The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Christ Impulse as Conqueror of Matter.

In order to complete the task that we have envisioned, we must now study the character of our own time in the same sense in which we have studied the four post-Atlantean epochs up to the appearance of Christianity. We have seen how, after the Atlantean catastrophe, there evolved the ancient Indian epoch, the ancient Persian epoch, and the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. In the description of the fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin, we have seen that in a certain connection man at that time worked his way into the physical plane and that this working into the physical world then reached its low point. Why is this time, which from one side we call the low point of human evolution, nevertheless so attractive, so sympathetic, for the modern observer'? Because this low point became the point of departure for many significant events of the present cultural epoch. We have seen how, in this Greco-Latin culture, a marriage was achieved between spirit and matter in Greek art. We have seen how the Greek temple was a building where the god could dwell, and that man could say, “I have brought matter so far that for me it can be an expression of the spirit, so that in every detail I can feel something of this spirit.” Thus it is with all Greek works of art. Thus it is with everything we have to say about the life of the Greeks. This world of artistic creations, into which the spirit was implanted, made matter so terribly attractive that among us in Middle Europe the great Goethe, in his Faust tragedy, sought to portray his own union with this epoch of culture.

If in the succeeding time the progress of culture had continued in the same direction, what would have been the result? We can make this clear through a simple sketch. In the Greco-Latin time man had descended to his lowest point, but in such a way that in no piece of matter was the spirit lost to him. In all the creations of this time, the spirit was incorporated in matter. When we look at the figure of a Greek god, we see everywhere how the Greek creative genius imprinted the spiritual on the external matter. The Greek had conquered matter, but the spirit had not been lost. The normal course of culture would have been that man should descend below this level, plunging down below matter so that the spirit would become the slave of matter. We need only turn an unprejudiced glance on our environment and we shall see that, on one side, this has actually happened. The expression of this descent is materialism. True, in no period has man mastered matter more than in our time, but only for the satisfaction of bodily needs. We need only consider with what primitive means the gigantic pyramids were built, and then compare this with the boldness and loftiness with which the Egyptian spirit moved among the mysteries of world-existence. We need only think of the deep sense in which, for the Egyptians, their pictures of the gods were images of what took place in the cosmos and on earth in the remote past. One who, at that time in Egypt, could look into the spiritual world, lived in something that became invisible in the Atlantean time but was a fact of evolution in the Lemurian time. One who was not an initiate, who belonged to the common people, could still participate in these spiritual worlds with his whole feeling and his whole soul. Yet how primitive were the means with which these men had to work externally on the physical plane. Compare this with our own time. We need only read the innumerable eulogies that our contemporaries write about the enormous strides made in modern times. The science of the spirit makes no objection to this. Human achievements are increasing through the conquest of the elements. But let us look at the thing from another side.

Let us look back to far-distant times when men ground their corn between simple stones, yet could look up into tremendous heights of the spiritual life. The majority of men today have no inkling of the heights that were surveyed at that time. They have no inkling of what a Chaldean initiate experienced when, in his special manner, he saw the stars, animals, plants, and minerals in connection with man, when he recognized the healing forces. The Egyptian priests were men to whom the physicians of today could not hold a candle. The men of today cannot penetrate into these heights of the spiritual world. Only through the science of the spirit can an idea be formed of what the ancient Chaldean-Egyptian initiates saw. For example, what we are offered today by way of interpretation of the inscriptions, in which deep mysteries are contained, is only a caricature of the ancient significance. Thus we find that in ancient times man had little power over the tools and equipment for labor on the physical plane, but he had enormous forces in relation to the spiritual world.

Man is descending ever more deeply into matter, and more and more he devotes his spiritual powers to conquering the physical plane. Can we not say that the human spirit is becoming the slave of the physical plane? In a certain way man descends even below the physical plane. Man has devoted enormous spiritual force to inventing the steamship, the railway, and the telephone, but what does he use these for? What a mass of spirit is thus diverted from life for the higher worlds. The spiritual scientist understands this and does not criticize in our time, because he knows that it was necessary to conquer the physical plane. Yet it is true that the spirit has plunged down into the physical world. Is it important for the spirit that, instead of grinding our own corn in a quern, we should be able to call Hamburg by long-distance telephone and order what we want to be sent from America by steamer? Great spiritual force has been applied to building up such connections with America and many other foreign lands, but we may ask whether the aim of all this is not the satisfaction of the material life, of our bodily needs. Since everything in the world is limited, there is not much spiritual force left over whereby man may ascend to the spiritual world after he has devoted so much to the material. The spirit has become the slave of matter. The Greek incorporated the spirit in his works of art, but today the spirit has descended very far. We have proof of this in the many technical and mechanical arrangements of our industry, which serve only material needs. Now let us ask whether this process is completed and whether man has descended too far.

This would have been the case were it not for the occurrence that we discussed in the preceding lectures. At the low point of human evolution something was infused into mankind, through the Christ-impulse, that gave the stimulus to a new ascent. The entry of the Christ-impulse into human evolution forms the other side of culture thereafter. It showed the way to the overcoming of matter. It brought the force through which death can be overcome. Thereby it offered to humanity the possibility of again raising itself above the level of the physical plane. This mightiest impulse had to be given, this impulse which became so efficacious that matter could be overcome in the magnificent way that is described in the Gospel of John, in the Baptism in Jordan and the Mystery of Golgotha.

Christ Jesus, who was foretold by the prophets, gave the most powerful impulse of all human evolution. Man had to separate himself from the spiritual worlds in order to attach himself to them again with the Christ-being. But we cannot yet understand this if we do not penetrate still more deeply into the connections of human evolution as a whole.

We must point out that what we call the advent of the Christ on earth is an event that could occur only at the low point, when man had sunk so far. The Greco-Latin period stands in the middle of the seven post-Atlantean epochs. No other period would have been the right one. When man became a personality, God also had to become a personality in order to save him, to give him the possibility of rising again. We have seen that in his Roman citizenship the Roman first became conscious of his personality. Earlier, man still lived in the heights of the spiritual world; now he had descended entirely to the physical plane, and now he had to be led upward again through God himself. We must go more deeply into the third, the fifth, and the intermediate period. We shall not study Egyptian mythology in an academic way, but we must pick out the characteristic points in order to get deeper into the feeling-life of the ancient Egyptians. Then we may ask how this illuminates our own time. There is one thing here that must be weighed carefully.

We have seen how, in the Egyptian myths and mysteries, all the mighty pictures of the Sphinx, of Isis, of Osiris, were memories of ancient human conditions. All this was like a reflection of ancient events on earth. Man looked back into his primeval past and saw his origin. The initiate could experience again the spiritual existence of his forebears. We have seen how man grew out of an original group-soul condition. We could point out how these group-souls were preserved in the forms of the four apocalyptic beasts. Man grew out of this condition in such a way that he gradually refined his body and achieved the development of individuality. We can follow this historically. Let us read the Germania of Tacitus.¹ In the times described there, in the conditions of the Germanic regions in the first century after Christ as there portrayed, we see how the consciousness of the individual is still bound up with the community, how the clan spirit rules, how the Cherusker, for example, still feels himself as a member of his clan. This consciousness is still so strong that the individual seeks vengeance for another of the same group. It finds expression in the custom of the blood-feud. Thus a sort of group-soul condition prevailed. This condition was preserved into late post-Atlantean times, but only as an echo. In the last period of Atlantis the group-consciousness generally died out. It is only stragglers whom we have just described. In reality the men of that time no longer knew anything of the group-soul. In the Atlantean time, however, man did know of it. Then he did not yet say I of himself. This group-soul feeling changed into something else in the following generations.

Strange as it may seem, in ancient times memory had an entirely different meaning and power. What is memory today? Reflect on whether you can still recall the events of your earliest childhood. Probably you can remember very little, and beyond your childhood you cannot go at all. You will remember nothing of what lies before your birth. It was not like this in Atlantean times. Even in the first post-Atlantean time man could remember what his father, grandfather, and ancestors had experienced. There was no sense in saying that between birth and death there was an ego. The ego reached back for centuries in the memory. The ego reached as far as the blood flowed down, from the remotest ancestors to the descendants. At that time the group-ego was not to be thought of as extended in space over the contemporaries, but as proceeding upward in the generations. Therefore, the modern man will never understand what appears as an echo of this in the tales of the patriarchs: that Adam, Noah, and others grew to be so old. They counted their ancestors through several generations upward to their ego. The modern man no longer can form any conception of this. In those days there would have been no sense in giving a single man a name between birth and death. In the whole series of ancestors the memory continued upwards for centuries. As far as man could remember through the centuries, so far was he given his name. Adam was, so to say, the ego that flowed with the blood through the generations. Only when we are acquainted with these actual facts do we know how things really were. Man felt sheltered in this series of generations. This is what the Bible means when it says, “I and Father Abraham are one.” When the adherent of the Old Testament said this, only then did he rightly feel himself as man within the line of ancestry. Among the first post-Atlanteans, even among the Egyptians, this consciousness was still present. Men felt the community of the blood, and this caused something special for the spiritual life.

When a man dies today he has a life in kamaloka, after which comes a relatively long life in Devachan. But this is already a result of the Christ-impulse. This was not the case in pre-Christian times; then a man felt himself connected with the times of his forefathers. Today a man must wean himself in kamaloka from the wishes and desires to which he has accustomed himself in the physical world; the duration of this condition depends upon this. We cling to our life between birth and death; in ancient times man clung to much more than this. Man was connected with the physical plane in such a way that he felt himself as a member of the whole physical series of generations. Thus, in kamaloka, one did not merely have to work out the clinging to an individual physical existence, but one really had to traverse all that was connected with the generations, up to the remotest ancestor. One experienced this backwards. One result of this was the deep truth underlying the expression: “To feel oneself sheltered in Abraham's bosom.” One felt that after death he went upward through the whole row of ancestors, and the road that one had to travel was called “the way to the fathers.” Only when one had traversed this path could he ascend into the spiritual worlds and travel the way of the gods. At that time the soul traveled first the path of the fathers and then the path of the gods.

Now the various cultures did not come to abrupt ends. The essence of the Indian culture remained, although it underwent a change. It was preserved alongside the following cultures. In the continuation of the Indian culture that was contemporaneous with the Egyptian, something similar arose. Today we easily confuse what was later with what was earlier. Therefore it was emphasized that I was giving indications only out of the remotest periods. Among other things, the Indians now took up the view of the path of the fathers and the path of the gods.

As a man became more initiated, freed himself more from dependence on home and the fathers, became more homeless, the path of the gods became longer and the path of the fathers became shorter. One who clung closely to the fathers had a long father-path and a short god-path. In the terminology of the Orient, the way of the fathers was called Pitriyana and the way of the gods was called Devayana. When we speak of Devachan, we should understand that this is only a distorted form of the word Devayana, the path of the gods. An old Vedantist would simply laugh at us if we came to him with descriptions such as we give of Devachan. It is not so easy to find one's way into the oriental methods of thinking and contemplating. As to those who pretend to give out oriental truths, these truths often must be protected from just such people. Many a person today who accepts something as Indian teaching has no idea that he is receiving a confused doctrine. The modern science of the spirit does not claim to be an oriental-Indian teaching. In certain circles people love what comes from far away, perhaps from America, but the truth is at home everywhere. Antiquarian research belongs to scholars, but the science of the spirit is life. Its truth can be checked everywhere at any time. We must keep this before our minds.

What we have just mentioned was practice as well as theory among the ancient Egyptians. What was taught in the great mysteries was also practical., Something special was connected with this, as we shall learn as we penetrate further. The mysteries of the ancient Egyptians strove for something special. Today we may smile when we are told how the Pharaoh was at a certain time a kind of initiate, and how the Egyptian stood in relation to the Pharaoh and to his state institutions. For the modern European scholar it is particularly comical when the Pharaoh gives himself the name, “Son of Horus,” or even “Horus.” It seems singular to us that a man should be venerated as a god; nothing more abstruse could be thought of. But the man of today does not understand the Pharaoh and his mission. He does not know what the Pharaoh-initiation really was. Today we see in a people, only a group of persons who can be counted. To the man of today a people² is a meaningless abstraction. The reality is simply a certain number of persons filling a certain area. But this is not a people for one who accepts the standpoint of occultism.³ As a single member such as the finger belongs to the whole body, so do the single persons within the people belong to the folk-soul. They are as it were embedded in it, but the folk-soul is not physical; it is real only as an etheric form. It is an absolute reality; the initiate can commune with this soul. It is even much more real for him than are single individualities among the people, far more so than a single person. For the occultist spiritual experiences are entirely valid, and there the folk-soul is something thoroughly real. Let us examine briefly the connection between the folk-soul and the individuals.

If we think of the single individuals, the single egos, as little circles, for external physical observation they will be separate beings. But one who observes these single individualities spiritually sees them as though embedded in an etheric cloud, and this is the incorporation of the folk-soul. If the single person thinks, feels, and wills something, he radiates his feelings and thoughts into the common folk-soul. This is colored by his radiations, and the folk-soul becomes permeated by the thoughts and feelings of the single persons. When we look away from the physical man and observe only his etheric and astral bodies, and then observe the astral body of an entire people, we see that the astral body of the entire people receives its color-shadings from the single persons.

The Egyptian initiate knew this, but he also knew something further. When he observed this folk-substance, the ancient Egyptian asked himself what really lived in the folk-soul. What did he see therein? He saw in his folk-soul the re-embodiment of Isis. He saw how she had once wandered among men. Isis worked in the folk-soul. He saw in her the same influences as those that proceeded from the moon; these forces worked in the folk-soul. What the Egyptian saw as Osiris worked in the individual spiritual radiations; therein he recognized the Osiris-influence. But Isis he saw in the folk-soul.

Thus Osiris was not visible on the physical plane. He had died for the physical plane. Only when a man had died was Osiris again placed before his eyes. Therefore we read in the Book of the Dead how the Egyptian felt that he was united with Osiris in death, that he himself became an Osiris. Osiris and Isis worked together in the state and in the single person, as his members.

Now let us again consider the Pharaoh, remembering that this was a reality for him. Each Pharaoh received certain instructions before his initiation, to the end that he should not grasp this with his intellect only, but that it should become truth and reality for him. He had to be brought to the point where he could say to himself, “If I am to rule this people, I must sacrifice a portion of my spirituality, I must extinguish a part of my astral and etheric bodies. The Osiris and Isis principles must work in me. I must will nothing personally; if I say something, Osiris must speak; if I do something, Osiris must do it; if I move my hand, Osiris and Isis must be active. I must represent Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris.”

Initiation is not erudition. But to be able to do something like this, to be able to make such a sacrifice, pertains to initiation. What the Pharaoh sacrificed of himself could be filled up with portions of the folk-soul. The part of himself that the Pharaoh relinquished was just what gave him power. For justified power does not arise through a man's raising his own personality; it arises through his taking into himself something that transcends the boundaries of personality, a higher spiritual power. The Pharaoh took such a power into himself, and this was externally portrayed through the Uraeus-serpent.

Again we have peered into a mystery. We have seen something much higher than the explanations that are given today when the Pharaohs are discussed.

If the Egyptian cherished such feelings, what would have to be his particular concern? It would be his particular concern that the folk-soul should become as strong as possible, rich in good forces, and that it should not be diminished. The Egyptian initiates could not reckon with, what man possessed through blood-relationship. But what the forefathers had accumulated as spiritual riches, was to become the property of the individual soul. This is indicated for us in the judging of the dead, where the man is brought before the forty-two assessors of the dead. There his deeds are weighed. Who are the forty-two judges of the dead? They are the ancestors.⁴ It was believed that each man's life was interwoven with the lives of forty-two ancestors. Therefore he had to answer to them as to whether he actually had taken up what they had offered to him spiritually. In this way, what was contained in the Egyptian mystery-teachings was something that was to become practical for life, but which could also be turned to good account for the time beyond death, for the life between death and a new birth. In the Egyptian epoch man was already entangled in the physical world. But at the same time he had to look up to his ancestors in the other world, and cultivate in the physical world what he had inherited from them. Through this interest he was fettered to the physical plane, since he had to continue working on what his fathers had created.

Now we must reflect that the souls of today are reincarnations of the ancient Egyptian souls. For the souls of today, who experienced it in their Egyptian incarnation, what is the significance of what happened at that time? All that the soul experienced at that time between death and a new birth has been woven into the soul, weaves within it, and has arisen again in our fifth period, which brings the fruits of the third period. These fruits appear in the inclinations and ideas of modern times, which have their causes in the ancient Egyptian world. Nowadays all the ideas emerge which at that time were laid down in the soul as germs. Therefore it is easy to see that man's modern conquests on the physical plane are nothing more than a coarser version of the transfer of interest to the physical plane that was present in ancient Egypt, only people are now even more deeply ensnared in matter. In the mummifying of the dead we have already seen a cause of the materialistic views that we now experience on the physical plane.

Let us imagine a soul of that time. Let us imagine a soul that then lived as a pupil of one of the ancient initiates. Such a pupil's spiritual gaze had been directed to the cosmos through actual perception. The way Osiris and Isis lived in the moon had become spiritual perception for him. Everything was permeated by divine-spiritual beings. He had taken this into his soul. He is again incarnated in the fourth and fifth periods. In the fifth period such a person experiences all this again. It comes back to him as a memory. What happens to it now? The pupil had gazed up at all that lived in the world of the stars. This sight comes to life again in a certain person of the fifth period. He remembers what he saw and heard at that time. He cannot recognize it again, because it has taken on a material coloring. It is no longer the spiritual that he sees, but the material-mechanical relationships emerge again and he recreates the thoughts in materialistic form as memory. Where he had previously seen divine beings, Isis and Osiris, now he sees only abstract forces without any spiritual bond. The spiritual relationships appear to him in thought-form. Everything arises again, but in material form.

Let us apply this to a particular soul which at that time acquired insight into the great cosmic connections, and let us imagine that there arises again before this soul what it had seen spiritually in ancient Egypt. This appears again in this soul in the fifth post-Atlantean period, and we have the soul of Copernicus. Thus did the Copernican system arise, as a memory-tableau of spiritual experiences in ancient Egypt. The case is the same with Kepler's system. These men gave birth to their great laws out of Their memories, out of what they had experienced in the Egyptian time. Now let us think how such a thing arises in the soul as a faint memory, and let us think also how what such a spirit truly thinks was, in ancient Egypt, experienced by him in spiritual form. What can such a spirit say to us? That it seems to him as though he looked back into ancient Egypt. It is as though he stated all this in a new form when such a spirit says, “But now, a year and a half after the first dawning, a few months after the first full daylight, a few weeks after the pure sun had risen over these most wonderful contemplations, nothing holds me back any longer. I shall revel in holy fire. I shall scorn the sons of men with the simple confession that I am stealing the sacred vessels of the Egyptians to build with them an habitation for my God, far removed from the borders of Egypt.” Is this not like an actual memory, which corresponds to the truth? This is Kepler's saying, and in his works we also find the following: “The ancient memory is knocking at my heart.” Wonderful are the connections of things in human evolution. Many such enigmatic sayings take on light and meaning when one senses the spiritual connections. Life becomes great and powerful, and we feel our way into a mighty whole when we understand that the single person is only an individual form of the spiritual that permeates the world.

I have already pointed out that what has arisen in our time as Darwinism is a coarser materialistic version of what the Egyptians portrayed as their gods in animal form. I was also able to show that if one understands Paracelsus correctly, his medical lore is a recrudescence of what was taught in the temples of ancient Egypt. Let us contemplate such a spirit as Paracelsus. We find a remarkable statement by him. One who has steeped himself in Paracelsus knows what a lofty spirit lived in him. He made a remarkable statement, saying that he had learned much in many ways; least of all in the academies, but much from old traditions and from the common people during his journeys through many lands. It is impossible here to give examples of the deep truths that are still present among the common people but are no longer understood, although Paracelsus could still turn them to account. He said that he had found one book containing deep medical truths. What book was it? The Bible! Thereby he meant not only the Old Testament, but also the New. One need only be able to read the Bible to find therein what Paracelsus found. What became of the medicine of Paracelsus? It is true that it is a memory of the ancient Egyptian methods of healing. But through the fact that he absorbed the mysteries of Christianity, the upward impulse, his works are saturated with spiritual wisdom, they are filled with Christ. This is the path into the future. This is what everyone must do who, in modern times, will pave the way back out of the fall into matter. We must not under-value the great material progress, but there is also the possibility of letting the spiritual flow into it.

One who studies what material science can offer today, who plunges into material science and is not too lazy to steep himself in it, such a man acts wisely also in relation to the science of the spirit. Much can be learned from the purely materialistic investigators. What is found there we can permeate with the pure spirit, which the science of the spirit offers. If thus we permeate everything with the spiritual, then this is properly understood Christianity. It is a slander of the science of the spirit when men say that it is a fantastic view of the world. It can stand firmly on the ground of reality, and it would be only a most elementary beginning in the science of the spirit if one were to concentrate on a schematic representation of the higher worlds. It is not important that the student should simply know the things, learning the concepts by heart. This is not all that counts. The important thing is that the teachings about the higher worlds should become fruitful in men, that the true spiritual-scientific teachings should be introduced into everything, into the everyday life.

It is not so important that one should preach about universal brotherly love. It is best to speak of that as little as possible. Speaking in such phrases is like saying to the stove, “Dear stove, it is your duty to warm this room. Fulfill your duty!” So it is with teachings that are given through such phrases. The important thing is the means. The stove remains cold if I simply tell it that it should be warm. It gets warm when it has fuel. People also remain cold when they are admonished. But what is fuel for the modern man? The specific facts of spiritual teaching are fuel for man.⁵ One should not be so lazy as to remain content with “Universal brotherhood.” People must be given fuel. Then brotherhood will arise of itself. As the plants stretch out their blossoms to the sun, so must we all look up to the sun of the spiritual life.

The important thing is that the matters we have examined here should not be accepted merely as theoretical doctrines, but that they should become a force in our souls. For every man, in every position in practical life, they can give impulses for what he must create. People who look today at the science of the spirit with a certain scorn feel themselves superior to its “fantastic” teachings. They find “unprovable assertions” therein and say that one should cleave to the facts. If the spiritual scientist were made pusillanimous rather than bold through his life in the science of the spirit, it would be easy for him to lose his sureness and energy when he sees how just those persons who should understand the science of the spirit are the ones who utterly fail to grasp it.

Our times easily look down on what the Egyptians recognized as their gods. The latter are said to be meaningless abstractions. But modern man is far more superstitious. He clings to entirely different gods, who are authorities for him. Because he does not actually bend the knee before them, he does not notice what superstitions he cherishes.

My dear friends, when we have thus been together again we should always be mindful that when we disperse we should not take with us only a number of truths, but we should take away a collective impression, a feeling, that can properly take the form of an impulse of will, an impulse to carry the science of the spirit into life and to allow nothing to disturb our confidence in it.

Let us place a picture before our soul. One often hears it said, “Oh, these seekers for the spirit! They assemble in their lodges and pursue all kinds of fantastic rubbish. A man of really modern views can have no part in that.” The adherents of the science of the spirit sometimes seem to be a sort of pariah class, regarded as uneducated and untrained. Should we be discouraged because of this? No. We shall place a picture before our souls and arouse the feelings that are connected with it. We can recall something similar in past times; how something similar occurred in ancient Rome. We can see how, in ancient Rome, primitive Christianity spread among a despised class of people. We look with legitimate delight today on such things as the Coliseum constructed by imperial Rome. But we can also look at the people who then regarded themselves as the choicest of their time; we can see how they sat in the Circus and watched while the Christians were burned in the arena and incense was kindled to quench the stink of the burning bodies.

Now let us look at those despised ones. They lived in the catacombs, in underground passages. There the spreading Christianity had to hide. There they erected the first Christian altars on the graves of their dead. There below they had their wonderful symbols and shrines. A strange feeling seizes us today when we walk through the catacombs, through that despised underground Rome. The Christians knew what awaited them. That first germ of the Christ-impulse on earth, confined to the catacombs, was despised. But what remains of imperial Rome? It has disappeared from the earth, while what then lived in the catacombs has been exalted.

Let us hope that those who today wish to make themselves the bearers of a spiritual world-view may preserve the confidence of the first Christians. The representatives of the science of the spirit may be despised by contemporary academic learning, but they know they are working for what will bloom and thrive in the future. Let them learn to endure all the vexations of the present day. We are working into the future. This we may feel confidently and without arrogance, firm against the misunderstandings of our time.

With such feelings let us try to give permanence to what has passed before our souls. Let us take it away with us as a force, and let us continue to work together fraternally in the right direction.

• 1. he passage referred to is probably the following (pages 293 and 295 in the Loeb Classical Library Edition): “Sisters' children mean as much to their uncle as to their father; some tribes regard this blood-tie as even closer and more sacred than that between son and father . . . The more relations a man has and the larger the number of his connections by marriage, the more influence has he in his age; it does not pay to have no ties. It is incumbant to take up a father's feuds or a kinsman's not less than his friendship.”
• 2. The German word Volk has no convenient English equivalent. We shall translate it as people or folk in different contexts.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner's fullest discussion of this subject appears in the cycle of lectures, Mission of the Folk-Souls, delivered at Oslo in 1910.
• 4. A full description of these 42 gods is to be found in Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, Volume I, pp. 316-317. For a fairly good picture, see pages 344-45 of the same work.
• 5. This thought is more fully expounded in Rudolf Steiner's booklet, Anthroposophical Ethics, comprising three lectures delivered in 1912 in Norrköping.

If you give a public anthroposophical lecture today in our present time - and what is said here in relation to a public lecture must be taken into account in everything we bring from anthroposophy to the outside world, to people who do not join an anthroposophical Society, then we must always bear in mind that although the souls of people today have a great longing for anthroposophy in their depths, in their subconscious, there is very little connection with spiritual truths in those parts of their soul life of which they themselves are aware. Therefore, in a public lecture, it is not important to pay attention to what is popular or unpopular with such personalities. One should never ask oneself what they like or dislike to hear, but one must take into consideration that our age has habits of thought and ways of imagining things that are in many ways directly opposed to what we are working towards through anthroposophical knowledge. I always try to pay careful attention to the aspects that need to be considered when I try to determine the difference between the tone in which a public lecture must be delivered and the tone in which we can speak to our anthroposophical friends. And we should get used to really observing this distinction. Even if people who are still far from anthroposophy are perhaps unpleasantly affected by what they are told, this need not trouble us in any way, as long as we are aware that we have brought them what is good for their souls. But then, when we are among ourselves, we must try to penetrate deeper and deeper into the things. We can, among ourselves, discuss certain very definite truths that are already extraordinarily important and significant for our present time. We must discuss them among ourselves so that they can penetrate deeper and deeper into the spiritual life of the time, and then, so to speak, we can bring them to the outer world in clearly formulated words.

We must understand this matter quite correctly. Let us assume that we are talking about what constantly plays a role in human life, about the fact that all human life on earth is permeated by the Ahrimanic, by the Luciferic forces, or we are talking about certain things that relate to life between death and a new birth. What should prevent us from speaking so readily about these things to the unprepared should not be what often occurs in a society like ours, and what could be called a certain secrecy, where most people do not even have the right idea of why it is done. What should prevent us from speaking about these things to the unprepared is that people who are unprepared cannot take things seriously enough, cannot take them deeply enough. The words Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces should gradually become something so significant for the life of the anthroposophist, something that so deeply moves his feelings and perceptions when these words are spoken that one has the feeling: If you throw these words at the head of the unprepared, the inner power that you are supposed to feel when they are spoken is taken away, and we also harm ourselves if we use these words in ordinary life on every occasion that suits us. For example, when we reach into our wallet and have to deal with money, we are indeed dealing with Ahrimanic forces. But it is not good to apply the word 'Ahrimanic' so readily to everyday situations. When we apply such words to everyday situations, they become dulled for our perception, for our feeling, and we then no longer have the possibility of having words that, when we think or speak them, exert on us that elementary, significant meaning that they are meant to exert. It is extremely important that we do not get too casual about these things in our daily lives, for we will gradually lose the best and most effective that anthroposophy can give us. The more we use anthroposophical words in our daily lives, the more we deprive ourselves of the possibility that anthroposophy will truly become something that supports our soul and deeply permeates our soul. We need only consider the power of habit and we will see that there is a difference when we use words, such as, let us say, the words 'aura' or 'Ahrimanic forces' or 'Luciferic forces', with a certain sacred awe, with a certain awareness that we are speaking of other worlds. If we always feel that we have to stop before using such words, and only use them when it is really important for us to consider our relationship to the supersensible world, then it is quite different from speaking of these things of the higher world in everyday life and constantly using words taken from these worlds.

I had to give this introduction because, in this hour, we want to point out something in the human soul that should always be present in our consciousness, but which we only truly contemplate when it is done with a certain sacred awe. Take in hand the little book 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. There you will find a description, so to speak, of the processes that take place in a developing human being from seven to seven years. It shows that up to the age of seven, until the change of teeth, we are mainly dealing with the development of the physical body; that in the next period, from the age of seven to fourteen, until sexual maturity, we are dealing with the development of the etheric body and so on. If you consider this development of the human being from seven to seven years, then you are primarily dealing with what the, so to speak, normal beings of the higher hierarchies bring about in human evolution. This is the true progressive evolution that takes place from seven to seven years, so that we can say: the actually progressive divine-spiritual powers guide and direct this evolution from seven to seven years. If only these progressive divine spiritual powers were active in man, then the whole of human life would take a completely different course, a completely different course from the one it actually takes. Above all, man would approach a small child in a completely different way. He would always have the feeling that a spiritual individuality was speaking through the child. One would even always have the feeling that the small child, in everything it does, receives the impulses from higher worlds. And people would certainly have no other feeling than that the child acts out of far higher impulses than those that they themselves can penetrate with their minds. And that would take quite a long time in relative terms.

What seems so desirable to people today, that children should be clever in a human and earthly sense as early as possible, would then seem highly unwelcome to people, because of a child that causes the delight of those around it today because it already or did, would be a child that would be guided by the progressive divine-spiritual powers according to the seven-year periods. If people had only children, they would say, if the child spoke cleverly in the modern sense as early as possible and they were accustomed to the different circumstances: How godforsaken the child is! What is considered delightful today would be seen as a punishment. And a young person of fifteen who was as clever as is expected today would be seen as a completely godforsaken being. For it is only through the progressive divine spiritual powers that the human being is actually called upon to gradually emerge completely with his ego between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight; and before that, what he does would appear much more as if higher spiritual, supersensible impulses were working through him. Of course, a certain dreamy life would be characteristic of the children; but this dreamy life would be felt as a blessing from God or the spirit, and there would be no attempt to educate the children to be precocious in the modern sense.

Now, as we know, something else also occurs during these developmental periods of the human being. This is what we have often emphasized: the development of self-awareness in the third, fourth, fifth year, at that point in time that we can generally characterize by saying: it is the point in time up to which a person remembers in later life. It is the occurrence of that moment from which the person begins to say “I” to themselves. You must now actually think of the whole development of man as two currents: as that of evolution, in which the progressive divine-spiritual entities are at work, and in addition the other current, through which man, within the first seven-year period, begins to develop an inner self-awareness, to develop a memory that later allows him to consciously remember back to that point in time. This does not come from the progressive divine spiritual beings. They would let us dream for much longer and would work through us into the world. The fact that we become self-aware so early and say 'I' so early is purely the result of the forces of Lucifer working in people. Thus we are dealing with two currents, with a regular progressive divine-spiritual current, as it were, which would actually only lead us to a clear, distinct sense of self between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight, and with a Luciferic current within us. This luciferic current works in us in such a way that it completely crosses the other current, so that it does something completely different in us than what the progressive divine-spiritual beings actually want from us. They work in such a way that we learn to say “I” to ourselves in the midst of the first period, learn to develop our egoity inwardly, soul-wise, and to remember back in our memory.

If we really consider this, we can get an idea of our ongoing development. Imagine for a moment the luciferic influence just characterized away and only what the progressive entities would make of man as a calmly flowing water. We think of this calmly flowing water as an image of the progressive life stream of man under the influence of the actually good divine entities. And now let us take the water that flows so calmly for a walk, then take a blue or red substance, pour it into the calmly flowing water and, choosing a chemical liquid that can be kept separate from the clear water, let a second current flow alongside the first current from a certain point on. Thus, in our own true, calmly progressive, we might say, “Yahweh-Christ” current, the Luciferic current flows with us from about the middle of our first seven-year period. And so Lucifer lives in us. If Lucifer did not live in us, we would not have this second current. But if we only lived in the first stream, then we would have the consciousness until well into our twenties: we are actually a member of the divine-spiritual powers. We attain the consciousness of independence, of inner individuality and personality, through the second stream. Thus we see at the same time that it is full of wisdom that this Luciferic stream pours into us.

But in the second seven-year period, too, something occurs that we can, in a sense, understand as a current that is not connected with the merely progressive divine beings. From a certain point of view, this has already been repeatedly characterized in us. It occurs around the ninth or tenth year, that is, in the second seven-year period. For some, the perceptive people, the experiences come as I have mentioned them, for example, with Jean Paul. For him it occurred perhaps a little earlier, for others it usually occurs around the ninth or tenth year. There can be a significant intensification, one might say a condensation of the sense of self. But the fact that something special is happening can also be established in another way. However, I would not recommend that this other way should become a particular educational rule. It can only be said that once it happens, one might say, of its own accord, it can be observed, but one should not play with it, one should not make it a principle of education. If you let a child, especially around the age of nine or ten, look at himself naked in the mirror, and the child is not jaded by our often strange educational principles today, he will always feel a certain fear in a natural way at the sight of his own body, a certain fear if he has not been made flirtatious earlier through looking in the mirror a lot. This can be observed especially in naturally sensitive children who have not looked in the mirror much before, because during this time something grows in the human being that acts as a kind of counterbalance to the luciferic current that is present in the first period. In this second period, around the ninth or tenth year, Ahriman takes hold of the human being and forms a kind of balance with his current to the luciferic current. We can now accomplish that which does Ahriman the greatest favor if, at this very time, we develop the mind of the growing child, which is directed towards the external sensory world, if we say to ourselves: During this time, the child must be trained in such a way that it comes to its own independent judgment in everything. You know that I am mentioning an educational principle that is now quite generally accepted in pedagogy. The almost universal demand today is to foster independence, especially in these years. They even put adding machines in front of children so that they are not even encouraged to learn the multiplication table by heart. This is based on a certain benevolence of our age towards Ahriman. Our age wishes, unconsciously of course, to educate children in such a way that Ahriman can be cultivated as strongly as possible in the human soul. And when we go through the current educational methods today, we say to ourselves as occultists: These people who advocate these educational methods are only bunglers. If Ahriman himself were to write these educational principles, he would do better! But what is said there about children's independence and their own judgment is a true discipleship of Ahriman. What is implied here will become more and more prevalent in the near future. Ahriman will become a good guide for the external powers and spiritual guides of our age.

Now take a matter such as we have just mentioned. We must regard it as something quite natural and self-evident that it should appeal to man; that man feels Lucifer and Ahriman approaching him. It would be quite wrong to believe that it would be better if we were now to eliminate Lucifer and Ahriman altogether. That would be quite impossible. The following reflection can show you how impossible it would be. If our life were not regulated, as it were, by the interaction of the progressive divine spiritual beings with the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces, if only the progressive powers were to work on us, then we would come to a certain independence much later and we would also have this independence in such a way that, just as we now perceive colors and light, we would then no longer doubt that divine spiritual entities also really prevail behind colors and light, behind that which we perceive externally. We would perceive the thoughts of the world simultaneously with our sense perceptions. We would only come to our independence in our twenties, but then we would also perceive world thoughts externally. We would then dream away our youth because divine spiritual powers would be working in us, and when these would cease to work from within, they would then confront us from without. We would perceive their thoughts from the outside as we now only receive sensory perceptions. We would therefore, with the exception of a few years, towards the twentieth year, when we would become visible, otherwise never have any proper independence at all. As children we would be dreamy beings, in middle age we would not be able to make our own decisions and determine our own course, but wherever we encountered the outer world we would simply see what we had to do, as the people of ancient Atlantis could still do. Independence flows into us through the working of Lucifer and Ahriman within us.

Of course, it is extremely important that we do not speak in the same way as today's foolish pedagogy speaks about the human being, which always speaks of development, as if one were to extract the inner being from the human being. In an educational sense, we only speak meaningfully about the human being when we know that three things are involved in his soul: the progressive good divine spiritual beings, and Lucifer and Ahriman, and when we can distinguish between them. It is now of particular value to first take the main point of view of the progressive divine spiritual beings and consider above all: What are the requirements when we look at the seven-fold periods of human development? For in this respect we can really help every human being simply by behaving in the right way towards this child of man. If in the first seven years of the child's life we bring about conditions in which it lives in an environment that has a healthy effect on its physical body, we are doing something good for the child under all circumstances. If during the second period we create around the human being good authorities, authorities that may be called such in the noblest sense, so that the human being does not become a clever talker in these times, but rather a being that builds on the people around him as authorities, the child has respect for and devotion to, then we are doing something good for him under all circumstances. We are doing something good when we educate children who, in their ninth or tenth year, do not already want to know everything themselves, but who, when asked, “Why is this or that right or good?” they will say: because their father or mother said it was good, or because their teacher said so. If we educate our children in such a way that the adults around them are seen as self-evident authorities, then we are doing our children a favor in all circumstances. And if we violate these seven-year periods, if we bring about a situation in which children begin to criticize those who are self-evident authorities during this period, if we do not avoid this criticism, then we do something bad for the growing person under all circumstances. And if we do not find the opportunity to speak to a person between the ages of fourteen, fifteen and twenty-one in such a way that we can naturally rise with him to ideals, to ideals that fill the heart with joy, then we are not doing this young person any good either. With people in these years, one must speak of ideals, of what later life must bring under all circumstances to the person growing up properly. One may say: Today, one's heart could really break sometimes when eighteen-year-old boys – pardon me, personalities – come and already carry their feuilletons into the newspapers. If, instead of accepting something from them, one were to talk to them about things that do not yet interfere with their outward lives, but which they are only to realize later, if one were to talk to them about the great ideals of human life and be inspired by them, then one would relate to them in the right way. Actually, anyone who, as an editor, accepts the feature section of a person who has not yet reached the age of twenty, does something worse under all circumstances than someone who, when the young person comes up with this feature section, says to him: Yes, look, that's very nice what you've done. But when you are ten years older, you will have completely different ideas about it. Now put it nicely in your drawer and take it out again in ten or twelve years. The person who does that, then takes a look at the manuscript and talks to the person concerned about the ideals of life that can be associated with it, does something good for him.

I just want to characterize that the things that were said in my writing “The Education of the Child” should always be taken into account in education under all circumstances. Everything else, where Lucifer and Ahriman are involved, does not allow for general rules, it is actually different for every person, because it relates precisely to the personal. In many cases, it is a matter of the educator's personal tact, and one cannot intervene in these matters with all kinds of pedantic rules. I wanted to give you a characterization of what is in the human soul, and how we must take into account Lucifer and Ahriman if we want to understand the full human nature, if we really want to consider everything, not just look at it and say: we must fight Lucifer and Ahriman. If we wanted to fight Lucifer at all costs, we could do so in a very sure way: we would only have to prevent people from developing a memory. For just as it is true that certain lunar beings were brought into our earthly development, it is equally true that all memory is a Luciferic power. So we would simply have to avoid developing our memory! We must, however, realize that we have to develop this memory in the right way. And that is why it was said in that writing that the right period for the education of memory is between the ages of seven and fourteen. In the previous period, we do not particularly need to systematically educate memory, because it develops itself then, because that is when Lucifer is most present in man. We leave the children to themselves. But then, after the change of teeth, when Ahriman has most clearly taken hold of the human being, we begin to train the memory. For by then Ahriman has already created his counterweight to Lucifer, so we no longer work directly in the service of Lucifer when we train the memory. We must not even entertain the idea that we want to fight Ahriman. There would be a very simple way to combat the grossest Ahrimanic effects, but it would not do the human being any good. When the human being gets his second teeth, they would have to be hammered in, because that is when the most intense Ahrimanic effects occur. Of the progressive powers, man has only his so-called milk teeth. What man receives as his independent teeth throughout his life has a purely Ahrimanic effect.

Thus we must realize that much of what is in us at all can only be in us because the forces of Ahriman and Lucifer are in us. Sometimes we even succeed in being quite dissatisfied with our unconscious counteraction to Ahriman. In the course of our lives, we prepare ourselves to have certain powers when we have passed through death, so that Ahriman cannot do too much to us between death and a new birth. But sometimes we clearly show ourselves that we do not even welcome the fight against Ahriman, for example when we regret every tooth loss. But with every tooth that falls out, we gain a power that we can put to very good use. I am not, of course, speaking against the filling or insertion of teeth, because nothing Ahrimanic grows in us through this, at most the gold itself, but that is not the point. So there is no question of this being a bad thing. The fact that we gradually lose our Ahrimanic teeth is due to the fact that in evolution we also receive certain impulses that defeat Ahriman. And regardless of whether we have a tooth inserted again or not, once it has been lost, we have gained an impulse that helps us in the forces that we have to develop between death and a new birth at the very lowest level. It is a small thing at first, but it can show us how, when we approach reality and look beyond the appearance and the great deception that usually surrounds us, we really have to get into the habit of looking at things in life quite differently than they are usually looked at. And even the weakness of old age, for example, is a strength that, by feeling it, we gain directly to have something against Ahriman when we have passed through the gate of death. While we can indeed be angry here between birth and death if we age prematurely, in terms of what we want after death to cope with Ahriman, we have to be glad that we age.

And now you see how wonderfully beautiful it is that our inner spiritual and soul core remains, which, by developing between birth and death, has everything to do with the progressive powers. For this germ, which passes through the gate of death, is there, where it has developed its strongest inner powers of tension, purely dominated by the progressive powers. That which is outside of it, which withers away externally, that is where the Ahrimanic powers are. And we must now consider what the seer of this Ahriman actually is.

When our plants grow out of our soil, wither towards autumn and the leaves fall, then the elemental spirits that Ahriman sends to the earth's surface appear everywhere. There he reaps the first dying; he reaps it through his elemental spirits. When one walks through the fields in autumn and clairvoyantly sees nature dying, then Ahriman is stretching out his forces everywhere, and everywhere he has his elemental messengers to bring him the withering physical and etheric entities. But as human beings, we are actually also in a kind of autumn and winter mood throughout the day. Truly, the soul's summer mood is actually only present when the soul is asleep. It is really the case that the sleeping human body, physical body and etheric body, is of the same value as a plant; and what is outside, the I and the astral body, reflect their rays back onto the physical and etheric body, acting like the sun and stars and causing the forces that we have destroyed during the day to sprout out. Vegetable life grows, and the thinking during the day is actually only there to remove what the night has caused to sprout. When we wake up, we flit over our vegetative life, just as autumn flits over the plants of the earth. And what winter does to the vegetation of the earth, we do in exactly the same way to our physical and etheric body when we wake up, to that which they bring forth in the summer time of the soul, namely during the time when we are asleep at night. When we are awake, it is wintertime, the soul's real wintertime, and if we want to have the soul's springtime, we have to fall asleep. It is so. And from this point of view, it is actually easy to understand why people who do not at least mix something from the soul's summertime into their waking lives dry up so easily. Dry scholars, scrawny little professors, they are those who do not like to take in what is not fully conscious, who do not like to take in something of the soul's summer time. Then they dry up, then they become quite pronounced winter people. And to the seer, the whole development of human daily life presents itself as quite similar to what I have just said for nature. When man forms his ordinary thoughts that relate to the external, when he thinks only in a materialistic way about what happens externally, then his thoughts engage the brain in such a way that the brain secretes substances that Ahriman can put to good use, so that Ahriman actually accompanies the waking life of the day. And the more materialistic we are, the more possessed we are by Ahriman. No wonder it is true that materialism is connected with fear. If you remember the “Guardian of the Threshold”, you will realize how fear is in turn connected with Ahriman.

We should get the feeling that we are indeed facing complicated spiritual worlds in life. And what we should get from anthroposophy is not just that we know this or that, that we know there is Ahriman, Lucifer, a physical body, an etheric body. That is the very least. What we are to acquire from anthroposophy is a certain mood of the soul, a basic feeling for human life, what is actually there in these depths of the soul. Therefore, it is necessary that we keep the words that are connected with these higher things with a certain sacred awe. If we always have them on our lips, then it all too easily happens that their seriousness and dignity become dulled for us.

Thus we see man between birth and death, in his relationship to the progressive spiritual entities, standing in a certain way between Lucifer and Ahriman. And in order that the entire development of man may take place in the right way, this relationship must remain the same between death and a new birth, only that which is inward between birth and death becomes outward between death and a new birth. Inwardly, from the moment we can remember back, Lucifer has joined his claws to the human soul. Inwardly, man knows nothing about it unless he learns something through spiritual science and learns to feel about it. After death, the matter is different. At a certain point in time, Lucifer makes his appearance, just as surely as inwardly between birth and death, outwardly in the life between death and a new birth. So he stands there in full form before us, so he stands by our side, so we walk with him! Just as little as man knows Lucifer before he has stepped through the gate of death, so surely and clearly does he know him when he walks by his side between death and a new birth. Only that in the present cycle of time this consciousness can become a rather unpleasant one. We can pass through the region between death and a new birth in such a way that we have Lucifer beside us, so to speak, and realize his necessity for the world. The time is drawing near when people will only be able to pass through the life after death with Lucifer if they have already properly sensed and recognized the Luciferian impulses in the human soul here in life. Those people – and there will be more and more of them in the future – who want nothing to do with Lucifer, and that is probably the majority, will know all the more about Lucifer after death. Not only will he stand by their side, but he will continually tap their soul-forces, he will vampirize them. This is what man, through ignorance, prepares himself for, to be vampirized by Lucifer. In this way he robs himself of strength for the next life, for he gives it, in a sense, to Lucifer.

It is very similar with regard to Ahriman. With regard to him, the matter is as follows. The two spirits are always there between death and a new birth, but one time one is more present and the other less, the other time it is the other way around. We go there, and then back again in life between death and a new birth. At the time of passing away, Lucifer is especially at our side, and at the time of returning towards a new birth, Ahriman is especially at our side. For he leads us back to the earth, and he is an important personality in the second half of the return journey. And he too can, as it were, do harm to those people who do not want to believe in him in their life between birth and death. He gives them too much of his powers. He gives them what he always has left over, those powers that are connected with earthly heaviness, that bring illness and premature death upon people, that bring all kinds of misfortunes that look like coincidences into earthly existence, and so on. All this is connected with these Ahrimanic powers.

From a slightly different point of view, I presented the matter over in Munich. There I pointed out that after death the human soul can be the serving spirit for the powers that send illness and death from the supersensible worlds into the sensual. What makes life weak is what Ahriman welcomes so much and what makes it possible for him to further weaken our lives. But again, we must not judge one-sidedly. It would be quite wrong to say: So it is very bad that Ahriman has introduced us into life and that we have to suffer from his after-effects in life. — No, that is good, because under certain circumstances an effect of illness can be what contributes most to our ascending development.

It is always the case that when we approach the threshold that separates the supersensible from the sensory world, we must be prepared to modify our judgment somewhat and not to judge as we are accustomed to doing in the ordinary physical world. For it is true, in the physical world, there is indeed Maja in abundance. Where does materialism come from in the physical world, that materialism that says: There is no Ahriman, there is no devil at all! Who shouts the loudest: There is no devil? — He who is most possessed by him. For the spirit we call Ahriman has the greatest interest in having his existence most of all denied by the one who is most possessed by him. “The devil never senses the little people, even if he has them by the collar!” So not believing in Ahriman is a bad Maja, because he has you by the collar most of all when you don't believe in him, because then you give him the greatest power over you. So that you judge wrongly when monists appear and rail against the devil, and you say: They are fighting the devil. No, a materialistic-monistic gathering that rails against the devil is set up to conjure up the devil. And the modern materialists conjure up the devil much more than the old witches are said to have done, much, much more! That is the truth and the rest is Maya. So we must learn to judge differently. And anyone who goes to a monistic meeting that is nuanced in a materialistic way is not telling the truth when they say: People free people from the devil. — They should say: Now I am going to a meeting where the devil is being invoked into human culture with all the powers that people have. That is what we should really come to realize: that we, as we grow into spiritual life, not only learn to absorb concepts and ideas, but we also learn to think and feel differently. And yet, when we face the external world, we remain rational enough not to mix this external world all the time with what is true for the supersensible worlds. When people constantly use words in relation to the external physical world that actually only have the right value for the supersensible worlds, then they take away what is most important: that we learn to distinguish between the sensory and supersensible worlds, that we learn to apply the words in the right sense.

This is the single thing that should be hinted at today, when we have gathered here, for the first time in such large numbers, with friends from outside the city, at our recently established Augsburg branch. And today, when we wanted to gather our thoughts here in our souls, which should help us in our work in this place, a serious word, a very serious word, should also be spoken as a kind of opening word for our Augsburg branch. For then, under the guidance and direction of the masters of wisdom and harmony of feeling, who serve the advancing divine-spiritual beings, the work of a branch will flourish quite surely when this spiritual work harmoniously integrates itself into a larger spiritual stream of work. And our friends from outside have come here to you, my dear friends from Augsburg, in order to develop thoughts of love and devotion for the general anthroposophical cause and for each individual anthroposophical striving person here with you in their souls, and this will remain in these souls, which from this hour has taken its starting point and developed like a source of togetherness in these souls. You will, my dear friends in Augsburg, continue to work here alone from week to week, from time to time, but only seemingly, only outwardly and spatially alone. The fact that many friends are together with you will be the starting point for those strengthening forces that can actually flow That is why it is so wonderful when the opportunity arises for our friends to come together with a young branch in larger numbers. Because then the point at which they come together in time is also an outward sign, which we as human beings need, that from there the will can really go to And if you, my dear friends in Augsburg, who have been working faithfully on anthroposophy for some time now, continue to work faithfully in the future, remember that there will be friends all over the world who will think to you with the intention that your work may be a worthy In this way we practise our togetherness and never lose sight of our togetherness in spirit. Let us always keep it clear, but also strongly present, for only in this way can we really be helped by those powers that prevail over our true work, the forces of the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings. These forces will invisibly flit through your thoughts when you The dear local members have shown through so much in their anthroposophical work and activities how faithfully and truly they want to work with us. And so we are all doing something important when we now, through this gathering, have the opportunity to unite our thoughts in the goal that has brought us together: May the work of our Augsburg sisters and brothers be blessed and strengthened by the powers to which we always appeal! It is in this spirit that I invoke the blessing of the Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings upon this branch, that blessing which I know is with us in our work if we make ourselves worthy of it.

I want to speak today OF something that will help to deepen our understanding of truths that must now be given to humankind by anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of forces of the human being: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence. To understand the nature of the human being we must be constantly mindful of these two poles.

The human is a being of will and a being of intelligence. Between them—at any rate from birth until death—lies the element of feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and the will. You know that these forces separate from each other in a certain sense when people reach what is called the threshold of the spiritual world.

Our study today will be concerned more particularly with the relationship in which humanity stands to the surrounding world, on the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In the life between birth and death, human beings unfold the force of will as the impulse of their actions and activity. As it comes to expression through the human organism, the force of will is a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one aspect, everything of the nature of human will bears a great likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner relation between the forces of will in the human being and the forces of nature.

You know from earlier studies that even while people are awake, they are in a condition resembling sleep wherever their will is involved. True, we have in our consciousness the ideas lying behind what we will, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that we know nothing. We do not know how the idea, “I move my arm,” is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconscious and it may truly be said that people are no more conscious of the real process of will than they are of what takes place during sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of human will with the surrounding world, we come to something that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of geological, purely physical processes. And even if scientists do not expressly say so, they have in mind that from the earth's beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings. Why is this view held by natural science today? The reason is that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9, 1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of time. People think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and what happens at any point is the effect of what went before; the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way people think and you will find evidence of it in any text book of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch but the causes are attributed entirely to what once took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that humanity inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were humans not present, everything would run a similar course, that the external reality would be the same—although, in fact, humankind has always been part of this external reality. The truth is that the earth is one whole, humanity itself being one of the active factors in the earth's evolution. I will give you an example.

You know that our present epoch—thinking of it for the moment in the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great Atlantean catastrophe—was preceded by the Atlantean epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa, and America in their present form were not in existence. At that time there was one main continent on the earth—Atlantis as it is called—extending over the area that is now the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was rampant throughout the then-Civilized world. Human beings had far greater power over the forces of nature than they later possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to those who base their thinking on the principles of modern natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and activities of human beings were among the contributory causes. Yet so it is. In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe was the outcome of the deeds of people on the earth.

Outer, mineral causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic events that break in upon earth existence. We must look for causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses: Humanity itself belongs to the chain of causative forces in earth existence. Nor does this apply only to an event of such magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the connection between what goes on within human beings and cosmic happenings which take effect in tellurian events remains hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion. For if you want to get at the real causes you will not discover them by studying the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms alone.

Let me give you the following illustration of what comes into consideration here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite side. Here (X) is the center of the earth. When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of the following. In the region around Naples in Italy, you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit vapor if you take a piece of paper and set it alight. Vapors begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will say: the force which drives up the vapors lies in the physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air the vapors inside the earth press upward. They are kept down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an example of effects of a purely mineral nature—such as these vapors arising out of the earth—I could say for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you that the causes of the rising of the vapor do not lie below the soil, but above it. Now these points in the diagram a, b, c, d, e, f—do not represent pieces of paper that have been set alight; in this instance they represent something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point on its own has no significance but that the significance lies in the system of points as a whole. Do not think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth; and these different causes do not work singly, but together. And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let us say, 1,500 million points¹ all working together, producing a combined effect. These 1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has within you what may be called the center of gravity of your own physical structure. When people are awake, this center of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when they are asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centers of gravity spread over the earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within the human beings.

This is a truth of which there is scarcely an inkling today. It is known to very, very few that the causes of processes active in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms lie within the human organism. (This does not apply to all the forces working in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of them.) Within humankind lie the causes for what happens on earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be cultivated truly without anthropology—without the study of the human being. Science tells us of physical, chemical, and mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with the human will, with the force of human will that is concentrated in our center of gravity. If we speak of the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must not follow the geologist in speaking of an earth in the abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on yonder side of the threshold. Everything that can be known on this side of the threshold belongs to the realm of the illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point the question arises: What relation is there between the forces of will that areconcentrated in our center of gravity, and the external, physical, and chemical forces? We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity. In normal life, this relation takes effect in the metabolic processes. When people take into themselves the substances of the outer world, it is their will that actually digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and forces; and the relation between the human being and the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms of nature today is such that our will is connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction inherent in our planet.

We could not live were this destruction not to take place—but for all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And what are often described as unlawful magical practices are based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

Through our will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And if as human beings we had only our forces of will, the earth would be condemned through us, through humankind, to sheer destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic space. So much for the one pole in the human constitution.

But the human is a twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole—that of intelligence—is connected with the will by the bridge of feeling. But in waking life, human intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a true relationship to earth existence through our intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will happens while we are awake, although we are not conscious of it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the inner, organic nature of the human being. Strange as this will seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of human nature were not there—the pole of the up-building forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will that is concentrated in our center of gravity, so the up-building forces lie in the sphere into which we pass during sleep. From the time of falling asleep until that of waking, we are in a condition figuratively described by saying that with our “I” and astral body we are outside the physical body. But then we are entirely beings of soul and spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation between falling asleep and waking. During this time we are connected, through these forces, with everything that builds up the earth planet, everything that adds to the forces of destruction the constructive, up-building forces. If you did not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually proceeding from your will would not be working in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. If you never went to sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually up-built would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive, up-building forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity itself. I do not say: in the individual human being—for I have expressly said that all these single causes form a collective whole. The up-building forces lie in humankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in our being but not in our waking intelligence. Waking intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting itself into earth evolution. The intelligence that works, unconsciously, during our sleep—that is what builds up the earth planet. By this I am only trying to explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth; you must look for them within the human being. Once you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be unintelligible.

You look up to the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that can be perceived by human sense organs here on earth. But what you behold when you gaze at the stars is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. In reality it proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inner activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of what was to be expected from these physical descriptions exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of will and intelligence which at a distance appears as light. If inhabitants of the moon—supposing in this sense there were such beings—were to look at the earth, they would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but—also perceiving it as a light effect or something similar—they would detect what takes place around the centers of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of the conditions in which human beings live between going to sleep and waking. That is what would actually be seen from the universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the region of your centers of gravity and what would happen if you were suddenly to fall asleep—it is to be hoped that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the outer universe, what takes place through human beings is the perceptible reality—not what surrounds us in earthly existence. A very common saying is that everything perceived with the senses is maya—the great illusion—no reality but simply appearance. Such an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To say glibly that the animal, plant, and mineral worlds are maya means nothing: What is of value is the realization that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon yourselves and that—not of course at each moment but in the course of human evolution—you make yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and effects.

Even when such a shattering truth is uttered—and I think it may well be shattering—it is not always seen in the aspect where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not physical beings only; we are moral—or maybe immoral—beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this domain. Natural science provides a knowledge of the earthly that is confined to the connection between purely external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural causes and effects, the human being too is involved. So it is alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that moral impulses also light up in people is admitted but nothing is known about the connection between these moral impulses and what comes to pass in the round of external nature. Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and effects—and on the other hand have to admit that moral impulses light up in people. That is the reason why Kant wrote two “Critiques”: the Critique of Pure Reason, concerned with the relation of the human being to a purely natural course of things, and the Critique of Practical Reason where he puts forward his moral postulates—which in truth, if I may speak figuratively, hover in the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori relation with natural causes.

As long as we believe that what takes place in the external manifestations of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as long as we cling to this illusion, the intervention of moral impulses is something that remains separate and apart from the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed today lies under the shadow of this breach. In their thinking people cannot use the earthly round as such with the moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to say: Yes, as a human being I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause—together with all humankind—of every physical happening. The moral conduct and achievements of human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes to pass in the course of earth existence.

Natural history and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in text books of geology, botany, and so forth. What is said there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe it in the light of Martian premises. I am not saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to illustrate what I mean. Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology, and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the earth. This being would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of earth existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink. That is what a being not entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by human beings themselves of happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside the human being; they lie within humankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realize that the earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling people to sleep than to impress upon them that they have no share in the course taken by earth existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.

The truth is that the responsibility for the course of earth existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with humanity. Everyone must feel themselves to be a member of humanity, the earth itself being the body for that humanity.

Someone may say: For ten years I have given way to my passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my body. With equal conviction such a person should be able to say: If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the body of the earth will be different from what it would be were the moral impulses pure. The day-fly, because it lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world differing entirely from that of human beings. The range of our vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of life prevailed among human beings in the civilized world two thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical earth planet in another two thousand years will not depend upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon what we do and allow to be done. With world consciousness, human responsibility widens into world responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of things for the most part taught as abstractions today. Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in which they have been handed down they are nothing but the sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya and of truth as its antithesis, do not imagine that what you read there today can be really intelligible to you. It is only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these concrete realities. People think today that they have some understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the external world of sense is maya. But nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realized: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in humankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is maya,” becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in the human being a reality far greater than is usually perceived. And then the feeling of responsibility for earth existence begins.

If you will try to get to the inner core of these things—and it must be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of intelligence employed in natural science—you will gradually find your way to the realization that humankind is composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no greater than if—to give an example—you are stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will simply because someone else checks a movement. As people of the present day we are checked in many respects because of some action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect. But at all events it was an action of human beings.—What human beings? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach, for we ourselves were the ones who, in earlier earthly lives, brought about the conditions obtaining today.

We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective inter-working of human beings on the earth. None of us should, for that reason, exclude ourselves as individuals, for each of us has a share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of earthly humanity in its on-flowing life.

I have been endeavoring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific text-books. Suppose I were to draw a series of figures:

And now suppose some creature who had never lived in our world were to crawl out of the earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge, were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second, and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first figure—a triangle; effect of the second circle. This creature would then be combining cause and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the other. It only appears to be dependent to this creature who associates what comes first with what follows, as if the one were the outcome of the other. This, approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quaternary epoch, and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously—through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of sleep when human beings are outside their physical bodies.

This shows you that the descriptions given by external science are very largely illusion—maya. But merely to speak about maya is of little account. To the assertion that the external world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent from our powers of cognition. The part played by humankind in shaping earth existence cannot be fathomed by means of external science but only by an inner science. My book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment speaks of the human being's inner activity between the time of going to sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that reaches down to the sphere of the will Human beings know nothing of the connection between the will and the outer world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed. We do not know what is really going on when by lifting our hand we set in operation a process of will; nor do we know that this process continues and has an effect in the whole course of earth existence.

This is indicated in the scene in my mystery play, The Portal of Initiation, where the actions of Capesius and Strader have their outcome in cosmic manifestations—in thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it is not fantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true poets whose fantasy must always be perception of super-sensible processes.

This is very little understood by modern people who like to relegate poetry, indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external reality. They feel relieved not to be asked to see in poetry anything more than fantasy. True poetry, true art, is of course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth—but a reflection it is. Even if poets are not themselves conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if their soul is linked with the cosmos, if they have not been torn away from the cosmos by materialistic education, they give utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where as I have shown in the case of particular passages, the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes.² The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of what I have been saying. Take any picture painted by no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule, landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of landscape has come into prominence only since the last three to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that landscape takes second place; it is the human world that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness still survived that in regard to objective processes of earth existence the human world is much more important than the landscape—which is but the effect of the human world. In the very birth of preference for landscape there lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the birth of the materialistic trend of mind—consisting in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an existence of its own, entirely apart from humanity. But the truth is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper,” but not in paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes—including painted landscapes—and the whole configuration of the earth quite differently and with his particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning. Please remember that I am saying these things merely in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to convey.

So you see, the saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be fully understood without entering into the concrete realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately with earth existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that there can be external and apparent realities which are not the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is in front of you there cannot be the reality. It can be true reality only while it is growing on the rose tree, united with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The earth as described by the geologists is as little a true reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual science endeavors never to halt at the untrue reality, but always to seek what must be added, in order to have the whole, true reality. The meager sense of reality prevailing in our present civilization expresses itself in the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without human beings, is no more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose tree. These things must be pondered and worked upon; they must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thoughts: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality. Similarly, the human being has no true reality apart from the earth, nor has the earth without humankind. It is an unreal concept when modern scientific investigators think, according to their premises, that earth evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in earth evolution and that if no human bodies—either by burial or cremation—became part of the earth, the whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is in consequence of these bodies having been received into the earth.

In the lecture today I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection between the two poles of will and intelligence in human beings and their cosmic environment.

• 1. Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.
• 2. Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlauterungen zu Goethe's Faust.

I want to speak to-day of something that will help to deepen our understanding of truths that must now be given to mankind by Anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of forces in man: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence. To understand the nature of man we must be constantly mindful of these two poles.

Man is a being of will and a being of intelligence. Between them—at any rate from birth until death—lies the element of feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and the will. You know that these forces separate from each other in a certain sense when man reaches what is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World.

Our study to-day will be concerned more particularly with the relationship in which man stands to the surrounding world, on the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In his life between birth and death, man unfolds the force of will as the impulse of his actions and activity. As it comes to expression through the human organism, this force of will is a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one aspect, everything of the nature of will in man bears a great likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner relation between the forces of will in the human being and the forces of nature.

You know from earlier studies that even while man is awake, he is in a condition resembling sleep wherever his will is involved. True, he has in his consciousness the ideas lying behind what he wills, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that he knows nothing. He does not know how the idea, “I move my arm”, is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconsciousness and it may truly be said that man is no more conscious of the real process of will than he is of what takes place during sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of man's will with the surrounding world, we come to something that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of geological, purely physical processes. And even if he does not expressly say so, he has in mind that from the earth's beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings. Why is this view held by natural science to-day? The reason is that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9th, 1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of time. Men think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and what happens at any point is the effect of what went before; the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way men think and you will find evidence of it in any text-book of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch—but the causes are attributed entirely to what once took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that man inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were man not present, everything would run a similar course, that the external reality would be the same—although, in fact, man has always been part of this external reality. The truth is that the earth is one whole, man himself being one of the active factors in the earth's evolution.—I will give you an example.

You know that our present epoch—thinking of it for the moment in the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great Atlantean catastrophe—was preceded by the Atlantean epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa and America in their present form were not in existence. At that time there was one main continent on the earth—Atlantis as it is called—extending over the area that is now the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was rampant throughout the then civilised world. Human beings had far greater power over the forces of nature than they later possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to those who base their thinking on the principles of modern natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and activities of men were among the contributory causes.—Yet so it is.—In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe was the outcome of the deeds of men on the earth.

Outer, mineral causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic events that break in upon earth-existence. We must look for causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses. Man himself belongs to the chain of causative forces in earth-existence. Nor does this apply only to events of such magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the connection between what goes on within man and cosmic happenings which take effect in tellurian events, remains hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion. For if you want to get at the real causes you will not discover them by studying the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms alone.

Let me give you the following illustration of what comes into consideration here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite side.—Here (X) is the centre of the earth.—When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of the following.—In the region around Naples in Italy, you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit vapour if you take a piece of paper and set it alight. Vapours begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will say: the force which drives up the vapours lies in the physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air the vapours inside the earth press upwards. They are kept down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an example of effects of a purely mineral nature—such as these vapours arising out of the earth—I could say for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you that the causes of the rising of the vapour do not lie below the soil, but above it. Now these points in the diagram—a, b, c, d, e, f do not represent pieces of paper that have been set alight; in this instance they represent something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point on its own has no significance but that the significance lies in the system of points as a whole.—Do not think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth; and these different causes do not work singly, but together. And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let us say 1,500 million points [Note 1] all working together, producing a combined effect. These 1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has within you what may be called the centre of gravity of your own physical structure. When man is awake, this centre of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when he is asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centres of gravity spread over the earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within man.

This is a truth of which there is scarcely an inkling to-day. It is known to very, very few that the causes of processes active in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms lie within the organism of man. (This does not apply to all the forces working in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of them.) Within mankind lie the causes for what happens on earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be cultivated truly without anthropology—without the study of man. Science tells us of physical, chemical and mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with the human will, with the force of human will that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity. If we speak of the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must not follow the geologists in speaking of an earth in the abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on yonder side of the Threshold. Everything that can be known on this side of the Threshold belongs to the realm of the illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point the question arises: What relation is there between the forces of will that are concentrated in man's centre of gravity, and the external, physical and chemical forces?—We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity.—In normal life, this relation takes effect in the metabolic processes. When man takes into himself the substances of the outer world, it is his will that actually digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and forces; and the relation between man and the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature to-day is such that his will is connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction inherent in our planet.

We could not live were this destruction not to take place—but for all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And what are often described as unlawful magical practices are based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

Through our will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And if as human beings had only our forces of will, the earth would be condemned through us, through mankind, to sheer destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic space.—So much for the one pole in man's constitution.

But man is a twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole—that of intelligence—is connected with the will by the bridge of feeling. But in his waking life, man's intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a true relationship to earth-existence through our intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will happens while man is awake, although he is not conscious of it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the inner, organic nature of man himself. Strange as this will seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of man's nature were not there—the pole of the upbuilding forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity, so the upbuilding forces lie in the sphere into which men pass during their sleep. From the time of falling asleep until that of waking, man is in a condition figuratively described by saying that with his “I” and astral body he is outside the physical body. But then he is entirely a being of soul-and-spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation between falling asleep and waking. During this time he is connected, through these forces, with everything that builds up the earth-planet, everything that adds to the forces of destruction the constructive, upbuilding forces. If you did not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually proceeding from your will would not be working in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. If you never went to sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually upbuilt would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive, upbuilding forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity itself: I do not say: in the individual human being—for I have expressly said that all these single causes form a collective whole. The upbuilding forces lie in mankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in man's being but not in his waking intelligence. Waking intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting itself into earth-evolution. The intelligence that works, unconsciously to man, during his sleep—that is what builds up the earth-planet. By this I am only trying to explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth; you must look for them within the human being. Once you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be unintelligible.

You look up to the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that can be perceived by man's sense-organs here on earth.—But what you behold when you gaze at the stars is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In reality it proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inter activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of what was to be expected from these physical descriptions exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of will and intelligence which at a distance appears as light. If an inhabitant of the Moon—supposing in this sense there were such a being—were to look at the earth, he would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but—also perceiving it as a light effect or something similar—he would detect what takes place around the centres of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of the conditions in which man lives between going to sleep and waking. That is what would actually be seen from the universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the region of your centres of gravity and what would happen if you were suddenly to fall asleep—it is to be hoped that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the outer universe, what takes place through human beings is the perceptible reality—not what surrounds man in earthly existence. A very common saying is that everything perceived with the senses is maya—the great illusion—no reality but simply appearance. Such an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To say glibly that the animal, plant and mineral worlds are maya means nothing. What is of value is the realisation that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon yourselves and that—not of course at each moment but in the course of mankind's evolution—you make yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and effects.

Even when such a shattering truth is uttered—and I think it may well be shattering—it is not always seen in the aspect where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not physical beings only; we are moral—or maybe immoral—beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this domain.—Natural science provides a knowledge of the earthly that is confined to the connection between purely external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural causes and effects, physical man too is involved. So it is alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that moral impulses also light up in man is admitted but nothing is known about the connection between these moral impulses and what comes to pass in the round of external nature. Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and effects—and on the other hand have to admit that moral impulses light up in man. That is the reason why Kant wrote two “Critiques”: the Critique of Pure Reason, concerned with the relation of man to a purely natural course of things, and the Critique of Practical Reason where he puts forward his moral postulates—which in truth—if I may speak figuratively—hover in the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori relation with natural causes.

As long as man believes that what takes place in the external manifestations of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as long as he clings to this illusion, the intervention of moral impulses is something that remains separate and apart from the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed to-day lies under the shadow of this breach. In their thinking men cannot fuse the earthly round as such with the moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to say: Yes, as man I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause—together with all mankind—of every physical happening.—The moral conduct and achievements of human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes to pass in the course of earth-existence.

Natural history and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in text-books of geology, botany and so forth. What is said there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe it in the light of his premises.—I am not saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to illustrate what I mean.—Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the earth.—He would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer-houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of earth-existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink.—... That is what a being not entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by man himself of happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside man; they lie within mankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realise that the earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling man to sleep than to impress upon him that he has no share in the course taken by earth-existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.

The truth is that the responsibility for the course of earth-existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with humanity. Everyone must feel himself to be a member of humanity, the earth itself being the body for that humanity.

An individual may say to himself: For ten years I have given way to my passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my body.—With equal conviction he should be able to say: If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the body of the earth will be different from what it would be were the moral impulses pure.—The day-fly, because it lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world differing entirely from that of man. The range of man's vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of life prevailed among human beings in the civilised world two thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical earth-planet in another two thousand years will not depend upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon what we do and allow to be done. With world-consciousness, human responsibility widens into world-responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of things for the most part taught as abstractions to-day. Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in which they have been handed down they are nothing but the sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya and of truth as its antithesis,do not imagine that what you read there to-day can be really intelligible to you. It is only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these concrete realities. Men think to-day that they have some understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the external world of sense is maya.—But nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realised: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in mankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is maya”, becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in man a reality far greater than is usually perceived.—And then the feeling of responsibility for earth-existence begins.

If you will try to get to the inner core of these things—and it must be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of intelligence employed in natural science—you will gradually find your way to the realisation that mankind is composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no greater than if—to give an example—you are stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will simply because someone else checks a movement. As men of the present day we are checked in many respects because of some action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect. But at all events it was an action of men.—What men? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach, for we ourselves were the men who, in earlier earthly lives, brought about the conditions obtaining to-day.

We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective interworking of men on the earth. No one should, for that reason, exclude himself as an individual, for each of us has his share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of earthly humanity in its onflowing life.

I have been endeavouring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific text-books.—Suppose I were to draw a series of figures:

And now suppose some creature who had never lived in the world of men were to crawl out of the earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first figure—a triangle; effect of the second—a circle.—This creature would then be combining cause and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the other. It only appears to be dependent to this creature who associates what comes first with what follows, as if the one were the outcome of the other. This, approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quarternary epoch, and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously—through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of sleep when man is outside his physical body.

This shows you that the descriptions given by external science are very largely illusion—maya. But merely to speak about maya is of little account. To the assertion that the external world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent from man's powers of cognition. The part played by mankind in shaping earth-existence cannot be fathomed by means of external science but only by an inner science. My book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment speaks of man's inner activity between the time of going to sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that reaches down to the sphere of the will. Man knows nothing of the connection between the will and the outer world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed. He does not know what is really going on when by lifting his hand he sets in operation a process of will; nor does he know that this process continues and has an effect in the whole course of earth-existence.

This is indicated in the scene in my Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, where the actions of Capesius and Strader have their outcome in cosmic manifestations—in thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it is not phantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true poets whose phantasy must always be perception of super-sensible processes.

This is very little understood by modern man who likes to relegate poetry, indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external reality. He feels relieved not to be asked to see in poetry anything more than phantasy. True poetry, true art, is of course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth—but a reflection it is. Even if the poet is not himself conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if his soul is linked with the cosmos, if he has not been torn away from the cosmos by materialistic education, he gives utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where as I have shown in the case of particular passages, the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes. [Note 2] The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of what I have been saying.—Take any picture painted by no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule, landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of landscape has come into prominence only since the last three to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that landscape takes second place; it is the world of man that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness still survived that in regard to objective processes of earth-existence the world of man is much more important than the landscape—which is but the effect of the world of man. In the very birth of preference for landscape there lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the birth of the materialistic trend of mind—consisting in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an existence of its own, entirely apart from man. But the truth is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper”, but not in paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes—including painted landscapes—and the whole configuration of the earth quite differently and with his particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning.—Please remember that I am saying these things merely in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to convey.

So you see, the saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be fully understood without entering into the concrete realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately with earth-existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that there can be external and apparent realities which are not the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is in front of you there, cannot be the reality. It can be true reality only while it is growing on the rose-tree, united with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The earth as described by the geologists is as little a true reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual science endeavours never to halt at the untrue reality, but always to seek what must be added, in order to have the whole, true reality. The meagre sense of reality prevailing in our present civilisation expresses itself in the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without man, is no more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose-tree.—These things must be pondered and worked upon; they must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thought: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality.—Similarly, man has no true reality apart from the earth, nor has the earth without mankind. It is an unreal concept when the modern scientific investigator thinks, according to his premises, that earth-evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in earth-evolution and that if no human bodies—either by burial or cremation—became part of the earth, the whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is in consequence of these bodies having been received into the earth.

In the lecture to-day I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection between the two poles of will and intelligence in man and his cosmic environment.

Notes:

Note 1. Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.

Note 2. Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erläuterungen zu Goethe's Faust. [This is a reference to GA#'s 272 and 273: Spiritual Scientific Note on Goethe's Faust, Volumes I (15 lectures) and II (13 lectures), most of which are yet untranslated. – e.Ed.]

This is lecture 7 of 14 from the book entitled Background of the Mystery of Golgotha.

In our age it has become of ever increasing importance that those souls who, by reason of their karma, have been led to Spiritual Science, should acquire a deep understanding of that which we call “The Mystery of Golgotha.” Those friends who were present at our recent Group meetings have already heard much concerning this Mystery: that it had a spiritual pre-history and that it was, as it were, the conclusion of a series of events. It was also explained that at that time in our Earth-evolution there took place the union of the Christ-Being with the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and that thereby a Being walked upon the Earth of whom it may be said, “By virtue of this Being moving on the physical plane the Cosmic Christ was present in our Earth-existence.”

It is important for the whole future of human evolution that through a deeper understanding of this Mystery men should develop more and more reverence and loving and true heartfelt devotion for what occurred through that event for the evolution of mankind.

It has been said repeatedly, and is well known to you, that in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha two Jesus-children were born. The one was the Jesus who descended from the line of Solomon and bore the Ego of Zarathustra. The other, coming from the Nathan line of the House of David, was a very special Being. In the twelfth year of the life of the latter the Ego of Zarathustra passed over into him from the child of the line of Solomon, and from that time until his thirtieth year the Nathan child with the Ego of Zarathustra made himself ready to receive the Christ-Being. This event is indicated through the Baptism in Jordan when Jesus of Nazareth was permeated by the Christ-Being. At His death the Christ-Being poured Himself out into the spiritual Earth-sphere, so that mankind may become more and more able to participate in that which, proceeding from the Mystery of Golgotha, can pour forth spiritual forces into the souls and hearts of all men.

In a certain sense as preparation this Mystery, as I have already pointed out, had already been accomplished three times before for the salvation of mankind: once in the old Lemurian epoch, then in the Atlantean, and once again at the end of Atlantean times. That is, three times and then a fourth time in the post-Atlantean epoch at the beginning of our own era. That which we know as the Mystery of Golgotha, however, was the only one enacted on the physical plane. The other events, which were preparatory, took place wholly in the spiritual world; but the forces which were thus developed flowed down into the earthly souls and bodies for the salvation of mankind. In all three of these preparatory events that same Being was present who was born later as the Nathan-Jesus and who was permeated by the Christ-Being. This is the essential fact in the Mystery of Golgotha that the Jesus-Being who grew up as the Nathan boy was permeated by the Christ-Being. He who was later the Nathan-Jesus had been present in the three earlier events, but not incarnated as physical man; he lived in the spiritual worlds as a spiritual Being of the nature of the Archangels; and in the spiritual worlds, in the preparatory stages of the Mystery of Golgotha, in the Lemurian age and twice in Atlantis, he was permeated by the Christ-Being.

It may be said, therefore, that there were three Archangel-lives in the spiritual world, and that the Being who lived those lives was the same as he who was later incarnated as man and is described in the Gospel of St. Luke as the Jesus-child. Three times had this Angelic being, who later sacrificed himself as Man, offered himself for permeation by the Christ-Impulse. As in Christ Jesus we have a Man permeated with the Christ-Impulse, so it may be said that three times previously we have an Angel permeated with that Impulse. And as that which was accomplished by the Mystery of Golgotha streamed forth into the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth, so did that which was brought about by the first three events pour into the Earth from out the Cosmos. Looking at the course of our human evolution we note that the Mystery of Golgotha stands in its very center. Everything that went before was in preparation for and pointed to this Event, which was the center-point of human development, and everything that has since happened is a gradual advance in the streaming of the forces of the Mystery into the hearts and souls of men.

The human principle into which these forces stream, if it makes itself receptive, is that which is able to develop its consciousness in the world of the physical plane. We cannot speak to a newborn infant about Christ Jesus; there are no means whereby we can make him understand what He is. We may show him a picture such as the Sistine Madonna with the Jesus Child, or a representation of the Crucifixion, but could we look into his soul we should know that he cannot possibly be approached in these first stages of his life by means of our external methods of education on the physical plane. We may indeed, when he first begins to lisp, accustom him to pronounce the name of Christ, and we can surround him with ideas about Christ, but we find that the deeper understanding of the heart is not yet ready. One thing is clear to everyone able by means of Spiritual Science to look into the child's mind: only when he has reached an age when he can look back in memory, and his Ego-consciousness has awakened, is it at all possible for us to convey to him by our external education even the faintest glimmerings of a feeling for Christ. Nor during the first few years after the awakening of the Ego-consciousness will there be any great understanding. Nevertheless all that we can give him in the way of ideas about Christ without dogma, and all we can convey by means of words and ideas containing something of the Christ-Impulse, will be of advantage throughout the whole of his later life. After the awakening of the Ego-consciousness, though it be only a glimmer, and when we are still unable to work on the child by physical means, he will look upon a picture of the Madonna and Child or at the Cross on which hangs the Christ in quite a different way from before. For just as the Mystery of Golgotha has entered the earthly evolution of man, so is it also destined to work in the advancement of spiritual life on the physical plane. Man, in fact, only enters the physical plane consciously when his Ego awakens. What occurs before this? Three things, which I have pointed out in former lectures, precede the awakening of the Ego in the child—three things of immense importance.

The child learns to walk; that is to say, he learns to raise himself from the position in which he was incapable of lifting his body from the earth level towards the heavenly heights of the Cosmos. He is now in that position which, above all, distinguishes man from the animals. Having learnt by his own inner forces to assume it, he turns his gaze away from the earth at which the animal is compelled to look by reason of its nature and form. (There are exceptions in the animal world, but they are only apparent.)

It is this upright position that the child learns to acquire before the awakening of his Ego-consciousness. In our present post-Atlantean life we recapitulate those things which, as man, we have acquired only in the course of the ages. This power to stand and to walk in an upright position was acquired by slow stages in the old Lemurian epoch, and we now recapitulate it in infancy before our Ego awakens to consciousness. This pre-knowledge is crowded into a time of life when the process does not yet depend upon our consciousness but works as an unconscious impulse towards the upright position.

In the case of the animals which have an approximately upright walk the whole organism is so arranged that they assume this attitude by nature. But like so many of the comparisons which are made this one is incomplete. Man, in the early stages of his life and before his Ego-consciousness has awakened, is destined by means of the rudiments of this Ego to bring himself to a vertical position, to raise himself out of the condition he still occupied during the old Moon period when the line of direction of his spine was practically horizontal, parallel with the Moon's surface. During the old Lemurian time he learnt to alter the Moon direction to that of the Earth. This came about because, during the Earth development, the Spirits of Form poured the Ego into man out of their own substance. And the first manifestation of this in-flowing of the “I” was that inner force by means of which man raised himself into an upright position. Thus, through this position, he is wrested from the Earth. The Earth contains within itself spiritual forces capable of streaming through the spine as in the case of the animal body where in its natural growth it remains horizontal. But the Earth has no forces enabling it directly to serve the human being who, through his Ego when it awakens later to consciousness, can raise himself upright. In order that man may develop harmoniously with an upright position and vertical walk, forces had to stream into the Earth from the Cosmos, the extra-earthly.

If, during the old Lemurian epoch, the first Christ-Event had not taken place, Lucifer and Ahriman would have been able to bring about disaster to the whole of humanity since man, through his upright position, was wrested from the spiritual forces of the Earth. In that old Lemurian epoch, in the realm which is the nearest spiritual sphere to our Earth, the Being—at that time, however, of an angelic nature—who later on became the Nathan-Jesus, was permeated with the Christ-Being.

This was a first stage of the Mystery of Golgotha. The consequence was that in that old Lemurian epoch—but in etheric spiritual heights—the being who later became the Nathan-Jesus, and who otherwise would have had the form of an angel, took on human form (not of flesh, but a human etheric form). In the super-earthly region Jesus of Nazareth is to be found as an etheric angel-form. Through permeation with the Christ he then assumed etheric human form. Thereby something new entered the Cosmos and rayed down upon Earth and made it possible for man, the physical earthly human form, into whom streamed the force of the etheric super-earthly Christ-Being, to protect himself from that destruction which must have overtaken him had not the Formative Force, which enabled him to become an upright harmonious being, permeated and lived on in him. Disorder must inevitably have entered had not this form-giving force, which was able to stream into mankind because of the first Christ Event, poured in with the forces of the physical Sun. This which man received into himself in the old Lemurian epoch has since lived on in the evolution of humanity. We take the right view of a growing child when we see him emerging from the crawling, wriggling, helpless state and managing for the first time to stand upright or walk, when we realize that his being able to do so has only become possible because the first Christ-Event took place in the old Lemurian time for the help and salvation or mankind; because he who, as the Nathan-Jesus, was permeated by Christ, took on as a spiritual etheric being the human etheric form as the result of that permeation.

Yes, my dear friends, Spiritual Science is here that we may enrich our feelings. Such a feeling as can live in our souls when we see a little child learning to stand upright and to walk has most certainly a deep religious background. We should often call to mind why the child walks and realize how we must thank the Christ-Impulse for it. Then we have enriched our conception of the world through Spiritual Science and acquired a feeling for our environment which we could not possess otherwise. Through Spiritual Science we take note, as it were, of the protectors and guardians of a child's growth and development and see how the Christ-Force radiates around his being.

You will have seen from my descriptions of Atlantean times taken from the Akashic Records that our Atlantean forefathers were dumb. The Atlantean man was actually the first to learn to speak, and the Akashic Records show how that came about. Learning to speak is the second capacity which a child acquires before the actual Ego-consciousness awakens, the awakening coming after he has learnt to speak. Learning to speak depends altogether on a kind of imitation, the aptitude for which, however, is deeply embedded in human nature. Speech came to man as a consequence of progressive development. The Spirits of Form poured themselves into man and permeated him, and thereby he became able to speak a language, to live his earth life on the physical plane.

Thus, by means of two principles, viz., the upright position and speech, he wrests himself free from those spiritual forces that are active upon the Earth. Animals are permeated by those forces; they do not in reality speak. Speech through gestures is not the speech of man. If, by means of training or other methods, animals were to be taught a speech similar to man's, special conditions would arise external to their bodily structure. These conditions must some day be dealt with by Spiritual Science, but they are outside our subject to-day. We will restrict ourselves to the normal development of man by saying that human speech was established in man from out of divine heights through that which the Spirits of Form poured into him, and we will consider how he has transformed himself from a dumb into a speaking being.

Man has made himself independent of those forces which spiritually flow through the Earth, just as through acquiring the power to stand upright he made himself independent of the first stream. If he had been abandoned entirely to the Earth, if Cosmic-spiritual influences had not come down to Earth and poured into him, everything connected with his speech must have become debased through the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences. If nothing had been brought about by Christ, man in the Atlantean epoch would so have developed his whole life-culture—all his bodily organs: larynx, tongue, throat, etc., and indeed even the organs lower down such as the heart in so far as they are connected with the former—that he would only have been capable of expressing his own selfish joy or pain, desire or bliss, in poor babbling sounds somewhat like the utterances of Sibyls or mediums. Certainly he would have been able to utter much more artistic or intelligent sounds than an animal can produce, but these sounds would only have been expressive of that which lived within him, of the bodily processes taking place in his organism. He would have found expressive interjections for these only; his speech would have consisted entirely of interjections. Whereas we now limit our interjections to a few words, the human art of speech with all its subtleties would have developed at that time only as far as a language of such interjections. This disorder in the power of speech in so far as it would have affected man's inner being was averted; the second Christ-Event prevented it from entering human evolution. Through the fact that for the second time the Being in the etheric heights, who later became the Nathan-Jesus child, received into himself the Christ-Being who henceforward permeated the bodily organs of man, man became capable of uttering more than interjections. The power of grasping the objective was brought about through the second Christ-Event.

But the human capacity for expressing the working of the mind in words was again faced with danger. Through the second Christ-Event it might indeed have come to pass that man would have found not only sounds, interjections and words to express the feelings of his inner being; in a certain sense he might also have been able to give out what he had called forth as an inner speech movement. But the power of so describing outer things in words, in order that the words should rightly indicate them, was still in danger from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences right into the Atlantean epoch. Then came the third Christ-Event. For the third time that Being in the spiritual heights, later to be born as the Nathan-Jesus, united himself with the Christ-Being and again poured the forces so received into the human power of speech. The force of this Christ-Jesus Being now permeated once more the organs of the human body in so far as those organs come to expression in the power of speech. In this way it was made possible for the power of speech to create, by means of words, actual signs representative of the external environment, thus enabling mankind to create language as a means of communication between the different inhabited regions. A child learns to speak, but he could never do so if these two Christ-Events had not taken place during the Atlantean epoch. Through Spiritual Science we can enrich anew our inner feelings if we remember, when we see a child beginning to speak and gradually improving his power of expression, that the Christ-Impulses rule within the unconscious nature and that the Christ-Force lives in the child's power of speech, guarding and stimulating it.

After the occurrence of the three Christ-Events, which have again been described to-day from a certain standpoint in their influence on human evolution, came the post-Atlantean epoch. In this evolution the mission of the peoples belonging chiefly to that stage of man's development known to us as the Egyptian-Chaldean was to recapitulate what had happened for humanity in the Lemurian epoch; but at the same time to permeate it with consciousness. Quite unconsciously man learnt to stand upright in the Lemurian epoch, and to become a speaking being in the Atlantean epoch. Quite unconsciously he took in the Christ-Impulse at that time because his power of thought had not been awakened. In the post-Atlantean times he has had to be led slowly to understand what it was that he had thus taken in unconsciously in prehistoric ages. It was the Christ-Impulse which enabled him to stand upright and look up into the cosmic heights. In the Lemurian epoch man lived as he was obliged to do. Later the peoples of Egypt, who were not yet fully conscious but in a condition preparatory to the attainment of full consciousness, had to be led to revere what dwells in the human power of erectness. The Initiates, whose mission it was to influence the culture of Egypt, taught the people to revere that power by causing them to build the Pyramids which reach up from the earth towards the Cosmos. Even now we cannot but marvel at the way in which, through the working of the cosmic forces into the whole form and position of these structures, this power of the upright is brought to expression. The Obelisks were erected so that man might begin to penetrate into the power of the perpendicular. The wonderful hieroglyphics in the Pyramids and on the Obelisks, which were intended to point to the Christ, awakened to consciousness the super-earthly forces of the Lemurian epoch.

As regards the power of speech, however, the Egyptians could not even acquire that dim comprehension which they had for the power which enables man to stand upright. Their souls had first to undergo the right schooling, so that in later times they might be able to understand the riddle—how the Christ lives in man's gift of speech. That riddle was to be received with the most sacred reverence by the maturing human soul. This was provided for in the most wonderful way by the Hierophants, the Initiates of the Egyptian civilization, when they erected the enigmatic Sphinx with its dumb, granite form which only produced sound under the influence of the Cosmos when the human beings of that day were in an exalted state of consciousness. In the contemplation of the silent Sphinx, from which sound only proceeded at sunrise under certain cosmic conditions and in certain relations, there came to man that deep reverence by which the soul was prepared to understand the language which must be spoken when it would be brought to higher consciousness how the Christ-Impulse gradually enters into the evolution of earthly humanity. That which the Sphinxes themselves could not yet say, although they prepared the way for it, had to be said to mankind. In the forming of the word-movement lies the Christ-Impulse.

This was announced to mankind in the words:

In the Primal Beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And a God was the Word.
The same was in the Primal Beginning with God.
It was there where all things came into being,
And nothing came into being but through the Word.
In the Word was the Life, and the Life was the Light of men.

“In the Word was the Life, and the Life was the Light of men.” These words are to be found where the Gospel was born out of the fourth post-Atlantean age; when man, prepared by the Greco-Latin civilization, had reached the stage when he was to recapitulate in the fourth post-Atlantean age what had taken place before. Just as the reverence for the upright position was recalled in the Egyptian epoch, so now the reverence for the Word was recalled. Thus do the super-human spiritual forces work into the evolution of humanity.

A third thing which the child has to learn before he actually awakens to the Ego-consciousness is to form ideas, to think. This power of thinking was reserved for the humanity of the post-Atlantean epoch; and, indeed, for the humanity of the fourth age in that epoch. Before that men thought in pictures. I shall treat of this subject further in my book, Riddles of Philosophy, which is about to be published. The child, too, thinks in pictures. It was only gradually given to humanity to think in thoughts, this faculty not being aroused in man until the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ. From that time onwards the thinking of thoughts has developed more and more; we now stand in the middle point. It is through the development of this power that the Ego can be grasped. In order that thinking, too, might be united with the Christ-Impulse, that thinking as such might not come into disorder in its activity on the Ego, there came the fourth Christ-Event, the Mystery of Golgotha.

If our thinking is gradually to be brought more and more into order, to develop on the right lines so that our thoughts shall no longer be chaotic and confused, but filled, permeated with inner feeling, if there is to be an increasing development of healthy thinking based upon truth—it will be because thinking has acquired, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the fourth Christ-Event, the impulse which it could only acquire as a result of the Christ-Impulse having poured itself out into the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth.

This outpouring occurred for the first time in the Lemurian epoch when the upright position of man was threatened by Lucifer.

It occurred for the second time in the Atlantean epoch when man's power of speech which, as an expression of his inner being, was in danger of being disordered, was saved.

Towards the end of the Atlantean epoch it occurred for the third time. When the Christ permeated the spiritual being of the later Jesus of Nazareth, the gift of speech, inasmuch as words are signs which represent things in the outer world, was delivered by Christ from danger.

The fourth danger was to man's thinking, the inner representation of his ideas. From this danger man is saved by permeation with thoughts on such forms as live within him—forms such as that which flowed out into the spiritual sphere of the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. This can be the case even now if man will prepare himself for it through Spiritual Science.

My dear friends, we have progressed so far in the evolution of humanity that the first words of the Gospel of St. John may be set forth in another form, in the following form:—

In the Primal Beginning is the Thought,
And the Thought is with God,
And a God-like being is the Thought.
In it is Life,
And the Life shall become the Light of my Ego.
And may the Divine Thought shine into my Ego
That the darkness of my Ego may grasp the Thought Divine.

It was not expressed quite clearly, but human evolution strove forward in this direction.

The fourth post-Atlantean civilization began in the eighth century before Christ. About three and a-half centuries later thought had ripened sufficiently to be expressed by the Greek philosophers with such clarity that it led to the Platonic Philosophy. Then the life of man was permeated with the Christ-Impulse. With the dawn of the fifteenth century after Christ the fifth post-Atlantean age began. There was exactly the same length of time between the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantean age and the understanding of thought as there was between the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age and the conscious utterance of the nature of thought, that is to say, until Hegel. Human thought attained its highest point with Hegel: “The living and weaving of thought in truth is the causative Spirit.” What Hegel says, in a form so apparently quite incomprehensible, can really be expressed as follows:—

In the Primal Beginning is the Thought,
And Infinite is the Thought.
And the Life of the Thought is the Light of the Ego.
May light-giving Thought fill the Darkness of my Ego,
That the Darkness of my Ego may grasp the Living Thought
And live and weave in its Divine Primal Beginning.

Thus with rhythmical steps the evolution of humanity goes forward. Humanity has not yet advanced very far; even Hegel was much maligned. It may well be said that “The Light-giving Thought did indeed shine into the Darkness, but the Darkness wished to know nothing of it.” When man learns to understand the Life of Thought he will understand what devolves upon humanity in its further existence.

And now there is still something more to be said, as we are standing on the ground of Spiritual Science. Later epochs are always being prepared for during those that precede them. And inasmuch as we stand within the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, inasmuch as we foster Spiritual Science and have continuously more to contribute to the understanding of living thought, of the thinking which is becoming clairvoyant—we have at the same time the sixth Post-Atlantean epoch.

Just as the Christ-Impulse now streams into the thoughts of life, so will it stream later into something which is indeed one of the qualities of the human soul but must not be confused with mere thinking. The child develops his capacities out of the unconscious. When he attains to Ego-consciousness he enters the sphere in which he can acquire, in which he must develop, all that can come to him from outside through the Christ-Impulse. When the child has learnt to walk, when he has learnt to speak, and when with learning to think, he has begun to work through to the Ego, we can see how the conscious Christ-Impulse, which entered through the Mystery of Golgotha, begins gradually to work upon him. At the present time there is something else among the powers of the human soul which is not yet able to take in the Christ-Impulse. It is possible to introduce the Christ-Impulse into the power of walking upright, and into speaking and thinking; these things are possible because of that which has been done for the civilization of mankind for centuries.

We have now to prepare for the introduction of the Christ-Impulse into a fourth element, a fourth human capacity, if we truly stand on the foundation of Spiritual Science. We must consider this, too! The soul-capacity into which the Christ-Impulse cannot yet be directed, but into which we must prepare to direct it, is the human memory. For in addition to the walking and standing upright, the speaking and thinking, the Christ-Force is now entering the memory. We can understand the Christ when He speaks to us through the Gospels. But we are only now being prepared as human beings for His entrance also into the thoughts which live in us and which then, as remembered thoughts and ideas, live on further in us. And a time will come for humanity which is now being prepared but which will only be fulfilled in the Sixth Great Period of humanity when men will look back upon that which they have lived through and experienced, upon that which lives on within them as memory. They will be able to realize that Christ Himself is present in the power of Memory. He will be able to speak through every idea. And if we make concepts and ideas alive within us Christ will be united with our memories, with that which as our memory is so closely and intimately bound up with us.

Man, looking back at his life, will realize that just as he can remember, just as the power of recollection lives within him, so in this recollection there also lives the Christ-Impulse which has streamed into it. The path which is shown to man is to make the words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” more and more true. And the way will be made smooth through the Christ-Impulse gradually drawing into man's power of memory. The Christ-Impulse is not yet within the memory. When it actually comes, when it lives not only in the understanding of man but is poured out over the whole length and breadth of his memories, he will not have to turn to external documents to learn history, for then his whole power of memory will be extended. Christ will live in this memory. And when Christ has entered into the power of Memory, when Christ lives in that power, man will know that until the Mystery of Golgotha Christ worked outside the Earth; that He prepared for and went through that Mystery, and that He works on further as an Impulse in history. Man will be able to survey this in the same way as he now perceives facts which live in his ordinary life as Memory. He will not be able inwardly to survey the earthly evolution of humanity otherwise than by seeing the Christ-Impulse as the central point. The whole power of Memory will be penetrated, and at the same time strengthened, by the entrance into it of the Christ-Impulse. In time to come, if we grasp Christianity in a living way, the following words will also hold good for us:—

In the Primal Beginning is Memory,
And the Memory lives on further,
And Divine is the Memory.
And the Memory is Life.
And this Life is the Ego of Man
Which streams into Man himself,
Not he alone, the Christ in him.
When he remembers the Divine Life
In his Memory is the Christ.
And as the radiant Life of Memory
Christ will pour Light
Into every Darkness of the immediate present.

We shall be able to say that Christ is in our inner soul-life. Many of us will feel it to be so if we learn to unite ourselves with the Christ-Impulse, even as the human child learns to stand upright and to speak because he has united himself with the Christ-Impulse. Looking upon our present faculty of memory as a preparatory stage, many of us also realize that it must fall into disorder in the future unless it has the will to allow itself to be permeated with the Christ-Impulse. Should there be upon the Earth a state of materialism in which the Christ is denied, the power of Memory would fall into disorder. More and more people would appear whose memory was chaotic; who would become duller and duller in their dark Ego-consciousness if memory were not to shine into this darkness of the Ego.

Our power of Memory can only develop in the right way if the Christ-Impulse is perceived aright. History will then be a living memory because a true understanding of events has entered the memory; human memory will understand the central point of world-evolution. A perceptive faculty will then arise in man and his ordinary memory, which at present is only directed to one life, will extend over former incarnations. Memory at the present time is in a preparatory stage, but it will be endowed through the Christ. Whether we look without and see how as children we have developed as yet unconsciously, or through an intensive deepening of our soul forces look within to what remains in our memory as our inner being—everywhere we behold the living force and activity of the Christ-Impulse.

The Christ-Event which is now approaching us—not in the physical but in the etheric, and connected with the first kindling of the power of Memory, with the first kindling of the Christ-permeated Memory—will be such that Christ will approach man as an Angel-like Being. For this event we must prepare ourselves.

Spiritual Science is not simply to enrich us with mere theories. It is to pour into us something which will enable us to accept that which meets us in the world, and that which we ourselves are, with new feelings and perceptions. Our life of feeling and perception can be enriched if, through Spiritual Science, we penetrate in the right way into the nature of the Christ-Impulse and its sovereignty in man, in the spiritual being of man. It is well for us to think often on the following:—

In the Primal Beginning was the power of Memory.
The power of Memory shall become Divine;
And a Divinity shall the power of Memory become.
All that arises within the Ego shall become
Something which has arisen
Out of the Christ-permeated, God-permeated Memory.
In it shall be the Life;
In it shall be the radiant Light
Which, out of the Thinking which remembers,
Shines into the Darkness of the present time.
May that Darkness as it is to-day
Comprehend the Light of the Memory which has become Divine!

When we take into our hearts the meaning of such words as these, we take in something which is right for us human beings to receive. Just as the plant forms the seed for the next plant life, so do we learn to perceive and feel within ourselves not only the fruits that come to us from former incarnations, but also how to pass over into our future incarnations. It would go ill with our power of Memory in future incarnations if we were not permeated with the Christ-Impulse. Our Thinking is at yet permeated with the Christ-Impulse in the barest measure, and already this Impulse is approaching our Memory. May we learn, through Spiritual Science, to live not only for the transitory man who exists between birth and death but for that man who passes through ever-recurring incarnations. Let us learn, through Spiritual Science, what it means for the full development of the individual soul to have the right understanding, the right feeling and perception for the most powerful Impulse in the whole evolution of humanity—the Christ-Impulse.

In recent lectures given here my endeavour has been to show how in the middle of the 19th century a flood of materialism burst into the evolutionary process of humanity, and how from different sides it was felt that a flood of materialism of this kind had never previously been known, and that furthermore there was a certain significance in the way it had arisen I also tried to bring home the fact that men must arm themselves if they are to continue along the path of evolution once laid down for humanity.

Particularly in the most recent lectures¹ I described the efforts that were made from different quarters concerned with the furtherance of cultural aims akin to those of spiritual science to inculcate an element which was deemed necessary in order to demonstrate to men that something entirely new must be added to the old. Naturally, a very great deal more could be said about this subject, and as time goes on, there will be opportunities for speaking of many aspects of it—for illustrations will have to be given of what was presented in the first place more in the form of narrative. Today, however, I want to show that towards the middle of the 19th century there were evidences in the external spiritual life, too, of a feeling that a crucial point had been reached. In the external spiritual life—that is to say, in the different philosophical movements, the literary movement and so on—there are evidences that a convulsive element interpolated itself into the course of evolution. As numbers of illustrations could be given, it is obviously only possible to select one or two.

I will take as our starting-point today, two examples from European literature. These examples will show that in the hearts and minds of some men there was a feeling that significant things were taking place in the invisible worlds.

One of these examples is Gutzkow's novel “The Mahaguru”—the great Guru.² The second—remarkably enough it was written at about the same time—is the extraordinarily interesting drama which ends with the cry: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!”³ So far as my knowledge of it goes, it seems to me to represent a crowning point in Polish literature of the 19th century.

It is remarkable that in the thirties of the 19th century, the young freethinker Gutzkow—then in his twenties—should have chosen this particular material in order to point to much that was astir at that time, linking it on to a personage who subsequently became the Dalai-Lama in Tibet—the “Mahaguru,” as he called him.

A few brief words will suffice to outline this picture of conditions apparently so remote from those prevailing in Europe, yet in reality infinitely pertinent to them, “The Mahaguru” was published in the thirties of the 19th century—at the dawn, therefore, of the age of materialism.

One of the principal characters in the novel is a man who makes models of gods. What is such a man in Tibet? He is one who models figures of gods out of all kinds of substances (as we today work with clay or plasticine); he makes models of gods according to the traditions strictly laid down in the Tibetan canon. The details of these figures must be absolutely correct: the proportions laid down for the facial structure, the size and position of the hands—all must be exact. The hero, or rather one of the heroes of the novel, has descended from an ancient stock, the members of which have always been engaged in the trade of making gods, and he is an expert in his craft. His fame is widespread and his figures of gods are bought all over Tibet. In modeling one of the chief gods, a very terrible thing happens to him.—We must of course try to put ourselves into the heart and mind of a Tibetan before the whole import of the word “terrible” in this connection will be clear to us.—To the heart of a devout Tibetan it is a terrible thing that befell this maker of gods. In the figure of one of the chief gods, the length between the nostrils and the upper lip was not correct, not in accordance with the canon. This was a terrible and significant matter. The man had departed from the ancient, time-honoured canon and had made the space between the nostrils and the upper lip a little larger than was prescribed.

In Tibet this is a dreadful sin—nearly or perhaps just as dreadful as when someone in the West today states to an audience of orthodox believers that the existence of the two Jesus boys was necessary in order that Christ might descend into Jesus—or when he speaks of a faculty of knowledge higher than the ordinary faculty, so that he must be accused of inducing his followers to engage in experiments with clairvoyance and the like. Such teachings are sheer fantasy—that is what is said today. But in the days described in this novel it was an equally outrageous sin that in a figure of one of the chief gods the nostrils should lie too far above the upper lip. The only thing that is different is the actual form of punishment. Today, the most that happens is that lectures crammed with inaccuracies are delivered and other “justifiable” measures adopted. But at that time in Tibet the maker of gods was obliged to appear before the supreme tribunal of the Inquisition—the dread Council of black Inquisitors.—That is how it would be designated in terms current in Europe today.

So the maker of gods was obliged to set out for Lhassa and present himself before the tribunal—police are not necessary in Tibet, for the people obey automatically; when they are told that they must appear before the tribunal of the black Inquisition, there is no need to fetch them. So the maker of gods set out with his brothers and his enchanting daughter, a great Tibetan beauty.

With her masterly knowledge of the Tibetan canon, this daughter had been helping him devotedly and efficiently for many years and was an altogether lovable character. The brothers of the man were obliged to accompany him because they were co-responsible for what he had done. The caravan party now set out for Lhassa where the sinner must appear before the black tribunal. When they had traveled some distance from their home on the way to Lhassa, they came upon a curious troop of men, also bound for Lhassa, weeping, dancing, whistling, beating all kinds of instruments, and led by a Shaman. He was an acquaintance, a youthful playmate of the daughter of the maker of gods, and he knew the members of the caravan party, at the head of which was the man on his way to judgment in Lhassa, weighed down by the sinfulness he had incurred with his falsely-made god. The Shaman impressed upon him the danger of his position, saying that it would be a good thing if the real Dalai-Lama were still on the throne, but possibly the new Dalai-Lama had already been found and would be ruling Tibet from Lhassa. If that were so, things might be even worse, for the Vice-Regent was able in certain circumstances to be merciful in the administration of justice—but if the new Dalai-Lama were installed there was no telling whether or not the supreme penalty would have to be paid. And when the canon had been violated as seriously as the maker of gods had violated it by placing the nostrils too high above the upper lip—naturally the penalty would be death.

So the sinner learns that the Dalai-Lama, the Mahaguru, may soon be found. What does this mean in Tibet? The Tibetans are convinced that the soul of the great Bodhisattva who rules over Tibet passes from one body to another. When a Dalai-Lama dies, a new Dalai-Lama must be sought for—on an entirely democratic basis, for the Tibetans are thoroughly democratic in their attitude. No rank is hereditary, nothing transmitted from father to son by way of the body is of any account. According to Tibetan ideas this principle is utterly inconsistent with the dignity of the Dalai-Lama. Therefore when a Dalai-Lama dies the priesthood must set about finding a new Dalai-Lama, and then every young boy must be inspected—for the great soul might have incarnated in the very poorest family. The whole country must be searched and every boy in every house and on the roads scrutinised; if one of them shows signs of what is considered by the priesthood to indicate the necessary intelligence, be has the prospect of being acclaimed as the Dalai-Lama. The conviction is that in the boy who shows the most signs, the great soul of the Bodhisattva has incarnated, and then he is the Dalai-Lama. In the interval, while the search continues for the incarnation of the god in human form, a Vice-Dalai-Lama must rule the country temporarily.

Gutzkow's story continues.—It is already being rumoured that the new Mahaguru or the new Dalai-Lama will eventually be crowned in Lhassa, brought there with all honours.—And here I must interpolate an episode narrated by Gutzkow; he interpolates it in a slightly different place in the story, but what we are trying to do is to get a picture of his “Mahaguru.”

The beautiful girl was journeying with her father, the sinner. According to the Tibetan Constitution, his brothers are also fathers because a kind of polyandry is customary there. When a man marries, his brothers also marry the same woman. So the brothers of a father are also fathers, although one is the actual chief. The caravan procession is beautifully described in the book: the fathers are in front, then the chief father (the sinner) and his beautiful daughter. While she was still a small child and was just beginning to help her father, she had a companion with whom she liked to play, who at that time had been very dear to her and whose memory she still cherished. The Shaman at the head of the shrieking, whistling band had also been one of her early playmates and he was the brother of the one who had been her dearly-loved companion.—I have had to interpolate this in order to make what comes later more intelligible.—

The whole caravan moves on towards Lhassa, and on arriving there it is learnt that the new Mahaguru, the new Dalai-Lama, has been installed with all the honours due to him. But first we are told how the great sinner who has made the nostrils too far above the upper lip in a figure of one of the chief Tibetan gods is led before the black tribunal.

During the terrible proceedings of the tribunal it is made clear that this is a sin whose only expiation is death. Meanwhile the sinner is thrown into prison together with his family, to await a further trial in which all the sins ever committed by him are to be enumerated.—It must be emphasised that until now he had committed no sin other than that of having made the distance between nostrils and upper lip barely a millimeter too long in one of his figures. But in Tibet that is a crime punishable by death.

With pomp and splendour the new Dalai-Lama has been installed in office. We are told of many Tibetan customs, also of what goes on around the Court at Lhassa. Exact and lengthy descriptions are given in the book. In this setting, with the honourable rank of a Chinese Envoy at the Court, was a man who also had a charming young sister and who had reached a certain degree among the mandarins of China. He was a mandarin of the 6th degree but was hoping soon to be raised to a higher rank. Actually the ideal to which he aspired was the Order of the Peacock's Feather. But while this Chinese Envoy is dreaming his dreams, the most daring of which is to be made a member of the high Order of the Peacock's Feather, the new Dalai-Lama has been installed in his glory. The new Dalai-Lama knows that he has made the sun, the moon, the stars, the lightning and the clouds, the plants and the stones, and he explains to those who now come to pay their respects to him how he created it all, that he is the creator of everything that is visible in the wide universe and also of what is invisible—that he is therefore the primal creator of the visible world and of the invisible worlds connected with it.

Now in Tibet—as elsewhere—there are two parties. But these two parties are still closely bound up with the spiritual evolution of mankind in very ancient times. The two parties, whose priests belong to different sects, are usually designated by their headgear: the Yellow Caps and the Red Tassels. These two parties are in perpetual conflict with one another. In our language—for in Tibet these things are closely connected with the spiritual—we should say; the Yellow Caps are connected with the Luciferic element, the Red Tassels more with the Ahrimanic. These traits come to expression not only in their doctrines but also in their deeds: the Luciferic element is predominant in the doctrines and deeds of the Yellow Caps, the Ahrimanic element in those of the Red Tassels. In consequence of this—to explain why would lead us too far afield—the Red Tassels are bent upon ensuring that the Dalai-Lama at Lhassa shall be regarded as the lawful god who has created the plants, the animals and men; it is in their interest that the new Dalai-Lama shall be found and that the whole country shall believe him to be the lawful god—whereas the Yellow Caps are always indignant when the new Dalai-Lama is found and sits on the throne. For in Tibet, as well as the Dalai-Lama there is a Teshu-Lama, whose followers are found more among the northern Tibetans and the Mongol tribes. The Teshu-Lama strives his whole life long to overthrow the Dalai-Lama and usurp the throne. The Yellow Caps, then, support the Teshu-Lama and try to put him on the throne.

The man who aspires to the Order of the Peacock's Feather is now faced with the fact that a new Dalai-Lama is there. China, his country, holds a kind of mandate over Tibet. The Teshu-Lama is out to contest the throne, so there is opportunity here for intrigue. The man now begins to intrigue by arranging a kind of warlike caravan column to go to the Teshu-Lama and reinforce his power. But in reality his aim is not that the Teshu-Lama shall come to the throne but that the Chinese regiment shall be able to tighten the reins. In the confusion caused by this action, the beautiful daughter of the sinner is able to escape from the prison, and something unheard of happens: in the garden where only the god, the Dalai-Lama, may walk, she comes across him—and lo! the Dalai-Lama was her childhood's playmate who one day had suddenly disappeared and in the intervening time had been trained to become the Dalai-Lama. He is now the Dalai-Lama and encounters this girl, the daughter of the sinner. A deeply-interesting dialogue now ensues.—You can well imagine the situation that may arise when the girl, who had loved her playmate very intensely, encounters this playmate who is convinced that he has created the sun, the moon and the stars, and she is not altogether disinclined to believe in her god. But the priests discovered the shameful thing that had happened and threw the girl back into prison. The Dalai-Lama, however, sitting on his soft silken cushions, surrounded by all his other appurtenances, continues to meditate on how he directs the lightning and the clouds, how he has created and sustains the other phenomena of the visible world.—

The further course of the story brings us once again to the black tribunal. There is a terrible scene because the sinner, who to begin with had nothing on his conscience except the fact of having made the nostrils and upper lip of the god about a millimeter too far apart, now appears as an arch-criminal. He had gone mad in prison and had made out of some kind of substance—similar to what we should now call plasticine—most curious figures of gods. Just imagine it—A Tibetan tribunal confronted with a whole number of false figures of gods made by the culprit in prison! A howl of anger arises, no matter how he tries to vindicate himself; the judges sit around and the long galleries are full of people. The judges are monks who lay down the correct measurements of each feature in the case of every single god, how much larger the stomach of a god may be than that of an ordinary man, and so on; all the sins thus committed by the man with the figures made in prison are enumerated one by one. It is a dreadful affair and the fanatical judges pour their wrath on the sinner. He and his party are again thrown into prison, together with his daughter whose particular charm consists in the fact that because her feet are not too minute they differ from the excessively small feet customary in the Far East—in other respects, too, she is a lovely creature. But the followers of the aspirant to the Order of the Peacock's Feather cause a commotion in Lhassa and in the confusion a fire breaks out, burning the very house where the girl is imprisoned. She appears at the top of the house amid the smoke and flames at the moment when the Dalai-Lama is passing by with his brother, the Shaman, who, knowing all that has happened, has helped him to escape. At the crucial moment the human heart of the god, the Dalai-Lama, is moved. Instead of sending thunder and lightning to help, he throws himself into the flames, rescues the girl and brings her to the ground. He flees with her to a lonely, mountainous region together with his brother—and the Teshu-Lama, supported by the Yellow Caps, is enthroned in his place. So the beautiful girl goes off with the Mahaguru and his brother, the Shaman, and the Mahaguru is now married to her. After a year the Shaman dies. The good Dalai-Lama lives to an advanced age and for many long years is his wife's only husband. He actually outlives her, becomes a solitary old man and has long ceased to imagine that he rules over the lightning and the thunder, that he has created the mountains, forests and rivers, that sun, moon and stars circle in their courses according to his will. In his last years he becomes a Yogi, striving to acquire the wisdom that will lead his soul into the spiritual worlds. He stands on one leg, the other coiled around it like a serpent, one hand held behind him, the other raised upwards; he stands there with only his lips moving. The poor from the valley bring him food, but he never changes his posture.—The description of this final scene is most remarkable. We are told how the man who had been made the Dalai-Lama does indeed, in old age, find his god; how his soul dissolves into the elements which he was trying to understand and of which for a certain period in his life he had believed himself to be the creator.

The novel is a very remarkable product of the thirties of the 19th century, a work in which a comparatively young man describes with profound insight, customs prevailing in the strange country of Tibet. These customs are relics, surviving in the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, of many things that existed in quite different forms in the Atlantean age, that is to say, the fourth main period of earth-evolution. The outward significance lies in the fact of such a novel having been written when it was; it shows that a human soul felt the need to portray something that in truth can be understood only by those who have at least some inkling of the evolutionary course of mankind, in its spiritual aspect too. One man in Europe at all events divines that in this strange country, in many Tibetan customs seeming to us so grotesque, there is preserved more faithfully than anywhere else—in caricature, of course—what was present in a quite different form in the Atlantean world. That is the outward significance, added to the fact that this novel was written at the time it was, and that attention is directed to a country which affords most telling evidence of how in the so-called Yellow Caps and Red Tassels there still live the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces with which the men of Atlantis, especially in the fourth Atlantean epoch, were well acquainted and with which they worked.—But something else as well is inwardly significant in this novel, “The Mahaguru.”

Inwardly significant is what is presented to us in the scene of the proceedings at the black Inquisition-tribunal. The sinner makes a remarkable speech in self-defence. As we know, he had made a great number of gods during his imprisonment; but he made them when be was in a state of madness. There is a fine description of how the first symptoms of madness already became apparent on the way to Lhassa, how the condition became more and more acute and finally broke out in the form referred to. In a state of complete madness he had made all kinds of figures which violated the canon in the most atrocious way. We learn a great deal about the Tibetan canon from Gutzkow's powerful description; but we also learn something quite remarkable.—We are told that this great sinner, as the offspring of his forbears, has become a maker of gods—as is invariably the custom in Tibet. The figures he made had always been correct in every detail: the proportions and positions of the limbs, the length between nostrils and upper lip, and the like. Never once had it happened that the measurement between nostrils and upper lip had been one iota too long—but it did happen once, and he must expect death as the penalty. But now, as a madman—that is to say, in the condition where his soul is already to some extent outside his body—he uses his body in such a way as to produce utterly heterodox figures of gods. And now, he who knows nothing about Art except what is laid down by the canon for the making of gods, makes a long speech in his own defence, a speech in which, in his madness, he talks about principles of art. For one who understands these things it is a most moving scene. As long as the connection between the man's four bodies was intact, only the negligible mistake in the measurement between nostrils and upper lip could occur. But now, after the astral body and etheric body have loosened from the physical body, the man becomes an artist, producing grotesque, but for all that, artistic figures. The Inquisition does not understand this and believes that he had allied himself with evil in order to destroy the works of the gods.—The description of the moving scene at the tribunal reminds us of many things I have said about the aberrations of the human soul towards the one abyss or the other. In the soul of the young Gutzkow, too, the thought arose that there may come a time when men will no longer be able to find their equilibrium.—And now he places such men in the setting of a Tibetan religious community, because these problems can be brought home more vividly by presenting sharply contrasting situations, and because the novelist is able to show how art suddenly comes upon the scene. Art bursts forth from a human soul who has gone astray in the abyss, a human soul who has drawn near to Lucifer in order to save himself from the Ahrimanic claws of the Red Tassels, who are there as the unlawful judges. A profound law is indicated here—the law of man's connection with the spiritual world and its abysses: the world of Lucifer and the world of Ahriman.

Before continuing this particular line of thought, I want to say something about the Polish drama by Zigmunt Krasinski, which ends with the words: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean?” A translation of parts of it, under the title “La Comedie Infernale,” was given by Mickiewicz in his lectures in Paris in the year 1842.⁴ I must emphasise that I am not in a position to form a judgment of the drama from the purely artistic point of view because I know only the idea and intention underlying it. The fine impressions of this drama given by Adam Mickiewicz in his lectures enables me to speak about its basic idea and intention, but I can say nothing about it as a work of art. This reservation must be kept in mind. It is possible, however, to speak about the drama in this way, for Mickiewicz analysed its underlying idea and intention. The passages in French are so excellent that by studying what Mickiewicz says one is immediately impressed by its grandeur and significance. This conviction is still further strengthened when one reads Mickiewicz's rendering of the beautiful preface on the spirit of poetry. This is obviously a drama that has sprung from the very depths of the human soul. It presents the secrets of the life of soul in a wonderful way.

The chief character is a Polish Count; speaking to him and bending towards him from left and right are good angels and bad angels, the former intent upon leading mankind to the good side of evolution, the latter to the bad side. The relevant scenes are translated into French and show with what wonderful simplicity the Polish poet was trying to depict the relations of the beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angeloi to the hero of the drama, the old Count. We then learn of the Count's family life which has suffered on account of his personal characteristics. He lives entirely in the Past as it plays into his personal life, in the past history and evolution of the human race; surrounded by pictures of his parents and forbears, he also lives in the past of his Polish ancestral stock. He pays very little heed to the Present and so can find no real link with his wife. But in what has come to him through heredity, in what has been implanted in him through the blood refined through many generations, there is also in him an unusual spirituality, a sense for the realities of those worlds which hover above the earthly world. The result is that he can find no inner link with his wife. He lives entirely in the spirit, and the manner of his life is such that he is regarded by those around him as a god-gifted prophet. His wife has just borne him a son. We then come to the scene of the child's baptism, but the Count himself is not there. He can find no bond with anything earthly. This baptism and the circumstances associated with it send the child's mother insane. The Count had gone away, and when he returns to the house after the baptism, he learns that his wife has been taken to a madhouse.

Strangely enough we are again confronted with a case where the members of a man's constitution have loosened. We are told of the words that had been uttered by the wife before she went mad. Before the baptism the idea came to the mother that misfortune would surround the child because her own talents and human qualities had not made her equal to living, like her husband, in the spiritual world, and that she was incapable of bearing a child who would be able to live with sufficient intensity in the spiritual worlds to win the father's love. And with all the strength of her soul she longs to penetrate into the spiritual worlds in order to bring down for her son what is to be found in yonder worlds. Her wish is to bring from the spiritual worlds everything that would imbue the child with spirituality. This drives her insane and she is put into a madhouse—or asylum, as we should say nowadays.

The old Count searches for and finds her there, and she speaks deeply moving words to him. First of all, she declares that she wants to bring out of the spiritual worlds for the child those qualities that will enable the father to love him—and then she speaks wonderful words to this effect: I can traverse all worlds; my wings carry me upwards into all the worlds; I would fain gather up everything that is there and instill it into my child; I would fain gather all that lives in the light of the spirit and in the heavenly spheres in order to make my child a poet.—One passage in particular is deeply indicative of the poet's intuitive conception of the spiritual world. It is where he lets the old Count say, on hearing that his wife has become insane: Where is her soul now? Amid the howling screams of maniacs! Darkness has enshrouded this bright spirit who was full of reverence for the great universe ... She has sent her thoughts into the wilderness, searching for me!

The father then goes to the child who had been born physically blind but who has become clairvoyant. The child speaks of his mother. Some time after this scene, remarkable words are uttered by the Count. In the meantime the mother has died. The child had told his father that his soul could always soar, as if on wings, to where the mother now dwelt—the mother he had not known. While the child is describing how he looks into the spiritual world, he relates something which he himself could not have heard but which the father had heard from the wife when she was already insane, as her last wish. The Count speaks remarkable words—remarkable for those who understand these things in the light of spiritual science. He asks: Is it then possible that one who has passed through death retains for a time the last ideas he had before death?

So we see how mother and child go to pieces physically, and are transported in a certain abnormal, atavistic way into the spiritual world. Around the Count whose spirit lives entirely in the Past, they go to pieces physically and are transported atavistically into the spiritual worlds.

We cannot fail to perceive an inner connection between this atavistic transport into the spiritual world of those around the old Polish Count and of the Tibetan maker of gods in the novel “The Mahaguru” who, after he becomes insane and has gone to pieces physically, describes principles of art and produces an entirely new world of gods. The Polish drama, perhaps even more clearly than the novel, makes us aware of the cry which goes forth from humanity: What will befall if the souls of men cannot receive teachings concerning the spiritual worlds in the right and pure form? What will become of humanity in the future? Must human beings go to pieces physically if they are to enter the spiritual worlds?—

Earnest souls were inwardly compelled to put these grave questions to destiny. And as we read the preface to “The Undivine Comedy” we feel that these questions stood in all their urgency before the soul of the Polish poet. There is perhaps no finer, no more poignant description of this tragic situation than is given in the preface to this drama.

Confronting the Count who has seen his family go to pieces around him, is a forceful personage who will have nothing to do with the Past; inwardly he is a Tartar-Mongolian character, outwardly a personality who has imbibed the socialistic doctrines of Fourier, Saint Simon and others, who will stop at nothing in order to destroy all existing conditions and to establish a new social order for mankind, who says; The world of the Past in which the Count lives must be exterminated root and branch from the earth.—A despot is presented to us, a despot who is bent upon universal destruction, who will not tolerate things as they are. A battle begins between the bearer of the Past and the bearer of the Present, a vehement battle, brilliantly described. The scenes that have been translated into French amply justify this praise.

There is also a dialogue between the despot and the old Count; a dialogue that could take place only between men in whose souls two world-destinies confront each other. A battle wages in which the old Count appears with the clairvoyant child. The child and the old Count perish and the despot is the victor. The whole of the Count's faction is exterminated. The old order is overcome, the despot has gained the mastery; the Present has triumphed over the Past.

The description of the field of battle is magnificent. And then still another scene is presented. After the battle the despot stands with a friend, looking upwards towards a high rock gleaming with the golden light of the sun that is setting behind it.—And suddenly he has a vision. The friend sees nothing unusual, he sees only the rock gleaming in the setting sun. But the despot who has burdened his soul so heavily, with whom the impression remains of the old Count whose life has been so full of experiences—the despot stands there—and sees over this mountain pinnacle the figure of Christ Jesus.—

From this moment onwards he knows: Neither the old Count, the representative of the Past, who lives in the spirit in an atavistic way and has been able only to save the Past that is breaking up around him, nor he himself who lives in the immediate Present, has won the real victory. He knows that a battle will ensue but that neither of the two will be victorious—neither the Past which can lead only to atavistic life in the spiritual world, nor the Present, of which he, the despot, is the representative. The Present, basing itself upon doctrines such as those of Fourier and Saint-Simon, mocks at angels and teachings about God. Christ Jesus Who now appears to him shows him: Victory lies neither on the one side nor the other, but in that which is above them both.—And the One—Christ Jesus—whom the despot now beholds over the pinnacle gleaming golden in the rays of the setting sun, draws from him the cry: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!”—Thereupon he falls down dead. This is the tragic consequence brought about through what is higher than the two streams which are presented in such magnificent contrast in this drama. As is clear from the single scenes, we have in this wonderful product of Polish literature a magnificent expression of Polish Messianism. We see how with the coming of the modern age it behoves men to ask weighty, far-reaching questions concerning the destiny of the human race.

• 1. “The Occult Movement in the 19th Century.” Course of 10 lectures.
• 2. “The Mahaguru” has not been translated into English.
• 3. See notes later in lecture on “The Undivine Comedy” (Krasinski).
• 4. An English translation, of the drama, with the title “The Undivine Comedy,” and Mickiewicz's analysis, was published in 1875. A later translation with a preface by G. K. Chesterton was published in 1924. (George Harrap & Co., London.)

If we are to continue in the right way today, we must consider something of the nature of the human being and how human beings are part of historical evolution. First of all we consider the fact that human beings have the power, or the gift, of the intellect. What does this mean? It means that we are able to form ideas. For the moment we need not reflect on where these ideas come from. The life of thought is with us wherever we are in waking consciousness. And we also feel, for instance, that when we walk, stand or do anything else, we are guided by our thoughts, by something which exists first of all in the mind. Later on we shall discuss if this really is the case. For the moment I merely want to establish what fills the conscious mind in everyday life. It is our thoughts. But when it comes to the world of thought as such, the matter is really quite different. And we shall not understand how human beings really relate to their thoughts unless we first consider the true nature of the world of thought.

In reality we are always, wherever we are—whether sitting, standing or lying down—not only in the world of air and light and so on, but also in a world of surging thoughts. You will find it easiest to get an idea of this if you look at it like this: When you walk on earth as an ordinary physical human being you are also a breathing human being, walking in a space filled with air. And in more or less the same way you move in a space filled with thoughts. Thought-substance fills the space around you. It is not a vague ocean of thoughts, nor the kind of nebulous ether people sometimes like to imagine. No, this thought-substance is actually what we call the elemental world. When we speak of entities which are part of the elemental world in the widest sense of the word, they consist of thought-substance, actual thought-substance. There is, however, a difference between the thoughts flitting around out there, which really are living entities, and the thoughts we have in our minds. I have spoken of this difference on a number of occasions. In my book due to be published shortly, and which I mentioned yesterday,¹ you will find further references to this difference.

You may well ask yourself: If there is such an elemental principle out there in thought-space and if I, too, have thoughts in my head—what is the relationship between the two? To get the right idea of how your own thoughts relate to the thought-entities out there you have to visualize the difference between a human corpse which has been left behind when someone has died and a living person who is walking about. The kind of thoughts you have to consider in this respect are the kind you gain from the world you perceive with the senses when in waking consciousness. Our own thoughts are actually thought-corpses. This is the essential point. The thoughts coming from the world we perceive with the senses and drag around with us when in waking consciousness are thought-corpses—thoughts that have been killed. Outside us they are alive, which is the difference.

We are part of the elemental world of thought in so far as we kill its living thoughts when we develop ideas on the basis of what our senses have perceived in the world around us. Our thinking consists in having those corpses of thoughts inside us, and this makes our thoughts abstract. We have abstract thoughts because we kill living thoughts. It is really true that in our state of consciousness we walk around bearing thought corpses which we call our thoughts and ideas. This is the reality.

The living thoughts in the outside world are certainly not unrelated to us; there is a living relationship. I can demonstrate this to you, but do not be frightened by the grotesque nature of this unaccustomed idea. Imagine you are lying in bed and it is morning. You can get up in two different ways. Ordinarily, you are not aware of the difference between them because you are not in the habit of making the distinction, and anyway you do not pay attention to this particular moment of getting up. Nevertheless, you can get up out of habit, without thinking about it, or you can actually produce the thought: I am now going to get up. There are people, however, who get themselves up out of sheer habit, and yet there is just a touch of the idea: I am going to get up now. To repeat, many people do not make the distinction, but it can be made in the abstract, and the difference is enormous. If you get up without giving it a thought, out of sheer habit and training, you are following impulses given by the Spirits of Form, the Elohim, when they created human beings as dwellers on earth at the beginning of earth evolution. So you see, if you switch off your own thinking and always get up like a machine, you are not getting up without thought having gone into it, but it is not your own thought. The form of movement involved in getting up involves thoughts—objective, not subjective, inner thoughts; these are not your thoughts but those of the Spirits of Form.

If you were a terribly lazy person who really did not want to get up at all, if it really was not in your nature to get up and you would only get up on reflection, against your nature, out of purely subjective thought, you'd be following ahrimanic tendencies; you would be following only your head, and therefore Ahriman. As I said, the distinction is not made in ordinary life. And everything else we do is really done in the same way as our getting up. Human beings truly are made up of two entities which can be outwardly distinguished as the head and the rest of the body. The human head is an extraordinarily significant instrument and much older than the rest of the body. The construction of the human head is such—I spoke about this last year²—that the basic shape arose during Moon evolution, though the head has, in fact, come down through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. Humans would look quite different if they still had the shape they had during Moon evolution.

In very general terms we might say people would look like spectres, with only the form of the head emerging somewhat more clearly, which was the original intent. The rest of the body was not meant to be as visible as it is now. These things have to be considered, otherwise we cannot really understand human evolution on earth. The rest of the body was meant to be purely elemental by nature. In the head, everything would come into effect which has come down as Moon existence transformed by earth; let us call it ‘a’. But this inherited Moon existence transformed by earth is the actual human being, for the human being is really a head with only a very insignificant attachment.

The rest of the human being—let us call it ‘b’ and to begin with let us simply consider it to be this elemental, airy principle—is a manifestation of the higher hierarchies, from the Spirits of Form downwards. The right and only way of seeing the human being is to realize that everything shown here as ‘b’ has been created by the cosmic hierarchies. The human being which has evolved from the time of Saturn emerged against the background of the cosmic hierarchies. If you visualize the essential nature of the parts of the human being which are not head—you must think of it as all spirit, or at least all air—then you have the body of cosmic hierarchies (drawing on the board).

However, luciferic seduction entered into the whole process of evolution. The outcome was that this whole, more elemental, body condensed to become the rest of the human body, which of course also had an effect on the head. This will give you an idea of the true nature of the human being. Apart from the head, which is their own, having come from earlier evolution, human beings would be an outward manifestation of the Elohim if their bodies had not become sensuous flesh. It is entirely due to the temptations of Lucifer that this outward manifestation of the Elohim has condensed to become flesh.

Something very strange has arisen as a result, an important secret to which I have referred a number of times. What has happened is that the human being has become the image of the gods in the very organs which are normally called the organs of his lower nature. This image of the gods has been debased in human beings as they are on earth. The highest principle in human beings, the spiritual principle coming from the cosmos, has become their lower nature. Please, do not forget that this is an important secret of human nature. Our lower nature, which is due to Lucifer's influence, was actually destined to be our higher nature. This is the contradictory element in human nature. Rightly understood, it will solve countless riddles in the world and in life.

We are thus able to say: In the course of human evolution man has, thanks to the luciferic element, made the part of him that should be constantly emerging from the cosmos into his lower nature. Many historical phenomena will find their explanation if you consider that this was known to the leaders of the ancient Mysteries, people who were not as facetious, cynical and narrow-minded as people are today. Certain symbols taken from the lower nature and used in the past, symbols that today are merely seen as sexual symbols, are explained by the fact that the priests who used them in the ancient Mysteries did so in order to give expression to the higher reality of the lower nature of man.

You can see how sensitive we have to be in dealing with these things if we are not to be facetious. Modern people slip easily into facetiousness, because they cannot even imagine that there is more to human beings than mere sensuality—which, in fact, is the luciferic element in our higher nature. Thus historical symbols are easily given entirely the wrong interpretation. It takes some nobility of spirit not to interpret the old symbols in a lower sense, even though they often can be interpreted in that way.

With this, you will also begin to realize that if thoughts from the elemental world come to us—they are living thoughts, not abstract, dead ones that come from the head—they must be coming out of the whole human being. Mere reflection will not achieve this. Today the idea is that we only arrive at our thoughts by reflection. Today the idea is: If human beings will just reflect, they can think about anything, providing the things they want to think about are accessible. This is nonsense, however. The truth is that the human race is in a process of evolution, and the thoughts developed by Copernicus, for example, or Galileo, at a particular time could not be reached by mere reflection before that time. You see, people fabricate the thoughts they have in their heads. But when a thought which marks a real change arises in world history, this thought is given by the gods and through the whole human being. It flows through the human being, overcoming the luciferic element, and only reaches the head out of the whole human being. I think this is something you can understand. In certain ages, particular thoughts just have to be waited for and expected; then human beings are not merely reflecting, nor is something conveyed through their eyes or ears, but inspiration comes from the world of the hierarchies and it comes through the whole essential human being, which is the image of the hierarchies.

If you consider this, some of the things I said yesterday can also tell you great deal. In the present age, from the fifth post-Atlantean age, we are living much more inwardly than before—in ancient Greek times, for example, when the outer environment provided much more that was spiritual. This inwardness of life relates to the process in which thoughts come up through the whole human being. In earlier times, in the fourth post-Atlantean age, the relationship between human beings and the gods was much more of an exterior thing; today it has become much more intimate. Human beings are always associating with the gods; their heads do not normally know anything about this, however, because they only hold human thoughts, or rather the corpses of thoughts.

Human beings always associate with the gods as whole human beings, and this association is more intimate today than it was in the past. Even the nature of clairvoyance is such that the relationship to the gods and to disembodied spirits is altogether different from what it was before. When a human soul associates with spirits or with the dead, the association is a very subtle one. It is more or less similar to the way in which our own thoughts associate with our own will in the soul. It is very intimate, and this intimacy belongs to the present age. It corresponds to the essential nature of human beings here on earth and also to that of the dead, of those who are going through the gate of death to enter the world of the spirit at this time. This intimate association has become possible because in some ways the relationship between man and cosmos has changed. If the relationship which some human beings have to the world of the spirit comes to conscious awareness, it shows itself to be a much more intimate one, even today, than it was before.

Certain abilities had to be lost, so that this intimate association with the gods could develop. During the times of ancient Greece and Rome and after, right into the Middle Ages, people still had direct perception of spiritual elements in the world around them; as I said, they did not merely see physical colours in the way we do today, or hear physical sounds, but perceived spiritual elements in colours and sounds. They were also able to use the element which for us has turned into chaotic dreams as a means of entering into the world of the spirit and they did so in a way that was much less subtle than is possible today. It was relatively easy to approach the Spirits and the dead in the past. Today our ordinary dreams no longer have the same quality, though this did continue well into the Middle Ages. Some people still had it for a long time afterwards. Those earlier people also perceived as in a dream all that happened around them in the elemental thought-world of which I have spoken. They were not yet cut off from that surrounding world, and their own essential nature still extended into it. People were aware of this and acted and behaved accordingly.

Today these things are, of course, considered to be an old superstition. Yet when something significant occurs in connection with this ‘old superstition’, modern science does not know what to do with it. Let me give you just one example: Cimon, a well-known historical figure, had a friend called Astyphilos who knew how to interpret dreams. Astyphilos was able to interpret dreams intellectually. When Cimon had dreamed of a vicious, yapping dog before the Egyptian campaign, Astyphilos forecast his death, saying: ‘You have dreamt of a vicious, yapping dog; you will die in this campaign.’ The story was told by Horace.³

A modern sage who has written about dreams, though in materialistic terms, does of course believe that Cimon had an ordinary dream and Astyphilos was a mountebank who interpreted dreams. Yet he also makes a strange comment: ‘Chance willed it, however, that his prophesy came true.’ I could show you books which give irrefutable evidence of prophesies which have come true,⁴ but people will say: ‘Chance willed it.’ This is one of many examples. People imagine that the inner life has always been the same as it is today and that there has been no development in the inner life of man.

Thus the outer senses perceived more of the spiritual, and at the same time the relationship with the surrounding elemental thought-world was, in a way, based more on images. Dreams still had the quality of images which pointed to the future. Just as memory relates to the past, so the images pointed to the future, though not in the same way, of course. The constitution of the human soul was therefore entirely different in the past. Blurred dream images came into everyday sensory perception, images which nevertheless related to real happenings in the elemental world. We might put it like this: The physical world of sensory perception had not yet condensed and become solid and mineral in quality. Everywhere colour and sound still sparkled with spiritual qualities. At the same time people still had the ability to live in waking dreams, and these were reality in the elemental, objective world of thought. Then humanity was deprived of this relationship with the outside world in order to establish and strengthen human freedom; the inner life became more intimate in the way I have described.

There is something we must consider which is most important. We can use the powers of the normal intellect to reflect on the phenomena belonging to the world of nature, but we cannot use this intellect to reflect on social phenomena. People believe that the way of thinking which enables them to reflect on the events of the physical world can also be used to establish social laws and political impulses. They are actually doing so now, but the laws and impulses are of correspondingly poor quality. The kind of thing you find in Roman history, and you would also find it in later history if it had not all been turned into romance—for instance, that Numa Pompilius took his inspiration from a nymph called Egeria in certain matters of state⁵—indicates that in those days people appealed to the gods when matters of state had to be dealt with. They would not have thought it possible to create political structures merely by thinking about them. Today the idea is that individuals are not able to do this, but if you multiply the individual by so and so many times, then it can be done. So if you have a modern democracy and an enlightened parliament, three hundred heads are able to achieve by reflection what a single head cannot do, of course. This goes against one of Rosegger's statements which I have quoted a number of times: ‘One's a human being; if there are several, you've people; if you have lots of them, they're beasts!’⁶—but surely it is not what you would do in practice! And just imagine what the whole enlightened modern world would say if news were to get around—not in the old form but in a new one—that Woodrow Wilson had taken his inspiration for some decree or other from a nymph.

These things have changed, even if they are not exactly more intelligent. It will, of course, be difficult to grasp, but it is something we have to realize, that real and appropriate ideas concerning social structures will only come when people appeal again to the spirit. They are not forced to do so, and the form will be different, but this appeal to the spirit must be made again. Otherwise, everything people produce by way of political principles, social structures and ideas will be mere nothingness. There has to be living awareness of the fact that we live in the world of elemental thought and have to take our inspiration from it.

People are still able to laugh about such things today. But humanity will have to struggle through pain and suffering to gain awareness of inspiration in the creative sphere of the social order. Here we have an even more subtle indication of something that will become more and more necessary for humanity.

People will have to realize that they must now prepare themselves to make a connection again with the world of the spirit, so that they may bring into the kingdom of this world a kingdom which is not of this world but is present everywhere in the kingdom of this world. Only then will salvation come for a social sphere where chaos now reigns.

It will, however, be necessary for people to overcome the unease and reluctance they feel about concerning themselves with the intimate relationship between man and world. In the more important fields of human activity, people will have to go more deeply into the nature of this relationship as it was in the fourth post-Atlantean age. This will give them the necessary orientation so that they can really see how human beings related differently to the world around them than they do now. It is possible to study this, but we must overcome this mythology—mythology in the bad sense—we call the study of history today. We need to consider historical reality, going back at least as far as the Mystery of Golgotha, and this will be possible if the study of external history is enriched by the study of spiritual science. People will simply have to make the effort to enter into a study of spiritual science. The whole way of thinking, of course, is such nowadays that people often feel everything to be utterly grotesque when they begin to enter into the world of the spirit; people instinctively think that things will look just the same there as they do in the physical world. All they are prepared to accept is that they will find a more refined, subtle form of this world, and they fail to understand that they will find it completely different, so much so that even the smallest detail will come as a surprise.

Let us assume a modern philosopher, your normal kind of university professor, were to have some kind of Inspiration⁷—it would be a small miracle, but let us assume such a miracle were to happen—so that for five minutes he were in a position to ask the world of the spirit if he was a true philosopher with a true inner vocation. What do you think the answer would be? He would be given an image; this would be the right answer, only it would need to be correctly interpreted. This is really true; I am telling you something which has happened innumerable times. The answer would be that the philosopher is given ass's ears. And the interpretation of this would be: ‘I am indeed a real philosopher.’ This is not a joke. The point is that some ideas mean one thing in the physical world and exactly the opposite in the spiritual world. In the physical world it is not a distinction to have ass's ears; in the spiritual world, having ass's ears as an image is worth much, much more than the highest distinction ever awarded to a professor of philosophy. But imagine someone who is only used to the physical world and who suddenly—as I said, by a miracle—becomes clairvoyant and sees himself wearing ass's ears. He would think he was being made a fool of, that he was being taken in. And he would immediately call this an illusion. Things are different in the world of the spirit, down to the last detail, and it is necessary to translate everything we meet there, in order to find the right correspondence and interpretation in the physical world. I was not simply telling a joke when I spoke of those ass's ears. If you read the writings of ancient times you will find the dreams dreamt by philosophers to convince them of their inner vocation. The dream I have described is quite typical of that kind of thing. Philosophers had to see themselves with ass's ears to be convinced of their vocation.

People will inevitably be surprised and taken aback when they want to get acquainted again with the specific nature of the spiritual world. Reading The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz Anno 1459,⁸ you will sometimes feel that the grotesque things said in it are enough to make you laugh. Yet they are deeply significant, for the path to which the work refers should not be considered in a sentimental way, but with a certain superior humour.

As I have said, later times also have events analogous to Numa Pompilius receiving instruction from Egeria. These things are no longer made known, which is, of course, the reason why history has become mere conventional fiction. Consider, it was as late as the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century when Jacob Boehme⁹ had his profound Intuitions; truly great, tremendous grand visions which contained Intuitions from an earlier time. His followers included many people who lived in later times. One of the last to be consciously a follower of Jacob Boehme was Saint-Martin.¹⁰ He based himself entirely on Jacob Boehme, especially in his book Des erreurs et de la vrit, though it is a somewhat dematerialized Boehme. Still, he had enough of what had come through from older times to realize: If one wants to have ideas concerning social structures, if one wants to have real, effective political ideas, these must not merely be thought up, they must have come from the spiritual world. In his book, Saint-Martin presents not merely ideas concerning the world of nature and its progress, and of history and its progress, but also quite specific political ideas. Today, when states are the only kind of political structure, one would call them ideas on the political state. His discussions do, however, include one idea of special significance, and it is characteristic that this is in the forefront of his political ideas. Saint-Martin refers to ‘original human adultery’, which he says took place at a time when sexual relations did not yet exist between male and female on earth. He is therefore not referring to adultery in the usual sense. He means something quite different, something he keeps deeply veiled, and to which The Bible refers with the words: ‘The sons of the gods saw how beautiful these daughters were and they took for themselves such women as they chose.’¹¹ This event brought chaos to the world of Atlantis; there is also a mysterious connection between this and the way in which human beings had made their elemental spiritual nature sensual. All one can do is hint at the event which Saint-Martin calls ‘original adultery’; he, too, was merely hinting at it.

It is evident that Saint-Martin realized that to consider politics, one must not merely take account of outer human situations, as people do today, but find a way of going back to earlier times when one had to go beyond the world of the senses and into the world of the spirit if one wanted to know anything about the human being. The principles of political thinking must be evolved out of the world of the spirit. Saint-Martin still knew this at the end of the eighteenth century—he only died in 1804, and what he said in Des erreurs et de la vrit has also been translated into German. It is not without interest to say this, because a certain cleric who is against we who want to serve the life of the spirit here in Dornach—he lives quite near to here¹²—has said that in the face of all this folly people should remember plain, simple Matthias Claudius, and he quoted a verse by Claudius in his support.¹³ It was Matthias Claudius, however, who translated Saint-Martin's Des erreurs et de la vrit in order to make the spiritual science of that time accessible to his people. The gentleman in question therefore demonstrated his colossal ignorance where Matthias Claudius is concerned, quite apart from the fact that he quoted only one verse; if he had quoted the preceding verse he would have contradicted himself. Still, he was satisfied with the one verse which he thought suited his purpose, which was to quote something against anthroposophy.

As late as the eighteenth century, Saint-Martin knew that if we are to have fruitful political ideas there has to be a bridge between human thoughts and the spiritual influences which come from higher worlds. No previous century has been as godforsaken, really, as the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It is important to realize this. Nor was any earlier century so vain and so proud of being godforsaken. Still, if people were to read about the statesmanship advocated by Saint-Martin—I think all those clever people who now get together and want to guide the destinies of the world would feel their stomachs turn. For it is the tendency today to get to know as little as possible about the real world around us. It is, of course, possible to erase from our minds the thoughts which come from the living spirit, and we can decide to work only with thought-corpses. People's actions do not relate to this, however, but become part of a web of living thought. And when people with thought-corpses refuse to enter into those living thoughts, the outcome will be chaos. This chaos has to be overcome, which calls for the clear insights of which I have spoken before, as well as in these lectures. It does, however, require a complete change of direction from what is considered to be right today and the absolute ideal.

Above all, this change of direction will have to come soon. And it would be best if it were to come right now and be as widespread as possible in the field where educators are appointed for both young and old. There is no other field where humanity has entered as deeply into materialism as it has in education.

Let me conclude by presenting a thought which will be occupying us in the days ahead, for it is very interesting and very important for all humanity. I would like to present it in such a way, however, that you will be able to turn it over in your own inner mind for a few days. You will then be better prepared to consider this thought.

The children who are born today—we must consider them in the knowledge that the outer form is withering and splitting up, as I have shown in these days. But deep inside is the true human being. This no longer comes to outward expression in the way it did until the fifteenth century. We will have to get more and more used to the thought that, especially in the case of children, the inward human being cannot be fully revealed by the way people present themselves, nor by the way they think and the gestures they make. In many respects these children are something quite different from what comes to outward expression. We even know extreme cases. Children may appear to be the worst of rascals and yet there is so much good in them that they will later be the most valuable of human beings. But you will also find many children who are very good and not the least bit bad, never putting a finger in their mouths nor thumbing their noses at people. They will study well, perhaps be good bank managers one day, or good schoolteachers according to present-day ideas, and indeed good lawyers. But—forgive these harsh words—they will not be good people, because they cannot achieve inner harmony between themselves and the true world around them. It is specifically in the field of education and training where the principle must be established that people are very different inside today from what they appear to be. It will therefore be necessary in future to appoint teachers on entirely different principles. To be able to see into something which is inside and does not come to expression on the outside requires something of a prophetic gift. Examinations for prospective teachers must therefore be organized in such a way that candidates with intuitive and prophetic gifts do particularly well. Candidates who do not have such gifts must be made to fail their exams, however great their knowledge.

The last thing we do today is to consider the prophetic gifts of people who are to become teachers. We still have a long way to go with regard to many things that will have to be done. Yet the course of human evolution will eventually force people to accept such principles. Many of the materialists of our age would, of course, consider it a crazy notion to say that teachers should be prophets. But it will not be for ever. Humanity will be forced to recognize these things.

• 1. Riddles of the Soul. See Note 1 of lecture 5.
• 2. In a lecture given in Dornach on 21 October 1916, for example. (GA 171. Not available in English.)
• 3. Plutarch also teils the story in his Life of Cimon.
• 4. For example, Rudolf Steiner's library in Dornach includes a book by Max Kernmerich called Prophezeiungen, alter Aberglaube oder neue Wahrheit (translates as: “Prophesies, an old superstition or a new truth”), Munich 1911; it includes prophesies which have since come true.
• 5. Numa Pompilius (probably 715–673 BC) succeeded Romulus as King of Rome. See Livy's History of Rome, Book 1, Chapter 19.
• 6. Peter Rosegger (1843–1918), Austrian poet and novelist. Some of his works were in the Styrian dialect, which also applies to the quoted sentences.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner generally made careful distinction between ‘imagination’ in the ordinary sense, using the ordinary German terms for this, and ‘Imagination’ as the ability to see images of spiritual realities, which is generally achieved in the course of initiation. The same applies to the terms ‘Intuition’ and ‘Inspiration’. The three should be treated as technical terms in the field of anthroposophy. The convention in English versions of his works has become to use capitals for the higher faculties described by these words.
  
  In this text, capital first letters are put where Steiner is using them as technical terms.
• 8. See Note 3, lecture 3.
• 9. See Note 2, lecture 3.
• 10. Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803) took up German at the age of 49 so that he might translate Jacob Boehme's writings into French. His Des erreurs et de la vrit ou les hommes rappels au principe universel de la science par un Ph(ilosophe) inc(onnu) of 1775 was translated into German by Matthias Claudius in 1782. A new edition of the translation was published by Der Kommende Tag in Stuttgart in 1925.
• 11. Genesis 6:2. Revised English Bible.
• 12. This was the parish priest at Arlesheim, which is next to Dornach. For further details see Necessity and Freedom (GA 166), translated by P. Wehrte, the lecture given in Berlin on 25 January 1916, Anthroposophic Press N.Y.; and ‘Things of the Present and of the Past in the Spirit of Man’ (GA 167), MS translation C42, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London.
• 13. Matthias Claudius (1740–1815), German poet and writer. The ‘verses’ in question are the third and fourth verses of his evening hymn Der Mond ist aufgegangen.

Of peculiar importance for the understanding of the history of the West in its relation to the East is the period that lies between three or four hundred years before, and three or four hundred years after, the Mystery of Golgotha. The real significance of the events we have been considering, events that culminated in the rise of Aristotelianism and in the expeditions of Alexander to Asia, is contained in the fact that they form, as it were, the last Act in that civilisation of the East which was still immersed in the impulses derived from the Mysteries.

A final end was put to the genuine and pure Mystery impulse of the East by the criminal burning of Ephesus. After that we find only traditions of the Mysteries, traditions and shadow-pictures,—the remains, so to speak, that were left over for Europe and especially for Greece, of the old divinely-inspired civilisation. And four hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha another great event took place, which serves to show what was still left of the ruins—for so we might call them—of the Mysteries.

Let us look at the figure of Julian the Apostate.¹ Julian the Apostate, Emperor of Rome, was initiated, in the 4th century, as far as initiation was then possible, by one of the last of the hierophants of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This means that he entered into an experience of the old Divine secrets of the East, in so far as such an experience could still be gained in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

At the beginning of the period we are considering, stands the burning of Ephesus; and the day of the burning of Ephesus is also the day on which Alexander the Great was born. At the end of the period, in 363, we have the day of the death—the terrible and significant death—of Julian the Apostate far away in Asia. Midway between these two days stands the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now let us examine a little this period of time as it appears in the setting of the whole history of human evolution. If we want to look back beyond this period into the earlier evolution of mankind, we have first to bring about a change in our power of vision and perception, a change that is very similar to one of which we hear in another connection. Only we do not often bring the things together in thought.

You will remember how in my book Theosophy I had to describe the different worlds that come under consideration for man. I described them as the physical world; a transition world bordering on it, namely, the Soul-world; and then the world into which only the highest part of our nature can find entrance, the Spirit-land. Leaving out of account the special qualities of this Spirit-land, through which present-day man passes between death and a new birth, and looking only at its more general qualities and characteristics, we find that we have to give a new orientation to our whole thought and feeling, before we can comprehend the Land of the Spirits. And the remarkable thing is that we have to change and re-orientate our inner life of thought and feeling in just the same way when we want to comprehend what lies beyond the period I have defined. We shall do wrong to imagine that we can understand what came before the burning of Ephesus with the conceptions and ideas that suffice for the world of to-day. We need to form other concepts and other ideas to enable us to look across the years to human beings who still knew that as surely as man is united through breathing with the air outside him, so surely is he in constant union through his soul with the Gods.

Starting then from this world, the world that is a kind of earthly Devachan, earthly Spirit-land,—for the physical world fails us when we want to picture it,—we came into the interim period, lasting from about 356 B.C. to 363 A.D. And now what follows? Over in Europe we find the world from out of which present-day humanity is on the point of emerging into something new, even as the humanity of olden times came forth from the Oriental world, passed through the Greek world, and then into the realm of Rome.

Setting aside for the moment what went on in the inner places of the Mysteries, we have to see in the civilisation that has grown up through the centuries of the Middle Ages and developed on into our own time, a civilisation that has been formed on the basis of what the human being himself can produce with the help of his own conceptions and ideas. We may see a beginning in this direction in Greece, from the time of Herodotus onward. Herodotus describes the facts of history in an external way, he makes no allusion, or at most very slight allusion, to the spiritual. And others after him go further in the same direction. Nevertheless in Greece we always feel a last breath, as it were, from those shadow-pictures that were there to remind man of the spiritual life. With Rome on the other hand begins the period to which man to-day may still feel himself related, the period that has an altogether new way of thought and feeling, different even from what we have observed in Greece. Only here and there in the Roman world do we find a personality such as Julian the Apostate who feels something like an irresistible longing after the old world, and evinces a certain honesty in getting himself initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

What Julian, however, is able to receive in these Mysteries has no longer the force of knowledge. And what is more, he belongs to a world where men are no longer able to grasp in their soul the traditions from the Mysteries of the East.

Present-day mankind would never have come into being if Asia had not been followed first by Greece and then by Rome. Present-day mankind is built up upon personality, upon the personality of the individual. Eastern mankind was not so built up. The individual of the East felt himself part of a continuous divine process. The Gods had their purposes in Earth evolution. The Gods willed this or that, and this or that came to pass on the Earth below. The Gods worked on the will of men, inspiring them. Those powerful and great personalities in the East of whom I spoke to you—all that they did was inspired from the Gods. Gods willed: men carried it into effect. And the Mysteries were ordered and arranged in olden times to this end,—to bring Divine will and human action into line.

In Ephesus we first find a difference. There the pupils in the Mysteries, as I have told you, had to be watchful for their own condition of ripeness and no longer to observe seasons and times of year. There the first sign of personality makes its appearance. There in earlier incarnations Aristotle and Alexander the Great had received the impulse towards personality.

But now comes a new period. It is in the early dawn of this new period when Julian the Apostate experiences as it were the last longing of man to partake, even in that late age, in the Mysteries of the East. Now the soul of man begins to grow different again from what it was in Greece.

Picture to yourselves once more a man who has received some training in the Ephesian Mysteries. His constitution of soul is not derived from these Mysteries: he owes it to the simple fact that he is living in that age. When to-day a man recollects, when, as we say, he bethinks himself, what can he call to mind? He can call to mind something that he himself experienced in person during his present life, perhaps something that he experienced 20 or 30 years ago. This inward recollection in thought does not of course go further back than his own personal life. With the man who belonged, for instance, to the Ephesian civilisation it was otherwise. If he had received, even in a small degree, the training that could be had in Ephesus, then it was so with him that when he bethought himself in recollection, there emerged in his soul, instead of the memories that are limited to personal life, events of pre-earthly existence, events that preceded the Earth period of evolution. He beheld the Moon evolution, the Sun evolution, beholding them in the several kingdoms of Nature. He was able, too, to look within himself, and see the union of man with the Cosmic All; he saw how man depends on and is linked with the Cosmos. And all this that lived in his soul was true, ‘own’ memory, it was the cosmic memory of man.

We may therefore say that we are here dealing with a period when in Ephesus man was able to experience the secrets of the Universe. The human soul had memory of the far-past ages of the Cosmos.

This remembering was preceded in evolution by something else: it was preceded by an actual living within those earlier times. What remained was a looking back. In the time, however, of which the Gilgamesh Epic relates, we cannot speak of a memory of past ages in the Cosmos, we must speak of a present experience of what is past.

After the time of cosmic memory came what I have called the interim time between Alexander and Julian the Apostate. For the moment we will pass by this period. Then follows the age that gave birth to the western civilisation of the Middle Ages and of modern times. Here there is no longer a memory of the cosmic past, still less an experience in the present of the past; nothing is left but tradition.

1. Memory of the Cosmic Past.
2. Present Experience of the Past.
3. Tradition.

Men can now write down what has happened. History begins. History makes its first appearance in the Roman period. Think, my dear friends, what a tremendous change we have here! Think how the pupils in the Ephesian Mysteries lived with time. They needed no history books. To write down what happened would have been to them laughable. One only needed to ponder and meditate deeply enough, and what had happened would rise up before one from out of the depths of consciousness. Here was no demonstration of psycho-analysis such as a modern doctor might make: the human soul took the greatest delight in fetching up in this way out of a living memory that which had been in the past. In the time that followed, however, mankind as such had forgotten, and the necessity arose of writing down what happened. But all the while that man had to let his ancient power of cosmic memory crumble away, and begin in a clumsy manner to write down the great events of the world,—all this time personal memory, personal recollection was evolving in his inner being. For every age has its own mission, every age its own task.

Here you have the other side of that which I set before you in the very first lectures of this course, when I described the rise of what we designated ‘memory in time.’ This memory in time, or temporal memory, had, so to say, its cradle in Greece, grew up through the Roman culture into the Middle Ages and on into modern times. In the time of Julian the Apostate the seed was already sown for the civilisation based on personality, as is testified by the fact that Julian the Apostate found it, after all, of no avail to let himself be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

We have now come to the period when the man of the West, beginning from the 3rd or 4th century after Christ and continuing down to our own time, lives his life on Earth entirely outside the spiritual world, lives in concepts and ideas, in mere abstractions. In Rome the very Gods themselves became abstractions. We have reached a time when mankind has no longer any knowledge of a living connection with the spiritual world. The Earth is no longer Asia, the lowest of the Heavens, the Earth is a world for itself, and the Heavens are far away, dim and darkened for man's view. Now is the time when man evolves personality, under the influence of the Roman culture that is spread abroad over the lands of the West. As we had to speak of a soul-world bordering on the spiritual world, on the land of the Spirits that is above,—so, bordering on this spiritual oriental world is the civilisation of the West; we may call it a kind of soul-world in time. This is the world that reaches right down to our own day. And now, in our time, although most men are not at all alive to the fact, another stupendous change is again taking place.

Some of you who often listen to my lectures will know that I do not readily call any period a period of transition, for in truth every period is such,—every period marks a transition from what comes earlier to what comes later. The point is that we should recognise for each period the nature of the transition.

What I have said will already have suggested that in this case it is as though, having passed from the Spirit-land into the Soul-world one were to come thence into the physical world. In modern civilisation as it has evolved up till now, we have been able to catch again and again echoes of the spiritual. Materialism itself has not been without its echoes of the spirit. True and genuine materialism in all domains has only been with us since the middle of the 19th century, and is still understood by very few in its full significance. It is there, however, with gigantic force, and to-day we are going through a transition to a third world, that is in reality as different from the preceding Roman world as this latter was different from the oriental.

Now there is one period of time that has had to be left out in tracing this evolution: the period between Alexander and Julian. In the middle of this period fell the Mystery of Golgotha. Those to whom the Mystery of Golgotha was brought did not receive it as men who understood the Mysteries, otherwise they would have had quite different ideas of the Christ Who lived in the man Jesus of Nazareth. A few there were, a few contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, who had been initiated in the Mysteries, and these were still able to have such ideas of Him. But by far the greater part of Western humanity had no ideas with which to comprehend spiritually the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the first way by which the Mystery of Golgotha found place on Earth was the way of external tradition. Only in the very earliest centuries were there those who were able to comprehend spiritually, from their connection with the Mysteries, what took place at the Mystery of Golgotha.

Nor is this all. There is something else, of which I have told you in recent lectures,² and we must return to it here. Over in Hibernia, in Ireland, were still the echoes of the ancient Atlantean wisdom. In the Mysteries of Hibernia, of which I have given you a brief description, were two Statues that worked suggestively on men, making it possible for them to behold the world exactly as the men of ancient Atlantis had seen it. Strictly guarded were these Mysteries of Hibernia, hidden in an atmosphere of intense earnestness. There they stood in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, and there they remained at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Over in Asia the Mystery of Golgotha took place; in Jerusalem the events came to pass that were later made known to men in the Gospels by the way of tradition. But in the moment when the tragedy of the Mystery of Golgotha was being enacted in Palestine, in that very moment it was known and beheld clairvoyantly in the Mysteries of Hibernia. No report was brought by word of mouth, no communication whatever was possible; but in the Mysteries of Hibernia the event was fulfilled in a symbol, in a picture, at the same time that it was fulfilled in actual fact in Jerusalem. Men came to know of it, not through tradition but by a spiritual path. Whilst in Palestine that most majestic and sublime event was being enacted in concrete physical reality,—over in Hibernia, in the Mysteries, the way had been so prepared through the performance of certain rites that at the very time when the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled, a living picture of it was present in the astral light.

The events in human evolution are closely linked together; there is, as it were, a kind of valley or chasm moving at this time over the world, into which man's old nearness with the Gods gradually disappears.

In the East the ancient vision of the Gods fell into decay after the burning of Ephesus. In Hibernia it remained on until some centuries after Christ, but even there too the time came when it had to depart. Tradition developed in its stead, the Mystery of Golgotha was transmitted by the way of oral tradition; and we find growing up in the West a civilisation that rests wholly on oral tradition. Later it comes to rely rather on external observation of Nature, on an investigation of Nature with the senses; but this after all is only what corresponds in the realm of Nature to tradition, written or oral, in the realm of history.

Here then we have the civilisation of personality. And in that civilisation the Mystery of Golgotha, with all that pertains to the spirit, is no longer perceived by man, it is merely handed down as history.

We must place this picture in all clearness before us, the picture of a civilisation from which the spiritual is excluded. It begins from the time that followed Julian the Apostate, and not until towards the end of the 19th century, beginning from the end of the seventies, did there come, as it were, a new call to humanity from the spiritual heights. Then began the age that I have often described as the Age of Michael. To-day I want to characterise it as the age when man, if he wishes to remain at the old materialism—and a great part of mankind does wish so to remain—will inevitably fall into a terrible abyss; he has absolutely no alternative but to go under and become sub-human, he simply cannot maintain himself on the human level. If man would keep on the human level, he must open his senses to the spiritual revelations that have again been made accessible since the end of the 19th century. That is now an absolute necessity.

For you must know that great spiritual forces were at work in Herostratus. He was, so to speak, the last #8224 stretched out by certain spiritual powers from Asia. When he flung the burning torch into the Temple of Ephesus, demonic beings were behind him, holding him as one holds a sword,—or as it might be, a torch; he was but the sword or torch in their hands. For these demonic beings had determined to let nothing of the Spirit go over into the coming European civilisation; the spiritual was to be absolutely debarred entry there.

Aristotle and Alexander the Great placed themselves in direct opposition to the working of these beings. For what was it they accomplished in history? Through the expeditions of Alexander, the Nature knowledge of Aristotle was carried over into Asia; a pure knowledge of Nature was spread abroad. Not in Egypt alone, but all over Asia Alexander founded academies, and in these academies made a home for the ancient wisdom, where the study of it could still continue. Here too, the wise men of Greece were ever and again able to find a refuge. Alexander brought it about that a true understanding of Nature was carried into Asia.

Into Europe it could not find entrance in the same way. Europe could not in all honesty receive it. She wanted only external knowledge, external culture, external civilisation. Therefore did Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus take out of Aristotelianism what the West could accept and bring that over. It was the more logical writings that the West received. But that meant a great deal. For Aristotle's works have a character all their own; they read differently from the works of other authors, and his more abstract and logical writings are no exception. Do but make the experiment of reading first Plato and then Aristotle with inner concentration and in a meditative spirit, and you will find that each gives you quite a different experience.

When a modern man reads Plato with true spiritual feeling and in an attitude of meditation, after a time he begins to feel as though his head were a littler higher than his physical head actually is, as though he had, so to speak, grown out beyond his physical organism. That is absolutely the experience of anyone who reads Plato, provided he does not read him in an altogether dry manner.

With Aristotle it is different. With Aristotle you never have the feeling that you are coming out of your body. When you read Aristotle after having prepared yourself by meditation, you will find that he works right into the physical man. Your physical man makes a step forward through the reading of Aristotle. His logic works; it is not a logic that one merely observes and considers, it is a logic that works in the inner being. Aristotle himself is a stage higher than all the pedants who came after him, and who developed logic from him. In a certain sense we may say with truth that Aristotle's works are only rightly comprehended when they are taken as books for meditation. Think what would have happened if the Natural Scientific writings of Aristotle had gone over to the West as they were and come into Middle and Southern Europe. Men would, no doubt, have received a great deal from them, but in a way that did them harm. For the Natural Science that Aristotle was able to pass on to Alexander needed for its comprehension souls that were still touched with the spirit of the Ephesian age, the time that preceded the burning of Ephesus. Such souls could only be found over in Asia or in Egypt; and it was into these parts that this knowledge of Nature and insight into the Being of Nature were brought, by means of the expeditions of Alexander. Only later in a diluted form did they come over into Europe by many and diverse ways—especially, for example, by way of Spain,—but always in a very diluted or, as we might say, sifted form.

The writings of Aristotle that came over into Europe direct were his writings on logic and philosophy. These lived on, and found fresh life again in medieval scholasticism.

We have therefore these two streams. On the one hand we have always there a stream of wisdom that spreads far and wide, unobtrusively, among simple folk,—the secret source of much of medieval thought and insight. Long ago, through the expeditions of Alexander, it had made its way into Asia, and now it came back again into Europe by diverse channels, through Arabia, for instance, and later on following the path of the returning Crusaders. We find it in every corner of Europe,—inconspicuous, flowing silently in hidden places. To these places came men like Jacob Boehme,³ Paracelsus⁴ and a number more, to receive that which had come thither by many a roundabout path and was preserved in these scattered primitive circles of European life. We have had amongst us in Europe far more folk-wisdom than is generally supposed. The stream continues even now. It has poured its flood of wisdom into reservoirs like Valentine Wiegel⁵ or Paracelsus or Jacob Boehme,—and many more, whose names are less known. And sometimes it met there,—as for example, in Basil Valentine⁶—new in-pourings that came over later into Europe. In the Cloisters of the Middle Ages lived a true alchemistic wisdom, not an alchemy that demonstrates changes in matter merely, but an alchemy that demonstrates the inner nature of the changes in the human being himself in the Universe. The recognised scholars meanwhile were occupying themselves with the other Aristotle, with a misstated, sifted, ‘logicised’ Aristotle. This Aristotelian philosophy, however, which the scholiasts and subsequently the scientists studied, brought none the less a blessing to the West. For only in the 19th century, when men could no longer understand Aristotle and simply studied him as if he were a book to be read like any other and not a book whereon to exercise oneself in meditation—only in the 19th century has it come about that men no longer receive anything from Aristotle because he no longer lives and works in them. Until the 19th century Aristotle was a book for the exercise of meditation; but in the 19th century the whole tendency has been to change what was once exercise, work, active power into abstract knowledge,—to change ‘do’ and ‘can’ into ‘know.’

Let us look now at the line of development, that leads from Greece through Rome to the West. It will illustrate for us from another angle the great change we are considering. In Greece there was still the confident assurance that insight and understanding proceed from the whole human being. The teacher is the gymnast.⁷ From out of the whole human being in movement—for the Gods themselves work in the bodily movements of man—something is born that then comes forth and shows itself as human understanding. The gymnast is the teacher.

In Rome the rhetorician.⁸ steps into the place of the gymnast. Already something has been taken away from the human being in his entirety; nevertheless we have at least still a connection with a deed that is done by the human being in a part of his organism. What movement there is in our whole being when we speak! We speak with our heart and with our lungs, we speak right down to our diaphragm and below it! We cannot say that speaking lives as intensely in the whole human being as do the movements of the gymnast, but it lives in a great part of him. (As for thoughts, they of course are but an extract of what lives in speech). The rhetorician steps into the place of the gymnast. The gymnast has to do with the whole human being. The rhetorician shuts off the limbs, and has only to do with a part of the human being and with that which is sent up from this part into the head, and there becomes insight and understanding.

The third stage appears only in modern times and that is the stage of the professor.⁹ who trains nothing but the head of his pupils, who cares for nothing but thoughts. Professors of Eloquence were still appointed in some universities even as late as the 19th century, but these universities had no use for them, because it was no longer the custom to set any store by the art of speaking; thinking was all that mattered. The rhetorician died out. The doctors and professors, who looked after the least part of the human being, namely his head,—these became the leaders in education.

As long as the genuine Aristotle was still there, it was training, discipline, exercise that men gained from their study of him. The two streams remained side by side. And those of us who are not very young and who shared in the development of thought during the later decades of the 19th century, know well, if we have gone about among the country folk in the way that Paracelsus did, that a last remains of the medieval folk-knowledge, from which Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus drew, was still to be found in Europe even as late as the sixties and seventies of the last century. Moreover, it is also true that within certain orders and in the life of a certain narrow circle a kind of inner discipline in Aristotle was cultivated right up to the last decades of the 19th century. So that it has been possible in recent years still to meet here and there the last ramifications, as it were, of the Aristotelian wisdom that Alexander carried over into Asia and that returned to Europe through Asia Minor, Africa and Spain. It was the same wisdom that had come to new life in such men as Basil Valentine and those who came after him, and from which Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus and countless others had drawn. It was brought back to Europe also by yet another path, namely through the Crusaders. This Aristotelian wisdom lived on, scattered far and wide among the common people. In the later decades of the 19th century, one is thankful to say, the last echoes of the ancient Nature knowledge carried over into Asia by the expeditions of Alexander were still to be heard, even if sadly diminished and scarcely recognisable. In the old alchemy, in the old knowledge of the connections between the forces and substances of Nature that persisted so remarkably among simple country folk, we may discover again its last lingering echoes. To-day they have died away; to-day they are gone, they are no longer to be heard.

Similarly in these years one could still find isolated individuals who gave evidence of Aristotelian spiritual training; though to-day they too are gone. And thus what was carried east as well as what was carried west was preserved,—for that which was carried east came back again to the west. And it was possible in the seventies and eighties of the 19th century for one who could do so with new direct spiritual perception, to make contact with what was still living in these last and youngest children of the great events we have been describing.

There is, in truth, a wonderful interworking in all these things. For we can see how the expeditions of Alexander and the teachings of Aristotle had this end in view, to keep unbroken the threads that unite man with the ancient spirituality, to weave them as it were into the material civilisation that was to come, that so they might endure until such time as new spiritual revelations should be given.

From this point of view, we may gain a true understanding of the events of history, for it is often so that seemingly fruitless undertakings are fraught with deep significance for the historical evolution of mankind. It is easy enough to say that the expeditions of Alexander to Asia and to Egypt have been swept away and submerged. It is not so. It is easy to say that Aristotle ceased to be in the 19th century. But he did not. Both streams have lasted up to the very moment when it is possible to begin a renewed life of the Spirit.

I have told you on many occasions how the new life of the Spirit was able to begin at the end of the seventies, and how from the turn of the century onwards, it has been able to grow more and more. It is our task to receive in all its fullness the stream of spiritual life that is poured down to us from the heights.

And so to-day we find ourselves in a period that marks a genuine transition in the spiritual unfolding of man. And if we are not conscious of these wonderful connections and of how deeply the present is linked with the past, then we are in very truth asleep to important events that are taking place in the spiritual life of our time. And numbers of people are fast asleep to-day in regard to the most important events of all. But Anthroposophy is there for that very purpose,—to awaken man from sleep.

You who have come here for this Christmas Meeting,—I believe that all of you have felt an impulse that calls you to awaken. We are nearing the day—as this Meeting goes on, we shall have to pass the actual hour of the anniversary—we are coming to the day when the terrible flames burst forth that destroyed the Goetheanum. Let the world think what it will of the destruction by fire of the Goetheanum, in the evolution of the Anthroposophical movement the event of the fire has a tremendous significance.

We shall not however be able to judge of its full significance until we look beyond it to something more. We behold again the physical flames of fire flaring up on that night, we see the marvellous way in which the fusing metal of the organ-pipes and other metallic parts sent up a glow that caused that wonderful play of colour in the flames. And then we carry our memory over the year that has intervened. But in this memory must live the fact that the physical is Maya, that we have to seek the truth of the burning flames in the spiritual fire that it is ours now to kindle in our hearts and souls. In the midst of the physically burning Goetheanum shall arise for us a spiritually living Goetheanum.

I do not believe, my dear friends, that this can come to pass in the full, world-historic sense unless we can on the one hand look upon the flames mounting up in terrible tongues of fire from the Goetheanum that we have grown to love so dearly, and behold at the same time in the background that other treacherous burning of Ephesus, when Herostratus, guided by demonic powers, flung the flaming brand into the Temple. When we bring these two events together, setting one in the background and one in the foreground of our thought, we shall then have a picture that will perhaps have power to write deeply enough in our hearts what we have lost and what we must strive our utmost to build again.

• 1. Flavius Claudius Julianus, called the Apostate by the Christians, was Roman Emperor from 361–363.
• 2. See the 8th and 9th lectures in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres.
• 3. (1575–1624), mystic. See Eleven European Mystics by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Publications, New York, 1971.
• 4. Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541), physician. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 5. (1533–1588), mystic. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 6. Alchemist and Benedictine monk, lived from 1413 onwards in the Monastery of St. Peter in Erfurt. His writings were not discovered or printed till the beginning of the seventeenth century. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.
• 8. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.
• 9. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.

When we discuss the history and position of anthroposophy in relation to the Anthroposophical Society, any such reflections have to take into account two questions. First, why was it necessary to link the anthroposophical movement to the theosophical movement in the way they were connected? And second, why is it that malicious opponents still equate the Anthroposophical Society with the Theosophical Society? The answers to these questions will only become clear from a historical perspective. Yesterday I said that when we talk about the Anthroposophical Society, the first thing of relevance is that of the people who feel the need to pursue their path through an anthroposophical movement. I have tried to describe the sense in which the souls who come into contact with anthroposophy in order to satisfy their spiritual yearning are homeless souls in a certain respect. There were more of them about than is normally suspected, because there were many people who in one way or another tried by various means to develop their more profound human qualities.

Quite apart from the reaction to modern materialism, which subsequently led to various forms of spiritualism, many souls sought to fulfil certain inner needs by reading the work of people like¹ and similar writers. They tried, one might say, to compensate for something missing in their human nature; something which they wanted to feel and experience inwardly, but which they could not find on the well-trodden paths of modern civilization: neither in the popular literature or art of a secular age, nor in the traditional religious faiths.

Today, then, I will place before you a number of facts, and will have to leave it to the following lectures to create the links between them.

Those who were engaged in such a search also included human beings who joined the various branches of the Theosophical Society. And if we ask whether there was something which distinguished those who joined the Theosophical Society from others, the answer has to be yes. There was what I might call a special sort of endeavour present. We know from the way in which the Theosophical Society developed that it was not unreasonable to assume that the something which people were looking for at the start of our century as anthroposophy was most likely to be understood within the circles then united by theosophy. But we will only be able to throw some light on that if the facts are properly presented.

I would like to draw a pen picture of what the Theosophical Society, which found its most potent expression in the English Theosophical Society, represented at the time. Indeed, the latter was then joined by what emerged immediately as anthroposophy.

If we look at the character of the English Theosophical Society as expressed in its members, we have to to look into their souls in order to understand their thinking. After all, they gave expression to their consciousness in the way they went about things. They assembled, held meetings, lectures and discussions. They also met and talked a great deal in smaller groups: at general meetings, for instance, there was always time to have a meal together, or a cup of tea and so on. People even found time to change dress in the intervals. It was really what might be described as a reflection of the kind of social behaviour one might find in daily life. In the consciousness of those people it was particularly noticeable that there were highly conflicting forces at play.

To anyone who was not a dyed-in-the-wool theosophist it was evident that they sought to have two conceptions of every person. The first one was the direct impression on meeting someone. But the other was the conception which everyone else had of each individual. This was based on very generalized ideas about the nature of human beings, about universal human love, about being advanced—as they called it—or not, about the seriousness of one's inclinations in order to prove worthy of receiving the doctrines of theosophy, and so on. These were pretty theoretical considerations. And everyone thought that something of all this had to be present in people walking around in flesh and blood. The naive impressions of individuals, were not really alive in the members, but each one had an image of all the others which was based on theoretical ideas about human beings and human behaviour.

In fact no one saw anyone else as they really were, but rather as a kind of spectre. And thus it was necessary on meeting Mr Smith, for example, and forming a naive impression of him, to form a spectral idea of him by visualizing what someone else thought of Mr Smith. Thus it was necessary to have two images of each person. However, most of the members dispensed with the image of the real person and merely absorbed the image of the spectre, so that in reality members always perceived one another in spectral form. The consciousness of the members was filled with spectres. An interest in psychology was necessary to understand this.

Real interest required a certain generosity and lack of preconception. It was, after all, very interesting to be involved in what existed there as a kind of spectral society. Its leaders were perceived by the others in a very peculiar manner. Reference might be made to a leading individual—let us call him X. During the night his astral form went from house to house—only members' houses, of course—as an invisible helper. All kinds of things emanated from him. The spectral ideas about leading individuals were in part extraordinarily beautiful. Often, it was a considerable contrast to meet these leading personalities in the flesh. But the general ethos then ensured that as far as possible only the spectral conception was allowed to exist and the real conception was not permitted to intrude.

A certain view of things, a doctrine, was definitely required for this. Since not everyone was clairvoyant, although there were many people at the time who at least pretended to be, certain theories were necessary to give form to these spectres. These theories had something exceedingly archaic about them. It was hard to avoid the impression that these spectral human constructs were assembled according to old, rehashed theories. In many cases it was easy to find the ancient writings which provided the source material.

Thus on top of their ghostly nature these human spectres were not of the present time. They were from earlier incarnations; they gave the impression of having clambered out of Egyptian, Persian or ancient Indian graves. In a certain sense any feeling of the here and now had been lost.

These ancient doctrines were difficult to understand, even when clothed in relatively modern terminology. The etheric body was borrowed from medieval concepts, as was perhaps the astral body. But then we move on to manas, kama manas and suchlike, which everybody talked about but no one really understood. How could they, when they approached them with very modern, materialistic ideas? These teachings were meant to be seen in a cosmic context; they contained cosmic concepts and ideas which made it easy to feel that souls were talking in a language not of centuries, but of millennia past.

This process spread far and wide. Books were written in such an idiom. But there was another side to all this. It had its beautiful aspect, because despite the superficial use of words, despite the lack of understanding, something did rub off on people. One might almost say that, even if it did not enter their souls, an extraordinary amount adhered to the outer garment of their souls. They went about not exactly with an awareness of the etheric body or kama manas, but they had an awareness that they were enveloped in layers of coats: one of them the etheric body, another kama manas and so on. They were proud of these coats, of this dressing of the soul, and that provided a strong element of cohesion among them.

This was something which forged the Theosophical Society into a single entity in an exceptionally intense manner, which created a tremendous communal spirit in which every single person felt himself to be a representative of the Theosophical Society. Beyond each individual member, the Society itself had what might be described as an awareness of itself. This identity was so strong that even when the absurdities of its leaders eventually came to light in a rather bizarre manner, the members held together with an iron grip because they felt it was akin to treachery if people did not stick together, even when the Society's leaders had committed grave mistakes.

Anyone who has gained an insight into the struggles which later went on within certain members of the Theosophical Society long after the Anthroposophical Society had separated itself, when people repeatedly realized the terrible things their leaders were doing but failed to see that as a sufficient reason to leave—anyone who saw the struggle will have developed a certain respect for this self-awareness of the Society as a whole.

And that leads us to ask whether the conditions which surrounded the birth of the Anthroposophical Society might not allow a similar self-awareness to develop.

From the beginning the Anthroposophical Society² had to manage without the often very questionable means by which the Theosophical Society established its strong cohesion and self-awareness. The Anthroposophical Society had to be guided by the ideal: wisdom can only be found in truth.³ But this is something which has remained little more than an ideal. In this area in particular the Anthroposophical Society leaves a lot to be desired, having barely begun to address the development of a communal spirit, an identity of its own.

The Anthroposophical Society is a collection of people who strive very hard as individual human beings. But as a society it hardly exists, precisely because this feeling of a common bond is not there, as only the smallest number of members of the Anthroposophical Society feel themselves to be representatives of the Society. Everyone feels that he is an individual, and forgets altogether that there is supposed to be an Anthroposophical Society as well.

Having characterized the people attracted to anthroposophy, what has been the response of anthroposophy to their endeavours? Anyone with sufficient interest can find the principles of anthroposophy in my The Philosophy of Freedom.⁴ I wish to emphasize that this refers with inner logic to a spiritual realm which is, for example, the source of our moral impulses. The existence of a spiritual realm takes concrete form when human beings develop an awareness that their innermost being is not connected to the sensory world but to the spiritual world. These are the two basic points made in The Philosophy of Freedom: first, that there is a spiritual realm and, second, that the innermost part of a person's being is connected to this spiritual realm.

Inevitably the question arose as to whether it is possible to make public in this way what was to be revealed to contemporary mankind as a kind of message about the spiritual world. After all, one could not simply stand up and and talk into the void—which, incidentally, does not exclude a number of odd proposals having been put to me recently. When I was in Vienna in 1918, for instance, I was summoned, by telegram no less, to go to the Rax Alp on the northern boundary of Styria, stand up on that mountain and there deliver a lecture for the Alps! I need hardly add that I did not respond to it. One must create a link with something which already exists in contemporary civilization. And basically there were few opportunities like that around, even at the turn of the century. At that time peoples' search led them to the Theosophical Society, and they, finally, were the ones to whom one could talk about such things.

But a feeling of responsibility towards the people whom we were addressing was not enough; a feeling of responsibility towards the spiritual world was also required, and in particular towards the form in which it appeared at that time. And here I might draw attention to the way in which what was to become anthroposophy gradually emerged from those endeavours which I did not yet publicly call anthroposophy.

In the 1880s I could see, above all, a kind of mirage; something which looked quite natural in the physical world but which, nevertheless, took on a deeper significance in a certain sense, even when taken as an insubstantial mirage, a play of the light. If one opened oneself in a contemporary way to the world views of that time, one was liable to encounter something very peculiar. If we think about Central Europe, in the first instance, the philosophy of Idealism from the first half of the nineteenth century presented a world-shattering philosophy whose aim was to provide a complete metaphysical conception of the world. In the 1880s there were echoes of, let us say, Fichte, Hegel and Solgers philosophies,⁵ which meant as much to some of their adherents as anthroposophy can ever mean to people today. But they were basically a sum of abstract concepts.

Take a look at the first of the three parts of Hegel's Encyclopedia of Philosophy⁶ and you will find a series of concepts which are developed one from the other: the concepts of being, not-being, becoming and existence, ending with the idea of purpose. It consists only of abstract thoughts and ideas. And yet this abstraction is what Hegel describes as God before the creation of the world. So if one asks what God was before the Creation, the answer lies in a system of abstract concepts and abstract ideas.

Now when I was young there lived in Vienna a Herbartian philosopher called Robert Zimmermann.⁷ He said we should no longer be permitted to think in the Hegelian mode, or that of Solger or similar philosophers. According to Zimmermann these men thought as if they themselves were God. That was almost as if someone from the Theosophical Society had spoken, for there was a leading member of the Theosophical Society, Franz Hartmann,⁸ who said in all his lectures something to the effect that you had to become aware of the God within yourself, and when that God began to speak you were speaking theosophy. But Hegel, when in Zimmermann's view he allowed the God within himself to speak, said: Being, negation of being, becoming, existence; and then the world was first of all logically put in a state of turbulence, whereupon it flipped over into its otherness, and nature was there.

Robert Zimmermann, however, said: We must not allow the God in human beings to speak, for that leads to a theocentric perspective. Such a view is not possible unless one behaves rather like Icarus. And you know what happened to him: you slip up somewhere in the cosmos and take a fall! You have to remain firmly grounded in the human perspective. And thus Robert Zimmermann wrote his Anthroposophy to counter the theosophy of Hegel, Schelling, Solger and others, whom he also treats as theosophists in his History of Aesthetics.⁹ It is from the title of this book, Anthroposophy, that I later took the name. I found it exceedingly interesting then as a phenomenon of the time. The trouble is that it consists of the most horribly abstract concepts.

You see, human beings want a philosophical framework which will satisfy their inner selves, which will give them the ability to say that they are connected with a divine-spiritual realm, that they possess something which is eternal. Zimmermann was seeking an answer to the question: When human beings go beyond mere sensory existence, when they become truly aware of their spiritual nature, what can they know? They know logical ideas. According to Zimmermann, if it is not God in human beings who is thinking, but human beings themselves, then five logical ideas emerge. First, there is logical necessity; second, the equivalence of concepts; third, the combination of concepts; fourth, the differentiation of concepts; and fifth, the law of contradiction, that something can only be itself or something else. That is the sum total of the things which human beings can know when they draw on their soul and spirit.

If this anthroposophy were the only thing available, the unavoidable conclusion would be that everything connected with the various religions, with religious practice and so on, is a thing of the past, Christianity is a thing of the past, because these are things which require a historical basis. When a person thinks only of what he can know as anthropos, what he can know when he makes his soul independent of sensory impressions, of worldly history, it is the following: I know that I am subject to logical necessity, to the equivalence of concepts, the combination of concepts, differentiation, and the law of contradiction. That, whatever name it is given, is all there is.

It can then be supplemented by aesthetic ideas. Five ideas once again, including perfection, consonance and harmony, conflict and reconciliation. Third, five ethical ideas—ethical perfection, benevolence, justice, antagonism and the resolution of antagonism—form the basis for human action. As you can see, that has all been put in an exceedingly abstract form. And it is preceded by the title: Anthroposophy—An Outline. The dedication shows clearly that this was intended to be a major project.

You can see that it was very remarkable, in the way that a mirage is. Zimmermann transformed theosophy into anthroposophy, as he understood the word. But I do not believe that if I had lectured on his kind of anthroposophy we would ever have had an anthroposophical movement. The name, however, was very well chosen. And I took on the name when, for fundamental reasons which will become clear in the course of these lectures, I had to start dealing with particular subjects, starting with the spiritual fact—a certainty for everyone with access to the spiritual world—of repeated lives on earth.

But if I wanted to deal with such things with a degree of spiritual responsibility, they had to be put in a context. It is no exaggeration to say that it was not easy at the turn of the century to put the idea of repeated lives on earth into a context which would have been understood. But there were points where such a link could be established. And before going any further I want to tell you how I myself sought to make use of such points of contact.

Topinard¹⁰ wrote a very interesting synopsis of anthropological facts, facts which lead to the conclusion, acceptable of course to everyone who subscribed to modern thinking at that time, that all animal species had evolved one from the other. Topinard quotes his facts and writes, after having presented, I think, twenty-two points, that the twenty-third point is what he argues to be the transformation of animal species. But then we face the problem of the human being. He does not provide an answer to this. So what happens there?

Now, by taking the biological theory of evolution seriously, it is possible to build on such an author. If we continue, and add point twenty-three we reach the conclusion that the animal species always repeat themselves at a higher level. In the human being we progress to the individual. When the individual begins to be repeated we have reincarnation. As you can see, I tried to make use of what was available to me, and in that form attempted to make something comprehensible which is, in any case, present before the soul as a spiritual fact. But in order to provide a point of access for people in general, something had to be used which was already in existence but which did not come to an end with a full stop, but with a dash. I simply continued beyond the dash where natural science left off. I delivered that lecture¹¹ to the group which I mentioned yesterday. It was not well received because it was not felt necessary to reflect on the issues raised by the sciences, and of course it seemed superfluous to that group that the things in which they believed should, in any case, need to be supported by evidence.

The second thing is that at the beginning of the century I delivered a lecture cycle entitled “From Buddha to Christ” to a group which called itself Die Kommenden.¹² In these lectures I tried to depict the line of development from Buddha to Christ and to present Christ as the culmination of what had existed previously. The lecture cycle concluded with the interpretation of the Gospel of St. John which starts with the raising of Lazarus. Thus the Lazarus issue, as represented in my Christianity As Mystical Fact,¹³ forms the conclusion of the lecture cycle “From Buddha to Christ”.

This coincided roughly with the lectures published in my book Eleven European Mystics and the task of addressing theosophists on matters which I both needed and wanted to speak about. That occurred at the same time as the endeavour to establish a German Section of the Theosophical Society.¹⁴ And before I had even become a member, or indeed shown the slightest inclination to become a member, I was called upon to become the General Secretary of this German Section of the Theosophical Society.

At the inauguration of the German Section I delivered a cycle of lectures which were attended by, I think, only two or three theosophists, and otherwise by members of the circle to which I had addressed the lectures “From Buddha to Christ”.¹⁵ To give the lecture cycle its full title: “Anthroposophy or the evolution of mankind as exemplified by world conceptions from ancient oriental times to the present.” This lecture cycle—I have to keep mentioning this—was given by me at the same time as the German Section of the Theosophical Society was being established. I even left the meeting, and while everyone else was continuing their discussion and talking about theosophy I was delivering my lecture cycle on anthroposophy.

One of the theosophists who later became a good anthroposophist said to me afterwards that what I had said did not accord at all with what Mrs Besant was saying and what Blavatsky was saying. I replied that this is how it was. In other words, someone with a good knowledge of all the dogmas of theosophy had discovered correctly that something was wrong. Even at that time it was possible to say that it was wrong, that something else applied.

I now want to put to you another apparently completely unconnected fact which I referred to yesterday. Consider Blavastky's books: Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. There really was no reason to be terribly enthusiastic about the kind of people who took what was written in these books as holy dogma. But one could see Blavatsky herself as an exceedingly interesting phenomenon, if only from a deeper psychological point of view. Why? Well, there is a tremendous difference between the two books. This difference will become most clearly apparent to you if I tell you how those familiar with similar things judged them.

Traditions have been preserved which have their origins in the most ancient Mysteries and which were then safeguarded by a number of so-called secret societies. Certain secret societies also bestowed degrees on their members, who advanced from the first degree to the second and the third and so on. As they did so they were told certain things on the basis of those traditions. At the lower degrees people did not understand this knowledge but accepted it as holy dogma. In fact they did not understand it at the higher degrees either, but the members of the lower degrees firmly believed that the members of the higher degrees understood everything.

Nevertheless, a pure form of knowledge had been preserved. A great deal was known if we simply take the texts. You need do no more than pick up things which have been printed, and revitalize it with what you know from anthroposophy—for you cannot revitalize it in any other way—and you will see that these traditions contain great, ancient and majestic knowledge. Sometimes the words sound completely wrong, but everyone who has any insight is aware that they have their origin in ancient wisdom. But the real distinguishing mark of the activity in these secret societies was that people had a general feeling that there were human beings in earlier times who were initiates, and who were able to speak about the world, the cosmos and the spiritual realm on the basis of an ancient wisdom. There were many people who knew how to string a sentence together and who were able to expound on what was handed down.

Then Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled appeared. The people who were particularly shocked by its publication were those who held traditional knowledge through their attainment of lower or higher degrees in the secret societies. They usually justified their reaction by saying that the time was not yet ripe to make available through publication to mankind in general the things which were being kept hidden in the secret societies. It was, furthermore, their honest opinion. But there were a number of people who had another reason. And this reason can really be understood only if I draw your attention to another set of facts.

In the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, specifically in the nineteenth century, all knowledge was transformed into abstract concepts and ideas. In Central Europe one of those who began with such abstract ideas was the philosopher Schelling.¹⁶ At a time when these ideas could still enthuse others because they contained inner human emotional force, Schelling was among those who taught them. A few years later Schelling no longer found any satisfaction in this mode of thought and began to immerse himself in mysticism, specifically in Jakob Boehme,¹⁷ allowing himself to be influenced by Boehme's thinking and extracting from it something which immediately took on a more real quality. But what he said was no longer really understood, for no one could make sense of what Schelling wrote. In the 1820s, following a lengthy reclusive period, Schelling began to speak in a curious manner. There is a small booklet by him, called Die Weltalter. You may feel that it is still rather nebulous and abstract, but a curious feeling remains: Why is it that Schelling does not advance to the stage where he can talk about what was later discussed on an anthroposophical basis as the truths about Atlantis, for instance, but only reaches the point at which he almost, rather clumsily, hints at them? It is quite interesting.

In 1841 he was appointed by to teach at the University in Berlin. That is when Schelling began to lecture on his Philosophy of Revelation. Even that is still terribly abstract. He talks about three potentialities A1, A2, A3. But he follows this line until he achieves some kind of grasp of the old Mysteries, until he achieves some kind of grasp of Christianity. Nevertheless, his is not really the appropriate way to come to terms with the ideas which he briefly puts forward here. Schelling was never properly understood, but that is not really surprising because his method was a dubious one. All the same, there was something in the general awareness of the time and we can take the above as evidence for this, too which led people like Schelling to conclude that a spiritual world needed to be investigated.

This feeling took a different form in England. It is exceedingly interesting to read the writings of Lawrence Oliphant.¹⁸ Of course Oliphant presents his conclusions about the primeval periods of human development on earth in quite a different way, because the English approach is quite distinct from the German one; it is much more physical, down-to-earth, material. The two approaches are in a certain sense, taking into account differing national characteristics, parallel phenomena: Schelling in the early part of the nineteenth century with his idealism, Oliphant with his realism, both of them displaying a strong drive to understand the world which is revealed by the spirit. These two men grew into the culture of their time; they did not stop until they had taken the philosophical ideas of their time about human beings, the cosmos and so on to their ultimate conclusion.

Now, you know from my anthroposophical explanations that human beings develop in early life in a way which makes physical development concomitant with soul development. That ceases later on. As I told you, the Greeks continued to develop into their thirties in a way which involved real parallel development of the physical and spiritual. With Schelling and Oliphant something different happened from the average person of today. One may work on a concept and develop it further, but Schelling and Oliphant went beyond this, and as they grew older their souls suddenly became filled with the vitality of previous lives on earth; they began to remember ancient things from earlier incarnations. Distant memories, unclear memories, arose in a natural way. Suddenly that struck people like a flash. Both Oliphant and Schelling are now suddenly seen in a different light.

Both establish themselves and begin by becoming ordinary philosophers, each in their own country. Then in their later years they begin to recall knowledge which they have known in earlier lives on earth, only now it is like a misty memory. At this point Schelling and Oliphant begin to speak about the spiritual world. Even if these are unclear memories they are, nevertheless, something to be feared by those who have only been through the old style, traditional development of the societies, to the extent that they might spread and gain the upper hand. These people lived in terrible fear that human beings could be born with the facility to remember what they had experienced in the past and speak about it. Furthermore, it also called into question all their principles of secrecy. Here we are, they thought, making members of the first, second, third grades and so on swear holy oaths of secrecy, but what remains of our secrecy if human beings are now being born who can recall personally what we have preserved and kept under lock and key?

Then Isis Unveiled appeared! The notable thing about it was that it brought openly on to the book-market a whole lot of things which were being kept hidden in secret societies. The great problem with which the societies had to come to terms was how Blavatsky obtained the knowledge which they had kept locked away and for which people had sworn holy oaths. It was those who were particularly shocked by this who paid a great deal of attention to Isis Unveiled.

Then The Secret Doctrine appeared. That only made things worse. The Secret Doctrine presented a whole category of knowledge which was the preserve of the highest grades in the secret societies. Those who were shocked by the first book, and even more so by the second one, used all kinds of expressions to describe them both, because Blavatsky as a phenomenon had a terribly unsettling effect, particularly on the so-called initiates. Isis Unveiled was less frightening because Blavatsky was a chaotic personality who continuously interspersed material which contained deep wisdom with all kinds of stuff and nonsense. So the frightened, so-called initiates could still say about Isis Unveiled that in it what was true was not new and what was new was not true! The disagreeable fact for them was that things had been revealed. After all, the book was called Isis Unveiled. They reassured themselves by saying that the event was an infringement of their rights.

But when The Secret Doctrine appeared, containing a whole lot of material which even the highest grades did not know, they could no longer say: What is true is not new and what is new is not true. For it contained a large body of knowledge which had not been preserved by tradition.

Thus in a rather strange and, indeed, confusing way, this woman represented what had been feared since Schelling and Oliphant. That is why I said that her personality is psychologically even more interesting than her books. Blavatsky was an important and notable phenomenon of the spiritual life of the late nineteenth century.

This is the extent to which I wanted to present the facts.

• 1. Ralph Waldo Trine, 1866–1958. American author of philosophical books. Pupil of R. W. Emerson. His best known work is In Tune with the Infinite (New York, 1897).
• 2. The German Section of the Theosophical Society unanimously rejected the absurd theories here referred to, which began to circulate in the Society from 1910/11 (see also Lecture Six). The Section's rejection led to a decision by the General Council in Adyar on 7 March 1913 to expel the German Section. Since such a move was not totally unexpected, the Anthroposophical Society had been founded on 28 December 1912 with an executive committee comprising Dr. Carl Unger, Michael Bauer and Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner).
• 3. This principle, enunciated by Goethe, was chosen by Rudolf Steiner as the motto for the constitution which he gave to the Anthroposophical Society in 1912. From: Sprüche in Prosa; Goethes naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach, 1975. Vol. V, p.360.
• 4. Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: A philosophy of freedom. Translated by Rita Stebbing. Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol, 1992.
• 5. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814, philosopher. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770–1831, philosopher. Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, 1780–1819, philosopher and aesthetician.
• 6. 1817. Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Philosophical Library, New York, 1959. Part One: Logic.
• 7. Robert Zimmermann, 1824–1912. Philosopher and aesthetician. From 1861 to 1895 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. One of the leading representatives of Herbartian philosophy. cf. Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, Chapter III.
• 8. Franz Hartmann, 1838–1912. Doctor and theosophist. Founder of a separate school within the Theosophical Society. cf. Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, Chapter IX.
Briefe I.
• 9. i>Geschichte der Aesthetik als philosophische Wissenschaft. Vienna, 1858. Anthroposophie im Umriss-Entwurf eines Systems idealer Weltansicht auf realistischer Grundlage. Vienna, 1882. The text of the dedication referred to is as follows: To Harriet. It was your strength of soul, when night threatened to blanket my eyes, which made me resolve to use the long and involuntary leisure in my dark room to bring an ordered conclusion to a stream of thoughts long maturing in isolation, for which a willing hand kindly lent itself to write them down. Thus is the origin of this book of whose content no one will be able to dispute that, like the light, it was born in the dark. Who else but you could lay claim to the same?
• 10. Paul Topinard, 1830–1911. French anthropologist. A German translation of his Anthropology appeared in 1888.
• 11. The date and title could not be established.
• 12. The name Die Kommenden was used by a society founded in Berlin by the poet Ludwig Jacobowski which consisted of literary figures, artists, scientists and others, with an interest in the arts. Rudolf Steiner delivered 24 lectures from October 1901 to March 1902. cf. also Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, Chapter XXIX and Chapter XXX.
• 13. In the same winter, from October 1901 to April 1902, Rudolf Steiner again delivered a series of lectures in the Theosophical Library (see Lecture One, Note 12) which provided a comprehensive expansion of the subject treated in the previous year (mysticism). In 1902 these lectures were published as Christianity As Mystical Fact. Translated by C. Davy and A. Bittleston. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972.
• 14. cf. Rudolf Steiner, Eine historische Antwort. From an address on 14 December 1911, reprinted in Aus dem Leben von Marie Steiner-von Sivers. Dornach, 1956. See also Briefe II.
• 15. he reference is to the second major lecture cycle of 27 lectures from October 1902 to April 1903 which was given to the society Die Kommenden under the title From Zarathustra to Nietzsche. The inaugural meeting of the German Section of the Theosophical Society took place on 20 October 1902 in the presence of Annie Besant. cf. also The Course of My Life, Chapter XXX.
• 16. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, 1775–1854. Die Weltalter, a fragment from his unpublished works; English translation The Ages of the World. Columbia University Press, New York, 1942. Philosophie der Offenbarung. 2 vols. Stuttgart/Augsburg, 1858. cf. the chapter “The Classics of World and Life Conceptions” in Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy (1914). Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1973. pp. 151–164. cf. also the lecture in Dornach on 16 September 1924, in Karmic Relationships, Vol. 4. Translated by D. S. Osmond and C. Davy. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1983.
• 17. See Lecture Three, Note 10.
• 18. Lawrence Oliphant, 1829–1888. His two most important books are Sympneumata and Scientific Religion. London, 1888. cf. Rudolf Steiner's lecture in London on 24 August 1924, in Karmic Relationships, Vol. 6. Translated by D. S. Osmond. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.

Rudolf Steiner: Gentlemen! I mentioned our wish to look further into the history that is connected with our present study of the world. You have seen how the human race gradually built itself up out of the rest of mighty Nature. It was only when conditions on the earth were such that men were able to live upon it—when the earth had died, when it no longer had its own life—that human and animal life could develop in the way I have pictured.

Now we have also seen that in the beginning, human life was actually quite different from what it is today, and had its field of action where the Atlantic Ocean is now. We have to imagine that where the Atlantic Ocean is today, there was formerly solid ground. Today we have Asia on the one hand; there is the Black Sea, below it is Africa, then there is Russia and also Asia. On the other hand, there is England, Ireland, and over there also America. Formerly all this in between was land, and here very little land; over here in Europe at that time there was actually a really huge sea. These countries were all in the sea, and when we come up to the north, Siberia was sea too; it was still all sea. Below where India is today, the land was appearing a little above the sea. Thus we actually have some land there, and on the other side again land. Where today we find the Asian peoples, the inhabitants of the Near East and those of Europe, there was sea—the land only rising up later. The land, however, went much farther, continuing right on to the Pacific Ocean where today there are so many islands, Java, Sumatra, and so on; they were all part of the continent formerly there—all this archipelago. Thus, where now the Pacific Ocean is, there was a great deal of land with sea between the two land masses.

Now the first peoples we are able to investigate have remained in this region, here, where the land has been preserved. When we took around us in Europe we can really say: Ten, twelve or fifteen thousand years ago the earth, the ground, became sufficiently firm for men to dwell upon it. Before that, only marine animals were there which developed out of the sea, and so on. If at that time you had looked for man, he would have been where the Atlantic Ocean is today. But over there in Asia, in eastern Asia, there were also men earlier than ten thousand years ago. These men naturally left descendants, and the descendants are very interesting on account of their culture, the most ancient on earth. Today these are the peoples called the Japanese and Chinese. They are very interesting because they are the last traces, so to say, of the oldest inhabitants of the earth.

As you have heard, there was, of course, a much older population on earth that was entirely wiped out. That was the humanity who lived in ancient Atlantis, of whom nothing remains. For even if remains did exist, we would have to dig down into the bed of the Atlantic Ocean to find them. We would have to get down to that bed—a more difficult procedure than people think—and dig there, and in all probability find nothing. For, as I have said, those people had soft bodies. The culture which they created with gestures was something that one cannot dig out of the ground-because there was nothing that endured! Thus, what was there long before the Japanese and Chinese is not accessible to ordinary science; one must have some knowledge of spiritual science if one wants to make such discoveries.

However, what has remained of the Chinese and Japanese peoples is very interesting. You see, the Chinese and the older Japanese—not those of today (about whom I am just going to speak)—the Chinese and Japanese had a culture quite different from ours. We would have a much better idea of it if our good Europeans had not in recent centuries extended their domination over those spheres, bringing about a complete change. In the case of Japan this change has been very effective. Although Japan has kept its name, it has been entirely Europeanized. Its people have gradually absorbed everything from the Europeans, and what remains of their ancient culture is merely its outward form. The Chinese have preserved their identity better, but now they can no longer hold out. It is true that the European dominion is not actively established there, but in those regions what the Europeans think is becoming all-prevailing, and what once existed there has disappeared. This is no cause for regret; it is in the nature of human evolution. It must, however, be mentioned.

Now if we observe the Chinese—among them, things can be seen in a less adulterated form—we find a culture distinct from all others, for the Chinese in their old culture did not include anything that can be called religion. The Chinese culture was devoid of religion.

You must picture to yourselves, gentlemen, what is meant by a “culture without religion”. When you consider the cultures that have religion you find everywhere—in the old Indian culture, for instance—veneration for beings who are invisible but who seem to resemble human beings on earth. It is the peculiar feature of all later religions that they represent their invisible beings as manlike.

Anthroposophy does not do this. Anthroposophy does not represent the super-sensible world anthropomorphically but as it actually is. Further, it sees in the stars the expression of the super-sensible. The remarkable thing is that the Chinese have had something of the same kind. The Chinese do not venerate invisible gods. They say: What is here on earth differs according to climate, according to the nature of the soil where one lives. You see, China in the most ancient times was already a large country and is still today larger than Europe; it is a gigantic country, has always been gigantic, and has had a tremendously large, vigorous population. Now, the idea that the population of the earth increases is just superstition on the part of modern science, which always makes its calculations from data to suit itself. The truth is that even in the most ancient times there was a vast population in China, also in South America and North America. There too in those ancient times the land reached out to the Pacific Ocean. If that is taken into account the population of the earth cannot be said to have grown.

So, gentlemen, we find a culture there that is quite ancient, and today this culture can still be observed as it actually existed ten thousand, eight thousand years ago. The Chinese said: Above in the north the climate is different, the soil is different, from what they are farther south; everything is different there. The growth of the plants is different and human beings have to live in a different way. But the sun is all-pervading. The sun shines in the north and in the south; it goes on its way and moves from warm regions to cold regions. They said: On earth diversity prevails, but the sun makes everything equal. They saw in the sun a fructifying, leveling force. They went on to say, therefore: If we are to have a ruler, our ruler must be like that; individual men differ, but he must rule over them like the sun. For this reason they gave him the name “Son of the Sun.” His task was to rule on earth as the sun rules in the universe. The individual planets, Venus, Jupiter, and so on, act in their various ways; the sun as ruler over the planets makes everything equal. Thus the Chinese pictured their ruler as a son of the Sun. For they took the word “son” essentially to imply “belonging to something.”

Everything was then so arranged that the people said: The Son of the Sun is our most important man. The others are his helpers, just as the planets are the helpers of the sun. They organized everything on the earth in accordance with what appeared above in the stars. All this was done without prayer, for they did not know the meaning of prayer. It was actually all done without their having what later would constitute a cult. What might be called their kingdom was organized so as to be an image of the heavens. It could not yet be called a state. (That is a mischief that modern men perpetrate.) But they arranged their earthly affairs to be an image of what appeared to them in the stars above.

Now something came about through this circumstance that was naturally quite different from what happened later: a man became the citizen of a kingdom. He had no creed to profess; he simply felt himself to be a member of a kingdom. Originally the Chinese had no gods of any kind; when later they did have them, they were gods taken over from the Indians. Originally they had no gods, but their connection with the super-sensible worlds was expressed by the essential nature of their kingdom and its institutions. Their institutions had a family quality. The Son of the Sun was at the same time father to all the other Chinese and these served him. Although it was a kingdom, it partook of the nature of a family.

All this was only possible for men whose thinking had as yet no resemblance to that of later humanity. The thinking of the Chinese at that time was not at all like that of later men. What we think today would have been quite foreign to the Chinese. We think, for example, “animal”; we think “man”; we think “vase” or “table”. The Chinese did not think in this way, but they knew: there is a lion, there a tiger, a dog, there's a bear—not, there is an animal. They knew: my neighbor has a table with corners; someone else has a table that is rounder. They gave names to single things, but what “a table” is, never entered their head; “table” as such—of that they had no knowledge. They were aware: there stands a man with a bigger head and longer legs, there one with a smaller head, with shorter legs, and so on; there is a smaller man, here a bigger man, but “man” in general was to them an unknown factor. They thought in quite a different way, in a way impossible for man today. They had need, therefore, of other concepts. Now if you think “table,” “man,” “animal,” you can extend this to legal matters, for Jurisprudence consists solely of such concepts. But the Chinese were unable to think out any legal system; with them everything was organized as in a family. Within a family, when a son or daughter wants to do something, there is no thought of such a thing as a legal contract. But today, if someone here in Switzerland wants to do something, he consults liability laws, marriage laws, and so on. There one finds all that is needed, and the laws then have to be applied to individual cases.

Inasmuch as human beings still retain something of the Chinese in them—and there always remains a little—they don't really feel comfortable about laws and must always have recourse to a lawyer. They are even at sea sometimes with general concepts. As for the Chinese, they never had a legal code; they had nothing at all of what later took on the nature of a state. All they had was what each individual could judge in his individual situation.

So, to continue. The whole Chinese language was influenced by this fact. When we say “table,” we at once picture a flat surface with one, two or three legs, and so on, but it must be something that can stand up like a table. If anyone were to tell me a chair is a table, I would say: A table? You stupid! that's not a table, that's a chair. And if someone else came along and called the blackboard a table, I'd call him something even stronger, for it's not a table at all but a blackboard. With our language we have to call each thing by its own special name.

That is not so with Chinese. I will put this to you hypothetically; it will not be a precise picture, but you will get the idea from it. Say, then, that Chinese has the sounds OA, IOA, TAO, for instance.

It has then a certain sound for table, but this same sound signifies many other things too. Thus, let us say, such a sound might mean tree, brook, also perhaps pebble. Then it has another sound, let's say, that can mean star, as well as blackboard, and—for instance—bench. (These meanings may not be correct in detail; I mean only to show the way the Chinese language is built up.) And now the Chinese person knows: there are two sounds here, say LAO and BAO, each meaning things that are quite different but also both meaning brook. So he puts them together: BAOLAO. In this way he builds up his language. He does not build it up from names given to single things, but according to the various meanings of the various sounds. A sound may mean tree but it may also mean brook. When, therefore, he combines two sounds, both of which—beside many other things—mean brook, the other man knows that he means brook. But when he utters only one sound, no one knows what he means. In writing there are the same complications. So the Chinese have an extraordinarily complicated language and an extraordinarily complicated script.

And indeed, gentlemen, a great deal follows from this. It follows that for them it is not so easy to learn to read and write as it is for us-nor even to speak. With us, reading and writing can really be called simple; indeed, we are unhappy when our children don't learn quickly to read and write—we think it is “mere child's play.” With the Chinese this is not so; in China one grows quite old before one can write or in any way master the language. So you can easily imagine that the ordinary people are not at all able to do it, that only those who can go on learning up to a great age can at last become proficient. In China, therefore, noble rank is conferred as a matter of course from a spiritual basis on those who are cultured, and this spiritually high rank is called into being by the nature of the language and script. Here again it is not the same as in the West, where various degrees of nobility can be conferred and then passed on from one generation to another. In China rank can be attained only through education and scholarship.

It is interesting, gentlemen, is it not, that if we judge superficially we would surely say: then we don't want to be Chinese. But please don't assume that I am saying we ought to become Chinese, or even particularly to admire China. That is what some people may easily say about it. Two years ago when we had a Congress in Vienna,⁶ someone spoke of how some things in China were managed even today more wisely than we manage them—and immediately the newspapers reported that we wanted Chinese culture in Europe! That is not what was meant. In describing the Chinese culture, praise must be given in a certain way—but only in a certain way—for what it has of spiritual content. But it is a primitive culture, of a kind that can no longer be adopted by us. So you must not think I am agitating for another China in Europe! I simply wish to describe this most ancient of human cultures as it actually existed.

Now—to continue. What I have been saying is related to the whole manner of Chinese thinking and feeling. Indeed, the Chinese (and also the Japanese of more ancient times) occupied themselves a great deal, a very great deal, with art—with their kind of art. They painted, for instance. Now when we paint, it is quite a different affair from the Chinese painting. You see, when we paint (I will make this as simple as possible), when we paint a ball, for example, if the light falls on it, then the ball is bright in one part and dark over in the other, for it is in shadow; the light is falling beyond it. There again, on the light side, the ball is rather bright because there the light is reflected. Then we say: that side is in shadow, for the light is reflected on the other side; and then we have to paint also the shadow the ball throws on the ground. This is one of the characteristics of our painting: we must have light and shade on the objects. When we paint a face, we paint it bright where the light falls, and on the other side we make it dark. When we paint the whole man, if we paint properly, we put shadow in the same way falling on the ground.

But beside this we must pay attention to something else in our picture. Suppose I am standing here and want to paint. I see Herr Aisenpreis sitting in front; there behind, I see Herr Meier, and the two gentlemen at the back quite small. Were I to photograph them, in the photograph also they would come out quite small. When I paint, I paint in such a way that the gentlemen sitting in the front row are quite big, the next behind smaller, the next again still smaller and the one sitting right at the back has a really small head, a really small face. You see, when we paint we take perspective into account. We have to do it that way. We have to show light and shade and also perspective. This is inherent in the way we think.

Now the Chinese in their painting did not recognize light and shade, nor did they allow for perspective, because they did not see as we see. They took no notice of light and shade and no notice of perspective. This is what they would have said: Aisenpreis is certainly not a giant, any more than Meier is a dwarf. We can't put them together in a picture as if one were a giant and the other a dwarf, for that would be a lie, it is not the truth! That's the way they thought about things, and they painted as they thought. When the Chinese and the Japanese learn painting in their way, they do not look at objects from the outside, they think themselves right into the objects. They paint everything from within outwards as they imagine things for themselves. This, gentlemen, constitutes the very nature of Chinese and Japanese painting.

You will realize, therefore, that learning to see came only later to mankind. Human beings in that early China thought only in pictures, they did not form general concepts like “table” and so on, but what they saw they apprehended inwardly. This is not to be wondered at, for the Chinese descended from a culture during which seeing was different. Today we see as we do because there is air between us and the object. This air was simply not there in the regions where the Chinese were first established. In the times from which the Chinese have come down, people did not see in our way. In those ancient times it would have been nonsense to speak of light and shade, for there was not yet any such thing in the density the air then had. And so the Chinese still have no light and shade in their painting, and still no perspective. That came only later. From this you can see the Chinese think in quite a different way; they do not think as men do who came later.

However, this did not in the least hinder the Chinese from going very far in outer cleverness. When I was young—it is rather different now—we learned in school that Berthold Schwarz⁷ invented gunpowder, and this was told us as if there had never been gunpowder before. So Berthold Schwarz, while he was doing alchemistic experiments, produced gunpowder out of sulphur, nitre and carbon. But—the Chinese had made gunpowder thousands of years earlier!

Also we learned in school that Gutenberg⁸ invented the art of printing. We did learn many things that were correct, but in this case it looked to us as if there had formerly been no knowledge of printing. Actually, the Chinese already possessed this knowledge thousands of years earlier. They also had the art of woodcarving; they could cut the most wonderful things out of wood. In such external things the Chinese have had an advanced culture. This was in its turn the last remnant of a former culture still more advanced, for one recognizes that this Chinese art goes back to something even higher.

Thus it is characteristic of the Chinese to think not in concepts but in pictures, and to project themselves right into things. They have been able to make all those things which depend upon outer invention (except when it's a matter of steam-engines or something similar). So the present condition of the Chinese, which we may say is degenerate and uncultivated, has actually come about from centuries of ill-treatment at the hands of the Europeans.

You see that here is a culture that is really spiritual in a certain sense—and really ancient, that goes back to ten thousand years before our time. Much later, in the millennium preceding Christianity, individuals like Lao Tse⁹ and Confucius¹⁰ made the first written record of the knowledge possessed by the Chinese. Those masters simply wrote down what had arisen out of the intercourse among families in this old kingdom. They were not conscious of inventing rules of a moral or ethical nature; they were simply recording their experience of Chinese conduct. Previously, this had been done by word of mouth. Thus everything at that time was basically different. That is what can still be perceived today in the Chinese.

In contrast to this, it is hardly possible to see any longer the old culture of the Japanese people, because they have been entirely Europeanized. They follow European culture in everything. That they did not develop this culture out of themselves can be seen from their inability to discover on their own initiative what is purely European. The following, for example, really happened. The Japanese were to have steamships and saw no reason why they should not be able to manage them perfectly well themselves. They watched how to turn the ship, for instance, how to open the screw, and so on. Their instructors, the Europeans, worked with them for a time, and finally one day the Japanese said proudly: Now we can manage by ourselves, and we will appoint our own captain! So the European instructors were put ashore and off steamed the Japanese to the high seas. When they were ready to turn back, they turned the screw, and the ship turned round beautifully—but no one knew how to close the screw, and there was the ship whirling round and round on the sea, just turning and turning! The European instructors watching from the shore had to take a boat and bring the revolving ship to a standstill.

Perhaps you remember Goethe's poem, “The Magician's Apprentice” where the apprentice watches the spells of the old master-magician? And then, to save himself the trouble of fetching water, he learns a magic verse by which he will be able to make a broom into a water-carrier. One day when the old magician is out, the apprentice begins to put this magic into practice, and recites the words to start the broom working. The broom gets really down to business, and fetches water, and more water, and always more water. But the apprentice forgets how to stop it. Just imagine if you had your room flooded, and your broom went on fetching more and more water. In his desperation the apprentice chops the broom in two—then there are two water-carriers! When everything is drowned in water, the old master returns and says the right words for the broom to become a broom again.

As you know, the poem has been done in eurythmy recently, and the audience enjoyed it immensely. Well, the same kind of thing happened with the Japanese: they didn't know how to turn back the screw, and so the ship continued to go round and round. A regular ship's dance went on out there until the instructors on land could get a boat and come to the rescue.

Surely it is clear from all this that the European sort of invention is impossible for either the Chinese or the Japanese. But as to older inventions such as gunpowder, printing and so forth, they had already gone that far in much more ancient times than the Europeans. You see, the Chinese are much more interested in the world at large, in the world of the stars, in the universe as a whole.

Another people who point back to ancient days are the Indians. They do not go so far back as the Chinese, but they too have an old culture. Their culture may be said to have arisen from the sea later than the Chinese. The people who were the later Indian people came more from the north, settling down in what is now India as the land became free of water.

Now whereas the Chinese were more interested in the world outside, could project themselves into anything, the Indian people brooded more within themselves. The Chinese reflected more about the world—in their own way, but about the world; the Indians reflected chiefly about themselves, about man himself. Hence the culture that arose in India was more spiritualized. In the most remote times Indian culture was still free of religion; only later did religion enter into it. Man was their principal object of study, but their study was of an inward kind.

This too I can best make clear by describing the way the Indians used to draw and paint. The Chinese, looking at a man, painted him simply by entering into him with their thinking—without light and shade or perspective. That is really the way they painted him. Thus, if a Chinese had wanted to paint Herr Burle, he would have thought his way into him; he would not have made him dark there and light here, as we would do today, he would not have painted light and shadow, for they did not yet exist for the Chinese. Nor would he have made the hands bigger by comparison because of their being in front. But if the Chinese had painted Herr Burle, then Herr Burle would really have been there in the picture!

It was quite different with the Indians. Now just imagine the Indians were going to paint a picture: they would have started by painting a head. They too had no such thing as perspective. But they would at once have had the idea that a head could often be different, so they would make another, then a third again different, and a fourth, a fifth would have occurred to them. In this way they would gradually have had twenty or thirty heads side-by-side! These would all have been suggested to them by the one head. Or if they were painting a plant, they imagined at once that this could be different, and then there arose a number of young plants growing out of the older one. This is how it was in the case of the Indians in those very ancient times. They had tremendous powers of imagination. The Chinese had none at all and drew only the single thing, but made their way into this in thought. The Indians had a powerful imagination.

Now you see, gentlemen, those heads are not there. Really, if you look at Herr Burle, you see only one head. If you're drawing him here on the board, you can draw only one head. You are therefore not painting what is outwardly real if you paint twenty or thirty heads; you are painting something thought-out in your mind. The whole Indian culture took on that character; it was an inner culture of the mind, of the spirit. Hence when you see spiritual beings as the Indians thought of them, you see them represented with numbers of heads, numbers of arms, or in such a way that the animal nature of the body is made manifest.

You see, the Indians are quite different people from the Chinese. The Chinese lack imagination whereas the Indians have been full of it from the beginning. Hence the Indians were predisposed to turn their culture gradually into a religious one—which up to this day the Chinese have never done: there is no religion in China. Europeans, who are not given to making fine distinctions, speak of a Chinese religion, but the Chinese themselves do not acknowledge such a thing. They say: you people in Europe have a religion, the Indians have a religion, but we have nothing resembling a religion. This predisposition to religion was possible in the Indians only because they had a particular knowledge of something of which the Chinese were ignorant, namely, of the human body. The Chinese knew very well how to put themselves into something external to them. Now when there are vinegar and salt and pepper on our dinner table and we want to know how they taste, we first have to sample them on our tongue. For the Chinese in ancient times this was not necessary. They already tasted things that were still outside them. They could really feel their way into things and were quite familiar with what was external. Hence they had certain expressions showing that they took part in the outside world. We no longer have such expressions, or they signify at most something of a figurative nature. For the Chinese they signified reality. When I am becoming acquainted with someone and say of him: What a sour fellow he is!—I mean it figuratively; we do not imagine him to be really sour as vinegar is sour. But for the Chinese this meant that the man actually evoked in them a sour taste.

It was not so with the Indians; they could go much more deeply into their own bodies. If we go deeply into our own bodies, it is only when certain conditions are present—then we feel something there. Whenever we've had a meal and it remains in our stomach without being properly digested, we feel pain in our stomach. If our liver is out of order and cannot secrete sufficient bile, we feel pain on the right side of our body—then we are getting a liver complaint. When our lungs secrete too freely so that they are more full of mucus than they should be, then we feel there is something wrong with our lungs, that they are out of order. Today human beings are conscious of their bodies only in those organs that are sick. Those Indians of ancient times were conscious even of their healthy organs; they knew how the stomach, how the liver felt. When anyone wants to know this today, he has to take a corpse and dissect it; then he can examine the condition of the individual organs inside. No one today knows what a liver looks like unless they dissect it; it is only spiritual science that is able to describe it. The Indians could think of inner man; they would have been able to draw all his organs. With an Indian, however, if you had asked him to feel his liver and draw what he felt, he would have said: Liver?—well, here is one liver, here's another, and here's another, and he would have drawn twenty or thirty livers side-by-side.

So, gentlemen, you have there a different story. If I draw a complete man and give him twenty heads, I have a fanciful picture. But if I draw a human liver with twenty or thirty others beside it, I am drawing something not wholly fantastic; it would have been possible for these twenty or thirty livers really to have come into being! Every man has his distinctive form of liver, but there is no absolute necessity for that form; it could very well be different. This possibility of difference, this spiritual aspect of the matter, was far better understood by the Indians than by those who came later. The Indians said: When we draw a single object, it is not the whole truth; we have to conceive the matter spiritually. So the Indians have had a lofty spiritual culture. They have never set great store by the outer world but have had a spiritual conception of everything.

Now the Indians took it for granted that learning should be acquired in accordance with this attitude; therefore, to become an educated man was a lengthy affair. For, as you can imagine, with them it was not just a matter of going deeply into oneself and then being capable all at once of knowing everything. When we are responsible for the instruction of young people, we have first to teach them to read and write, imparting to them in this way something from outside. But this was not so in the case of the ancient Indians. When they wanted to teach someone, they showed him how to withdraw into his inner depths; he was to turn his attention away from the world entirely and to focus it upon his inner being.

Now if anyone sits and looks outwards, he sees you all sitting there and his attention is directed to the outer world. This would have been the way with the Chinese; they directed their attention outwards. The Indians taught otherwise. They said: You must learn to gaze at the tip of your nose. Then the student had to keep his eyes fixed so that he saw nothing but the tip of his nose, nothing else for hours at a time, without even moving his eyes.

Yes indeed, gentlemen, the European will say: How terrible to train people always to be contemplating the tip of their nose! True! for the European there is something terrible in it; it would be impossible for him to do such a thing. But in ancient India that was the custom. In order to learn anything an Indian did not have to write with his fingers, he had to look at the tip of his nose. But this sitting for hours gazing at the tip of his nose led him into his own inner being, led him to know his lungs, his liver, and so forth. For the tip of the nose is the same in the second hour as it is in the first; nothing special is to be seen there. From the tip of his nose, however, the student was able to behold more and more of what was within him; within him everything became brighter and brighter. That is why he had to carry out the exercise.

Now, as you know, when we walk about, we are accustomed to do so on our feet and this going about on our feet has an effect upon us. We experience ourselves as upright human beings when we walk on our feet. This was discouraged for those in India who had to learn something. While learning they had to have one leg like this and sit on it, while the other leg was in this position. Thus they sat, gazing fixedly at the tip of their nose, so that they became quite unused to standing; they had the feeling they were not upright men but crumpled up like an embryo in a mother's womb. You can see the Buddha portrayed in this way. It was thus that the Indians had to learn. Gradually they began to look within themselves, learned to know what is within man, came to have knowledge of the human physical body in an entirely spiritual way.

When we look within ourselves, we are conscious of our paltry thinking; we are slightly aware of our feeling but almost not at all of our willing. The Indians felt a whole world in the human being. You can imagine what different men they were from those who came later. They developed, as you know, a tremendous fantasy, expressed poetically in their books of wisdom—later in the Vedas and in the Vedantic philosophy, which still fill us with awe. It figured in their legends concerning super-sensible things, which still today amaze us.

And look at the contrast! Here were the Indians, there were the Chinese over there, and the Chinese were a prosaic people interested in the outer world, a people who did not live from within. The Indians were a people who looked entirely inward, contemplating within them the spiritual nature of the physical body.

So—I have begun to tell you about the most ancient inhabitants of the earth. Next time I will carry it further, so that we will finally arrive at the time we live in now.

Please continue to bring your questions. There may be details that you would like me to enlarge upon, and I can always at some following meeting answer the questions they have raised. But I can't tell you when the next session will be, because now I must go to Holland. I will send you word in ten days or so.

• 6. The Second International Congress, Vienna, June 1–12, 1922. See The Tension Between East and West.
• 7. Berthold Schwarz, Franciscan monk, Freiburg, around 1300.
• 8. Johann Gutenberg, 1394–1468.
• 9. Lao Tse, Chinese philosopher, 6th century B.C.
• 10. Confucius, 531–478 BC., Chinese ethical teacher.