just as in the course of a day we experience early freshness, readiness for work in the morning, then the onset of hunger and of evening weariness, and just as we can trace the inner life and activity of the forces and substances within our skin, so, by taking to heart anthroposophical ideas—entirely different from the usual descriptions of sense-perceptible events—we can prepare our souls to become receptive to the activities that go on outside in the course of the year. We can deepen more and more this sympathetic participation in the cycle of the year, and we can enrich it so that we do not live sourly—one might say—within our skin, letting the outer world pass us by. On the contrary, we can enrich our experience so that we feel ourselves living in the blossoming of every flower, in the breaking open of the buds, in that wonderful secret of the morning, the glistening of dew-drops in the rays of the sun. In these ways we can get beyond that dull, conventional way of reacting to the outer world merely by putting on our overcoat in winter and lighter clothes in summer and taking an umbrella when it rains. When we go out from ourselves and experience the interweaving activities, the flow and ebb, of nature—only then do we really understand the cycle of the year.

Then, when spring passes over the earth and summer is drawing near, a man will be in the midst of it with his heart and soul; he will discern how the sprouting and budding life of nature unfolds, how the elemental spirits fly and whirl in a pattern laid down for them by planetary movements. And then, in the time of high summer, he will go out of himself to share in the life of the cosmos. Certainly this damps down his own inner life, but at the same time his summer experience leads him out—in a cosmic waking-sleep, one might say—to enter into the doings of the planets.

To-day, generally speaking, people feel they can enter into the life of nature only in the season of growth—of germination and budding, flowering and fruiting. Even if they cannot fully experience all this, they have more sympathy and perception for it than they have for the autumn season of fading and dying away. But in truth we earn the right to enter into the season of spring growth only if we can enter also into the time when summer wanes and autumn draws on; the season of sinking down and dying that comes with winter. And if during high summer we rise inwardly, in a cosmic waking-sleep, with the elemental beings to the region where planetary activity in the outer world can be inwardly experienced, then we ought equally to sink ourselves down under the frost and snow-mantle of winter, so that we enter into the secrets of the womb of the earth during mid-winter; and we ought to participate in the fading and dying-off of nature when autumn begins.

If, however, we are to participate in this waning of nature, just as we do in nature's growing time, we can do so only if in a certain sense we are able to experience the dying away of nature in our own inner being. For if a man becomes more sensitive to the secret workings of nature, and thus participates actively in nature's germinating and fruiting, it follows that he will livingly experience also the effects of autumn in the outer world. But it would be comfortless for man if he could experience this only in the form it takes in nature; if he were to come only to a nature-consciousness concerning the secrets of autumn and winter, as he readily does concerning the secrets of spring and summer. When the events of autumn and winter draw on, when Michaelmas comes, he certainly must enter sensitively into the processes of fading and dying; but he must not, as he does in summer, give himself over to a nature-consciousness. On the contrary, he must then devote himself to self-consciousness. In the time when external nature is dying, he must oppose nature-consciousness with the force of self-consciousness.

And then the form of Michael stands before us again. If, under the impulse of Anthroposophy, a man enters thus into the enjoyment of nature, the consciousness of nature, but then also awakes in himself an autumnal self-consciousness, then the picture of Michael with the dragon will stand majestically before him, revealing in picture-form the overcoming of nature-consciousness by self-consciousness when autumn draws near. This will come about if man can experience not only an inward spring and summer, but also a dying, death-bringing autumn and winter. Then it will be possible for the picture of Michael with the dragon to appear again as a forcible Imagination, summoning man to inner activity.

For a man who out of present-day spiritual knowledge wrestles his way through to an experience of this picture, it expresses something very powerful. For when, after St. John's tide, July, August and September draw on, he will come to realise how he has been living through a waking-sleep of inner planetary experience in company with the earth's elemental beings, and he will become aware of what this really signifies.

It signifies an inner process of combustion, but we must not picture it as being like external combustion. All the processes which take a definite form in the outer world go on also within the human organism, but in a different guise. And so it is a fact that these inner processes reflect the changing course of the year.

The inner process which occurs during high summer is a permeation of the organism by that which is represented crudely in the material world as sulphur. When a man lives with the summer sun and its effects, he experiences a sulphurising process in his physical-etheric being. The sulphur that he carries within him as a useful substance has a special importance for him in high summer, quite different from its importance at other seasons. It becomes a kind of combustion process. It is natural for man that the sulphur within him should thus rise at midsummer to a specially enhanced condition. Material substances in different beings have secrets not dreamt of by materialistic science.

Everything physical-etheric in man is thus glowed through at midsummer with inward sulphur-fire, to use Jacob Boehm's expression. It is a gentle, intimate process, not perceptible by ordinary consciousness, but—as is generally true of other such processes—it has a tremendous, decisive significance for events in the cosmos.

This sulphurising process in human bodies at midsummer, although it is so mild and gentle and imperceptible to man himself, has very great importance for the evolution of the cosmos. A great deal happens out there in the cosmos when in summer human beings shine inwardly with the sulphur-process. It is not only the physically visible glow-worms (Johannis Käferchen) which shine out around St. John's Day. Seen from other planets, the inner being of man then begins to shine, becoming visible as a being of light to the etheric eyes of other planetary beings. That is the sulphurising process. At the height of summer human beings begin to shine out into cosmic space as brightly for other planetary beings as glow-worms shine with their own light in the meadows at St. John's time.

From the standpoint of the cosmos this is a majestically beautiful sight, for it is in glorious astral light that human beings shine out into the cosmos during high summer, but at the same time it gives occasion for the Ahrimanic power to draw near to man. For this power is very closely related to the sulphurising process in the human organism. We can see how, on the one hand, man shines out into the cosmos in the St. John's light, and on the other how the dragon-like serpent-form of Ahriman winds its way among the human beings shining in the astral light and tries to ensnare and embrace them, to draw them down into the realm of half-conscious sleep and dreams. Then, caught in this web of illusion, they would become world-dreamers, and in this condition they would be a prey to the Ahrimanic powers. All this has significance for the cosmos also.

And when in high summer, from a particular constellation, meteors fall in great showers of cosmic iron, then this cosmic iron, which carries an enormously powerful healing force, is the weapon which the gods bring to bear against Ahriman, as dragon-like he tries to coil round the shining forms of men. The force which falls on the earth in the meteoric iron is indeed a cosmic force whereby the higher gods endeavour to gain a victory over the Ahrimanic powers, when autumn comes on. And this majestic display in cosmic space, when the August meteor showers stream down into the human shining in the astral light, has its counterpart—so gentle and apparently so small—in a change that occurs in the human blood. This human blood, which is in truth not such a material thing as present-day science imagines, but is permeated throughout by impulses from soul and spirit, is rayed through by the force which is carried as iron into the blood and wages war there on anxiety, fear and hate. The processes which are set going in every blood-corpuscle when the force of iron shoots into it are the same, on a minute human scale, as those which take place when meteors fall in a shining stream through the air. This permeation of human blood by the anxiety-dispelling force of iron is a meteoric activity. The effect of the raying in of the iron is to drive fear and anxiety out of the blood.

And so, as the gods with their meteors wage war on the spirit who would like to radiate fear over all the earth through his coiling serpent-form, and while they cause iron to stream radiantly into this fear-tainted atmosphere, which reaches its peak when autumn approaches or when summer wanes—so the same process occurs inwardly in man, when his blood is permeated with iron. We can understand these things only if we understand their inner spiritual significance on the one hand, and if on the other we recognise how the sulphur-process and the iron-process in man are connected with corresponding events in the cosmos.

A man who looks out into space and sees a shooting-star should say to himself, with reverence for the gods: “That occurrence in the great expanse of space has its minute counterpart continuously in myself. There are the shooting-stars, while in every one of my blood-corpuscles iron is taking form: my life is full of shooting-stars, miniature shooting-stars.” And this inner fall of shooting-stars, pointing to the life of the blood, is especially important when autumn approaches, when the sulphur-process is at its peak. For when men are shining like glow-worms in the way I have described, then the counter-force is present also, for millions of tiny meteors are scintillating inwardly in their blood.

This is the connection between the inner man and the universe. And then we can see how, especially when autumn is approaching, there is a great raying-out of sulphur from the nerve-system towards the brain. The whole man can then be seen as a sulphur-illuminated phantom, so to speak.

But raying into this bluish-yellow sulphur atmosphere come the meteor swarms from the blood. That is the other phantom. While the sulphur-phantom rises in clouds from the lower part of man towards his head, the iron-forming process rays out from his head and pours itself like a stream of meteors into the life of the blood.

Such is man, when Michaelmas draws near. And he must learn to make conscious use of the meteoric-force in his blood. He must learn to keep the Michael Festival by making it a festival for the conquest of anxiety and fear; a festival of inner strength and initiative; a festival for the commemoration of selfless self-consciousness.

Just as at Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Redeemer, and at Easter the death and resurrection of the Redeemer, and as at St. John's Tide we celebrate the outpouring of human souls into cosmic space, so at Michaelmas—if the Michael Festival is to be rightly understood—we must celebrate that which lives spiritually in the sulphurising and meteorising process in man, and should stand before human consciousness in its whole soul-spiritual significance especially at Michaelmas. Then a man can say to himself: “You will become lord of this process, which otherwise takes its natural course outside your consciousness, if—just as you bow thankfully before the birth of the Redeemer at Christmas and experience Easter with deep inner response—you learn to experience how at this autumn festival of Michael there should grow in you everything that goes against love of ease, against anxiety, and makes for the unfolding of inner initiative and free, strong, courageous will.” The Festival of strong will—that is how we should conceive of the Michael Festival. If that is done, if nature-knowledge is true, spiritual human self-consciousness, then the Michael Festival will shine out in its true colours.

But before mankind can think of celebrating the Michael Festival, there will have to be a renewal in human souls. It is the renewal of the whole soul-disposition of men that should be celebrated at the Michael Festival—not as an outward or conventional ceremony, but as a festival which renews the whole inner man.

Then, out of all I have described, the majestic image of Michael and the Dragon will arise once more. But this picture of Michael and the Dragon paints itself out of the cosmos. The Dragon paints himself for us, forming his body out of bluish-yellow sulphur streams. We see the Dragon shaping himself in shimmering clouds of radiance out of the sulphur-vapours; and over the Dragon rises the figure of Michael, Michael with his sword.

But we shall picture this rightly only if we see the space where Michael displays his power and his lordship over the dragon as filled not with indifferent clouds but with showers of meteoric iron. These showers take form from the power that streams out from Michael's heart; they are welded together into the sword of Michael, who overcomes the Dragon with his sword of meteoric iron.

If we understand what is going on in the universe and in man, then the cosmos itself will paint from out of its own forces. Then one does not lay on this or that colour according to human ideas, but one paints, in harmony with divine powers, the world which expresses their being, the whole being of Michael and the Dragon, as it can hover before one. A renewal of the old pictures comes about if one can paint out of direct contemplation of the cosmos. Then the pictures will show what is really there, and not what fanciful individuals may somehow portray in pictures of Michael and the Dragon.

Then men will come to understand these things, and to reflect on them with understanding, and they will bring mind and feeling and will to meet the autumn in the course of the year. Then at the beginning of autumn, at the Michael Festival, the picture of Michael with the Dragon will stand there to act as a powerful summons, a powerful spur to action, which must work on men in the midst of the events of our times. And then we shall understand how this impulse points symbolically to something in which the whole destiny—perhaps indeed the tragedy—of our epoch is being played out.

During the last three or four centuries we have developed a magnificent natural science and a far-reaching technology, based on the most widely-distributed material to be found on earth. We have learnt to make out of iron nearly all the most essential and important things produced by mankind in a materialistic age. In our locomotives, our factories, on all sides we see how we have built up this whole material civilisation on iron, or on steel, which is only iron transformed. And all the uses to which iron is put are a symbolic indication of how we have built our whole life and outlook out of matter and want to go on doing so. But that is a downward-leading path. Man can rescue himself from its impending dangers only if he starts to spiritualise life in this very domain, if he penetrates through his environment to the spiritual; if he turns from the iron which is used for making engines and looks up again to the meteoric iron which showers down from the cosmos to the earth and is the outer material from which the power of Michael is forged. Men must come to see the great significance of the following words: “Here on earth, in this epoch of materialism, you have made use of iron, in accordance with the insight gained from your observation of matter. Now, just as you must transform your vision of matter through the development of natural science into Spiritual Science, so must you rise from your former idea of iron to a perception of meteoric iron, the iron of Michael's sword. Then healing will come from what you can make of it.” This is the content of the aphorism:

O Man,
You mould it (iron) to your service,
You reveal it (iron) according to the value of its substance
In many of your works.
Yet it will bring you healing
Only when it reveals to you
The lofty power of its spirit.

That is, the lofty power of Michael, with the sword he has welded together in cosmic space out of meteoric iron. Healing will come when our material civilisation proves capable of spiritualising the power of iron into the power of Michael-iron, which gives man self-consciousness in place of mere nature-consciousness.

You have seen that precisely the most important demand of our time, the Michael-demand, is implicit in this aphorism, this script that reveals itself in the astral light.

When, out of that existence which is called the pre-earthly, the human being first grows through the germinal state into the physical-earthly life, we then see how in his physical existence the spiritual nature, which is at first hidden, begins to assert itself Out of the physical body; how the child sleeps, as it were, into the physical-earthly world. We see that the life of the child in its relation with the surrounding world is still a kind of dreaming; that it only gradually awakes. Threefold, however, do we find is that which the child manifests at especially conspicuous points in the stages of this awaking. Indeed, something of this threefoldness is observed with that intimate joy, that devoted love, with which one who is in the full sense a human being always observes a child. But the full significance of this threefoldness really becomes clear to one only when it is possible through spiritual science to observe the spiritual life in the physical-corporeal existence. This threefoldness is the learning to walk, learning to speak, learning to think. You know that the human being passes through this threefoldness in an age like the springtime of life. Such is this meaningful order of occurrence. We shall soon see why it must be this meaningful succession. It can, as a matter of fact, be different, but the succession according to nature is just this.

Learning to walk is something which, in an utterly one-sided manner, points to a series of things that the child achieves at the same time. The child enters into the world in such a way that it is in a state of equilibrium utterly unlike that in which it later moves about in the world. There is associated with this at the same time the right use of the arms and the right placing of the human organism in a posture suitable for man in his relation with the world, in the capacity for movement in relation with the world suitable for the human being, in the capacity for movement suited to the human being in the earthly existence. This is what the child must first learn. Out of what the human being acquires in the mobility of his organism there proceeds what adapts him to the equilibrium of the solid, the fluid, the gaseous. In all of this lies the basis for something else. While the human being is undertaking all this activity—learning to walk, learning balance, learning to use the arms and hands and fingers—these movements, which take place in his entire system, are working upward into the system which is the basis for human speech. This tenses the muscles, causes the blood to flow, exercises an influence upon the etheric body, works over into those physical, etheric, astral organs of breathing, proceeds further exerting a certain plastic activity in the brain. One might say that it passes beyond into those organs which, out of the inner human being, bring about speaking through imitation of the surroundings. Language is the transposition of movement and transposition of balance. One who can bring reality into cognition through beholding the actuality of the soul-spiritual sees how dexterity—not the achieved, but the striving that the child must exercise in order to gain the dexterity practiced by the hand in grasping—works onward into the melodious element of language. What is rhythm in language comes to expression in the manner in which the feet are set down in the movement of walking. It is of much significance to observe whether the child, in learning to walk, steps on the heel, the ball of the foot, or the toes. Out of speech there grows what darts forth out of the human being as childish thinking. Walking, speaking, thinking,—all of this evolves out of that dim, dreamy state of consciousness. When the human being is born, and is not yet able to do these things, the force is none the less within the child in the last after-effects of its presence in the pre-earthly existence. Spiritual science can show us how this exists in the pre-earthly life. The earliest sounds of language are not such as manifest thinking, but proceed out of bodily comfort or discomfort.

How did walking, speaking, thinking appear in the pre-earthly life? Thinking, as it flows out of the child,—one who observes the manifestation of this thinking, as he traces it backward, finds that it disappears in an indefinite darkness. It emerges again in the very last period before the earthly birth. There one sees the human spirit-soul being in spiritual intercourse with that host of Beings described in my Occult Science as Angels. This is an intercourse which may be described by saying that thoughts are not being conceived and expressed abstractly, but that a living stream of thought is flowing here and there from one Being to another: there is living intercourse with the Angels. Out of what has flowed into the human soul in the form of a force, there develops something which is slept through, as it were, during the germinal life but later becomes manifest as the force of thinking, conceiving. This we possess in order to enter rightly into intercourse with human beings. Just think what we should be if we were not thinking beings, what we should be as human beings together! All that we are as human beings together results from the fact that we are thinking beings. Here on this earth we mutually understand one another in the relation of man to man by means of the thinking which we express in speech. This manner in which we understand one another here by means of thinking,—this we have acquired out of the pre-earthly intercourse with the Angels. This intercourse which we there practice with the Angels can be practiced also with other human beings who are there in the pre-earthly existence. This takes the form of direct speaking in thoughts. Loftier, however, is the intercourse with the hierarchy of the Angels, since this affords not only satisfaction for the soul but a force which reappears in the thinking that the child acquires in the third stage of his earthly life.

Let us consider now the second stage, that of language. This is not so completely bound up with the sense-nerve system as is thinking. Speaking is bound up with the breast system, man's rhythmic system, with that which comes to expression in breathing, in blood circulation. When that which there struggles out of the child, imitating in language the outer world, is traced back to the pre-earthly life, we find that these forces are acquired out of intercourse he is permitted to experience during the pre-earthly existence with the second hierarchy, that of the Archangels, those Beings who rule over peoples, Beings with this responsibility for the very reason that they have the relation with human beings which we have just described. These forces acquired by the human being in relation with the Archangels sink down into night and come again to manifestation in the forces of the earthly life of speech, by means of which we have mutual understanding with other human beings. Without language, what should we be as human beings in mutual association if we could not pour forth in the coarser vibration of the air, which manifest speech, the ether vibrations of thought? That our rhythmic system becomes the bearer of a denser manifestation,—this force we receive from the Hierarchy of the Archangels. And thus can we follow this process as we go back to the pre-earthly existence; we can say not only in abstract ways that man lives there among spiritual Beings, but can declare in an entirely specific manner what this or that class of Beings has bestowed upon us for the life on earth. We thank these spiritual Beings—that is, we place ourselves in a right relation with these Beings—when we say: For my thinking, I thank the Angels; for language, I thank the Archangels.

Let us go back now to the first thing that the child learns: to walk, learning a balanced posture. There is more connected with this than is usually thought. Connected with it is the bringing about by the ego of a specific physical process which changes man from a creeping to a walking being. It is the ego that erects the human being; the astral body that is at work within the feeling for speech in the erect being; the etheric body that permeates all of this with the force of thinking. But all of these work into the physical body. When we consider the animal, which has its back parallel with the surface of the earth, its action, its walking, its behavior—everything that proceeds out of the astral—is utterly unlike these things in man, who is a being with volition acting out of his upright, vertical nature. What comes about in man, taking place in the ego, astral body, etheric body,—all of this is in the physical body a sort of combustion process. Here is a point where our physical science, if it was desirous of fulfilling itself, would be able to discover its union with Anthroposophy. It must be said that the combustion processes in man are altogether different from those in the animal. When the flame of the organic being works horizontally, it destroys what comes out of conscience; there cannot work into this what is derived from the moral out of conscience. The fact that, in the case of the human being, these processes are streamed through by the conscience is due to the fact that the flame of volition in man is perpendicular to the earth. Within this striking in of the moral, of the nature of conscience, the child places himself just as into the external posture of balance. Together with the learning to walk, there darts into man the moral human nature—indeed, the religious permeation of the nature of man. These are truly lofty forces which are there at work when the child passes over from the creeping to the walking movement. These forces, if we follow them back through the darkness of the child's consciousness, lead us to a still loftier association of man with the Beings whom we call the Primal Forces, the Archai. Everything through which the human being has passed in the pre-earthly life is here reactivated. If to the prayer-like formula, for my thinking I thank the Angels, for language I thank the Archangels, we wish to attach a third unit, we must say: For my being placed within the earthly existence according to physical and moral forces, I thank the Archai—who have been endowed with this power by still loftier Beings.

And now we can answer the question for ourselves: How is it that the human being, who possessed a brilliant consciousness before birth, brings with him here a dull consciousness? Indeed, into this consciousness there dips down what we can combine under the concepts of walking capacity, speaking capacity, thinking capacity, which we have received into ourselves from the higher Hierarchies to be transformed by us. We see thus that what makes us human beings, that through which we are human beings among human beings, manifests our connection with the loftier divine-spiritual worlds. Into these divine-spiritual worlds we enter again and again in a certain way during our earthly existence. The truth is that we must say to ourselves: For the real nature of man, the state of sleep, out of which dreams come into play, is at least just as significant as the waking state. When man passes over from the waking state to the state of sleep, these three capacities that have been acquired in the manner described begin to grow silent: conceiving, speaking, action all grow silent. But we see then that, as thinking grows silent when we fall asleep, the human being, in the same degree in which thought disappears from his consciousness, comes near to the Angels, and, as his speaking capacity comes to an end, he approaches the Archangelic Beings. In the degree to which the human being has entered into complete stillness, he passes through the quieting of his activity into proximity with the Primal Beings, the Archai.

What is important, however, is that we should enter during the sleeping state in a worthy manner into proximity with these three hierarchies: that we come close to the Angels, Archangels, Archai in a worthy way during the state of sleep. Here is the point at which one would have to speak in a special manner to the human beings of the present time; for the manner in which we enter into proximity with the Angels depends very much upon the manner of one's thinking during the waking state. The manner in which man uses worthily his speaking forces determines whether he comes worthily near to the Archangels; the way in which man uses rightly his capacity for movement and his moral sense determines whether he comes worthily near to the Archai.

We are living in a time when the human being is no longer willing to have in his thinking anything extending beyond the physical world, when he desires to be stimulated by the external world. A pure, self-sustained thinking, such as I recommended more than thirty years ago in my Philosophy of Freedom as the foundation for moral intuition,—such thinking, unfortunately, is sought but little at present and but little cultivated in children. But through such thinking, which Goethe and Schiller would still have called idealistic thinking,—through such thinking one breaks free from the mere waking world in earthly existence and retains something for the sleeping state. So much power do we possess for approaching the Angels during sleep as there is idealism in our thinking. And just as helpless are we for the steps we must take toward the Angels as materialism is at work in our thinking. In the same sense it is to be observed that those persons fall victims to Ahrimanic elemental spirits—to which then their thinking is forced to turn—who do not, through idealism developed during the waking state, find the forces for drawing near to the Angelic Beings. It is so very beautiful when the child has learned to think so directly, in a manner of which human beings no longer form any conception! The thinking of the child just after it has learned to think is filled with spirituality. It is wonderful to see how—up to the time when they have been nibbled at by materialism—children upon sleeping move immediately as if on wings toward their Angelic Being, how united they become during sleep with the Angelic Beings. Thus we may say that we seek during sleep—but only through idealism, through spiritualizing the realm of thoughts—those worlds out of which we have evolved in order to learn to think here as human beings together with human beings.

And when we consider language, idealism in one's disposition has the same significance for intercourse during sleep with the Archangels as idealism in thinking has for association with the Angels. The person who is able, when addressing his words to another person, to stream good will into these words, a good mood that passes over into the soul of the other person, which does not pass by the other person but penetrates into him with the interest that one may have for a human being,—that mood which may be called an idealistic mood of good will, it is this that, when astral body and ego have passed over into sleep, gives to language the melodious sound. This gives to astral body and ego, which also share in language, the capacity to come near to the Archangelic Beings, whereas it is the unsocial, egotistic attitude of mind which scatters these forces in the realm of the Ahrimanic elemental beings. Thus the human being, when he falls asleep, and has not used language in the right, idealistic manner, really dehumanizes himself.

Such is the situation likewise when our actions, our conduct is such as to be humanly friendly, but is also fully aware that the human being is not only that entity living in flesh, but in his inner nature is a spiritual being, for out of this awareness arises respect for the other person likewise as a spiritual being. It is out of action based upon this attitude that we gain for the sleeping state the power that brings us in the right manner close to the Archai, whereas, if we are not in a condition to perform humanly kind actions, if we are aware of our own nature only as bodily, the corresponding forces are then scattered in the realm of Ahrimanic elemental Beings: we alienate ourselves from the very nature of man.

Thus the human being brings three kinds of gifts out of the pre-earthly existence, but it is in this way that he connects these again in a threefold manner with his primordial form between sleeping and waking, while he remains unconscious, but returns again and again into proximity with these Beings. This, then, is just as we here on earth have to form our association with other human beings out of three sources: the source of thought, of speech, of action. Thus are we during sleep in a threefold relation with the spiritual world: with the Angels, with the Archangels, with the Primal Forces.

The nature of our link in association with these Beings is of determinative significance when we pass through the portal of death. For it is possible to know through spiritual vision that one is able to draw ever nearer to the Angels, the Archangels, the Beings of the Archai. But it is something which may become extremely bad for future human beings if they surrender themselves wholly to the Ahrimanic elemental Beings, if materialistic thinking, speaking, action become ever more habitual. Thanks to the spiritual world, however, human souls of the present time—at least as to most persons—have such an inheritance of a good mood in thinking, speaking and action that the materialism of the present time cannot degrade everything. Very materialistic persons do not possess out of the contemporary life on earth much that can render possible approach to the hierarchies, yet out of the life of the past there flows forth what brings them there. Yet humanity may very easily meet with a different reward if a spiritual conception of life is not acquired. The idealizing of thinking, speaking and action provides man with the possibility of creating in a certain way new connections with the three classes of divine-spiritual Beings—the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai—and this man needs for the time between death and a new birth. Otherwise, in a far future time, if he has not had a connection in the present time with the Angels, he must be born as a being crippled in thinking; if he has not entered into a union with the Archangels, as a man without language; if he has not had a connection with the Archai, as a being crippled in limbs and in moral impulses. It is within the power of mankind on earth, through materialism in civilization and culture, to drag the whole of earthly humanity down to ruin, or through spiritualizing to lift humanity to a loftier height, such as I described in my Occult Science as the Jupiter existence of the earthly beings.

It is simply true that Anthroposophy is not a theory: every word, every thought passes over into our whole spiritual human nature. We cannot do otherwise than to possess the thought: you are truly a crippled person if you do not possess the right relation with the Higher Beings. This gives us the right sense of responsibility in a moral relation with the spiritual world, and it is out of this that there comes about in man a right sense of responsibility in relation also with the physical world. Only thus does it arise. When you consider what thus occurs to the human being, how through idealism in his thinking he enters into proximity with the Angels, how through his words, through the idealistic attitude expressed in his speaking, he enters into proximity with the Archangels, how through the idealism embodied in his actions he draws near to the Archai—how during sleep he struggles upward to the three Hierarchies—you will then find intelligible what anthroposophical research discloses to us: that the constitution of human destiny is woven in this way. All of this we carry through the portal of death, and it later becomes conscious. After death we must form our thoughts in association with the Angels; it is through the disposition of mind we possess that we must acquire our concepts after death. The manner in which we take our place through language in the midst of mankind gives us the capacity, the power, to enter into association with the Archangels. Through the manner in which we use our limbs must we gain the possibility of possessing self-consciousness after death through association with the Archai. Thus do we enter livingly within and thus is that woven which develops into a clearer power of consciousness between death and a new birth.

If we now observe the child during the earliest years of life, we behold the preceding earthly existence in its after effects. We see not only into the preceding pre-earthly life, but also the preceding life on earth, and thus only does one gain a view for the entire life on earth. One observes the child, how it learns to walk, to use its arms; one observes whether it steps on the ball of the foot or on the heel. Not only does one notice how it directs its physical look, but how still earlier actions are carried out with delicacy, with tenderness, with a pitying heart, how this gives to the child in this life a firm tread, how an insecure, wavering step is the outcome of brutish, pitiless action in the previous life. Every step taken by the child, the striving for this or that forming of the tread, reveals to us how this forming is the outcome of the previous life on earth. We learn to recognize the physical as the image of what is living in the child as a moral impulse out of the previous life on earth. The most impressive thing that can be observed is the learning to walk. Human freedom comes about through the fact that man is born with his destiny as little interfered with as whether he has light or dark hair.

The primary measure of destiny is expressed in the learning to walk. In learning to speak, something else is really indicated. This also is in relation with the pre-earthly existence, but it is difficult to describe. Since it is difficult to characterize, I shall express this in popular language. When the human being passes through the portal of death, he has in a certain way formed his nature morally. Always during the sleeping state he has been weaving his own being, and what he has then woven he himself begins to see. What a person is, comes to manifestation in his learning to walk. When he has passed through the portal of death, he enters in the right manner into association with the Angels, Archangels, Archai, but something further is added to this which the person receives from the second group of the hierarchies. These stream into this person, as an additional, more impersonal karma, that which places him in his next life within a specific language, integrates him within a certain body of people. Individual destiny is connected with what the person is in relation with the Archai. Capacity for speaking we receive from the Archangels. But what language we learn,—this is received from far loftier Beings: the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes.

When we consider thinking, conceiving, this is in relation, as I have shown, with the Angels; these Beings can bestow upon man the gift of thinking. This capacity, however, man achieved first in the earth period of evolution; he did not possess it during the Moon period. In this way there comes about a development for the Angels themselves; they enter thus into relation with the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. They have gained in this way the capacity for a direct association with the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, and these do not bestow a capacity which is to be shared only within a single human group, but one to be shared by the whole of humanity. Thinking is really something belonging in common to the whole of humanity. For this reason is logic identical over the whole earth. Walking, in which personal destiny is expressed, we receive from the Archai, out of their own forces. The capacity for speaking is received by the human being from the Archangels, but these are directed in this by the second group of the hierarchies. It is from the Angels that the human being receives the gift of thinking, but these bestow this upon man under the influence of the highest hierarchies.

Thus are things woven in the cosmic order, and man is understood only when he is clearly seen in this relation of being interwoven with the cosmic order. In this way one understands, not only the single person, but also the nature of a living or dying branch of language, a deficient or a perfect capacity for thinking. Man exists on earth in a certain dualistic relation. He sees entities and sees them in a certain dependency under natural laws. In relation with these, man comes to a consciousness of his own relation with the Godhead. Here on this earth there is no relation between the physical and the moral cosmic order. But, when we look back into the life before birth and that after death, we then enter into a world where these two realms are merged into one. Moreover, a human being cannot determine rightly what he himself is unless he is in a position to see truly into himself as a spiritual being. Man does not acquire a unitary world view unless he can see beyond birth and death, if he does not look into the higher worlds. In order to understand his entire, total being, man needs a consciousness permeated by knowledge of his connection with the spiritual world.

We have spoken at length about the relationship between a humanistic worldview and a social approach to life. We are discussing these matters because it is necessary today, from various points of view, to recognize how a thorough recovery of our lives and a truly fruitful development towards the future are only possible if spiritual-scientific views and ideas enter into the way people think and imagine.

Besides what I said recently about looking back on life, there is something else that applies to this life review. I have drawn your attention to the fact that when a person looks back on his life, he should actually be aware that he is only aware of discontinuous elements of his life with his ordinary consciousness, and that between these discontinuous links, which man looks back on, are the states of sleep, which actually fall away, with regard to which man, in terms of his retrospective view, even indulges in a certain delusion. He assumes that life is continuous; but it is not continuous. This life is such that it only shows us fragmented episodes. But from the spiritual-scientific background one should be clear about the fact that what is not perceived from the review of life is nevertheless an experience, just as much an experience as that which is incorporated into ordinary consciousness.

Now, the experiences that the human soul always undergoes between falling asleep and waking up are not easy to describe, because the person has to free themselves from a number of things that are part of their usual perception of consciousness if they are to have any idea at all of the experiences that take place between falling asleep and waking up.

We live for ordinary life in space and time. When we are completely asleep – from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, speaking now – then it is the case that we live neither in ordinary time nor in ordinary space. When we recall what happens to us in the time between falling asleep and waking up, the memory itself is a kind of shadow image or, as they say, a projection of the experience during sleep into the space and time of waking day life.

But if you want to take a closer look at these conditions, then you must also bear in mind that the state of sleep is not merely rest in relation to the waking state. It is precisely in this respect that one of the cases arises in which people judge more out of preconceived ideas than out of real observation. One might ask, if one calls the ordinary waking life the normal state of man: When does rest occur? Rest actually only exists in two points, at the moment of falling asleep and at the moment of waking up. In a sense, falling asleep and waking up are zero compared to the waking state during the day. But the state of sleep is not zero; the state of sleep is the opposite. We must here resort to the favorite comparison from arithmetic. You may, for instance, have some property, say fifty francs; then you have something. When have you nothing? Well, just when you have nothing. But if you owe fifty francs, then you have less than nothing, then you have the negative. Thus, in relation to waking, nothingness is falling asleep and waking up; in relation to the ordinary waking state, the state of sleep itself is the negative. For while we sleep, processes opposite to those of waking occur, processes of a completely different kind, processes that, above all, in their reality, are not subject to the laws of space and time like the processes of waking daytime life.

But, as you may have already suspected from my previous lecture, it is actually only in this state of sleep that our real self is truly in its element. The self certainly lives in our will, but even there it sleeps, as we know. The real self does not enter into our ordinary thought life. We would not even be aware of the real self if we did not perceive it as a kind of negative. And when we look back on our experiences, we do not say to ourselves: We have experienced days and nights – but we only look back on the days. And instead of saying: We look back on the nights – we say: “I” – we feel, we perceive ourselves as I.

People must gradually come to understand such truths, otherwise they will be crushed by the purely scientific world view, which has indeed taken hold of all other life, of all other views of life, in the majority of modern people. We will only be able to know ourselves completely as human beings if we say to ourselves at every moment of our lives: You are not only a human being in flesh and blood who has a consciousness, as is familiar to most people now living, but you are a human being who has only slipped out of his body from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up. But then you live under completely different circumstances than in ordinary waking life, and only then, between falling asleep and waking up, is your ego in its actual element; there it can unfold, there it is what it can lay claim to: to be substantial. During daytime wakefulness, our ego is present only in our volition. In thinking, in imagining and even in a large part of feeling, of sensing, only images of the ego are present.

Therefore, it is a great mistake when some philosophers claim that there is a reality in what a person addresses as his or her self. Only when a person awakens in sleep in higher consciousness would he become aware of his real self. Or if he were to see through what the process of the will is, then he would experience his real self in willing.

But these things must actually pass over into the human being's intuitive perception, into his feeling, if they are to play the right role in life. Man must, so to speak, be able to say to himself: You are a being who, with his ordinary conception of the world, actually perceives only one half of it; you are embedded with the other half of this being, continually in supersensible experiences, which you cannot perceive with your ordinary consciousness alone. A certain reverence for the creative principles behind man can only be attained by man in the right way, when he can connect with the supersensible in this way. Therefore, in a materialistic age like ours, not only will the view of the supersensible fade away, but in such an age reverence for the creative principles of the world will also fade away. Respect will have vanished altogether from human hearts. There is little respect and few feelings in the present time that can truly uplift the soul to the supersensible! And much of the sentiment that people try to preserve is nothing more than a certain sentimentality, and sentimentality is at the same time also untrue, sentimentality is never completely true.

When one – and I must mention this again on this occasion – takes such things into one's consciousness, intellectually and emotionally, then the fact that human and world life has something of the character of a great mystery comes before one's soul's eye. And without this view, that life and the order of the world are a mystery, real progress in the development of humanity cannot really be imagined. Epochs such as our own, in which no one really wants to believe that life contains secrets, can basically only be episodes. They can serve to cut people off from their own origins for a while, and then, precisely through the reaction against this cutting off, they can penetrate all the more to a real feeling for the mystery of life. But this mystery of life can reveal itself to man neither out of sentimentality nor out of abstraction. It can only reveal itself when man is inclined to enter concretely into the facts of the supersensible world. And it will be something of a beginning of such an engagement with supersensible facts if one can really develop a kind of sacred feeling when entering into the state of sleep and can develop a sacred feeling with regard to looking back into this state of sleep, in which one, one may, without actually speaking figuratively, characterize it in this way: was in the dwellings of the gods.

Ultimately, we must realize how far removed our present-day view of life is from this idea, how thoughtlessly the present human race sees this other side of life. But how can we see through what lies beyond birth and death if we cannot see through what lies beyond falling asleep and waking up? For that which lies in man beyond birth and death is also there between birth and death; only between birth and death it is hidden behind the physical shell. But if there were less egotistical religiosity and more altruistic religiosity - I have already spoken of this - then in what man lives through from birth on, the continuation of prenatal life or life before conception would be seen in the spiritual world. But then the phenomena in human life would appear to us as miracles, and we would constantly have the need to unravel them. We would have the longing to see the revelation of that which is formed, embodied from supersensible worlds into the sensible world, through human evolution. And basically, it is already the case today that we can only understand the after-death life in the right way if we look at the prenatal life.

You see, there are secrets of life. A number of secrets of life must be revealed in our time because of the developmental demands of humanity. A human being cannot become aware of their full humanity if they do not broaden their view of themselves to include prenatal and post-mortem life. For we only know part of our being if we do not allow the prenatal and post-mortem to reveal themselves to us in this physical existence. Even today it is still extraordinarily difficult to speak of these things to people who have not been introduced to them through anthroposophy, because either there is the utmost interest in these things, in which case the truth is not allowed to come among people, or there is a lack of proper understanding. You only need to look around in life, then you will find that the usual world views today pay very, very little attention to prenatal life. They care about the afterlife out of selfishness, because they demand not to perish with their physical body. And the religious denominations count on this selfishness by basically only speaking of the afterlife, not of the prenatal life.

But the matter is not just that, but it is still difficult today to talk about these things because it is a dogma of the Catholic Church not to believe in prenatal life, a dogma that other Christian denominations have also adopted. So that pretty much most Christian denominations today consider it heresy to speak of prenatal life. But it is something that reaches extraordinarily deep into the spiritual development of humanity when one dogmatically forbids looking at prenatal life. It is indeed difficult to imagine — and here I am not speaking of conscious things, but rather of unconscious ones in the development of humanity — that anything could succeed more in lulling man into illusions about his actual being than withholding from him views about prenatal life. For the whole view of man is falsified by the fact that people are deceived into believing that the mere fact of being born of father and mother is the only reason man is placed on earth at all. By withholding man's insight into prenatal life, the church has created an enormous means of exerting power. Therefore the church as such will fight in the most terrible way against all those teachings that dwell on prenatal life. The church will not tolerate that. There should be no illusions about that; but nor should there be any illusion that life simply cannot be understood if no consideration is given to prenatal life.

But something will follow from this that you should really take into account deeply and thoroughly. Consider this: it was in the interest of the church creeds to withhold important information about themselves from people. The church creeds have made it their mission to withhold the most important truths about themselves from people. These church creeds have thus found their means to envelop people in dullness, in illusion. And today it is necessary not to succumb to any illusions on this point, not to compromise out of any kind of indulgence with all kinds of church dogmas. There is no compromising on this. And it should be noted that it is of no avail to assert somewhere: Anthroposophy is concerned with the Christ, it is not atheistic, it is not pantheistic either, and so on. This will never help you, for the church creeds will not be annoyed that you do not concern yourself with the Christ; they do not care much about that, but they will be annoyed precisely because you do concern yourself with the Christ. For it matters to them that they have the monopoly on saying anything about Christ. In these matters one must not practice inner indulgence, otherwise one will always be tempted to shroud the most important things in life in twilight and fog and illusion. Humanity today has a need to approach spiritual knowledge. But dogmatic church creeds are the ones that are most opposed to spiritual knowledge, especially those dogmatic church creeds that have gradually developed in the West. The Church as such cannot actually be hostile to spiritual knowledge; that is quite impossible, because the Church as such should actually only be concerned with the feelings of man, with ceremonies, with worship, but not with the life of thought. The educated Oriental does not understand the Western church creeds at all, because the educated Oriental knows exactly: he is bound to the external cult; it is his duty to devote himself to the ceremonies to which he devotes himself in his confession. He can think whatever he wants. In the Oriental confession one still knows something of freedom of thought. This freedom of thought has been completely lost to Europeans. They have been educated in the bondage of thought, especially since the 8th or 9th century AD. That is why it is so difficult for people of Western culture to understand the things I mentioned the other day: that it is easy to prove any opinion. You can prove one opinion and you can prove its opposite. Because the fact that something can be proved is no proof of the truth of what is asserted. To arrive at the truth, one must go into much deeper layers of experience than those in which our usual proofs lie. But certain church creeds have not wanted to bring experience to the surface; therefore they have separated people from such truths as these: There you stand, O human being! As your organism develops from infancy, what you have lived through in prenatal life gradually develops within you.

And what, in particular, develops mainly from prenatal life in the individual human life between birth and death?

Now, we distinguish between an individual life and a social life in a human being. If you do not keep these two poles of human experience separate, you cannot arrive at any concept of the human being at all: individual life – that which we have, so to speak, as our most personal sense of ownership every day, in every hour; social life – that which we could not have if we did not constantly exchange ideas and engage in other interactions with other people. The individual and the social play into human life. Everything that is individual in us is basically the after-effect of prenatal life. Everything we develop in our social life is the germ of our after-death life. We have even seen recently that it is the germ of karma. So we can say: there is the individual and the social in man. The individual is the after-effect of the prenatal life. The social is the germ of the after-death life.

The first part of this truth, that the individual is, so to speak, the after-effect of prenatal life, can be seen particularly clearly by studying people with special talents. Let us say, because it is good to look at the root of the matter in such cases, that we study human genius. Where does the power of genius come from? Man brings the genius into this life through his birth. It is always the result of pre-birth life. And since, understandably, pre-birth life is particularly evident in childhood — later, a person adapts to life between birth and death, but in childhood everything that a person experienced before birth comes out — that is why, in the case of genius, the childlike manifests itself throughout life. It is virtually the characteristic of genius to retain the childlike throughout life. And it is even part of genius to retain youthfulness and childlikeness until the very last days, because all genius is connected with prenatal life. But not only genius, all talents, everything that makes a person an individuality is connected with prenatal life. Therefore, if you give people the dogma that there is no prenatal life, that there is no preexistence, what are you implicitly doing with it? You are spreading the doctrine that there is no reason for special individual talents. — You know that the actual church creeds, when they are completely sincere and honest, profess that there are no reasons for personal talents. It is not right to deny personal talents themselves; but if you deny their reasons, then you can consider personal talents to be quite meaningless.

This is connected with the fact that an education of European humanity has emerged from the church confessions, as they have prevailed for centuries, which has ultimately led to the modern levelling of people. What are people's individual talents today? And what would individual talents be if the usual socialist doctrine were implemented? In these matters, it is less important to look at the outward name of a thing than at the inner connections. A person who is a Catholic believer in dogma on the one hand and a hater of social-democratic teachings on the other is subject to a very strange inconsistency. He is as inconsistent as someone who says: I met a little boy in 1875, I was very fond of him then, and I am still very fond of him today. But now someone says to him: But look, the little boy of 1875 has become the guy who is now standing in front of you as a Social Democrat. Yes, so the answer goes, I still like the little boy of 1875 in his life back then, but I don't like, I hate, the man he has become. But social democracy grew out of Catholicism! Catholicism is just the little boy who has grown into social democracy. The latter does not want to admit it, nor does the former want to admit it, but only because people do not want to see any liveliness in the external social sphere, but only want to see something made of papier-mâché. When you make something out of papier-mâché, it remains stiff and keeps its form as long as it lasts; but that which is in the social life grows and lives and can also be preserved. But here one must distinguish between 'deception and reality. You see, you distinguish between deception and reality when you, for example, come up with the following idea. 8th century: Catholicism; 20th century: From the real Catholicism of the 8th century, social democracy has emerged! And what is present as Catholicism alongside it is not the real Catholicism of the 8th century, but its imitation, counterfeit Catholicism; for real Catholicism has since grown into social democracy.

This is not generally recognized, not because people are unwilling to face reality, but because they create illusions and deceptions to shield themselves from reality. And it is easy for them to do so. For one simply gives the same name to what has long since ceased to be itself. But if today what is represented in Europe from Rome - I have to describe it - is given the name Catholicism in the same sense as what was represented in the 8th century from Rome, it is just the same as if I were to say of a sixty-year-old man: “He's just the eight-year-old lad!” Once upon a time he was an eight-year-old lad, but today he is no longer an eight-year-old lad.

I am drawing your attention here to something that needs to be considered because social life, too, may be seen as something alive and not as something inanimate and dead. And until such things are seen through, present-day humanity will not rise to an understanding of real social life. The social life has its roots in spheres that we today no longer grasp with our externalized names in any language, at best in the oriental languages, a little in the European languages, least of all in English or American, which is of course very far removed from reality. So our languages are obstacles to understanding the social. Therefore, humanity will only advance in its understanding of the social if it emancipates itself from mere linguistic understanding. But today, anything that goes beyond mere linguistic understanding is very much condemned. And what is most often found today is that when something is to be explained, some kind of word explanation is presented first. But it does not matter what you call a thing, what word you use for it; the important thing is to lead people to the thing and not to the word. So, above all, we must overcome the bondage of languages if we want to advance to social understanding. But the bondage of languages will only be overcome if the greatest prejudices of our time are overcome. During the years of terror that we have gone through, the cry rang out throughout the world: Freedom to the individual nations! — and the smallest nations today want to create their own social structures. A passion, a paroxysm of nationalism has come over humanity, and this is just as damaging to the social life of the earth as materialism is to the life of thought. And just as man must work his way out of materialism to freedom and spirituality, so must humanity work its way out of all nationalism, in whatever form it may appear, to universal humanity. Without this, no progress can be made.

However, we will not find the possibility in languages of completely getting out of nationalism if these languages do not draw on deeper forms of expression for the spiritual. You see, I would like to conclude these reflections more or less with an image. If you reflect on this image, which I will use, you will be able to come up with many things that may be important for your understanding of the present time. Look at any piece of writing today. These little devils standing on the white paper are called letters, which you put next to each other. They have grotesque forms and in their juxtaposition they then signify the sounds of our languages. This goes back to other more expressive forms of writing. And if we trace this back very far, we come to the forms of writing, let us say, as the Egyptians had them, or what the original Sanskrit was like, which more or less developed entirely from the snake character in its forms. The Sanskrit signs are transformed snake forms with all kinds of things attached to them. The Egyptian forms of writing were still painted, drawn forms of writing, were still pictures, and in their oldest times were even the imagination of that which was depicted. The writing was directly out of the spiritual. Then writing became more and more abstract until it became what was more or less bad enough: our ordinary writing, which is only connected to what it represents by learning its forms.

Then came something even more terrible, shorthand, which is now the deathblow to the whole system that developed out of ancient pictographic writing. This downward development must give way to an upward one; we must return to a development that leads us out of all that we have been driven into, especially with writing. And with that an attempt was made to make a beginning. Here on this hill at Dornach it stands. However much is lacking in the Dornach building, however much is imperfect, it is something in its forms that expresses in a contemporary way the supersensible essence to which the human being is meant to aspire today. I would like to say that it is also meant as a world hieroglyph. If you really study its individual forms, you will be able to read much more in them than you can absorb from descriptions of the spiritual. This is at least the intention. The intention is to realize a world scripture in it. Writing emerged from art, and writing must return to art. It must go beyond symbolism, allow the spiritual within itself to live directly, by becoming a hieroglyph again in a new way.

What is written here on this hill will only be properly understood if one says to oneself: There are many demands of humanity in the present time that should have an answer. Basically, the language of today is not sufficient to provide an answer. Such an answer is attempted with the forms of this building. Much in it is imperfect; but the attempt at such an answer has been made through this building. And if one looks at it from this point of view, then one will look at it in the right way.

This is what I wanted to add to the previous reflections.

This book, in line with all Rudolf Steiner's courses of lectures, is an elaboration of certain aspects of the basic teaching of spiritual science. It describes the potential inherent in human knowing to take man beyond the sense perceptible knowledge of Nature into realms of supersensible experience. It requires, therefore, two essential prerequisites of the reader: first, that he be already familiar with that basic teaching itself as it is contained in such books as The Philosophy of Freedom, Theosophy, Occult Science—An Outline, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—all of which are referred to in this one; and second, that his familiarity with them shall have reached a point where he has no doubt that what is contained in them is founded on a conception of man and the world that satisfies the strictest standards of thought. Without this, the reader may find himself awash in what may seem to him a flood of metaphysical speculation in which he can find no solid ground on which to stand.

But the solid ground is there. It consists in the fact that all our knowledge is, after all, nothing but the thoughtful elaboration of experience; and that thought activity itself is, when followed through, an indication—one could just as well say `proof—that behind all sense phenomena is a reality of being, imperceptible as it may be to the senses, which can be truly called spiritual. Sense phenomena alone, and what is often referred to as their bearer, matter, are neither the sole reality of the world in which we live nor the means for a full assessment of man as a being of body, soul and spirit. Sense phenomena are a special form of spirit. That alone gives them meaning; and without that meaning which the spirit in man manifesting as thought gives to them, the world would be for him a chaotic aggregate of meaningless sensations. He might conceivably live and act instinctively in such a world, but he could never establish that relation to it which we call knowledge. But even with the knowledge of sense phenomena he is still, from an evolutionary point of view, far from what he can know and become. He has it in him, however, to advance to the development of higher, more subtle senses, the germs of which are already latent in his etheric and astral bodies.

If this, then, can be the reader's conviction he will find no difficulty in following the author's fascinating exposition of, first, the difference between a sense organ and what he calls a vital organ; and second, the relations between them and the cosmos out of which man has evolved. Our sense organs mediate impressions of the outer world; our vital organs, however, govern the very continuance of life itself. If a sense organ is damaged or even destroyed we may well go on living, though so much the poorer in experience; but if a vital organ is destroyed our life must necessarily come to an end. Nonetheless, not only were our present sense organs, like the eye and ear, vital organs, way back in the distant past; but our vital organs of today, like the lungs and heart, are also on the way to becoming sense organs of the future. It must follow, then, that a wholly different conception of the world, and man's being and activity in it, must arise as a result. The implications and ramifications of this are the sum and substance of this book.

On this basis the author is able to speak not only of the kind of perception earlier man had before the sense organs had reached their present maturity, and which gave him a different relationship to the world; but more particularly of how a properly trained initiate consciousness of today can, as it were, use in advance the perceptive powers latent in the heart and lungs for observations in the spiritual world. In doing so he not only anticipates what will one day be the general possession of mankind, but he is able to communicate the results of his researches in thought forms accessible to ordinary modern consciousness.

The transformation of vital organs into sense organs, which will be possible for the future, will, however, only happen if man has the will and desire to bring it about. This is the essential difference between the past and the future; and although man in general has a long way to go before this change actually takes place, the important thing is that he is now able to grasp the logic of it. (This is what made it essential to state so emphatically the two pre-requisites for reading such a book as this. Spiritual science is a science; and like all science it must be learned from the ground up.)

This transformation of the vital organs, therefore, will only be possible if there is a willingness now, and in the future to take up the teaching of spiritual science with an open and unprejudiced mind. It is necessary to say this, for it is all too easy today to reject out of hand any such extensions of the senses beyond those accessible to our present perception, and the instruments adapted to it—even though our generally accepted concept of evolution must envisage such a possibility. But there is a blind spot in our concept which prevents us from seeing that knowing, too, evolves. Knowing was different in the past. It will be different again in the future, but we must be able to see the direction in which that difference lies. Then we shall be able to do something about it, for we are the knower.

Contrary to popular belief, the wonderful results of technology today are neither the highest nor the final achievement of human knowledge. They will disappear as all material things disappear. What is important is what has happened to man so that he could come to know the world in such a way that he can make these things. We have to do here with an evolution of the knowing capacity itself. Earlier man did not make such things, though the laws of Nature by which they are made have lain hidden in phenomena since the dawn of time. But the conviction dies hard that the sense perceptible world out there, Nature, is not only nothing but a material process, but that that is all we can know of it. This has completely cut man off from any conscious feeling- relationship he once had, albeit in a more instinctive, half-conscious way, with the gods, the spiritual world. The knowledge we pride ourselves on today, because of what we are able to make with it, has both brought about, and had to be paid for by, the isolation of our self-consciousness. We no longer have that awareness of the spirit. If we are to have it again it must be in a new, a self-conscious way. We are on our own now; and this is at once an opportunity and a danger. We can, if we will, advance in full self-consciousness to a collaboration with the gods in the evolution of the world and ourselves such as was never possible before; or, by ignoring this opportunity, we can lay ourselves open to a “take over” by backward spiritual beings who have ideas of their own about how both we and the world should evolve. They will be able to use man's dammed-up, sense-based knowing capacities for their own purposes, and for all his skills and know-how he will actually be nothing but their “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

The choice is ours. This is the alternative with which this book closes; and this, too, is the message of spiritual science, or anthroposophy.

Alan Howard

Vancouver, 1984

[ 1 ] It is necessary to found a bank-like institution which, in its financial measures, serves economic and spiritual undertakings that are oriented both in terms of their goals and their attitude towards the anthroposophically oriented world view. It should be distinguished from ordinary banking enterprises by the fact that it serves not only the financial aspects, but also the real operations which are supported by the financial aspects. It will therefore be important above all that the loans, etc., are not obtained in the same way as in ordinary banking, but from the objective points of view which are relevant to the operation to be undertaken. The banker should therefore have less the character of a lender and more that of a businessman who is familiar with the matter, who can assess the scope of an operation to be financed with a sound mind and make the arrangements for its execution with a sense of reality.

[ 2 ] It will mainly be a question of financing such undertakings as are suitable for placing economic life on a healthy associative basis and for shaping intellectual life in such a way that legitimate talents are brought into a position through which their talents can live out in a socially fruitful way. What is particularly important, for example, is that enterprises are created that are profitable at the moment in order to support other enterprises that can only bear economic fruit in later times and above all through the spiritual seed to be poured into them now, which can only sprout after some time.

[ 3 ] It is necessary for the officials of the banking enterprise to have an insight into how the view of life given by anthroposophy can be translated into economically fruitful activity. To this end, it is necessary that a strictly associative relationship be established between the bank administrators and those who, through their idealistic effectiveness, can promote the understanding of an enterprise to be brought into being.

[ 4 ] An example: a personality has an idea that promises economic fruitfulness. The representatives of the ideals of the world view can evoke understanding for the social consequences. Their activity is financially supported by the amounts to be raised, which should also economically and technically support the realization of the idea.

[ 5 ] The focus must be on supporting the headquarters of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement itself. The building in Dornach, for example, cannot initially support anything; nevertheless, it will bring about a powerful economic return in later times. It must be understood that everyone can support it while respecting their financial conscience, if they only count on its material fruitfulness over a longer period of time.

[ 6 ] The enterprise must be based on the realization that technical, financial, etc., activity can develop branches that are not only financial but also material. The enterprise must rest on the realization that technical, financial, etc. activity can develop branches which, while temporarily producing favorable results for the individual entrepreneur, are destructive in the context of the social order. Many of the latest ventures were oriented in this way. They were fructified, and it was precisely through their fructification that the social order was undermined. This type of undertaking must be countered by those that stem from healthy thinking and feeling. They can fit into the social order in a truly fruitful way. But they can only be borne out of the social way of thinking stimulated by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

[ 7 ] It is true that even an enterprise such as the one characterized here can initially only overcome the socio-technical and financial crisis possibilities, and that it will be confronted with social difficulties as long as these still bear the form of the actual workers' question, which originates from the old mode of production condemned to crises. The workers involved in the new enterprises will, for example, behave in the same way with regard to wage differences as they do with regard to the old-style enterprises. But in such matters one must not underestimate how soon, if properly managed, an enterprise of the kind characterized here must also have socially favorable consequences. We will see that. And the example will be convincing. When an enterprise of this kind comes to fruition, the workers who are involved will already have their convictions in the process of bringing it back into flow. For it is only by bringing the manual laborers and the intellectual leaders of enterprises into one interest through a way of thinking that affects all classes of people that the forces of social destruction can be countered.

[ 8 ] The basic condition is that the spiritual endeavors are intimately connected with all material ones. We cannot achieve such an orientation with the forces now available in the anthroposophical movement because we have no practical enterprise in its bosom that has grown out of its own forces, apart from the Berlin anthroposophical publishing house. But this alone is not enough to have an exemplary effect. For its economic orientation is only the outward expression of the clout of spiritual science as such. Only those undertakings that do not have spiritual science as such as their content, but which have a content supported by the spiritual scientific way of thinking, can have a truly exemplary effect. A school as such can only be considered exemplary in this sense if it is financially supported by only those undertakings whose entire institution has already emerged from humanities circles. And the Dornach Building will only be able to prove its social significance when the personalities associated with it have brought such enterprises into being that are self-supporting, provide the people who maintain them with adequate sustenance and then leave enough left over to cover the deficit that is always required of an intellectual enterprise. In reality, this deficit is not a deficit at all. For it is precisely the fact that it arises that causes the fructification of material undertakings.

[ 9 ] You just have to take things really practically. This is not done by those who ask: so how should one make a financial or economic enterprise in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? That is simply nonsense. What is important is that the powers organized in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement itself undertake the enterprises, that is, that bankers, manufacturers, etc. join forces with this movement, so that the Dornach building becomes the real center of a new spirit of enterprise. That is why it is not "social", "technical" etc. "programs" that are to be set up in Dornach, but the building is to be the center of a working method that is to become the working method of the future.

[ 10 ] Whoever decides to provide financial support for the Dornach undertakings will have to understand that we have already reached the point where supporting undertakings in the old sense means putting one's money into unfruitful things, and that caring for one's money today means supporting promising undertakings that alone are capable of withstanding the devastating forces. Short-sighted people who still believe today that such things have never borne financial fruit will certainly not join the Dornach endeavors. Those who join must be far-sighted, financially and economically sound people who realize that continuing to muddle along in the old ways means digging themselves a safe grave. It will be these people alone who will not follow the destructive existences of the last four to five years. Continuing to work in the same way as before means nothing more than using up financial and economic reserves. Because the reserves of raw material and agricultural production, which last the longest, will also be used up. Their financial and economic fructification does not lie in the fact that they are there, but in the fact that the labor by which they are supplied to the social organism is possible. This work, however, definitely belongs to the reserves. Everything for the future depends on a new spirit taking the lead in individual enterprise as well.

Author's note ¹ Prague, April 4, 1924

I would like to speak of a kind of education and teaching that strives to develop the whole human being, body, soul and spirit, in an equal way. Such an education can only be achieved if the educator is aware of how the physical is formed out of the soul and spiritual during development. For one can only contribute to the formation of a being if one understands the laws of this formation.

Anthroposophy leads to such knowledge of the human being. It does not look at the physical one-sidedly, as it happens in the scientific world view. It rises to a spiritual vision and thereby looks at every age of the human being at the way in which the spirit works on the body of the human being and how the soul lives in the body.

In the face of such a view, clearly distinct epochs arise in the growing human being.

The first epoch runs from birth to the change of teeth, around the seventh year. The appearance of the second teeth is not just a localized process in the human organism. When the first teeth fall out and the second teeth appear, something is happening in the whole organism. Until then, the soul and spirit participate intensively in the formation of the body. During this period of human development, body, soul and spirit are still highly unified.

The whole human being is therefore like a comprehensive sensory organ. What later is concentrated only in the sensory organization, still works in the whole human being at this time. The human being is therefore completely devoted to the activities of the environment, just like a sensory organ. In the most pronounced sense, he is an imitative being. His will reacts reflexively to everything that happens around him.

Therefore, the only way to educate a child at this age is for the educator to behave in such a way that the child can imitate everything they do. This must be taken in the broadest sense. There are imponderables at work between the child and their educator. The child is not only influenced by what it perceives with its external senses in its environment, but it also senses the attitudes, characters, and good and bad intentions of other people from their behavior. Therefore, as an educator, one should cultivate purity of life in the child's environment, right down to one's thoughts and feelings, so that the child can become what one is oneself.

But one should also be aware that one's behavior has an effect not only on the soul but also on the body. What the child absorbs and allows to flow reflexively into his will continues to vibrate in the organization of his body. A teacher with a violent temper can cause the child's physical organization to become brittle, so that in later life it is easily influenced by pathogenic influences. How one educates in this direction will become apparent in later life in the state of health of the person.

The anthroposophical art of education does not focus on the spiritual and soul aspects of education because it wants to develop only these, but because it knows that it can only develop the physical properly if it develops the spiritual, which works on the body, in the right way.

A complete metamorphosis takes place in the child when the teeth change. What was previously absorbed in the physical organization and working in it becomes an independent soul being and the physical is more left to its own forces.

Therefore, when dealing with the soul of the age at which the child is to be educated and taught in a scholastic way, one has to bear in mind that one is dealing with forces that were previously the malleable forces in the body. One only works in an educational and teaching way if one keeps this in mind. The child at this age does not yet absorb with an abstract mind; it wants to experience images, as it has worked with images up to this period of life. This is only achieved if the educator and teacher relate to the child in an artistic way through the soul. They cannot assume that the child already understands what they are communicating. He should work in such a way that the child is immersed in love in the images that he unfolds in an artistic way. He should be the self-evident authority for the child. The child cannot yet absorb what is true, good and beautiful because it understands it, but something must be true, good and beautiful for the child because the beloved teacher or educator presents it as such in front of the child.

Everything in teaching and education must be brought out in a pictorial way. All teaching must be artistically designed. You cannot start with reading and not with the letterforms, which in their present form are foreign to the inner experience of the human being. One must begin with a kind of painting drawing. The child must paint and draw forms that are similar to certain processes and things, like the signs in the pictographic writing of prehistoric peoples. First there must be a picture, which the child fixes from the things and processes of the world. Then one should proceed from the picture to the letter forms, just as pictographic writing developed into abstract sign writing.

Only when the child has progressed from painting to drawing to writing in this way should one move on to reading. This is because only one part of the human being is activated in this process: the ability to comprehend that is tied to the organization of the head. In painting, drawing and writing, a more comprehensive part of the human organization is also involved. This is how you educate the whole person, not just one side of the brain.

All education should be based on the same attitude until the second decisive point in the child's development. This lies in the onset of sexual maturity. Here, too, not only a local part of the human organism undergoes a metamorphosis, but the human being as a whole. It is only at this point that the relationship between the human being and his environment unfolds, which is revealed in the more abstract conceptualization. Only from this point on should one count on the adolescent to grasp things intellectually and freely. Before that, everything should be presented in a pictorial form, and in grasping it, one should count on the child's love of pictures.

Such an education has the whole of human life in mind, not just childhood. It is quite a different matter to occupy the child in a pictorial way, so that what it has absorbed is only later understood, than to develop only the intellectual system one-sidedly at an early stage in so-called visual instruction, which is not true visual instruction because it has no artistic element. What is laid down in childhood only comes to expression in later life. A child who has gone through the pictorial stage at the appropriate age will become a person who can still be fresh and fit for life in old age; a child who is taught in a one-sided way to understand what is often thought to be appropriate for childhood will become a person who ages prematurely and is susceptible to disease-causing living conditions.

• 1. On April 4, 1924, Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture in Prague with this title. The author's note presented here is apparently a text written for press representatives to make it easier for them to report on the lecture. Rudolf Steiner prefaced it with the following note: “This is only an outline of what I will say; the spiritual researcher cannot actually do such things; in a lecture, he draws from the spirit, not from memory, and is therefore misled when his lecture is to be written down verbatim. Please excuse this.”

As you can probably imagine, it is not easy for one who is free from a fanatical or sectarian attitude to accomplish the kind of education, based on knowledge of the human being that we have spoken of in the past few days. Many of you will have noticed already that what is considered here to be both right and good in education differs in many ways from what is found in conventional forms of education, with their regulations, curricula, and other fundamental policies. In this respect, one finds oneself caught in a dilemma.

On the one hand, we stand on the firm ground of a pedagogy that derives from objective knowledge, and that prescribes specific curricular and educational tasks for each year (as you will have discovered already from what you have heard so far). To ascertain what must be done in this education, we take our cue from the children themselves; and not only for each year, but also for each month, each week, and, in the end, each day. Here I feel justified in expressing appreciation for how much the teachers of the Waldorf schools have responded to the objective demands of a truly grounded pedagogy, and also for their insight into how this pedagogy is related to the needs of the growing child.¹ They have come to realize that not a single detail of this pedagogy is arbitrary, that everything in it is a direct response to what can be read in the child's own nature. This represents one side of what has led to the dilemma. The other side consists of demands made by life itself. Those who are free of any fanaticism despite their own ideals (or whatever else you choose to call these things), and who feel the need for firm roots in life's realities, experience this other aspect with particular acuity.

Sectarianism to any degree or fanatical zeal must never be allowed to creep into our educational endeavors, only to find at the end of the road that our students do not fit into life as it is; for life in the world does not notice one's educational ideals. Life is governed by what arises from the prevailing conditions themselves, which are expressed as regulations concerning education, as school curricula, and as other related matters, which correspond to current ways of thinking. And so there is always a danger that we will educate children in a way that, though correct in itself, could alienate them from life in the world—whether one considers this right or wrong. It must always be remembered that one must not steer fanatically toward one's chosen educational aims without considering whether or not one might be alienating one's students from surrounding life.

Opponents of anthroposophy have often attributed fanaticism and sectarianism to this movement, but this is not the case, as you will see. On the contrary, it is precisely these two attributes that are alien to its nature. They may appear within some individual members, but anthroposophy itself always strives to enter fully into the realities of life. And just because of this, one is only too aware of the difficulties encountered in dealing with the practical sides of life. From the very beginning of the Waldorf school something had to be done. It is difficult to give it a proper name, but something bad or negative had to be agreed upon—that is, a kind of compromise—simply because this school is not grounded in fanaticism but in objective reality. At the very beginning, a memorandum addressed to the local school authorities had to be worked out. In it I made the following points: During the first three years the students in our school are to be educated, stage by stage and wherever possible, according to what is considered relevant to their inner needs. At the same time, the standards generally achieved in other schools are to be respected to the extent that, after completion of the first three years, the students of the Waldorf school should be able to fulfill the necessary requirements for entering corresponding classes in other schools, if desired. Such an offer, for our teachers, amounted to an “ingratiating compromise”—forgive this term, I cannot express it otherwise. A realistic mind has to take such a course, for discretion is essential in everything one does. A fanatic would have responded differently. Naturally, many difficulties have to be ironed out when such a policy is chosen, and many of our teachers would find it preferable to steer a straight course toward our aims and ideals. Lengthy and minutely detailed discussions occurred before a passage was found through these two conflicting approaches.

Another point in my memorandum was that, after completion of their twelfth year—that is, when our pupils are in the sixth grade, counting upward from the first grade—they should again be able to fulfill the requirements for entry into the corresponding class in another school. My choice for this particular age is based on the fact that it marks the end of a period of development, as already described during a previous meeting. And finally, it was presented in the memorandum that, in their fourteenth year, our students should have reached again the necessary standards of learning that would enable them, if desired, to change schools.

In retrospect, one could say that during the first three grades this plan has worked fairly well. At that level it has been tolerably successful. With a great deal of effort and trouble, it is still workable until the students' twelfth year. However, the real difficulties begin during the following years, for out of a dark subconsciousness, some knowledge of what is happening in a young child lingered from the distant past into our present time, however dim this insight may have become today. And because of this it is now customary to send children to school when they are losing their first teeth. Today people hardly realize that these two things are connected. Nevertheless, entering school at about six is still the result of ancient wisdom, passed on through the ages, which today has become only vague and instinctive. Since these things are no longer recognized, however, there is a tendency toward arbitrarily establishing the age for entering school at the completion of the sixth year, which is always a little premature, and therefore not in keeping with the child's nature. There is nothing one can do about it, because if parents do not send their children to school when they have completed their sixth year, the police or bailiff, or whatever else such people are called, will come and take the children to school.

However, as previously mentioned, it is relatively easy to work with this compromise during the first three years. Admittedly, if one or another student has to leave the Waldorf school for another school during this time because of circumstance, one is usually told that such students are behind in reading and writing. They may be considered far ahead in artistic subjects, such as in drawing or eurythmy, but these, so we are told, are not generally considered to be very important.

Such official judgments, however, can even be seen as an affirmation of Waldorf methods! They prompt me to tell you something interesting about the young Goethe.² If you look at his spelling, even when he was much older than seven or eight, you will find it full of atrocious mistakes. It is easy to deduce from this that far more is expected of an eight-year-old child today (if “more” is the right word) than what Goethe managed to achieve at seventeen (only with regard to spelling, of course). This certainly demonstrates that there is also another way of judging the situation, for Goethe owed much to the fact that, even at the age of seventeen, he was still likely to make spelling errors because, not having been too fettered to rigid rules, his inner being could remain flexible with regard to the unfolding of certain soul forces. If one knows how these things interact with each other (and a more sensitive kind of psychology is needed for this than is frequently encountered today) one will be no more influenced by adverse criticism than by the superficial criteria of such a historical fact, which is interesting, at least.

Another interesting example can be found in so-called Mendelisms, which emerged around the beginning of the twentieth century (perhaps even around the end of the nineteenth century), and which was considered by natural scientists to be the best theory for explaining the phenomena of heredity. It received its name from a certain Gregor Mendel,³ a botanist who lived during the middle of the nineteenth century and was also a teacher at a Realschule in Moravia.⁴ Gregor Mendel made careful experiments with plants in order to investigate their inherited properties. His writings remained obscure for a long time, only to surface again toward the turn of the century, to be hailed as the most convincing theory regarding heredity.

Now it is interesting to consider the biography of Gregor Mendel. As our Austrian friends here know, monastic clerics had to pass an examination before they could become eligible for a teaching post at a high school. Mendel failed his exam brilliantly, which meant that he was considered incapable of becoming a high school teacher. But an Austrian regulation existed permitting failed candidates to retake their exams after a certain period of time. Gregor Mendel did so and again failed spectacularly. I believe that even today in Austria such a person could never find a high school teaching position. In those days, however, regulations were a little less stringent. Because of a shortage of teachers at the time, even failed candidates were sometimes hired as teachers, and so Gregor Mendel did finally become a high school teacher, even though he had twice failed his exam. Since this had been made possible only through the grace of the headmaster, however, he was considered to be a second-rate staff member by his colleagues and, according to the rules governing high school teachers, he was not entitled to add “Ph.D.” to his name. Successful exam candidates usually write these abbreviated degrees after their names, for example, “Joseph Miller, Ph.D.” In the case of Gregor Mendel these letters were missing, the omission of which indicated his inferior position. Well, several decades passed, but after his death this same individual was hailed as one of the greatest naturalists!

Real life presents some strange examples. And, although it is impossible to plan the education of young people to suit the practical demands of later life (since, if this were the only aim, some very strange requests would certainly be made), even though one cannot adapt the curricula to what life itself will bring to maturity later on, one must nevertheless be ready to listen with inner clarity and a sense of psychology to what the many occurrences in life are trying to tell us, with regard to both primary and secondary education. So it could certainly be said that it is not really a tragedy when a Waldorf student has to leave during the third grade, a student who has not yet reached the same level of achievement in certain elementary skills as students in another school, who were drilled using bad methods, the harmful effects of which will surface only later in life. Many life stories could be told to substantiate this claim. Strange things sometimes show up when one looks at obituaries. R¶ntgen, for example, was also excluded from teaching at a high school, and only through the special kindness of an influential person was he allowed to gain a teaching post at all. [Wilhelm Konrad von Röntgen (1845–1923) German physicist, discoverer of the “Röntgen” rays or X-rays.] As already said, one cannot base one's educational ideas on such things, but they should be noticed, and one must try to comprehend their significance through a more discriminating psychology.

Returning to our point, after the twelfth year it becomes increasingly difficult to find a workable compromise in our way of teaching. Until the twelfth year it is just possible to do so, as long as one really knows what is going on inside the students. But afterward, the situation begins to get more and more difficult, because from that time on, the curricula and the required standards for achievement no longer have any relationship to the nature of the growing human being; they are chosen entirely arbitrarily. The subject matter to be covered in any one year is chosen entirely autocratically, and one simply can no longer bridge the conflicting demands, on the one hand, from the powers that be, and, on the other hand, those that arise directly from the evolving human being. Remember what I said yesterday: by the time puberty is passed, the adolescent should have been helped toward developing sufficient maturity and inner strength to enter the realm of human freedom. I referred to the two fundamental virtues: gratitude, for which the ground has to be prepared before the change of teeth, and the ability to love, for which the ground needs to be prepared between the change of teeth and puberty; this was the theme developed yesterday.

Furthermore, we have seen that, with regard to the ethical life, the soul life of the child must also experience feelings of sympathy and antipathy toward what is good and evil. If one approaches a student at this age with a “thou shalt” attitude, proper development will be hindered in the years to come. On the other hand, when one instead moves the pre-adolescent child, through natural authority, to love the good and hate the evil, then during the time of sexual maturity, from the inner being of the adolescent, the third fundamental virtue develops, which is the sense of duty. It is impossible to drill it into young people. It can only unfold as a part of natural development, based only on gratitude—in the sense described yesterday—and on the ability to love. If these two virtues have been developed properly, with sexual maturity the sense of duty will emerge, the experience of which is an essential part of life

What belongs to the human soul and spirit realm has to develop according to its own laws and conditions, just as what belongs to the physical realm must obey physical laws. Just as an arm or a hand must be allowed to grow freely, according to the inner forces of growth, just as these must not be artificially controlled by, for example, being fixed into a rigid iron frame—although in certain places on Earth there is a custom of restricting the free growth of feet similar to the way we impede the free unfolding here of the child's soul life—so must adolescents feel this new sense of duty arising freely from within. The young person will then integrate properly into society, and Goethe's dictum will find its noblest fulfillment: “Duty is a love for what one demands of oneself.” Here again you see how love plays into everything, and how the sense of duty must be developed so that one eventually comes to love it. In this way one integrates properly as a human being into society. And then, from the previous experience of right authority, the ability to support oneself by one's own strength will evolve.

What is finally revealed as genuine piety, when seen with spiritual eyes, is the transformed body-related, natural religiousness during the time before the change of teeth, which I described to you in fair detail. These are all things that must be rooted deeply in a true pedagogy, and applied practically. Soon enough, one will realize how necessary it is to allow the curriculum—from the twelfth year until puberty, and, most of all, after puberty—to be more and more inclined toward practical activities. In the Waldorf school, the ground for this task is prepared early. In our school, boys and girls sit side by side. Although interesting psychological facts have emerged from this practice alone—and each class has its own psychology, of which we will speak more tomorrow—one can definitely say: if one lets boys and girls practice their handcrafts side by side as a matter of course, it is an excellent preparation for their adult lives. Today there are only a few men who recognize how much the ability to knit can help toward healthy thinking and healthy logic. Only a few men can judge what it means for one's life to be able to knit. In our Waldorf school, boys do their knitting alongside the girls, and they also mend socks.

Through this practice, the differentiation between the types of work performed by the two sexes will find its natural course later on, should this become necessary. At the same time, a form of education is being implemented that considers fully the practical aspects of the students' future lives.

People are always extremely surprised when they hear me say (and the following assertion not only expresses my personal conviction, but is based on a psychological fact) that I cannot consider anyone to be a good professor in the full meaning of the word unless that person can also mend a shoe in an emergency; for how could it be possible for anyone to know something of real substance about being and becoming in the world, unless that person can also repair a shoe or a boot if the situation demands it? This is, of course, a rather sweeping statement, but there are men who cannot even sew on a button properly, and this is a lamentable failing. Knowledge of philosophy carries little weight, unless one can also lend a hand to whatever needs doing. This is simply part of life. In my opinion, one can only be a good philosopher if one could have just as well become a shoemaker, should this have been one's destiny. And, as the history of philosophy shows, it sometimes happens that cobblers become philosophers.⁵

Knowledge of the human being calls on us to make adequate provision in our curricula and schedules for preparing pupils for the practical side of life. Reading in the book of human nature, we are simply led to introduce the children—or rather, the young men and women, as we should call them now—to the art of setting up a loom and weaving. From there it follows quite naturally that they should also learn to spin, and that they gain a working idea of how paper is made, for example.

They should be taught not only mechanics and chemistry, but also how to understand at least simple examples of mechanical and chemical processes used in technology. They should reproduce these on a small scale with their own hands so they will know how various articles are manufactured. This change of direction toward the more practical side of life must certainly be made possible. It has to be worked toward with honest and serious intent if one wants to build the proper curriculum, especially in the upper classes.

But this can place one in terrible difficulties. It is just possible to equip children under nine with sufficient learning skills for a transfer into the fourth grade of another school, without neglecting what needs to be done with them for sound pedagogical reasons. This is also still possible in the case of twelveyear-olds who are to enter the seventh grade. It is already becoming very difficult indeed to bring pupils to the required standards of learning for their transfer to a high school. Tremendous difficulties have to be overcome if pupils from our higher grades have to change to a high school.

In such cases one would do well to recall ancient Greece, where a wise Greek had to put up with being told by an Egyptian, “You Greeks are like children—you know nothing about all the changes the Earth has gone through.” A wise Greek had to listen to the judgment of a wise Egyptian. But nevertheless, the Greeks had not become so infantile as to demand of a growing youth, who was to be educated in one or another particular subject, that knowledge of the Egyptian language should first be acquired. They were very satisfied that the young person use the native Greek language. Unfortunately, we do not act today as the Greeks did, for we make our young people learn Greek. I do not want to speak against it; to learn Greek is something beautiful. But it is inconsistent with fulfilling the needs of a particular school age. It becomes a real problem when one is told to allocate so many lessons to this subject on the schedule at a time when such a claim clashes with the need for lessons in which weaving, spinning, and a rough knowledge of how paper is made should be practiced. Such is the situation when one is called on to finalize the schedule! And since we very well know that we shall never receive permission to build our own university anywhere, it is absolutely essential for us to enable those of our pupils who wish to continue their education at a university, technical college, or other similar institution, to pass the necessary graduation exam.

All this places us in an almost impossible situation, with almost insurmountable difficulties. When one tries to cultivate the practical side in education, prompted by insight into the inner needs of adolescent pupils, one has to face the bitter complaints of a Greek teacher who declares that the exam syllabus could never be covered with the amount of time allocated to the subject, and that, consequently, the candidates are doomed to fail their exams.

Such are the problems we have to tackle. They certainly show it is impossible for us to insist on pushing our ideals with any fanatical fervor. What will eventually have to happen no longer depends solely on the consensus of a circle of teachers about the rights and wrongs of education. Today it has become necessary for much wider circles within society to recognize the ideals of a truly human education, so that external conditions will render it possible for education to function without alienating pupils from life. This is obviously the case if, after having gone through a grammar school kind of education in one's own school, pupils were to fail their graduation exams, which they have to take somewhere else.⁶

Speaking of failing an exam—and here I am speaking to specialists in education—I believe that it would be possible to make even a professor of botany, however clever, fail in botany—if that were the only intention! I really believe such a thing is possible, because anyone can fail an exam. In this chapter of life also, some very strange facts have shown up. There was, for example, Robert Hamerling, an Austrian poet, whose use of the German language was later acclaimed as the highest level any Austrian writer could possibly attain.⁷ The results of his exam certificate, which qualified him for a teaching position at an Austrian Gymnasium, make interesting reading: Greek—excellent; Latin—excellent; German language and essay writing—hardly capable of teaching this subject in the lower classes of a middle school. You actually find this written in Hamerling's teaching certificate! So you see, this matter of failing or passing an exam is a very tricky business.

The difficulties that beset us, therefore, make us realize that society at large must provide better conditions before more can be accomplished than what is possible by making the kind of compromise I have spoken of. If I were to be asked, abstractly, whether a Waldorf school could be opened anywhere in the world, I could only answer, again entirely in the abstract, “Yes, wherever one would be allowed to open.” On the other hand, even this would not be the determining factor because, as already said, in the eyes of many people these are only two aspects of one and the same thing. There are some who struggle through to become famous poets despite bad exam results in their main subject. But not everyone can do that. For many, a failed graduation exam means being cast out of the stream of life. And so it must be acknowledged that the higher the grade level in our school, the less one can work toward all of one's educational ideals. It is something not to be forgotten. It shows how one has to come to terms with actual life situations.

The following question must always be present for an education based on an understanding of the human being: Will young people, as they enter life, find the proper human connection in society, which is a fundamental human need? After all, those responsible for the demands of graduation exams are also members of society, even if the style and content of their exams are based on error. Therefore, if one wants to integrate Waldorf pedagogy into present social conditions, one has to put up with having to do certain things that, in themselves, would not be considered right or beneficial. Anyone who inspects our top classes may well be under the impression that what is found there does not fully correspond to the avowed ideals of Waldorf pedagogy. But I can guarantee you that, if we were to carry out those ideals regardless of the general situation—and especially, if we attempted to make the transition to the practical side of life—all of our candidates for the graduation exam would fail! This is how diametrically opposed matters are today. But they have to be dealt with, and this can be done in great variety of ways. At the same time, awareness has to emerge regarding the degree of change necessary, not just in the field of education, but in all of life, before a truly human form of education can be established.

Despite all obstacles, the practical activities are being accomplished in the Waldorf school, at least to a certain extent—even though it does happen, now and then, that they have to be curtailed in some cases because the Greek or Latin teacher claims some of these lessons. That is something that cannot be avoided.

From what I've said, you can see that puberty is the proper time to make the transition, leading the adolescent into the realities of ordinary life. And the elements that will have to play more and more into school life, in a higher sense, are those that will make the human individual, as a being of body, soul, and spirit, a helpful and useful member of society. In this regard, our current time lacks the necessary psychological insight; for the finer interrelationships in the human spiritual, soul, and physical spheres are, in general, not even dreamed of. These things can be felt intuitively only by people who make it their particular task to come to understand the human psyche.

From personal self-knowledge I can tell you in all modesty that I could not have accomplished in spiritual science certain things that proved possible, if I had not learned bookbinding at a particular time in my life—which may seem somewhat useless to many people. And this was not in any way connected with Waldorf pedagogy, but simply a part of my destiny. This particularly human activity has particular consequences to most intimate spiritual and soul matters, especially if it is practiced at the right time of life. The same holds true for other practical activities as well. I would consider it a sin against human nature if we did not include bookbinding and box-making in our Waldorf school craft lessons, if it were not introduced into the curriculum at a particular age determined by insight into the students' development. These things are all part of becoming a full human being. The important thing in this case is not that a pupil makes a particular cardboard box or binds a book, but that the students have gone through the necessary discipline to make such items, and that they have experienced the inherent feelings and thought processes that go with them.

The natural differentiation between the boys and girls will become self-evident. Yet here one also needs to have an eye for what is happening, an eye of the soul. For example, the following situation has come up, the psychology of which has not yet been fully investigated, because I have not been able to spend enough time at the Waldorf school. We will investigate it thoroughly another time. But what happened was that, during lessons in spinning, the girls took to the actual spinning. The boys also wanted to be involved, and somehow they found their task in fetching and carrying for the girls. The boys wanted to be chivalrous. They brought the various materials that the girls then used for spinning. The boys seemed to prefer doing the preparatory work. This is what happened and we still need to digest it from the psychological perspective.

But this possibility of “switching our craft lessons around”—if I may put it that way—allows us to change to bookbinding now, and then to box-making. All are part of the practical activities that play a dominant role in Waldorf pedagogy, and they show how an eye for the practical side of life is a natural byproduct for anyone who has made spiritual striving and spiritual research the main objective in life. There are educational methods in the world, the clever ideas of downright impractical theoreticians, who believe they have eaten practical life experience by the spoonful, methods that are nevertheless completely removed from reality. If one begins with theories of education, one will end up with the least practical results. Theories in themselves yield nothing useful, and too often breed only biases. A realistic pedagogy, on the other hand, is the offspring of true knowledge of the human being. And the part played by arts and crafts at a certain time of life is nothing but such knowledge applied to a particular situation. In itself this knowledge already presents a form of pedagogy that will turn into the right kind of practical teaching through the living way in which the actual lessons are given. It becomes transformed into the teacher's right attitude, and this is what really matters. The nature and character of the entire school has to be in tune with it.

And so, in the educational system cultivated in the Waldorf school, the center of gravity iis within the staff of teachers and their regular meetings, because the whole school is intended as one living and spirit-permeated organism. The first grade teacher is therefore expected to follow with real interest not only what the physics teacher is teaching to the seventh grade, but also the physics teacher's experiences of the various students in that class. This all flows together in the staff meetings, where practical advice and counseling, based on actual teaching experience, are freely given and received. Through the teaching staff a real attempt is made to create a kind of soul for the entire school organism. And so the first grade teacher will know that the sixth grade teacher has a child who is retarded in one way or another, or another who may be especially gifted. Such common interest and shared knowledge have a fructifying influence. The entire teaching body, being thus united, will experience the whole school as a unity. Then a common enthusiasm will pervade the school, but also a willingness to share in all its sorrows and worries. Then the entire teaching staff will carry whatever has to be carried, especially with regard to moral and religious issues, but also in matters of a more cognitive nature.

In this way, the different colleagues also learn how one particular subject, taught by one of the teachers, affects a completely different subject taught by another teacher. Just as, in the case of the human organism, it is not a matter of indifference whether the stomach is properly attuned to the head, so in a school it is not insignificant whether a lesson from nine to ten in the morning, given to the third grade, is properly related to the lesson from eleven to twelve in the eighth grade. This is in rather radical and extreme terms, of course. Things do not happen quite like that, but they are presented this way because they correspond essentially to reality. And if thinking is in touch with reality, judgments about matters pertaining to the sense-perceptible world will differ greatly from those based on abstract theories.

To illustrate this point I would like to mention certain lay healers who give medical treatment in places where this is not illegal. They are people who have acquired a certain measure of lay knowledge in medicine. Now one of these healers may find, for example, that a patient's heart is not functioning normally. This may be a correct diagnosis, but in this case it does not imply that the cure would be to bring the heart back to normality. And according to such a lay healer, the patient may have adapted the entire organism to the slightly abnormal function of the heart. This means that if now one were to get the heart to work normally again, such a “cured” heart, just because of its return to normality, might upset the entire organism, thus causing a deterioration of the patient's general condition. Consequently the therapy could actually consist of leaving the heart as it is, with the recommendation that, should the symptoms of the slight heart defect return, a different course of treatment should be given from what would normally be done through the use of medications under similar circumstances.

I said yesterday that educating and healing are related activities. And so something similar is also called for in the field of education. That is, a kind of conceptual and sensitive feeling approach, both comprehensive and in touch with reality, since it would have to apply to other realms of cognition directly related to practical life.

If we look at what contemporary anatomy and physiology tell us about the human being—not to mention psychology, which is a hodgepodge of abstractions anyway—we find a certain type of knowledge from which a picture of the human being is manufactured. If this picture is used as a means of selfknowledge, it creates the impression that we are merely a skeleton. (Within certain limits, knowledge of the human being is also self-knowledge—not the introspective kind, but rather a recognition of essentially human qualities found in each individual.) If, when looking at ourselves, we had to disregard everything within and around our skeleton, we would naturally conclude that we were only skeletons. This is how the whole human being—body, soul, and spirit—would appear to us if we used only what contemporary anatomy and physiology offers as a picture of the human being. Psychology needs to truly permeate the human psyche with spirit. If this is done, we can follow the spiritual element right into the physical realities of the body, because spirit works in every part of the human body.

I have already said that the tragedy of materialism is its inability to understand the true nature of matter. Knowledge of spirit leads to true understanding of matter. Materialism may speak of matter, but it does not penetrate to the inner structures of the forces that work through matter. Similarly, pedagogy that observes only external phenomena does not penetrate to the regions of the human being that reveal what should be done about practical life. This causes a situation that, to the spiritual investigator, is very natural, but would appear paradoxical for many people. They wonder why a pedagogy grown from anthroposophy always emphasizes the

necessity of training children at specific ages in certain practical activities—that is, the necessity of training them in the correct handling of material processes. Far from leading students into a foggy mysticism, the principles and methods of the education based on anthroposophical research will not estrange them from life. On the contrary, it will induce spirit and soul substance to penetrate their physical bodies, thus making them useful for this earthly life, and at the same time, provide them with the proper conditions to develop inner certainty. This is why we feel it necessary to expand the practical type of work, and, of course, difficulties therefore increase with the beginning of every new school year when we have to add a new class to the existing ones (we began with eight grades, adding the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, and we are about to open our first twelfth grade).

This has led to the situation where, while other problems facing the anthroposophical cause were being dealt with very recently, a memorandum was handed in by the pupils of the current highest grade level in the Waldorf school. Those among them who were expecting to have to take their graduation exam had worked out a remarkable document, the deeper aspects of which will be appreciated only when the whole matter is seen in the proper light. They had sent more or less the following memorandum to the Anthroposophical Society:

Since we are being educated and taught in the sense of the true human being⁸ and, consequently, since we cannot enter existing types of colleges, we wish to make the following proposal to the Anthroposophical Society: That a new anthroposophical college is to be founded where we can continue our education.

No negative judgment regarding colleges in general is implied in this wording, although such judgments are frequently encountered in contemporary society.

All of this presents us with the greatest difficulties. But since you have made the effort to come here to find out what Waldorf pedagogy is all about—something we very well know how to appreciate—these problems should also be aired. Any sincere interest in what is willed in this education deserves a clear indication of all the difficulties involved.

Thus far, Waldorf pedagogy is being practiced only by the teachers of the one existing Waldorf school, and there we find our difficulties increase the higher we go with the school. I can only assume that the problems would be even greater in a college operated anthroposophically. But since such a college is only a very abstract ideal, I can only speak about it hypothetically. It has always been my way to deal directly with the tasks set by life, and this is why I can talk about this education only up to the twelfth grade, which is opening soon. Things that belong to a misty future must not take up too much time for people standing amid life, since it would only detract from the actual tasks at hand.

One can say only that problems would increase substantially, and that obviously there would be two kinds of difficulties. First, if we were to open a college, our exam results would not be recognized as proper qualifications, which means that successful candidates could not take up professional positions in life. They could not become medical doctors, lawyers, and so on; professions that in their present customary forms are still essential today. This presents one side of the problem. The other side would conjure up really frightening prospects, if certain hard facts did not offer relief from such anxieties; for, on the strength of the praiseworthy efforts made by our young friends, an association has actually been founded with the express aim of working toward the creation of such a college, based on the principles of Waldorf pedagogy. The only reason there is no need to feel thoroughly alarmed about the potential consequences of such an endeavor is that the funds needed by this association will certainly not reach such giddy heights that anyone would be tempted to seriously consider going ahead with the project. The underlying striving toward this aim is thoroughly laudable, but for the time being it remains beyond the realm of practicality. The real worry would come only if, for example, an American millionaire were to suddenly offer the many millions needed to build, equip, and staff such a college. The best one could do in such a situation would be to promote, en masse, the entire teaching staff of the Waldorf school to become the teachers of the new college. But then there would no longer be a Waldorf school!

I am saying all this because I believe actual facts are far more important than any kind of abstract argument. While acknowledging that the idea of basing education, including college education, on true knowledge of the human being represents a far-reaching ideal, we must not overlook the fact that the circle of those who stand firmly behind our ideals is extremely small. This is the very reason one feels so happy about every move toward an expansion of this work, which may gain further momentum through your welcome visit to this course. At the same time, one must never lose sight of all that must happen so that the Waldorf ideal can rest upon truly firm and sound foundations. This needs to be mentioned within the context of this course, for it follows from the constitution of the Waldorf school.

Tomorrow, in the concluding lecture, I would like to tell you more about this constitution of the Waldorf school—about how it is run, about what the relationship should be between teachers and students, as well as the interrelationships of pupils among themselves, and teachers among themselves. Furthermore, I would like to speak about what, in our way of thinking, are the proper methods of dealing with exams and school reports, so that they reflect knowledge of the human being.

• 1. In August and September 1919, Rudolf Steiner gave three courses to the teachers of the first Waldorf school, which was founded by the industrialist Emil Molt for the children of the workers in his cigarette factory, and which was opened on September 7, 1919.
• 2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German poet, scientist, and philosopher.
• 3. Gregor Johann Mendel (1822–1884) Austrian botanist. He became a monk in the order of Saint Augustine in 1843, and taught in a technical school from 1854 until 1868, when he became abbot. He is known for his experiments in breeding peas in the monastery garden, and from the statistics gathered, he established certain laws concerning heredity, which became the foundation of the science of genetics.
• 4. Realschule (or Realgymnasium) is the high school equivalent in Germany for preparation in the sciences, trades, or technical studies, whereas Gymnasium usually refers to a high school for classical preparation toward university study.
• 5. For example, Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), the shoemaker from Görlitz, whose influence has been far-reaching in Western philosophical and spiritual streams.
• 6. Waldorf school pupils had to take the required graduation exams (Abitur) at a state school.
• 7. Robert Hamerling (1830–1889) Austrian poet and philosopher.
• 8. they had somehow gleaned this