The Rudolf Steiner Archive

At the times when the great festivals of the year approach our souls, it is good ever and again to bring before our inner eye, out of spiritual cosmic connections, the meaning of the festival year. And I should like to do this by setting before you how, under the influence of spiritual insights and over long ages, the festival year has gradually evolved out of the whole constitution of the Earth. If we look at the Earth and its events from such an aspect, we must only make clear that we cannot conceive the Earth as a mere conglomeration of minerals and rocks, as is done by modern mineralogy and geology, but we must rather regard it as a living, ensouled organism, which brings forth the plants, the animals and the physical being of man out of its own inner forces. Then what I shall now set forth will be in agreement.

You know that the Earth, with all the beings belonging to it—consider only the plant covering of the Earth—completely changes its aspect in the course of the year, changes everything with which it looks out into cosmic space as with its physiognomy, so to speak. After a year the Earth has always arrived again at about the same point, as to its appearance, at which it stood a year before. You need only to think how almost everything related to weather conditions, to the budding of plants, to the appearance of animal creatures—how with regard to all this the Earth has arrived again in this March, 1923, at about the same point of development at which it stood in March of the year 1922.

Today we intend to consider this cycle of the Earth as a kind of mighty breathing which the Earth carries out in relation to the surrounding cosmos. We can consider still other processes which take place on the Earth and around it as breathing processes of a sort. We can even speak of a daily breathing of the Earth. But today we want to place before our inner eye the yearly cycle, in the large, as a mighty breathing process of the Earth, in which of course it is not air that is breathed in and out, but rather those forces which are at work for example in vegetation, those forces which push the plants out of the Earth in spring, and which withdraw again into the Earth in fall, letting the green plants fade and finally paralyzing plant growth.

To repeat, it is not a breathing of air of which we speak, but the in-and-out-breathing of forces, of which we can get a partial idea if we notice the plant-growth during the course of the year. We intend today to bring this annual breathing process of the Earth before our souls.

Let us first look at the Earth at the time of the winter solstice, in the last third of December, according to our present reckoning. At this time we may compare the Earth's breathing with the lung-breathing of a man when he has inhaled a breath of air and is working on it in himself, that is, when he is holding his breath within him. In the same way, the Earth has within it those forces which I spoke of as being inhaled and exhaled. At the end of December it is holding these forces. And what is happening then with the Earth I can sketch for you schematically in the following way:

Let us think of this (red) as representing the Earth. We can of course only consider one part of the Earth in connection with this breathing. We shall consider that part in which we ourselves dwell; the conditions are of course reversed on the opposite side of the Earth. We must picture (vorstellen) the breathing of the Earth in such a way that in one region there is out-breathing, and in the opposite region in-breathing; but this we need not consider today.

Let us picture in our minds the season of December. Let us imagine what I am drawing here in yellow to be the held breath in our region. At the end of December the Earth has fully in-breathed and is holding in herself the forces of which I just spoke. She has entirely sucked in her soul element, for the forces of which I have spoken are the soul element of the Earth. She has drawn it completely in, just as a man who has inhaled holds the air entirely in himself.

This is the time at which with good reason the birth of Jesus has been set, because Jesus is thus born out of an Earth force which contains the entire soul element of the Earth within it. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the initiates who were still worthy of the ancient initiation connected a deep meaning with the view which placed the birth of Jesus just at this point of the earthly in-breathing and holding of the breath.

These initiates said something like the following: “In the ancient days, when our places of initiation stood within the Chaldean and Egyptian cultures, when a wish arose to know what that Being who represents the lofty Sun-Being had to say to earthly humanity, an idea of his message was formed, not by looking at the sunlight directly in all its spirituality, but rather by observing the way in which the sunlight was rayed back from the Moon.” And when the gaze was turned toward the Moon, they saw—with the help of clairvoyant vision—along with the flooding moonlight the manifestation of the Spirit of the Universe. And the meaning of this manifestation was realized in a more external way when they regarded the constellation of the Moon in relation to the planets and fixed stars.

In this way the position of the stars, especially in relation to the down-streaming moonlight, was observed during the night hours in the Chaldean, and still more in the Egyptian mysteries. Just as a man now reads the meaning of letters on a sheet of paper, in those times meaning was read in the relation of Aries, or of Taurus, of Venus, or of the Sun itself, to the streaming moonlight. From the way in which the constellations and the stars stood in relation to one another, especially from the way they were oriented with the moonlight, there was read what the heavens had to say to the Earth. All this was put into words. And according to the meaning of what was thus put into words, the ancient initiates sought what that Being Who was later called the Christ had to say to earthly man. They sought to interpret what was conveyed by the stars in their relation to the Moon and apply it to the earthly life.

But now as the Mystery of Golgotha drew near, the whole nature of the Mysteries passed through what I might call a great soul-spiritual metamorphosis. Then the oldest of the initiates said to their pupils: “A time is at hand when the stellar constellations must no longer be related to the flooding moonlight. The universe will speak differently to earthly man in the future. The light of the Sun must be observed directly. The spiritual gaze of the knower must be turned away from the revelations of the Moon and toward the revelations of the Sun.”

The teachings given in the Mysteries made a profound impression upon those men who at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha still ranked as initiates of the old order. And it was from this point of view that these initiates formed their judgment of the Mystery of Golgotha. But at the same time they said, “Some Earth event must enter in, which can bring about this transition from a lunar to a solar orientation.”—It was in this way that the cosmic significance of the birth of Jesus dawned on them.

They saw the birth of Jesus as something which gave the impulse out of the very Earth itself, no longer to regard the Moon as the regent, so to speak, of celestial phenomena, but rather the Sun itself.—“The event that brings this about,” so they said to themselves, “must be of an extraordinary kind.” And the nature of this extraordinary event yielded its secret to them through the following: They began to understand the inner meaning of the Earth occurrence that took place in the last third of December, the occurrence which we now call Christmas. They said to themselves: “Everything must now be related to the Sun.”—But the Sun can exert its power on the Earth only when the Earth has exhaled its forces. At Christmas time it has breathed them in; its breath is being held. If Jesus is born at this time, He is born at a time when the Earth is in a certain way not speaking with the heavens, a time when the Earth with its being has entirely withdrawn into itself. Jesus is born, then, at a time when the Earth is rolling along through cosmic space quite alone, when it is not sending out its breath to be welled and woven through by the force of the Sun, by the light of the Sun. At this time the Earth has not offered its soul-being to the cosmos; it has withdrawn its soul being into itself, has sucked it in. Jesus is born on the Earth at a time when the Earth is alone with itself, is isolated as it were from the cosmos.

Try to feel for yourselves the cosmic perceiving-feeling (Empfinden) which lies at the basis of such a way of calculating!

Now let us follow the Earth further in its yearly course. Let us follow it up to the time in which we are just now, about the time of the spring equinox, the end of March. Then we shall have to picture the situation in this way:

The Earth (red) has just breathed out; the soul is still half within the Earth, but the Earth has breathed it out; the streaming soul-forces are pouring out into the cosmos. Whereas since December, the force of the Christ Impulse has been intimately bound up with the Earth, with the soul-element of the Earth, we find that now this Christ Impulse, together with the outward-streaming soul element, is beginning to radiate around the Earth (arrows). This which here as Christ-permeated Earth-soul is flowing out into spiritual cosmic space, must be met now by the force of the sunlight itself. And the mental picture arises: While in December the Christ withdrew the Earth-soul element into the interior of the Earth, in order to be insulated from cosmic influences, now with the out-breathing of the Earth, He begins to let His forces breathe out, to extend them to receive the forces of the Sun (das Sonnenhafte) which radiate toward Him. And our schematic drawing will be correct if we represent the Sun force (yellow) as uniting with the Christ force radiating from the Earth. The Christ begins to work together with the Sun forces at Easter time; hence Easter falls at the time of the out-breathing of the Earth. But what happens then must not be related to the light flowing back from the Moon; it must be related to the Sun.

This is the origin of fixing the time of Easter as the first Sunday after the full moon following the spring equinox. And anyone who is sensitive to such things would have to say to himself with regard to the Easter time: “If I have united myself with the Christ force, my soul also streams out into cosmic spaces along with the out-breathing force of the Earth-soul, and receives the Sun force, which the Christ now brings to human souls from the Earth, whereas before the Mystery of Golgotha He brought it to them from the cosmos.”

But here something else enters in. When festivals were established in those times in which whatever was important on Earth was referred to the flooding moonlight, it was done purely in accordance with what could be observed in space: how the Moon stood in relation to the stars. The intent of the Logos, which had been written into space by Him, was thus deciphered in order to determine the festivals. But if you consider the fixing of the Easter festival as we have it now, you will see that it has been established according to space only up to a certain point, that point at which we speak of the full moon after the beginning of spring. Thus far everything is spatial, but we depart from space when we refer to the Sunday after the spring full moon. This Sunday is determined, not spatially, but according to how it stands in the cycle of the year, how it stands in the cycle of the weekdays, where following Saturday come Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and again Saturday, always in periodical succession. We step out of space here, when we cross over from the spatial setting of the Moon constellation to the purely temporal course in the yearly cycle of Sundays.

Thus it was possible still in the old mysteries to perceive in feeling that the fixing of the festivals had formerly been related to cosmic space but that with the Mystery of Golgotha there was a progression out of cosmic space into time, which itself was no longer related to cosmic space. What related to the spirit was as it were torn away from the purely spatial. This was a powerful “jolt” of mankind toward the spirit.

If we carry further our view of the Earth's breathing process during the course of the year, we find the Earth in yet a third condition in June. At this place which we are observing, the Earth has completely exhaled. The entire soul-element of the Earth has been poured forth into cosmic space; it is yielded up to cosmic space and is saturating itself with the forces of the Sun and the stars. The Christ, Who is joined with this soul-element of the Earth, now unites His force also with the forces of the stars and the Sun, surging there in the Earth-soul that is given over to the cosmic All. It is St. John's Day—Mid-summer. The Earth has fully out-breathed. In her outer physiognomy, with which she looks out into the universe, she reveals not her own inherent force, as she did at the time of the winter solstice; instead, the Earth reveals on her surface the reflected forces of the stars, of the Sun, of all that is in the cosmos outside her.

The old initiates, particularly those in the northern regions of Europe, felt most livingly the inner meaning and spirit of this time that is our June. At this time they felt their own souls, along with the Earth soul, given over to the cosmic expanses. They felt themselves to be living, not within the earthly realm, but rather in the cosmic distances. Indeed they said the following to themselves: “We live with our soul in the cosmic expanses. We live with the Sun, we live with the stars. And when we direct our gaze back upon the Earth, which has filled herself with springing and sprouting plants, which has brought forth animals of all kinds, then we see in the springing and sprouting plants, in the gleaming, unfolding colors of the flowers; we see in the insects flitting and creeping hither and yon, in the birds with their multicolored feathers traversing the air; we see gleam back from the Earth as though mirrored, what we take up into our souls just when we abandon the Earth and unite ourselves with the out-flowing breath of the Earth in order to live with the cosmos rather than with the Earth. What appears in world space springing and sprouting from the Earth in thousandfold colors—this is of the same nature. Only it is a reflection, a raying-back force, whereas we bear in our human souls the original force itself.”

This was the feeling of those men who were inspired out of the Mystery places, those men who especially understood the festival of the summer solstice; and so we see the St. John's festival placed at the time of the Earth's great out-breathing into the cosmos.

If we follow this breathing-process still further we come finally to the stage that makes its entry at the end of September. The out-breathed forces begin their return movement; the Earth begins once more to inhale. The soul of the Earth which was poured out into the cosmos now draws back into the interior of the Earth again. Human souls perceive this in-breathing of the Earth-soul element, either in their subconscious or in their clairvoyant impressions, as processes of their own souls. Those men who were inspired by initiation knowledge of these things could say to themselves at the end of September: “What the cosmos has given us and what has united itself with our soul force through the Christ Impulse—this we now allow to flow back into the earthly realm, into that earthly sphere which throughout the summer has served only as a reflection, as a kind of mirror in relation to the extraterrestrial cosmos.”

But a mirror has the property of not permitting anything that is in front of it to pass through it. Because the Earth is a mirror of the cosmos in the summer, it is also opaque in its inner nature, impermeable by cosmic influences and therefore, during the summer time, impermeable by the Christ Impulse. (See drawing). At this time the Christ Impulse has to live in the exhaled breath. The Ahrimanic forces, however, establish themselves firmly in this Earth which has become impervious to the Christ Impulse. And when the human being returns once more with the forces which he has taken up into his own soul through the Earth's out-breathing—including the forces of the Christ—he plunges into an Earth which has been ahrimanized.

However, it is so, that in the present cycle of Earth evolution—since the last third of the nineteenth century—from spiritual heights there comes to the aid of the descending human soul the force of Michael, who, while the Earth's breath is flowing back into the Earth itself, contends with the Dragon, Ahriman.

This was already foreseen prophetically by those in the ancient Mysteries who understood the course of the year spiritually. They knew that for their time the Mystery had not yet approached which would reveal Michael coming to the help of descending human souls. But they knew that when the souls should have been reborn again and again, this Michael force would enter, would come to the aid of earthly human souls. This was the meaning they saw in the cycle of the year.

Hence it is out of ancient wisdom that you will find written in the calendar on September 29, a few days after the fall equinox—Michael's Day, Michaelmas. And Michaelmas is for simple country people an exceedingly important time. But because of its position in the cycle of the year, Michaelmas is an important time also for those who want to grasp the whole significance of our present earth epoch. If we want to take our place in the present time with the right consciousness, we need to understand that in the last third of the nineteenth century the Michael force took up the struggle with the Dragon, with the Ahrimanic powers, in just the way necessitated by our time. And we must insert ourselves into this intention of earthly and human evolution by taking part in the right way with our own consciousness in this cosmic-spiritual battle.¹

We may say that up until now Michaelmas has been a festival for peasants—you know the sense in which I use the word—a festival for simple folk. But once the significance of the yearly breathing process that takes place between the Earth and the cosmos is recognized, Michaelmas will be more and more called upon to form a very real supplement to Easter. For mankind, who will understand earthly life again also in a spiritual sense, will eventually have to think in this way.

While the summer out-breathing occurred, the Earth was ahrimanized. Woe if Jesus had been born into this ahrimanized Earth! Before the cycle is completed again and December approaches, which brings about the birth of the Christ Impulse in the ensouled Earth, the Earth must be purified by spiritual forces, from the Dragon, from the Ahrimanic forces. And the purifying force of Michael, which subdues the evil Ahrimanic forces, must unite itself, from September into December, with the in-flowing earth breath, so that the Christmas festival may approach in the right way, and the birth of the Christ Impulse take place in the right way, so that it will then mature up until the beginning of the out-breathing at Easter time.

We can therefore say: “At Christmas time the Earth has drawn its soul-element into itself, the Earth has taken its soul-being into itself in the great yearly respiration. In this Earth-soul element which has been drawn into the Earth, the Christ Impulse is born in the inwardness of the Earth. Toward spring it flows out into the cosmos with the out-breathing of the Earth. It views the star world and enters into reciprocal action with it, but in such a way that its relation to the stars is no longer spatial, but temporal, so that the temporal is withdrawn from the spatial.”

Easter is on the first Sunday after the spring full moon. Within the full out-going breath man rises up with his soul-being into the cosmic world, permeates and saturates himself with the quality of the stars, takes in the breath of the cosmos with his earthly breath, thus permeating himself with the Easter spirit, and by St. John's Day he is most strongly imbued with that with which he began to permeate himself at Easter. He must then return to the Earth, with the Earth soul and his own soul-being, but he depends upon Michael's standing by him, so that he may penetrate the earthly world in the right way after the Ahrimanic element has been overcome through the Michael forces.

And ever more and more, with the strength of the indrawn breath, does the soul-element of the Earth retire into the Earth itself, up to Christmas time. And today we celebrate Christmas time in the right way if we say to ourselves: “Michael has purified the Earth, so that the birth of the Christ Impulse can occur at Christmas time in the right way.”

Then the out-flowing into the cosmos begins again. In this outflowing Christ takes Michael with Him, in order that Michael may again gather to him out of the cosmos those forces which he has used up in his struggle with the earthly Ahrimanic forces. At Easter time Michael begins again to immerse himself in the cosmic world, and is most strongly interwoven with the cosmos at St. John's time.

And a man in the present who comprehends in the right sense what unites him as man with the earthly, says to himself: “The age is beginning for us in which we see the Christ Impulse aright when we know that it is accompanied by the force of Michael in the course of the year; when we see the Christ flowing down into the earthly and rising up into the cosmos, accompanied by Michael, who at one time is contending within the earthly, at another gathering strength for the fight in the cosmic spaces.” (See lemniscate)

In the Easter thought we have an image of utmost grandeur which has been implanted into earth existence in order to bring enlightenment; namely, the image of Christ arising out of the grave in victory over Death. We can grasp this Easter thought in the right way in our time only if we understand that we must add to it today the Being of Michael, at the right hand of Christ Jesus. For while the force of the Earth's breath is becoming woven through with the force of Christ during the breathing process of the Earth in the course of the year's cycle, Michael accompanies Christ.

If we as Earth men would understand how to make the Christ thought alive in ourselves at each of the four great festivals of the year, including Easter, as indeed we must do, we need to be able to place this thought in the right way and in full consciousness into the present time. The hope that was focused on the coming of the Michael force in the service of the Christ force animated those who understand the Christ Impulse in the right way up to our time.

The obligation arises for us, especially in the modern age, to permeate ourselves with the Christ Impulse in the sense of the Michael thought. We do this in the right way when we know how to link the Resurrection thought with the active Michael thought which has been implanted into human evolution, in the way I have often explained.

• 1. This is the first occasion on which Rudolf Steiner spoke in a broader sense of the importance of celebrating Michaelmas today. His first allusion to the subject at all had been in a brief reference three months earlier. (The Spiritual Communion of Mankind, December 24, 1922)

As an introduction to these fourteen lectures, we quote the following extract from Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth's book, The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner (pp. 517: 520–521, Spiritual Science Library, Blauvelt NY):

“In Dornach he then gave the second of the three cycles of lectures preparing for the Christmas Conference. The first, between October 5 and 12, had set forth the work of the four Archangels in the course of the year. The second, between October 19 and November 11, dealt with the theme Man as Symphony of the Cosmic Word; the third, between November 23 and December 23, bore the title Mystery Formations. These three cycles led spiritual-scientific knowledge systematically from an insight into the work of the spiritual Guiding Powers, the Hierarchical Beings, to man as the earthly being who is to receive the creative action of the Cosmic Word and bring it to realization on earth; and they gave the foundation for the new impulse to be initiated during this year, a survey of the nature of the Mysteries in the history of humanity, the work of which is now to be observed in the further stages of evolution and continued in a manner in keeping with the times.

“The time from the end of November until Christmas was devoted to the preparations for the coming decisive events. Rudolf Steiner did this through the third of the lecture cycles mentioned above dealing with Mystery Formations. By way of introduction, he explained the path that a human being must follow in his soul life in order to penetrate to an insight into the spiritual foundations of the world. He set forth that the spiritual in the course of evolution has worked each time upon the soul element of man, and molded the physiological element, even into the metamorphosing of the activity of thinking, of the forces of memory, of hereditary impulses, but also into the individual imprint in gesture, physiognomy, and structure of body. He gave also a detailed description of the early stages in the evolution of the earth and the relations of the human being to the Beings, substances, and forces of the earth planet. And he now developed in the lectures of December 2–23 a magnificent picture of the history of the ancient Mysteries out of which we can still read how in early epochs this knowledge was achieved, protected, nurtured in the Mystery places of the earth, and developed in the Mysteries of the North and the South as the most sacred treasure of humanity, unfolded from stage to stage.

“This description of a previously almost completely unknown chapter of spiritual history and the history of the Mysteries is so comprehensive, and so important in its details, lays open such an abundance of knowledge about the methods and stages of the spiritual guidance of humanity through the centuries that we can only allude here to the most important main divisions: “The Ephesus Mysteries of Artemis. The Mystery places of Hybernia. The Great Mysteries of Hybernia. The Chthonic and the Eleusinian Mysteries. The transition from Plato to Aristotle. The mystery of the nature of the plant, the metal, and the human being. The mysteries of the Cabire of Samothrace. The transition from the spirit of the ancient Mysteries to those of the Middle Ages. The soul striving of the human being during the Middle Ages. The Rosicrucian Mysteries.

“It is now the task of the modern Mystery place, of the spiritual-scientific Movement and its school, the Goetheanum in Dornach, to bring about again in human consciousness the lost knowledge of the spiritual guidance of man and of humanity out of the spiritual history of the past. The revelation given during these weeks out of the history of the mysteries was for that reason the right foundation for the decisions to be carried out at Christmas of this year. Those who heard the lectures of November and December 1923 experienced the fact, and will still remember it, that at this decisive point the future history of humanity was inscribed in the consciousness and forces of the earth and the consciousness of those human beings who had a will for its reception.”

This book was originally published in October 1942 in London, England by the Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company.

We have decided to reprint it in its original book format for several reasons. Historically, it should be helpful to all those readers and collectors of rare book editions. Some of these books or lectures are either out of print, or copies are very difficult to find, and so these reprints will be most useful in making as much of Dr. Steiner's Spiritual Science Research available at all times and to a wider audience. To help spread the knowledge contained in these books to the general public, through as many different editions, sources and outlets as possible is one of the primary objectives of the Foundation and its Institute, and that is why we are supporting this effort.

We are most thankful to those early pioneers, who produced these editions which have been so valuable to many of us in America when first we contacted Dr. Steiner's Spiritual Science. And it is with sincere appreciation of their courage and effort that we present these volumes to a wider audience in keeping with their original objective.

September 1985

Steiner Institute for Spiritual Research (a project of the Foundation for Advancement of Arts and Letters, in memory of Rudolf Steiner)

Dr. Steiner: I am sorry I could not come sooner, but it was not possible. We have a number of things to catch up on, and I am really very happy to be here today.

A member of the administrative committee: (After greeting Dr. Steiner) After we came back from the Christmas Conference in Dornach, we felt responsible for doing everything to make the Waldorf School an appropriate instrument for its new task. I have been asked to tell you that the members of the administrative committee now place their positions in your hands. Since it seems possible that the relationship of the school to the Anthroposophical Society may change, we would like you to redetermine from this new standpoint how the school should be run.

Dr. Steiner: I certainly understand how this view could arise among you, since the intent of the Christmas Conference was to do something for anthroposophy based upon a complete reformation, a new foundation of the Anthroposophical Society. On the other hand, the Christmas Conference gave the Anthroposophical Society an explicitly esoteric character. That seems to contradict the public presentation, but through the various existing intentions, which will gradually be realized over the course of time, people will see that the actual leadership of the Anthroposophical Society, the present board of directors [Vorstand] in Dornach, will have a completely esoteric basis. That will also effect a complete renewal of the Anthroposophical Society.

Now, it is quite understandable that the various institutions connected with anthroposophy ask themselves how they should relate to what happened in Dornach. In my letter to members published in our newsletter, I said that the conference in Dornach will have a real purpose only if that purpose is not forgotten for all time. The conference will realize its complete content to the extent individual anthroposophical institutions slowly make the intent of the Dornach conference their own.

The Christmas Conference was the second part of a decision in principle. The first part was that if anthroposophists want it, the board of directors will do some things from Dornach, and that includes a continuous questioning of life within the Anthroposophical Society. In principle, there is a decision that—to the extent that this intention is realized, that we bring it into reality—the board of directors in Dornach is justified in taking over the responsibility for anthroposophy, not just for the Society. That is the esoteric purpose, but of course the esoteric impulses must come from various directions. I would like to ask the individual institutions to understand that whatever emanates from Dornach always has an esoteric background. It is, of course, just as understandable that the Waldorf School particularly, and its representatives, question its relationship to Dornach and to the Free School of Spiritual Science.

Perhaps, as you have considered the question in more detail, you already feel there are some significant difficulties, particularly concerning the final decision about the administrative committee. The situation is this: First, we must find the form through which the Waldorf School can make the connection to the School of Spiritual Science. Formally, the Waldorf School is not an anthroposophical institution; rather, it is an independent creation based upon the foundations of anthroposophical pedagogy. In the way it meets the public, as well as the way it meets legal institutions, it is not an anthroposophical institution, but a school based upon anthroposophical pedagogy. Suppose the Independent Waldorf School were now to become officially related to the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Then the Waldorf School would immediately become an anthroposophical school in a formal, external sense. Of course, there are some things that would support making such a decision. On the other hand, though, we must consider whether the Waldorf School can fulfill its cultural tasks better as an independent school with an unhindered form than it can as a direct part of what emanates from Dornach. Everything that emanates from Dornach is also collected there. If the Independent Waldorf School entered a direct relationship to Dornach, all activities of the Waldorf School falling within the Pedagogical Section of the Anthroposophical Society would also be the responsibility of the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science and fall within their authority. In the future, Dornach will not be simply a decoration, as many anthroposophical institutions have been. Dornach will be a reality. Every institution belonging to Dornach will, in fact, must, recognize the authority of the leadership in Dornach. That will be necessary. At the same time, the leadership of the Waldorf School would then take on an esoteric character.

On the other hand, given the state of the world today, we could certainly weigh the question of whether the Waldorf School could best achieve its cultural goals that way. This is definitely not a question we can immediately brush aside. Weighed with nothing but the most serious feeling of responsibility, the question is extremely difficult since it could mean a radical change throughout the Independent Waldorf School.

Pedagogical life in the modern world may still be subject to the error, or better said the illusion, expressed through the various goals of all kinds of pedagogical organizations. However, everything in those pedagogical organizations is really nothing more than talk. In reality, pedagogy is increasingly falling prey to three factors of development, two of which are making giant steps today. Anthroposophy, the third factor, is very weak; it is only a shadow and is not seen by opponents as anything of any importance. Pedagogy is slowly being captured by the two main streams in the world, the Catholic and the Bolshevik, or socialist, streams. Anyone who wants to can easily see that all other tendencies are on a downward path in regard to success. That says nothing at all about the value of Catholicism or Bolshevism, only about their strength. Each has tremendous strength, and that strength increases every week. Now people are trying to bring all other cultural movements into those two, so it only makes sense to orient pedagogy with the third cultural stream, anthroposophy. That is the situation in the world.

It is really marvelous how little thought humanity gives to anything today, so that it allows the most important symptoms to go by without thinking. The fact that a centuries-old tradition has been broken in England by MacDonald’s system is something so radical, so important, that it was marvelous that the world did not even notice it. On the other hand, we from the anthroposophical side should take note of how external events clearly show that the age whose history can be written from the purely physical perspective has passed. We need to be clear that Ahrimanic forces are increasingly breaking in upon historical events. Two leading personalities, Wilson and Lenin, died from the same illness, both from paralysis, which means that both offered an opening for Ahrimanic forces. These things show that world history is no longer earthly history, and is becoming cosmic history. All such things are of great importance and play a role in our detailed questions.

If we now go on to the more concrete problem of the administrative committee putting their work back into my hands, you should not forget that the primary question was decided through the conference in Dornach. From 1912 until 1923, I lived within the Anthroposophical Society with no official position, without even being a member, something I clearly stated in 1912. I have actually belonged to the Anthroposophical Society only as an advisor, as a teacher, as the one who was to show the sources of spiritual science. Through the Christmas Conference, I became chairman of the Anthroposophical Society, and from then on my activities are those of the chairman of the Society. If I were to name the administrative committee now, that committee would be named by the chairman of the Anthroposophical Society. The highest body of the Independent Waldorf School would thus be designated by the chairman of the Anthroposophical Society. That is certainly something we could consider, but I want you to know that when we go on to discuss this whole problem. If the Waldorf School and Dornach had that relationship, then the Waldorf School would be something different from what it is now. Something new would be created, different from what was created at the founding of the Waldorf School. The Christmas Conference in Dornach was not just a ceremony like the majority of anthroposophical activities, even though they may not have a ceremonious character, particularly in Stuttgart. The Christmas Conference was completely serious, so anything resulting from it is also very serious.

The Independent Waldorf School can relate to Dornach in other ways. One of those would be not to place the school under Dornach, but instead to have the faculty, or those within the faculty who wish to do so, enter a relationship to Dornach, to the Goetheanum, to the School of Spiritual Science, not for themselves, but as teachers of the school. The Waldorf School, as such, would not take on that characteristic, but it would emphasize to the outer world that from now on the Pedagogical Section at the Goetheanum will provide the impulse for the Waldorf School pedagogy, just as anthroposophical pedagogy previously provided it. The difference would be that, whereas the relationship to anthroposophical pedagogy was more theoretical, in the future the relationship would be more alive. Then, the faculty as a whole or as individuals would conform to the impulses that would result when one, as a teacher at the Independent Waldorf School, is a member of the School of Spiritual Science. That relationship would make it impossible for the Goetheanum to name the administrative committee. The committee would, of course, need to remain as it is now because the thought behind it is that the committee was chosen, even elected, by the faculty. It may not even be possible from the perspective of the legal authorities here for the administrative committee to be named from Dornach. I do not believe the laws of Württemberg would allow the administrative committee of the Independent Waldorf School to be chosen from the Goetheanum, that is, from an institution existing outside Germany. The only other possibility would be for me to name the new administrative committee. However, that is unnecessary.

These are the things I wanted to present to you. You can see from them that you should consider the question in detail yourselves. Now I would like you to tell me your thoughts about the solution of the question. Whether you want to give me more or less control over the solution, whether you want me to decide how you should operate. You do not need to do this in any way other than to say what you have already discussed in the faculty, and what led you to say what you said at the outset.

A teacher: For us, the question was whether the Christmas Conference in Dornach changed the relationship of the Waldorf School to the Anthroposophical Society.

Dr. Steiner: The Waldorf School has had no relationship to the Anthroposophical Society. Because it was outside the Society, the Christmas Conference has no significance for the Waldorf School. That is the situation. It is different, though, for institutions that arose directly from the Anthroposophical Society. That is quite different. The Waldorf School was founded as an independent institution. The relationship that existed was unofficial and can continue with the new Society. The relationship was completely free, something that came into existence each day because the vast majority of the teachers here belonged to the Anthroposophical Society and because anthroposophical pedagogy was carried out in a free manner, since, as the representative of anthroposophical pedagogy, I also was chairman of the faculty. We need change none of that.

A teacher: How should we understand the Pedagogical Section?

Dr. Steiner: We can only slowly put into practice the intentions of the Christmas Conference, particularly those of the School of Spiritual Science. To an extent, that is because we do not have enough money right now to construct all the buildings that we will need for everything we want to do. What we need will gradually be created. For now, the various sections will be created to the extent possible with the people and resources available today. My thought was that the basis for creating the Independent University as an institution of the Anthroposophical Society would be the membership of the School of Spiritual Science. I have now seen that a large number of teachers of the Waldorf School have applied for membership; thus, they will also be members and from the very beginning become a means for spreading the pedagogy emanating from the Independent University. We will have to wait and see which other institutions join the Independent University.

Other institutions have often expressed a desire to form a relationship with Dornach. The situation is simple with those anthroposophical institutions that have either all the prejudices against them or none. For example, the Clinical Therapeutic Institute here in Stuttgart can join. Either it has been fought against from the very beginning as an anthroposophical institution, in which case no harm is done if it joins, or it has been recognized because people are forced to see that the healing methods used there are more effective than those found elsewhere, in which case it is obvious that it joins. That institution is not in the same situation in regard to the world as a school. The clinic can join without any further problems.

However, if a school suddenly became an anthroposophical school, that would upset both the official authorities and the public. There is even a strong possibility that the school officials would object. They actually have no right to do so, and it doesn’t make any sense to object to the pedagogical methods, which can certainly be those of anthroposophy. There is also no reason to object even if all the teachers personally became members of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. That is of no concern to the officials, and they can raise no objection to it. However, they would immediately object if an existing relationship between the Waldorf School and the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum required the Waldorf School to accept pedagogical decisions made there, so that, for example, those in Dornach controlled the curriculum here. That is certainly true for the first eight grades. If we had only the higher grades, from the ninth grade on, hardly any objections could be raised except for possibly not allowing the students to take their final examinations, but the officials would hardly do that. Nevertheless, they would not allow it for the elementary school grades.

The basic thought of the School of Spiritual Science is that it will direct its primary activity toward insight and life. Thus, we can say that every member has not only the right, but, in a certain sense, a moral obligation to align him- or herself with Dornach in regard to pedagogical questions. Certainly, there will be people at the School of Spiritual Science who want to learn par excellence. However, once having learned, they will remain members, just as someone who has earned a diploma from a French or Norwegian or Danish university remains a member of the university and has a continuing relationship with it. In France, you do not simply receive a piece of paper when you earn a degree, you become a lifelong member of the university and retain a scientific connection to it. That is something the old Society members who will be members of the school under the assumption that they already know a great deal of what will be presented there should consider from the very beginning. The school will, however, continually have scientific or artistic tasks to resolve in which all members of the school should participate. To that extent, the life of each individual member of the school will be enriched. In the near future, we will send the same requests to all members of the other sections that we have already sent to the members of the Medical Section, requesting that they turn toward Dornach in important matters. We will also send a monthly or bimonthly newsletter, which will contain answers to all the questions posed by the membership. However, you would not be a member of the section, but of the class. The sections are only for the leadership in Dornach. The board of directors works together with the sections, but the individual members belong to a class.

A teacher: Should we work toward making it possible for the Waldorf School to be under Dornach?

Dr. Steiner: As with everything that can really be done, the moment we wish to join the school with Dornach we are treading upon a path we once had to leave, had to abandon, because we were not up to the situation when we undertook it. That is the path of threefolding. If you imagine the Independent Waldorf School joined with the School of Spiritual Science, you must realize that could only occur under the auspices of what lies at the foundation of threefolding. We would be working toward a specific goal if all reasonable institutions worked toward threefolding. However, we have to allow the world to go its own way after it intentionally did not want to go the other one. We are working toward threefolding, but we have to remember that an institution like the Independent Waldorf School with its objectively anthroposophical character, has goals that, of course, coincide with anthroposophical desires. At the moment, though, if that connection were made official, people could break the Waldorf School’s neck. Therefore, the way things presently are, I would advise that we not choose a new administrative committee; rather, leave it as it is and decide things one way or another according to these two questions. First, is it sufficient that the teachers here at the school become individual members of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach? Or, second, do you want to be members through the faculty as a whole, so that you would have membership as teachers of the Independent Waldorf School? In the latter case, the Pedagogical Section in Dornach would have to concern itself with the Waldorf School, whereas it would otherwise be concerned only with general questions of pedagogy.

That is certainly a major difference. Our newsletter might then have statements such as, “It would be best to do such and such at the Independent Waldorf School.” In a certain sense, such statements would then be binding on the teachers at the Waldorf School, which would be connected with the School of Spiritual Science. There is no danger in joining all branches and groups with the Anthroposophical Society. Actually, they have to do that. All such groups of many individuals who fulfill the requirements, and such institutions as, for example, the biological institute, the research institute, and the clinic can join. You could have problems otherwise. The difficulties that would arise for the Waldorf School would not be of concern there. When the school was founded, we placed great value upon creating an institution independent of the Anthroposophical Society. Logically, that corresponds quite well with having the various religious communities and the Anthroposophical Society provide religious instruction, so that the Society provides religious instruction just as other religious groups do. The Anthroposophical Society gives instruction in religion and the services. That is something we can justifiably say whenever others claim that the Waldorf School is an anthroposophical school. Although anthroposophy believes it has the best pedagogy, the character of anthroposophy is not forced upon the school. That is a very clear situation. Had The Coming Day approached the Anthroposophical Society for exercises everyone who wanted to could do, then the remarks in the Newsletter would not have been necessary. We can clearly see the real formalities through such things.

A teacher: Hasn’t a change already occurred since you, the head of the Waldorf School, are now also the head of the Anthroposophical Society?

Dr. Steiner: That is not the case. The position I have taken changes nothing about my being head of the school. The conference was purely anthroposophical and the Waldorf School had no official connection with the Society. What might happen if, in the course of time, the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach takes over the guidance of the religious instruction, is a different question. Were that to occur, it would be a situation of organic growth.

A teacher: Is the position we took at the founding of the Waldorf School still valid today?

Dr. Steiner: When you present the question that way, the real question is whether it is even appropriate for the faculty to approach the question, or whether that is actually a question for the Waldorf School Association. You see, the outside world views the Waldorf School Association as the actual administration of the school. You know about the seven wise men who guide the school. This is a question we should consider in deciding whether the Waldorf School is to be joined with Dornach or not, that is, should the faculty of the Waldorf School decide whether to join as a whole or as individual teachers? Everything concerning pedagogy can be decided only in that way. Under certain circumstances, this is a professional question. The Waldorf School is as it is, outside of that. You need to look at things realistically. What would you do if you, here in the faculty, decided to connect the school with Dornach, and then the school association refused to pay your salaries because of that decision? That is something that is at least theoretically possible.

A teacher asks about the final examination.

Dr. Steiner: In connection with the question of the final examination, which is purely a question of compromise, what would change through the connection to the Society?

The teacher explains his question further.

Dr. Steiner: Well, the only other viewpoint would have to be that we absolutely refuse to take into account whether a student wishes to take the final examination or not, that we consider it a private decision of the student. Until now, no one has been thinking of that, and the question is whether we should consider that as a principle. Thus, all students’ parents would be confronted with the question, “Do I dare consider sending my child into life without having taken the final examination?” Of course, we can do that, but the question is really whether we should do that. All that is quite independent of the possibility that we may have no students at all or only those who cannot go anywhere else. It seems to me very problematic whether we can bring that question into the discussion of final examinations. I do not believe a connection with Dornach would change anything in that regard. In some ways, we would still have to make a compromise.

I believe we first need to choose a form. Such things are not permanent; they can always be reconsidered. I think you should decide to become members of the School of Spiritual Science as individual teachers, but with the additional remark that you want to become a member as a teacher of the Independent Waldorf School. I think that will achieve everything you want, and nothing else is necessary for the time being. The difference is that if you join as an individual without being a member as a teacher, there would be no mention of the Waldorf School in our newsletter, and, therefore, questions specifically about the Waldorf School would not be handled by Dornach. Of course, if you add that you are joining as a teacher, that has no real meaning for you, but for the cultural task of the Waldorf School it does have some significance, because all other members of the School of Spiritual Science will receive news about what those in Dornach think about the Waldorf School. The Independent Waldorf School would then be part of anthroposophical pedagogical life, and interest would spread to a much greater extent. Everywhere members of the School of Spiritual Science come together, people would speak about the Waldorf School: “This or that is good,” and so forth. The Waldorf School would thereby become a topic of interest for the Society, whereas it is presently not an anthroposophical activity. For you, it is all the same. The questions that would be discussed in Dornach would of course be different from those that arise here. It could, however, be possible that we need to discuss the same questions here in our meetings. For the Society as a whole, however, it would not be all the same. It would be something major for anthroposophical pedagogy, and in doing that you would fulfill the mission of the Independent Waldorf School. Through such an action, you would accomplish something you actually want, namely, making the Independent Waldorf School part of the overall cultural mission of anthroposophy. It could, for example, happen that a question arises in the faculty meeting in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart that then becomes a concern of the School of Spiritual Science.

A teacher: That would mean the school would send reports about our work for publication in the newsletter.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good to make reports about the pedagogical methods so long as they do not concern personnel questions, unless, of course, these had pedagogical significance.

The teachers ask Dr. Steiner how he envisions the Easter pedagogical conference and ask him to give a theme for the conference.

Dr. Steiner: The only thing I have to say is that the conference at Easter must take into account that there will also be a pedagogical course in Zurich beginning Easter Monday.

I would like to bring up another question, which relates to something we mentioned earlier. What we can do from the Waldorf School is the following, although I need to consider what I’m now going to mention in more detail. There is another way that could immediately bring you closer to achieving your intention of a complete connection with the anthroposophical movement. The proposal is that the Waldorf School declare itself prepared to host a conference that the Anthroposophical Society would present at Easter at the school. No one could complain about that. Certainly, the Independent Waldorf School could hold an anthroposophical conference on its own grounds. That is something we can do. I would like to think some more about whether this is the proper time. However, I do not think there will be any public objection, and the officials at the ministry will not even understand the difference. They will certainly not understand what it means. That would be a beginning. I will set up the program.

There is one other thing I would like to say. The Youth Conference of the Christian Community in Kassel was quite in character in terms of the desires you now bear in your hearts. What happened was that the Christian Community priests held small meetings from Wednesday until the end of the week with those who wished an introduction to what the Christian Community, as a religious group, has to say. The whole thing closed with a service for the participants of the conference. The last two or three days were available for open discussions, so that the people who attended had an opportunity to meet officially with the Christian Community and see that it is independent of the Anthroposophical Society.

I should mention that the participants consisted of young people under the age of twenty, and others who were thirty-six and older, so that the middle generation was missing, something characteristic of our time. They participated in a Mass, followed by open discussion that assumed the topic would cover what had been experienced. What actually happened, however, was that what had been experienced awakened a longing for something more, so that the anthroposophists present then spoke about anthroposophy. It could be seen that all of what had occurred had anthroposophy as its goal. That was a very characteristic conference because it shows that what is objectively desired is a connection with Anthroposophy. There will be something about the Kassel youth conference in the next newsletter.

A teacher discusses the question of the final examination and says that some students will be advised to not take it.

Dr. Steiner: The question is how we should give the students that advice. If you handle the question from the perspective you mentioned, the principles will not be readily apparent when you give that advice. I would like to know what you have to say about the principles.

A teacher: If students are to take the final examination at the end of the twelfth grade, we cannot achieve our true learning goals in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. Instead, we will have to work toward preparing the students to pass the examination. They should take both a thirteenth school year and the examination at another school.

Dr. Steiner: On the other hand, the whole question of final examinations arose from a different perspective, namely, that the students wanted to, or their guardians wanted them to, take the test. Has anything changed in that regard? The students, of course, are unhappy, but students in other schools are also unhappy that they need to learn things they don’t want to learn. I mean that our students are unhappy about the same things all other children with the same maturity at eighteen or nineteen years are unhappy about. The question of final examinations is purely a question of opportunity. It is a question of whether we dare tell those who come to us that we will not prepare them for the final examination at all, that it is a private decision of the student whether to take the final examination or not. That is the question. For the future, it would be possible to answer that question in principle, but I do not think it would be correct to decide it for this year at the present stage.

A teacher asks whether it would be better to have the students take a thirteenth school year at another school and take their examinations there. Should a note be sent to the parents with that suggestion?

Dr. Steiner: You can do all that, but our students cannot avoid having to take an entrance examination. The question is only whether they will fail the entrance examination or the final examination.

Most of the parents want their children to have an opportunity to attend a university, in spite of the fact they gave the students to us. Both parents and students want that. At the beginning, the children did not believe it would be a problem. Their concern was that they would be able to take the final examination. That is certainly a possibility, and they can try it, but we cannot solve the problem simply by sending the students to a thirteenth school year at another school. The question is only whether we can solve it in the way we already discussed but found very problematic and therefore rejected. If we are firm about completing the school, the question is whether we could consider the alternative of creating a preparatory session in addition to the school. We rejected that because we thought it very unpedagogical. The question is whether to create a preparatory group or ignore the curriculum. I think it would be best if we did not send the students to another school. They would then need to take an entrance examination. However, if we completed the curriculum through the twelfth grade, we could use a thirteenth year to prepare them for the final examination.

Let’s consider the question pedagogically. Suppose a child comes into the first grade at the age of six or seven and completes the twelfth grade at the age of eighteen or nineteen. At that time and not later, the child should actually begin the transition into the university. Adding another year then is just about as smart as what the state does when it believes there is more material to be learned and adds an additional year for medical education. Those are the sorts of things that can drive you up the wall. Those who do not want to attend the university will need to find their own way in life. They will be useful people in life without the final examination, since they will find what they need for life here. Those who are to go to the university can use an additional year to unlearn a little. I think we can certainly think of the thirteenth year as a year of boning up. Nevertheless, we will certainly need to be careful that they pass, since we cannot put the children in a different school. We will need to separate it in some way from the Waldorf School, and we could hire instructors. We would have to enlarge the faculty to include the thirteenth grade. If we hired such people and the faculty kept control of things, we could possibly do that. That is what I think.

A teacher asks about the students who are not yet ready for the examination.

Dr. Steiner: We could suggest that, in our judgment, they are not yet ready. At other schools, the question of taking the final examination is also handled by advising the relatives of such students in the last grade not to enroll them, but to wait a year. We could also give such advice, and tell the officials that we gave it. You have always said something that is true: we have had these students only from a particular grade. We could give the ministry a report stating that it was impossible for us to properly prepare the students for the final examination during the time they were with us. We believe they need to wait a year. You should try to advise them against it, but if they want to enroll for the examination, you should inform the officials in the way we discussed by saying we think the students need to stay in school one more year.

A teacher asks about counseling students for choosing a career.

Dr. Steiner: That can be done only in individual cases. It would hardly be possible to do it in principle. In most instances, the school has little influence upon their choice of career. Determining that is really not so simple. By the time a boy is eighteen or nineteen, he should have come to an opinion about which career he should work toward; then, based on that desire, you can counsel him. This is something that involves much responsibility.

A teacher asks about pedagogical activities relating to writing essays and giving lectures.

Dr. Steiner: That would be good in many instances, particularly for eurythmy students. I think that if you held to the kind of presentations I gave in Ilkley, it would be very useful.

I do not know what you should do to revise my lectures. It is not really possible to give a lecture and then tell someone how to revise it.

A teacher asks about reports on work at the school.

Dr. Steiner: Why shouldn’t we be able to report on our work? I think we should be able to send reports to the Goetheanum on things, like those, I believe it was Pastor Ruhtenberg, has done about German class. You could give the details and the general foundation of what you as a teacher think about the specific subject. For each subject you could do things like what Ruhtenberg did and also a more general presentation about the ideas and basis of the work done up to now.

It would probably be quite good if you did some of these things the way you previously did. Keep them short and not too extended, so that the Goetheanum could publish something more often, something concrete about how we do one thing or another. the Goetheanum now has a circulation of six thousand, so it would be very good for such reports to appear in it or in some other newspaper.

A shop teacher thinks it is too bad that painting instruction cannot be done as regularly and in the upper grades as often as in the lower grades. He also asks about painting techniques for the lower grades.

Dr. Steiner: It does no harm to interrupt the painting class for a few years and replace it with sculpting. The instruction in painting has a subconscious effect, and when the students return to the interrupted painting class, they do it in a more lively way and with greater skill. In all things that depend upon capability, it is always the case that if they are withheld, great progress is made soon afterward, particularly when they are interrupted.

I think painting instruction for the lower grades needs some improvement. Some of the teachers give too little effort toward technical proficiency. The students do not use the materials properly. Actually, you should not allow anyone to paint on pieces of paper that are always buckling. They should paint only on paper that is properly stretched. Also, they should go through the whole project from start to finish, so that one page is really completed. Most of the drawings are only a beginning.

Since you are a painter, what you want will probably depend upon your discussing technical questions and how to work with the materials with the other teachers. No other practical solution is possible.

In the two upper grades, you could have the talented students paint again. There is enough time, but you would have to begin again with simpler things. That could not cause too many problems if you did it properly. With younger children, painting is creating from the soul, but with older children, you have to begin from the perspective of painting. You need to show them what the effects of light are and how to paint that. Do all the painting from a practical standpoint. You should never have children older than ten paint objects because that can ruin a great deal. (Dr. Steiner begins to draw on the blackboard with colored chalk.) The older the children are, the more you need to work on perspective in painting. You need to make clear to them that here is the sun, that the sunlight falls upon a tree. So, you should not begin by drawing the tree, but with the light and shadowy areas, so that the tree is created out of the light and dark colors, but the color comes from the light. Don’t begin with abstractions such as, “The tree is green.” Don’t have them paint green leaves; they shouldn’t paint leaves at all, but instead areas of light. That is what you should do, and you can do it.

If I were required to begin with thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds, I would use Dürer’s Melancholia as an example of how wonderfully light and shadows can be used. I would have them color the light at the window and how it falls onto the polyhedron and the ball. Then, I would have them paint the light in the window of Hieronymus im Gehäus. And so forth. It is very fruitful to begin with Melancholia; you should have them translate the black and white into a colorful fantasy. We cannot expect all the teachers to be well-versed in painting. There may be some teachers who are not especially interested in painting because they cannot do it, but a teacher must be able to teach it without painting. We cannot expect to fully develop every child in every art and science.

A teacher: Someone proposed that the school sell the toys the shop class makes.

Dr. Steiner: I do not know how we can do that. Someone also wanted to sell such things in England, with the proceeds going to the Waldorf School, I believe. However, we cannot make a factory out of the school. We simply cannot do that; that would be pure nonsense. This idea makes sense only if someone proposes building a factory in which the things we make at school would be used as prototypes. If that is what they meant, it is no concern of ours. At most, we can give them the things for use as prototypes. However, I did not understand the proposal in that way, so it really doesn’t make much sense. In the other case, someone could make working models. If someone were to come with a proposal to create a factory, we could still think about whether we wanted to work that way.

A teacher requests a new curriculum for religion class in the upper grades.

Dr. Steiner: We have laid out the religious instruction for eight grades in two groups, the first through fourth grades in the lower group, and the others in the upper. The religious instruction is already arranged in two stages. Do you mean that we now need a third?

A teacher asks whether the curriculum could be more specialized for the different grades, for instance, the fifth, eighth, and twelfth grades.

Dr. Steiner: You can show me tomorrow how far I went then.

A teacher asks about the material for religion class in the ninth grade.

Dr. Steiner: St. Augustine and Thomas à Kempis.

A teacher asks if Dr. Steiner would add something more to the ritual services throughout the year, for example, colors or such things.

Dr. Steiner: The Youth Service for Easter is connected with the entire intention of youth services. I am not certain what you mean. Were you to do that, you would preoccupy the children with a suggested mood. That is not good while they are still in school.

Through that, you would make them less open. Certainly, children need to remain naïve until a certain age, to do things without being fully conscious of them. Therefore, we should not have a complete calendar of the year, as that would suggest certain moods. Children need to be somewhat naïve about such things, at least until a certain age. You certainly could not have a small child who has just learned to walk, walk according to a vowel or consonant mood. You can work only with the Gospel texts in the Mass. I think that in the Youth Services we can proceed more objectively. The Mass is also not given according to season; it does not adhere strictly to the calendar. What was done historically comes in question only for the reading. During the period from Christmas until Easter, there is an attempt to present the story of the birth and suffering, but later, we can only take the standpoint that the listeners should learn about the Gospels. I don’t think we can do this strictly according to the calendar.

A teacher asks about creating new classes at Easter.

Dr. Steiner: It is a question of space and even more so of teachers. The problem is that there are no more people within the Anthroposophical Society who could teach within the Waldorf School. We can find no more teachers, and male teachers are nowhere to be found within our movement.

A teacher asks what they can do about the poor enunciation of the children.

Dr. Steiner: You mean you are not doing the speech exercises we did during the seminar? You should have done them earlier, in the lower grades. I gave them for you to do. It is clear the children cannot speak properly. You should also do the exercises for the teachers, but you need to have a feeling for this improper speaking. We have often discussed the hygiene of proper speech. You should accustom the children to speaking clearly at a relatively early age. That has a number of consequences. There would be no opportunity for doing German exercises in Greek class, but it is quite possible during German class. You could do speech exercises of various sorts at nearly every age.

In Switzerland, actors have to do speech exercises because certain letters need to be pronounced quite differently if they are to be understood, g, for example. Every theater particularly studies pronouncing g. Concerning the course by Mrs. Steiner, you should never give up requesting it. At some time you will have to get it from her. If you request it often enough, it will happen.

Some teachers ask about the school garden and how it could be used for teaching botany.

Dr. Steiner: Cow manure. Horse manure is no good. You need to do that as well as we can afford to do. In the end, for a limited area, there can be no harmony without a particular number of cattle and a particular amount of plants for the soil. The cattle give the manure, and if there are more plants than manure, the situation is unhealthy.

You cannot use something like peat moss, that is not healthy. You can accomplish nothing with peat. What is important is how you use the plants. Plants that are there to be seen only are not particularly important. If you grow plants with peat, you have only an appearance, you do not actually increase their nutritional value. You should try to observe how the nutritional value is diminished when you grow seedlings in peat.

You need to add some humus to the soil to make it workable. It would be even better if you could use some of Alfred Maier’s manure and horn meal. That will make the soil somewhat softer. He uses ground horns. It is really a homeopathic fertilizer for a botanical garden, for rich soil. In the school garden, you could arrange the plants according to the way you want to go through them. Sometime I will be able to give you the twelve classes of plants.

[ 1 ] When it is possible to look back with the suitable spiritual organs of knowledge into a man's previous earth-lives, observation shows a number of such earth-lives in which the man was already a ‘person.’ His exterior resembled that of the present day, and he had an inner life that bore an individual stamp. Earth-lives appear, which shew signs of the existence of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, but not yet of the Spiritual Soul; others again, in which only the Sentient Soul is as yet developed and so on.

[ 2 ] This was so in the ages of Earthly History, and has been so already for a long time before.

[ 3 ] Pursuing the observation however, one comes back to ages in which it was not yet so. There one finds Man, both in respect of inner life and outer habit, still interwoven with the world of the divine spiritual beings. Man is there an earth-man, but not yet detached from divine spiritual being, thinking and willing.

[ 4 ] In still earlier times, a detached and separate Man vanishes altogether from sight. There is nothing to be seen but divine Spirit-Beings, holding Man within their lap.

[ 5 ] These three stages of his evolution, Man has gone through during his time on earth. The transition from the first to the second lies in the late Lemurian age, from the second to the third in the Atlantean age.

[ 6 ] Just as, in his present earth-life, Man carries everything that has entered his life as a memory within him, so too he carries within him as cosmic memory everything which he has gone through in the manner above described. What is the soul-life on earth? It is the world of memories, open every moment to take in new perceptions. In this interplay of memory and new experience Man lives his inward earthly life.

[ 7 ] But this inward earthly life could never come to expression, if there were not still existing at the present time in Man, as a cosmic memory, those things that one sees when one looks back in spirit to the first stage of his growth to earth-manhood, when he was not yet detached from the divine spirit-beings.

[ 8 ] Of what then went on in the world, all that remains in living existence upon earth to-day is the process carried out in the human nerves-and-senses system. In external Nature, all the forces which were active in those times have died out, and are only to be seen in their dead forms.

[ 9 ] Thus, in the thought-world of Man, there is living as present revelation something which, to have earthly existence, must have as its basis what had been evolved in Man before ever he attained to individual life on earth.

[ 10 ] In the life between death and new birth, Man every time goes anew through this stage. Only, that into the world of divine Spirit-Beings—who now again receive him even as once they bore him within themselves—he now carries his own full individual entity, in the form it has acquired during his lives on earth. He is, between death and new birth, both in the present and at the same time in all the times through which he has traveled in recurring earth-lives and recurring lives between death and new birth.

[ 11 ] It is otherwise with what lives in the human feeling-world. This feeling-world of Man is connected with experiences which followed immediately after those in which Man as such was not yet revealed—with those experiences namely which Man lived through as Man, indeed, but not yet detached from the divine-spiritual being, thinking, willing. There would be no world of feeling for Man to disclose at the present day, if the foundations from which it springs were not laid in his rhythmic system. In this rhythmic system we possess the cosmic recollection of the second stage of Man's evolution, described above.

[ 12 ] Thus in Man's feeling-world there are working together his human soul-life of the present, and the after-effects of an olden time.

[ 13 ] In the life between death and new birth, the time of which we are here speaking, with all that fills it, is known to Man as the bounds of his cosmos. What the starlit sky is to Man in his physical life, the same part is played for him spiritually in his life between death and new birth by his existence between his complete union with the divine Spirit-world and his detachment from it. There, shining at the ‘world's bourne’ he sees not the physical heavenly bodies, but in the place of each star the collective group of divine Spirit-Beings who are in reality the star.

[ 14 ] And in connection with the will only—not with feeling nor thought—there lives on in Man whatever those earth-lives have to shew, which begin, on observation, to display Cosmos and gives Man his exterior form, remains reserved in this exterior form as a cosmic recollection. This cosmic recollection lives on as forces in the human form. These are not directly the forces of the will, but are that which gives in the human organization the groundwork for the will-forces.

[ 15 ] This is a region of Man's being which lies outside the ‘world's bourne’ in his life between death and new birth. Man there conceives of it as of something that will again be part of his human existence in his new earth-life.

[ 16 ] In his nerves-and-senses system, Man is to-day still bound up with the Cosmos in the same manner as he was when he shewed only as a first life-seed amid the divine-spiritual being.

[ 17 ] In his rhythmic system, Man still lives to-day in the Cosmos as he lived when he already was Man, but not yet detached from divine-spiritual being.

[ 18 ] In his metabolic and limb-system, the basis for the development of will, Man's life is such that he has working on in this system the after-effect of all that he has gone through in his personal, individual earth-lives, ever since these began, and also in the intervening lives between death and new birth.

[ 19 ] From the forces of earth, Man has that alone which lends him the consciousness of Self. The physical, bodily basis, too, of this Self-consciousness is an effect of the earth's action. Everything else in the human being is extraterrestrial and cosmic in its origin. The astral body as conveyer of sensation and thought, together with its etheric and physical basis—all the life-stir of the ether-body, and even all that is working physically and chemically in the physical body—all this has its origin beyond the earth. Strange as it may seem, the physical and chemical action which takes place within Man is not derived from the earth.

[ 20 ] That Man develops this extra-earthly, cosmic life within him, is the work of the planets and the other stars. What he develops in him by their aid, is carried by the Sun and its forces to the Earth. The Human-Cosmic is by the Sun transplanted to earthly territory. By virtue of the Sun, Man lives as heavenly being upon Earth. That property only, whereby Man exceeds the limits of his human form—the capacity to bring forth his kind—is a gift of the Moon.

[ 21 ] Of course these are not the only effects of the Sun's and the Moon's action; highly spiritual effects proceed from them also.

[ 22 ] When the Sun about Christmas-time begins to gain increasing power for the Earth, this is its action in the physical earthly sphere, exhibited rhythmically in the cycle of the year; it is an expression of the spirit in Nature. The evolution of mankind is one unique part in a so-to-speak gigantic world-year. In this world-year it is World-Christmas or ‘Holy Night’ when the Sun does not merely act on the Earth through the spirit of Nature, but when the soul of the Sun, the Christ Spirit, comes down from above into the Earth.

[ 23 ] As in each single man, that which he realizes individually in his own life is connected with a cosmic memory, so will the yearly Christmas be felt in its truth by the human soul, if the cosmic and heavenly Christ-Event is thought of as working on continually—conceived not merely as a human but as a cosmic recollection. Not Man alone at Christmas-time celebrates in remembrance the Descent of the Christ, but the Cosmos also.

Leading Thoughts

[ 24 ] On looking back into a man's repeated earth-lives, they may be distinguished into three different stages: First a very early one, in which Man is not yet existent as an individual form of being, but as a life-seed amid divine spiritual being. Looking back into this stage, one finds not as yet a Man, but only divine Spirit-Beings (the Principalities or Primeval Powers, the Archai.)

[ 25 ] Following on this comes a middle stage in which Man is already discernible as an individual form of being, but not yet detached from the thinking and willing and being of the divine-spiritual world. He has not yet, as that time, his present personality, which is involved with his appearance on earth as an entirely distinctive being, detached from the divine spiritual world.

[ 26 ] The third stage is the present one. Man realizes himself, as he stands forth in his own human form, detached from the divine spiritual world; and he realizes the world as an environment over against which he takes his place as an individual personality. This stage began in Atlantean times.

[ 1 ] When we are able to look back with spiritual knowledge into the former Earth-lives of a human being, we find that there are a number of such lives in which man was already a ‘person.’ His outward form was similar to what it is today, and he had an inner life of individual stamp and character. Earthly lives emerge, revealing that the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was present in them, but not as yet the Spiritual Soul; others appear, in which only the Sentient Soul was developed—and so forth.

[ 2 ] We find it so in the epochs of Earthly History, and indeed it was so long before these epochs.

[ 3 ] But as we look back still farther, we come into ages of time when it was not yet so—ages in which we find Man interwoven still, both in his inner life and in his outer formation, with the world of Divine-Spiritual Beings. Man is already there as earthly man, but he is not yet detached from Divine Spiritual Being, Thinking and Willing.

[ 4 ] And in yet earlier epochs man as a separate being disappears altogether; there are present only the Divine Spiritual Beings, bearing man within them.

[ 5 ] Man has undergone these three stages of evolution during his earthly time. The transition from the first to the second took place in the latest epoch of Lemuria; that from the second to the third in Atlantean times.

[ 6 ] Now just as in his present earthly life man bears his experiences within him in the shape of memory, so does he bear within him as a cosmic memory all that he has undergone in the way above described.

What is the earthly life of the soul? It is the world of our memories, ready at every moment to have fresh perceptions. In this interplay of memory and fresh experience, man lives, his inner life on Earth.

[ 7 ] But this inner life on Earth could not unfold at all if there were not present still in man, as a cosmic memory, what we see when we look back with spiritual vision into the first stage of his becoming Earthly Man—the stage in which he was not yet detached from Divine-Spiritual Being.

[ 8 ] Of all that took place in the world at that time, there is livingly present on the Earth today, that alone which is unfolded within the human system of nerves and senses. In outer Nature, all the forces that were then at work have died and can now only be seen in their dead forms.

[ 9 ] Thus in the human world of Thought there lives as a present manifestation something which, in order to have earthly existence, requires as its basis the very thing that was already evolved in man before he attained individual, earthly being.

[ 10 ] Every time he passes through the life between death and a new birth, man experiences this stage anew. But into the world of Divine-Spiritual Beings, which receives him again even as it once entirely contained him—into this world he now carries his full individual existence which has taken shape during his lives on Earth. Between death and a new birth, man is indeed in the present, but he is living also in all the time that he has undergone through repeated lives on Earth and lives between death and a new birth.

[ 11 ] It is different with that which lives in the Feeling-world of man. This is related to those experiences of the past which came immediately after the ones in which man was yet unmanifest as such. It is related, that is to say, to experiences which man already underwent as man but when he was not yet separated from Divine-Spiritual Being, Thinking and Willing. Man in the present could not unfold the world of Feeling if it did not arise on the foundation of his rhythmic system. And in his rhythmic system we have the cosmic memory of the above-described second stage of his evolution.

[ 12 ] Thus in the world of Feeling the ‘present’ in the human soul is working together with that which works on in him from an ancient time.

[ 13 ] In the life between death and a new birth, man experiences the contents of the epoch of which we are here speaking as the boundary of his Cosmos. What the starry heavens are to man in the physical life on Earth, his existence between his full union with the Divine-Spiritual world and his severance from it, is to him spiritually in the life between death and a new birth. In that life, there appear to him at the ‘world-boundary’, not the physical heavenly bodies, but in the place of each star the sum-total of Divine-Spiritual Beings, who, as we know, are in reality the star.

[ 14 ] Connected with the Will alone and not with Feeling or with Thought, there lives in man that which is manifested by those earthly lives which, when we look back on them, reveal already the personal, individual character. That which from cosmic sources gives to man his outer form, is preserved in this outer form as a cosmic memory. This cosmic memory lives in the human form as a totality of forces. But these are not the immediate forces of the Will; they represent that in the human organism which is the foundation of the forces of the Will.

[ 15 ] In the life between death and a new birth, this region of the human being lies beyond the ‘world-boundary.’ Man there conceives of it as of something that will belong to him once more in his new life on Earth.

[ 16 ] In his system of nerves and senses, man is today still united with the Cosmos in the way he was when he was manifest only germinally within the Divine-Spiritual womb.

[ 17 ] In his rhythmic system, man is today still living in the Cosmos in the way he lived when he was already there as man, but not yet detached from the Divine-Spiritual.

[ 18 ] In his system of metabolism and limbs—the foundation for the unfolding of his Will—man lives in such a way that all that he has undergone in his personal individual lives on Earth, ever since these began, and in his lives between death and a new birth, works on within this system.

[ 19 ] From the forces of the Earth, man receives that alone which gives him consciousness of self. The physical bodily foundation of self-consciousness is due also to what the Earth brings about. But everything else in the human being has a cosmic origin, external to the Earth.

The sentient and thought-bearing astral body with its etheric-physical foundation, all the moving life in the etheric body, and even that which works physico-chemically in the physical body, is of extra-earthly origin. Strange as this may seem, the physico-chemical which is at work within the human being is not derived from the Earth.

[ 20 ] The fact that man evolves this extra-earthly, cosmic life within him, is due to the working of the planets and other stars. All that he thus unfolds, the Sun with its forces carries to the Earth. By the Sun, the human-cosmic element is transplanted into the earthly realms. By the Sun, man lives as a heavenly being on the Earth. And that alone, whereby he transcends his own human formation—namely, his power to bring forth his kind—is a gift of the Moon.

[ 21 ] Needless to say these are not the only influences of Sun and Moon. Lofty spiritual influences also proceed from them.

[ 22 ] When about Christmas-time the Sun increases more and more in power for the Earth, it is the yearly influence—manifesting rhythmically in the physical-earthly realm—which is an expression of the Spirit in Nature. The evolution of mankind is a single member in what we may describe as a gigantic cosmic year, as will be evident from our preceding studies. And in this cosmic year the cosmic Christmas is at the point where the Sun not only works towards the Earth out of the Spirit of Nature, but where the Christ-Spirit, the Soul of the Sun, descends on to the Earth.

[ 23 ] As in the single human being what he experiences individually is connected with the cosmic memory, so will the human soul have a right feeling of the yearly Christmas when he conceives the heavenly and cosmic Christ-Event as working on and on, comprehending it as a memory not only human but cosmic. For at Christmas-time not only man remembers in celebration the descent of Christ, but the Cosmos does so too.

(about New Year, 1925)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (with respect to the preceding study: ‘What is revealed when one looks back into repeated Lives on Earth’)

[ 24 ] 144. Looking back into a human being's repeated lives on Earth, we find three distinct stages. In a remote past, man did not exist with individuality of being, but as a germ in the Divine and Spiritual. As we look back into this stage we find not yet a human being but Divine-Spiritual Beings: the Primal Forces, Principalities or Archai.

[ 25 ] 145. This was followed by an intermediate stage. Man existed already with individuality of being, but he was not yet detached from the Thinking and Willing and Being of the Divine-Spiritual World. At this stage he had not yet his present personality, with which he appears on Earth as a being completely self-possessed, detached from the Divine Spiritual World.

[ 26 ] 146. The present condition is the third and latest. Here man experiences himself in human form and figure, detached from the Divine-Spiritual World; and he experiences the world as an environment with which he stands face to face, individually and personally. This stage began in Atlantean time.

Originally published in Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 22, Number 4, Winter 1977.

Yesterday I called your attention to the fact that the birth of Jesus gradually conquered men’s hearts and souls, that the Christmas Plays which can now be performed, only developed little by little their present beautiful form, together with that atmosphere of earnest devotion which streamed into them during the times when they were at their height. It is really still possible to say of the early forms of these Christmas Plays that people tried, in an entirely secular mood, to participate in something which they had seen for centuries in a form which they could not grasp. We may say that Christ, the Child, conquered the hearts of men only gradually. Indeed, He conquered the hearts of men quite slowly. In the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, when the people themselves gradually began to take part in the Plays which in the past could be performed only by priests, we do not find the noble form which the Christmas Plays assumed later on. We have just seen two examples of these Plays,¹ and I have tried to explain to you their different origin, for they clearly reveal this. The first play has a simple, popular character. Its chief aim is to set forth how the Child, in whom the great Cosmic Spirit incarnated and began to work on earth, entered the world as a Child, and how He was, on the one hand, re-ceived by the publicans and on the other hand by the shepherds. This appears particularly in the first Christmas Play which was performed yesterday: the great difference in the reception given to the Child by the publicans and by the shepherds comes to expression in it.

The other Christmas Play is quite different. It immediately reveals to us that wise men—and for the people of those days wise men were at the same time Kings, Magi—had read in the stars what a significant destiny was awaiting mankind. In the action of this Play we therefore see ancient occult wisdom. And in the course of the action we see that in accordance with this occult wisdom, with these truths discovered in the stars, Herod enters the earthly events and faces us as the one by whose side we clearly recognise Evil, the Principle that remained backward, the devilish Ahrimanic-Luciferic principle. We see how the Christ Principle and the Luciferic-Ahrimanic Principle confront each other. But we also see the manifestation of forces which enter the course of events from the spiritual world. The Angels appear, as the manifestation of guidance from spiritual spheres; they lead and guide the action in order to frustrate Herod’s aims, and the events follow another course. Forces from the spiritual world pervade the will of men.—This is consequently a play containing forces which undoubtedly lead us beyond the events pertaining merely to the earth.

When we consider how these two plays face each other, one of them filled by the primitive conception of common folk, and the other by a wisdom which really indicates a primeval wisdom of the earth’s development, then we are induced to call up within ourselves thoughts concerning the events which took place in the course of time and the whole significance of the Mystery of Golgotha for the evolution of the earth.

Let us bear in mind that at the time—but this in a wider meaning—at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, there existed in certain circles a profound wisdom in connect-ion with spiritual matters. This deep wisdom which existed at that time is called Gnosis.

In the external world, when considering the course of Europe’s spiritual culture, we may say: This Gnosis, this deeply spiritual science which existed in connection with the mysteries of the spiritual world, vanished from the cultural life of Europe, as far as the outer world is concerned,—and in the spiritual life of the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th centuries, etc., there existed only a very dim idea of what was contained in this science.

Those who knew something (I mean, those who knew what could be known by a Christian priest, a Christian scientist), those who had the knowledge which could be acquired in those days, were only aware of the existence of the Gnosis, because people had opposed it in the early Christian centuries, because opponents had fought against the Gnosis. Imagine the situation if to-day all the books and lecture-cycles which constitute our Anthroposophical literature were to be suppressed and burned, so that nothing remained—if the only writings on Anthroposophy available to posterity were books written by opponents! Imagine the situation that in centuries to come, people were to get hold of these books written by antagonists, acquiring from these their conception of the truths contained in our writings! This is what happened to the Gnosis.

An outstanding writer of the early Church was Irenaeus, the pupil of Bishop Polycarp of Asia Minor, who had been a disciple of the Apostles. But Irenaeus wrote as an opponent of the Gnosis. In the course of the centuries, the teachings of the Gnostics were gathered by reading what Irenaeus had written as a refutation of the Gnosis. In regard to this ancient wisdom, we must reckon with everything brought about by the circumstance that these teachings were trans-mitted by an opponent.

This shows you that the whole development of the Occident is really based on the fact that something handed down from past ages was blotted out, stamped out completely. Outwardly we see how new was the beginning brought by the Mystery of Golgotha, what an entirely new impulse it brought to the culture of the West. In reality it began everywhere with an entirely new impulse. Indeed, I might use the following comparison: The ancient writings lay deeply buried underground, like some ancient-city covered by the earth; deeply buried, when we consider the writings of Ambrose and Augustine, old Fathers of the Church, to Scotus, and so forth. A new beginning, a new element arose like a new city over apparently new ground, under which an ancient city lies buried, whose aspect is unknown. This is what took place in the course of the development of European culture.

If there is to be a spiritual deepening in the present age, it is therefore evident that this must be drawn out of man’s own forces and that human beings themselves must discover truths which cannot be handed on to them traditionally from outside, at least not in the course of the spiritual development of Europe. And it is out of the question (I cannot deal with this to-day, for it would lead us too far away from our subject), it is out of the question to draw in Oriental documents as a substitute for the external documents which have been lost in the spiritual life of the Occident. This is impossible for the simple reason that the Oriental documents convey something which is far more primitive than that which developed in the world by spreading from Asia Minor to North Africa, Southern Europe, and even as far as Central Europe. Spiritual knowledge was blotted out completely in the early Christian centuries; it reached posterity only through the writings of opponents.

The Gnostic writings which have been destroyed, do not only contain a knowledge of the spiritual worlds, the spiritual knowledge of these worlds—apart from the truths relating to Christ—but also the whole encompassing spiritual wisdom of ancient times in connection with the Mystery of Christ Jesus. The loss of these documents implies the loss of all this knowledge. The Gnostics (—if we wish to give them this name—) tried to grasp in their own way the course of the earth’s development and the true nature of Christ. In those days it was not yet possible to grasp these things as they can be grasped now, by drawing down from the spiritual worlds truths which need not be recorded in writing, because they exist in an immediately living form in the spiritual world. In those days the truths relating to the real being of Christ-Jesus could not be drawn down in this way. But certain truths relating to Christ-Jesus were known in an older form of wisdom which has been lost.

Quite recently, a few scant remains of a book entitled "Pistis-Sophia" were discovered, and of another one entitled "The Mystery of Jeû". Also in an external way, they draw, as it were, attention to the fact that the truths relating to Christ, which we should now strive to attain with the aid of anthroposophical methods, are not as foolish as the opponents of our Movement wish to make them appear. Only a small fragment, in Coptic writing, has been preserved of the "Book of Jeû"; nevertheless it calls attention to the fact that what we read in the Gospels is not the only wisdom which lived in the thoughts of men during the first centuries of Christian development.

The "Book of Jeû" describes how, after His Resurrection, Christ spoke to those who were at that time able to understand Him, to those who had become His disciples. The strange thing about this "Book of Jeû" (I mean, the small existing fragment of this book) is that it clearly speaks of Christ and of His true being in a way which differs completely from the Gospel of St. John. There is one thing which recurs again and again in this book, which clearly shows that it seeks to attract our attention to something quite definitive. This thing to which it draws attention over and over again, may, in other words, be explained as follows:

Suppose that in those days someone had wished to explain why Christ Jesus had entered the evolution of the earth; he would have had to do it in the following way—To those who were able to understand him, he would have said: "Behold, a new age is dawning, in which man will enter the future epoch of the development of the Consciousness-Soul. An age is approaching when the world will have to be grasped through man’s external physical organs, through organs which are essentially connected with the physical body. This age is approaching. The age in which revelations could be obtained through an originally primitive clairvoyance has gone by. Past is the age when knowledge could be gathered, not only by using the physical body with its instruments, but by using the etheric body independently of the physical body. This age has gone by—henceforth people will have to use as their only instrument the physical body. But also in future it will be possible to know things which in the past could only be known through the etheric body. In the external world, there will only exist a knowledge connected with the physical body, which is subjected to death. But a knowledge of the spiritual world cannot be gained through the instruments linked with the physical body. A Helper must come who kindles the etheric element in man, a Helper connected with the living essence, with everything in man’s earthly life which does not pertain to the earth. A Helper must come, Who tears out of the indolent, lifeless, physical body an understanding which is able to grasp the spiritual world, an understanding which lives in man and is connected with heaven; that understanding which cannot be crucified by the world, because it belongs to heaven, the understanding which cruci-fies the world, that is to say, which overcomes the world."

We should imagine that in earlier epochs, when people could not yet see Christ in His true Being, as He passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, they still felt connected with the spiritual world through the etheric body. When the physical body hardened more and more, thus becoming the instrument it is now, it was necessary that One should come, Christ, in order to draw a living essence out of the indolent instrument of the physical body. This is what we should imagine.

But let us now consider this "Book of Jeû". After having passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ spoke to those who had learned to lean on Him and on the wisdom contained in His words: He said,

"I loved you, and I wished to give you Life."

In the words, "and I wished to give you Life", we hear that He wished to draw the indolent physical body out of its indolence, by giving it something which only the etheric body can give.

"Jesus, the Living One, is the Knowledge of Truth."

The Living One—that is, He who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha—speaks in such a way as to appear as the Representative of Life. The text then continues:

"This is the Book dealing with the Knowledge of the Invisible God through the hidden Mysteries"—, that is to say, of Mysteries which lie concealed in man—"which indicate the path to man’s chosen Being, leading in silence to the life of the Father of the World, in the arrival of the Redeemer, the Saviour of the souls who receive within them the Word of Life, higher than every other life—, in the knowledge of Jesus, the Living One, Who through the Father came out of the Aeon of Light into the All-ness of the Pleroma"—(i.e. of the other Aeons, of all the Spiritual Beings)—"in the teaching, which cannot be matched by any other, the teaching given by Jesus, the Living One, to His Apostles, when He said: This is the Teaching in which the whole Knowledge reposes."

We should thus imagine the Risen One Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha speaking to His Disciples, who had learned to listen to Him.

Jesus, the Living One, began to speak to His Apostles as follows:

"Blessed is he who crucified the world and who did not let the world crucify him" (he who can grasp that part in man which cannot be conquered by matter, by external physical matter).

The Apostles replied unanimously by saying: "Teach us, O Lord, this way of crucifying the world, that the world may not crucify us, and we may not perish and lose our life."

Jesus, the Living One, answered and spoke: "He who has crucified the world is one who has found my Word and fulfils it in accordance with the will of Him who sent me."

And the Apostles replied by saying: "Speak to us, O Lord, that we may hear you! We followed you with all our heart, we left father and mother, vineyards and fields, we left estates and the glory of the external king and we followed you, that you might teach us the Life of your Father, who sent you." And Christ, the Living One, met this appeal of His apostles by revealing to them what He had to say.

Christ, the Living One answered and spoke: "The Life of my Father is this: that out of the human essence of that understanding you receive your soul, which is not of this earth …"

What the Living One expects, is this: That those who are His disciples should grasp that in man lives an understanding of spiritual things which may tear itself away from the physical body, an understanding that is not of this earth. If they call to life within them this understanding, they will in truth have grasped His Word.

… "this essence of every soul, may be grasped through what I reveal to you in the progress of my Word. And that you may fulfil it, and this before the Archon" (—i.e. before the essence of this Aeon, this age—), "his snares" (the Ahrimanic-Lucifer Being) "and his traps, which have no end,—that you may be saved from these. But you, my disciples, hasten to receive my Word with greatest care, so that you may recognise it, and that the Archon of this Aeon" (i.e. the Ahrimanic-Luciferic) "may not be at strife with you, because he cannot find any of his commands in me" (—he therefore finds his commands outside the One who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha): "that you yourselves, O! my Apostles, may fulfil it in regard to myself, and that I myself may free you, and you be hallowed by that freedom which has no blemish. Even as the Spirit of the Holy Ghost is holy, so will you become holy through the freedom of the Spirit, of the Holy Spirit."

Unanimously the Apostles—Matthew and John, Philip, Bartholomew and James—replied by saying:

"O! Jesus, Living One, whose goodness is spread out over those who have found your wisdom and your form in the Illumination, O! Light, burning in the Light you have kindled in our hearts, when we received the Light of Life, O veritable Logos, that through the Gnosis, has become for us true knowledge of what the Living One has taught!"

Jesus, the Living One, answered and spoke: "Blessed is he who recognises this and leads heaven down to the earth." (i.e. who is conscious of the fact that there is something in him which is not dependent on his earthly body, but on the Beings of Heaven, and who leads into the earthly events that part in him which is connected with heaven.)

"Blessed is he who recognises this and leads heaven downwards, who carries the earth and sends it up to heaven" (—who connects the earthly part in him with the heavenly, so that when he passes through the portal of death with the fruits of his earthly life, he may lead the earth back to heaven).

The Apostles replied by saying: "Jesus, Living One, explain to us how we may bring down heaven to earth. For we have followed you, in order that you might teach us the true Light."

And Jesus, the Living One, answered and spoke: "The Word that lives in heaven"—(He means, the wisdom or knowledge which may be gained independently of man’s physical being) … the Word lived in heaven before the earth, which is called world, came into being. But if you know my Word, you will lead heaven down to earth and the Word will dwell in you. Heaven is the invisible Word of the Father. If you know this, you will lead heaven down to the earth. I will teach you how the earth may be sent up to heaven, that you may know: To send the earth up to heaven, is to listen to the Word of Knowledge, that is no longer mere knowledge of an earthly human being, but knowledge of a heavenly human being …" (—one who has severed his understanding from the external physical body, who has ceased to be an earthly human being and has become a heavenly human being. His understanding has ceased to be earthly: it has become heavenly).

"You will instead be saved from the Archon of this Aeon" (from the Ahrimanic-Luciferic Being).

Here, therefore, is a fragment which has been preserved and has been found again, a fragment which calls attention to the infinitely profound knowledge which once—during the first centuries of the Christian era—connected man with the secret of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Editor’s Note

The two independent discoveries in the forties of this century of the Coptic manuscripts in Upper Egypt in 1945 and the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 have both proved of very great importance for the study of primitive Christianity. In particular, the Scrolls have led the way to a new understanding of the Messianic prophecies while the Coptic manuscripts, apparently the library of a Gnostic sect, have given unexpected opportunity to learn at first hand the teachings and beliefs of various sects, or groups, belonging to a widespread spiritual movement active in the first and second centuries of our era.

Of the few discoveries of Gnostic writings made earlier it is invaluable to have Dr. Steiner’s interpretation of the concepts that appear in the fragments from the Books of Jeû, with his interpretation of the phraseology which may be almost incomprehensible to the reader of today. Now that some of the new discoveries are available in English translation they can be approached in the light of this lecture, and much that seems incomprehensible—even bizarre—reveals itself as having a meaning based on a profound spiritual knowledge. Of the new discoveries, perhaps the books that comprise what is called The Jung Codex have excited the most interest. They were sent to Dr. Carl Jung at Zurich on account of the fact that he was known to be deeply interested in Gnosticism. These writings were first made known to the public in a newspaper report of November 1953, just on thirty three years after Rudolf Steiner gave his lecture.

In one of his Letters to the Members (No. 22 in The Michael Mystery) Dr. Steiner wrote of the Gnosis and its relation to Anthroposophy, pointing out that the Gnosis was properly connected with the development of the Sentient Soul while Anthroposophy is, "by the light of Michael’s agency, to evolve out of the Spiritual Soul a new form of understanding of Christ and the World."

• 1. A Shepherds Play from the Palatinate and a Three King’s Play from Oberufer, near Pressburg. These plays were performed at Dornach on the stage of the Schreinerei for the first time at Christmas 1915.

[It is a profound truth:] The gods have been man-like beings in the past, and man will be a god-like being in the future. The gods have gone through an apprenticeship in the past; man is going through it today. What have the gods achieved in their development that preceded the earth? To be able to co-create all that surrounds us. Mineral, plant and animal kingdom are a creation of the gods.

Once there was a state for the gods - devas - in which they learned exactly the same thing that man learns today. Any finished art presupposes that lessons have been learned. [If you study Raphael, you will find that he was preceded by predecessors who gradually tried what he then brought to a supreme level]. In order for harmony to emerge, experiments must first be made, disharmonies must be overcome.

Human beings today are learning to master the mineral kingdom. The further we look back in history, we find that in the beginning man could not master the mineral kingdom. Only gradually did he learn. He ground his grain with two stones until gradually [after much trial and error] he brought about the mill. He learned to transform the forces of the mineral kingdom into art products. Basically, all human activity is a transformation of the mineral forces and substances into art products. There were times when man had not yet laid hands on the mineral kingdom, but had begun to plow the earth. We can look into a future where man will have transformed all minerals into artificial products. In a millennium, not so many discoveries have been made as in the nineteenth century alone. Things will go faster and faster in the future. Wireless telegraphy can already give a foretaste of it. [From here, for example, blowing up the Tuileries.] If man has not become unselfish, he can wreak great havoc.

Man cannot transform the plant and animal kingdoms today, merely the mineral kingdom. In the next round, everything that man has reshaped will rise as a plant. Through the Pralaya, man will gain the germ [of what he is developing today]. Everything he achieves in overcoming the mineral kingdom will come up to him. The Cologne Cathedral, for example, will rise in the fifth round as a plant cathedral. Now man tries to put things together in external form, then they are there. In the same way, the devas used to try to put together what can rise today as a plant.

When I look at an infinitely beautiful rhythm, I have to learn that it is made of lessons. We see the sequence throughout the turn of the year: Nature dies and rises again. This is only possible because the sun is in a regular relationship with the earth. In the solar time, on the second planet, it has learned to make the turn. The solar devas first tried the way in which the rhythm is brought forth. So it is with all activity. It took a long time in the Saturnian time until the quartz crystal was brought forth. And so we have Saturn, Sun and Moon devas which brought forth the three realms and also the cycle of the year. All are effects of long activities and the signs of an activity in the future. Man has been in this work and through it has become as he is. Thus man is connected with the three realms. For what has it happened that the sun and the moon and so on have been brought into certain orbits? For man. For his sake the sun turned around and started its new orbit. At Christmas we have the shortest day. It was an infinitely important point when the sun parted [from the earth]; the earth was left to itself and now had to unfold the power itself, which had otherwise been given to it by the sun. From the feast of Easter the sun is really there, in full power.

Everything that happens in summer is an epoch related to the earlier period in which there was a union [of sun and earth]. And winter is the realm of darkness, which now comes to the earth, so that at Christmas time man can say to himself: Something happens here every year, like when the sun left. Therefore, every year the etheric power coming to the earth is drawn away. Christmas has not only a symbolic, but also a natural meaning. There from the human being a power withdraws, which otherwise comes to him.

A natural consequence is that man adapts his life to this changed life of the earth. When the student is ready, he must pay attention to it. Man must unfold from within the forces that otherwise flow to him from without. He must unfold the spring within himself. This source must be nurtured in the winter time. At the end of winter he must have made himself ripe to receive the outer life again. This is indicated in the festivals.

Christ is the revival of the inner etheric forces and is placed in the time when the earth gives out the least forces. At the time around Easter, he must give life to life. In this festive year man notices one thing: Here a force arises in him, which also flows in on him from outside. There man remembers the time when he was still one with the sun. Man was in the bosom of the gods; then he had split off at the same time with the earth, and must now begin to shine from within.

We see why the great myths of all times gave names of gods to the planets. What the god is spiritually, the planet is physically. Festivals are not something arbitrarily inserted, but read from the heavens. The festival calendar is the cosmology. In the times when people understood the connection between human and celestial life, the priests composed the calendars. This is important for the one who, at a higher level of development, directs his gaze up to the heavenly bodies in order to put himself in harmony with the world forces, and this, in turn, is the basis of astrology. The etheric body will flourish differently if it is a sun child or a winter child. By placing the birth of man on certain dates, the Maharajas can cause etheric forces to act upon him as his karma requires. From the time of birth, one can in turn infer the karma.

My dear friends! Yesterday I tried to lead up to the consciousness of the present time by means of a kind of historical consideration, which, however, was intended to have a spiritual-Christian content. The reflections that will now follow in this direction can be inserted into what we still have to discuss. I wanted to get that far yesterday so that today I could speak of something very specific that relates to contemporary consciousness. But I must first make a necessary preliminary remark.

You see, what the anthroposophical movement, as far as I consider it my duty to represent it, can do is never anything other than to bring into the world what is already clearly recognizable as a demand of the world, that is, what is in some sense demanded from some quarter or other; after all, the demand does not always have to consist of clearly articulated words. But it must be regarded as something that I consider necessary for the anthroposophical movement, that it does not in any way appear in the sense that one calls agitatorisch. Today, of course, all words are misunderstood, and so, if one wants to misunderstand – if one wants to cast an evil eye in the sense of yesterday's very grateful lecture [by Pastor Geyer] – one can define what is happening from the anthroposophical side as agitational. On the other hand, it can be said quite honestly and truthfully that I myself do not engage in any agitation. Giving public lectures cannot be agitation, because it is a matter of the sense in which one gives them and to what extent one can take them from the whole configuration of contemporary spiritual life to the best of one's knowledge; it is a matter of them being demanded by the times themselves. Anyone can go away after a public lecture and say, “I want nothing to do with that.” Well, in this sense, everything is held. Therefore, when I speak of the things I will speak of today, I ask you to bear in mind that these things are held in such a way that they have been directly demanded by the circumstances.

I had to say this in advance because I now want to discuss the following. When we founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, the intention was that the Waldorf School should absolutely not be a school of world view, but rather that it should be a school in which the teaching of what could come from anthroposophy, the institution was made so that the actual religious, in this sense the world view, was transferred to the pastors of the respective denominations. So the religious instruction of the Roman Catholic children was entrusted to the Roman Catholic chaplain, and the religious instruction of the Protestant children to the Protestant chaplains, who were mainly concerned that as many as possible should attend, so that the individual had to do as little as possible. Incidentally, we also had this experience with Catholic pastors; it took us a long time to find someone who had the courage to enter this “den of iniquity.” So this is the principle of assigning the pastoral care to the pastoral workers concerned. Of course, the children of dissidents and their parents should also be allowed to receive religious instruction in their own way; and it soon became apparent that a not inconsiderable number of them wanted religious instruction, which now flows entirely from the anthroposophical movement, to be given specifically to the children of dissidents. You have to bear in mind that this is in fact already a considerable step forward in terms of religious sentiment, because the Waldorf School was initially founded for the children of the workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, so in the vast majority of cases for children of proletarian-Social Democratic parents, and it was the dissident sentiment that was actually predominantly represented. If these children had been sent to a regular school, they would not have taken part in any religious instruction at all; they would not have been forced to do so – after all, coercion would actually have contradicted the religious belief. In our case, religious instruction was specifically requested for these children, so the religious need arose out of complete freedom. In my opinion, this represents progress in religious belief. We were forced, as it were, to set up religious instruction in the sense of the anthroposophical worldview, and I sought to do so in such a way that it was actually separated in principle from the management of the school, which was to remain absolutely neutral on these matters and consider it only its task to work in an educational and didactic way. I consider it an important matter of principle that the school management and everything that flows into the school management has nothing to do with this religious education, so that the representatives of this religious education are placed in the school in the same way as the Roman Catholic and the various Protestant religion teachers. There were no Old Catholics, otherwise they would have been taken care of.

Thus Anthroposophical religious education, as it was often called – I myself don't think much of names – was inaugurated and began in the way that Anthroposophy believes it should be taught, namely by placing it as much as possible in life, and so that, in a sense, knowledge of the Bible and especially knowledge of the Gospels emerges as the crowning glory of all religious education. Now, I say that the Gospel is considered the crowning glory, so that this religious education, in which all kinds of children are mixed together, that is, children who have grown out of Catholic, Protestant or Jewish backgrounds, is definitely given in a Christian sense, and this is of course connected with the fact that the whole of the Waldorf School has an absolutely Christian character in terms of its imponderables. Those who have a feeling for such things would notice this very quickly if they were to enter a Waldorf school.

What then became necessary – not on our part, because we want to accommodate, not agitate – was seen very quickly: the children who receive our anthroposophical religious education need what has become a Sunday act. At first there was a very lively desire to have such a Sunday event, that is, to gather the children who receive anthroposophical religious education for a kind of ceremony on Sunday. And for reasons connected with the whole basic attitude of the Waldorf School towards the public, which is not very favorable to us, we have to carry out this Sunday ceremony in front of the children in the presence of the parents, or, if they are foster parents, we say, in the case of children who are educated in Stuttgart but whose parents are far away from Stuttgart, in the presence of the foster parents who are present in Stuttgart. Those who have no business being there, who want to go to this Sunday event for the sake of mere sensation, will not be admitted, but those who are responsible for the children will be allowed to attend the Sunday event with the children.

Now it was a matter of finding a ritual for this Sunday activity. I will discuss this ritual with you a little now and would like to make the following comment: In the next few days, I will have a lot to say about the ritual itself, about devices and the like, but we are definitely in the process of becoming, so that these things, which will also come into consideration for us, are even less likely to be considered in the Waldorf school. So it is important that you see the matter as an evolving one, that you see it in such a way that only that which can be imbued with full life can be done at first. But I believe that we will be able to communicate well precisely because you will receive a report not about something lifeless, but about something alive, and we will then be able to move up all the more easily to what – if I may use a prosaic expression – has to be planned in terms of ritual, ceremony, sacrament, worship and so on. In the whole cult, for example, the garment of the celebrant is not a trivial matter, but something important; but I will speak about that later.

Please do not misunderstand the expression. When a ritual is conceived, it is really not a matter of intellectually constructing something in the ritual, but rather that this ritual is conceived from the spiritual world. The problem with the ritual is that there is still an extraordinary difficulty at present; if you look at it realistically, the difficulty is that if you were to go about it radically, communion would be necessary for such a Sunday action. Now, given the circumstances, it is not possible to go to communion for the children of the Waldorf School in such a ritual today; it cannot be done. Therefore, it was necessary to emphasize that which is to be carried out in the communion later, and to handle it more spiritually. You will see that with the gradual introduction of rituals, you will have to go from the word, I would say, from the word that potentially contains the action, to the actual execution of the action. This will be a path that you will simply have to go through. You will not be able to come straight out with it, but you will have to go through the path from the action suggested by the word, whereby you must be aware that this is a beginning to the fully completed action.

But a ritual must never be composed merely intellectually; it must live in the living world process. For this, my dear friends, one thing is necessary: It is absolutely necessary to pay strict attention to the requirements of a ritual. My dear friends, when we speak from person to person, we must be clear about the fact that our speech must always be based on the only thing that lies solely in the convincing power of the content of our speech. If we understand the present time correctly in a religious sense, we must realize that we have no other work to do through the speech we address to people or to a gathering of people than that which can flow from the speaker out of his own conviction and the power of his own personality. Speeches that contain a moment of suggestion – as we use the word in Central Europe, not as it is used in Western Europe – would be absolutely reprehensible in the context of today's world, because we have come to the point in the development of humanity that, when we can use the word in a free way, we must put into the word that which is our own personal free conviction. If spiritual life is to be taken in full reality, nothing that is suggestive may be imposed on this personal free conviction, but one must behave in such a way that the consent of the other person comes out of complete freedom. This is the prerequisite for every future religious or spiritual-scientific or other work. If anyone were to misuse speech for magic, then this would be in the most extreme sense irreligious, even ungodly, in the strict sense that Anthroposophy must understand it, it would be a sin against the Holy Spirit, and this is what Anthroposophy must represent. For the speech may only be imbued with that sanctification which may be called sanctification through the Holy Spirit, and must observe in man absolutely the principle of directly and completely free conviction, which could not have existed in the evolution of mankind before the Mystery of Golgotha, because the word would have been repulsed by the human being altogether if the word had only had the power that it alone may have had today. At that time it had to work suggestively because the human organization was designed for it. That is why there also had to be chosen leaders, as I said yesterday, and it was also allowed at that time to work through the word in a sense that only happens in the spirit, by becoming aware, one spoke in the spirit, not out of one's own power, but out of the power of the God living in one, the Nous or the Logos. One must realize that this is impossible today, and that today one may only speak out of the Holy Spirit; but that is the word to which alone the free conviction of the one who hears the word answers. Therefore, all instruction today must be given under the sign of the Holy Spirit. We must be very clear about the fact that everything that flows from words into action can only be carried out in the Christian sense if the person carrying it out has the Paul consciousness: Not I, but the Christ in me! — Nothing in an act that is carried out in this way may be done without the consciousness that the act is performed as an inward divine commandment, as that which is performed in the spirit of the Christ-commandment itself.

We must realize that we are only the instrument through which the Christ can speak to people. This is especially difficult with children, because what I have explained applies to a limited extent to children only, and not to fully developed, mature people. Therefore, we must also make a distinction in what we do towards the person who is already considered worthy of the sacrament of the altar and towards the one we consider still too childlike to receive the sacrament of the altar. What I have now discussed must be evident in every action. Without this underlying principle, the action would be absolutely impossible.

The task is to find the Sunday activity from this point of view, and I ask that, as I describe it to you, you consider it only from this point of view. In doing so, we must today still leave out some things in the discussion that have a future value, but which we do not yet need to get into today. Of course, in the future we would actually need not only the spoken word, but also what in the older sense was also part of the cult: the recitative. But this is something that cannot be done today either, because recitative would still have too suggestive an effect on people today; we would make them unfree. Therefore, the ceremonies must not be performed in any other way than as initial ceremonies, initial cults, which I will now talk to you about.

The Sunday ritual is performed in such a way that the children are to gather in front of the entrance door to the room where the Sunday ritual is performed. There is someone standing at the door who first has to make the child aware that he or she must enter this room in a very special mood. Therefore, as the child enters the room, he or she is taken by the hand and told:

You know you are going to the act that
is to uplift your soul to the spirit of the world.

I will begin by telling you. I will speak later about how the matter can be carried out in a completely Christian sense, not in an anthroposophical sense, which must shape the matter differently, but which shapes it in such a way that it is led to the Christian. I would like to point out that what is being explained here is being done precisely because an anthroposophical religious education has been requested, which can only emerge from what anthroposophy already is and is allowed to be.

So the child is received with the words, by being greeted with the touch of the hand:

You know you are going to the act that
is to uplift your soul to the spirit of the world.

Then the child enters the room, which is relatively extraordinarily simple at first. It has a kind of altar at one wall, with seven candles on it. We shall have more to say about these seven candles in this context. Above the altar there must be a picture of Christ. Since I have not yet been able to get hold of a better one, the Stuttgart Waldorf School uses the one painted by Leonardo da Vinci as the image of the youthful Christ. But that is still an imperfection, but one can only do what is possible under the real circumstances.

Now the person who is facing the altar, with his back to the children as they enter, turns around and faces the children. He now speaks words to the children that are thoroughly ritualistic, in which the formulation of the sentences is such that the sequence of words moves in an element where the person cannot say that he speaks, but rather that he expresses what the Christ has to say within him. So the person says:

We now raise our thoughts and feelings to the spirit,
To the spirit that lives and works
In stone, plants and animals;
That lives and works in human thoughts and deeds, That works in everything that works,
That lives in everything that lives,
He who leads the living into death, so that it may live anew,
He who leads the dead into the living, so that it may behold the spirit.

Every word has been weighed, not only so that it stands as a word, but also so that each word stands in its right place and in the right relationship to the other words. After the one who is speaking has spoken this, he turns to the Christ-Image and speaks with arms raised to the Christ-Image the following words:

He who works as a spirit in the universe took on body in him.
Christ died.
He came to life in the being of human beings
Who gave him a home in their hearts.
Let our heart turn to him too.
Let it be imbued with his power
So that he may work in it
So that he may permeate
our thinking, feeling and willing.

So this is the direction towards the Christ-spirit of the world. Now the person who is doing the work speaks, turning to the children and with hands that bless. The gesture for blessing consists of taking two fingers together and spreading the hands out in this way. [The gesture is demonstrated.] Now the point is that the moment has come when Communion should be administered or something similar. So it is the case that the officiant turns to the children. After saying the words that I have expressed, the person turns to the children and speaks, preparing them, as it were, for what is to be said as a substitute for receiving Communion:

My dear ones! We learn to understand the world.
We learn to work in the world.
Love among people revives all human endeavor
Without love, being human becomes bleak and empty.
Christ is the teacher of human love.

The person who is acting speaks to the children about the relationship between Christ and them. This is followed by the common prayer, which is spoken in unison:

We lift up all our feeling and thinking to the Spirit of God.
We honor the Spirit of God. We love the Spirit of God.
We will remember the Spirit of God
When we are alone,
And also when we are with people.
Then He will be with us.

You must pay attention to all the details. In particular, you must pay attention to the fact that this turning to the Spirit of God is required “when we are alone and also when we are with people”.

Now follows what must first be introduced as a kind of surrogate for Communion, which can take on different forms, insofar as it can be given to children or an indicative substitute for it can be given to them. We cannot do more than the officiant approaches each individual child and speaks, laying his hand on the child's head or extending his hand – so it is spoken to each individual child, going through the whole row [of children]; before, it was only spoken to them as a group:

The spirit of God will be with you if you seek it.

The child answers:

I will seek it.

So you don't have to take this as a lecture, but as a ceremony.

Now the officiant returns to the altar and, with hands blessing, says:

I call upon the spirit of God
to be with you when you seek it.

After this, the Gospel chapter is read, which must be read in the correct manner at the appropriate time. We will have more to say about the distribution of the Gospel chapters throughout the year. Then the children sing a hymn that is relevant to the whole service, and finally the officiant says:

Dear children! I now dismiss you,

But keep in good thoughts

What you have heard, felt and thought here.

Then appropriate music follows. The children then leave the hall after the officiant has stepped back from the image of Christ.

The person performing the act can prepare himself by saying to himself before the act:

Through Your power, O Spirit of God,
I shall direct to You
the souls entrusted to me.
Let Your light illuminate the sphere of my thinking,
Your warmth of life permeates the center of my feeling, Your soul power permeates the radiant body of my will, Be in the service I want to do for you.

With these words, which he speaks to himself in thought, the doer prepares himself before the children are admitted.

I would like to make it clear that you should understand this as a ritual; you should not interpret it as a teaching instruction. This is counteracted by the fact that religious instruction is given in the corresponding religious education lessons. There is teaching, there is no cult.

The ritual that is performed, my dear friends, works, if it is performed in the right way and with the right attitude, precisely not as teaching for humanity. This must be borne in mind. And only in this way will you be able to understand how carefully the whole matter at hand is being handled. It can only be handled in such a way that the whole spirit of the matter is only gradually advanced, and we are actually coming to the development of the matter very slowly, because we can only respond, so to speak, to the signs of the times that we seek to understand.

Now, of course, it is important that the special times of the year also be made known to the child in the way he or she must be Christian, likewise through ritual. And so I would like to give you as an example the Christmas ritual first – we will talk about others later – which is added as a special one to the Sunday rituals, or would be performed on a Sunday if the birthday of Christ Jesus fell on a Sunday. So it is for the time being. I cannot say how things will turn out in the further development. So it is for the time being, according to our ability.

This Christmas action occurs in the same way as the Sunday actions. When the children have gathered, the person performing the action turns to them and says:

Dear children,

We live in the beginning of winter.
Our eyes see little of the outer sun.
It appears late and disappears early.
But within, our soul's eye beholds
In winter's cold and winter's darkness:
The bright shining spiritual sun of Christ,
Which has appeared through Jesus to humanity
From divine realms.

In the humble soul of the shepherd
Was heard the word of heaven:
God's spirit reveals itself in heights,
And he brings peace to the people of the earth,
In whose hearts dwells good will.
And the shepherds were led
By the lofty word of heaven,
And they sought the Spirit of God
After the proclamation on earth.
At the place of poverty they found
The child Jesus, who then became
The Christ.

It was the first Christmas in the world
When the humble shepherds
With a praying heart kneeled
At the poverty site before Jesus, the infant,
Through the light of the spirit
He appeared to the people of the earth.

Through the Christ
Who is the spirit sun, we will find
The way to spiritual heights,
And so become
First true people.
So the humble shepherds thought
In their intuitive souls,
When they saw the light,
That shone from the child's eyes
In the first Christmas of the world.

And as if they saw the light
The humble shepherds
There was a new beginning of the world:
The Christmas of mankind began.
And it can be light ever since
In the hearts of men,
Who learn to love
To say: behold, it is the Christ
Through whom the soul finds
The way into the spirit's
Sunshine-bright kingdom.

And it will remain bright
In the hearts of men,
Who lovingly feel
In their deepest innermost being
The light that shines there
On the way to the Christ
Sunshine-bright kingdom.

In the hearts of men
The dark night of winter
Becomes a bright spiritual day
When the soul consecrates itself
To the light that shines through Jesus
In earthly life.

The person carrying out the action goes to each child as usual and speaks to them:

Raise your thoughts and feelings
to the Christ-Spirit.

Then, after going back to the front of the line, he speaks to the children:

You shall raise your thoughts and feelings
to the Christ-Spirit,
He is the light
That shines in the hearts of men
So that they may find
The way to the Kingdom of God.

Now a piece of music suitable for Christmas should be played, and then the person carrying out the action continues:

Through the power of the Spirit's salvation,
In the consecration of the world,
Soul light awakens,
Human strength awakens,
Courage of the heart awakens,
After it once awakened
From times of Christmas
To eternal healing power.

Man fulfills himself
With true soul meaning,
When at Christmas time
He turns within
In strong thinking
In heartfelt feeling
To the power of Christ
Man strengthens himself
Through true spiritual power
When at Christmas time
He turns within
In bright thinking
In warm feeling
To the light of Christ.

Dear children:
Hold all this in your hearts,
and bring it from the holy Christmas season
into the life of the whole year.

This can, of course, be followed, in the sense that we will have to discuss it later, by a reading from the corresponding gospel.

Since we have accepted children of all age groups into the Waldorf School, we were soon obliged to also celebrate a youth festival with the children who had completed elementary school and were about to go out into life. This youth festival will be the basis for a confirmation or confirmation ritual. The text for this youth festival is the following: Upon entering, which is done in the same way as usual, the child is said, each one individually, for each one is admitted separately:

Consider the importance of this moment in your life.

Now the children are admitted, the person performing the act turns to the children and says:

Dear children, remember the importance of this moment in your life. You are entering a new age. You are rising from childhood to youth. Your teachers have guided you. Their concern was that the Spirit of God

shine in your thinking
be powerful in your feeling
be effective in your will.

Your teachers wanted to show you the Christ who died so that human souls could live, so that He might be:

the light in your soul
the guide on your path through life
the giver of the joys of existence
the comforter in the suffering of existence.

The man turns around and raises his arms, as I showed earlier, to the image of Christ, and says:

You light of souls
You guide on our paths of life
You giver of the joys of existence
You comforter in the suffering of existence
I spoke to you with beseeching words, imploring light for these children's thoughts, longing for strength for these children's feelings, seeking the blessing of action for these children's will. So send your light, bestow your strength, let your blessings flow in this hour
upon those who were entrusted to us
and whom we now hand over to life
so that they may
think through your light
feel through your strength
work through your blessing
in all their earthly lives
until in the moment of death
you lead them into the existence of the soul.
For you have spoken:

Now follows the reading of the high-priestly prayer from the Gospel of John. The person conducting the service then goes to each individual child, takes them by the hand and speaks to them:

Through the spirit of Christ
Who conquered death
So that the soul of man
Was saved in life
You were led
Here in this school for children:
So may the spirit of Christ guide
Your life forces
Your soul powers
Your spiritual goals
Through the great school of life.

The person who is doing this returns to his or her place and speaks about Easter in a speech that has something like the following content – here he is given complete freedom, and what I will now read as a speech to the children is to be understood only as an appeal:

Dear Children,

It was in spring, when the earth finds new life in its plants, that Christ went through death on Golgotha. He died. But he overcame death. As victor over death, he lives with people: he lives in people who seek him, seek him with all their thinking, feeling and willing. And every time spring brings the high Easter festival, then man, when he sees the new life of the earth, should remember death and the resurrection of Christ.

— The youth celebration is intended for Easter. —

Dear Children, each year at this Easter time, remember the feast we celebrate with you today and celebrate it anew each year, so that the thought of the death, resurrection and indwelling of Christ in the souls of those who seek him may be revived in you.

Then a hymn follows, as in the Sunday celebrations, prepared in the appropriate way for this festival. Finally, the following is spoken again:

Dear children, every Sunday I have
released you, asking you to remember
what you have experienced here;
now I dismiss you
with a sorrowful soul
into life.
The Spirit of Christ be with you
Seek Him
and you shall find Him:
As your light
As your strength
As your guide
As your comforter.

Each child is dismissed individually, taken by the hand and spoken to:

Remember the importance of this moment in your life. Never forget it, not in joy, not in sorrow.

Then the child is dismissed, at first from the action. The rest would be instruction, would no longer belong to the actual ritual.

I have given you here some examples of how this must be grasped in a living way in religious life, how it can flow into a cult that is now also sought in a completely living way out of that which can be a renewed religious life. Everything, my dear friends, is imperfect in the beginning, and of course many, many objections can be raised against any beginning. Accept this as a beginning, and know that where there is a sincere desire for such a beginning, the strength to improve what can be given in such a beginning will also be found. I believe, my dear friends, that it is not a matter of stifling such a child in its beginning, but rather of working on what is wanted. Of course, where the living and not the dogmatic is desired, every objection can only be welcome. But it should be clear to you from this example that, wherever the living is sought, the cultic must be sought. I have already been able to draw your attention to the prayerful character of what the person performing the action can have as a preparatory prayer. In a similar way, we begin each teaching morning, of course in a correspondingly simple way. This, of course, goes beyond the principle if the principle is only grasped in a completely abstract way. If the principle were grasped in a completely abstract way, we would not be allowed to place anything at the beginning of the teaching morning at all, but would have to start [with the teaching] straight away. But that would be quite impossible, because after all, all teaching must have a mood to it, and ultimately the Christian mood cannot be something that hovers above everything as an abstraction, but must be incorporated into every detail. There can be no principle in the life of the world, only that which changes in life. This should not be seen as an inconsistency, but as a requirement of life itself.

But you also see that, in accordance with what can only be use today, we must remain with the word as much as possible, and only the word itself can be transformed into action, because action is already inherent in the word, especially when the word occurs in the context of life itself. It is absolutely the case that in such a youth celebration, not only is something discussed, but something happens, something happens to the souls, not with, but to the souls of the children.

Just compare this, my dear friends, with how strong the belief was that the main thing had to be put into the teaching material that was being taught. Basically, this is still the case today in all religious denominations and in all forms of religion; too much emphasis is placed on the teaching material as such, on its dogmatic or other content. One must gradually come out of the merely human word and, by detour, by being aware that one draws the word from the spiritual worlds for the ceremony, penetrate to the immersion of the whole ceremonial in an atmosphere where acts of worship can take place without sacrificial acts.

But in the course of time, another problem arose: the children of the dissidents also wanted to be baptized. Until now, of course, I could only help myself, at least in the main, by teaching our friends who are priests and who were also imbued with the idea of breathing new life into their profession a baptismal ritual that could only be in keeping with the spirit of the times. But, my dear friends, before I proceed to this baptismal ritual tomorrow, I must make a few remarks, without which this baptismal ritual could not be understood. You see, a baptismal ritual would be impossible to create if one did not inspire one's understanding of the world and of God through that which in earlier times, when such things still lived atavistically, flowed into a ritual at all. I have pointed out to you times when no alchemical operation (that is, in those days, chemical operation) was carried out without the alchemist (that is, in our language, the chemist) having the Book of the Gospels in front of him in his alchemical laboratory. People at that time said that one would not have considered oneself authorized to carry out an alchemical process in the true sense of the word with the right attitude without the Gospel. You must always bear in mind how far a modern chemist is from such a thing, and how a modern chemist would fare if he were expected not to act with his retorts and his heating apparatus and with all that he does if he did not have the gospel book at his laboratory table. One must penetrate something like this if one seriously wants to see through what it is all about. One must also understand the concern that was present precisely in those who had the good eye in the times when modern science was emerging and one could see that, abandoned by the Spirit of God, actions were being carried out in accordance with the external laws of nature and external natural forces. One must put oneself in the shoes of such people, who were seized by a terrible fear when they heard that Agrippa von Nettesheim or his teacher, the Sponheimer, were performing something that had to do with new powers. They were extremely concerned that this should not have anything to do with divine powers. And so one must put oneself in the frame of mind that consecrating religious services, performing ceremonies, celebrating was nothing other than the highest stage of that which one also performed in alchemy. Therefore, one must really be imbued with the realization that not only external signs were present in those things that were used in a cultic act, but that the view that was held at that time of the substantial that served one in a cultic act was present. It was not, as would be the case today, decided to devise this or that symbol for this or that, whereby human arbitrariness plays an enormous role and with which one actually has to struggle continuously today. Isn't it true that in all these things it really depends on the how. And so it is just as necessary that in order to understand rituals it is also recognized that there is nothing arbitrary in the ritual, but a deeper knowledge of the substantiality of the world than can be admitted at present in science at all.

You see, a few years ago, for example, I read in a book written with good intentions that dealt with the history of alchemy how an alchemist's recipe from around the time of Basilius Valentinus's work was cited. The recipe was presented as it could be described from the works of Basilius Valentinus, which are largely forgeries. Then the excellent chemist who had to judge it wrote his verdict and said: This is complete nonsense, it is all nonsense; today's chemist cannot imagine what it means, it is complete nonsense. — Not a single word that the historian wrote down is wrong. The man could only not imagine anything because the recipe combined words that had to be learned in their terminological meaning, of which one would first have to know how they were used. There was talk of processes that are again expressed according to the words today, of dissolution, of heating and so on. Yes, if one reads the word “loosening” as today's chemists do, it is nonsense. If you read the word 'gold' as today's chemist does, it is nonsense, and if you read the word 'mercury', today's chemist cannot imagine what it is at all; because he understands mercury to mean the mercury that we also have in thermometer tubes, for example. If we approach the formulas of the 13th and 12th centuries with this terminology, they are complete nonsense today, and it would be much better if people admitted to themselves that they appear to be nonsense than if people today , which is what is really happening, they run to the antiquarian bookshops and buy works by Basilius Valentinus, which are forgeries – but which sometimes contain correct things that are just not understood today – or they buy all kinds of works by Paracelsus. They read it and think they understand it, while it would be more honest to just say to themselves: That is the height of madness from the point of view of today. That is just what must be taken into account; in this respect people today have, I might say, basically strayed from the honest sense of truth; they write and prattle on in words and are satisfied if the words are only moved into a slightly different atmosphere from the one they are accustomed to hearing today, even if they do not understand the words. Today, because all these things are taught in school, there is definitely an atmosphere in which people say to themselves: Yes, one hears about water, salt, phosphorus, mercury; one can understand all that, one understands it if one picks up the very first chemistry textbook today. But [they think], that which one understands cannot be of any value, that is knowledge that is of no value from the outset. Now they take a work by Paracelsus or a work by Basilius Valentinus. There they find the same words, but because they cannot understand it in the context, they believe that they are now in mystical depths because they do not understand anything, but they want to believe that they are experiencing something. That is where we have to be honest. Even if we only go back that far, we still have to search a little for the key. We have to learn to read these things, because today it is extremely difficult to even get a correct idea of what the spirit, what the supernatural actually is. It helps a great deal if one prepares oneself by delving into times when the spirit was still alive in the material world, by going back to such times and asking oneself: What did people in the 12th or 13th century understand when they talked about salt, water, ash? Not at all what people understand today. What did they understand when they spoke of salt, water, ash?

This is what I wanted to point out to you first, and I will start on it tomorrow when I have more to say about ritualism.

Today I should like you really to speak out what is in your minds so that the discussion can center around it.

Question: A question in the hearts of all of us is how to succeed with the meditations that we have been given. At what times ought we to do them, ought they to be done in rhythmic sequence, how ought they to be done, ought those given at Christmas to be done at the same time as the others? We think that at any rate most of us feel rather oppressed with all the substance that is contained in the meditations and we do not yet know how to live with them properly.

In these things one really ought not to give such strict indications for this would be to encroach too much upon the freedom of the individual. If things are looked at in the right way it is not likely that there will be any feeling of oppression. When the meditations were given here at Christmas it was also indicated in which direction they move the soul. It was said—and the same applies to the meditations that are now being given in the First Class—that with these meditations it is rather different than when someone comes and wishes to have a personal meditation. In the case of a personal meditation one must naturally indicate whether the meditation should be done in the morning or the evening, how the person must act in the sense of this meditation, and so on. These meditations are intended to be part of the esoteric life of the individual according to his capacities and his karma. They then lead of themselves to the individual not remaining in isolation but unfolding within himself the impulse to recognize those who have similar aspirations. Such meditation must be regarded as a personal meditation.

So far as the other kind of meditations are concerned it would be good if they were done at a definite time or in special circumstances, or when accompanied by definite circumstances. In giving all meditations like those of the esoteric instruction given at Christmas, one has in mind the goal that is striven for. And then it is a matter of using the circumstances of one's life, the special situations of one's life, to make such meditations. Such meditations are done when one finds the necessary spare time for them—the more often the better. They will always have their effect. Precisely with such meditations the striving should be for personal development. One should try to find the link from the results that happen in the spiritual life, and one will, moreover, find it. In reality, the feeling of oppression would come if definite rules were laid down in regard to individuals or a group doing them at the same time as you say. Moreover this would lead to the meditation losing something that it really ought to have. Every meditation, you see, is impaired if one starts from the feeling that it is one's duty to do it. You must bear this well in mind. Every meditation is impaired by the feeling of being obliged to do it. Therefore in the case of the personal meditations it is absolutely necessary for this personal meditation gradually to become something that the human being feels in his soul to be like a thirst for meditation. Those who really thirst for their meditation just as a man eats when he is hungry, do their morning and evening meditations in the best way. When meditation becomes something without which a person cannot exist, when he feels that it is part and parcel of the whole life of his soul, then he has the right attitude to meditation.

With the other meditations, what matters is the inner desire, the inner will to become a physician and to say to oneself: “This is my path and I will meditate as often as I possibly can. I realize that when I do the one or the other meditation, it has this or that aim.” Out of the free, inner will of man, therefore, there must arise the urge to such meditation, to the carrying out of such a meditation. It is really inconceivable how anyone can feel a sense of oppression. For why should anything for which one thirsts inwardly, also give rise to a sense of oppression? If it oppresses, it has already been made into a matter of duty and that is just what meditation should never be. It should never be a matter of duty. Precisely when it is a question of becoming a physician, the following ought to be taken in the very deepest sense: The conception of becoming a physician ought not to be as it is today, namely, entering a profession. One ought really to become a physician because of an inner calling, an inner devotion to healing. This general urge to be able to heal is the true accompaniment, and one is then led towards the goal. Perhaps in few professions is it so harmful as it is in the profession of the physician to think of this profession as an external duty. Love for humanity must be implicit in the physician's profession. A physician should find his bearings quite naturally in his work.

Now, although in modern medicine, in modern medical studies, it is not very favorable for real healing when people become physicians just because they must become something or other and because the medical profession seems for some reason to be desirable, it is still worse when someone thinks he can become a physician artificially, through meditation, without feeling this thirst of which I have spoken. If the aim is a true one, ancient esoteric methods of development demand infinitely more than an external decision; and they do much more harm than external circumstances of life if they do not spring from the right attitude of soul. But you must also have a right conception of what I have here called the “attitude of soul.” What we call karma is not, as a rule, taken very seriously in life. An inner vocation arises, of course, because karma has put a person in a certain place. We must realize that to follow something out of a sense of duty is injurious, but to follow karma is something that accords entirely with the direction of human evolution. The karma of all of you has brought you to work in medicine, and now if only you will look deeply enough within yourselves you will find that you really do feel the thirst of which I have spoken. And you will find, too, the moments and hours when you want to do such meditations.

Now just when one takes up such a serious profession in all earnestness, the following (which has happened frequently since the Christmas Foundation Meeting) really should not be. It is not connected directly with medical work, but it is connected very strongly with the “human universal” inasmuch as it exists within the general Anthroposophical movement, and so it is also of importance to you. I shall speak about it in another place, but because it holds good very specially for you, I will say it here too. It was said at the Christmas Foundation that a new character must come into the Anthroposophical movement, that inner work must be done. Now many people drew a strange conclusion from this. There are people within the Anthroposophical movement who have definite positions and offices. Such people have written: Yes, I understand perfectly that a new character is to come into the Anthroposophical movement. I place myself entirely at the disposal of this, I do not want to remain in my old position. But this can never lead to anything. It can only lead to something when the person concerned knows that at the place at which he stands he must find his development, find it in reality, also in connection with the faculties which he uses and applies. This, naturally, is the case with you who have begun to work in the medical profession. You must regard it as karma and you must realize that your work in the future will be tremendous. You must realize, secondly, that the thirst of which I have spoken, the thirst to approach the true preparation for medicine by way of meditation, is also to be found in the soul.

This is what I wanted to say about the practice of meditation. Each meditation should enlighten and support the other. It may well be that some one meditation has worked strongly, and now you must do a different one in order to strengthen the effects still more. You do one meditation once, twice; you do another twelve times. This is something that comes when you really take to heart what is given as a meditation, when you experience it inwardly, and also when you take to heart what has been said about the goal of meditation. We must use this opportunity for developing much that was touched upon at Christmas.

Question: My conception was not that it was a question of meditating at definite times, but in spite of that I was aware of a sense of oppression because I considered it a duty to do this meditation and often I was not really fresh enough to feel it as a need. Perhaps this is due to the fact, in my case at least, that up to now I have not had the attitude that one ought to have as a physician, that I have not had the real will to heal. I think it has been the same with one or two of us. Many of us have not become physicians in order to heal, but we have become physicians because of the great interest that we had in getting to know the nature of man, his conditions of disease and his normal conditions. We approached medicine entirely from the side of knowledge. Up till Christmas the will to heal was something entirely foreign to me; and so, to begin with, my work made me very unhappy because I had a great deal to do and at the beginning was too tired for meditation. But this work brought me more together with patients so that now I have an inkling of what it means to have the will to heal, and I think that now I shall be better able to meditate because this springs from a real need. Meditation can then really be seen as a path to the goal. Precisely this devotion to human destiny, this sympathy that one feels as a physician for everyone—this, and the will to heal which was not indicated through one's studies which lead to medicine more from the side of knowledge—is surely something that, until recently, has caused difficulties to many of us.

You must remember the following. When, in the sphere of medicine you divide these two things, the side of knowledge and the will to heal, it is a contradiction of the reality. It is very important to realize what is at stake here. Knowledge of the nature of man is necessary in many different fields of human activity. In pedagogy, for example, the essential starting point is a knowledge of the nature of the human being. In other domains, too, there must be knowledge of the nature of man if we have an eye to realities. Knowledge of the nature of man is essential for everyone who wants to get beyond superficialities. It is necessary for everyone. The fact that knowledge of the real nature of man is not sought for in many fields of activity is a consequence of the errors into which modern civilization has lapsed. In a certain sense this knowledge is sought for—although it cannot be found there because it can only be found today by way of Anthroposophy. It is sought for by theologians (I mean by the ordinary theologians). All kinds of people are looking and seeking for knowledge of the being of man. The only ones who are not seeking for it are the lawyers, because jurisprudence today is something which simply cannot be said to take hold of the realities of the world. The essential thing is that knowledge of the human being has to be somewhat specialized in the various domains of life. The physician needs a rather different kind of knowledge from the educator—a rather different kind only. It is necessary for educators to know as much as possible about education. There ought certainly to be connecting threads; there should be a hither and thither between the one and the other field of activity, based upon knowledge of the human being.

So far as concrete details of knowledge of the human being are concerned, the following must be remembered. You spoke about knowing the conditions of disease in a human being. This is a preconception—the outcome of materialism. In itself it is a materialistic preconception. Taken in the concrete, what does it mean to know the conditions of disease in the human being? How can I know anything about a disease that is localized, let us say, in the liver, in the spleen, in the lungs, in the heart? How do I get knowledge of it? When I know what kind of healing process might be capable of overcoming the process of disease. In reality the process of disease is the question and one remains at a standstill at this point if one's only aim is to get knowledge of the process of disease. The answer is the healing process. We know nothing at all about a process of disease when we do not know how it can be healed. Understanding consists in the knowledge of how the morbid process can be eliminated. Without the will to heal there can be no medical study in the true sense. To know conditions of disease means nothing. Without passing on from the pathology to the therapy one would simply be concerned with the pathological aspect, imagining that one was thus getting knowledge of the human being. One would simply be describing a diseased organ. But a description of this kind is quite inadequate; is not of the least value. So far as mere description and abstract knowledge are concerned there is no essential difference between a healthy or a diseased liver. In the sense of natural science there is no distinction to be made between a healthy and a diseased liver. The most that can be said is that a healthy liver is more frequent than a diseased one. But this is an external condition. If you want to get knowledge of a diseased liver, you must go into what is able to heal the diseased liver.

Upon what does healing depend? It depends upon knowing which substances, which forces must be applied to the human being in order that the process of disease may pass over into the healthy process. Such knowledge is transmitted, for instance, by the fact that one knows: Equisetum, within the human organism, takes over the activity of the kidneys. When, therefore, the activity of the kidneys is not sufficiently cared for by the astral body, I shall see that they are cared for by equisetum. I give support to the astral body by means of equisetum arvense. Here for the first time is the answer to what is really happening. The same process in the external world which leads to equisetum also takes its course in the human kidneys. The equisetum process must be studied in connection with the kidneys. This leads us to the domain of healing.

Thus it can never be a matter of pathology in a merely abstract sense or of a description of conditions of disease—all this amounts to nothing in reality. Our picture of a condition of disease should be that such and such a remedy works in such and such a way. The feeling that we have about knowledge in all domains of life should lead on to reality, not to formalism. It was always so when knowledge was everywhere connected with the Mysteries. In the Mysteries, knowledge was inevitably withheld from those who merely desired it in the formal sense and imparted only to those who had the will to lead over this knowledge into reality. Is that an answer to your question?

Question: I may have expressed myself rather radically when I spoke only about health and disease. In point of fact, I do consider the way in which the human being should be healed also to be a part of knowledge. I meant something rather different, namely, that one may know how a person can be healed but may not have the will to heal him. Up to now I have not, inwardly, had the impulse only to understand the human being in order to heal. I had not the impulse to let the whole of my work and studies and knowledge be filled entirely with the realization: I must be capable of healing the human being.

That is hypertrophy of knowledge.

Question: This is a fact with me and I wanted to speak about it because it is so. Perhaps it sounds very strange.

What I am going to say may sound very trivial and simple. It is as well that this kind of attitude cannot make clocks, for if it could, you would have clocks put together quite correctly according to the clock maker's art, but they would not want to go. By letting his will hypertrophy towards the one side or the other, a person can develop this or that, but the result will be of such a nature that it is not in line with the healthy evolution of human nature. Knowledge of healing should simply not exist without the will to heal. Today you ought to be speaking of something quite different. You should really be saying: “Yes, I have studied medicine for a short time and now I have an ungovernable will to heal. I must restrain myself so that this will which comes from knowledge does not break loose in such a way that I want to heal all the healthy people!” This is really not a joke. The voice should be a voice of restraint. It should simply not be possible to say: “I have striven for the knowledge of healing but not the will to heal!” For a knowledge that is real cannot separate itself from the will—that is quite impossible.

Question: I think that what was expressed in the previous question is a condition brought about by the kind of studies that are pursued at the universities. It seems to me to be a final result of such studies. The aim of all medical science is really knowledge, without leading over to the therapeutic aspect. In the lecture halls and the clinical courses one hears a little about diagnosis and when the professor does not know what to do until the new patient is brought in, he throws in a few words about the therapy. In a course on gynecology once, the lecturer spoke about the work of the physician in his practice. “Has it not struck you,” he said, “that in reality so little is said about therapy? You will realize this for the first time when you begin to practice. That is what happened to me. I had a head full of knowledge and then I realized the other.” Then he said that five minutes were given to the therapy and forty minutes to the diagnosis. Nobody realized that during all their studies they had heard nothing about therapy. This leads me to a question, because this fundamental attitude of modern science causes me many difficulties and conflicts. As a physician I was looking for something different in scientific medicine. This entirely superficial attitude which leads to all kinds of things, especially in diagnosis, often gives rise to results that are really repellent. Let me give an example. A patient came to me and asked, could I not help her? She suffered from recurrent inflammation of the frontal sinuses and she had been many times to a specialist. Among other things perforation had been done by way of the nose. She said she could not bear it any longer, she felt that the whole interpretation of her condition was too physical, and she asked if I could not help her in some other way. This attitude that the patient had realized is universal. It simply gropes on the surface and leads nowhere. It can only remain on the surface and it cannot lead to the real state of the case. And so I have often asked myself: Is it really good or indeed is it necessary to go so deeply into these methods which are considered a sine qua non in medical studies—methods which simply reach the point of monstrosity in gynecological research and simply have no relation to the final outcome? Is it necessary to go through all these things? I have the feeling that any instinct for healing which may exist is suppressed entirely by going through these things. I would like to mention something told to me by a former colleague. He was speaking of a peasant doctor in the Bavarian Alps who used to perform all kinds of orthopedic cures with such skill that he became famous. An orthopedic specialist in Munich got to hear of what this man was doing, went to see him and told him that he should come to him in his clinic. This man saw all the apparatus in the clinic and the specialist told him to show him how he worked. The peasant doctor looked at it all and from then onwards he could no longer cure people. Ought we to go through all the methods of scientific medical training or ought we to avoid them as far as is at all possible?

When you approach the question in this way, it becomes extremely important. You are right in thinking that I did not want to speak about personal characteristics of the prior questioner but to describe the attitude that inevitably arises from the modern methods of study. The true kind of medical studies would never lead anyone to desire knowledge of conditions of disease or processes of healing without at the same time having the will to heal. Such a thing would never arise out of true medical studies. It arises because of the way medical studies are arranged today. It must be admitted on the one side that by far the greatest part of what the medical student has to learn today in his various courses has nothing fundamentally to do with healing as such as therefore burdens the mind with all kinds of impossible things. In modern medical training it is more or less the same as it would be to make a sculptor, let us say, learn first of all about the scientific properties of marble and wood with which, in reality, he is not concerned. A great deal of what is contained in the medical textbooks today or is done in clinics has little to do with medicine in the real sense.

The moment you pass on from the physical description—this was what the lady of whom you spoke felt to be too physical—the moment you pass on to the etheric body, most of the things in the medical textbooks lose their significance because the moment you come to the etheric body the organs present quite a different aspect. When you pass from the physical to the etheric body, intellectual knowledge alone will get you nowhere. You will learn much more if you learn how to sculpture, if you learn the hand grip, the feeling for space that is needed by the sculptor.

So far as knowledge of the astral body is concerned, you learn far more when you can apply the laws of music. From music you learn an enormous amount about the forming of the human organism, how this process of formation develops out of the astral body. Inasmuch as the human being is organized for movement, for activity, he is built up, in reality, like a musical scale. Here (back of the shoulders) begins the tonic; then it passes over into the second, then into the third in the lower arms, where there are two bones because there are two thirds. This brings you to truths quite different from those which are considered nowadays to pertain to a real knowledge of the human being and quite a different course of teaching would really be necessary for one who is approaching medicine in the true sense.

The modern form of teaching has arisen from the fact that therapy has become nihilistic. Not only in the Viennese school of medicine has this been the case, but everywhere it is the same. Among the professors and lecturers who represent the various scientific faculties there have, at least, been serious minds who, in spite of all their shortsightedness, were, at any rate, scientific. At all events a certain earnestness was present. But when one comes to those who lecture about remedies, the earnestness ceases. The lecturer himself has no fundamental belief in what he is lecturing about. The earnestness stops at the point where the therapy begins.

From where, then, is the will to heal to proceed? It must proceed from a course of medical studies such as I outlined in connection with the course given at Christmas, where I spoke of what the sequence of studies should be. That, of course, is very different from the things that go on today and do not lead to a real art of medicine. In most cases, the practitioner has to learn things by dint of great effort when he has left his medical school. This is often not an altogether easy matter because the things he has learned are not only useless but actually harmful to him. He cannot see the real process of disease because all sorts of things are memorized in his head and he cannot see the process of disease in its reality. That is the one side.

But now, you are a group of young physicians. In the spiritual sense you have to be something more. The best way to attain that would be to say: Leave all medical studies alone, there is no true medical faculty today where you can study medicine in the real sense—come here and learn the essentials. In the radical sense, that is what one would say. But where would you be then? The world would reject you, would not recognize you as physicians. The only course open to the young physician is to go through the whole thing and then be healed by what he can learn of medicine here. With all the repugnance that you may feel, you must take the orthodox and regular course of study. There is no other alternative; it is absolutely necessary. That is the other side of the picture.

People like magnetic healers and amateurs who dabble in medicine abuse the university schools, but that is no use at all. Those who know how things are and who are led by experience to real understanding—they will be the true pioneers of reasonable medical study. This should be your endeavor: to awaken public opinion about the state of affairs. You realize, of course, that it is not you alone who speak as you have done. There are many physicians who speak in the same way, but they need what can be given here. And why? When one is an intelligent person today and becomes a physician, having passed through the university, one can, of course, criticize orthodox medicine. One has passed through the whole thing and knows what one lacks. But this knowledge can become effective only when one has got something to put in its place. Only then can it be effective. This, of course, is the other side. And so you must not take what I am saying here in the sense that I have any desire to hold back young physicians from completing their study. Bad as it may be, it is still necessary today to eat the bitter apple. When it is possible to speak on the platform of things which ought not to be—then and only then will there be a gradual improvement.

In this connection, you see, there is still a great deal to be done. I think I have already told the story of how I was once invited to speak about some medical subject to a group of physicians in Zurich. A professor of gynecology was also there. I saw that he had come with the attitude: “Well, we will listen to this lunatic so that at least we can abuse him, being justified by the fact that we did actually hear what he had to say” He came quite honestly in order to be amused by listening to a lunatic. His manner grew stranger and stranger and he listened in a most peculiar way. It was very unpleasant for him to find that he was not listening to a lunatic, that it could not all be put down as pure nonsense. I myself found it most amusing. I said to him: “This has made a strange impression on you, professor.” He replied: “Yes, one simply cannot speak about it. It is decidedly a different point of view.” It is, after all, a sign of progress when one gets to the point where people say: “It is a different point of view.”

What is it that has arisen by the side of scientific medicine which, after all, still towers above anything that has been achieved by the medicine of amateurs? I know that laymen have made progress. But it amounts to nothing. The valve in a steam engine was invented by a small boy one day when he was bored. One could not say of him that he was really capable of constructing engines because he invented the valve. Those who abuse scientific medicine today are really not justified in abusing it for they are talking about something of which they have no knowledge. What we have to achieve is not to mix up anthroposophical conceptions in medicine with what is already in existence. If in doing so we succeed in showing that we are sincere and serious, then great progress will have been achieved.

As you are young, I would like especially to lay this on your hearts. Let the aim of all the esotericism you receive be to make you capable of working also in the world, so that the real will to heal may unfold. Your aim cannot be to shut yourselves off, each one in the chamber of his heart. You must work to the end that medicine shall make real progress, just as the aim of educators is to enable education to make progress.

It is not possible for me to speak in detail of how most things that go on today in medical studies are really not essential for the understanding of the healthy and the sick human being. But if you study what I have given in the various lecture courses and cycles, you will find it. Suppose when a baby is born we were to ask ourselves how it should be fed, imagining that it is not possible to feed a baby properly before one has given him some idea about the nature of the foodstuffs: so it is with many things today. What I mean to convey is that one should have the intuition to understand a process spiritually, not physically. In diagnosis it is often more necessary to go back to the early causes which may lie at a definite time, very far back in the case of some patients. Methods are taught today for recognizing the condition of the diseased or the healthy organism at the actual time when the patient comes. But what is lacking is the kind of thinking which enables one to say to the patient: Fifty years ago this or that happened to you and that is the primary cause of your illness. As a rule, physicians depend upon what the patient himself says, and that is unreliable. The first cause is the external cause—it comes from outside. A physician in Christiania once brought a man of sixty to me. He had all kinds of eczema which it was easy to diagnose. But nothing that was applied was any help. The physician brought him to me, and the state of things was quite clear—I mention one example from hundreds—if one is to help in such a case, one must know the real starting point. In this case it was not very difficult. I very soon discovered that thirty or thirty-five years previously the man must have suffered from severe poisoning. This was still working in him. I told him to try and remember what had happened to him thirty-five years before. He told me that nobody had yet asked him such a thing. He said that he was in school and beside his classroom there had been a chemical laboratory where he had seen a glass containing liquid. He was thirsty and he drank the liquid. It was hydrochloric acid and he was severely poisoned.

It is very important to know such things. They lead one beyond the condition of the moment. Thus it is often important, for example, with certain conditions of hysteria, to know whether the person concerned has undergone the shock of having been nearly drowned. These things must be gone into. We go into them quite naturally when we have real sympathy for the human being whom we want to heal, and all medicine must take its start from sympathy with the human being. If this sympathy is lacking, the most significant things will be forgotten. That is what must be remembered in this direction.

Do all of you intend to come tomorrow? If so, we will say more about these things. I wanted now—without giving any explanation, for that I will do tomorrow—to give you certain lines which may become a central meditation. If you think about these lines again and again they will help you to realize what is built into the human being out of the cosmos, out of the earth's periphery, and by earthly forces. If you ask yourselves in connection with the formation of the eye: How is the eye formed from the cosmos?—if you ask yourselves how a lung is formed out of the forces of the earth's periphery, out of the planetary forces moving in the elements of air and water—if you ask how metabolism in the human being arises in connection with the earthly—then, if you will meditate on these questions in the light of the following lines, you will learn to look into the real nature of the human being.

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