The Rudolf Steiner Archive

What we have now been studying for some time in our Group-lectures is meant as a completion or expansion of the subjects that have occupied us during the winter. It may well be that a remark here or there seemed somewhat aphoristic, and we want by means of these studies to enlarge or round off thoughts and concepts that have been aroused in us.

In the last lecture we were particularly occupied with the presence of all sorts of spiritual beings which are to be found, so to speak, between the sense-perceptible kingdoms of nature that surround us. We saw especially how in the place where the beings of different nature-kingdoms come together, where the plant is pressed close to the stone at a spring, where ordinary stone impinges on a metal as constantly occurs under the earth, where there is a communion as between bee and blossom, how everywhere in such spots forces are developed which draw various beings, whom we have called elemental beings, into earthly existence. Moreover, in connection with these elemental beings we have been occupied with the fact of a certain cutting off, a detaching of beings from their whole connection. We have seen that the elemental beings called by spiritual science “Salamanders” have in part their origin from detached parts of animal group souls. These have, as it were, ventured too far forward into our physical world and have not been able to find their way back and unite again with the group soul, after the death and dissolution of the animal. We know that in the regular course of our life, the beings of our earth, the beings of the animal, plant, mineral kingdoms, have their “ego soul”—if one may so call it, have indeed such ego souls as man, differing only in the fact that the ego souls of other beings are in other worlds. We know that man is that being in our cycle of evolution who has an individual ego here on the physical plane—at least during his waking life. We know further that the beings which we call animals are so conditioned that—speaking loosely—similarly-formed animals have a group soul or group ego which is in the so-called astral world. Further, the beings which we call plants have a dreamless sleeping consciousness for the physical world here but they have group egos which dwell in the lower parts of the devachanic world; and, finally, the stones, the minerals, have their group egos in the higher parts of Devachan. One who moves clairvoyantly in the astral and devachanic worlds has intercourse there with the group souls of the animals, plants and minerals in the same way as here in the physical world he has intercourse during the day with other human souls or egos.

Now we must be clear that in many ways man is a very complicated being—we have often spoken of this complexity in different lectures. But he will appear more and more complicated the further we go into the connections with great cosmic facts. In order to realize that man is not quite the simple being which he may perhaps appear to a naive observation we need only remember that by night, from going to sleep to waking up, the man of the present evolutionary cycle is quite a different being from what he is by day. His physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, the ego with the astral body is lifted out of them. Let us consider both conditions, and in the first place the physical and etheric bodies. They lie there, and if we disregard the transitional state of dream, they have what we may call a sleep consciousness devoid of content, perceptions, or dreams. But the ego and the astral body outside have, in this present cycle of evolution, just the same dreamless sleep consciousness. The sleeping man, whether in the members remaining here in the physical world, or in those which are in the astral world, has the same consciousness as the plant covering of the earth. We must occupy ourselves a little with these two separated parts of the sleeping human being.

From other lectures we know that the man of the present time has arisen slowly and gradually. We know that he received the first rudiments of a physical body in the embodiment of our Earth lying in a primeval past which we call the Saturn evolution. We know that then in a second embodiment of our Earth, the Sun evolution, he received the etheric or life body, that in the third embodiment, the Moon evolution, he also received the astral body, and that in the present Earth embodiment of our planet he acquired what we call the ego. Thus the human being has evolved quite slowly and gradually. This physical body which man bears today is actually his oldest part, the part that has gone through most metamorphoses. It has undergone four changes. The first rudiment, received by man on ancient Saturn, has gone through three modifications, on the Sun, on the Moon, and finally on the Earth, and is expressed in man's present sense-organs. They were quite different organs on ancient Saturn, but their first rudiments were there while no other part of the physical body as yet existed. We can look on ancient Saturn as a single being, entirely consisting of sense-organs. On the Sun the etheric body was added, the physical body went through a change, and the organs arose which we call today the glands, though at first they existed merely in their rudiments. Then on the Moon when the physical body had undergone a third transformation through the impress of the astral body, were added those organs which we know as the nerve organs. And finally on the Earth was added the present blood-system, the expression of the ego, as the nervous system is the expression of the astral body, the glandular system of the etheric body, and the senses system the physical expression of the physical body itself. We have seen in former lectures that the blood system appeared for the first time in our Earth evolution and we ask: Why does blood flow in the present form in the blood channels? What does this blood express? Blood is the expression of the ego and with this we will consider a possible misunderstanding, namely, that man actually misunderstands the present physical human body.

The human body as it is today is only one form of many. On the Moon, on the Sun, on Saturn, it was there but always different. On the Moon, for instance, there was as yet no mineral kingdom, on the Sun there was no plant world in our sense, and on Saturn no animal kingdom—there was solely the human being in his first physical rudiments. Now when we reflect on this we must be clear that the present human body is not only physical body, but physical-mineral body, and that to the laws of the physical world—hence it is the “physical body”—it has assimilated the laws and substances of the mineral kingdom, which permeate it today. On the Moon the physical human body had not yet assimilated those laws: if one had burnt it there would have been no ash, for there were no minerals in the present earthly sense. Let us remember that to be physical and to be mineral are two quite different things. The human body is physical because it is governed by the same laws as the stone; it is at the same time mineral because it has been impregnated with mineral substances. The first germ of the physical body was present on Saturn, but there were no solid bodies, no water, no gases. On Saturn there was nothing at all but a condition of warmth. The modern physicist knows of no such condition because he thinks that warmth can only appear in connection with gases, water, or solid objects. But that is an error. The physical body which today has assimilated the mineral kingdom was on ancient Saturn a nexus of physical laws. We are physical laws working in lines, in forms, what you learn to know as laws in physics. Externally the physical human being was manifested on Saturn purely as a being which lived in warmth. We must thus clearly distinguish between the mineral element and the actual physical principle of man's body. It is physical law which governs the physical body. It belongs, for example, to the physical principle that our ear has such a form, that it receives sound in quite a definite way; to the mineral nature of the ear belong the sub-stances which are impregnated into this scaffolding of physical laws.

Now that we have become clear about this and realize particularly how the sense-organs, glands, nerves and blood are the expressions of our fourfold nature, let us turn again to the observation of the sleeping human being. When man is asleep the physical and etheric bodies lie on the bed, the astral body and the ego are outside. But now let us remember that the astral body is the principle of the nervous system and the ego that of the blood system. Thus during the night the astral body has deserted that part of the physical body of which, so to say, it is the cause—namely, the nervous system. For only when the astral body membered itself into man on the Moon could the nervous system arise. Thus the astral body callously leaves what belongs to it, what it is actually due to maintain, and in the same way the ego deserts that which it has called into life. The principles of the blood and of the astral body are outside and the sleeping physical and etheric bodies are absolutely alone. But now nothing of a material physical nature can subsist in the form which has been called forth by a spiritual principle when this spiritual principle is no longer there. That is quite out of the question. Never can a nervous system live unless astral beings are active in it, and never can a blood system live unless ego-beings are active in it. Thus you all meanly desert in the night your nervous and blood systems and relinquish them to other beings of an astral nature. Beings which are of the same nature as your ego now descend into your organism. Every night the human organism is occupied by beings fitted to maintain it. The physical body and the etheric body which lie on the bed are at the same time interpenetrated by these astral and ego beings; they are actually within the physical body. We might call them intruders, but that is in no sense correct. We ought in many ways to call them guardian spirits, for they are the sustainers of what man callously deserts in the night.

Now it is not so bad for man to leave his bodies every night. I have already said that the astral body and the ego are perpetually active in the night. They rid the physical body of the wear and tear which the day has given, which in a broad sense we call fatigue. Man is refreshed and renewed in the morning because during the night his astral body and ego have removed the fatigue which were given him by the impressions of daily life. This all-night activity of the astral body in getting rid of the fatigue substances is a definite fact to clairvoyant perception. The ego and astral body work from outside on the physical and etheric bodies. But in the present cycle of his evolution man is not yet advanced enough to be able to carry out such an activity quite independently. He can only do so under the guidance of other, higher beings. So the human being is taken every night into the bosom of higher beings, as it were, and they endow him with the power of working in the right way on his physical and etheric bodies. These at the same time are the beings—that is why we may not call them intruders—who care for man's blood and nerve systems in the right way in the night.

As long as no abnormalities arise the co-operation of spiritual beings with man is justified. But such irregularities can very well enter and here we come to a chapter of spiritual science which is extraordinarily important for the practical life of the human soul. One would like it to be known in the widest circles and not only theoretically but as giving the foundation for certain activities of the human soul life. It is not generally imagined that the facts of the soul life have a far-reaching effect. In certain connections I have also called your attention to the fact that it is only when viewed in the light of spiritual science that events in the life of the soul can find their true explanation. We all know the deep significance of the statement: “Regarded from the spiritual-scientific aspect a lie is a kind of murder.” I have explained that a sort of explosion really takes place in the astral world when man utters a lie—even, in a certain way, if he only thinks it. Something takes place in the spiritual world when man lies, which has a far more devastating effect for that world than any misfortune in the physical world. But things which one relates at a certain stage of spiritual-scientific observation, characterizing them as far as is possible then, gain more and more clearness and confirmation when one advances in the knowledge of spiritual science.

Today we shall learn of another effect of lying, slandering, although these words are not used here in the ordinary crude sense. When more subtly, out of convention, for in-stance, or out of all sorts of social or party considerations, people color the truth, we there have to do with a lie in the sense of spiritual science. In many respects man's whole life is saturated, if not with lies, yet with manifestations bearing an untruthful coloring. The enlightened materialist can at any rate see that an impression is made on his physical body if he receives a blow on the skull from an axe, or if his head is cut off by the railway, or he has an ulcer somewhere or is attacked by bacilli. He will then admit that effects are produced on the physical body. What is not usually considered at all is that man is a spiritual unity, that what happens in his higher members, the astral body and ego, has positive effect right down into his physical nature. It is not considered, for instance, that the uttering of lies and untruthfulness, untruth even in the affairs of life, has a definite effect on the human physical body. Spiritual vision can experience the following: If a person, let us say, has told a lie during the day, its effect remains in the physical body and is to be seen by clairvoyant perception while the person sleeps. Let us suppose this person is altogether un-truthful, piling up lies, then he will have many such effects in his physical body. All this hardens, as it were, in the night, and then something very important happens. These hardenings, these “enclosures,” in the physical body are not at all agreeable to the beings who from higher worlds must take possession of the physical body in the night and carry out the functions otherwise exercised by the astral body and ego. The result is that in the course of life and by reason of a body diseased—one might say—through lies, portions of those beings who descend into man at night become detached. Here we have again detachment processes and they lead to the fact that when a man dies his physical body does not merely follow the paths which it would normally take. Certain beings are left behind, beings which have been created in the physical body through the effect of lying and slander, and have been detached from the spiritual world. Such beings, detached in this circuitous way, now flit and whir about in our world and belong to the class that we call “phantoms.” They form a certain group of elemental beings related to our physical body and invisible to physical sight. They multiply through lies and calumnies, and these in actual fact populate our earthly globe with phantoms. In this way we learn to know a new class of elemental beings.

But now, not only lies and slanders but also other things belonging to the soul life produce an effect on the human body. It is lies and slanders which so act on the physical body that a detaching of phantoms is caused. Other things again work in a similar way on the etheric body. You must not be amazed at such phenomena of the soul: in spiritual life one must be able to take things with all calmness. Matters, for example, which have a harmful result on the etheric body are bad laws, or bad social measures prevailing in a community. All that leads to want of harmony, all that makes for bad adjustments between man and man, works in such a way through the feeling which it creates in the common life that the effect is continued into the etheric body. The accumulation in the etheric body caused through these experiences of the soul brings about again detachments from the beings working in from the spiritual worlds and these likewise are now to be found in our environment—they are “spectres” or “ghosts.” Thus these beings that exist in the etheric world, the life world, we see grow out of the life of men. Many a man can go about amongst us and for one who is able to see these things spiritually, his physical body is crammed, one might say, with phantoms, his etheric body crammed with spectres, and as a rule after a man's death or shortly afterwards all this rises up and disperses and populates the world.

So we see how subtly the spiritual events of our life are continued, how lies, calumnies, bad social arrangements, deposit their creations spiritually among us on our earth. But now you can also understand that if in normal daily life the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego belong together, and the physical body and etheric body have to let other beings press in and act upon them, then the astral body and the ego are not in a normal condition either. At any rate they are in a somewhat different position as regards the physical and etheric bodies. These two have in sleeping man the consciousness of the plants. But the plants on the other hand have their ego above in Devachan. Hence the physical and etheric bodies of sleeping man must likewise be sustained by beings which unfold their consciousness from Devachan. Now it is true that man's astral body and ego are in a higher world, but he himself also sleeps dreamlessly like the plants. That the plants have only a physical and an etheric body and that man in his sleeping condition possesses further an astral body and ego, makes no difference as regards the plant-nature. True, man has been drawn upwards into the spiritual, the astral world, but yet not high enough upwards with his ego, to justify the sleep-condition. The consequence is that beings must now enter his astral body too when the human being goes to sleep. And so it is: influences from the devachanic world press all the time into man's astral body. They need not in the least be abnormal influences, they may come from what we call man's higher ego. For we know that man is gradually rising to the devachanic world, in as much as he approaches ever nearer to a state of spiritualization, and what is being prepared there sends its influences into him today when he sleeps. But there are not merely these normal influences. This would simply and solely be the case if human beings were fully to understand what it is to value and esteem the freedom of another. Mankind at present is still very far removed from that. Think only how the modern man for the most part wants to over-rule the mind of another, how he cannot bear someone else to think and like differently, how he wants to work upon the other's soul. In all that works from soul to soul in our world, from the giving of unjustifiable advice to all those methods which men employ in order to overwhelm others, in every act that does not allow the free soul to confront the free soul, but employs, even in the slightest degree, forcible means of convincing and persuasion, in all this, forces are working from soul to soul which again so influence these souls that it is expressed in the night in the astral body. The astral body gets those “enclosures” and thereby beings are detached from other worlds and whir through our world again as elemental beings. They belong to the class of demons. Their existence is solely due to the fact that intolerance and oppression of thought have in various ways been used in our world. That is how these hosts of demons have arisen in our world.

Thus we have learnt again today to know of beings which are just as real as the things which we perceive through our physical senses, and which very definitely produce effects in human life. Humanity would have advanced quite differently if intolerance had not created the demons which pervade our world, influencing people continually. They are at the same time spirits of prejudice. One understands the intricacies of life when one learns about these entanglements between the spiritual world in the higher sense and our human world. All these beings, as we have said, are there, and they whiz and whir through the world in which we live.

Now let us remember something else which has also been said before. We have pointed out that in the man of the last third of the Atlantean age, before the Atlantean flood, the relation of etheric body to physical body was quite different from what it had been earlier. Today the physical part of the head and the etheric part practically coincide. That was quite different in ancient Atlantis; there we have the etheric part of the head projecting far out—especially in the region of the forehead. We now have a central point for the etheric and physical parts approximately between the eyebrows. These two parts came together in the last third of the Atlantean age and today they coincide. Thereby man is able to say “I” to himself and feel an independent personality. Thus the etheric and physical bodies of the head have joined together. This has come about so that man could become the sense being that he is within our physical world, so that he can enrich his inner life through what he takes in through sense impressions, through smell, taste, sight, and so on. All of this becomes embodied in his inner being so that having obtained it he can use it for the further development of the whole cosmos. What he thus acquires can be acquired in no other way, and therefore we have always said we must not take Spiritual Science in an ascetic sense, as a flight from the physical world. All that happens here is taken with us out of the physical world and it would be lost to the spiritual world if it were not collected here first.

But humanity is now getting nearer and nearer to a new condition. In this Post-Atlantean age we have gone through various culture epochs: the old Indian, the ancient Persian, lying before the time of Zarathustra, then the epoch which we have called the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian, then the Greco-Latin, and now we stand in the fifth culture-epoch of the Post-Atlantean age. Ours will be followed by a sixth and a seventh epoch. Whereas in the course of past ages and up to our own time the united structure of our etheric and physical bodies has always grown firmer, more closely united inwardly, man is approaching a period in the future when the etheric body gradually loosens itself again and becomes independent. The way back is taken. There are people today who have a much looser etheric body than others. This loosening of the etheric body is only right for man if during his different incarnations in those culture-epochs he has absorbed so much into himself that when his etheric body goes out again it will take with it the right fruits from the physical sense world of the earth, fruits suitable for incorporation into the increasingly independent etheric body. The more spiritual are the concepts which man finds within the physical world, the more he takes with him in his etheric body. All the utilitarian ideas, all the concepts bound up with machine and industry which only serve outer needs and the outer life, and which man absorbs in our present earthly existence, are unsuitable for incorporation in the etheric body. But all the concepts he absorbs of the artistic, the beautiful, the religious—and everything can be immersed in the sphere of wisdom, art, religion—all this endows man's etheric body with the capability and possibility of being organized independently. Since this can be seen in advance, it has often been emphasized here that the world-conception of spiritual science must send its impulses and activities into practical life. Spiritual science must never remain a conversational subject for tea-parties or any other pursuit apart from ordinary life; it must work its way into the whole of our civilization. If spiritual-scientific thoughts are one day understood, then men will understand that everything our age accomplishes must be permeated by spiritual principles. Many human beings, among them Richard Wagner, fore-saw in certain fields such a penetration with spiritual principles. Some day men will understand how to build a railway-station so that it streams out truth like a temple and is in fact simply an expression suited to what is within it. There is still very much to do. These impulses therefore must be effective and they will be effective when spiritual-scientific thoughts are more fully understood.

I still have a vivid recollection of a rectorial address given about twenty-five years ago by a well-known architect. He spoke about style in architecture and uttered the remarkable sentence: “Architectural styles are not invented, they grow out of the spiritual life!” At the same time he showed why our age, if indeed it produces architectural styles, only revives old ones and is incapable of finding a new style because it has as yet no inner spiritual life. When the world creates spiritual life again then all will be possible. Then we shall feel that the human soul shines towards us from all we look at, just as in the Middle Ages every lock on a door expressed what man's soul understood of outer forms. Spiritual science will not be understood till it meets us everywhere in this way as if crystallized in forms. But then mankind too will live as spirit in the spirit. Then, however, man will be preparing more and more something that he takes with him when he again rises into the spiritual world, when his etheric body becomes self-dependent. Thus must men immerse in the spiritual world if evolution is to go further in the right way.

Nothing symbolizes the permeation of the world with the spirit so beautifully as the story of the miracle of Pentecost. When you contemplate it, it is as though the interpenetration of the world with spiritual life were indicated prophetically through the descent of the “fiery tongues.” Everything must be given life again through the spirit, that abstract intellectual relation which man has to the yearly festivals must also become concrete and living again. Now, at this time of Pentecost, Whitsuntide, let us try to occupy our souls with the thoughts that can proceed from today's lecture. Then the Festival, which as we know is established on a spiritual foundation, will again signify some-thing living for man when his etheric body is ripe for spiritual creation. But if man does not absorb the Whitsuntide spirit then the etheric body goes out of the physical body and is far too weak to overcome what has already been created, those worlds of spectres, phantoms, demons, which the world creates as phenomena existing at its side.

Recently¹ it has repeatedly been my task to point out that it would be just as possible to write a person's biography for the time spent between going to sleep and awakening as it is for the time spent between awakening and going to sleep. Whatever man goes through between awakening and going to sleep is experienced through his physical and etheric bodies. Because in his physical and etheric bodies he has suitably developed sense organs, he is conscious of the world around him, for it is linked with his physical and etheric bodies so that it forms, as it were, a unity with him. But because at his present stage of evolution he does not possess similar organs of soul and spirit in his ego and astral body—organs which, if I may be permitted this paradoxical expression, would be super-sensible sense-organs—he is unable to be conscious of his experiences between going to sleep and awakening. Accordingly, only with spiritual sight would one be able to perceive what is contained in the biography of the ego and astral body, which runs parallel with the biography lived through with the help of the physical and etheric bodies.

In speaking about man's experiences between awakening and going to sleep we naturally include the events which take place in his physical and etheric environment, things which happen in connection with him, things he experiences and things which are caused by him. Thus we must speak of a physical and etheric environment, a physical and etheric world inhabited by man in the period between awakening and going to sleep. Similarly he inhabits another world between going to sleep and awakening, only the nature of this world is quite different from that of the physical and etheric world. Through spiritual vision it is possible to speak about this world which is just as much our environment when we sleep as the physical world is our environment when we are awake. You will find the elementary facts in the descriptions given, for instance, in my book Occult Science: an Outline. There you will find, albeit only in brief, a description of how the realms of the physical and etheric world, the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms, extend on into the realms of the higher Hierarchies. Let us give this some consideration today.

If, while awake, we direct our eyes or other sense-organs outwards towards our physical and etheric environment, we perceive the four kingdoms of mineral, plant, animal and man. If we then ascend further into those regions which can only be perceived supersensibly, we find that which may be called the continuation of these kingdoms: the kingdom of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, the kingdom of the Exousiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes, and the kingdom of the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim.

Thus we have two worlds which permeate one another: the physical and etheric world and the super-sensible world. And we already know that we live in this super-sensible world between going to sleep and awakening; we know that we have experiences there, although these experiences cannot make their way into our ordinary consciousness because we have no organs of soul and spirit.

As a matter of fact a more exact understanding can be reached of what man experiences in this super-sensible world, if the same sort of description of this world is given as is given of the physical and etheric world with the help of science and history. In order to set forth what we may call a super-sensible science of the actual course of the world we inhabit in sleep, we must begin by pointing out certain details. Today we shall first turn our attention to an event of deep signfiicance for the whole of human evolution during the last few thousand years.

We have already discussed this event frequently from the point of view of the physical and etheric world and its history. Now we shall look at it from the other side, as it were, taking our viewpoint not in the physical and etheric world but in the super-sensible world. The event I am referring to and which I have often portrayed from the one point of view took place in the 4th century A.D.

I have described how the whole disposition of man's soul in the Western world changed during this 4th century A.D.; how in fact without spiritual-scientific insight into the matter we today no longer have the slightest understanding of human feelings and sentiments as they were before the 4th century A.D. But we have often portrayed these feelings and this disposition of soul, describing what human beings experienced round about that century. Today we shall turn our attention for a moment to the experiences undergone by the Beings of the super-sensible realm during this time. So we shall be concerned, so to say, with the other side of life and speak from the viewpoint of the super-sensible realm.

That thoughts are confined to the head is a preconceived notion of man's so-called enlightenment. We should learn nothing about things through thoughts if these thoughts were confined to the heads of men. Anyone who believes that thoughts are to be found only in men's heads is a victim of the same prejudice, paradoxical though it may sound, as a person who believes that the sip of water which quenches his thirst arose on his tongue instead of flowing into his mouth from his glass. Really it is just as absurd to say that thoughts arise in men's heads as it is to say: If I quench my thirst with water from my glass, this water has come into being in my mouth. For thoughts are quite definitely spread throughout the world. Thoughts are the forces at work in things. And the organ of our thinking merely taps the cosmic reservoir of thought forces, taking the thoughts into itself. Accordingly we must not speak of thoughts as though they were something belonging to man alone. We must speak of thoughts with an awareness that they are forces which govern the world and are spread throughout the cosmos. But they do not just fly about at random; they are always borne and worked upon by beings of one kind or another. And most important of all: they are not always borne by the same beings.

Turning to the super-sensible world, we find by means of super-sensible investigation that until the fourth century A.D. the thoughts through which human beings make the world comprehensible to themselves were borne, or perhaps one should say, poured forth (earthly expressions are little suited for the description of such lofty events and beings) by the Beings of the Hierarchy called the Exousiai or Beings of Form.

If an ancient Greek wanted to account for the origin of his thoughts through knowledge of the Mysteries, he would have had to say the following: I lift up my spiritual vision to the Beings revealed to me by Mystery knowledge as the Beings of Form, the Forces of Form. They are the bearers of the cosmic intelligence, they are the bearers of the cosmic thoughts. They cause the thoughts to stream through the events of the cosmos, and they bestow these human thoughts upon the soul which becomes aware of them by experiencing them. When someone in the days of ancient Greece adapted himself to the super-sensible world by means of a special initiation, he was able to come to an experience of these Beings of Form; he actually beheld these Beings, and in order to find a true picture or Imagination of them he had to attach to them, in a way as an attribute, the thoughts which flowed shining through the universe. This ancient Greek saw how these Beings of Form as it were sent out shining thought forces from their limbs, forces which entered into the world-processes and there continued to work as world-creative forces of intelligence. He would say perhaps: Throughout the universe, throughout the cosmos, it is the task of the Beings of Form, the Exousiai, to pour thoughts through the universal processes. Therefore just as science based on sense-perception describes the activities of human beings by recording what they do individually or co-operatively, so a science based on super-sensible perception, in examining the activities of the Form Forces during the era under consideration, would have to describe how these super-sensible Beings cause the thought forces to flow from one to the other, how they receive them from each other, and how embedded in this outflowing and receiving lie the universal processes which present themselves to man externally in the shape of natural phenomena.

And then came the 4th century A.D. in the evolution of mankind. For the super-sensible world it brought an event of the utmost importance: the Exousiai, the Forces or Spirits of Form, transferred their thought forces to the Archai, the Primal Forces or Principalities.

At that time the Archai, the Principalities, took over the task previously carried out by the Exousiai. Events of this kind do take place in the super-sensible world. And this was an event of immense cosmic importance. The Exousiai, the Spirits of Form, retained merely the task of controlling external sense-perceptions; with special cosmic forces they rule over everything present in the world of colour, tone and so on. Accordingly, those who have insight into these things must say with reference to the times which follow the 4th century A.D.: the thoughts which rule the world are transferred to the Archai, the Principalities; now, all the manifold forms of the world, the constant metamorphoses seen by eyes and heard by ears constitute a fabric woven by the Exousiai, who formerly gave thoughts to human beings and now give them sense-impressions, while the Archai now give them thoughts.

This reality of the super-sensible world was mirrored here below in the world of the senses by the fact that in ancient times, for instance, the times of the Greeks, thoughts were perceived objectively in things. Just as today we believe we perceive red or blue on things, so a Greek found that a thought was not merely grasped by his head but that it radiated forth from an object in the same way as red or blue radiates forth.

I have described this human side of the matter in my book Riddles of Philosophy. In this book you will find a description of how this important event in the super-sensible world was reflected in the world of the physical senses. Philosophical terms are used there because the language of philosophy is suitable for describing the material world, whereas in discussing the point of view of the super-sensible world one also has to mention the super-sensible fact that the task of the Exousiai has been transferred to the Archai.

The preparation of such things in humanity takes many epochs. And such things are linked with basic transformations of the human soul. When I say that this super-sensible event took place in the 4th century A.D., this is of course only an approximation applying merely to the central period, whereas the whole process took place over many ages. Preparations began in pre-Christian times and the change was not completed until the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries A.D. The 4th century A.D. is only the central period and is alluded to in order to have something definite to point to in the historical development of mankind.

This is also the point in human evolution when men's outlook into the super-sensible world begins to become wholly obscured. The consciousness of the soul loses the capacity of super-sensible vision and perception while the soul devotes itself to the world. You will perhaps understand this more clearly in your souls if light is thrown upon it from another angle.

What is the point I am trying so insistently to make clear? It is that human beings begin to feel increasingly aware of themselves as individuals. When the thought-world passes from the Spirits of Form to the Principalities, from the Exousiai to the Archai, man feels more aware of the thoughts of his own being, because the Archai live one step nearer than the Exousiai to man. Somebody who begins to acquire super-sensible vision will receive the following impression. He will say: Certainly this is the same world which I know as the world of the senses.

Ordinary consciousness knows nothing at all about the conditions under consideration here. But with super-sensible consciousness there is definitely the feeling that Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai are present between man and his sense impressions. The feeling is that they are present here in the sense-world. They are not seen with the ordinary eye but they are actually present between man and the whole fabric of sense impressions. It is the Exousiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes who are beyond this world; they are concealed by the fabric of the senses.

Thus an individual possessing super-sensible consciousness feels that thoughts, after they have been handed over to the Archai, come nearer to him. He feels them now to be more in his own world, whereas previously they were behind the colours on things, behind the red or the blue; we might say they approached him through the red or the blue or through a C sharp or a G. He feels that his communication with the thought-world has become freer since the transfer. Of course this also brings about the illusion that man makes the thoughts himself.

It took a long time for man to evolve to the point of being able to take into himself, as it were, what had formerly presented itself to him as the objective external world. This only came about by degrees during the course of human evolution. Looking back a very long way in evolution, right back beyond the Atlantean catastrophe and into the time of ancient Atlantis, I must ask you to imagine man at that time as I have described him in my books Occult Science: an Outline and Cosmic Memory. As you know, human beings at that time were formed quite differently. Their bodily substance was much more delicate than it became later on during the post-Atlantean age. Because of this the soul element was related differently to the world and the Atlanteans experienced the world quite differently. Let me give you just one instance of this particular way of experiencing the world. The Atlanteans could not experience the interval of a third, or even of a fifth. Their musical experience began with the experience of the seventh. They were also aware of greater intervals, but the seventh was the smallest. Thirds and fifths escaped their hearing; no such intervals existed for them.

As a result their experience of tone-structures was quite different; the soul had a quite different relationship with the tone-structures. For if, without the smaller intervals, we were to live only in the music of sevenths, if we were to live as naturally in these sevenths as did the Atlanteans, we would not perceive music as something taking place within us or in connection with us; we would find ourselves outside our bodies the moment musical perception began. We would live outside in the cosmos as was the case with the Atlanteans. For them a musical experience was a direct religious experience. In experiencing sevenths they could not say that they themselves had anything to do with the creation of these intervals; they felt that the Gods, weaving and flowing through the world, revealed themselves in sevenths. To say: ‘I am making music’ was senseless to them. But it meant something when they said: ‘I live in the music made by the Gods.’

In a much weakened form this musical experience was still present in the post-Atlantean age, when mainly the interval of the fifth was experienced. This must not be compared with our present experience of the fifth. Today the fifth gives us the impression of an empty shell. In the best sense of the word we feel the fifth to be empty. It has become empty because the Gods have withdrawn from mankind.

But in post-Atlantean times man felt that the Gods still lived in the fifths. It was not until later, when the third, both major and minor, made its appearance in music, that music as it were submerged itself in man's inner nature, so that in musical experience he was no longer outside himself. In the real age of the fifth man was still definitely outside himself in the experience of music. In the age of the third, which as you know is comparatively recent, man remains within himself when he experiences music. He embraces music with his body. He interweaves musical and bodily nature. That is why the experience of the third is accompanied by the differentiation between major and minor, so that we have the experience of the major mood an the one hand and the experience of the minor mood an the other. With the arrival of the third, with the entry into music of the major and minor moods, musical experience links itself with the elevated and joyful moods and also with the depressed, painful and sad moods experienced by man because he bears a physical and an etheric body. We might say that man removes his experience of the world from the cosmos; instead he unites himself with his experience of the world. In olden times, in the age of the fifth, and even more so in the age of the seventh, if I may be permitted to use these expressions, man's most important experience of the world was such that it took him immediately outside himself. He could thus say: The world of tones draws my ego and my astral body out of my physical and etheric bodies; I interweave my earthly existence with the divine-spiritual world; the tone structures resound as something an whose wings the Gods flow through the world; and I experience this flowing of the Gods by perceiving the tones.

You see therefore in this particular field how cosmic experience in a certain sense makes its way towards the human being, how the cosmos penetrates into the human being. You see how if we look back into ancient times it is in the super-sensible world that we must seek man's most important experiences. And you see how later the time comes when man as an Earth-being endowed with physical senses must be included when the most important world events are being described.

This becomes necessary when the thoughts are given by the Spirits of Form to the Principalities, the Archai. Another expression of this may be found in the transition from the ancient period of the fifth to the period of the third and the experience of major and minor.

Now it is of particular interest, in connection with this experience, to go back into an age even earlier than the Atlantean, an age of human evolution upon Earth which fades away into the dim and far-distant past but which can be recalled with the aid of super-sensible vision. You will find this distant age described in my book Occult Science: an Outline as the Lemurian age. At that time man's perception of music was such that he could not even be conscious of intervals contained within an octave; at that time man could perceive an interval only if it extended beyond an octave, for instance: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, where the interval C, D, is experienced only if the D lies in the next octave.

Thus in the Lemurian age there could be no musical experience in listening to intervals smaller than an octave; the interval experienced goes beyond the octave to the first tone of the following octave and then to the next tone of the next octave. Thus man experiences something which is difficult to describe, but you may be able to imagine it if I say the following: man experiences the second in the next higher octave and the third in the next octave after that. He experiences a kind of objective third, indeed the two thirds, both major and minor. But of course it is not a third as we know it today, since for us the third only comes about if we take the tonic and the next note but one within the same octave. Because man in ancient times was able to have a direct experience of intervals which we describe today as the tonic in one octave, the second in the next octave and the third in the third octave, he was able to perceive a sort of objective major and minor; not a major and minor mood experienced within himself but a major and minor expressing a feeling of what the Gods experienced in their souls.

We cannot describe what man in the Lemurian age experienced by any such names as joy and sorrow, exultation and depression; we must say that through this particular musical perception in Lemurian times, when he was quite outside himself in perceiving these intervals, he experienced the cosmic jubilation of the Gods and the cosmic lamentation of the Gods. We are able to look back to a time an Earth really experienced by man when what is experienced today as major and minor was, as it were, projected out into the universe. What man experiences inwardly today was then projected out into the universe. What today flows through his emotion and feeling was then perceived by him outside his physical body as the experience of the Gods in the cosmos. What must be characterized as our present inner experience of the major mood was experienced by him outside his body as the cosmic jubilation, the cosmic music of the Gods rejoicing in their creation of the world. And what we know today as the minor mood was experienced in Lemurian times as the vast lamentation of the Gods over the possibility of what is described in the Bible as the Fall of man, the falling away of mankind from the divine spiritual powers, the powers of good.

This is something which echoes down to us out of that wonderful knowledge of the ancient Mysteries which of itself passes over into the realm of art; we not only perceive in a more abstract way how mankind once upon a time succumbed to Luciferic and Ahrimanic seduction and temptation and experienced this or that, but we also perceive how human beings heard in ancient times the music of the Gods rejoicing in the cosmos about their creation of the world and also the cosmic lamentation of the Gods whose prophetic vision showed them that man would fall away from the divine-spiritual powers.

This artistic understanding of something which later became more abstract in form is given to us out of ancient Mysteries; from it we may win the deep conviction that knowledge, art and religion have flowed from a single source. This must lead us to the conviction that we must seek to return to that state of soul which will appear once again when the soul has knowledge because religion streams and art flows through it, that state of soul which brings a deep and living understanding of what Goethe meant so many years ago when he said: ‘Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws which would have lain concealed forever had beauty not appeared.’

The secret of human evolution within the Earth's existence, within the Earth's evolution, itself reveals to us this inner unity of everything man must experience together with the world knowingly, religiously and artistically in order that he may experience his complete potentiality together with the world.

It is a fact that now the time has come when these things must once again enter human consciousness, for otherwise man's soul-nature would simply begin to decay. Now and in the near future man's soul would shrivel up as a result of increasingly intellectual and one-sided knowledge; his soul would be dulled by the one-sidedness of art and he would lose his soul altogether through the one-sidedness of religion if he could not find the way which leads to the inner harmony and unity of these three, the way which helps him to leave his body in a more conscious manner than of old and once more see and hear the super-sensible world together with the world of the senses.

Through Spiritual Science we can look at the more ancient and profound personalities of the developing Greek culture, personalities whose successors were such people as Aeschylus and Heraclitus. We find that these personalities, in so far as they were initiated into the Mysteries, all had similar feelings as a result of their knowledge and their artistic, creative powers. Like Homer, who said: ‘Sing me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus,’ they still felt their knowledge and their creative powers not as something working in them personally but as something they carried out in their religious feeling together with the spiritual world. Thus they could say: In most ancient times man experienced himself as man when, in carrying out the most important human activities, he passed out of himself and shared his experiences with the Gods (as I have shown you in connection with music, but it was also true in the forming of thoughts). But man has now lost what he was thus able to experience.

This feeling of having lost an ancient knowledge and an ancient artistic and religious possession of mankind most certainly weighed upon the more profound Greek souls.

Something different must come to mankind today. By developing the proper powers of his soul-experience, man must come to the point where he is able to rediscover what was lost long ago. What I want to say is that man must develop a consciousness—after all, we are living in the age of consciousness—of how what has become inward must find its way outwards again towards the divine-spiritual world. And it will be possible to accomplish this—as I have indicated in answer to a question put to me during a lecture-course at the Goetheanum—in one field for instance, when the inner wealth of feeling experienced in melody is transferred to the single tone, when man discovers the secret of the single tone, in other words when man experiences not only intervals but is also able to experience with inner richness and variety the single tone as if it were a melody. This is something which today can scarcely be imagined.

But you see how things progress: from the seventh to the fifth, from the fifth to the third, from the third to the prime and so down to the single tone and onward still further. So what once represented the loss of the divine world must be transformed in human evolution into the rediscovery of the divine by man on Earth, if humanity is to go on developing on Earth instead of perishing.

We only understand the past aright when we are able to see in contrast the true image of our development in the future, when we feel with an emotion which affects us deeply what was also felt by the more profound human beings in ancient Greece, namely that we have lost the presence of the Gods, and when we can contrast this by saying with deeply moved but intensely striving souls:

We will bring to blossom and fruition the spirit whose germ exists within us, so that we may once more find the Gods.

• 1. The translation by Johanna Collis of this lecture is also included in the volume entitled Art in the light of Mystery Wisdom, a collection of eight lectures given by Rudolf Steiner on various dates and published by Rudolf Steiner Press (London). Permission has been given for publication in the present volume.

In the course of the evolution of mankind, the different world-religions have placed mighty pictures before humanity. If these pictures are to be fully understood a certain esoteric knowledge is required. In the course of years, such a knowledge, based on Anthroposophy, has been applied to the interpretation of all the four Gospels, in order that their deeper content and meaning may be brought to light.* This content is for the most part in the form of pictures, because pictures refuse to communicate themselves in the narrow, rationalistic way that is possible with concepts and ideas. People think that once a concept has been grasped they have got to the root of everything to which it is relevant. No such opinion is possible in the case of a picture, an imagination. A picture or an imagination works in a living way, like a living being itself. We may have come to know one aspect or another of a living person, but ever and again he will present new aspects to us. We shall not be satisfied, therefore, with definitions purporting to be comprehensive, but we shall endeavour to look for characteristics which contribute to the picture from different angles, giving us increasing knowledge of the person in question.¹

To-day I want to bring two familiar pictures before you, and to describe certain aspects of them.

The first picture is that of the disciples of Christ Jesus on the day of the Ascension. Gazing upwards, they see Christ vanishing in the clouds. The usual conception of this scene is that Christ went up into heaven and so departed from the earth, and that the disciples were then left, as it were, to their own resources. Likewise all earthly humanity, for whose sake Christ fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, was by the Ascension left to its own resources.

The thought may occur to you that in a certain respect this belies the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. We ourselves know that through His deed on Golgotha Christ resolved to unite His own Being with the earth, that is to say, from the Mystery of Golgotha onwards to remain forever connected with earth-evolution. The mighty picture of the Ascension might thus seem to be at variance with what esoteric vision of the Mystery of Golgotha reveals concerning Christ's union with the earth and with mankind.

We will try to-day to overcome this seeming contradiction in the light of actual spiritual facts.

The second picture is that of the scene ten days after the Ascension, when tongues of fire descend upon the heads of the assembled disciples and they are moved “to speak with other tongues.” What this actually means is that henceforward the disciples were able to impart the secrets of the Deed on Golgotha to the heart of every human being, irrespective of religion or creed.

Keeping these two pictures before our minds, we shall try to give some indication of their meaning. Anything more than this is not possible.

We know from our study of Anthroposophy, that the evolution of mankind did not begin on the Earth, but that Earth-evolution proper was preceded by a “Moon” evolution, this by a “Sun” evolution, and this again by a “Saturn” evolution, as described in my book An Outline of Occult Science. During the period of the “Saturn” evolution, man developed in his descent from the Spiritual as far as the rudimentary basis of the physical body. In that epoch, however, the physical body was a body of warmth only; that is to say, warmth of varying degrees, forces of warmth, gathered together around the being of soul-and-spirit.

During the “Sun” evolution man acquired an aeriform body, during the “Moon” evolution a kind of fluid, watery body, and a solid, earthy body, in the real sense, only during “Earth” evolution proper.

Let us think, now, particularly of the Earth-evolution. It fulfils its course in seven successive epochs, of which the first three are recapitulations: the first, a recapitulation of the “Saturn” period, the second of the “Sun” period, the third (the Lemurian epoch) of the “Moon” period. Earth-evolution proper really begins with the fourth epoch, that of Atlantis. We are living now in the fifth epoch, which will be followed by the sixth and the seventh.

The mid-point of Earth-evolution falls in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and so in our present age the Earth has already passed the mid-point of its development. From this you will realise that the Earth is already involved in a declining phase of evolution, and in our time this must always be taken into account. As I have often said, it conforms entirely with the findings even of modern materialistic geology.

In his book The Face of the Earth, Eduard Suess has stated that the soil beneath our feet to-day belongs to an earth that is already dying. During the Atlantean epoch the earth was, so to say, in the middle period of life; it teemed with inner life; it had upon it no such formations as the rocks and stones, which are gradually crumbling away. The mineral element was active in the earthly realm in the way in which it is active to-day in an animal organism, in a state of solution out of which deposits will not form unless the organism is diseased. If the animal organism is healthy it is only the bones that can be said to take their form as deposits. In the bones, however, there is still inner life. The bones are not in the condition of death, they are not, like our mountains and rocks, in process of crumbling into dust. The crumbling of the rocks is evidence that the earth is already involved in a death-process.

As already said, this is now known even to ordinary materialistic geology. Anthroposophy must add to this knowledge the fact that the earth has been involved in this process of decline ever since the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Moreover, in the earth must be included everything that belongs to it: the plants, the animals, and, above all, physical man. Physical man is part and parcel of the earth. In that the earth is involved in a process of decline, so too is the human physical body. Expressed differently, in more esoteric terms, this signifies that by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, everything that was first laid down in a germinal condition in the warmth-body of the “Saturn” evolution had reached completion. The human physical body actually reached completion by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and since then the path of its evolution has been one of decline.

Evolution does not, of course, proceed with complete uniformity. One race or people enters a phase of evolution earlier or later than another, but, speaking generally, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was at hand, the evolution of the physical constitution of man had reached a stage when humanity all over the globe was facing the prospect of finding further incarnation impossible on the earth; in other words, of being unable henceforward to accompany the earth in its declining evolution.

In the Schools of Initiation it was known, and can of course also be known to-day, that at about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the human physical body had reached a degree of decline where the men who were then in incarnation or who were to be incarnated in the near future, that is, up to about the fourth century A.D., were faced with the danger of leaving an earth that was growing more and more desolate and barren, and of finding no possibility in the future of descending from the world of spirit-and-soul and building a physical body out of materials provided by the physical earth. This danger existed, and the inevitable consequence would have been the failure of man to fulfil his allotted earthly mission. The Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers working in combination had succeeded to the extent that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, earthly mankind was face to face with the possibility of dying out.

Mankind was rescued from this fate through that which was achieved by the Mystery of Golgotha, whereby the human physical body itself was imbued again with the necessary forces of life and freshness. Men were thereby enabled to continue their further evolution on earth, inasmuch as they could now come down from worlds of spirit-and-soul and find it possible to live in physical bodies. Such was the actual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha.

I have often spoken of this, as for example in the lecture-course given in Carlsruhe under the title From Jesus to Christ.² The greatest hostility was aroused by these lectures because, out of a sense of esoteric duty, certain truths were presented which many people wish to keep concealed. Indeed it can be said that from a certain quarter the hostility to Anthroposophy started from these very lectures.

What I have described, however, is one aspect of the actual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha. This same fact can, of course, be expressed in many different ways. It was expressed differently in that lecture-course, but what I am now describing is the same fact, merely seen from another side. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the forces promoting the growth and thriving of man's physical body were quickened anew, with the following result.—It was now made possible for man to receive, during his life of sleep, an impulse he would not otherwise have received. The whole evolution of man on earth takes its course, as we know, in the alternation of waking life and sleep-life. In sleep, the physical body and ether-body remain behind; from the time of falling asleep until that of waking, the ego and the astral body make themselves independent of them. During this state of independence in sleep the influence of the Christ-Force takes effect in the ego and the astral body in those men who through the requisite mood and content of their soul-life have made fitting preparation for this condition of sleep. Penetration of these higher bodies by the Christ-Force, therefore, takes place mainly during the state of sleep.

To turn now to the biblical event of the Ascension, we must realise that at that time the disciples had become clairvoyant to a degree at which they were able to behold what is, in truth, a deep secret of earthly evolution. These secrets remain unnoticed by man's everyday consciousness, which is incapable of knowing whether at one point or another in the evolution of humanity something of supreme importance is taking place. There are many such happenings, but the everyday consciousness is unaware of them. The picture of the Ascension actually signifies that at this moment Christ's disciples were able to witness spiritually an event of untold significance, enacted “behind the scenes” as it were of earthly evolution.

What they witnessed revealed to them, as in a picture, the prospect of what would have come about for men had the Mystery of Golgotha not taken place. They beheld as a concrete spiritual happening what would have then befallen, namely, that the physical bodies of men would have so deteriorated that the whole future of humanity would have been endangered. For the consequence of this physical deterioration would have been that the human etheric body would have obeyed the forces of attraction which properly belong to it. The etheric body is being drawn all the time towards the sun, not towards the earth. Our constitution as human beings is such that our physical body has earthly heaviness, gravity, but our etheric body, sun-levity. Had the human physical body become what it must have become if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, the etheric bodies of men would have followed their own urge towards the sun and have left the physical body. The existence of mankind on earth would inevitably have come to an end.

Until the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ's dwelling-place was the sun. Therefore in that the etheric body of man strives towards the sun, it is striving towards the Christ. Now picture to yourselves the scene on the day of the Ascension. In spiritual vision the disciples see Christ Himself rising heavenwards. A vision is conjured before them of how the power, the impulse of Christ unites itself with the etheric nature of man, in its upward striving; of how at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha man was facing the danger of his etheric body being drawn out into the sun like a cloud, but how, in its sunward streaming, it was held together by Christ. This picture must be understood, for in truth it is a warning. Christ is akin to those forces in man which naturally strive towards the sun and away from the earth, and will always do so. But Christ remains in union with the earth. Thus the Christ Impulse holds man securely on the earth.

In this picture of the Ascension, something more is manifest to the disciples. Suppose that the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place and that numbers of men had become clairvoyant to the degree to which the disciples became clairvoyant at this moment. These men would have seen the etheric bodies of certain human beings departing from the earth in the direction of the sun, and they would have come to this conclusion: ‘This is the path man's etheric body is taking. The etheric-earthly element in man is being drawn away into the sun.’ But now, by carrying to its fulfilment the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ has rescued for the earth this sunward-striving etheric body. And thereby is manifest the fact that Christ remains united with mankind on the earth. Thus something else became apparent here, namely that through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ brought to pass within earth-evolution a cosmic event. Christ came down from the heights of spirit, linked Himself with humanity in the man Jesus of Nazareth, fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, united His evolution with that of the earth. It was a cosmic Deed accomplished for the whole of humanity.

Mark these words: The Deed on Golgotha was fulfilled for all mankind. The eye of clairvoyance can never fail to perceive how, since that Deed, the etheric forces in man, with their urge to escape from the earth, are united with Christ in order that He may keep them in the earth-evolution. This applies to the whole of mankind.

This leads us to another consideration. Suppose that only a handful of human beings had been able to acquire knowledge of these facts that relate to the Mystery of Golgotha, and that a large section of mankind—as is actually the case—had not recognised its significance. If this had come about, the earth would be peopled by a few true believers in Christ and by a large number who do not acknowledge the essential content and meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. What, then, is to be said of the latter? How are these human beings who do not acknowledge the Mystery of Golgotha related to it?—or, better put, how is the Deed of Christ on Golgotha related to these human beings?

The Deed of Christ on Golgotha is an objective fact; its cosmic significance does not depend upon what men believe about it. An objective fact has, in itself, reality of being. If an oven is hot, it does not become cold because a number of people believe that it is cold.—The Mystery of Golgotha rescues mankind from the decay of the physical body, no matter what men believe or do not believe about it. The Mystery of Golgotha was enacted for the sake of all men, including those who do not believe in it.—That is the cardinal fact to be remembered.

We realise, then, that the Deed on Golgotha was enacted in order that by this means mankind on earth might be quickened to the degree necessary for its rejuvenation. That has come to pass. It has been made possible for men to find on the earth bodies in which they can and will for long ages of future time—be able to incarnate. It is, however, fundamentally as beings of spirit-and-soul that men will pass through existence in these now rejuvenated earthly bodies, and it is as beings of spirit-and-soul that they will be able to appear on the earth again and again.

Now the Christ Impulse, which must have significance for the spiritual nature of man as well as for his bodily nature, can impress itself upon a man's waking state, but it can make no impression on his sleeping state unless this Impulse has been received into his soul. The Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, would have produced its effect in the waking life of men who had no knowledge of it; but it would not, in such circumstances, have affected them in their life of sleep. The inevitable result would have been that while men would have gained the possibility of incarnating time and again on the earth, nevertheless, if they had acquired no knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, the condition of their sleep would have been such that the connection of their spirit-and-soul nature with Christ must have been lost.

Here you see the difference in the relation to the Mystery of Golgotha of those men who have, so to speak, no desire to know anything about it. Christ performed His Deed for their bodies, in order that earthly life should be made possible for them, just as He performed it for utterly unbelieving non-Christian peoples. But to take effect in man's spirit-and-soul nature, the Christ Impulse must also be able to penetrate into the human soul during the state of sleep. And this is only possible if a man consciously acknowledges the import of the Mystery of Golgotha. The spiritual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, can proceed only from a true recognition of its content.

Thus there are two things that mankind must realise: on the one hand that Christ holds back the ether-body in its perpetual urge towards the sun; and on the other, that man's spirit-and-soul nature, his ego and astral body, can receive the Christ Impulse only in the time between falling asleep and waking—and this is only possible when knowledge of this Impulse has been acquired in waking life.

To sum up: the urge of the etheric bodies of men to draw towards the sun is perceived by the disciples in clairvoyant vision. But they also perceive how Christ unites Himself with this urge, restrains it, holds it fast. The mighty scene of the Ascension is that of the rescue of the physical-etheric nature of man by Christ.

The disciples withdraw in deep contemplation. For in their awakened souls is the knowledge that through the Mystery of Golgotha complete provision was made for the physical-etheric nature of mankind as a whole. But what happens, they wonder, to the being of spirit-and-soul? Whence does man acquire the power to receive the Christ Impulse into his nature of spirit-and-soul, into his ego and astral body? The answer is found in the Whitsun festival.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ Impulse has taken effect on the earth as a reality which is within the comprehension of spiritual cognition alone. No materialistic knowledge, no materialistic science can understand the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the soul must acquire the power of spiritual cognition, of spiritual perception, of spiritual feeling, in order to be able to understand how, on Golgotha, the Christ Impulse was united with the impulses of the earth.

Christ Jesus fulfilled His Deed on Golgotha to the end that this union might take effect, fulfilled it in such a way that ten days after the event of the Ascension He sent man the possibility of imbuing also his inner nature of spirit-and-soul, his ego and astral body, with the Christ Impulse. The permeation of the human spirit-and-soul with the power to understand the Mystery of Golgotha is the sending of the Holy Spirit. This is the picture of the Whitsun festival, the festival of Pentecost. Christ fulfilled His Deed for all mankind. But to each human individual, in order that he may be able to understand this Deed, Christ sent the Spirit, in order that the individual being of spirit-and-soul may have access to the effects of the Deed that was accomplished for all men in common. Through the Spirit man must learn to experience the Christ Mystery inwardly, in spirit and in soul.

Thus these two pictures stand side by side in the history of the evolution of humanity. That of the Ascension tells us: The Deed on Golgotha was fulfilled for the physical body and the etheric body in the universal human sense. That of Whitsun tells us: The single human being must make this Deed bear fruit in himself by receiving the Holy Spirit. Thereby the Christ Impulse becomes individual in each human being.

And now something else can be added to the picture of the Ascension. Spiritual visions such as came to the disciples on the day of the Ascension always have a bearing upon what man actually experiences in one or another state of consciousness. After death, as you know, the etheric body leaves the human being. He lays aside the physical body at death, retains the etheric body for a few days, and then the etheric body dissolves, is actually united with the sun. This dissolution after death betokens union with the sun-nature streaming through the space in which the earth, too is included. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, man beholds, together with this departing etheric body, the Christ Who has rescued it for earthly existence through the ages of time to come. So that since the Mystery of Golgotha there stands before the soul of every human being who passes through death the Ascension picture which the disciples were able to behold that day in a particular condition of their soul-life.

But for one who makes the Whitsun Mystery, too, part of his being, who allows the Holy Spirit to draw near to him—for such a one this picture after death becomes the source of the greatest consolation he can possibly experience: for now he beholds the Mystery of Golgotha in all its truth and reality. This picture of the Ascension tells him: You can with confidence entrust all your following incarnations to earth-evolution, for through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ has become the Saviour of earth-evolution.—For one who does not penetrate with his ego and astral body—that is to say, does not penetrate with knowledge and with feeling—to the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha, for him this picture is a reproach until such time as he too learns to understand it. After death, the picture is as it were an admonition: Endeavour to acquire for the next earthly life such forces as will enable you to understand the Mystery of Golgotha!—That this picture of the Ascension should, to begin with, be an admonition, is only natural; for in subsequent earthly lives men can endeavour to apply the forces they have been admonished to acquire, and gain understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You can now perceive the difference between those who with their inmost forces of faith, knowledge and feeling put their trust in the Mystery of Golgotha, and those who do not. The Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled for mankind as a whole, in respect of the physical body and etheric body only. The sending of the Holy Spirit, the Whitsun mystery, signifies that the soul and spirit of man can partake of the fruits of the Deed on Golgotha only if he finds wings to bear him to actual understanding of the essence and meaning of that Deed.

But because this essence and meaning can be fully grasped by spiritual knowledge alone, not by material knowledge, it follows that the truth of the Whitsun festival can be grasped only when men realise that the sending of the Holy Spirit is the challenge to humanity more and more to achieve Spirit-knowledge, through which alone the Mystery of Golgotha can be understood.

That it must be understood—this is the challenge of the Whitsun Mystery. That it came to pass for all mankind—this is the revelation given in the Ascension.

And so it can truly be said that Anthroposophy enables us to understand the relation of the Whitsun Mystery to the Ascension revelation. We can feel Anthroposophy to be like a herald bringing illumination to these festivals of Spring, and to its many facets we have added yet another, essentially belonging to it.

This should convey to you the mood-of-soul in which the true feeling for the festivals of the Ascension and of Whitsun can arise. The pictures which such festivals bring before the soul are like living beings: we can approach nearer and nearer to their reality, learn to know them more and more intimately. When once again the year is filled with spiritual understanding of the festival seasons, it will be imbued with cosmic reality, and within earthly existence men will experience cosmic existence.

Whitsun is pre-eminently a festival of flowers. If a man has a true feeling for this Festival he will go out among the buds and blossoms opening under the influence of the sun, under the etheric and astral influences—and he will perceive in the flower-decked earth the earthly image of what flows together in the picture of Christ's Ascension, and the descent of the tongues of fire upon the heads of the disciples which followed later. The heart of man as it opens may be symbolised by the flower opening itself to the sun; and what pours down from the sun, giving the flower the fertilising power it needs, may be symbolised by the tongues of fire descending: upon the heads of the disciples. Anthroposophy can work upon human hearts with the power that streams from an understanding of the festival times and from true contemplation of each festival season; it can help to evoke the mood-of-soul that conforms truly with these days of the Spring festivals.

[Following the lecture Rudolf Steiner made a request for members to not make the jobs of the guards protecting the burned Goetheanum by entering these areas. See GA 259. —rsarchive.org]

• 1. See lecture-courses by Rudolf Steiner on each of the four Gospels; also numbers of other published lectures.
• 2. Ten lectures, Oct. 5th—14th, 1911. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co.

In the last few days I have been speaking of man's place in the Universe. On the one side we envisaged man's organisation as composed of physical body, etheric body or body of formative forces, astral body and the true ‘I’ which passes from earthly life to earthly life. At the same time I also tried to show how these members of the human being are each connected in a different way with the Universe. It can be said that the physical body is connected with all that is the physical, earthly world of the senses; man's physical body is part of that world. But when we think of the etheric body or the body of formative forces, we must understand that this belongs to quite a different kind of world, to that world which is itself etheric and of which I told you that man should experience it as coming to him from the far spaces of the cosmos. If, then, we imagine the forces of the earth spreading out in all directions and man living within these forces, which are those of the physical world, we must conceive the etheric world as coming in on all sides from the direction of the outer global shell of the universe to meet the outstreaming physical forces, and thus reaching man. It is obvious, therefore, that man's etheric body is subject to entirely different laws from those governing the physical body.—And again, when contemplating man's astral body, we perceive it to be connected with worlds that are not to be found at all in that cosmos which is contained in the Physical and the etheric, and in which we find that with our astral body we belong to the world we enter between death and a new birth.

And finally with the ‘I’ itself we belong to a world that flows as from a quickening fount through worlds which, as for instance our own world, are threefold in character. The three members of our world are the physical, the etheric, the astral. The world of the ‘I’ passes through this world and through other similarly threefold worlds. It is therefore a far more embracing world, one that we must regard as eternal as compared with the temporal.

But we must also have regard to the fact that, whenever we employ those human faculties of perception and understanding which inform us about the etheric body or the body of formative forces, the astral body and the ‘I,’ we do in fact enter into entirely different worlds. We have to change over to the sphere of active, living thinking in order to experience our etheric body. What we then have to bear in mind is that in that world everything is different from what we experience while bound to the physical world of the senses. In the first place the things and happenings we know from the aspect of the physical world appear in quite a different light in these higher worlds. As it is, the things and events encountered in the physical world are after all only final manifestations. They have their source in the higher worlds; so that we then see more into the primary origins of our surroundings in the physical world. But apart from that, when in the physical world we have, to begin with, the world well known to ordinary consciousness, where man is surrounded by the three kingdoms of nature besides his own. But when we rise to those powers of cognition—in my books I have used the expression ‘Imaginative Cognition’—which enable us to experience our own etheric body or the body of formative forces, we enter the etheric world. And we have sufficiently developed and strengthened our faculties when we have kindled the inner light and can experience ourselves, as it were, in the Second Man, in the body of formative forces; we then enter the world which, at any rate to begin with, reveals itself to us in images: the world of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai.

Having broken through, as it were, into the cosmic spheres where the etheric body, the body of formative forces, becomes perceptible to us, we recognise on entering this world of flowing images that these reveal manifestations of the Beings of the third Hierarchy, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. There we are among Beings who are not with us in the physical world of the senses. The presence of these Beings reveals itself to us through the medium of qualities similar in kind to those we perceive also through our senses in the physical world.

But here, in the world of the senses, we see for instance the colours spread over the surface of things or in purely physical configurations such as the rainbow. Sounds are experienced as connected with specific objects in the physical world. In the same way, warmth and cold are felt as emanating from certain objects in the physical world of the senses. But when we regard the world in which the third Hierarchy is revealed to us, we do not have colours adhering to things, sounds reverberating from objects, and so on, but colours, sounds, warmth and cold flowing and vibrating—one can hardly say through space—but flowing and vibrating in time. Colour is not spread over the surface of things but it fluctuates and moves in waves. And by applying the faculties which enabled us to enter these worlds, we know that, just as in the physical world colour-effect suggests a material foundation, so in yonder world the floating cloud of colour, a flowing organism of colour, is the manifestation of the working and weaving of the spirit-and-soul forces of the third Hierarchy. So that the moment we behold the life-tableau of which I have spoken, which gives a clear and spontaneous picture of the whole of our life since birth, there also appears within this stream of our own life's events something of which one can. say: within the de-materialised world of flowing colours and sounds lives the third Hierarchy.

The Connection of the various Members of Man's
Being with the corresponding Worlds of the Universe

When our faculties of cognition are strong enough to rise to the level where we can observe our own astral body, that is to say, that part of us which existed before we descended into earthly life, and which we shall again carry with us when we have passed through the gate of death, then we know: this is a wider world, a world we do not find in the cosmic ether but beyond the gates of birth and death. Here we enter the wider astral world.

Things do not tally exactly with descriptions given in my book, “Theosophy,” where they are presented from a different point of view. But just as we meet the third Hierarchy when we have attained experience of our body of formative forces, so we encounter the second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Kyriotetes and Dynamis, in the world which reveals to us our own astral body. And this second Hierarchy does not become perceptible to us in flowing colours and sounds, but it manifests itself to us by heralding and proclaiming the import of revelations of the Logos resounding and weaving through the Universe. The second Hierarchy speaks to us.

If, after having attained the necessary powers of cognition, one wants to give some Indication of how one is related to these worlds, using words which naturally no longer have meaning that is applicable in the sense-world, and yet are to some extent expressive in regard to the higher worlds, one must say: For the etheric world the inner living thinking becomes a kind of organ of touch. With living thinking we touch this world of flowing colours and so on. We must not imagine that we see the red as the eye sees the red of the senses, spread out on the surface of things; instead we sense, we ‘touch’ red and yellow and so forth; we touch the sounds, so that we can say: in the etheric world, living thinking is the element of touch in relation to what lives in the world of the third Hierarchy.

On entering that world to which in a sense our astral body belongs, we cannot speak of experiencing this astral world merely through the element of touch, but we must say: we apprehend this world as the revelation of the Beings of the second Hierarchy. Each separate manifestation presents itself to us as a member, a part of the World-Logos. Out of the deep silence resounds the voice of the Spiritual Beings. Thus, after touch: speech, communication.

And when, in the way I have indicated, sustained effort rewards us with the experience of the ‘I’ which goes from earthly life to earthly life and, between them, passes through the other lives between each death and a new birth, then we enter the spirit-world proper, the higher spirit-world. What happens in this world to begin with, is that we enter into a special relationship to our true ‘I.’ The ‘I’ we experience inwardly here in this life on earth between birth and death is, as we know, bound to the physical corporeality. We are aware of it as long as we experience ourselves in the physical body and, in a way, we are forced to practise selflessness when we rise into the etheric world and the astral world. There we have at most something like a recollection of this earthly ‘I.’

But now we find the true ‘I’ as it passes from earthly life to earthly life. Our first impression is that of an entirely different being. We say to ourselves: Here I live through this earthly existence between birth and death. Looking back I see that strip of etheric world which takes me back as far as my birth on earth. Then my vision opens into world-wide realms existing only in time, where to speak of space would be quite misleading; but in a wide perspective the world appears to me in all its fullness, as it lives and weaves between death and a new birth. Looking through and beyond the ether, the world of the third Hierarchy, and through the astral, where I was between death and a new birth as in a super-sensible world whose life is revelation of the Logos manifesting as the Cosmic Word—as my vision penetrates all this, I finally behold a being at first far remote, a being representing the essence of my previous life on earth. First, then, I see myself here in this earthly life with my present ghost-like ‘I,’ and then, looking far back through all that has just been described, I see what constitutes the essence of my previous life on earth. But at the same time I perceive how the content of the latter, as the gradually evolving ‘I,’ has been passing through the worlds I have been observing in retrospective perspective as far as my present life on earth. To begin with I do, in fact, perceive my true ‘I’ as some strange, remote being. And in this being, strange as it appears to me at first, I recognise myself.

Every word in this passage should be taken with absolute seriousness because every single word is of significance. This whole experience must culminate in the realisation that the true ‘I’ first taken to be some strange being, is indeed one's own self; that there appeared what seemed to be some other being which lived in the far distant past, but that it is, in fact, you yourself.

And then one discovers how this self has flowed from the previous existence on earth into the present earthly life, but that now, in this life, it is covered up, as it were, and could emerge only if all that befalls between going to sleep and waking were to stand revealed before the soul. It is there that all that which on its way through the astral and etheric world has reached us from our previous life on earth, continues to live and weave.

It is, you see, a world of earthly contradictions mingled with chords of heavenly harmonies in this inner process of the striving soul: earthly contradictions inasmuch as by means which are designed to meet the needs of ordinary daily life on earth, one cannot really reach one's own true ‘I.’ As it is, only the first rudiments of love live in our earthly ‘I.’ And even so, a glow is shed over life on earth through the power of love which radiates into this earthly life. But this love must grow stronger. It must gain sufficient strength to enable man to behold the etheric world and the astral world through the power of love and thus to overcome what lives in him as his lower self, as egoism—the opposite of love—to gain mastery over that which, as the antithesis of love, enables him to experience himself in earthly life as an independent ‘I.’ Love must grow so strong that one learns to ignore this earthly ‘I,’ to forget it, to disregard it. Love is the identification of one's own self with the other being. This impulse must be so strong that one ceases to heed one's own ‘I’ as it lives in the earthly body. Here then arises the contradiction, that it is precisely through selflessness, through the highest capacity for love, that one advances towards one's own true ‘I’ beckoning as it radiates through the cycles of time.

One has to lose one's earthly ‘I’ to behold one's true ‘I.’ And he who fails to accomplish this act of surrender has simply no means of finding the true ‘I.’ One could say that the true ‘I’ does not want to be sought whenever revelation of its presence is desired. If sought for, it hides. For only in love will it be found, and love is a surrender of self to the other being. For that reason the true Self must be found as if it were another being.

At the moment of coming face to face with one's true ‘I,’ one also becomes aware of what lives in a wider world, in the spiritual world itself. One meets the beings of the first Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones.

And just as there one finds again one's ‘I’—of which one has really only a reflection in earthly life—so now one finds the entire world of earthly environment in its true spiritual form. Hence one must also lose this earthly world to find the world of its primal origins, together with the true ‘I.’

So that we can say: What reveals itself in the spiritual world is something remembered, is touch, speech, memory; but remembrance of something which formerly one had known only in reflections, in images.

Thus, by experiencing one's human self, and with the realisation of one's own humanity, one enters into the life of the Universe in its totality. And to give a clear picture of the various members of man's being, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the ‘I,’ each must also be shown in its relationship to the corresponding worlds of the Universe.

What I have now described must be well understood and taken in its full meaning before any approach to the problem of the four parts of man's nature can disclose their true significance. Here is a case in point which shows very clearly that man must not only turn his thoughts in other directions, but think in a different way if he is to rise to a true understanding of the spiritual world. He must bring to life what are really only dead images in purely physical sense-perception: his attitude of mind must change.

And here one can indeed come across some extraordinary products of modern spiritual life, which show the difficulties that have to be overcome if Anthroposophy is to enter into the souls of men.

Anthroposophy as Academic Philosophy
(“Chair-Philosophy”) Sees It

When the book “Occult Science:” had been published, a well-known modern philosopher took it upon himself to analyse it. He first read the chapter about the four members of man's constitution—physical body, etheric body, astral body, ‘I’—and so on. Now this book has also been read by many quite simple people but people possessed of healthy common sense. For them it had point and meaning because with healthy common-sense one can always follow a subject, just as one can understand a picture without being a painter. But to one who in these days is a much quoted philosopher, such understanding presents considerably more difficulties than It does to a naive, simple human being. As this renowned philosopher reads: physical body, etheric body, astral body, ‘I,’ he is puzzled and wonders what he can make of it all. What does it all mean? Physical body, yes, of course. Etheric body?—well, perhaps it exists. What is dense matter in the physical body may here be of finer substance, but it is still matter. He argues, therefore, that to distinguish between physical and etheric body is to draw an arbitrary dividing line between the two.—Astral body?—We know something about a soul, says this philosopher, but—astral body? In the soul we have our thinking, feeling and willing. These are functions of the physical body. If one understands the physical body one has also grasped the meaning of thinking, feeling and willing. And the ‘I’—that is only the synthesis of all this. Such was his way of arguing.

And now please observe how the renowned philosopher's critical thought was formulated.—Having taken account of what he could find in the “Occult Science:” much as one might look at a chair, he said to himself: a chair can also be divided into its parts—legs, seat, back, first, second and third part—and there is no reason why man could not be divided in the same way as a chair. Finally he grants that this will serve well enough as a classification of man's constitution, but there is really nothing remarkably new in it, as in his view the principle underlying the division of man's constitution into its four members applies equally to the chair.

When we turn to physical chemistry the matter already becomes less difficult. There one could not talk so glibly about simple division. The chemist divides water into hydrogen and oxygen, H₂O; the natural scientist will not simply divide water in an abstract sense into two parts, hydrogen and oxygen.

He cannot leave it at that because he knows that hydrogen will not only combine with oxygen, as in water, but that it also combines, for instance in hydrochloric acid, with chloride. It follows that hydrogen contained in water is not only to be found there as part of water but is capable, when not forming part of water, of entering into quite different combinations. And likewise oxygen, when not forming part of water, can enter into other combinations and unite with quite different substances, as for instance, calcium, in lime. Hydrogen plus chloride can become hydrochloric acid, oxygen plus calcium becomes lime. Here one could not say: all you have to do is to divide water into its parts in the abstract, like a chair.

Man has to be considered on a still higher level. Here we have not merely a division into physical body, etheric body, astral body and ‘I,’ but man's physical body must be conceived as belonging to the earth. When a human being passes through the gate of death and leaves his physical corpse behind, the physical body turns to earth, but the etheric body rises up into the ether. The astral body leaves both and enters those worlds which are the domain of the second Hierarchy. And the I belongs to a different world again, the domain of the first Hierarchy. These four members do not merely represent a division for classification, they belong to quite different spheres of the Universe. At the same time the distinction illustrates the nature of man's being. We have here, on a much higher level, something for which one has to search already when progressing from the comparison of the chair with that of the water.

Naturally the level of mentality in our modern civilisation again presents a considerable obstacle, for the much-cited philosopher could have learned already from chemistry that it is not enough to go on talking only about abstract divisions, that one can apply them to a chair but not to water. However, in the case of this so-called philosopher, the philosophy unfortunately did not get past the chair to the water. It did not rise from the observation of life's trivialities to natural science. On the other hand, natural science does not concern itself with philosophy, so that the chemist of to-day does not think about such things at all.

It shows that in a philosophy which, from this point of view, might be called a ‘chair-doctrine,’ thinking in terms of natural science has as yet no part. Again, in chemistry, in natural science, philosophy plays no pert. Therefore it is precisely in the world of the scientist that those conditions are wanting, which can pave the way to an understanding of the deeper, inner truths of the Universe in their relation to man.

The man who undertook this critical study did in fact submit his article to me first, in manuscript. But what could I do with it? One cannot enter into a discussion with a man whose mind lacks the very first pre-requisites. I did nothing about it, but later found the article printed with all the mistakes and all the nonsense contained in such ‘chair-philosophy.’ Such are the trials of fate which Anthroposophy has to suffer on the way. One must be clear about such situations as they so often arise between Anthroposophy and its critics. It is precisely in that quarter that for the time being there is not the slightest possibility of an understanding.

And this philosopher, much quoted among philosophers, even makes certain concessions in line with ideas which are more or less popular currency in modern civilisation. For instance, he admits that there once existed a continent between Europe and America called ‘Atlantis,’ inhabited by the ancient Atlanteans, a prehistoric humanity. Then he asks the hypothetical question—I am not quoting verbatim—how is it possible that today, when we have a proper physiology and a proper psychology, anyone could conceive the idea of dividing man's being in such a way! Of course in Anthroposophy one does not do it in the way it can be done with a chair, but he thinks so. This philosopher—in his own way he is perfectly conscientious—was honestly puzzled how anyone could make such a division, or could hold such a primitive conception as compared with the knowledge a modern philosopher can command.

Well, as regards fundamental truths the modern philosopher is not in a particularly favourable position, but he thinks he is. Two days ago I explained to those who attended the Teachers' Course what modern so-called ‘psycho-analysis’ really is.

I should like to repeat that the peculiar thing about psycho-analysis is that it arises on the one side from dilettante physiology, in which the soul-forces do not reach the sphere of the spirit but remain bound to the body, while on the other hand it is based on dilettante psychology. The two do not meet. As a result, grotesque connections are being formulated when dilettantism endeavours to establish links between research work in psychology and research work in physiology. And the dilettantism is of immense proportions, and equally great in both cases. The psychiatrists' own psychological dilettantism equals in magnitude that of physical dilettantism, but when both are the same in volume and operate jointly, they multiply each other. That, according to simple arithmetic, makes the square of dilettantism. So that, seen in the true light, psycho-analysis is the square of dilettantism, because it is the product of the multiplication of dilettantism by dilettantism.

Now the problem for our much quoted philosopher amounted to this: he could not understand how anyone could conceive such a primitive idea as to divide man's being into four members as one divides a chair into three. So he advances the hypothesis that I must be a re-incarnated Atlantean. Really quite ingenious from the chair-philosophy point of view!

The Overcoming of Materialism by Knowledge attained
through living Thinking

One can be a materialist if lack of inner strength makes it impossible for the soul-forces to seek an opening for finding the way which leads into the world of soul-and-spirit, to the archetypal origins. Nothing can be gained by trying to prove anything on crude evidence, because materialism can certainly be proved as long as the evidence of proof is taken from the physical world. That is the crucial point. To find the way from the physical, into the spiritual, inner activity is needed, not abstract reasoning. The way to true Anthroposophy is found through that inner activity in man which stimulates the search for true knowledge. And all skirmishing in attempts to prove anything is useless, because you cannot argue with a man whose proofs are based entirely on the physical world of the senses. To disprove to such a man what to him is indisputable remains an impossibility as long as he lacks that primal strength of the inner life which alone could start him on the way to finding the spiritual world.

This must be understood. One must realise that it is given to man to rise of his own free will from the physical to the spirituals that this rising into the spiritual world is not an act of sense-bound reasoning, but an act of inner, conscious human experience. It is only when one really has this vital inner experience that one becomes capable of appreciating Anthroposophy in the right perspective, as seen against the merits of merely physical methods of cognition.

Our time is sorely in need of this.—A philosophy whose analytic powers of reasoning are only applicable to such things as chairs, can hardly be expected to have a ready understanding for what are real human values. It is, however, quite competent when dealing with chair-values. But what humanity needs today is what leads man to man, to the real man, not merely to his outward appearance. In its outer aspect the appearance reflects all that is inherent in the archetype of the spiritual entity, but it does not reveal that to inner experience. For in the experience of self, man must first find and recognise himself as a being of soul-and-spirit. Thus in the last resort the way to all knowledge is bound up with knowing oneself as an image of the true Self of man.

If with the growing strength of love that level of knowledge is attained by which one recognises as one's own self what at first seems to be a strange being, and again, if one rises to the height where the earthly world is found again in the archetypal world, then one is no longer engaged in a process of gaining abstract knowledge, but in a process of living cognition.

And it is in this living process of attaining knowledge that the world reveals itself to man through his own being, and that his own being reveals itself in his experience of the outer world. Thus man becomes a being who finds himself again in the entire Universe, for knowing himself he learns to know the world and, knowing the world, he learns to know himself. In this inter-relationship between world and man there reveals itself what unites man with the Divine-Spiritual, that which makes his being aglow with the religious mood of all real higher knowledge. And finally, when earnest cognition blends with religious experience, then knowledge radiates religious emotion, and the transparency of knowledge is lifted to that sphere where faith becomes knowledge through its own inner power of cognition. The world is found in man and man in the world on the path of knowledge through the world.

(In the etheric world: through living thinking: touch.
In the astral world: through the deep silence of the soul: speech.
In the spiritual world: through re-cognition: memory.)

Thus world and man become united in an all-embracing, cosmic, spiritual-divine being, in which man finds himself and the world and so for the first time rises to his true human dignity which can then also enter his religious and moral ethos and make him fully Man.

The course of lectures on the basic elements of theosophy which I announced some time ago will have to come later, at a time when numbers will perhaps be greater.¹⁵ I have put off the date for those lectures and decided to use the next few Thursdays to develop some aspects of cosmology, or world evolution, that is, the teaching in theosophical terms on the origins of the world and the creation of man within this world.

I am, of course, well aware that I am proposing to deal with one of the most difficult chapters in theosophical teaching, and it is probably right to tell you that in some lodges the decision has been made not to treat the subject for the time being, as it is too difficult. I have nevertheless decided to do it, for I believe that with the indications I am able to give, this will be useful to some of you. We may not be able to go into the whole of such a difficult subject immediately, but it should be possible to give encouragement, so that at a later time we may enter more deeply into the matter.

Those of you who have been in the theosophical movement for some time will know that questions as to how the world did actually come into existence, and how it has gradually evolved up to the present time when entities such as ourselves are able to inhabit it, have been the very first to be considered in the theosophical movement. Not only did one of the first books which drew the western world’s attention to ancient views of the world, H. P. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled,¹⁶ deal with such questions of the origin and evolution of the world, but the book to which we are probably indebted for the greatest number of our adherents, Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism,¹⁷ has done the same. How does a solar system evolve, and the planets and constellations? How did the Earth evolve, what stages has it gone through and what would still lie before it? These questions are considered in full in Esoteric Buddhism. Then Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine appeared in the late ’80s, and in the first volume she, too, considered the question as to how the human race developed in Earth evolution.

Now I need just refer to a single point to show the whole problem. If you open volume 1 of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine you will find that some of the statements made in Sinnett’s Buddhism are said to be erroneous and are in part corrected by her.¹⁸ The theosophical writers had partly misunderstood these things and partly presented them in a way that led to misunderstanding. Mrs Blavatsky therefore had to put them right. She said that a kind of Babylonian confusion of tongues had arisen with regard to theosophical cosmology,¹⁹ and that leading figures [in the Theosophical Society] certainly were not immediately well informed on these matters.

You all know that the contents of the Secret Doctrine were given by great, sublime masters who were far ahead of our average level of development. Before it was published, a book had appeared in which Sinnett, author of Esoteric Buddhism, published a number of letters by a mahatma.²⁰ We can thus see the problems which arise with understanding this secret doctrine, and we can understand that people who, like Sinnett and Blavatsky, were endeavouring to receive those doctrines were literally sighing, as it was so difficult to understand the doctrines that were given to them. ‘Oh,’ one teacher said, ‘being used to grasp things with a different set of mind, you cannot understand what we have to say, however much you endeavour to gain understanding of it.’ If we consider these words, the problems will be evident. Views that could be misunderstood arose wherever people spoke of cosmology.²¹ This is therefore well established, and I hope I may ask your forbearance as I try to say something on this doctrine.

Let me say something to begin with that will clarify the relationship of theosophical cosmology to modem science and its methods. Someone might come and say: ‘Consider the advances made by astronomers; we owe this to the telescopes, to the mathematical and photographic methods which have given us knowledge of distant stars.’ Modern science with its careful methods appears—in the opinion of scientists—to have the one and only right to establish anything about the evolution of the cosmic system. It appears that in modern science it is acceptable to disapprove of anything others say about the evolution and origin of the cosmic system. Many an astronomer will object: ‘What you theosophists are telling us about cosmology are ancient doctrines taught by the Chaldeans or Vedic priests and part of the oldest wisdom known to humanity; but what significance can anything said millennia ago have, since the teaching of astronomy has only gained reasonable certainty since Copernicus?’ It merely seems, therefore, that the contents of the first volume of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine confounds the things astronomers armed with telescopes and so on explain to us. But a theosophist need not be in conflict with anything an astronomer says. There is no need for this, though there are theosophists who believe they must fight against modem astronomy in order to make room for their own doctrines. I know only too well that leading figures in the theosophical movement think themselves able to teach the astronomers. A simple example may serve to demonstrate the standpoint some theosophists take against astronomers.

Take a poet whose works give pleasure and edification. Perhaps someone else will be his biographer and will try to make the soul and spirit which lives in the poet understandable and explain it. There is also another way of looking at a person, and that is the physiological or scientific way. Let us assume a scientist studies the poet. He will of course only consider the physiological and physiognomic aspects which are of interest to him. He will tell us about anything he is able to see in the poet and combine with his scientific thinking. As theosophists we would say the scientist is describing and explaining the poet from the standpoint of the physical plane. The scientist won’t say a single word, however, about the poet’s biography, as we call it, or about his soul and spirit. We thus have two approaches that run side by side, though they need not collide. Why shouldn’t there be a scientific study and parallel to it one which considers soul and spirit, with each valid in its own way? Neither is interfering with the other.

The same applies to scientific cosmology, with the information astronomers give us on the cosmic edifice and the evolution of the cosmic system. They will tell us what can be accessible to the ordinary senses. At the same time, however, it is possible to consider the matter in terms of spirit and soul, and if we take the cosmic edifice in this way, we’ll never collide with astronomy; both ways of looking at things will sometimes substantiate one another, for they run side by side and are independent of one another.

For instance, when the scientific physiology of the brain was still far from where it is today, people were already providing biographies of great minds. An astronomer cannot object, therefore, that the occult approach is out of date and impossible since Copernicus put astronomy on a different basis. The occult sources are completely different from this; they existed long before the eye was trained to study the heavens through telescopes, and before photography had reached the point where it was possible to photograph stars. Copernican science offers something very different from occult research; and the one power in the human soul is not at all dependent on the other. The power which gives us insight into the element of spirit and soul goes back such a long way that no historian is able to tell us where this way of looking at the cosmic edifice did have its beginnings. It is not possible to establish how the great minds came to develop these occult insights.

Occult schools existed in Europe before the Theosophical Society was established in 1875. However, the knowledge we now present in popular form was then only shared within closed groups. The law not to let it go beyond these schools was strictly observed. People wanting to join such a school had to do serious work on themselves before the first truths were given to them. The view was that people had to make themselves ready before they could receive such truths. They had many degrees in those schools through which people would progress, degrees of trial; and when anyone was found to be unready they would have to continue to prepare themselves. If I were to describe the degrees to you, it would make you dizzy to think of the strictness that was applied. Matters concerning world evolution were considered to be among the most important and only taught at the highest levels. In the 17^th century, which has had a great influence on civilization, this knowledge was in the hands of the Rosicrucian movement.²² Originally this had come from knowledge held in the East, and European followers were given it at many different levels.

By the end of the 18th and above all the beginning of the 19^th century, those occult schools vanished from Europe’s culture. The last of the Rosicrucians withdrew to the Orient. This was the age when humanity had to organize conditions of life according to external knowledge; the invention of the steam engine came then, and the scientific study of cells and so on. Occult wisdom had nothing to say to this, and the individuals who had reached the highest peak of that wisdom, people of the highest degree, withdrew to the Orient. Occult schools existed also after this, but they are of little interest to us; I must mention them, however, for Mrs Blavatsky and Mr Sinnett went to the source springs when they received their cosmological knowledge from Buddhist Tibetan occult schools.

A long period of cultural development in Europe had brought the European brain, the European ability to think, so far that difficulties arose in grasping occult truths. These could only be grasped with difficulty. When this early knowledge of theosophical cosmology came to public awareness, partly through Esoteric Buddhism and partly through The Secret Doctrine, the followers of occult schools pricked up their ears,²³ and it seemed wrong to them that the strict rule of not letting anything go outside their schools had been broken. The followers of the theosophical school knew, however, that it was necessary to make some of it known.

Western science could not do anything with such knowledge, however, for no one was able to check the truth of what Mrs Blavatsky and Mr Sinnett had written. Above all people did not know what to do with the glorious cosmological song which consists of the Stanzas of Dzyan and was published at the beginning of Mrs Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine.²⁴ The verses tell the history of the universe. Their authenticity was put in doubt; no scientist could do anything with them; initially they appeared to go against anything European scholars knew. There was one man, Max Müller, the orientalist, whom I respect most highly; he spoke energetically in favour of Oriental wisdom.²⁵ Everything he could get hold of in this sphere was made accessible to Europeans by Max Mueller. But neither he nor other European academics knew what to do with the things Mrs Blavatsky made known. At the time people merely said anything said in Secret Doctrine was mere fantasy. The reason was that the academics had never found any of it in the Indian books.

Mrs Blavatsky said that great riches of ancient literature were still to be found in the place from which her secrets had come, but that the most important thing about that wisdom had been kept from the eyes of European scholars. European thinking was such that even the little which it had been possible to tell could not be understood; commentaries were lacking that held the key to understanding. The books which showed how individual statements should be taken were in the safekeeping of native Tibetans who had received the teaching; at least that is what Mrs Blavatsky said.

However, others who have reached advanced levels also said that this literature provides historical evidence that there was an original wisdom which in things of the spirit went far beyond anything people in the world know today. The Oriental sages say that this original wisdom exists in books which are in their safekeeping, and that it did not come to us from human beings like ourselves, but from divine sources. The Orientals speak of an original divine wisdom.

Max Mueller said in a lecture to his students that following certain investigations it was impossible to maintain that there had been such original wisdom. Having heard Max Mueller’s opinion through Mrs Blavatsky, a great Brahmin Sanskrit scholar said: ‘Oh, if Max Mueller were a Brahmin and I were able to take him to a particular temple, he would be able to see for himself that there is such ancient divine wisdom.’²⁶ The things Mrs Blavatsky presents in the Stanzas of Dzyan partly come from such hidden sources which she opened up. If she had invented those verses herself we would be looking at an even greater miracle.

We do not, however, have to depend on getting the occult knowledge of world evolution from the old writings. Powers exist in the human being which enable him to perceive and explore the truths himself, if he develops these powers in the right way. Anything we are able to learn in this way agrees with the knowledge Mrs Blavatsky brought with her from the Far East. It emerges that in Europe, too, occultists preserved knowledge that was passed from teacher to pupils and was never entrusted to books. The occultists were therefore able to test the knowledge Mrs Blavatsky presented in her Secret Doctrine against their own knowledge, and above all against things they had gained out of their own powers. Someone trained in the European way can also check the information given in Mrs Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. And it has been checked and confirmed,²⁷ but it is nevertheless difficult for European occultists to cope with it. Let me say just one thing. European occult knowledge has been influenced in a quite specific way by Christian and cabbalistic elements which have given it a certain bias. If we ignore this, however, and go back to the basis of this knowledge, it is possible to have complete agreement with the knowledge which Mrs Blavatsky uncovered for us.

Although it has been possible in a way to check the cosmology Mrs Blavatsky had brought for us, it is difficult to explain to scholars what we mean when we speak of the origin of the world, doing so from occult knowledge. It is, of course, remarkable what they achieve in deciphering ancient records, making great efforts to decipher Babylonian cuneiform writing and Egyptian hieroglyphs; but Max Mueller himself has said that nothing they have discovered from those records does as yet give them a picture of the history of the world’s origin. We see the scholars labouring on the shell, as it were, without penetrating to the kernel. This is not to say anything against the careful work and fine bits of detail the scholars have been labouring over. I would merely draw attention to the books published relating to the Bible and Babel dispute.²⁸ All this is piecemeal; the scholars do not get beyond the shell. You feel they have no idea of the ways that take one to the key to these secrets. It is just like when someone begins to translate a book from another language into his own. Initially it is imperfect. That is how it is with the translation of ancient creation myths by today’s' scholars. They are shards of ancient wisdom taught from generation to generation in the mystery schools. Only people who had reached a certain degree of initiation could know something about it. I’ll come back to this again at the end of these lectures.

It is the initiates, therefore, who are able to come to these things in their own experience. You will ask: ‘What is an initiate, actually? People often speak of ‘initiates’ in theosophy and occult societies.’ An initiate is someone who has developed powers that lie dormant in every human being and are capable of development,²⁹ having done so to a high degree. The initiate has developed them to such a degree that he is able to understand the nature of those powers in the cosmos, in the cosmic edifice, which come into consideration for what I want to discuss with you. Well, you’ll say: ‘People always say that such powers lie dormant in the human being, but there’s no certainty of this.’ This is simply due to a misunderstanding. The mystic or occultist is not saying anything which any scholar may not also say in his field. Imagine someone tells you a mathematical truth. If you have never learned mathematics yourself, you will not have the knowledge to test this truth. No one would deny that one needs to have the necessary abilities before one can judge a mathematical truth. No authority can decide the issue, only the individual who has experienced it can judge it. In the same way only someone who has himself experienced, lived through an occult truth, can judge it. People of our time are, however, demanding that occultists should prove anything they have to say immediately and for any average level of understanding. They will quote the words: ‘Anything which is true must be capable of proof, and anyone should be able to understand it.’ Yet occultists say nothing else but what any other scholar would also say in his field, and they do not ask for more than any mathematician would also demand.

We may ask why occult truths are being presented today. Until now, occult schools have followed the principle that the knowledge should not go beyond a small number of people. Those on the ‘right’ still follow the principle today.³⁰ Yet anyone who has the experience and is able to read the signs of the times will know that this is no longer appropriate today. And this very fact, that it is no longer appropriate, has given rise to the theosophical world movement. Today, the rational mind is most highly developed. Associative thinking in conjunction with the senses has led to advances in industry and technology. This rational, intellectual thinking had its greatest triumphs in the 19th century. External intellectual thinking has never been as highly developed as it is today. 1 spoke of Oriental sages having original wisdom, and this was very different in form from our thinking today. Even the greatest masters among them did not have this acuity of logical thinking, this pure logicality; nor did they need it. Because of this it was also difficult to understand them. They had intuition, inner vision. True intuition does not come with logical or associative thinking; what happens is that a truth presents itself directly to the mind of the individual concerned. He will know it and there will be no need for proof.

The teachers in the theosophical movement now have the right to present part of the occult wisdom. We have the right to express the wisdom which has been given to us in form of intuition, putting it in the thought forms of modern life. A thought is a power like electricity, a power like steam power, like heat energy; and the thoughts presented within the theosophical movement are power for anyone who takes them in, giving himself up to them and not meeting them with immediate distrust. Hearing them, one will not notice it immediately, for the seed will only germinate later. No theosophical teacher asks anything but that people should listen to him. He is not asking for blind faith, only that people should listen. Neither acceptance as a matter of belief nor unbelieving rejection are the right attitude. Listeners should merely think the thoughts through for themselves, leaving aside belief or doubt, yes or no. They need to be ‘neutral’ and let the teaching come alive in their minds just to ‘try it out’. If you let theosophical thoughts be alive in you in this way, you will not just have thoughts in you, but a spiritual energy will pour in, to be active in you and bear fruit.

Western European civilization has developed thinking to such a high degree that people find it easiest to come to anything through thinking. Even the most faithful church-going Christians cannot now imagine the kind of faith people had in the past. That source spring of conviction has dried up. We have to make our thoughts fruitful in a very different way today. In the past, thinking was not widespread and spiritual knowledge could therefore only be presented in occult schools. Today we must turn to the power of thought with the things of the spirit; we then fire the thoughts so that they come alive in us. A spiritual speaker speaks to his listeners in a way that is very different from that of other speakers. He speaks in a way that makes a kind of spiritual atmosphere, spiritual powers, flow from him. Listeners should receive a thought without accepting or rejecting it, as something wholly objective, live with that thought, meditate on it and let it come alive in them. The thought will then generate energy or power in us.

Today we must make the occult truths concerning the origin and evolution of the world known in form of European thoughts and the modern scientific approach. The lectures will thus concern the conditions that preceded the beginnings of our own world. We will go back to long-ago times when the entity evolved from the greyest twilit darkness which was later to become human. We will go back to the stage where this human being was received by earthly powers, surrounded with earthly matter, up to the point where we are today. We’ll get to know the pre-earthly and earthly evolution of our world edifice and see how theosophy opens up a prospect on the future. We will see the direction in which our world evolution is going to continue. All this will be shown without going against the ideas of modem astronomy. Awakening the powers that lie dormant in us we will ourselves perceive the great goal towards which we are moving—to gain cosmological wisdom. Let us consider this cosmological wisdom in the sessions that follow.

• 15. The following announcement appeared in the German journal Vahan No. 9, March 1904: ‘In April and May Dr Steiner will be giving lectures on the basic concepts of theosophy at Motzstr. 17 every Thursday at 8 p.m.’ The lectures were put off until the autumn, however; they have been published (in German) in Ursprung und Ziel des Menschen. Grundbegriffe der Esoterik (GA 53).
• 16. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (1831–91). Isis Unveiled, New York 1877; The Secret Doctrine, London 1888.
• 17. Sinnett, Alfred Percy (1840–1921). Esoteric Buddhism, 1883. See also Rudolf Steiner’s references to this work in a lecture given in Berlin on 12 December 1912 (in German, in GA 62), in the lecture course The Occult Movement in the 19th Century, tr. D. S. Osmond, London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1973 (in GA 254) and in Rudolf Steiner’s biography, chapter 7.
• 18. See introduction to the 1st volume of The Secret Doctrine.
• 19. In The Secret Doctrine, Mrs Blavatsky wrote that it had been difficult to find the right terminology. ‘In these early letters [of the mahatmas], in which terms had to be invented and words coined, the “Rings” very often became “Rounds” and the “Rounds”, “Life-Cycles”, and vice versa. To a correspondent who called a “Round” a “World-Ring”, the Teacher wrote: “I believe this will lead to a further confusion. A Round we are agree to call the passage of a Monad from Globe A to Globe G or Z. ... The ‘World-Ring’ is correct ... Advise Mr... strongly, to agree upon a nomenclature before going any further.’” [page 191] See also Note 4.
• 20. In The Occult World, London 1881.
• 21. In the series of essays ‘Aus der Akasha-Chronik’ (later Cosmic Memory. Atlantis and Lemuria, GA 11), we read: ‘... that the inspirations of the great teacher mentioned in Esoteric Buddhism [by Sinnett] do not contradict what I am presenting here, but that the misunderstanding only arose because the author of that work translated the wisdom of those inspirations, which is difficult to put in words, into the human language of today, doing so in his own way.’
• 22. See lecture given in Berlin on 4 November 1904 on the Rosicrucian Mystery in The Temple Legend, GA 93, tr. J. M. Wood; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1997.
• 23. See lecture given in Domach on 10 October 1915 in The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century, GA 254, tr. D. S. Osmond; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1973.
• 24. David Reigle, Tibetologist, has since identified the stanzas as coming from the books of the Kiu-Te, probably also as the fifth, esoteric part of the Kalachakra Tantra entitled Jnana. See Life and Work of Helena Blavatsky by Sylvia Cranston. See also what Rudolf Steiner said about Tibet in his talk with the workmen at the Goetheanum on 20 May 1924 in From Beetroot to Buddhism, GA 353, tr. A. R. Meuss; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1999.
• 25. Max Müller (1823–1900), well-known expert on the Orient, language and religion in the 19lh century. Member and protagonist of the Theosophical Society for as long as it based itself on purely Indian philosophy.
• 26. See Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, vol. 1.
• 27. Clearly referring to C. G. Harrison’s The Transcendental Universe, lectures on occult science, theosophy and the catholic faith, London 1893/94.
• 28. Friedrich Delitzsch (1850–1922) professor of Assyriology and Semitic languages, had established a connection between certain Old Testament passages and Babylonian writings about the creation (Bibel und Babel, Leipzig 1902). Lectures he gave on the subject in 1902 and 1903 triggered serious disputes, and there were a number of published refutations. Rudolf Steiner wrote about this in an essay on the supersensible world which was published in Lucifer-Gnosis, GA 34, in May 1904.
• 29. Soon after this lecture Rudolf Steiner published the series of essays on how to gain knowledge of higher worlds in Lucifer- Gnosis.
• 30. See also lectures of 10-15 October 1915 in The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century (see Note 22), and on 1 and 7 November 1915 [in German] in Die okkulte Bewegung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, GA 254.

The occult brotherhoods do possess the ancient tradition, but they are not aware of what the spiritual world is trying to reveal to us in our age. There is a universal formula which rules a large number of these brotherhoods. They speak of the creative power which pulses and permeates the cosmos. When they want, in their sense, to direct themselves to these creative powers, namely, to the divine spiritual which pulsates and permeates the cosmos, then they speak about the Grand Architect of the World. This is a very often used formulation: The Elevated Grand Architect of the world.

For those who can understand the development of mankind from spiritual science, it proves the fact that in truth such brotherhoods go far, far back. These brotherhoods, to be sure, had other forms in more ancient times, but, nevertheless, they go far back in an unbroken sequence to the ancient communities which existed with the Greeks and Romans in the 4th post-Atlantean cultural epoch and we can also go back still farther to the ancient Egyptian times, and our present brotherhoods come from these ancient communities. But as we mentioned earlier, they do not stand in a direct connection with the spiritual world as did the earlier communities, but they preserved that which they had as knowledge more as traditional knowledge.

Now, you already find the concept of the primal revelation in the writings of individually illuminated, theological researchers or researchers of ancient times. What do these people mean by primal revelation? This concept of the primal revelation can become clear when you attempt to become familiar with the ancient religious writings. All you need to do is go back to the writings of Gautama Buddha you will see that what is said there is said upon the basis of the great knowledge; however, as far as he was concerned, it was transmitted by tradition which goes back into distant ancient times built up on a primal knowledge. Thus we are led back to a primal knowledge going back through the earliest centuries to that which was known by people, but which for our particular time is considered to be distorted nonsense by those modern intellectuals when they try to read Jacob Boehme, or Paracelsus. Then you come to the time when people did all sorts of alchemistic experiment and then you go farther and farther back and when an unprejudiced person goes back through the Romans, the Greeks and the Egyptians, he comes to a humanity which once had a knowledge which was spread out over the world in a way in which present day man, however, cannot acquire. Now, it is very difficult for present day man to obtain an idea of this particular situation, because when he tries to transplant himself into these ancient times, all he can think of is that man is a type of ape man. However, in spite of all these theories about the ape man, the unprejudiced person must admit that there must have originally been a knowledge which mankind with his present cleverness cannot reach, a knowledge which is infinitely deep and which stretched itself out over the spiritual worlds in such a superior way that in it is contained not only a consciousness of the fact that man can rise up into the spiritual worlds, but that man can find other beings in these spiritual worlds who are not incarnated in fleshy bodies, beings which we call Angels, Archangels and so on. So, we can find in these ancient religious writings that the people knew of these higher beings and they speak of them as beings with whom they were able to interact. As I said, the writings themselves prove this.

What actually is at the basis of this fact? From a certain stage of initiation, one can come directly behind this mystery. We know that the world around us is not only spread out in the way today's sense knowledge speaks of it, but there is a so-called elementary world at the basis of this nature, world which, if we go back into ancient mythologies we find descriptions of these elemental beings. These elemental beings that lie at the base of the mineral kingdom are called gnomes, those at the base of the water plant kingdom are known as undines, those aeroform elementals as sylphs and the warmth elementals as salamanders. These beings which we just described have their special task in the world; they have a great deal to do. External materialistic science says that everything makes itself of itself, but this is not true. Things do not make themselves of themselves. The person whose eyes are open to the elementary world sees how these elementals actually go through a kind of cycle of the year, how there are beings working down from the spiritual world upon these elementals, they work differently in spring, differently in summer, differently in autumn and differently in winter. This means that we have an elementary kingdom spread out around us which lies at the basis of the nature kingdom and there streams down, one cannot say an instruction, but one can say that forces pour down in order that these elementary beings can receive the power in the spring in order to form the plant covering for the earth. The forces of certain spiritual beings are carried down which impart themselves to these elementary beings so that a new world of form can sprout forth in the spring. And as summer approaches, they receive, as it were, a later course of instruction, forces are poured down upon them so that they can effect that which has to come about in summer. An interworking between the spirits of the higher hierarchies and the elementary beings who weave and live in the nature which surrounds us performs itself in the cycle of the year. This means we are continuously concerned with an up and down pouring, with an up and down streaming of spiritual beings of the hierarchies whose students are the elementary beings who provide the enlivening forces for all that which has to sprout and germinate in the course of the year. All that which arises and fades away in the course of the year, that does not simply grow out of the earth, but stands in a direct interworking with the divine spiritual. And it was said that that which germinates and sprouts in the course of the year stands in direct interworking with the beings who permit their forces to stream up and down and they pour these forces into the elementary world. But, my dear friends just as today sylphs, gnomes, undines and salamanders receive their influence from the beings of the hierarchies who stream up and down according to the course of the year, so when man did not have such a solid physical body in those ancient times, he received instructions from the higher hierarchies who streamed up and down. All the sagas and myths that remain tell us that in ancient times man received such instruction from beings who themselves had descended out of the spiritual worlds. These myths absolutely rest upon a truth. Man found himself with those spirits among whom the gnomes, sylphs, undines, and salamanders exist today, and whereas these elementary beings receive those forces through which they are able to effect the forms which sprout out of the Earth during the course of the year, so man in ancient times received his instructions from hierarchies who streamed up and down. And that which he received in ancient time remains as a residue in writings which have still been preserved and from which an unprejudiced person can prove—as we said—that once upon a time such a primal revelation did exist. Thus we see that such a primal revelation really did exist and in those periods which preceded the eighth century B.C. you have the last residue flowing down to mankind from this primal revelation. Actually we can put the year 747 B.C. as the year which mankind, a result of the further development of his physical nature, was excluded from a direct participation in such instruction. Naturally such an exclusion occurs very gradually, step by step. All that which was contained in ancient science flowed down in this way as a direct knowledge from the spiritual worlds into mankind and has been transmitted by tradition, but is no longer understood today.

Let us focus our attention upon the last science which came to the human being in this way. The question is: What did man experience from such a primal revelation that had flowed down in the course of the time from the earliest periods an into ancient Atlantis? He experienced the connection in which he himself as a human being stood within the spiritual worlds since he is a microcosm and all the processes and forces in the microcosm which otherwise occur in the great macrocosmic world play in him. And the last thing which man learned in this way, the last thing which flowed to him from the external is geometry and mathematics. That person who today allows geometry and mathematics to work upon him in a true sense, will still be able to perceive the fact that a different kind of knowledge comes to him in geometry and mathematics, a different kind of knowledge from the other knowledge which he gathers from experience. There is something within geometry and mathematics which one can perceive apart from external experience. No man can prove that the three angles of the triangle are 180° by merely drawing a triangle in a sense sort of way. He can arrive at the fact, but proving it can only be done as a result of an inner experience of thinking. Man does not need to use his fingers to prove to himself that 3x3=9; all he need do is ideate it to himself and in an inward way he will come to the truth that 3x3=9.

But what comes to expression in the forms of architecture is obtained from a much wider basis. That which is at the basis of geometry and mathematics goes back to a much more ancient knowledge than that which is at the basis of architecture art. In the Graeco-Latin times, that which was ancient knowledge in the mysteries was mediated to the human being by one saying the following to him: ‘When you really deepen yourself, then you bring out of yourself that which was revealed to you by the spirits of the higher hierarchies earlier lives on Earth.’ In the Egyptian Mysteries you did not have to do that. The higher beings themselves still came down. Now in the Greco-Latin period the master assembled his students and said the following: “You were there in earlier incarnations and you went through human development in which the spirits of the higher hierarchies took part. This has established itself in your souls. Bring it up.” Thus Masters of the Greco-Latin mysteries were still able in this way to fetch up that which was established in the human soul. Everything is to be found in the human soul, because everything streamed down through spiritual beings into the human beings from the primal revelation. What we once upon a time experienced in instructions from the hierarchies we really bring out of ourselves.

Now came the year 1413 and man can no longer become conscious of what the earlier spiritual instruction was because it has been covered over in his soul by the materialistic age. Since 1413 the soul unites itself thickly with the body and that is able to act as a covering for that which exists within our souls. However, in the whole period from 747 B.C. to 1413 A.D. it was possible to bring up out of the soul that which in earlier times streamed in in the way I indicated. Just imagine how a person, particularly in the ancient Greek Age, actually had to perceive. Precisely in the ancient Greek Age he perceived as I have indicated. he said to himself: “Geometry as it is brought to expression in the form of architecture, flowed down earlier through divine spiritual instruction from the external would.” Man was hemmed in by forms. Now when man wants to draw a triangle, he takes a piece of chalk and draws it, but the ancient Greek did not have to do that. All he needed to do was to meditate upon himself and at the same time he could, as it were, clairvoyantly see the triangle for himself. Thus he was still able to diagram geometry for himself in a clairvoyant way. It was also so with writing in primal ages, but this applies to a still earlier period. There one did not need to write upon papyrus, but one was able to write clairvoyantly for oneself; you wrote for yourself clairvoyantly. At a certain time in the Greek Mysteries, man was told the following: you are able to have thoughts about yourself and meditate clearly upon yourself, you can then recall what lives in you. You can recall the divine being which lives in you when you do not just focus on the transient earth human being but recall the divine being in you, then you would be able to build up an architectural structure around you which is put together from the forms of geometry. You are within all of that. Just as the spider who spins her web is within it, thus such a student of the Greek Mysteries etherically spun geometry around himself, whole geometry and the other human knowledge is presented in itself in this geometrical structure which he spun out of himself. All he needed to do was establish it outside of himself and then he had the Greek Temple. The Greek Temple is nothing other than the filling in with physical material that which presented itself in this way clairvoyantly in geometrical forms around the human being. The Greek Temple only put the stones into that which appeared before the Greek. Hence the Greek always had the tendency to present a figure of the god in the Temple which he actually had to think of to himself as his own divine hunan being. He did not simply build a temple, but he also put in a divine god such as Pallas Athene.

Thus from all this you can see the connection of architecture, the building of the temple with the original clairvoyance. That person felt something in architecture of a divine nature in these times, something which is connected in the highest degree with all the inner revelations of the human being. They felt that one did not build in the way people build today where you learn all sorts of things at the university, but at that time man could perceive the architectural structure as the revelation of the Spirits of Form. For this reason, we can see the rather special way in which Vitruvius, the great architect of the time of Augustus, speaks of the architect, of the moral qualities which the architect must have, of recollecting the divine spiritual of the universe. And why was it necessary that according to Vetruvius' perception, the architect had to know all this? They saw the manifestations of the beings of the higher hierarchies in the forms of the buildings and this is of great significance. It is true that today's architect would make a face if you demanded that he also learn medicine, philosophy, astronomy, etc., besides his studies at the technical university; in other words, he would be a spiritual scientist of sorts.

Now, why was this so? It was so because Vetruvius, himself, was still able to perceive the following: “When I build” he said to himself “this finite human being is not allowed to build, but this finite human being must be a channel so that a being, of the higher hierarchies can work through him.” However, this possibility of coming into connection with the higher hierarchies so that when one puts stone upon stone in the building, not what finite man creates but what the spirits of the hierarchies create, this possibility was received only in the secret places of the mysteries. One had to be initiated into the connection of the divine spiritual with the human. One had to know medicine, because one had to so adapt the forms so that they could actually be an imprint of the human being himself. Note how in a similar way the shell of the snail is an imprint of the snail himself, how the macrocosm injects the forces into the snail enabling the snail to build the shell out of its own beingness. In a similar way man felt the working of the divine spiritual beings in him; a divine spiritual being led his hand, his own spirit and worked into the forms of architecture.

Now, because the forms of the architecture were the last which were revealed, all those spiritual brotherhoods of which I spoke last time, speak of the real architecture and of the soul mood which real architecture must have. Above all, there live in these occult brotherhoods, even if it is in caricature, that which entered from the spiritual world in the way just described. The person who enters the first grade enters into the spiritual world upon this path. He is presented in these occult communities in the second grade and is made familiar not with those external social relationships but with those relationships which pass from one human soul to another. He becomes a brother member in the second grade and finally he learns to feel in himself what it means to say: ‘Here I stand as a human being and I, as a man, feel that I am a sheath of that which lives in me as spirit man to whom beings of the higher hierarchies can speak, down to whom they can descend; that I can speak no word that is not inspired by these spirits of the higher hierarchies.’ Even if only a small consciousness of this is present in those who are in the third grade of such occult brotherhoods, nevertheless they still call themselves masters of the third grade. But because revelations do not occur any longer, because today things do not work so intensively, because today there is no longer a direct connection with the spiritual world, one has to take hold of the traditions of that which was handed down, then one spreads a mystery over it and does not allow it to be imparted to any one else. However, this primal knowledge was continued in such communities from generation to generation, from century to century and sometimes it was utilized in a very bad way as I indicated last time.

I have already indicated that during the whole time from the year 747 B.C. to 1413 A.D. there was a certain connection with the spiritual world. One could at least enliven it out of one's inner being in these years, one could at least enliven it out of memory. That ended in the 14th century. However, beyond the 14th century certain sensitive people did feel that the spirit still plays in, that if, for example, you want to understand the 15th, 16th, 17th century, you must get an idea that those were still times in which the breath of spiritual life still streamed over the earth. However, this gradually disappeared. In the time from the 14th, 15th, 16th, even from the 17th century, there were sensitive natures who knew: The spirit weaves and lives around us.

Now, I want to bring a fact to your attention. The present historian speaks about the time of Savonarola in the 15th century, for example, in such a way that he speaks of Florence as he does of a city today, because he cannot transplant himself into the soul mood of that time, into that mood where one could still experience something of the spiritual. Why was it that at that time in a certain week in Florence every person who you met on the street looked so very sad and walked with his head bent down and his eyes dimmed? This was because Savanarola had given a sermon on the previous Sunday and he had said: “If the moral aspect continues as it is, then the flood will break in.” And he ended it with the words: “I tell you, waters will flow over the earth.” When he spoke these words, they were enlivened with spirit. The spirit streamed out, and for a whole week the people of Florence dwelled under this spiritual influence. It was very sad.

One of the contemporaries of Savanarola was Pico della Mirandola, Count Mirandola, who lived at the end of the 15th century and also experienced the soul mood which lived in Florence. Pico della Mirandola was one of those spirits who belonged to the sensitive spirits and in that year which passes over from the 4th to the 5th period he felt how the spirit was disappearing from the environment and at the same time he received an inner yearning to feel the spirit. There were a number of people in Florence at that time who experienced this in the same way. They felt that the spirit disappears for the normal person, but they must try to receive it into themselves and these Renaissance men called themselves the Neo-Platonists. In the Academy of Florence, there was a reliving of Plato. I wanted to characterize this for you so that you can understand that there was a sudden transition from the 14th to the 15th century in the soul mood in reference to how these men connected themselves with the spiritual world. When you go back into those times, you can see that people yearned to receive impressions of the spiritual world, but these people were single people all over the world and they had to do special ascetic exercises so that they could receive something of the spiritual in a sort of caricature way. You know that modern science says that nature makes no jumps, but that is not true, it does jump everywhere. When the leaf transforms itself into the blossom, that is a jump. So we see that there was a sudden spring from the 14th to the 15th century and this feeling died away.

Our task is to appeal to those forces which we have as a replacement for the ancient way of grasping the spiritual. There are two ways of doing this. One way is to continue to propagate tradition and many secret societies arose from being satisfied with the propagation of what the ancient said through tradition. However, there were people who attempted to reckon with the new soul forces which came in as replacements for it. They attempted to translate that which came in from the ancient way in the form of pictures, of direct perception into the form of intellectual power, this intellect which is bound to the physical body of our 5th post-Atlantean period. One of the people who tried to do this was Amos Comenius.

Very few people today know that Amos Comenius was the actual founder of the modern pedagogy and that he founded the primer in the 16th, 17th century. A book by Friedrich Eckstein entitled Comenius and the Bohemian Brothers was recently published. Friedrich Eckstein is one of those people who was united with me in a small theosophical group in Vienna at the end of the 1880's. Then he went his own way and I had not heard of him until this book about Amos Comenius appeared. These 150 wood cuts from the original edition are given with German and Latin texts. Here you have wood cuts beginning with God, the world, heaven, the elementals, the elements, plants, fruits, animals, the human body and its members, etc., all of which was put in such a way as to appeal to the heart. This sort of presentation still appeals very much to people. Herder and Goethe loved all this in their childhood. The whole way of writing children's books rests upon Amos Comenius. He was connected with many secret brotherhoods all over Europe and he wanted to establish what he called his “Pan Sophia”. In the beginning of our period, in the 16th, 17th century, we have in Amos Comenius a human being who knew that now is the time for a sudden change, that one must transmute all the knowledge from earlier times into the form of external intellect. You do not simply continue it in the form of the ancient tradition. This tradition rests upon that which was the Temple architecture. Amos Comenius had as his task translating in his “Pan Sophia” everything which worked in the 5th post-Atlantean period and he says the following: “Why should the Temple of Pan Sophia be erected according to the ideas, directions and laws of the higher architect Himself? Because we have to follow the primal picture of the totality; measure, number, position and the goal of the paths according to the wisdom of God, Himself, when, indeed, He instructed Moses to erect the Tabernacle, then Solomon to erect the Temple and finally Ezekial to reestablish the Temple. The structure materials of Solomon's Temple were very precious stones, metals, marble and sappy, good smelling trees like spruce and cedar.” And so we want to establish a school of wisdom, a universal wisdom, a “Pan Sophia” wisdom so that one can say that that which is in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, which was represented in the Wander Years, is a continuation of what Amos Comenius wanted.

In conclusion I want to add some more things. A book has recently been written by Karl Ludwig Sleiss entirely out of natural science. I just want to read something of it to you. (Summary of what was read) He talks about a hysterical young woman sitting on a sofa in a room where an electrical ventilator was running. She became hysterical and said: “Oh, there is a bee that wants to sting me.” She had heard the buzzing of the ventilator. Low and behold, she did produce an inflammation of the eyelid which was quite large. Here is another case where Sleiss talks about a well-known business man who approached him and asked him to cut off his arm because he felt that it was poisoned. Sleiss said that the arm was not poisoned. The man went away and the next day he died. Sleiss said that there was no inflection at all and his diagnosis was death by hysteria. What he wanted to say is that you cannot only cause an inflammation of the eyelid through thought, but you can also kill yourself through thought. What this modern scientist is saying is that thought can incarnate itself, that thought can make itself flesh. However, in the second case of the businessman who wanted his arm cut off because it was poisoned, this was a case of mediumistic clairvoyance where he knew he was going to die. Now, what happened in the case of the hysterical woman who had a swollen eyelid was that the thought that she imagined there was a bee from the sound of the ventilator became imagination and then descended into the astral body, it then came through the ether body and incarnated in the physical body.

In this same book in a chapter entitled “The Myth of Metabolism in the Brain”, Sleiss says that Goethe must have been some sort of clairvoyant, because Goethe had come to the idea that not only are the bones transformed out of the spinal column but also the whole brain has been transformed from it. Now, Sleiss said this in 1916 and he wondered if he could find some indication that Goethe had this idea. However he does not know that in 1892, I, myself, found this indication in the Goethe Archives.

Therefore we can see how certain truths of the spiritual world are penetrating into mankind's consciousness through certain channels. For example, they are talking about Strindberg's play of dream, “Tramspiel” which he produced and they can see the spiritual world breaking in everywhere. Strindberg worked in an extraordinary way and people are saying that there must be some spiritual communication there. Much streamed into Strindberg; however, everything is caricatured. Even that is very interesting for people today. For example, you can read the book Golom by Gustav Merig and you can find something there of which you can say that a stream of spiritual life breaks into mankind in a powerful way; however it is caricatured in forms where it can be more damaging than useful for those people who are not solidly established. Again you get a stream of the spiritual world breaking into the short story entitled “Cardinal Napaloos” (sic). In this story you find certain knowledge about the playing in of the Akashic Chronicle and so forth in a quite wonderful way. You can find indications of how the spiritual world wants to pour into mankind. It is very important to open our eyes to the fact that the spiritual world wants to pour into mankind today. We do not have to warm up ancient traditions, although they are interesting to study. We ought to meet the demands of the present. The spiritual worlds want to pour in. It comes unconsciously and is caricatured. However, when we develop ourselves according to spiritual science, it will not be caricatured; we can actually experience the spiritual world properly. through anthroposophical spiritual science, one can get an understanding for the opening up of our soul, our heart, our head, to the streams of the spiritual world.

It is, after all, something that should be taken into account that a meeting was convened some time ago by the opponents of the things presented at the Vienna Anthroposophical Congress, at which a wide variety of speakers spoke out of the materialistic sense of the present and that at the end a particularly materialistically minded physician summarized the various speeches in a slogan that was intended to represent a kind of motto for the opponents of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: the battle against the spirit. — It is simply the case that today there are people who see the battle against the spirit as a real motto.

When such a word is uttered, one is reminded again and again of how many people, well-meaning people, there are in the present day who, in the face of what is prevailing in the civilized world, are actually caught in a kind of sleep state, who do not want to hear where things are heading. They consider things of the greatest importance to be insignificant phenomena of the times, the opinion of one person or another, whereas it is in fact the case that today a striving that is present in the real progress of human development is clearly asserting itself. And actually all those who can muster an understanding for such a cause should also be most intensely involved with it in their hearts in order to truly muster it.

I have now tried to show, by taking two personalities as examples, how deeper natures in particular were placed in the newer currents of thought. I have contrasted these two personalities, Franz Brentano and Nietzsche, to show how, from the most diverse sides, people who are initially oriented towards the spiritual are, as it were, submerged in the contemporary scientific way of thinking. If we consider personalities who have shared the fate I have outlined, we may perhaps be more deeply moved than if such things are presented only in the form of an abstract description.

In the case of Brentano, I wanted to illustrate how a personality who grew up in an education shaped entirely by Catholicism retained for life, on the one hand, what Catholic Christianity had implanted in its soul in terms of an affinity for the spiritual world. In Franz Brentano, who was born in 1838 and thus lived during the time when the scientific way of thinking of the nineteenth century flooded all human research and spiritual striving, we see what lives on from very old currents of world view.

If we look at young Brentano, who studied in Catholic seminaries in the 1850s and 1860s, we find that his soul was filled with two things that guided him in a certain way. One is the Catholic doctrine of revelation, to which he stood in a position that theologians of the Catholic Church have held since the Middle Ages. The Catholic revelation about everything spiritual is traditionally received. One finds oneself in a kind of knowledge of the supersensible worlds that has come to man through grace. For Brentano, the other element was connected with this, through which he first wanted to understand what he had received through the Catholic doctrine of revelation. That was Aristotelian philosophy, the philosophy that was still developed in ancient Greece. And until the mid-sixties, perhaps even a little longer, Brentano's soul lived in a way that was entirely in keeping with the spirit of a medieval scholastic: one must accept what man is meant to know of transcendental worlds as revealed by the Church, and one can apply one's thinking to the study of nature and life according to the instructions of the greatest teacher for this research, according to the instructions of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

These two things, Aristotelianism and Catholic revelation, were indeed connected in the spiritual life of the medieval scholastics, who regarded them as compatible. This continued in Franz Brentano. He was only shaken in such a view by what then confronted him as the scientific method, so strongly shaken that when he took up his post as a private lecturer in Würzburg, he established as a main thesis the proposition that in all philosophy it must be done as in natural science. And then he wanted to found a psychology, a doctrine of the soul, in which the life of the soul would be considered in the same way that natural science considers external natural phenomena.

It is therefore fair to say that this man underwent a very radical change. He wanted to combine knowledge gained through revelation with knowledge gained through reason, which is limited only to earthly things. He thus demanded that science can only be what is formed according to the pattern of scientific methodology. One should really stop and think about what such a radical change really means.

What I would like to draw your attention to first is that, up until this change, medieval scholastic thinking still seems to be present in an extraordinary personality. This continues to have an effect, as it does today in many contemporaries who are honestly Catholic, as it basically exists, albeit in a slightly different form, in many honest confessors of the Protestant faiths. If I quoted Nietzsche, it was because, although Nietzsche did not have a survival of medieval scholasticism in his soul, something else lived on in his soul, namely, what emerged during the Renaissance as a kind of reaction to scholasticism. Nietzsche had a kind of Greek wisdom of art that formed the basis for his entire world view. He had it in the same way that the men of the Renaissance had it. But these men of the Renaissance by no means already had the urge and the inclination not to recognize the spiritual in its reality. They sensed, they still felt the reality of the spiritual. So that something from ancient times also survived in Nietzsche's soul. And he, too, as I told you yesterday, had to immerse himself in the scientific view of the 19th century and completely lost what connected his soul to a spiritual world.

The implications of this point to some tremendously significant riddles for the true seeker of truth in the present day. Let us take the two streams of spiritual thought that penetrated the life of the soul, as they lie in medieval scholasticism. Let us visualize what is actually present. I would like to do it in the following way. Within medieval scholasticism, we have a number of, let us say, doctrines about the supersensible world, for example about the Trinity of the original spiritual being, about the incarnation of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. series of doctrines that must be said to relate not to the sensual but to the supersensible world, which in very ancient times were once found by people who were then initiates, initiates. For one must not imagine, of course, that something like the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation was simply invented by someone to deceive people. These doctrines are rather the results of the experiences of former initiates. That they were regarded as a supernatural revelation is only a later conception. Such doctrines were originally found by way of initiation. Later on, however, it was no longer admitted that one could undergo such an initiation and arrive at the conception of the Trinity oneself, for example.

There were such conclusions, which the medieval scholastic admitted to the knowledge of reason, which touched the supernatural; only the view of the supernatural was not admitted. But reason was admitted, through which one could not understand the real knowledge of revelation, but through which one could approach something like the existence of God or the beginning of the existence of the world. These truths, which could be found through reason, were called preambula fidei, and could then form a basis for penetrating to that which could not be explored by reason, but which was said to be the content of revelation.

Now, having juxtaposed these two currents of thought, of knowledge, let us place ourselves in the mind of a person who juxtaposed them in his own soul. During the period in which scholasticism flourished, what lived in a scholastic was by no means the evil that uninformed people tell of today, but at a certain time in medieval development it was simply what was required by the development of humanity. One could not have had any other view at that particular time. Today, of course, things have changed. Today, we have to find different ways to knowledge and to human soul activity than those that were at home in scholasticism. But that is why one should still try to penetrate this scholasticism with understanding. And you can only do that if you now ask yourself: How did the knowledge of revelation stand in the soul of an honest scholastic, alongside the knowledge of reason that was directed towards natural phenomena and towards one-sided conclusions of reason from natural phenomena? How did these two things stand side by side?

What did such a scholastic want, and with him all his believers, all who were honestly Catholic, when he put himself in the frame of mind that was in line with revelation, when he said: What the dogmas give must not be looked at, looking at it is not possible; one must accept it as a revelation? The scholastic attempted to evoke a certain mood of soul in relation to the supersensible world. He was completely imbued with the fact that this supersensible world exists and stands in an intimate relationship to that which lives in man as soul. But he did not seek a path of knowledge in man in order to come directly through his own personality to that which stands as the supersensible world in an intimate relationship to man.

Imagine this mood. It was the mood towards, I would say, a known unknown, towards an unknown acquaintance, towards someone you should worship and revere, but to whom you should still be shy, so that you do not, so to speak, open your eyes to him.

Next to it stood the knowledge of reason. Scholastic reason was an extraordinarily astute one, something that has not been achieved again later. One would wish – I have also said it here several times – that people who do natural science or science in general today would only learn to think as sharply as the scholastics were able to think. It was a rational knowledge that only denied itself the right to go beyond certain limits: knowledge by revelation on the one hand, rational knowledge on the other. But if we now compare the knowledge by revelation and the rational knowledge of the scholastics with similar structures of today, then a great difference becomes apparent.

The scholastic said to himself: You dare not intrude with your knowledge into the realm from which you are only supposed to have revelations. You dare not intrude into a vision of the Trinity, into a vision of the Incarnation. But in the revelation that he received through his church, ideas of the Trinity and ideas of the Incarnation were given. They were described. People said to themselves: knowledge does not penetrate to these things, but one can think about them if one reflects on these things in the sense of what has been revealed. You cannot say of the medieval scholastics that they had a mere dark mystical feeling of the supernatural. It was not that. It was a thinking that was already trained in plastic ideas and that grasped the content of Revelation. They thought about the Trinity, they thought about the Incarnation. But they did not think as one thinks when one arrives at a conclusion oneself, but as one thinks thoughts that are revealed to one.

You see, that too still corresponds to a certain fact of higher knowledge. There are still people today who have certain atavistic clairvoyant views, as you might call them, who have dream-like imaginations. There are people who, for example, can rise in such atavistic clairvoyant imaginations to the point of visualizing the events of Atlantis. That still exists today. Don't think that there are no thoughts in what such people have as clairvoyant imaginations. Such seers often have much more plastic thoughts than our strange logicians, who learn to think from today's schooling. Sometimes one would like to despair of the logic of those who learn to think from today's schooling, while one need not despair of the logic that simply reveals itself atavistically and clairvoyantly; for this is often very strictly developed.

Thus, even today it can be shown that thinking is already present in that which is truly revealed supersensibly for human observation. This was also the case in medieval scholasticism. It is only in recent times that thought has been eradicated from the content of revelation, so that today faith seeks to distil not only knowledge but also thinking out of its content. The medieval scholastics did not do that. They did extract the knowledge, but not the thinking. Therefore, if you take the dogmatics of medieval scholasticism, you will find a very highly developed system of thinking.

This lived on in a man like Franz Brentano. That is why he could think. He could grasp thoughts. This can be seen even in the rudiments of his psychology, in which he only got as far as the first volume. There you can still see that he has a certain inner plasticity of thought formation, even though he constantly steps on his own feet in a terrible way and thus does not make any progress. As soon as he has any thought about a psychological construct - and he has such - he immediately forbids himself to think about the things. This prohibition is something extraordinary today. I have told you how an extraordinarily brilliant man, who wrote the important book 'The Whole of Philosophy and its End', told me in Vienna himself recently: 'I have my thoughts about what stands behind mere events as the primal factors.' But scientifically he forbids himself to have these thoughts. One could easily imagine, hypothetically of course, that a scientifically trained person today would suddenly become clairvoyant through a miracle, and that he would fight against this clairvoyance in the worst possible way. One could easily imagine this hypothetically because the authority of knowledge that clings to the external is enormous. So that was one thing that lived in the soul of the medieval scholastic: a specifically formulated content of revelation. On the other hand, there was a rational knowledge that was based on nature, but it was not yet the same as our present-day knowledge of nature. To substantiate this, just open a book of natural history, for example by Albertus Magnus; you will probably find descriptions of natural objects as they are described today – but they are described differently than they are today – but alongside that, you will still find all kinds of elemental and spiritual beings. Spirit still lives in nature, and it is not the case that only the completely dry sensual evidence is described as natural history and natural science. These two things live side by side, a content of revelation, in the face of which one prohibits oneself from knowing, but which one nevertheless thinks, so that the human spirit still attains it in its thoughts, and a content of rational knowledge, which still has spirit, but which also still has something that one must look at if one wants to have it before oneself in its reality.

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Knowledge of nature has developed out of medieval scholasticism. One branch of scholasticism, knowledge by reason, has developed further and become the modern view of nature. But what has happened as a result? Imagine the thoughts of a scholasticist regarding knowledge of nature quite vividly. There is still spiritual content in them. What do these spiritual contents protect the medieval scholastic natural scientist from?

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Perhaps I can illustrate this schematically. Suppose this here was such a medieval scholastic with his longing for revelational knowledge at the top and his longing for knowledge of nature at the bottom. But in the knowledge of nature, he has the spiritual. I'll let some red pass. He has thinking in the knowledge of revelation. I'll let some yellow pass. Where does this rational knowledge actually want to go? It wants to go out to the objects, to the things around us. The thoughts you have want to snap into place with the objects. You don't want to recognize just any plant, you want to form a concept of the plant, without you counting on it: the concept snaps in there, it wants to snap in. But with the scholastic, the spiritual content, which still permeates his rational knowledge, prevents him from really snapping in down there. It doesn't snap completely, it is, as it were, thrown back a little. What does it not snap into? When today's intellectualistic rational knowledge snaps into external nature, when it snaps fully into it, it actually snaps fully into the Ahrimanic. What then does the spirituality of the medieval scholastic mean in relation to his rational knowledge? That basically, he wants to approach nature with this rational knowledge as if it were something that burns a little. But he feels the burning and shrinks back again and again: nature is sin! He guards himself against Ahriman! But further development has brought this: in the nineteenth century it has thrown out of all spiritual rational knowledge, and with that rational knowledge snapped into the Ahrimanic.

And what does rational knowledge, which has snapped into the outer Ahrimanic, say? It says: the world consists of atoms, atomic movement is the basis of all scientific knowledge. It explains warmth and light as atomic movements, it explains everything in the external world as atomic movements, because that satisfies our need for causality.

In 1872, Da Bois-Reymond gave his famous lecture in Leipzig on the limits of knowledge of nature. It is the lecture in which the rational knowledge of scholasticism has advanced so far that all spirituality has been thrown out; and with the motto “Ignorabimus” the spirit of man should snap into the Ahrimanic. And Du Bois-Reymond describes very vividly how a human mind that now has an overview of everything that swirls as atoms in the universe no longer sees green and blue, but only perceives atomic movements everywhere. It feels no warmth, but wherever there is warmth, it feels that movement of which I spoke to you here eight days ago. He suppresses everything in his mind that has to do with colors, temperatures, sounds, etc. He fills his head with an understanding of the world that consists only of atoms. Imagine: the whole world as imagined by someone who thinks in terms of atoms. He has it all figured out in his head: the moment Caesar crossed the Rubicon, there was a certain constellation of atoms in our cosmos. Now he only needs to be able to set up the differential equation, and so, by continuing the calculation, he finds the next constellation, and the next, and so on. He can calculate the most distant future. Du Bois-Reymond called this the Laplacean mind because it was also an ideal of Laplace. So there we have, in 1872, a description of an intellect that comprehends the world universally, that comprehends everything as atomic motion, and all you need to do is know the differential equations and then integrate them, and you get the world formula.

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But what has actually been achieved as a result? What has been achieved is that one has learned to think as Ahriman can think, what the Ahrimanic ideal of thinking is. One can only recognize the full significance of what is happening in our time when one knows what it actually is. The Ignorabimus speech will go down in the history of the development of the modern spirit, but its true significance will only be recognized when we are in a position to show that here the one branch of the scholastic school of thought has actually snapped into the Ahrimanic. You see, the scholastic, so to speak, kept his knowledge in suspense. It did not quite reach what is out there. He always withdrew with his knowledge before Ahriman. That is why he had such a need to develop truly ingenious concepts; because ingenious concepts still have to be developed through human effort. When it comes to conducting experiments, well, then you only need human endeavor to put the apparatus together and so on, but the kind of astute thinking that scholasticism had is not needed.

This meant a very important turning point when one was once snapped into the Ahrimanic. Because what you see outside as the sensual phenomena of the world, as your sensual environment, that is only there as long as the earth is there. It perishes with our planet. What lives on are the thoughts that snap in outside. When something is conceived that is in line with Laplacean thinking, or what Du Bois-Reymond presented as an ideal of natural scientific thinking, it means not only that it is conceived, but that these are real thoughts that snap into place outside. And when everything we see with our senses on earth has perished, these thoughts can live on, if they are not eradicated beforehand. Therefore, there is a real danger that, if such a way of thinking becomes general, our earth will change into a planet corresponding to the materialists' conceptions. Materialism is only a mere doctrine as long as it does not become reality. But the Ahrimanic powers strive to make the thoughts of materialism so strong and widespread that the only thing left of the earth are atoms.

If we say today that we have to explain everything in terms of atoms, that is an error. But if all people start to think that everything has to be explained in terms of atoms, if all people put on Laplacian minds, then the earth will really consist of atoms. It is not true from primeval times that the earth consists of atoms and their components, but humanity can bring this about. That is the essential thing. Man is not merely predisposed to have wrong views, but wrong thoughts create wrong realities; when wrong thoughts become general, realities arise.

This danger from Ahriman has already manifested itself today. The other danger in the knowledge of revelation was sought to be avoided by the medieval scholastic, who still had the knowledge of revelation clothed in thoughts. It was concrete thoughts that grasped the content of the revelation. The dogmas were gradually thought through so little that people came to drop them altogether in general. One should indeed drop what is not understood. This is fully justified on the one hand, and if people can no longer follow the dogmas to the point of seeing them, it is natural that they drop them. But then what do they come to? Then they arrive at the most abstract of thoughts of dependence on some quite indefinite eternal or infinite. Then thoughts are no longer vividly formed that carry the content of the Revelation within them, but only some kind of dependence on some kind of infinite is felt in dark mysticism. Then the content of the thought disappears. This path has also been taken in recent times. It is the path that leads to the Luciferic. And just as surely as the path of knowledge through reason in modern times has led to the Ahrimanic, just as surely the other path can lead to the Luciferic.

And now look again at a mind like Franz Brentano's in the sense I have described. Franz Brentano approaches nature with this attitude: Just don't touch Ahriman! - and to the supersensible world: Just don't touch Lucifer! — So just don't become atomistic, just don't become a mystic. With this attitude he approaches natural science, which is such a powerful authority that he submits to it. He describes the phenomena of the soul in terms of the scientific method. If he had approached the subject from a more superficial point of view, as many of today's psychologists do, he would have written a doctrine of the soul inspired by Ahriman, a kind of psychology, a 'doctrine of the soul without a soul'. He could not do that. Therefore, he abandoned the attempt after the first volume, and did not write the following volumes – there should have been four – because something in him did not allow him to grasp the idea of rushing headlong into the purely Ahrimanic.

And take Nietzsche. Nietzsche was likewise seized by natural science. But how did he take up natural science? He did not really care much about the individual methods, but only looked at the natural scientific way of thinking in general. He said to himself: All that is spiritual is based in the physiological, is a “human, all too human” thing. What should actually be divine-spiritual ideals are an expression, a manifestation of the human, of the all-too-human. He rejected the very kind of knowledge that can be found in Brentano: knowledge through reason. He allowed the will to become active in him. And, as I said yesterday, he wore down the ideals, he wore down the spiritual. This is the other phenomenon where a personality, as it were, approaches the Ahrimanic, but strikes against it. Instead of snapping, he strikes. He also wants to develop atomism, but he strikes against a wall.

And so we see how such minds develop their particular soul mood in the 19th century because they come so very close to what plays into our knowledge as Ahrimanic powers. That is the fate of such minds in the 19th century: they come so incredibly close to Ahriman. And then they either end up in a situation like Brentano's, where they shyly retreat at the very boundary and do not advance at all with their knowledge, or they start lashing out like Nietzsche. But it is the Ahrimanic power that brought its waves to knowledge in the 19th century, which then had an effect on the 20th century. And one should understand that. And the original spirits who personally experienced this still half-masked encounter with Ahriman in the 19th century had a tragic fate behind them. But the students now received the prepared thoughts. These thoughts live in them. The Ahrimanic power has already formed the thoughts. The first original spirits recoiled; the pupils received the incomplete ahrimanic thoughts. These are now at work in them: 'Fight against the spirit', against the spirit that just does not want to surrender the earth to the ahrimanic powers, hatred of the spirit, fight against the spirit!

Today we must see this as a real connection. It lives today as a mood of the times, as a state of mind. We must understand it in order to truly grasp how necessary it is to assert a truly spiritual world view in all the different cultural forms in which such a world view must be lived.

On the basis of what I said yesterday it is possible to speak in greater detail of certain events in the course of the Earth’s evolution which have brought about its present form. As you will remember, I said that with clairvoyant consciousness a relationship can be established with the metallic substances in the Earth, with the essentially living quality inherent in the Earth by virtue of the veins of the different metals running through it. This relationship which can be established with the ‘metallity’ in the Earth enables one to look back over the Earth’s history.

It is particularly interesting to look back at what happened in the process of evolution in the times preceding the Atlantean epoch, during the period I have rather loosely called the Lemurian age and also in the epoch immediately before that, when the Earth was recapitulating the Sun-stage. It is interesting to look back at these happenings for they give one an impression of the great mutability of everything connected with the Earth’s existence.

We are accustomed today to regard the Earth as having always existed in the form in which it appears to us today. We inhabit a continent, we are surrounded by plants, by animals, by birds of the air. We are aware that we ourselves are living in a kind of atmospheric ocean surrounding the Earth, that we take oxygen out of this atmosphere into ourselves but that our relation to nitrogen has also a certain part to play. In general we simply think of the air around us as consisting of oxygen and nitrogen. Then we turn to look at the seas and oceans—further details need not be mentioned—and finally we have a picture of the planet we inhabit in the Universe. But the Earth has not always been as it is today; it has undergone tremendous changes, and if we go back to the epochs I have just mentioned—perhaps only to the Lemurian epoch or a little earlier—we shall find an Earth very different from that of today.

Let us begin by thinking of our present atmosphere which we regard as being devoid of life. Even this atmosphere proves to be quite different from anything to be found in early periods of the Earth’s evolution. Still further in the past something resembling the solid core of the Earth as we know it today is in evidence, surrounded by an atmosphere. But in those days there was nothing at all like the air we breathe today. In this air oxygen and nitrogen play the most prominent part, carbon and hydrogen a subsidiary role, sulphur and phosphorus a role of less importance still.

But it is really not possible to speak of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur and the rest in those early times, simply because what the chemists call by these names today did not exist. If a spirit-being of those times were to have met a modern chemist who spoke to him about carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and the rest, he would have retorted that nothing of the kind exists. We can justifiably speak of carbon, oxygen or nitrogen today but this could not have been done in those early times. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, as we speak of them today, became possible only when the Earth had reached a certain density and had developed forces such as it contains today. Neither oxygen, nitrogen, potassium, sodium nor any of the so-called fighter metals existed in those olden times. On the other hand, in the Earth’s environment that is filled today by our atmosphere there was something a little like albumen in consistency, a very fine fluid halfway between our present water and air. The Earth at that time was entirely surrounded by an albuminous atmosphere. The albumen we know in eggs today is very much coarser, but a comparison is possible.

When at a later time the Earth became denser, what we today call carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and so forth, were differentiated out of this atmosphere around the Earth. But it would be erroneous to say that the then albuminous atmosphere was composed of these elements which were not specific ingredients of it. Nowadays we think that everything is composite; but that is nonsense. Certain substances of a higher kind are not always composed of what comes to light when they are analysed. Carbon does not appear as carbon nor oxygen as oxygen in the higher kind of substance of which I am now speaking. As I said, it can be described as extremely fluid albumen. All this substance which surrounded the Earth in that age was permeated with the inpouring cosmic ether which imbued it with life; in addition, it was differentiated in a curious way. For instance, in one fairly wide area a man would have suffocated had he been present there, in another he could have been greatly invigorated. Chemical elements in the modern sense did not then exist but certain formations remind one of the effects of the chemical elements we know. The whole sphere teemed with gleaming reflections of light, with sparkling, luminous rays. And it was warmed through and through by the cosmic ether.

Such were the properties of the Earth-atmosphere—if I may use the modern expression—in that early epoch. The primeval mountains of which I spoke yesterday were the first formations to emerge from out of the Cosmos. The quartz to be found in those mountains, with its beautiful structure and relative transparency, was as it were poured into the Earth from the Cosmos. When a seer endowed with Imaginative vision observes those primeval rocks which, are the hardest substances on the Earth, they become the eyes through which he gazes out into the Universe—the same Universe which implanted these eyes into the Earth. It must be remembered that the quartz and silicious substances which permeated the whole atmosphere and were gradually deposited as primeval mountains were not as hard as they are today. They hardened into the state we know owing to the conditions that prevailed in later times. In the form in which they emerged from the Universe their consistency was scarcely more solid than wax.

A quartz crystal to be seen on mountains today is so hard that, as I said yesterday, if you were to hit your head against it, your skull—not the quartz—would crack. But in the far distant past, because of the all-pervading life, this primeval stone was as pliable as wax when it emerged from tire Cosmos. These drops of wax were transparent and their consistency can be pictured only by thinking of them in connection with the sense of touch. If one could have touched them, they would have felt like wax.

Silica came from the Cosmos into the Earth with a consistency similar to that of wax, and then it hardened. I described yesterday how pictures of the Cosmos arise in clairvoyant contemplation of this hard, rock-like substance. These pictures represent a more spiritual aspect of the phenomenon that was once concretely perceptible as a kind of plant-form in portions of this transparent, wax-like silica emerging from the Cosmos. Any observer of Nature will know that in the mineral kingdom today records of an earlier age are still to be found. When you look closely at certain stones you will see something like a plant-form within them. But in that distant past a quite usual phenomenon was that pictures were projected from the Cosmos into the albuminous atmosphere within the wax-like substance, where the pictures were not only seen but were reproduced, photographed, as it were, within this substance.

And then there was a noteworthy development: the fluid albumen filled these pictures and they became still denser and harder; and finally they were no longer merely pictures. The silicious element fell away from them, dispersed into the atmosphere, and in the earliest Lemurian age there appeared gigantic, floating plant-formations which remind one of the algae of today. They were not rooted in the soil—indeed there was as yet no soil in which they could have taken root; they floated in the fluid albumen, drawing their own substance from it, permeating themselves with it. And not only so—they lit up, glimmered and then faded out; reappeared and again vanished. Their mutability was so great that this was possible.

Try to picture this vividly. It is a panorama very different from anything to be seen in our environment today. If a modern man could project himself into that far-off time, set up a little observation-hut and look out on that ancient world, the spectacle before him would be something like this: he would see a gigantic plant-formation somewhat like present-day algae or palms. It would not appear to grow out of the Earth in springtime and die away in the autumn, but it would shoot up—in springtime, it is true, but the spring was then much shorter—and reach an enormous size; then it would vanish again in the fluid albuminous element. A clairvoyant observer would see the verdure appearing and then fading away. He would not speak of plants which cover the Earth but of plants appearing out of the Cosmos like airy clouds, condensing and then dissolving—it was a process of ‘greening’, taking place in the albuminous atmosphere. Of the period which would correspond more or less to our summer, an observer would say that it was the time when the environment of the Earth became ‘green’. But he would look upwards to the greening rather than downwards. In this way we can picture how the silicious element in the Earth’s atmosphere penetrates into the Earth and draws to itself the plant-force from the Cosmos, in other words, how the plant kingdom comes down to the Earth from the Cosmos. In the period of which I am speaking, however, we must say of the plant world: it is something that comes into being and passes away again in the atmosphere.

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And there is still something else to be said. If a human being of today, having established relationship with the metallic substance of the Earth, were to project himself into those past times, he would feel as if all this belonged to him, as if he himself had something to do with the process of greening and fading then taking place in the atmosphere. Now if you think back to your own childhood, this is simply a memory of a short span of time; on the other hand, if you recall a pain suffered in your childhood, this is something that really belongs to you. Similarly, in the cosmic memory of the past kindled through the metallity of the Earth, this process of greening and fading in the far past seems to be something that belongs to you. At that time man was already connected with the Earth which was surrounded by this watery-albuminous atmosphere; but he was then still wholly spiritual. It is correct to say, and it must also be realised, that these plant formations to be seen in the atmosphere at that time were something thrown off, ‘excreted’ by man. Man cast them out of his being which was still one with the whole Earth.

Now this same conception applies in the case of something quite different. Everything that I have so far described is the result of the fact that the silica had already, at an even earlier time, been precipitated in the atmosphere as the wax-like substance of which I have spoken. But apart from this there was the albuminous atmosphere upon which the infinitely diverse forces of the Cosmos were working, those forces which modern science sees fit to ignore. Hence our modern knowledge is no real knowledge at all, because a great many happenings on Earth simply would not take place if they were not brought about by cosmic forces and influences. Since the modern scientists do not speak of or do not recognise these cosmic forces, there is no reality in what they say. They take no account of what is essentially quick with life. Even in the tiniest particle looked at through a microscope, cosmic forces, not only earthly forces, are working. And if these cosmic forces are not taken into account, there can be no reality.

Thus cosmic forces were working in that remote time upon this fluid albumen in the Earth’s environment in such a way that it curdled or congealed. Albumen, congealed as a result of the working of cosmic forces, was everywhere to be seen in the sphere surrounding the Earth. But the forms assumed by this congealed albumen were not merely cloud-masses but living entities. These entities were in reality animals consisting of the congealed albumen which had solidified into a gelatinous state, into substance similar to gristle as it is today. Animal creatures of this kind were present in the fluid albuminous atmosphere. The forms of our present reptiles, lizards and the like, resemble, on a small scale, the forms of those earlier animals, but the latter were not so solid; they existed as gelatinous masses and were inherently mobile. At one moment their limbs were extended, at another withdrawn—comparable with what a snail does with its feelers today.

Now while all this was taking place, something else was being deposited into the Earth from the Cosmos. Another substance was being added to the silica; it is what you find today as the chalky constituents of the Earth. If you go—not necessarily into the oldest mountains but only into the Jura mountains, you will find limestone rock. It came to the Earth at a later stage than the silica but it too came from the Cosmos. Thus chalk is to be found as a second substance in the Earth.

This chalk deposit oozes constantly inwards and the actual effect is that in its core the Earth becomes denser and denser. Then in certain regions the silica combines with the chalk. But this chalk retains the cosmic forces and is altogether different from the crude substance which chemists consider it to be. Everywhere the chalk contains relatively latent formative forces.

Now in an epoch rather later than the period I described to you, when the greening became manifest and then faded away, we find that within this albuminous atmosphere there is a constant rising and falling of the chalk; chalk mist is followed by chalk rain. There was a period in the history of the Earth when what we know today as water-vapour and falling rain was a chalky substance, rising and falling. Then comes a strange development: the chalk is particularly attracted to the gelatinous, gristly masses; it permeates them, impregnates them with itself. And thanks to the Earth-forces which, as I told you, it contains, it dissolves the whole gelatinous mass which has formed as congealed albumen. The chalk takes from the heavens what the heavens have formed in the albuminous substance and carries it nearer to the Earth. And out of this the animals with calcareous bones came into being.

This is what develops in the later Lemurian epoch.

We must therefore think of plants in their earliest form as pure gifts from heaven and the animals, and all animal-like formations, we must regard as something which after the heavens had presented the Earth with chalk, the Earth has taken—literally filched—from the heavens and made into an earthly product.

Such things naturally seem paradoxical because they touch upon a reality of which modern man usually has no conception; nevertheless they are absolutely true. Now it corresponds with reality today if memory enables someone to say: ‘When I was nine years old I gave a friend many a sound thrashing.’ One may or may not feel gratified by such a memory, or it may pain one; but it does arise within one. Similarly, in human consciousness expanded through relationship with the metals into an Earth consciousness, this realisation arises: In the process of forming your whole being on Earth out of the heavens, during the descent you separated, cast off the plants from yourself. You also cast off the animal nature; your desire, to begin with, was that in the form of gelatinous coagulation or gristle it should be a product secreted by you. But then you were obliged to realise that pre-existent Earth-forces took this task over from you and reshaped the animal form into different structures which are products of the Earth. In this way, as it were in a cosmic memory, these happenings seem to be actual experiences of our own, just as the other incident I mentioned is an experience belonging to a brief earthly life. As man, we feel ourselves bound up with these happenings.

But all this is connected with many other processes—I am speaking briefly of only the most important ones. Many other things were happening. For example, during the period when what I have been describing was taking place, the whole atmosphere was also filled with sulphur in a highly rarefied state. This rarefied sulphur united with other substances and from this union there arose the ‘parents’ as it were of what is present in the ores today as pyrites, as galena, as native sulphide of zinc and so forth. All these substances developed at that time in an earlier form, in a soft, still wax-like consistency, and the body of the Earth was permeated with them. Then, when these metallic ores emerged from the universal albuminous substance and formed the solid crust of the Earth, there was really nothing much else for the metals to do, unless man made some use of them, than to reflect about the past. And indeed we find that they do conjure up for the inner vision, everything that has happened in the Earth’s history. A man in whom these things are cosmic, or at least terrestrial experience, will say to himself: Through having cast away from yourself the primeval plant-form—which has since developed into the later plant-formations—through having cast away from yourself the complicated processes of animal evolution, you have also rid yourself of everything that previously stood in the way of your having a will in your own being as man.

It was necessary for man to get rid of all this, just as today he must secrete sweat. In no other way could he cease to be a being in whom only gods willed, but become an individual with his own will, perhaps not yet free will, but nevertheless a will of his own. All this was necessary for the preparation of man’s earthly nature.

In the course of further development, during which there were many other happenings, everything changed. Naturally, when the metallic ores had separated and were now in the Earth, the whole atmosphere also changed. It became far less sulphurous. Oxygen gradually gained predominance over the sulphur whereas in ancient times sulphur was a very significant factor in the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this changed environment man was able to cast away other elements from himself and these are the successors of the earlier plants and animals. The later plant-forms now gradually developing were rooted in substance that was still very soft. Out of the earlier reptilian and lizard-like creatures, animals with a more complicated structure developed, the impressions of which modern geology can still discover. Nothing at all of the earliest animal creatures of which I have spoken can be found. It was not until the later epoch, when—for a second time as it were—man cast out more complicated structures, that the conditions I have been describing were present: cloud-masses continually forming and dissolving, viridescence (greening) appearing and then fading away, soft animal-like structures which, however, were real animals; at times they contracted and had a life of their own, and soon again lost identity in the general life of the Earth. All these developments resulted in greater solidification.

Among animals of this kind was one which at that time looked more or less like this (diagram): it had a very large eye-like organ surrounded by a sort of aura; adjoining this organ a kind of snout protruded further forwards; the body was lizard-like, with powerful fins. Such structures were already more solid in themselves. It would be equally correct to speak either of wings or fins in the case of these animals for they were not marine creatures—there was as yet no sea. There was only the soft Earth and the still soft elements in the surrounding atmosphere from which only the sulphur had been partially separated. In this atmosphere such animals flew or swam—it was something between flying and swimming.

If, starting from the present day, someone were to go back through time into the period between the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs, he would confront a strange spectacle: huge flying lizards with a kind of lantern-like formation on the head, radiating light and warmth; and down below, a soft, marshy Earth but with something very familiar about it because it would seem to a visitor of today to be emitting an odour, an odour between that of decaying substance and of green plants. The mud of this soft Earth would emit an odour partly seductive and partly extremely pleasant. And in it, moving about like creatures of the swamp, there would be these other animals, already with more limbs, rather like the lower species of mammals today but with powerful formations below—more powerful, naturally, than the webbed feet of ducks—by means of which they propelled themselves through the swamps.

Man was obliged to undergo this whole process in order that autonomous feeling might be prepared in him for his earthly existence.

Thus we have a primary plant-animal creation consisting of the products secreted by man and which made it possible for him to become a being on Earth possessed of will. If all these products had remained in him, they would have taken possession of his will which would have become a wholly physical manifestation. As a result of what he had cast off, the physical element had been eliminated and his will became a quality of the soul. Similarly, as a result of the second creation man’s feeling acquired the character of soul. Plants and mammals somewhat similar to those we know did not appear until the middle or later period of Atlantis. It was then that the Earth acquired a structure definitely resembling that of today. The substances known to modern chemists as carbon, oxygen, the heavy metals, and so on, had gradually developed, and it was possible for the third casting-off process to take place. Man separated from himself the plants and animals to be found in his environment today. And the fact that this environment came into existence around him has enabled him to live on Earth as a thinking being.

In those early times humanity was not split up as men are today, into single individuals; there was one universal humanity, still of the nature of spirit-and-soul, descending into the ether. For this universal humanity came out of the Cosmos together with the ether streaming thence to the Earth. The happenings I have described in the book Occult Science, then took place. Humanity came to the Earth, then departed to other planets and subsequently returned during the Atlantean epoch. This went on concurrently with other events; for whenever it was a matter of anything being cast off, humanity could not remain with the Earth but was obliged to depart from it in order that certain inner forces, now more of the nature of soul, might be strengthened. Humanity then came down again to the Earth. These happenings add details to what you can read in Occult Science. Man in truth belongs to the Cosmos, and it is he who prepares his earthly environment by casting off from himself the kingdoms of Nature and despatching them into the domain of the Earth where they form part of his environment. By sending these products of separation down to the Earth man was gradually able to equip himself with the faculties of thinking, feeling and willing. It was only in the course of time that he evolved into what he is today, an organic-physical being and able during his existence on Earth between birth and death to think and feel and will. He is connected with entities who, in order to further the evolution of humanity, have in the course of time separated from the human realm and in this separation have been metamorphosed into their present forms.

It is clear from what has been said that we do not speak in an abstract way about tire relationship that can be established with the metallic substances of the Earth. When relationship has been established with the metals with their memory of the Earth’s history, one can speak of what is remembered and discover for oneself what I have been describing to you today.

If we now go back to still earlier times, we shall find that everything is even more transient, even more evanescent. Think of the grandeur and majesty of the vista I described to you: those mobile, wax-like silica formations in which pictures of the plant-world appear, fill themselves with the soft albuminous substance and produce in the Earth’s environment the phenomena of ‘greening’ and fading. Think of all this and you will say to yourselves: In contrast to the plants growing out of the Earth today with their firmly formed roots and leaves or to our present trees with their strong trunks, this is as ephemeral as a cloud. How fleeting these earlier forms are if compared with an oak of today— the oak itself does not pride itself on its natural characteristic, it is usually the people living around such trees who are guilty of pride, for they mistake their frequent weakness for the hardiness of the oak! Compare this quality of our present oaks with those ancient, ethereal plant-formations, appearing and passing away like shadowy mists in the atmosphere, condensing and then vanishing away. Or to take cruder examples, compare a thick-skinned hippopotamus or elephant or a similar animal with those earlier creatures which emerged from the universal albumen, were laid hold of by the chalk and becoming rather more solid as a result developed the rudiments of bones and were drawn down into the animality of the Earth—I use this expression more as an adjective. Compare the Earth’s present density, shall I say the ‘elephantine’ density of the Earth today with the conditions that once existed, and you will no longer be able to doubt that the further back you go into the past the more fleeting and evanescent are the phenomena.

In even more remote times we come to conditions where there are only surging and weaving colour-formations, appearing and disappearing. And if you turn to the descriptions of Old Sun, or of Old Saturn given in the book Occult Science ¹ you will find that this is understandable when it is realised that these conditions belong to a far, far distant past. At that stage the evanescent plant-formations fill themselves with the albuminous substance and begin to look like clouds. At still earlier stages we can speak only of colour-formations such as I described in connection with Old Sun or Old Saturn.

If therefore we go back from physical conditions with the ‘elephantine’ quality they have today, through finer physical conditions, we finally reach the spiritual. In this way, by paying attention to actual realities we come to realise that everything belonging to the Earth has its origin in the spiritual. This is a matter of actual vision. And I think it is also a beautiful idea to be able to say to oneself: If you penetrate into the interior of the Earth and let the hard metals tell you their memories, they will say to you: Once upon a time we were so widely diffused over the cosmic expanse that we were not physical substances at all, but were simply colour, weaving, hovering, undulating in the spiritual Cosmos. The memories of the metals of the Earth go back to a condition when each metal was a cosmic colour permeating the others, when the Cosmos was a kind of spectrum, a rainbow which differentiated and only then became physical.

And it is at this point that the merely theoretical impression communicated to us by the metals of the Earth becomes a moral impression. For every metal says to us: I come from the cosmic expanse far away from the Earth, I come from the spheres of Heaven and have been compressed, enchanted into the interior of the Earth. But I await my redemption, for in time to come my essential being will again pervade the Universe.—When we learn to understand the speech of the metals in this way, gold tells us of the Sun, lead of Saturn, copper of Venus. And then these metals say to us: There was a time when we stretched far out into the Universe—copper to Venus, lead to Saturn—but now we have been enchanted into the Earth. We shall stretch far out again when the Earth’s mission is fulfilled through man having achieved on the Earth what can be achieved there and only there. We accepted this enchantment in order that man might become a free being on the Earth. When freedom has been won for man, release from our enchantment can also begin.

This release has been in process of preparation for a long time already. It is only a matter of understanding it and of understanding how the Earth, together with man, will evolve on into the future.

• 1. pp. 115-37 in the 1962/63 edition.

When we look at the world around us as our senses and intellect perceive it, we have something we may call, metaphorically speaking, a great cosmic edifice. We form concepts, ideas, and images of what it is like and what goes on in it. What happens in this cosmic edifice, even down to the details, affects us so that we develop certain sympathies or antipathies for this or that, and these then are expressed in our feeling life. Prompted by our will we do this or that, and thus intervene in the processes going on in this cosmic edifice.

At first, people think that this building of the cosmos consists of separate parts, and so they study these parts and find them made up of still smaller parts, which they then examine, and so on. Finally, scientists arrive at what they call the smallest parts, the molecules and atoms. As I told you, nobody has ever seen these molecules and atoms; they are hypothetical—in a certain sense the hypothesis of their existence is justified, as long as we keep in mind that it is only a hypothesis. In short, we are to some extent justified in thinking that the cosmic building consists of parts or members, and there is nothing wrong with trying to get a clear picture of these. However, the people who give rein to their fantasy in thinking about the atom and who perhaps even talk about the life of the atom, or have still wilder notions about it—well, they are simply speaking about the nothing of a nothing, for the atom itself is merely hypothetical. To build a hypothesis upon other hypotheses is nothing else but building a house of cards; not even that, for in a house of cards we have at least the cards, but in speculations about the atom, we have nothing.

Based on the insights to be gained from spiritual science, people should admit that if they want to see more of the cosmic edifice than our senses perceive, they must arrive at a different perspective. They must come to a way of thinking that is as different from our thinking in everyday life (which is also that of ordinary science) as our usual, everyday way of thinking is from dreams. We dream in pictures, and we can have a whole world in these pictures of ours. Then we wake up and are no longer confronted with the pictures of our dreams but with realities that impinge upon us, that push and tug at us, demanding attention. We know this from life itself, not on the basis of a theory, for no theory can enable us to distinguish between dreams and so-called everyday reality. Only our direct experience of life can teach us this.

Now, it is also true that we can wake up from everyday life experiences, which we may call by analogy “a dream life,” to a higher reality, the reality of the spirit. And again, it is only on the basis of life itself that we can distinguish between this higher spiritual reality and that of everyday life.

Now, what we see when we enter this world can be described with the following image—of course, one could use many different analogies to show the relationship between spiritual reality and ordinary reality, but I want to use a special image for this today. Let's imagine we are looking at a house built out of bricks. At first glance, the house appears to be composed of individual bricks. Of course, in the case of a house we can't go beyond the individual brick. However, let's assume the house doesn't consist of just ordinary bricks but of ones that are in turn extraordinarily artful constructions. Nevertheless, on first seeing the house we would only see the bricks, without having any idea that each brick in turn is a small work of art, so to speak. That is what happens in the case of the cosmic edifice.

We need only take one part of this cosmic edifice, the most complete one, let's say, the human being. Just think, as a part of this cosmic edifice, the human being seems to us to consist of parts: head, limbs, sense organs, and so on. We have tried over time to understand each part in its relation to the spiritual world. Remember, just recently I told you that the shape of our head can be traced to our previous earthly incarnation. The rest of our body, on the other hand, belongs to this incarnation and bears within it the rudiments of the head for the next life on earth.

I also spoke about the twelve senses and connected them with the twelve forces corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac. We said that microcosmically we bear within us the macrocosm with its forces working into us primarily from the twelve signs of the zodiac. Each of these forces is different: the forces of Aries differ from those of Taurus, which in turn differ from those of Gemini, and so on. Similarly, our eyes perceive different things than our ears. The twelve senses thus correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac, but there is more to it than that.

We know that the rudiments of our sense organs were developed already on old Saturn, then evolved further during the old Sun and the old Moon periods up to the time of our earth. During our earth period, we have become self-enclosed beings with completely developed sense organs. In the Moon, Sun, and Saturn periods, human beings were much more open to the great cosmos, and the forces of the twelve signs of the zodiac affected the essential core of the human being. While the rudiments of our sense organs were being formed, they were affected by the forces of the zodiac. Thus, when we speak of the connection between the senses and the signs of the zodiac, we mean more than a mere correspondence. We seek those forces that have built our sense organs into us. We do not speak superficially of some vague kind of correspondence between the ego-sense and Aries or between the other senses and this or that sign of the zodiac.

We speak about this correspondence because during the earlier periods of our earthly planet the senses of the human being were not yet developed to the point of being enclosed in the organism. It was only through the twelve forces that the sense organs were built into our organism. We are built up out of the macrocosm, and when we study our sense organs, we are actually studying world-embracing forces that have worked in us over millions and millions of years, and have produced such wonderful parts of the human organism as the eyes and the ears. It is indeed true that we study these parts for their spiritual content, just as we would have to study each brick in order to examine the artistic structure of a house.

I could explain this with yet another image. Suppose we had some kind of structure artistically built up out of layers of paper rolls, some of them standing upright, others at an angle—all of these arranged artistically into some kind of a structure. Now imagine we had not just rolls of plain paper, but inside each roll a beautiful picture had been painted. Of course, just looking at the rolled up paper, we wouldn't see the paintings on the inside of the rolls. And yet, the paintings are there! And they must have been painted before the paper rolls were arranged in the artistic structure.

Now suppose it is not we who build up this artful structure of paper rolls, but the paper rolls have to form it by themselves. Of course, you can't imagine they could do this by themselves; nobody can imagine it. But let's suppose because the pictures are painted on all the paper rolls, the latter now have the power to arrange themselves in layers. And that gives you a picture of our true cosmic edifice. We can compare the paintings on the rolls with all that happened during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, and is woven into every individual part of our cosmic building. These are not dead pictures, but living forces that build up everything meant to exist on earth. And we draw out what is artfully hidden in the structure made up of the individual rolls of the cosmic edifice—which science describes. This is what confronts us in our outer life. I have given much thought to finding an analogy corresponding as closely as possible to the facts of the matter and have come up with this image of the paper rolls with their living, active pictures. When you think this analogy through, you will find that when we first look at this structure, we cannot know anything about the paintings inside the rolls. If the structure is rather artful and ingenious, we can get an artful and ingenious description of it; however, it will not contain a word about the paintings inside the rolls.

You see, that's how it is with the conventional sciences. They describe this artistic structure, while ignoring completely the paintings on the inside of each roll. Now, you may wonder if a description of the elaborate structure of the rolls allows us to get an idea and to really know what is inside each roll as long as the rolls are rolled up and part of the whole structure? No, it does not! Conventional science is completely unable to arrive at the idea that the spiritual underlies our cosmic edifice. Therefore, simply continuing along the lines of conventional science will not lead to an understanding of spiritual science; something else must be added, something that has nothing to do with ordinary science.

Now picture all these layers of rolls; we can easily describe them and find them interesting and beautiful. Maybe some rolls are more slanted than others; maybe some are curved, and so on; all this can be nicely described. But in order to find out that there is a picture inside each roll, we will have to take out one of the paper rolls and unroll it. In other words, something special must be added to the human soul if we are to advance from the ordinary scientific outlook to that of the science of the spirit. The soul must be taken hold of by something of a special nature. This is what is so difficult to understand for our materialist culture. Yet, this must be understood again as it was in earlier cultural epochs when a spiritual world view permeated the physical one. In ancient times, people were always aware that everything they had to know about the spiritual content of the world was based on the spiritual taking hold of the soul. That is why people back then spoke not only about science, but also about initiation and the like.

Another analogy, one taken from the ancient traditions of spiritual science, will make the matter completely clear to you if you think it through. In spiritual science we speak of an “occult reading of the world,” and rightly so. What conventional science is doing cannot be called “reading the world.” If you look at what is written on a page of some book or other publication and you can't read at all, then what is written there will of course remain completely in comprehensible to you. Still, you could describe the handwriting; you could describe the lines, loops, and crossbars; you could tell what the individual letters look like and how they are combined. It will be a nice description, not unlike the one contemporary science gives of outer physical reality or the one contemporary history provides. However, this is not the same as reading.

Obviously, people do not learn to read by taking a page from a book, without having any idea what it means to read, and trying to figure out the meaning of the text from the shape of the letters. Reading is taught in childhood. We learn to read not by describing the shape of the letters, but because something spiritual is conveyed to us, and we are mentally and spiritually stimulated to read. It is the same with everything we call the higher and lower degrees of initiation. Initiation was not based on teaching souls to describe what was outside them, but on teaching them to read it, to decipher, so to speak, the meaning of the world. Thus, it was with good reason that what is spiritual in the world was called “The Word,” for the world has to be read if it is to be understood spiritually. And we do not learn to read by memorizing the shape of the letters but by receiving spiritual impulses.

That is what I want to make clear through the presentations in our circles. As you remember the themes running through our lectures, you will see I have always tried to use images. Today I am also using them, for it is only through images that one can lead the way into the spiritual. As soon as images are crammed into concepts applying only to the physical plane, they no longer contain what they should. This confuses people because they cannot grasp what is given in images in such a way that it is a true reality for them. Right away, they think of the images themselves in completely materialistic terms. When we look at more primitive cultures, we see that people then did not have our modern concepts but thought in images and expressed their reality in them. Even in Asian cultures, which are somewhat atavistic because they have kept features from earlier times, you find that to meaningfully express something profound, people always speak in images, images that definitely have the significance of a reality.

Let us take an example where the image really has the significance of an immediate reality, of a coarse and rough reality, so to speak. Europeans frequently find it very hard to understand Asians who have preserved older, atavistic ideas of reality; they often have only a very rough understanding of Asians. There is a very beautiful Asian novella telling the following story.

Once upon a time there was a couple, and they had a daughter. The daughter grew up and was sent to school in the capital because she showed special talents. On leaving school, she married a merchant, an acquaintance of her father. She had a son and died when the boy was four years old. The day after the mother's funeral, the child suddenly said: “Mother has gone upstairs to the top floor, and she must be there now!” And the whole family went upstairs.

Now we must put ourselves into the Asian soul in order to understand what follows. I am telling you something bordering closely on reality. Yet if a European were told by a four-year-old that his mother, who had been buried the day before, was upstairs and if he were then to go up with a candle to look around, he would of course find nothing there. The whole thing would be denied. In other words, we have to try to put ourselves into the Asian mind.

Well, the family went up there with a light and found the mother actually standing there before a dresser and staring at it. All the drawers were closed, and the people felt that there had to be something in the dresser that was troubling her. They emptied the drawers and took the items that had been in them to the temple to store them there. In that way those things would be removed from the world. They believed that now the soul would not return anymore; they knew it would return only if something was still binding it to this world.

However, the soul returned anyway! Every evening when the family looked upstairs, she was there. Finally, the family went to a wise guardian of the temple; he came, said he must be left undisturbed, and recited his sutras. And, when the “hour of the rat” struck—in the Orient, the time between midnight and two in the morning is called the hour of the rat—there was the woman again, staring at a certain spot on the dresser. He asked her if anything was there, and she gave him to understand by a gesture that there was indeed something. He opened the first drawer but nothing was in it, the second, nothing, the third, nothing, the fourth and still nothing. Then it occurred to him to lift up the paper lining of the drawers, and there between the last layer of paper and the bottom of the drawer he found a letter. He promised to tell nobody about this letter and to burn it in the temple. He did so, and the soul never returned again.

Now this oriental story actually agrees with reality; it expresses reality. It would be very difficult to present this matter in European concepts. Besides, the conceptions of modern Europeans are still too coarse. They think when something is real, then everybody must be able to see it. Europeans generally allow only for two things; either everyone sees something, and then it is a reality, or not everyone sees it, and then it is subjective and not objective. Now this distinction between subjective and objective applies only to the physical world but has no meaning in the spiritual world. There we cannot call anything others do not see subjective but not objective.

Now you may say that such things as told in that story also exist in Europe. Indeed, they do, but Europeans are generally glad to say it is only fiction and is not necessarily true. That is why it is so much easier to speak about the spiritual world in fiction. Fiction does not lay any claim to truth. People are content when they do not have to believe what is said in stories and the like. However, the objection that this is after all only a novella does not count. Europeans obviously have little understanding of Asians or they would not say such things. What Europeans call novellas, or art, is a most superfluous and useless game to Asians and means nothing to them. They even make fun of our telling stories about things that do not exist. Asians do not understand this. In what they call works of art, they tell only about what really exists, albeit in the spiritual world. That is the profound difference between the European and the Asian world views.

That Europeans write novellas about things that do not exist is, according to the Oriental view, a highly superfluous activity. In their view, all our art is only a rather superfluous and useless occupation. Clearly, we have to understand the Asian art works we possess as Imaginations of spiritual reality; otherwise we will never understand them at all. We Europeans in turn judge Asian stories not by Asian standards but by our own and call them fanciful and beautiful fiction, products of the fertile, unbridled Oriental imagination.

People will gradually have to realize that we have to speak more and more in images. Of course, if we were to speak in pictures only, we would be going against modern European culture, so we can't do that. But we can gradually allow ordinary thinking, applicable only on the physical plane, to turn into thinking about the spiritual world, and then into pictorial thinking, which develops under the influence of the spiritual world. Natural scientists also develop a view of the world, but if they think their view is clear and comprehensible, they make the same mistake as we would if we claimed we could paint a portrait, and the subject would then step out of the canvas and walk around the room.

In my latest book, Vom Menschenrätsel, I move from the usual logical presentation to a pictorial one.¹ This has to become our general style of presentation if spiritual science is really to become a part of Western civilization. A philosophical treatise about the same matters would cite innumerable logical arguments, would turn the most elaborate and artificial phrases; yet it would be virtually dead. It would aim only at understanding the outer layering of the rolls, not what lives as paintings on the inside of each roll. These things become meaningful only when we apply them in our lives, for that is how we learn to understand life. So-called logical proofs have to be imbued with life before we can understand spiritual science in a living way.

As you know, some people are musical and others are not, and there is a very great difference between those who are musical and those who are not. In terms of the soul a musical person is quite different from an unmusical one. I do not mean this as a criticism of unmusical people; it is simply a statement of fact. Those who look more closely at life may perhaps not go so far as to agree with Shakespeare's statement, “The man that hath no music in himself ... Is fit for such treasons, stratagems and spoils ... Let no such man be trusted.”²

Though we may not arrive right away at that conclusion, there is a certain difference in the souls of musical and unmusical persons.

Now, you may want to know why there are musical and unmusical people. If you look for an answer in psychology, which follows along the lines of the natural sciences, I do not think you will find much that could cast a light on this question. If psychology were to explain why one person is musical and another is not, if it were to deal with such subtleties, then it would finally do some good.

However, there is yet another difference between human beings. We find people who go through life and are, in a sense, hardly touched by what goes on around them. Others go through life with so open a soul that they are deeply affected by what is going on around them. They feel deep joy over some things and suffer over others; they feel happiness about some things and sadness about others. There are those who are dulled to impressions and those who are sensitive and empathize with all the world. There are people who shortly after entering a room that is not too crowded have a certain rapport with the others, because they can feel very quickly what the others feel by way of so-called imponderables. On the other hand, there are individuals who come into contact with many people but do not really get to know a single one of them because they do not have the gift I have just described. They judge others by what they themselves are, and when these others are different from them, they really consider them more or less bad people.

Still, there are those who give their time and attention to others, sharing their experiences. As a rule these are people who can also empathize with animals, with beetles and sparrows, who can feel joy with some events and sorrow with others. Notice how often this happens in life, especially at a certain age; young people are happy about all kinds of things. They are up one minute and down the next, while other people call them stupid because, to their minds, nothing really matters much anyway. So, there exist these two types of people. Of course, the two qualities are sometimes more and sometimes less developed; they are not necessarily very pronounced but are still clearly noticeable.

Now, the spiritual scientist, trying to understand the world from his point of view, comes to the conclusion that those people are musical in this life who empathized with everything and moved easily from joy to sorrow and from sorrow to joy in their previous life. This was internalized, and that is how the rhythmical flexibility of the musical soul developed. On the other hand, people who were dulled in their sensitivity to outer events in the preceding incarnation do not become musical. Nevertheless, they may have other excellent qualities, may even have been great world reformers and have influenced world history.

Imagine a person living in Rome at the time when Michelangelo and Raphael produced their great works and not seeing anything but immorality in the Rome of that time. Now Rome was indeed immoral and decadent. But this individual ignored everything that was not immoral, for instance, the art of Michelangelo and Raphael. Perhaps he became a very important personality, a reformer who accomplished great things. What I am telling you is not meant as malicious criticism. Still, people are unmusical because in the previous incarnation they did not receive vivid impressions of things that do deeply impress other souls.

Think how transparent life would become and how well we would be able to understand others if we approached them with such knowledge. And when we keep in mind that spiritual science imbues our souls with a longing to perceive in pictures, then all this should seem to us something desirable.

Of course, if everything were limited to concepts and if spiritual science were to dissect everyone and investigate what the person was like in previous incarnations, then people would do well to be on their guard against spiritual science. No one would venture forth among people anymore if they would analyze like this. However, this would happen only if we worked with crude concepts. If we stay with pictures, the latter lay hold of our feelings, and we arrive at an emotional understanding of others, which we do not need to transform into concepts. We turn it into concepts only when we express it as a general truth. It is quite all right to talk about the flexibility of the soul in a preceding incarnation and musicality in a later one, as I have done, but it would be in poor taste if I were to approach a person who is musical and describe what he or she was like in the previous incarnation based on this talent. These truths are derived from individual details, but the point is not to apply them to details. This must be understood in the deepest sense.

Most people may understand truths like these, but when we go a bit further, then what is meant to enlighten humanity can easily lead to nonsense. For example, we often speak about reincarnation in general terms, and at one time, I talked to one of our branch groups about the relationship between reincarnation and self-knowledge, a theme that deserves some attention. I said it would be good to try to apply certain concepts we acquire from spiritual science to our efforts to understand ourselves. I explained that at the beginning of our life karma often brings us into contact with people who were connected with us at about the middle of our previous life, when we were in our thirties. In other words, we are not right away with the people we were with at the corresponding time in our earlier incarnation. This is how I have explained various rules of reincarnation; you can also find in my lectures how reincarnation can be applied to self-knowledge. Well, what did all this lead to in those days? It turned out that shortly thereafter a number of people founded a sort of “Club of the Reincarnated.” Yes, indeed, there was a clique that explained who each member had been in the preceding incarnation or even in all previous lives. Of course they had all been exceedingly eminent figures in human history, that goes without saying, and they had all been connected in their earlier lives.

That was a nuisance for a long time. Naturally this is all terrible because it violates what I have emphasized, namely, that if you are to know anything about your previous incarnation, in our era you will not understand it from within yourself. Rather, your attention will be drawn to it through some outer event or through another person. In our time it is generally false when somebody looks within and then claims to have been this or that person. If we are to know anything, it will be told to us from outside.

Those who founded the “Club of the Reincarnated” would have had to wait a long time before being told about their previous incarnations. Yet they had all been important personalities, the most important in human history! When the thing became known, and those people were asked why they had done all this, they answered that they did it because I had said in a lecture one should cultivate self-knowledge in the light of reincarnation. Since then they had all been busy thinking about who they had been in previous lives and how they had been connected with each other.

In such a case we sin against the reverence we should have for the great spiritual truths. This reverence consists in staying appropriately with the image, with the metaphor; only when it is really necessary should the picture be left behind, and should we go beyond the metaphor. In spiritual science we have to develop reverence and to realize that this sophistry, this putting things into the concept, is always a bad thing. It is always bad to think about spiritual matters in the same way we think about things on the physical plane. Indeed, when we acquire this reverence, we also develop certain moral qualities, which cannot unfold if we don't carry all this in our soul in the right way. Accordingly, spiritual science will also lead to a moral uplifting of our modern culture.

Now we Europeans say—and rightly so—that because we can see the Christ Mystery in our spiritual life, we have an advantage over other cultures, for example, over the Asian or oriental ones. What those cultures know about the spiritual does not include the Christ Being. The Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, Persians, do not include the Christ Being in their thinking about the spiritual interrelationships in the world. We are therefore right in calling the Asian world view atavistic, a relic of an earlier age. Though those people may have an exceedingly lofty understanding of the world, as, for instance, in the Vedanta philosophy, their inability to understand the Christ Mystery makes their world view an atavistic one. To be able to penetrate deeply into certain connections is not necessarily a sign of great spiritual heights.

For example, I used to know a man who was among us for a long time and even belonged to the “Club of the Reincarnated,” and he propounded excellent theories about certain conditions of life on Atlantis. Continuing along the lines of my book on Atlantis, this person came to very interesting conclusions that were true. Yet, he was so loosely connected to our movement that he left it when external reasons made it convenient for him to do so. Under certain conditions, it takes only a particular formation of the etheric body to see into supersensible regions. However, if spiritual science is to flow in a living way into our culture, it has to take hold of the whole person so that he or she can grow close to its deepest impulses. And then spiritual science will create what our culture, which is developing more and more into a materialistic one, is lacking.

Thus, we are right in saying we have the advantage of the Christ Mystery over the Asian cultures. But what do Asians say about this? Now, I am not telling you something I just made up; I am telling you what the more reasonable Asians really say. They agree we have the advantage of the Christ Mystery over them. They say, “That is something we do not have, and that's why you Europeans think you are on a higher stage of cultural development. However, you also say, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them,’ and your religion tells you to love one another. But when we look at how you live, it does not seem as though you are doing that. You send missionaries to us in Asia who tell us all kinds of great things; however, when we come to Europe, we find people do not at all live as they should if all we've been told were true.” Well, that's what the Asians say.

Now just think whether they are so entirely wrong. At a religious convention where people from all religions were to speak, this case was discussed, and the Asian representatives said what I have just told you. They said, “You send us missionaries, which is very nice. However, you have had Christianity for two thousand years now, and we cannot see that it has advanced your moral development so much beyond ours.”

There are good reasons for this, my dear friends. You see, Asians live much more in the group-soul and much less as individuals. Morals are in a sense innate to them, inborn through the group-soul. Europeans, precisely because they are developing their I, must leave the group-soul behind and must be left to their own resources. That is why egoism inevitably had to appear. It goes hand in hand with individualism. People will only gradually be able to come together again by understanding Christianity in a higher sense.

Much has prevented those who have thought about Christianity, even the best of them, from truly understanding the consequences of the Mystery of Golgotha. Granted, it is certainly very “profound” to say we must experience the Christ in our own inner being. You see, there is what I would like to call a symbolical theosophy. As you know, I have always spoken out against this theosophy that wants to explain everything as symbols. It explains even the resurrection of Christ as merely an inner experience even though in reality it is a historical event. Christ really did rise again in the world, but many a theosophist finds it easier to deal with the matter by claiming it is merely an inner process. As you know, this was the special skill of the late Franz Hartmann; in every lecture he repeatedly explained theosophy to his audience by saying that one has to understand oneself inwardly, to comprehend God in oneself, and so on.³

Now if you understand the Gospels properly, you will not find any grounds for the idea that the Gospels advocate people should experience the Christ only inwardly. There are theosophical symbolists who reinterpret various passages, but in reality everything in the Gospels confirms the truth of the great word, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” The Christ is a social phenomenon. The Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality, and He is here as a reality, belonging not to the individual but to the common life of all people. What He does is what is important. These things can often be better understood in pictures than in abstract concepts.

Just recently we went to see a friend on leave from the front lines of the battlefield, where he has since returned. This friend was kind enough to get us a taxicab, and when he returned with it and pulled up, he told us he had had a conversation with the driver. This driver was an altogether peculiar man, for when we had arrived and were about to get out, he opened the door and after he had been paid, he gave us two little pamphlets called “Peace Messenger.” He was making propaganda for the spiritual world while working his job! Then our friend told us that this driver had told him the essential thing is for people to find the Christ, everything depends on the Christ. In other words, our friend had picked out a cab at the taxi-stand and gotten into a conversation with the driver, who told him the world will advance only when people find the Christ, whom they have not yet found.

Well, the cab driver added a few other things and said, “You see, with Christ it's like this. Just think, I am a very respectable man, an exemplary man, and I have children who are all good for nothing. But am I any less respectable and exemplary a man because I have children who are no good? They all know me, or think they know me, but they are still good-for-nothings. That's how I think of the Christ. He belongs to us all, He is the person we all look to but that does not mean everybody necessarily really understands Him.”

This cab driver has created a marvelous picture of the special life of Christ, of His isolated life! He has discovered that Christ is living among us, living with us, belonging to us all and not to any one individual. He saw his sons who were all no good as the individuals, who were good for nothing and would have to struggle before reaching an understanding. If this cab driver had wanted to express this extraordinarily significant idea in philosophical terms, nothing would have come of it. But his picture reflects wonderfully what we are trying to understand. Of course, such a picture is not quite sufficient; an individual may understand it, but you will not influence our culture with it. I just wanted to show you that even the simplest soul can light on a true picture. This is how things should really flow into pictures. I have tried to achieve this particularly in the style of my latest book, which deals with non-theosophical matters. However, in its presentation this book is “theosophical,” if we want to use that expression.

It is important to understand our teachings more and more between the lines, so to speak, if we want to grasp correctly that they have to become life, the life of each one of us. And what weighs so heavily upon one's soul is just this awful difficulty of integrating these things into life.

You see, if these things are important to you, and particularly if you really know our rationalist culture, you will realize that what pulsates through spiritual science has to live in all branches of culture. It must influence thinking, feeling, and willing, only then will it fulfill its mission. To feel connected with our cause really takes quite some inner strength. It is a pity that it takes such an infinitely long time for people to feel thoroughly connected with the impulses of spiritual science. In the meantime, we can see people passing by and ignoring precisely what they should be focusing on.

Now let me tell you about another case. There was a very learned gentleman who used to be a member of our Society; in fact, he was tremendously learned, but his erudition did not satisfy him. He was profoundly unhappy in spite of all his learning, which included a knowledge of oriental languages and the culture of the Near East. Now this man came and asked for advice. In such a case my advice will necessarily have to show that through an understanding of spiritual science the spirit can enter into a science such as oriental philosophy. So I indicated that he should permeate all this scholarly material with what he had received from spiritual science. However, for him the two things merely continued to exist side by side. On the one hand, he pursued his oriental studies as this is done in the universities; on the other hand, he pursued spiritual science. The two never came together for him; he could not permeate the one with the other.

Now just think how fruitful it would be if someone who knows so much—and this man did indeed know a tremendous amount—were to take his science and learning and imbue it with theosophy! He wouldn't even have to let it be known that he thinks theosophically if he feared people might look askance at him for that. Still, he could then present all this in his university lectures. That man could very well have penetrated the culture on the Euphrates and the Tigris and the one a bit further west—he was particularly at home in Egyptology—with spiritual science and could have accomplished something remarkable. In any case, he could have achieved something more fruitful than the popularizing stuff produced by our common writers. Recently a piece by such a popular writer appeared in a widely read daily paper. The fellow had written an article on the discovery of a sphinx-like figure during construction for the Baghdad railway—well, even if his name is Arthur Bonus, he is still definitely not a “good one!”⁴ This article is absolutely terrible!

The ideal we have in mind, my dear friends, is to let our thinking be carried by what spiritual science gives us. And it should be the same in life too, in our everyday life with each other. Spiritual science can be carried into everything. If we did not intend this, did not have this ideal, then spiritual science would not be able to bear fruit. The challenge to make it fruitful meets us everywhere.

Just think, there are excellent historians who write about the history of England at the time of James I, let's say.⁵ Then there are excellent historians who write books about the life of Francisco Suarez, the Jesuit.⁶ As you know, I have to be careful what I say when I speak about Jesuitism. That is, I must not say too much that is positive—or at least what can be misunderstood as positive. Nevertheless, it is true that most people know about this Suarez only that in one of his writings he is supposed to have explicitly preached regicide. But this is not true. In general, people often know things that are untrue but don't as often and as thoroughly know things that are true.

Now, excellent books about this Suarez are available nowadays; most of them are written by Jesuits. You can read these books about Suarez, the successor of Ignatius of Loyola, and understand them.⁷ That does not mean that you will become, or have been, a Jesuit, nor that you have to put up with people drawing such conclusions. The facts are clear, and when we connect them, we can answer one of biggest questions of modern history. These two individuals, James I and Francisco Suarez, the Jesuit philosopher, are complete opposites. At the time of James I, a very ahrimanic new development was inaugurated. Another development began with Suarez that was very luciferic. Their combined influence, and particularly their fights against each other, shaped much of what lives and weaves in the present age.

Here we come to mysterious connections. I don't want to blame anyone with what I am going to say now. For example, we find that a great deal of what these days is called historical materialism or Marxism, the Social Democratic outlook, can be traced directly to Suarez. Now please do not take this to mean that I am saying the Social Democrats are Jesuits. Nevertheless, there are in a certain sense good reasons for connecting the Social Democrats with the Jesuits. By the same token, many members of the opposing party, that is, those who oppose social democracy, can be traced back directly to what was inaugurated by James I.

With this, I have indicated something that lives in many people's thoughts. Particularly in occult communities you find two main streams, and from these flows something that is not occult. These two main streams produce two typical, contrasting figures: James I of England, in whom an extraordinary initiate-soul lived, and Suarez.

Now, if you read the biography of Suarez, you will not understand it at all if you have not really grasped spiritual science. Suarez was one of those people who are at first bad students and don't learn anything. According to the contemporary materialist view, such people are hopeless cases and not good for anything. However, one can easily prove that many great geniuses did not learn anything when they were in school. Well, Suarez was also one of the bad students, and even in college he was not yet what one might call a bright man. Then all of a sudden he changed, and every biography of him describes this sudden awakening. The gift of brilliance suddenly awakened in him, and he wrote extraordinarily interesting books, which are, unfortunately, not widely known. This happened all of a sudden, kindled by some of the things I told you about in my lectures on the spiritual exercises of the Jesuits, which Suarez also practiced. Through these he awakened something in himself that enabled him to develop special mental and spiritual forces.

Thus, the biography of Suarez proves—as it can also be proved in the case of James I—that he turned around, so to speak, and came from the unspiritual into the spiritual. This soul, which later achieved outstanding accomplishments, was born at a certain moment. Its development did not proceed in a straight line, but took place in a sudden jolt, produced either by karma or by an influence on the person in question that can be compared to how we learn to read in elementary school: not by describing the shape of the letters, but by receiving an impulse through which we learn to understand the letters.

Here, you see again how spiritual science can guide us in understanding these historical connections, and then we can see life quite differently. If you take in spiritual science in a living way, then your attitude to life really changes, an you can think of other things to do than what you have been doing. It is hard to imagine that a person who takes in spiritual science in a living way could come up with the strange idea, for example, that he or she is Mary Magdalene reincarnated. This would not occur to such a person; instead he or she would focus on other contents of the soul.

It is hard to have to watch how slowly the development in the direction I indicated proceeds. People really take Spiritual science far too much as merely a theory or as simply something to be enjoyed. However, it must be studied in a living way. Now that we are together before parting or some time at the beginning of summer, when we will have to return to Dornach, I would like to discuss briefly a few important points we must consider in this regard.

You see, my dear friends, if things had turned out as many people adhering to older traditions had expected at the time when we first established spiritual science here fourteen years ago, we would have become a sect. For all the ideas brought over from England were headed toward the formation of a sect. And many people felt very comfortable being completely secluded in their small circles. Then they could call the other people outside their circles fools. There was very little control over this. However, this kind of thing had to stop.

Spiritual science has to reckon with our whole culture. We have always considered this culture, and we have emphasized particularly in public lectures what one can get into European heads these days—regardless of how many objections were raised. Now I don't want to criticize—that would be silly—but still, we have to understand that our movement really must not become a sect and must not even have any characteristics of a sectarian movement if it is to fulfill its task. We can accomplish much if we take the general culture into account. People outside our movement for the most part write nonsense about it—if they write about it at all. You may say this does not matter in a deeper sense. On the contrary, it matters very much! That is why we have to defend ourselves and do what we can to stop it. We have to do everything possible so that eventually people will not write nonsense but something better.

However, in a spiritual sense it is even more harmful when what was intended only for members of our immediate circle is brought in the wrong way before the public so that our lecture cycles are now sold in second-hand bookshops. Granted, we may not be able to prevent this. Still it happens again and again, not only that our lecture cycles can be bought in second-hand bookshops but other equally detrimental things as well. For instance, somebody just recently told me about a person he had worked with for a long time. He said that person did not write anything on his own initiative but belongs to a somewhat dubious clique, which has complete control over him. He himself only sits down and goes ahead with his writing. Now this person has written many brochures about our spiritual science and even big books. In those you find not only quotations from my printed and published works, but also long passages from the cycles. In other words, it is not just that one can buy these cycles in second-hand bookshops, but, in fact, anyone wanting to write a stupid book these days is able to get hold of them. Such people then buy two or three cycles and copy passages that sound completely absurd when taken out of context, and then they can make a book out of all that.

These are the problems that result from our having to face the public while at the same time being a Society. However, we have to understand this problem if we want to overcome it. As I said, I do not want to criticize, for that would be totally useless; instead, I want to describe the problem. I want to show you where the difficulties lie, and we just have to watch for them. In the immediate future even more abominable things will be done against our Society than we have had to endure up to now. We won't be able to change that in the twinkling of an eye. Still, we must not ignore both the encouraging, pleasant elements and the annoying ones in the way the world judges our movement as though we were trying to become totally unmusical in the next incarnation.

You see, those who think purely egoistically—as I said, this is not meant as criticism, but merely as description think that spiritual science has more to say about certain relationships in nature than ordinary science. Thus, people turn to me for medical advice even though I have emphasized repeatedly that I am only a teacher or cultivator of spiritual science, and not a physician. Of course, people may want some friendly advice and to refuse that would be absurd. If people come for friendly advice, why should it be denied them even if it concerns matters of natural science? However, after everything that has happened, I have to request that nobody seeks my advice on medical matters who is not in the care of a physician. People who think selfishly do not consider that such things are not permissible nowadays and that they bring us into conflict with the world around us, and that is detrimental to our spiritual science. We have to make an effort to improve things; we have to advocate everywhere that there should be more than just the officially authorized medicine, which is based on pure materialism. We can certainly do this, but we must not just selfishly think of what is good for us individually if this could interfere with what our movement must be.

Spiritual science can give advice, and it would be absurd if it didn't. It would be pathetic indeed if one could not give some advice to a person suffering from this or that ailment. However, it is a great risk to give advice when the following happens—and I am telling you a true story here. Someone was ill in a town where I had just previously said that I definitely do not want people to turn to me in case of illness. I had said so publicly and officially. Now, someone became ill and was admitted into a sanitarium, where he remained for some time. A long-standing member of ours who had always been connected with the most intimate aspects of our cause wrote to this sanitarium, explaining that the patient in question could now be discharged because Dr. Steiner gave such and such advice. The member wrote this to the physician, who replied that this just goes to show we don't mean it when we claim theosophy wants to be nothing but theosophy and does not want to meddle in other people's business.

Yes, indeed, my dear friends, we have to pay attention to such things. If we ignore them, it will not be for the good of the movement. Of course, this is only one case, but variations of this are happening again and again. This leads to a peculiar feature of our movement, about which I have to speak now. What I am referring to is that the new good side of our movement comes to light less rapidly than other new developments that have also never before been there. They prove that our movement is indeed something new; however, these are peculiar novelties.

For example, let us suppose this or that were written in my published books. If no cycles were getting into the wrong hands, people outside our movement would refute what is in my books. Well, let them do it, but then they would present their opinion. It would never occur to people out there who do not belong to our Society to copy sentences from my books to prove I am a “bad guy.” No one would do this; instead people out there would present their own opinions. What happens in our Society, however, is that someone accepts our teaching—swallows it hook, line, and sinker, as the saying goes—but then refutes me with my own teaching. You can see an example of this in an as yet unpublished exposition.

As you may remember, in an earlier edition of Riddles of Philosophy—the book then was called Views of Life and World in the Nineteenth Century—I explained that Leverrier discovered the planet Neptune merely on the basis of his calculations about Uranus, before Neptune had been seen.⁸ Neptune was first seen at the Berlin observatory, but its existence was already known earlier simply because of calculations. I referred to this example to show that something may follow from calculations, that we can know of a fact merely on the basis of our thinking.

Well, just recently someone wrote that he has applied this very obvious and convincing idea, but in a different field. He claims to have found that something is wrong in our movement, that there are disruptions and interferences like the ones Leverrier found in observing the planet Uranus. If Uranus does not move the way it should according to calculations based on the general laws of gravity, then obviously something is interfering. Similarly, according to this individual, something supposedly interferes with our movement. So he propounds the hypothesis that there is something disruptive here, interfering with everything. And then, in the same way Leverrier discovered Neptune, this individual discovered that the evil interferences in our movement are in me. As the astronomers in the observatory here turned their telescope to the place where Neptune was said to be, so this person focused his spiritual telescope on me and found the evil there.

This is a special case; the methods I have given are all applied to my character and I am refuted with myself. In this man's circle a letter was written recently—not by him but by others from his circle—saying that I have no right to complain about this refutation because I myself had always said spiritual science was the common property of everyone and that it would be wrong to think spiritual science originated with the spiritual investigator. Well now, when things get this confused, there can be no simple, clear explanation for them. This, indeed, is something new arising in our Society. Outside, where the old still holds good, others are refuted by means of what the critics themselves think. But within our Society people do not take their own thoughts, but what they read in the lecture cycles and use it against me.

For example, in the letter I mentioned you can find many quotations from my book An Outline Of Occult Science and others.⁹ Everywhere you'll find exhortations to read this or that for yourself so you'll see I am actually an evil, bad guy. Now, the letter does not claim what I say is bad. On the contrary, because it is good, it can be used as evidence. This is something entirely new arising in our midst, a novelty based on the theory that our teaching can be accepted and then used to slander the one who is trying to popularize it. That is indeed something new!

This may be a particularly blatant case; still, on a smaller scale such things occur very frequently. If we so much as say anything about such things, then we get threats! Recently a letter informed us that articles and pamphlets, whose titles constitute a direct threat, would soon appear in shop windows and newspapers. As I said, if we dare make a sound, this is what happens. This is a novelty, something new in our movement, and we must pay attention to it.

We can see difficulties cropping up before they have fully emerged, so to speak, for we can predict what will happen. Tell me, should we really never talk about such a case as the one I have mentioned; should we always keep quiet about it? That is certainly possible. However, since the members themselves are not trying to discover such things, nobody in our circles would ever find out. Therefore, we must speak about it. But what happens when we speak about it? Pretty soon you will probably read in another letter—of course, this is just a hypothesis for now that I have been speaking about a private letter before a large number of members. And this is simply because there are certainly people here who will immediately report somewhere or other what I have said tonight. That is happening all the time. Not talking about these things is no good, but talking about them only encourages what is repeatedly being done. We can predict the outcome.

I do not want to criticize; I only want to point out that in a movement where spiritual science lives, that is, where occult things pulsate, difficulties do indeed arise, and we must pay attention to them. If we ignore them, they will continue and get worse. Yes, we have to be prepared for the attacks to get more and more trenchant. If we were a small sect, this would not be the case. But our movement had to become just what it has become, and so that's the way it is.

Much of what comes from outside is understandable although many attacks ostensibly from the outside actually can be proven to have originated within our circles. Just today we have learned that in Dornach we practice eurythmy, which supposedly consists in dancing to the point of reaching a trance, as the dervishes do, and so on. We were told this news was reported by members. Members have reported that we dance until we reach a state of trance! In reality this was told to one of our members by people totally unconnected with us, but these people said they had heard it from members whose names they mentioned.

These difficulties come up because we have united spiritual science and the Society, and we must examine them carefully. If we ignore them, we cannot progress properly and we risk the dissolution of our Society and its total annihilation. True, all this does not harm spiritual science as such, but it does harm what spiritual science is also trying to be. It is harmful when people come and tell me that much of what they read about spiritual science interested them, but then they sat at a table in a boarding house and heard a lady prattle on about theosophy and say all kinds of things, and, of course, they feel they cannot join a Society where such a lot of rubbish is talked that's supposed to be theosophy. Now, this is not an isolated case; this happens again and again in one way or another.

Speaking about these things at the end of a serious talk may be misunderstood. However, it is absolutely necessary, my dear friends, that you know about them and pay attention to them. Our Society must be the carrier and helper of spiritual science; however, it can easily develop in such a way that it works against what spiritual science is to bring to world evolution. Naturally, in the individual case it is easy to understand that much of this damage could not be prevented. Yet we can be sure that the damage will look quite different if we pay attention to it and if we ourselves try to keep to a certain line, a certain direction, so to speak. Sometimes it is indeed extremely difficult, but also necessary, to take a hard line in a certain direction. Then novelties like the ones I just described will be rightly judged. It does not happen anywhere else that a person is refuted with his own works, for the idea of accepting a person's teaching in order to refute him with them is in itself absurd and foolish. Of course, if someone talks nonsense, you can use his nonsense against him, but that is not the point here. Rather, the new twist here is that the teaching is accepted and the person is refuted on the basis of his teaching.

On a smaller scale, things like that are very widespread. And they are not far removed from another evil I will also speak about before coming to a close. Indeed, it happens nowhere else as often as in our movement that somebody does something one can condemn, in fact, has to condemn. Then people take sides. For example, somebody may say something against the leading personalities in our Society, or against long-standing members, or against the Vorstand, as we unfortunately have to call it. Yet, even if the allegations are completely unfounded and perhaps only made up, clearly revealing the accuser's underlying motivation, you will rarely find that people try to discover whether the unfortunate Vorstand is right. Instead, people immediately take sides with the person who is wrong.

In fact, that is the rule here: people take sides with those who are wrong, and write letters asking the victims of the attack to do something to preserve the friendship, to straighten things out again—after all, one must show love. When somebody commits an unkind deed against another, people do not write to the one who did the deed. Instead, they write to the one who suffered it that he should show some kindness and that it would be very unloving not to do something to set things right again. It never occurs to them to ask this of the one who is wrong. Such peculiar things happen in our circle.

Of certain other things we will not even speak; nevertheless, there may of course come a time when we have to speak about them too. Today, we wanted to talk about a serious topic since we are living in a serious time and our movement is to influence it in a serious way. Still, we absolutely had to point out these peculiar things. You must pay attention to them, for things are indeed happening that you will find hard to believe if you hear about them. Nevertheless, we constantly have to deal with such things, and nobody should misunderstand that I had to speak about them; instead you should all reflect on them a bit.

It is our intention not to have as long a break between lectures as we had in the past. We may be able to meet again in fall; however, it is better not to promise anything specific in this time of uncertainties and obstacles. And so I ask you to use the picture I have tried to paint in this winter of our souls and to let your souls dwell on it during this summer. Bring to life in your souls, in a kind of meditation, what we have talked about and reflect on the basic requirements for the integration of our spiritual science into the general culture.¹⁰

And so let us now part, my dear friends, in the realization that we can do much to help integrate what we take seriously into our times if we are all really committed to it. People now sacrifice much more than ever before in such numbers and in so short a time. We are living in a hard time, a time of suffering. May the hardships and sufferings also be a summons to us. No matter how difficult it may be to incorporate the spiritual into human evolution, it has to happen. However much or however little we can do as individuals, let us do it! Let us try to understand the right way to do our part so that what cannot come about of itself but has to be done through people will result. Of course, there will also be help from the spiritual world. Thus, let us remain united in thoughts like this even when we will be apart for a while. People who are united in spirit are always together. Neither space nor time can separate them, and particularly not a more or less short span of time. Let us remain united in thoughts that try again to penetrate a little bit what I have said here in these days to your souls.

We must take in the full weight of the significance of the truths connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us realize that in order to understand this or that we have to be in the solitude of our souls and return there again and again. But let us also understand that we belong to humanity and that the One Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha brought something from spiritual heights to the earth for all human beings, for the working together of all people. And let us remember that He said: “When two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in their midst.”

Through all we experience in solitude we can prepare ourselves for what the Christ is destined to be to the world through us. But Christ is in our midst only if we try to carry into the world what we strive for in solitude, and we can do that only if we understand the conditions for carrying it into the world. Let us look at these conditions! Let us open our eyes, and, above all, let us have the courage to admit that things are as they are and must be dealt with accordingly.

When I speak here about Christ, I do so knowing that He is helping because He is an actively living being. We can feel His presence among us; He will help us! But we have to learn His language, and His language today is that of spiritual science. That is the way it is for the present. And we have to find the courage to represent and support this spiritual science as much as we can among ourselves and before others.

This summer, let us reflect upon this and let us meditate on it until we meet again.

• 1. See Lecture Two, note 4.
• 2. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1.
• 3. Franz Hartmann, 1838–1912, doctor and theosophist. Founded his own movement within theosophy.
• 4. Translator's note: The Latin word bonus means “good.”
• 5. James I, 1566–1625, King of Scotland as James VI and of Great Britain as James I. Son of Mary, Queen of Scots. Succeeded to English throne at death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. During his reign group of scholars prepared new version of the Bible in English, called in his honor King James Bible (1611).
• 6. Francisco Suarez, 1548—1617, Spanish theologian and scholastic philosopher. Joined Society of Jesus (1564), considered foremost Jesuit theologian.
• 7. Ignatius of Loyola, 1491–1556, Spanish religious. Founded Society of Jesus in 1539. Began composition of his Spiritual Exercises in 1523.
• 8. Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
  
  Urbaine-Jean-Joseph Leverrier, 1811–1877, French astronomer. Investigated disturbance in the motion of Uranus (1845), making calculations indicating the presence of an unknown planet, which was discovered in 1846 and named Neptune.
• 9. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, 3rd ed., repr., (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1989).
• 10. After these words, Rudolf Steiner spoke about the day care nursery the members of the Anthroposophical Society in Berlin had organized:
  
  “I would like to add here that our dear friends who organized and cared so devotedly for our day care nursery are concerned that it might be forgotten—not completely of course, but perhaps almost forgotten. Naturally, we will have a kind of vacation, but after that the nursery will have to open again. Then we will need some money and, above all, some dear friends who will help with the day care—of course, only those who can help. Maybe there are women here who could help with the cooking or something like that. All this is needed. Those who have worked in the nursery and know something about such matters can tell you that its results are very good. The children gained something from having come here,- something has been made of them. Therefore, I would like to ask that the women who could take on this task again do so as a labor of love. Of course, if you take on such a task, you have to stay with it. If you cannot make a certain commitment to it, it is better not to take it on. For example, we cannot have somebody promising to be in the nursery at 5 o'clock and then send a note in the afternoon to cancel; we will not be able to find somebody else to fill in on such short notice. We have to know about cancellations at least one day in advance. Thus, I now ask those friends who can work in the nursery to contact Frau Dannenberg, who, together with others, has done so much for the nursery, so that the nursery can open again in winter.”

If you follow the spirit of the studies we have made here during the last few days, you will find it comprehensible that not only a guiding and directing of the events on our Earth and above all in human evolution takes place through the Beings and forces of the various hierarchies, but that the Beings of these hierarchies themselves go through a sort of evolution, a sort of development. In the last lectures we spoke of how the Beings of this or that hierarchy intervene and guide, how for instance the Spirits of Form in normal and abnormal development organize the races.

Now let us ask ourselves the following: Do these spiritual Beings with whom we are now dealing also progress in their own development? As regards certain spiritual Beings we can during our own period of evolution witness the spectacle that they are, so to speak, progressing a stage further in their own development. Since the Atlantean catastrophe, ever since the post-Atlantean development began, we are living in an age in which certain Archangels, certain Beings of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi are ascending into the Hierarchy of the Archai, or Spirits of the Age. It is extremely interesting to notice this, for when we observe how the Folk-spirits, the Folk-souls whom we designate as Archangels ascend to a higher rank, then only do we obtain a correct conception of what is actually going on in the great world. This ascent is connected with the fact that into that distribution of humanity, which we must look upon as the division into races, there has been sent, since the Atlantean epoch, a second stream of humanity, of peoples. We must, as a matter of fact, look back very far indeed, back to early Atlantean times, if we want to find the period when the division into the five principal races of which we have spoken took place, if we wish to enquire when those men came to that particular spot in Africa where they then formed the black or Ethiopian race; when those other peoples came to Southern Asia, who compose the Malay race. We should have to look back to early Atlantean times. But later on other streams were sent after these early ones.

While therefore the Earth was already colonized with the foundations of these races, others were sent afterwards to those colonized parts of the Earth. Thus we have to do with a later stream, with a stream which came in later Atlantean times. If we wish to comprehend what was thus accomplished in Europe, Africa and America, in the way of the division of races, whilst Atlantis was gradually crumbling away, and what was then sent later on, towards the end of the Atlantean epoch, and part of which was only sent during the post-Atlantean evolution,—then we must clearly understand that we are dealing with that mighty stream of humanity which pushed forward into Asia, into Indian territory, and that, as has often been pointed out, bodies of people remained at the different points, from which then the various peoples of Asia, Africa and Europe arose. We have to deal therefore with an earlier division and a later advance,—with a second stream. The purpose of this second stream was, that companies of peoples who were each under the guidance of an Archangel were sent out from the West to the East. But these Archangels who were the guiding spiritual powers of these tribes that were sent out, were at different stages of development, in other words, they were nearer to or further away from the rank of a Spirit of the Age.

We have to look in the Far East for that stream of peoples whose Archangel was the first one to attain the rank of a Spirit of the Age. It was that stream of peoples who formed the ruling class of that land and laid the foundations of the first post-Atlantean civilization after their Archangel had become the Spirit of the Age, after he had been promoted to the first Spirit of the Age or Archai of the post-Atlantean age of civilization. Now this Spirit of the Age guided the primal sacred culture of India and made it the leading one in the first post-Atlantean age of civilization. The other peoples of Asia who were gradually developing, were for a long time under the guidance merely of Archangels.

Those peoples of Europe who had remained behind when the migration from West to East took place, were also under the guidance of Archangels for a long time after the Archangel of India had risen to the rank of an Archai and then acted through intuition upon those great Teachers of India, the Holy Rishis, who because they were aided by this exalted and important Spirit were able to fulfill their high mission in the manner already described. This Spirit of the Age worked on for a long time, whilst the people lying to the north of ancient India were still under the guidance of the Archangel. When the Spirit of the Age of India had fulfilled his mission, he was promoted to the guidance of the entire evolution of post-Atlantean humanity.

At the time which we designate as the Old Persian age, we have that Spirit of Personality, the Spirit of the Age, who was the guide or intuitor of the great Zarathustra or Zoroaster, the Zarathustra of ancient times. This again is an example of how an Archangel, a Folk-soul, rises to the rank of a Spirit of the Age, that is the very spectacle which, as we stated at the beginning of our lecture to-day, we are experiencing in our own time, that the Archangels work themselves up, through the mission they accomplish, to the rank of guiding and ruling Spirits of the Age.

A later rise in rank resulted from the Egyptian people and its Archangel on the one hand and from the Chaldean people and its Archangel on the other. Then took place the event in which the Archangel of the Egyptian people rose to the rank of a guiding Spirit of the Age, and undertook, so to speak, the guidance of that which formerly devolved upon the Chaldean Archangel; so that the leader in the Chaldæan-Egyptian age became the third mighty guiding Spirit of the Age who had gradually evolved himself up from the rank of the Egyptian Archangel. But that was also the age when another important development took place, which ran parallel with the Egyptian-Chaldæan civilization and with which is connected that to which we had to draw special attention in our last lecture.

We have seen that everything belonging to the Semitic tribes assumed special significance, and that from these Jahve or Jehovah had chosen one in particular and made that His own people. Hence, because He had elected one particular race to be His special people, He employed at first, while this race was gradually growing up, a sort of Archangel to be His representative with the people; so that in ancient times the gradually growing Semitic people had an Archangel who was under the continuous inspiration of Jahve or Jehovah, and who then later on grew up into a Spirit of the Age. Hence, besides the ordinary, evolving Spirits of the Age of the Old Indian, Old Persian and Old Chaldean peoples, there was yet another one who played a special part by working in a single people.

Thus we have a Spirit of the Age who in a certain respect appears in the mission of a Folk-spirit, one whom we must call the Semitic Folk-spirit. His was a very special task. This will be comprehensible to you if you call to mind that in reality this particular people was lifted out of normal evolution and had a special guidance, that so to say, special arrangements were made for the guidance of this people. Through these special arrangements this people had received a mission which was really of quite special importance and significance for the post-Atlantean epoch, and which was distinguished from the missions of all other peoples. One can best understand this mission of the Semitic people by taking it in connection with the missions of the various other peoples of the post-Atlantean epoch.

There are two spiritual currents in mankind. The one must be called, if we wish to designate it rightly, that which proceeds from plurality, which we might also say proceeds from Monadology, which therefore conceives the origin and source of existence as consisting primarily of a number of Beings and forces. You may look round wherever you will in the world, and you will see that, in some way or other, the peoples of the post-Atlantean epoch started from several gods. Begin with the trinity of ancient India, which was later expressed as Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. Look at the German mythology; there you find the trinity of Odin, HSnir, LSdur, and so on. Everywhere you will find a trinity and this again divided into a larger number. You find this peculiarity not only where myths and teachings about the gods appear, but also in the philosophies, in which we meet with the same thing again as monadology. This is the current which, because it proceeds from a number, may assume the greatest possible variety. We might say, that in the post-Atlantean epoch, from the farthest East in India and in a wide curve through Asia across to Europe, this worship of a number,—which on the whole is expressed in our Anthroposophy by our recognition of a number of different Beings belonging to the various hierarchies,—has acquired its manifold representations and forms.

This worship of many had to be opposed by a synthetic, all-comprising movement which proceeded strictly from the Monon, Monism. The actual inspirers, the impulse-givers of all Monotheism and Monism, of the worship of a single Divinity, are the Semitic peoples. It is in their nature, and if you remember what was said in the last lecture you will know that it is in their blood, to represent the one god, the Monon.

If man were however to look out into the great cosmos, he would not get very far if he were always to emphasize that there is only unity, a Monon at the foundation of the world. Monism or Monotheism, considered alone, can only represent a final ideal, but it would never lead to a real understanding of the world, to a comprehensive and exact view of it. Nevertheless in the post-Atlantean age the current of Monotheism had also to be represented, so that the task was given to one people to introduce the impulse, the ferment for this Monotheism. This task was given to the Semitic people. Hence you see how the Monistic principle is represented by this people with a certain abstract severity, with an abstract relentlessness, and how all the other peoples, in so far as their different Divine Beings are comprised in unity, received the impulse for this from them. The Monistic impulse has always come from that quarter. The other peoples have pluralistic impulses.

It is extremely important that this should be borne in mind, and one who examines the continuation of the old Hebrew impulse can still see at the present day Monotheism ruling in its greatest extreme among the learned Rabbis, in their learned Rabbinism. It is the task of this particular people to give as an impulse that the world-principle can only be unity. Therefore we might say: All the other nations, peoples, and Spirits of the Age had an analytic task, the task of representing the world-principle as being composed of different Beings; for example, the most extreme abstraction of the Monon in India was soon divided into a trinity, as the one god of Christianity is divided into Three Persons. All the other peoples have the task of analyzing the foundations of the world and thus to fill their several parts with rich contents, to fill themselves with rich material for conceptions that may lovingly comprehend the phenomena. The Semitic people has the task of ignoring all plurality and synthetically devoting itself to the unity; hence, for example, through this very impulse, the power of speculation, the power of synthetic thought is the greatest imaginable in the Kabbalistic studies.

All that could possibly ever be spun out of the unity by the synthetic, inclusive activity of the ‘I’, has been spun out by the Semitic Spirit in the course of thousands of years. That is the great polarity between Pluralism and Monism, and that is the significance of the Semitic impulse in the world. Monism is not possible without Pluralism, and the latter is not possible without the former. Therefore we must recognize the necessity for both.

The objective language of facts often leads to quite different knowledge from that to which the sympathies or antipathies which reign here or there lead. Therefore we must thoroughly understand the several Folk-spirits. Whereas the leaders of the several peoples over in Asia and Africa had long since risen to the rank of Spirits of the Age or Spirits of Personality and some of them were even already expecting to transform themselves from Spirits of the Age to the next higher stage, to Spirits of Form,—just as for instance that Spirit of the Age who was active in old India had in certain respects already risen to the rank of a Spirit of Form,—the several peoples of Europe were still for a long time guided by their several Archangels. It was only in the fourth post-Atlantean age that the Archangel of Greece raised himself out of the various peoples of Europe (who were being guided by their Archangels), to a leading position, by becoming the chief Spirit of the Age of the fourth, the Greek age of the post-Atlantean epoch; so that we see the Archangel of Greece rise to the rank of an Archai, a Spirit of Personality. That for which this Archangel of Greece had prepared himself became manifest, when he had become the Spirit of the Age, in Asia, Africa and Europe, whose centre the Greek people had become. The Archangel of the Greeks developed into an Archai, the active Zeitgeist of the Egyptians and also that of the Persians had risen to be a sort of Spirit of Form. What we are now coming to is something exceptionally interesting in the course of post-Atlantean evolution. As a result of all the development which the Archangel of the Greeks had formerly gone through, he could pass comparatively quickly through that which enabled him to take a specially prominent position as Spirit of the Age. Hence, however, something of the greatest significance occurred in the fourth age of post-Atlantean civilization.

We know that at that time the event occurred which we describe as the reception by humanity of the Christ-impulse. The Christ-impulse was received, the Mystery of Golgotha took place. The impulse then given was, in the course of the following centuries and thousands of years, gradually to spread over the whole earth. This required not only the fact that this event took place, but it required certain guiding and directing Beings from the ranks of the hierarchies; and then occurred the most remarkable and interesting event, that—at a definite moment of time, which practically coincided with the coming to Earth of the Christ-impulse—the Greek Spirit of the Age renounced for this our present period his ascent into the region of the Spirits of Form, which would at that time have been possible to him, and became the guiding Spirit of the Age, who then acts on through the ages. He became the representative guiding Spirit of exoteric Christianity; so that the Archai, the guiding Spirit of the Greeks, placed himself in front of the Christ-impulse. Hence the Greek nation crumbled away so quickly at the time when Christianity developed, because it resigned its guiding Spirit of the Age that he might become the leader of exoteric Christianity. The Spirit of the Age of Ancient Greece became the missionary, the inspirer, or rather the ‘intuitor’ of the out-spreading exoteric Christianity. Here therefore we have before us the spectacle of a renunciation such as we have spoken of, in a concrete case. The Spirit of the Age of the Greeks, because he had fulfilled his mission in the fourth post-Atlantean age of civilization so exceptionally well, might have risen into a higher sphere, but he renounced that, and by so doing became the guiding Spirit of the out-spreading, exoteric Christianity, and in that capacity he worked further among the various peoples.

Another such renunciation occurred on another occasion, and this second renunciation is particularly interesting, especially to those who call themselves Anthroposophists. Whereas over in Asia and right down to the Egyptians and Greeks the several Archangels develop into the Spirits of the Age, we have on the whole in Europe various peoples and tribes who are guided by their several Archangels. Thus whereas the corresponding Archangels who were once upon a time sent from the West towards the East, had ascended to the rank of Spirits of the Age, we still have an Archangel in Europe who worked in the Germanic and above all in the Celtic peoples; in those peoples who, at the time when Christianity started, were still spread over a great part of Western Europe, as far as the present Hungary, across South Germany and the Alps. These peoples had the Celtic Folk-spirit for their Archangel. The peoples belonging to the Celtic Spirit were also spread far up towards the north-east of Europe. They were guided by an important Archangel who, soon after the Christian impulse had been given to humanity, had renounced becoming an Archai, a Spirit of Personality, and decided to remain at the stage of an Archangel and to be subordinate in future to the various Spirits of the Age who should arise in Europe. Hence also the Celtic peoples as one combined people dwindled away, because their Archangel had practiced a special resignation and had undertaken a special mission. That is a characteristic example of how in such a case the ‘remaining-behind’ helped to inaugurate special missions.

Now what became of the Archangel of the Celtic peoples, when he had renounced becoming a Spirit of Personality? He became the inspiring Spirit of esoteric Christianity; and in particular of those teachings and impulses which underlie esoteric Christianity; the real true esoteric Christianity comes from his inspirations. The secret, hidden place for those who were initiated into these Mysteries was to be found in Western Europe, and there the inspiration was given by this guiding Spirit, who had originally gone through an important training as Archangel of the Celtic people, renounced his further ascent, and had undertaken another mission, that of becoming the inspirer of esoteric Christianity, which was to work on further through the Mysteries of the Holy Grail, through Rosicrucianism. Here you have an example of a renunciation, a remaining behind of one of these Beings of the hierarchies, and at the same time you have a concrete example in which you can at once recognize the significance of thus remaining behind. Although this Archangel could have risen to the rank of an Archai, he remained in that of an Archangel and was able to lead the important current of esoteric Christianity, which is to work on further through the various Spirits of the Age. No matter how these Spirits of the Age may work, this esoteric Christianity will be a source for everything which may again be changed and metamorphosed under the influence of the various Spirits of the Age. Thus we have another example of how such a renunciation taken place, whilst on the other hand we are experiencing in our age the mighty spectacle of Folk-spirits being promoted to the rank of Spirits of the Age.

Now in Europe we have the various Germanic peoples. These peoples who originally were guided by one Archangel, were destined to come gradually under the guidance of many different Archangels, in order to form individual peoples in various ways. It is of course exceedingly difficult to speak impartially of these things,—difficult only for the reason that in certain respects passion and jealousy may easily be aroused. Hence certain mysteries belonging to this evolution can only be lightly touched upon. From among the number of those Archangels proceeded the Archai who is the guiding Spirit of the Age of our fifth age of civilization in the post-Atlantean epoch. He took the precedence long, long after one of the Archangels of the Germanic peoples had gone through a certain training. The Spirit of the Age who was the Folk-spirit in the Græco-Latin age became that Spirit of the Age who, as you know, was at a later time occupied in spreading exoteric Christianity. Later Roman history was also guided by a kind of Spirit of the Age, who had risen from having been the Archangel of the Roman people and had united his activity with that of the Christian Spirit of the Age. Both of these were the teachers of that Archangel who guided the Germanic peoples, who had been one of their guiding Archangels and had then raised himself to be the Zeitgeist, or the Spirit of the Age of the fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization.

There was a great deal to be done, but above all it was necessary that a strong individualizing and intermingling of the various folk-elements should take place in Europe. This was only possible because, whilst over in Asia and Africa the Archangels had long since ascended to Spirits of the Age, in Europe the guidance was still carried on by the Archangels themselves, because the several small peoples were guided by their Folk-souls and, without troubling about the Spirits of the Age, were completely devoted to the impulses of the Folk-spirits themselves. At the time when the Christian impulse passed over humanity, there was in Europe an intermingled activity of several Folk-spirits who were filled with a sense of freedom; every one of them went his own way and therefore made it difficult for a guiding Spirit of the Age to arise for the fifth age of civilization, to lead the several Folk-spirits. In order to make possible that people which occupies the country of France there was an intermingling of the Roman, Celtic and Frank folk-elements, and on account of this the whole guidance naturally assumed a different form. It passed from the several guiding Archangels,—who had received other tasks,—over to others. (In the case of the guiding Archangel of the Celts, we have said what his mission was; and in the same way we could state what were the missions of the Archangels of the other peoples.) Hence among the peoples which arose through such interminglings came other Archangels, who entered upon their office when the various elements intermingled. Thus in fact for a long time even in the Middle Ages, in Central and Northern Europe the leadership was chiefly in the hands of the Archangels who were only gradually influenced by that common Spirit of the Age who went in front of the Christ-impulse. In many cases the several Folk-spirits in Europe became the servants of the Christ Spirit of the Age. The European Archangels placed themselves in the service of this universal Christ Spirit of the Age whilst the several peoples were hardly in a position to allow any of the Archangels to rise to the rank of a Spirit of the Age. Only in the sixteenth to the seventeenth century (beginning from about the twelfth century), was preparation made for the development of the guiding Spirit of the Age of the fifth post-Atlantean age, under whose guidance we still are to-day. He belongs just as much to the great directing Spirits of the Age, as those who were the great directing Spirits of the Age during the Egyptian-Chaldæan-Babylonian, Old Persian, and Indian ages of civilization. But this Spirit of the Age of our fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization worked in a very unique manner. He had to make a kind of compromise with one of the old Spirits of the Age who worked before the Christian-impulse, viz., the Egyptian Spirit of the Age, who, as we have heard, had in a certain respect risen to the rank of a Spirit of Form. Thus it comes about that our fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization, in which we now are, is really ruled by a Spirit of the Age who is in a certain way very much under the influence and impulses of the old Egyptian civilization, and of a Spirit of Form who is only at quite an elementary stage.

That caused the many rifts and divisions in our age. Our Spirit of the Age in the fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization is striving in a certain respect to raise himself up to spiritual heights and to raise the fourth post-Atlantean age of civilization to a higher stage. But that includes the materialistic tendency and inclination, and according as the various Archangels, the various Folk-souls, have greater or less inclination towards this materialistic tendency, does a more or less materialistic people arise under the guidance of this Spirit of the Age of the fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization, and the people itself gives a more or less materialistic shade to the Spirit of the Age. On the other hand an idealistic people is one which gives the Spirit of the Age a shade which is in the direction of Idealism.

Now from the twelfth to the sixteenth century something gradually developed, something which in a certain respect worked beside the Christian Spirit of the Age,—who is the on-working Greek Spirit of the Age,—so that in fact, in a wonderful manner, that which we call the Christian Spirit of the Age,—who was united with a real Archai of the fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization,—streamed into our culture; and besides this, the influence of old Egypt was also active, whose Spirit of the Age had raised himself to a certain rank among the Spirits of Form. Now for the very reason that such a triad is at work in our whole culture, it has become possible for the many different kinds of culture and the various Folk-souls to appear in our fifth age. It became possible for the Spirit of the Age to manifest the most varied colors and shades in his activity. The Archangels, who received their orders from the Spirit of the Age, worked in very many different ways.

Those of you who dwell in the North will be interested in something which in our next studies we shall have to go into more closely. The following question will especially interest you: How did that Archangel work, who was once upon a time sent up to Norway with the northern, the Scandinavian peoples, and from whom the various Archangels of Europe—especially those of Western, Central and Northern Europe—received their inspirations? In the world outside it would be reckoned as folly that the very spot in the continent of Europe should be indicated, from whence at one time the greatest impulses streamed forth in all directions, the spot which was the seat of sublime Spirits before the Celtic Folk-Spirit as Celtic Archangel had founded a new Centre in the noble citadel of the Grail. From that spot which in ancient times was the centre for the outpouring of the spirituality of Europe, there also streamed forth that which was first of all given to the Archangel of the Northern peoples as his mission. To the external world it would, as I say, appear folly, if we were to indicate the spot from which radiates that which works into the various Germanic tribes, as that part which now lies over Central Germany, but is really situated above the earth. If you were to draw something like a circle, so that the towns of Detmold and Paderborn were to lie within it, you would then arrive at that neighborhood from whence poured forth the mission of the most exalted Spirits who extended their mission to Northern and Western Europe. Hence, because the great centre of inspiration was there, later on the Saga said that Asgard had actually been situated on this part of the earth's surface. There, however, in the distant past, was that great centre of inspiration, which later on transferred its chief activity to the centre of the Holy Grail.

The peoples of Scandinavia, with their first Archangels, were at the same time given quite different tendencies, tendencies which at the present time are really only still expressed in the unique form of the Scandinavian mythology. If we compare, in the occult sense, the Scandinavian mythology with other mythologies which have reigned upon the earth, we may know that this Scandinavian mythology represents the primal tendencies of the Archangel who was sent up here to the North, the primal tendencies which have retained their original form, such as we would have to see in a child, when particular talents, latent genius, etc., remain at the stage of childhood. In the Archangel who was sent to Scandinavia we have those tendencies which were expressed later in the unique form of the Scandinavian mythology. Hence the great significance of the Scandinavian mythology for the comprehension of the real, inner being of the Scandinavian Folk-soul. Hence also the great significance which the understanding of this mythology has for the further development of this Archangel, who certainly had within him, in a certain way, the tendency to rise to the rank of an Archai. But to that end several things are necessary. It is necessary that in quite a definite way those tendencies should develop which in certain respects have to-day withdrawn behind the dim and shadowy influence of that Spirit of the Age who had placed himself in front of the impulse of Christianity. Although several things in the Germanic-Scandinavian mythology may appear curiously like the presentations of the Greek mythology, it must nevertheless be said that there is no other mythology on the earth which, in its remarkable construction and unique development, gives a more significant or a clearer picture of the evolution of the world than this Scandinavian mythology, so that this picture may be taken as a preparatory stage for the Anthroposophical picture of the evolution of the world.

In the way in which it has been developed out of the tendencies of the Archangel, Germanic mythology is in its pictures most significantly like that which, as the Anthroposophical picture of the world, is gradually to grow for humanity. The point in question will be, how those tendencies which once upon a time an Archangel brought with him into the world, may be developed after he has had the advantage of being educated by the Christ—Spirit of the Age. These tendencies will be able to become an important part in the guiding Spirit of the Age, if at a later stage in its development, this people understands how to bring to perfection the tendencies it has received at an earlier epoch.

This gives only a slight indication of an important problem, an important evolution of a European Archangel; we have indicated, in how far he has the foundations for a Spirit of the Age. At this point we shall stop for a little while, and then continue our studies in such a manner that, from the configuration of the Folk-soul, we shall endeavor to enter into an esoteric study of Mythology; and, in doing so, the description of the very interesting character of the Germanic and especially also of the Scandinavian mythology, will be brought before us as a special chapter.