The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If you were in the Cathedral last night you could have seen written there in illuminated lettering: C. M. B. As you will all know, these letters represent the names of the so-called Three Holy Kings, according to the tradition of the Christian Church: Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar. These names awaken quite special memories for Cologne. An old legend tells us that some time after they had become bishops and died their bones had been brought here. Another legend relates that a Danish king had once come to Cologne, bringing with him three crowns for the Three Holy Kings. After he had returned home he had a dream; in his dream the three kings appeared to him and offered him three chalices: the first chalice contained gold, the second frankincense, and the third one myrrh. When the Danish king awoke the three kings had vanished, but the chalices remained; they stood before him; the three gifts which he had retained from his dream.

In this legend there is profound meaning. We are to understand that the king in his dream attained a certain insight into the spiritual world by which he learnt the symbolic meaning of these three kings, these three wise men of the East who brought offerings of gold, frankincense and myrrh at the birth of Christ Jesus. And from this realisation he retained a lasting possession: those three human virtues which are symbolised in the gold, the frankincense and the myrrh: self-knowledge in the gold; self-piety, that is the piety of the innermost self—which we can call self-surrender—in the frankincense; and in the myrrh self-consummation and self-development, or the preservation of the eternal in the self.

It was possible for the king to receive these three virtues as gifts from another world because he had endeavoured to penetrate with his whole soul into the profound symbol lying concealed in the three kings who brought their offerings to Christ Jesus.

There are many features in this legend which lead us a long way towards understanding the Christ-principle, and what it is to bring about in the world. Among its profound features are the Adoration and the Presentation by the three Magi, the three Oriental Kings, and only with the deepest understanding may we approach this fundamental symbolism of the Christian tradition. Later the idea was formed that the first king was the representative of the Asiatic races; the second, the representative of the European peoples; and the third, the representative of the African races. Wherever people wanted to understand Christianity as the religion of earthly harmony they saw in the three kings and their homage a union of the different lines of thought and religious movements in the world into the One principle, the Christian principle. When this legend received this form those who had penetrated into the principles of esoteric Christianity saw in Christianity not only a force which had affected the course of human development, but they saw in the Being embodied in Jesus of Nazareth a cosmic world-force—a force far transcending the merely human that prevails in this present age. They saw in the Christ-principle a force that indeed represents for mankind a human ideal lying in a far distant future, an ideal which can only be approached by our understanding the whole world more and more in the spirit. They saw in man, in the first place, a miniature being, a miniature world, a microcosm, an image of the macrocosm, the great, all-embracing world. This macrocosm comprises all that man can perceive with his external senses, see with his eyes, hear with his ears, but comprises, besides, all that the spirit could perceive from the perceptions of the least developed human spirit up to perceptions in the spiritual world. This was how the esoteric Christian of the earliest times regarded the world. All he saw in the firmament or on our earth, all he saw as thunder and lightning, as storm and rain, as sunshine, as the course of the stars, as sunrise and sunset, as moonrise and the setting of the moon—all this was for him a gesture, something like a mimicry, an external expression of inner spiritual processes. The esoteric Christian looks on the universe as he looks on the human body. When he looks on the human body he sees it as consisting of different limbs: the head, arms, hands, and so on. When he looks on the human body and sees the movements of hand, eye, etc., these are for him the expression of the inner spiritual and psychic experiences. In the same way as he looked through the human limbs, and their movements, into that which is eternal, spiritual in man, the esoteric Christian regarded the movements of the stars, the light that streams down from the stars to humanity, the rising and setting of the sun, the rising and setting of the moon, as the external expression of divine-spiritual Beings pervading all space. All these natural phenomena were to him deeds of the gods, gestures of the gods, expressions in mime of those divine-spiritual Beings, as also was everything that occurs among mankind, when people establish social communities, when they submit to moral commandments and regulate their dealings through laws, when from the forces of nature they create instruments for themselves. These implements, indeed, they make with the help of the forces of nature, but in a form in which they are not to be found directly. All that was done in humanity, more or less unconsciously, was for the esoteric Christian the external expression of inner divine-spiritual sway. But the esoteric Christian did not confine himself to such general forms, he pointed to quite definite single gestures, single parts of the physiognomy of the universe, of the mimes of the universe, in order to see in these single parts quite definite expressions of the spiritual. When he pointed to the sun he said: The sun is not merely an external, physical body; this external, physical solar body is the body of a spiritual-psychic Being; one of those psychic-spiritual Beings who are the rulers, the leaders of all earthly fate, the leaders of all natural occurrences on the earth, but also of all that happens in human, social life, in the relationship of men among each other as determined by laws. When the esoteric Christian looked up to the sun he revered in the sun the external revelation of his Christ. In the first place the Christ was for him the sun's soul, and the esoteric Christian said: “From the beginning the sun was the body of the Christ, but men on earth and the earth itself were not yet matured for receiving the spiritual light, the Christ-light, which streams from the sun. Men had, therefore, to be prepared for the Christ-light.”

Then the esoteric Christian looked up at the moon and saw that the moon reflects the light of the sun, but more feebly than the sun's light itself; and he said to himself: “If I look with my physical eyes into the sun I am dazzled by its shining light; if I look into the moon I am not dazzled; it reflects in a feebler degree the shining light of the sun.” In this subdued sunlight, in this moonlight, pouring down on the earth, the esoteric Christian saw the physiognomical expression of the old Jehovah-principle, the expression of the religion of the old law. And he said: “Before the Christ-principle, the Sun of Righteousness, could appear on earth, the Jahve-principle had to send down on earth this light of righteousness, toned down in the Law, to prepare the way.” And so what lay in the old Jehovah-principle, in the old Law—the spiritual light of the moon—was for the esoteric Christian the reflected spiritual light of the higher Christ-principle. And with the pupils of the ancient Mysteries the esoteric Christian—until far into the Middle Ages—saw in the sun the expression of the spiritual light ruling the earth, the Christ-light, and in the moon the expression of the reflected Christ-light, which would blind man in its full strength. And in the earth itself the esoteric Christian saw with the pupils of the ancient mysteries that which at times disguised, and veiled for him, the blinding sunlight of the spirit. And for him the earth was just as much the physical expression of a spirit as was every other bodily form an expression of something spiritual. He imagined that when the sun looked visibly down on the earth, when it sent down its rays, beginning in the Spring and continuing through the summer, and called forth from the earth all the budding and sprouting life, and when it had culminated in the long summer days—then the esoteric Christian imagined that the sun cherished and maintained the external, up-shooting life, the physical life. In the plants, springing from the soil, in the animals unfolding their fertility in these seasons, the esoteric Christian saw the same principle, in an external, physical form, that he saw in the Beings whose external expression the sun was. But when the days became shorter, when autumn and winter approached, the esoteric Christian said: the sun withdraws its physical power more and more from the earth. But in the same degree as the sun's physical power is withdrawn from the earth, its spiritual power increases and flows to the earth most intensively when the shortest days come, with the long nights, in the season afterwards fixed by the Christmas festival. Man cannot see this spiritual power of the sun. He would see it, said the esoteric

Christian, if he possessed the inner power of spiritual vision. And the esoteric Christian had still a consciousness of what was a fundamental conviction and experience of the Mystery-pupils from the earliest times into the newer age.

In those nights, now fixed by the festival of Christmas, the Mystery-pupils were prepared for the experience of inner spiritual vision, so that they could see inwardly, spiritually, that which at this time withdrew its physical power from the earth most completely. In the long Christmas winter night the novice was far enough advanced to have a vision at midnight. The earth was then no longer a veil for the sun, which stood behind the earth. It became transparent for him. Through the transparent earth he saw the spiritual light of the sun, the Christ-light. This fact, which marks a profound experience for the mystery-novice, was recorded in the expression: To see the sun at midnight.

There are places where the churches, otherwise open all day, are closed at noon. This is a fact which connects Christianity with the traditions of ancient religious faiths. In ancient religious faiths the Mystery-pupils said, on the strength of their experience: “At noon, when the sun stands highest, when it unfolds the strongest physical power, the gods are asleep, and they sleep the deepest sleep in summer, when the sun develops its strongest physical power. But they are widest awake on Christmas night, when the external physical power of the sun is weakest.”

We see that all forms of life which desire to unfold their external physical power look up to the sun when the sun rises in the sky in Spring and strive to receive the external physical power of the sun. But when, on a summer noon, the sun's physical power pours most lavishly on to the earth, its spiritual power is weakest. In the winter midnight, however, when the sun rays the least physical power down to the earth, man can see the sun's spirit through the earth, which has become transparent for him. The esoteric Christian felt that through absorption in Christian Esotericism he approached more and more that power of inward vision through which he could imbue his feeling, thinking and his will-impulses in gazing into this spiritual sun. Then the Mystery-novice was led to a vision of the greatest importance: As long as the earth is opaque the separate parts appear inhabited by people of different confessions, but the unifying bond is not there. Human races are as scattered as the climates. Human opinions are scattered all over the earth and there is no connecting link. But in the degree in which men begin to look through the earth into the sun by their inner power of vision, in the degree in which the “star” appears to them through the earth, their confessions will flow together to one great united Brotherhood. And those who guided the great separated human masses in the truth of the higher planes, towards their initiation into the higher worlds, were known as “Magi.” They were three in number, as in the various parts of the earth various powers express themselves. Humanity had, therefore, to be led in different ways. But as a unifying power there appears the star, rising beyond the earth. It leads the scattered individuals together, and then they bring offerings to the physical embodiment of the solar star, appearing as the star of peace. Thus was the religion of peace, of harmony, of universal peace, of human brotherhood, connected cosmically and humanly with the ancient Magi, who laid the best gifts that they had in store for humanity before the cradle of the Son of Man incarnate.

The legend has retained this beautifully, for it says: The Danish king attained an understanding of the Wise Men, of the three Kings, and because he had attained it they bestowed on him their three gifts: first the gift of wisdom, in self-knowledge; secondly, the gift of pious devotion, in self-surrender; and, thirdly, the gift of the victory of life over death, in the power and development of the eternal in the self.

All those who have understood Christianity in this way have seen in it the profound idea in spiritual science of the unification of religions. For they had the firm conviction that whoever understands Christianity thus can rise to the highest grade of human development.

One of the last of the Germans to understand Christianity in this way is Goethe, and Goethe has laid down for us this kind of Christianity, this kind of religious reconciliation, this kind of theosophy, in the profound poem, The Mysteries, which has, indeed, remained a fragment but which shows us in a deeply significant way the inner spiritual development of one who is penetrated and convinced by the feelings and ideas that I have just described. Goethe first invites us to follow the pilgrim-path of such a man, but indicates that this pilgrim-path may lead us far astray, that it is not easy to find it, and that one must have patience and devotion to reach the goal. Whoever possesses these will find the light that he seeks. Let us hear the beginning of the poem:—

A wondrous song is here prepared for many.
Hear it with joy! Tell all from far and near!
The way will lead you out o'er mount and valley;
Now is the view obscured, now wide and clear,
And if the path should glide into the bushes,
That you have gone astray, you need not fear,
For by a persevering, patient climb
We shall draw near our goal, when it is time.

But no one will, despite profound reflection,
Unravel all the wonders hidden here:
Our mother earth brings forth so many flowers,
And many shall find something to revere;
Maybe that one will gloomily forsake us,
Another stays with gestures full of cheer:
For many wand'ring pilgrims flows the spring,
To each a different pleasure it will bring.

This is the situation to which we are introduced. We are shown; a pilgrim who, if we were to ask him, would not be able to say in formal words what we have just seen to be the esoteric Christian idea—but a pilgrim in whose heart and soul these ideas live, transformed into feeling. It is not easy to discover everything that has been secreted into this poem called The Mysteries. Goethe has clearly indicated a process occurring in human life, in which the highest ideas, thoughts and conceptions are transformed into feelings and perceptions. How does this transformation take place?

We live through many embodiments, from incarnation to incarnation. In each one we learn things of many kinds; each one is full of opportunities for gathering new experiences. It is impossible for us to carry over from one incarnation to the other everything in every detail. When we are born again it is not necessary for everything that we have once learnt to come to life in every detail. But if we have learnt a great deal in one incarnation, and die and are born anew, although there is no need for all our ideas to live again, we come to life with the fruits of our former life, with the fruits of what we have learnt. The powers of perception and feeling are in accord with our earlier incarnations.

In this poem of Goethe's we have a wonderful phenomenon: a man who, in the simplest words—as a child might speak, not in definite intellectual or abstract terms—shows us the highest wisdom, which is a fruit of former knowledge. He has transformed this knowledge into feeling and experience and is thereby qualified to lead others who have perhaps learnt more in the form of concepts. Such a pilgrim, with a ripe soul, which has transformed into direct feeling and experience much of the knowledge which it has gathered in earlier incarnations—such a pilgrim we have before us in Brother Mark. As a member of a secret Brotherhood he is sent out on an important mission to another secret Brotherhood. He wanders through many different districts, and when he is getting tired he comes to a mountain. He journeys up the path at last—(every feature in this poem has a deep significance)—and when he has climbed the mountain he finds himself before a monastery. This monastery here indicates the other Brotherhood to which he has been sent. Over the gate of the jnonastery he sees something unusual. He sees the Cross, but in unusual guise; the cross is garlanded with roses! And at this point he utters a significant word that only he can understand who knows how again and again that motto has been spoken in secret Brotherhoods: “Who added to the Cross the wreath of Roses?” And round the Cross he sees the Triangle shine, radiating beams like the sun. There is no need for him to understand in ideas the meaning of this profound symbol. The experience and understanding of it live already in his soul, in his ripe soul. His ripe soul knows its inner meaning. What is the meaning of the Cross? He knows that the Cross is a symbol for many things; among many others, for the threefold lower nature of man; the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. In him the “I,” the Self is-born. In the Rose-Cross we have the fourfold man: in the Cross the physical man, the etheric man and the astral man, and in the roses the Self. Why roses for the Self?—the esoteric Christian added roses to the Cross because by the Christ principle he felt called upon to develop the Self more and more from the state in which it is born in the three bodies, to an ever higher Self. In the Christ-principle he saw the power to develop this Self higher and higher. The Cross is the symbol of death in a quite particular sense. This, too, Goethe expresses in another beautiful passage when he says:

And until thou truly hast
This “dying and becoming,”
Thou art but a troubled guest
O'er the dark earth roaming.

“Die and be re-born”—overcome what you have first been given in the three lower bodies: deaden it, not out of a desire for death, but purify what is in these three bodies so as to attain in your Self the power to receive an ever greater perfection. If you overcome what is given you in the three lower bodies, the power of consummation will live in the Self. In the Self must the Christian absorb in the Christ-principle this power of consummation down to the very blood. Right into the blood this power must work.

Blood is the expression of the Self, the “I.” In the red roses the esoteric Christian saw the power of the Christ-principle purifying and cleansing the blood, thus purifying the Self, and so guiding man upwards to his higher being—he saw the power that transforms the astral body into the Spirit Self, the etheric body into the Life-Spirit, the physical body into Spirit Man. Thus the Rose-Cross in its connection with the triangle shows us the Christ-principle in profound symbolism. The pilgrim, Brother Mark, who arrives here, knows that he is at a place where the profoundest meaning of Christianity is understood.

Full weary by a long and tiring journey,
With a sublimest motive underta'en,
A pilgrim, brother Mark, came through the thicket,
With staff in hand, his footsteps to sustain,
And longing for a little food and drinking,
One beauteous eve he reached a quiet plain.
Its wooded gorges soothing hope bestowed
Beneath a friendly roof to find abode.

But lo! a path he scarcely can distinguish,
High up a mountain steep before him wending.
He follows it, as more and more it rises,
In curvings in and out the boulders bending,
Until again by sunlight warm enveloped,
He turns and sees how fast he is ascending.
At last the summit comes within his sight,
Inspiring him with heart-felt, deep delight.

Next it the sun, majestic in its setting,
Enthroned 'mong clouds within the dark'ning sky.
Now for the peak! For all his weary toiling
He hopes to be rewarded there on high.
O'erlooking all the country 'fore him spreading,
A human home he will perchance espy.
And while he climbs, oh sound how full of cheer!
The chime of bells is wafted to his ear.

And as at length he has attained the summit,
Below a softly sloping valley lies.
His quiet look with inward pleasure brightens;
Before the forest full of joy he spies
A stately building in a greening field,
Which the departing sun with lustre dyes.
E'er long he nears through meadows dewy damp
A monastery lit with gleaming lamp.

He soon arrives outside the quiet homestead,
With hope and peacefulness his soul enfolding,
And on the arch above the closed portal
A symbol full of mystery beholding.
He stands and ponders, whispers words of prayer,
The deep devotion of his heart unfolding;
He ponders long: What does this sign convey?
The sun has set, the chiming dies away.

The sign he sees erected here on high
That brings consoling hope to all mankind,
Which many thousands pledged their lives to shield,
To which in fervour prayed the human mind,
That has destroyed the bitter powers of death,
On victors' banners fluttered in the wind:
A stream of comfort permeates his being,
He sees the cross and bows his head in seeing.

He feels anew the faith of all on earth,
The power of salvation streaming thence;
But as he looks, he feels his very soul
Pervaded by a new and unknown sense:
Who added to the cross the wreath of roses?
It is entwined by blooming, clusters dense,
Profusely spreading just as though they could
Endow with softness e'en the rigid wood.

While light and silv'ry clouds, around it soaring,
Seem heavenward with cross and roses flowing,
And from the midst like living waters streaming
A threefold ray from out one core is glowing;
But not a word surrounds the holy token,
The meaning of the symbol clearly showing.
And while the dusk is gath'ring grey and greyer,
He stands and ponders and is lost in prayer.

The spirit of deepest Christianity which pervades this dwelling is expressed in the cross entwined by roses, and as the pilgrim enters he is actually received in this spirit. When he enters he becomes aware that in this house not this or that religion holds sway—but that there rules here the higher Oneness of the religions of the world. Within this house he tells an old member of the Brotherhood that lives there at whose behest and on what mission he has come. He is made welcome and hears that in this house there lives in perfect seclusion a Brotherhood of twelve Brothers. These twelve Brothers are representatives of different human races from all over the earth; every one of the Brothers is the representative of a religious faith. None is accepted here in the un-ripeness of youth, but only when he has explored the world, when he has struggled with the joys and sorrows of the world, when he has “worked and been active in the world and won his way to a free survey beyond his narrowly confined domain. Only then is he placed and accepted in the circle of the Twelve. And these Twelve, of whom each one represents one of the world religions, live here in peace and harmony together. For they are led by a thirteenth who surpasses them all in the perfection of his human Self, who surpasses them all in his wide survey of human circumstances. And how does Goethe indicate that he is the representative of true Esotericism? Goethe indicates, by the words the Brother speaks, that he is the bearer of the religion of the Rosy Cross. He said: “He was among us; now we are in deepest sorrow because he is about to leave us; he wishes to part from us. But he finds it right to part from us even now; he desires to rise to higher regions, where he no longer needs to reveal himself in an earthly body.”

He is worthy to rise. For he has risen to the point that Goethe describes with the words: “In every religion there is the possibility of attaining the highest purity.” When each of the twelve religions is ripe to form a basis of harmony, the Thirteenth, who has before brought about this harmony externally, can pass away. And we are beautifully told how we can achieve this consummation of the Self. First, the life-story of the Thirteenth is related; but the Brother who has received Mark knows many details, which the great Leader of the Twelve cannot tell himself. Several features of profound esoteric significance are now recounted by one of the Twelve to Brother Mark. He learns that when the Thirteenth was born a star appeared to herald his life on earth. Here there is a direct connection with the star which guided the three holy kings, and with its inner meaning. This star has an enduring significance: it shows the way to self-knowledge, self-surrender and self-consummation. It is the star which opens the mind for the gifts which the Danish king received from the vision in his dream, the star which appears at the birth of anyone ripe enough to absorb the Christ-principle. And there were other signs. There were signs showing that he had developed to that height of religious harmony which brings the peace and harmony of the soul. Profoundly symbolical in this sense is the vulture which swoops down at the birth of the Thirteenth, but instead of destroying it spreads peace around it among the doves. We are told still more. While his little sister is lying in the cradle a viper winds itself round her. The Thirteenth, still a child, kills the viper. Hereby is wonderfully indicated how a ripe soul—for only a ripe soul can achieve such a thing after many incarnations—kills the viper in early childhood: that is to say he overcomes the lower astral nature. The viper is the symbol for the lower astral nature; the sister is his own etheric body, round which the astral body winds itself. He kills the viper to save his sister. Then we are told how he submitted obediently to every demand of his parents. He obeyed his stern father. The soul transforms its knowledge into ideas and thoughts; then healing-powers develop in the soul and can bring healing into the world. Miraculous powers develop: they are represented by the sword with which he strikes a spring out of the rock. We are here definitely shown how his soul follows the path of the Scriptures. Thus gradually there develops the higher man, the representative of humanity, the Chosen one, who works as the Thirteenth here, in the society of the Twelve, the great secret Brotherhood which, under the sign of the Rose-Cross has taken upon itself for all mankind the mission of harmonising the religions scattered in the world. This is how we are made acquainted, in a profound, manner, with the soul-nature of that one who has until now guided the Brotherhood of the Twelve.

At last he knocks. The myriad stars above him
Look down with shining eyes as they appear.
The portal opes, and he is bidden welcome
By brethren wont to comfort and to cheer.
So he relates how far by hill and valley
The will of higher Beings led him here.
They stand amazed, for well they see their guest
Was sent to them by heavenly behest.

They crowd around him, and their inmost being
They feel by a mysterious power stirred,
Their breath they hold to listen, for he rouses
An echo in their hearts with ev'ry word.
Like deepest lore, yet uttered by a child,
The wisdom flowing from his lips is heard:
He seems so innocent, like crystal clear,
As though descended from another sphere.

At last an aged brother cries: Oh welcome,
If with consoling hope thy path is blessed!
Thou seest us, our souls are moved within us
By thee, and yet we can but stand oppressed:
Our greatest bliss from us is being taken,
Anxiety and dread disturb our rest.
Thou comest as a stranger, yet to share
Portentous hours of mourning and of care:

For he, alas! who all of us united,
To whom as father and as friend we bow,
Who light and fortitude within us kindled—
Our leader—is prepared to leave us now.
Yea, he himself his passing has predicted,
Refusing though to tell us when and how:
The mystery of what must needs befall
Brings bitter tribulation to us all.

Thou seest us grey and aged ev'ry one,
By nature destined for repose and rest:
Not one was here admitted who, a youth,
Desired to fly from wordly joy and zest.
Each one has met with life's vicissitudes,
Its burdens, pleasures and its anxious quest,
Until, matured, too old to longer roam,
Within these walls we found a shelt'ring home.

The noble man who led us to this haven,
Within his heart the peace of God does dwell;
Along the path of life we walked together,
His ev'ry action I remember well;
But now his fervent praying, his seclusion,
The hour of his departing must foretell.
How small is man! Oh would that he could give
His life, so that a greater one might live!

This is my heart's profound and only wish!
Fulfilment is denied to my desire.
How many have preceded me in death!
How bitter is the thought he must expire.
Had he been here, with hearty welcome's warmth
He would have given all thou didst require;
But now in spirit-regions dwells his mind,
Already far from those he leaves behind.

Each day one hour he lingers in our midst
And speaks to us, by strange emotion stirred:
The wondrous paths that Providence has led
Within his life he lauds with ev'ry word;
We hark and heed, for after-ages hoarding
With care the merest trifle that occurred,
While one writes down his words to make us sure
His memory shall live both true and pure.

I hear him speak, but oh, how much there is
That I would rather far myself relate,
For all is still alive within my mind,
The least of circumstances I would state;
Impatiently I list, can scarce conceal
How sore it is thus silently to wait:
One day I shall no more restrain my zeal,
The splendours of this beauteous life reveal.

I should disclose how first an angel's voice
His coming to his mother prophesied,
And how, when he was christened, in the sky
A star with brilliant lustre was descried,
How down a vulture swooped with mighty wings
To settle by the gentle pigeons' side,
But not to pounce on them in greedy wildness,
A harbinger he seemed of peace and mildness.

How as a child a viper he destroyed,
This is a miracle he ne'er has told.
He found his sister peacefully asleep,
The clinging reptile round her arm was rolled.
The nurse had fled and left the babe alone,
He killed the pois'nous snake, resolved and bold;
His mother came and saw the daring deed
And thrilled with joy she found her daughter freed.

He ne'er related that a spring arose
From out the barren rock before his sword,
And as a brook, with rippling waves alive,
Its plenteous waters down the hill-side poured;
E'en now, as quick as forth it gushed at first,
It bickers silver sparkling o'er the sward.
But those who saw the wondrous stream appear,
Dared not to drink, o'ercome by solemn fear.

For when a man excels by gifts of nature,
It is no wonder if his life is blessed;
In him we worship the Creator's power,
Through feeble human clay made manifest;
But he who overcomes himself has gained
The greatest triumph, stood the hardest test,
And well may he to all the world be shown:
Yea, this is he, this deed is his alone!

With all our strength we strive to live and labour,
Where'er by fate our twisting paths be wended;
Whereas the world oppresses, e'er impeding,
And seeks to tear us from the way intended;
Within this inner storm and outer struggle
Our spirit hears a word scarce comprehended:
The power that holds constrained all humankind
The victor o'er himself no more can bind.

This man who had overcome himself, that is, who had overcome that ego which is man's portion at first, has become the Head of the chosen Brotherhood. And thus he leads the Twelve. He has led them to a point at which they are matured enough for him to leave them. Our Brother Mark is then conducted further to the rooms where the Twelve work. How do they work? Their activity is of an unusual kind, and we are told that it is an activity in the spiritual world. A man whose eyes observe only physically, whose senses experience only the physical plane, and only what is done by people in the physical world, cannot easily imagine that there is still another task which may even be far more vital and important than what is done externally on the physical plane. Work from the higher planes is far more important for mankind. Naturally, whoever wishes to work on the higher planes can only do so on condition that he has first completed the tasks of the physical plane. These Twelve had done so. For this reason their combined activity is of great importance as a service to mankind.

Our Brother Mark is led into the hall where the Twelve were accustomed to assemble, and there he sees in deep symbolic guise the nature of their combined activity. The individual contribution of each of the Brothers to this combined activity is expressed by an individual symbol above the seat of each one of the Twelve. Symbols of many kinds are to be seen there, expressing profoundly and in very different ways the contribution of each to the common task, which consists in spiritual activity, so that these streams flow together into a current of spiritual life which flows through the world and invigorates the rest of mankind. There are such brotherhoods, such centres from which such streams emanate and have their effect on the rest of mankind.

Above the seat of the Thirteenth, Brother Mark again sees the sign: the cross entwined with roses; this sign, which is at the same time a symbol for the four-fold nature of man, and in the red roses the symbol of the purified Blood or ego-principle, the principle of the higher man. And then we see what is to be overcome by this sign of the Rose-Cross, portrayed in a symbol of its own, to the right and left of the seat of the Thirteenth. On the right Mark sees the fiery-coloured dragon, representing the astral nature of man. It was well known in Christian Esotericism that man's soul can surrender to the three lower bodies. If it succumbs to them it is dominated by the lower life of the threefold bodily nature. This is expressed in astral experience by the dragon. It is no mere symbol but a very real sign. The dragon represents what has first to be overcome. In the passions, in those forces of astral fire, which are part of man's physical nature, in this dragon, Christian Esotericism, which has inspired this poem and which has spread through Europe, saw what mankind has received from the torrid zone, from the South. It is the South that has bestowed on mankind the fierce passion, tending chiefly towards the lower senses. The first impulse to fight and overcome it was divined in the influences streaming from the cooler North. The influence of the cooler North, the descent of the Ego into the threefold physical nature of man, is expressed according to the old symbol taken from the Constellation of the Bear and shows a hand thrust into the jaws of a bear. The lower physical nature expressed by the fiery dragon is overcome; and what has been preserved, represented by the higher rank of animal life, was expressed in the bear; and the Ego, which has developed beyond the dragon nature, was represented with profound appropriateness by the thrusting of a human hand into the bear's jaws. On both sides of the Rose-Cross there appears what must be overcome by the Rose-Cross, and it is the Rose-Cross which calls upon man to purify and raise himself more and more.

Thus the poem really describes the principle of Christianity in the profoundest manner and, above all, shows us what we ought to have before our mind's eye, particularly at a festival such as we are keeping to-day.

The eldest of the Brothers living here, and belonging to the Brotherhood, tells the Pilgrim Mark expressly that their combined activity is of the spirit, that it is spiritual life. This work for mankind on the spiritual plane has a particular meaning. The Brothers have experienced life's joys and sorrows; they have passed through conflicts outside these walls; they have accomplished tasks in the world; now they are here, but that does not mean that their work is at an end; the further development of mankind is their unending task. He is told: “You have seen as much now as can be shown to a novice to whom the first portal is opened. You have been shown in profound symbols what man's ascent should be. But the second portal hides greater mysteries: those of the influence of higher worlds on mankind. You can only learn these greater mysteries after lengthy preparation, only then can you enter through the other gate.” Profound secrets are expressed in this poem.

In him I scarce as virtue may denote
The power of good which e'en his youth inspired
And taught him to respect his father's word,
When harshly he his services required,
With duties burdening his leisure hours;
The son obeyed with ardour, never tired,
Like some poor boy who, friendless and astray,
Is glad to work for but a trifling pay.

On foot he joined the warriors in the field,
In lowering tempest and in dazzling light,
The horses he did tend, the meals prepare,
And armed the soldiers ready for the fight.
Oft as a messenger, both keen and fleet,
He hastened through the woods by day and night;
To live for others both in thought and action
Seemed but to give him joy and satisfaction.

And brave and cheerful always, in the strife
He sought the arrows scattered on the ground;
Then hastily he gathered curing herbs,
With which the burning wounds he cooled and bound;
And just as if his very touch were healing,
Ere long the sufferers were strong and sound;
How all regarded him with joy and pride!
Alone his father seemed not satisfied.

E'en as a ship, despite its heavy load
From port to port with speedy lightness sailing,
He bore the burden of his parents' word
That in obedience ne'er he should be failing;
As pleasure is for boys, for youths distinction,
For him his father's will was all-prevailing,
So that he might demand whate'er he would,
Each task was soon fulfilled, each test was stood.

At last the father yielded and acknowledged
The merit of his son in word and deed;
While of a sudden all his sternness vanished,
He gave the youth a swift and precious steed;
Henceforth a sword replaced the shorter #8224,
And from his lesser duties he was freed:
Thus, destined by his birth and well acquitted,
Into an Order he was now admitted.

Ah, well could I report for many days
Amazing things to every one who hears;
And higher than the most delightful tales
His life will be esteemed in coming years;
For what in poetry and fiction charms,
Yet to our mind incredible appears,
Will here with greater pleasure still be heard,
Because it has in real event occurred.

The name of him whom Providence has chosen
That wondrous things on earth he should achieve,
Whom I may often praise, though ne'er sufficing
Whose destiny we scarcely can believe,
His name—it is Humanus, Saint and wise one,
The best of men whom I did e'er perceive:
By origin another name he bears,
Which with illustrious ancestors he shares.

The aged brother would have spoken on.
Filled with the miracles that he did know,
And he shall gladden us for many weeks
With all the stirring facts he still can show;
But he was interrupted, just as now
His heart was pouring forth in fervent flow.
The others softly in and out had passed
And deemed it time to intervene at last.

When Mark had bowed before his hosts and prayed
In gratitude for the sustaining meal,
A bowl of crystal water he requested.
They brought what he had craved with friendly zeal.
Hereafter led him to their festive hall,
Therein a sight unwonted to reveal.
Of what he saw you soon will be aware,
For everything shall be described with care.

No ornament was here, the eye deluding,
A cross-arched vault rose sternly from the ground,
And thirteen chairs against the walls, he noticed.
Were like a pious chorus ranged around,
By clever hands full delicately carven;
In front of each a little desk he found.
Devotion seemed to fill the very air,
Fraternity and restfulness and prayer.

Above each chair was hung a special shield,
Thirteen in all the number he espied.
They seemed to be important, purposeful,
No boast of ancestors in shallow pride.
And brother Mark, with longing all aglow,
Desired to learn what secret they did hide:
Lo, in the middle one the mystic sign,
The cross which clustring roses do entwine.

Each object will arouse to life and action
The soul which to its inspiration yields;
Some places are adorned by swords and lances,
While helmets hang above these other shields;
Here battered weapons are to be discovered,
Such as one may collect on battle-fields:
There spears and banners, come from distant lands,
And even fetters here and iron bands!

Each brother sinking down before his chair,
In silent prayer profoundly wrapt they rested;
Then softly chanted fervent hymns of thanks,
By cheerfulness and piety suggested;
With mutual blessing they retired to sleep,
A short repose, by fancies unmolested:
But Mark remains, surrounded by a few,
Still wishing more attentively to view.

Though tired in body, full awake his mind,
Preoccupied by many hidden things:
For here, his thirst in raging flames appeasing,
A dragon is enthroned with fiery wings;
And here between his jaws a bear is holding
An arm from which the blood it loses springs,
Both shields, in distance corresponding quite,
Hung next the Rosy-Cross to left and right.

The paths were wonderful that led thee here,
The aged brother speaks unto his guest:
Oh let these symbols bid thee stay until
The many heroes' deeds we manifest;
Our mysteries we will confide to thee,
For what is here concealed, can ne'er be guessed;
Although thou wilt divine what here was done,
Endured and lost, and last what triumph won.

Do not believe that but of times gone by
The brother spake. Here wonders never fail;
And more and ever more thou shalt behold,
Until withdrawn is the enshrouding veil.
One portal only 'tis that thou hast passed:
And if thou feelst the call, O friend, prevail!
The foremost court as yet thou didst attain,
But worthy art the very core to gain.

After a short sleep our Brother Mark next learns to divine something at least of the inner mysteries; in the powerful symbols he has let the ascent of the human Self work upon his soul, and when he is awakened by a sign from his short rest he comes to a window, a kind of lattice, and hears a strange threefold harmony sounding thrice, and the whole as if intermingled with the playing of a flute. He cannot look in, cannot see what is happening there in the room. We do not need to be told more than these few words as an indication of what awaits the man who approaches the spiritual worlds, when he is so far purified and perfected by his endeavours to develop his Self, that he has passed through the astral world and approaches the higher worlds—those worlds in which are to be found the spiritual archetypes of the things here on earth. When he approaches what is called in esoteric Christianity the world of heaven, he approaches it through a world of flowing colour; he enters into a world of sound, into the harmony of the universe, the music of the spheres. The spiritual world is a world of sound. He who has developed his higher Self to the level of the higher worlds must become at home in this spiritual world. It is indeed Goethe who clearly expressed the higher experience of a world of spiritual sound in his Faust when he lets him be carried up to heaven and the world of heaven is revealed to him through sound.

The sun-orb sings, in emulation
'Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round:

The physical sun does not sing, but the spiritual sun sings. Goethe retains this image when, after long wanderings, Faust is exalted into the spiritual worlds (Faust, Second Part): “Sounding loud to spirit-hearing, see the new-born day appearing.” “Pealing rays and trumpet-blazes—eye is blinded, ear amazes: The Unheard can no one hear!”

Through the symbolic world of the astral, man, if he evolves higher, approaches the world of the harmony of the spheres, the Devachanic domain, the spiritual music. Only softly, softly, does Brother Mark, after passing through the first portal, the astral portal, hear floating out to him the sound of the inner world behind our external world, of that world which transforms the lower astral world into that higher world which is pervaded by the triple harmony. And in reaching the higher world man's lower nature is transformed into the higher triad: our astral body is changed into the spirit-self, the etheric body into the life-spirit, the physical body into the spirit-man. In the music of the spheres he first senses the triple harmony of the higher nature, and in becoming one with this music of the spheres he has the first glimpse of the rejuvenation of man when he enters into union with the spiritual world. He sees, as in a dream, rejuvenated mankind float through the garden in the form of the three youths bearing three torches. This is the moment when Mark's soul has awakened in the morning from darkness, and when some darkness still remains; his soul has not yet penetrated it. But precisely at such a time the soul can gradually look into the spiritual world. It can look into the spiritual worlds as it can look when the summer noon is past, when the sun is losing in power and winter has come, and then at midnight the Christ-principle shines through the earth in the night of Christmas. Through the Christ-principle man is exalted to the higher trinity, represented for Brother Mark by the three youths who are the rejuvenated soul of man. This is the meaning of Goethe's lines:

And until thou truly hast
This “dying and becoming,”
Thou art but a troubled guest
O'er the dark earth roaming.

Every year anew Christmas will indicate to the one who understands esoteric Christianity that what happens in the external world is the mimicry, the gestures, of inner spiritual processes. The external power of the sun lives in the spring and summer sunshine. In the Scriptures this external power of the sun, which is only the forerunner of the inner spiritual power of the sun, is represented by John the Baptist, but the inner, spiritual power by Christ. And while the physical power of the sun slowly abates, the spiritual power rises and grows in strength until it reaches its zenith at Christmas time. This is the meaning underlying the words in the gospel of S. John: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” And he increases until he appears where the sunforce has again attained the outer physical power. So that man may henceforth revere and worship in this external physical power the spiritual power of the sun, he must learn the meaning of the Christmas festival. For those who do not know this meaning the new power of the sun is nothing but the old physical power returning. But whoever has become familiar with the impulses which esoteric Christianity, and especially the Christmas festival, should give him will see in the growing power of the solar body the external body of the inner Christ which shines through the earth, which gives it life and fruitfulness, so that the earth itself becomes the bearer of the Christ-power, of the Earth-Spirit. Thus what is born in every Christmas night will be born for us each time anew. Through Christ we shall experience inwardly the microcosm in the macrocosm, and this realisation will lead us higher and higher.

The festivals, which have long ago become something external to men, will again appear in their deep significance for mankind if they are led by this profound Esotericism to the knowledge that the occurrences of external nature, such as thunder and lightning, sunrise and sunset, moonrise and the setting of the moon, are the gestures and physiognomy of spiritual existence. And at the turning-points which are marked by our festivals we should realise that these are also times of important happenings in the spiritual world. Then we shall be led on to the rejuvenating spiritual power represented by the three youths, which the ego can only win by devoting itself to the outer world and not egotistically shutting itself away from it. But there is no devotion to the outer world if this external world is not permeated by the Spirit. That this Spirit shall appear every year anew for all men, even for the feeblest, as Light in the darkness, must be written every year afresh in the heart and soul of man.

This is what Goethe wished to express in this poem, The Mysteries. It is at once a Christmas poem and an Easter poem. It would indicate profound secrets of esoteric Christianity. If what he wished to indicate of the deep mysteries of Rosicrucian Christianity is allowed to work upon our souls, if we absorb its power even in part, then for some few at least in our environment we shall become missionaries; we shall succeed in fashioning this Festival once more into something filled with spirit and with life.

When after short repose within his cell
A deep resounding bell awakes our guest,
His soul is filled with longing for devotion,
He rises quickly with unwearied zest
And hastens to the church, with all his heart
Responding to the gladly heard behest,
Obedient, peaceful and by prayer bestirred;
Alas! The door is locked, he stands deterred.

But hark! a blow on dull resounding ore
Three times in equal intervals renewed,
No chime it seems to be of clock or bells,
From time to time with tones of flute imbued;
The floating music fills the heart with joy,
Mysterious 'tis and scarce to be construed,
It sounds like singing, solemn and entrancing,
To which the couples interlace in dancing.

Bewildered and by strange emotion moved,
He hastens to the window there to gaze;
The day is dawning in the distant east,
The sky o'erflown by lucent streaks of haze.
And may he trust his eyes? A mystic light
Is fleeting through the garden's winding ways;
Three youths with torches in their hands he sees
Who haste along the paths between the trees.

He clearly sees their wonderful apparel,
The white resplendent garments which they wear,
Their girdles made of intertwining roses,
The wreaths of flowers in their curly hair;
They seem to come from some nocturnal dances,
With joy of movement thrilled, enlived and fair.
But as the stars will fade, when day is near,
Extinguishing their torch, they disappear.

We have seen that out of the Mysteries grew something that made man aware of being related to the world in a way that can be expressed in the annual festivals; and in particular we have learned that Easter is an outgrowth of the principle of initiation. From all that has been set forth it will have become evident what a significant role the Mysteries played in the entire evolution of humanity. Really everything of a spiritual nature that has permeated the world and developed through mankind originated in the old Mysteries. In modern terms we could say that the Mysteries were all-powerful in guiding the spiritual life.

Now, it was intended from the beginning that mankind should develop freedom; and to this end it was necessary for the old Mystery system to recede and for humanity to be less closely linked, for a time, with the powerful guidance that proceeded from the Mysteries, to be cast more upon its own resources, as it were. We certainly cannot assert today that the time has arrived in which men have achieved their true inner freedom and are ready to pass over into the next phase of evolution that is to follow upon that of freedom. This is not the case. Still, many have already passed through a number of incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was less strongly felt than formerly; and though the seeds of these incarnations have not yet sprouted, they are nevertheless potentially present in the souls of men. And with the coming of a more spiritual age they will develop what they have not developed in their present dimness of vision. Above all things, however, it will be necessary that the wisdom, the vision, the experience of the spiritual such as can be attained by modern initiation, be met with esteem, with reverence; and this must be offered out of man's freedom. Without esteem and reverence, true enlightenment and a spiritual life of humanity is really not possible.

Surely we make the right use of festivals if with their help we try to implant in our souls this esteem, this reverence for things spiritual as they have evolved during the course of human history; if we try to learn how to observe in the most intimate way possible the spiritual significance of outer events, to understand how these carry spiritual meaning from one age over into another. For the time being men keep returning to Earth in repeating incarnations, thus carrying over their experiences of earlier epochs into later ones. Human beings are the most important factor in the further development of all that takes place within the history of mankind. But men of all periods live in a definite environment, and clearly, one of the most significant environments was that of the Mysteries. A most important factor in the progress of humanity is the carrying over of what has been experienced in the Mysteries and re-experienced, be it again through the medium of Mysteries, whence it acts upon mankind, or by other means of enlightenment. Today it must be the latter, for the true Mystery system has withdrawn from the present outer world and is to reappear only in the future.

If the impulse that went forth from here, from the Goetheanum, at the time of the Christmas Meeting, really takes root in the Anthroposophical Society, it is certain that by leading to ever deeper insight the Anthroposophical Society will be the foundation for the Mysteries of the future. These new Mysteries must be consciously nurtured by the Anthroposophical Society. We recall an event that can be utilized in our development as once a similar one was used: the burning of the Temple of Ephesus. Both were the result of a grave wrong; yet on different planes things have different meanings, and it is possible for a frightful iniquity, as it appears on one plane, to be employed on another for the advancement of human freedom—in the sense that precisely such horrible events can bring about a real advance in human progress.

But as I have already said, such matters must be grasped through their inner meaning if they are to be approached understandingly. One must enter into the particular manner in which the spiritual element of the world pervaded the Mysteries. Yesterday I pointed out how the establishment of the annual Easter Festival grew out of a spiritual conception of the constellation of Sun and Moon, and that from the Moon viewpoint the other planets were observed. And I said further that according to what is learned by observing the other planets, the human being, in descending from the pre-earthly to the earthly existence, is guided in forming his light-ether body.

If we would observe and rightly understand how this light-ether body, these ether forces, are transmitted to us by the Moon forces, Moon observations—by what I might call the spiritual Moon observatory, this can be done as we have just endeavored to do it: by turning to the cosmos where it is all inscribed and exists as a fact. But it is important to ponder in our souls the human element as well, the part it plays in the different epochs as a factor of these truths.

As a matter of fact, never did the souls of men take part so intimately, so fervently, in this last phase of the descent to Earth—the enveloping in an etheric body—as in the Mysteries of Ephesus. There the whole service of the Goddess of Ephesus, exoterically called Artemis, was directed toward co-experiencing the spiritual weaving life within the cosmic ether. When members of the Ephesian Mystery approached the image of the Goddess, the feeling this gave them may be said to have become intensified to hearing; and what they heard, as though the goddess were speaking, was something as follows: I rejoice in all that bears fruit in the wide expanse of cosmic ether.—A deep impression was created by this expression of intense joy on the part of the Goddess of the Temple, her joy in all that grows, sprouts and burgeons in the world-ether; and an ardent feeling of close relationship with blossoming and flowering was in particular something that permeated the spiritual atmosphere of the Ephesian Sanctuary as with a magic breath.

Nowhere else was the growth of the plant life, the drive of the Earth forces into the plants, co-experienced so intensely as in the Mystery of Ephesus, for the entire training here tended to that end. And this led to the next step: it was here that instruction was given, if I may so call it, specially intended to induce in the minds of members a feeling for the Moon secret, of which I spoke yesterday. It was everyone's own experience to feel himself as a light-being, because the act of receiving his light-form from the Moon was made so alive for the neophytes and initiates.

A part of the ritual ran something as follows—and one who could take part in it was actually transported into that act of forming himself out of the sunlight that circles around the Moon: as though proceeding from the Sun, there came to him the sound J O A.¹

He knew that this J O A activated his ego, his astral body. J O (ego, astral body) and A (the approach of the light-ether body), joining in J O A. Then, with the J O A vibrating in him, he felt himself to be composed of ego, astral body and etheric body.

And then it seemed as though he heard sounding up to him from the Earth—for he had been transported into the cosmos—something that saturated the J O A: eh v. JehOvA What rose up to him in the eh v were the Earth forces.

Now he realized that in this JehOvA he felt the complete human being. The premonition of the physical body, which he acquired only on Earth, he felt intimated in the consonants complementing the vowels that in the J O A indicate the ego, the astral and the etheric body.—This becoming one with the JehOvA was what enabled the disciple of Ephesus to sense in their full significance the last steps of the descent from the spiritual world.

But in feeling the import of this J O A the neophyte at the same time felt himself to be the sound J O A in the light. Then he was a human being: resonant ego, resonant astral body, in a shimmering light-ether body. He was sound in light. That is the nature of cosmic man; and in this state the initiate was able to grasp what he saw in the cosmos, just as on Earth he could perceive through his eyes what occurs in the physical environment of the Earth. When the neophyte of Ephesus bore this J O A within him he really felt transported into the Moon sphere, and he took part in all that could be observed from the point of view of the Moon.

In this condition the human being was man in general, in the sense that the differentiation between man and woman did not enter until the descent to Earth occurred. Man felt himself transported into this pre-earthly existence, the region immediately preceding his approach to the terrestrial. The Ephesian disciples were able to achieve this ascent to the Moon sphere in a particularly intimate way; and henceforth they carried in their heart, in their soul, what they had experienced there. It sounded for them something as follows:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might;

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing,
And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging;

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming,
And Venus' love-bearing beauty is on thee beaming;

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being and to ages now aborning consecrate thee.²

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,
Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen
Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit
Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

That expresses what permeated every Ephesian, and he counted it the most important of all that pulsed through his being. When a participant in the Ephesian Mysteries heard these words ringing in his ears, as it were, there was something about them that made him feel himself completely as a human being; for through them he became aware of the relation between the forces of his etheric body and the planetary system. This came to forceful expression. The cosmos speaks to the etheric body:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might.

Now the human being feels himself to be in the power of the moonlight.

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing.

The chiming, endowed with creative force, sounds across from Mars. And what gave strength to man's limbs, endowing him with the power of movement:

And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging.

From Jupiter there rays across:

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming.

And from Venus:

And Venus' love-bearing beauty ...

In order that then Saturn may gather up all that rounds off the human being within and without, prepare him to descend to Earth and there to clothe himself in a physical garb; and then further enable this physically garbed being, who bears the god within him, to live on the Earth:

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being
And to ages now aborning
Consecrate thee.

From what I have described you can readily see that the spiritual life in Ephesus was colorful and aglow with inner light. Epitomized in the thought of Easter, it comprised really everything that had ever been known about man's true dignity in the cosmos, in the whole universe. And many of the wanderers I mentioned yesterday—those who went from one Mystery to another in order to benefit by the totality of the Mysteries—many of these have repeatedly assured us that nowhere else as in Ephesus—at least, not so joyously—did they perceive so intimately and brightly the harmony of the spheres through that Moon point of view, where the radiant astral light of the world shone on them, where they sensed it in the spiritual sunlight flooding the Moon: in other Mysteries the saturation of man's soul and spirit with astral light was not felt with such an intense, inner artistic grasp.

All this was associated with the temple that went up in flames by the hand of a criminal or a lunatic. But as I mentioned during the Christmas Conference, initiates of the Ephesian Mysteries were re-embodied in Aristotle and Alexander; and these personalities came close to what was still capable of being sensed, in their time, of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

Now, what appears to be an outwardly fortuitous event can be of great spiritual significance in world evolution. Among ourselves it has frequently been mentioned for years that the Temple of Ephesus was burned at the hour in which Alexander the Great was born. But as this temple burned, something significant occurred.

What untold experiences had come to the dwellers in that temple through the centuries! What a wealth of spiritual light and wisdom had suffused its halls! And while the flames lept up from the Temple of Ephesus, all that wisdom was imparted to the cosmic ether, so that we may say: the perpetually recurring Easter Festival of Ephesus that had been locked in the temple halls was henceforth inscribed in the dome of the universe, in so far as this is etheric, though in less legible letters.

That is often the way things work out: much human wisdom that in olden times had been enclosed within temple walls was released, was inscribed in the world-ether, and there at once becomes visible to one who ascends to real imagination. And this imagination is the interpreter, as it were, of the secret of the stars: what once was secret within the temples has been inscribed in the world-ether, and there it can be read by means of imagination.

We can put it another way, but it means the same. I go out into the starlit night, contemplate the firmament and throw myself open to it. Then, if I have the right capacity, the forms of the constellations and the movements of the planets are transmuted as into vast cosmic script. And if I read this script, something emerges like that which I explained yesterday in referring to the Moon secret. When the stars no longer remain merely something to be mathematically and mechanically computed, but become the alphabet of cosmic script, these things can indeed be read there.

But I should like to develop the matter further. When Alexander and Aristotle approached the Kabirian secrets in Samothrace at a time when the old Mysteries were already on the decline,² something occurred to them at that moment through the influence of the Kabirian Mysteries like a memory of the old Ephesian time, which both had passed through in a certain century. And once more there resounded the J O A, and again they heard intoned:

World-engendered being, thou art shaped in light,
By the Sun empowered in the Moon's full might;

Mars' creating chiming, power to thee is bringing,
And Mercury, moving limbs in oscillation swinging;

Jupiter's radiant wisdom is on thee gleaming,
And Venus' love-bearing beauty is on thee beaming;

So that Saturn's world-aged spirit-inwardness
Doth to space's being and to ages now aborning consecrate thee.

But in this memory, this historical recollection of something ancient, there resided a certain power, the power to create something new. And from that moment there streamed forth this power to create something new—but it was something strange and little observed by mankind. For you must really first understand the nature of this creative power that went forth from the collaboration of Alexander and Aristotle.

Take any notable poem or other work of art—it can be a most beautiful one, such as the Bhagavad Gita or Goethe's Faust or his Iphigenia—anything you value very highly—and reflect on its rich and mighty content—let us say, on the content of Goethe's Faust. Now, by what means, my dear friends, is this rich content transmitted to you? Let us assume that it is transmitted in the ordinary way, as it is to most people. At some time during your life you read Faust. What did you encounter on the physical plane—on the paper? Nothing but combinations of a b c, and so forth. The means by which the mighty content of Faust is disclosed to us consists only of combinations of the letters of the alphabet. If you know the alphabet, the paper contains nothing that does not correspond with one of the twenty-odd letters. Something is conjured up out of these twenty-odd letters—if you know how to read—that evokes for you the whole glorious substance of Faust. You may find it excessively tiresome to recite the alphabet, and you may consider it as abstract as anything could well be; yet rightly combined, this superlative abstraction gives us the whole of Faust.

Now, when there was heard again the cosmic resounding from the Moon that disclosed to Aristotle and Alexander what the blaze of Ephesus signified, how that fire had carried the secret of Ephesus out into the world-ether, there came to Aristotle the inspiration to found the cosmic script. This, however, is not achieved by means of the alphabet, but rather through thoughts, as book writing is made up of letters. And so the letters of the cosmic script came into being.—When I write them down for you they are just as abstract as the alphabet:

There you have a number of concepts. They originated when Aristotle laid them before Alexander. Learn to accomplish with these concepts what you do with the alphabet, and you will have learned to read in the cosmos by means of Being, Quantity, Quality, Relationship, Space, Time, Position, Having, Doing, Suffering.

In our age of abstractions something peculiar happened to logic, as it is taught in the schools. Imagine a custom existing in some school to teach—not reading, but, for instance, to provide books from which the pupils had to keep learning the letters in all conceivable combinations, but never arriving at using them for envisioning the wealth of the contents: that would be the same as what the world has done to Aristotle's Logic. In the books on logic are listed his categories—that's what people call them. People memorize them, but have no idea what to do with them. It is exactly like memorizing the alphabet without knowing how to apply it.

Reading the cosmic records bases on something just as simple as extracting the content of Faust by means of the alphabet—it must merely be learned. And fundamentally, all that anthroposophy has ever brought forth or ever will has been experienced by means of these concepts, just as what is read in Faust is experienced through the letters. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are comprised in these simple concepts that are the cosmic alphabet.

Something intervened in Earth evolution at the time of Alexander that stands in contrast with the direct perception so characteristic of Ephesus. It did not develop till later, especially during the Middle Ages; and it is deeply hidden, profoundly esoteric. Profoundly esoteric is the meaning that dwells in those ten simple concepts; and actually we are learning more and more to live in them. But we must keep striving to experience them as livingly in our soul as we do the alphabet when a wealth of spiritual substance is in question.

Thus you see how something that for thousands of years had been a mighty instinctive revelation of wisdom flowed into ten concepts, whose inner power and light, however, remain to be re-disclosed. And when man will have learned again to read in the cosmos, when he will experience the resurrection of what has lain buried as though in a grave during this interlude in human evolution between the two spiritual ages, then it will come about at some future time that the world wisdom, the light of the world, will be found again. It is our task, my dear friends, to bring to light again what is hidden. We must make of Easter an experience for all humanity. And just as it could be said on other occasions that anthroposophy is a Christmas experience, so it is in its whole manifestation an Easter experience, a resurrection experience coupled with an experience of the grave. And it is especially important during this Easter gathering that we should feel, if I may so express it, the solemnity of anthroposophic striving by realizing that today we can turn to a spiritual Being Who may be close to us, directly beyond the threshold, and appeal to Him thus: Oh, how blessed was mankind at one time with divine-spiritual revelation that still shone so very bright in Ephesus! But now all that is buried. How can I uncover what is so deeply buried?—for one would like to believe that what once existed might in some historical way be found again in the grave where it lies.

Then the Being will reply to us, as did once before a like being in a similar case: What you seek is no longer here. It is in your heart, if only you will unlock your heart in the right way.

Anthroposophy is indeed latent in the hearts of men, but it is for these human hearts to open in the right way. That is what we must deeply feel. Then we will be led back—not instinctively, as of old, but in full awareness—to the wisdom that lived and shone in the Mysteries.

All this I would like to implant in your hearts, my dear friends, at this Easter time; for to permeate yourself with something that can enkindle a feeling of solemnity in every heart dedicated to anthroposophy, that is something which carries up into the spiritual world and which must be correlated with the Christmas impulse given at Dornach. For this impulse must not remain a thought-out, intellectualistic one, but must spring from the heart; it must not be formal or matter-of-fact, nor must it be sentimental: it must issue from the cause itself and bear the mark of solemnity. When the conflagration at Ephesus blazed up, first in the outer ether and then in the heart of Aristotle, it revealed anew to Aristotle the secrets that could then be epitomized in the simplest terms; and we may say in all modesty that, just as he was able to use the fire of Ephesus to this end, so it is our task—and we shall fulfill it—to use what the flames of the Goetheanum carried into the ether: the aims and purpose of anthroposophy.

What do we gather from all this, my dear friends? That at the memorial service in the Christmas-New Year time, the time in which the disaster struck us a year before, it was vouchsafed us to send forth a new impulse from the Goetheanum. How could this be? Because we are right in feeling that what had previously been a cause pertaining to this Earth, worked for and established as such, was carried by the flames out into cosmic space. Because this misfortune has come to us we are, recognizing its consequences, justified in saying, Now we understand that we may no longer represent a mere Earth cause, but must know it as one of wide etheric space in which the spirit lives: the cause represented by the Goetheanum is a cause of the cosmic ether in which lives the spirit-filled wisdom of the world. It has been carried out into the ether; and it is granted us to permeate ourselves with the Goetheanum impulses flowing in from the cosmos.

Take this in any sense—as an image, if you like: even as an image it signifies a profound truth, a truth that can be simply expressed: the Christmas impulse calls for the permeation of anthroposophical activity with an esoteric element. This is present because what had been earthly now reacts on the impulses of the anthroposophical movement through the astral light in the physical fire that rayed forth into cosmic space; but we must be able to receive these impulses.

Then, if we are able to receive them, we feel a certain important link in the chain of all that lives in anthroposophy: it is the anthroposophical Easter spirit, which can never in the world believe that the spirit perishes, but rather that it arises ever and again after dying through the world; and anthroposophy must hold fast to the spirit resurrected again and again out of eternal depths.

That is what we will take into our hearts as the Easter thought, the Easter feeling; and from this gathering we shall carry away feelings, my dear friends, that will fill us with courage and strength for work when we return to our allotted spheres.

• 1. Translator's Note:—For readers not familiar with German it must be explained that j is pronounced like our y in “yet”—in other words, like an excessively short German i. For this reason it is not too strange that one often encounters J for I (but only in capitals), and the above is a case in point. Indeed, there is no choice here but to use it, as the same letter must serve as a pure vowel in J O A and later as a modified vowel in Jehova.—The letters J O A must be pronounced Ee Oh Ah, and Jehova that appears later, Yay-hoh-vah.
• 2. Translation by Henry B. Monges.
• 2. Samothrace still existed as a memorial and also as a sanctuary for work, but in the main the Mystery schools had declined in the time of Alexander.

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science

This institution cannot come about from abstract considerations “from above”. It must arise from the needs of our membership “from below”. The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society has conceived the plan to form a Youth Section because it corresponds to what young people in our Society are seeking from the depths of their being. And it will shape it in such a way that these needs can be met as they arise.

The same must be true for the other sections. But for this to happen, the needs that arise within our membership must flow through the whole society and ultimately unite in what is expected of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. We must therefore become more and more aware that the purpose of the Christmas Conference was not to form a mere “administrative board”. Of course, the “administration” must be there, and it should not be forgotten that it is necessary and that it has to develop care and accuracy. But the main thing will be that the attitude of the members of the Goetheanum Executive Council really places it at the center of the Society's spiritual interests. It should bring together all the spiritual interests that exist.

It is not the intention of this executive council to in any way restrict the initiative of the individual parts of the Society. But it should increasingly be seen as a necessity that everything that arises in the Society be brought to the attention of this executive council. It can then harmonize what is wanted in one place or by one group of people with what is intended by another. This board will not want to act in a one-sided way like an authority “from above”; it will make it its business to have an open heart and an understanding mind for everything that strives for realization from within the membership. In this regard, he would also like to be able to count on understanding in the sense that he will be met halfway, actively met halfway, when he wants to carry out something based on his initiative and the goals of the anthroposophical movement. In this sense, I said at the Christmas Conference: this board should be an initiative board.

If this board is increasingly seen in this light, then it will be able to serve as a true advisor in all matters concerning the Society. And it wants to be an “advisor”; because it knows that it would fundamentally contradict the spirit of the Anthroposophical Society if it wanted to be a “decider”. In his advice, he will appeal to nothing but the free insight of the members; but he will only be able to be a true “advisor” if the right attitude is brought to his position, which lies in the intentions and aspirations of the members.

The Executive Council at the Goetheanum would like to see as little as possible in the way of paragraphs and programs in the way of establishing a connection with the work in society; it would like to see the human element, which can also have an individual effect in every detail, come into general validity within society. And above all, it would like to achieve this in everything that is to be done for the School of Spiritual Science.

[ 1 ] Through the liberal politician of whom I have spoken I became acquainted with the owner of a book-shop. This book business had seen better days than those it was passing through during my stay in Weimar. This was still true when the shop belonged to the father of the young man whom I came to know as the owner. The important thing for me was the fact that this book-shop published a paper which carried sketchy articles dealing with contemporary spiritual life and whatever was then appearing in the fields of poetry, science, and art. This paper also was in a decline; its circulation had fallen off. But it afforded me the opportunity to write about much which then lay within the scope of my thinking or had a relation to this. Although the numerous essays and book reviews which I thus wrote were read by very few, it was an important thing to me to have a paper in which I could publish whatever I pleased to write. There was a stimulus in this which bore fruit later, when I edited the Magazin für Literatur and was therefore compelled to share intensely in thought and feeling in contemporary spiritual life.

[ 2 ] In this way Weimar became for me the place to which my thoughts had often to turn back in later years. The narrow limits within which my life had been restricted in Vienna were now expanded, and I had spiritual and human experiences the results of which appeared later on.

[ 3 ] Most important of all, however, were the relationships with men which were then formed.

When in later years I have recalled to memory Weimar and my life there, my mental gaze has often been directed to a house which had become dear to me in very special measure.

[ 4 ] I became acquainted with the actor Neuffer while he was still engaged at the Weimar theatre. I appreciated in him at first his earnest and austere conception of his profession. Into his judgment concerning the art of the stage he allowed nothing of the dilettante to enter. This was satisfying for the reason that people are not always aware that dramatic art must fulfil genuinely artistic requirements in the same way as does, for instance, music.

[ 5 ] Neuffer married the sister of the pianist and composer Bernhard Stavenhagen. I was introduced into his home. One was in this way received at the same time in friendly fashion in the home of the parents of Frau Neuffer and Bernhard Stavenhagen. Frau Neuffer is a woman who radiates a spiritual atmosphere over everything about her. Her sentiments, deeply rooted in the soul, shone with wonderful beauty in the free and informal talk in which one shared while in her home. She brought forward whatever she had to say thoughtfully and yet graciously. Every moment that I spent with the Neuffers I had the feeling: “Frau Neuffer strives to reach truth in all the relationships of life in a way that is very rare.”

[ 6 ] That I was welcomed there was evidenced in the most varied incidents. I will choose one example.

[ 7 ] One Christmas Eve Herr Neuffer came to my home, and – as I was not in – left the request that I must without fail come to his home for the ceremony of Christmas gifts. This was not easy, for in Weimar I always had to share in several such festivities. But I managed somehow to do this. Then I found, beside the gifts for the children, a special Christmas gift for me all nicely wrapped up, the value of which can be seen only from its history.

[ 8 ] I had been one day in the studio of a sculptor. The sculptor wanted to show me his work. Very little that I saw there interested me. Only a single bust which lay out of sight in a corner attracted my attention. It was a bust of Hegel. In the studio, which belonged to the home of an old lady very prominent in Weimar, there was to be seen every possible sort of sculpture. Sculptors always rented the room for only a short time; and each tenant would leave there many things which he did not care to take with him. But there were also some things which had lain there for a long time unobserved, such as the Hegel bust.

[ 9 ] The interest I had conceived in this bust led from that time on to my mentioning it here or there. So this happened once also in the Neuffer home; there also I added a casual remark to the effect that I should like to have the bust in my possession.

[ 10 ] Then on the following Christmas Eve it was given to me as a present at Neuffer's. At lunch on the following day, to which I was invited, Neuffer told how he had procured the bust.

[ 1 ] He first went to the lady to whom the studio belonged. He told her that some one had seen the bust in her studio, and that it would have a special value for him if he could procure it. The lady said that such things had been in her house for a long time past, but whether a “Hegel” bust was there – as to that she knew nothing. She appeared quite willing, however, to guide Neuffer around in order that he might look for it. Everything was “thoroughly searched”; not the most hidden corner was left uninspected; nowhere was the Hegel bust discovered. Neuffer was quite sad, for there had been something very satisfying to him in the thought of giving me pleasure by means of the Hegel bust. He was already standing at the door with the lady. The maid-servant came along. She heard the words of Neuffer's: “Yes, it is a pity that we have not found the Hegel bust!” “Hegel!” interjected the maid: “Is this perhaps that head with the tip of the nose broken off which is under my bed in the servant's room?” Forthwith the final act of the expedition was carried out, and Neuffer actually succeeded in procuring the bust; before Christmas there was still time to supplement the defective nose.

[ 12 ] So it was that I came by the Hegel bust which is one of the few things that later accompanied me to many different places. I always liked to look again and again at this head of Hegel (by Wassmann, the year 1826) when I was deeply immersed in the world of Hegel's ideas. And this, as a matter of fact, happened very often. This countenance, whose features are the most human expression of the purest thought, constitutes a life-companion wielding a manifold influence.

[ 13 ] So it was with the Neuffers. They spared no pains when they wished to give someone pleasure by means of something that had a special relation to him. The children that came one by one into the Neuffer home had a model mother. Frau Neuffer brought them up less by what she did than by what she is – by her whole being. I had the happiness of being godfather to one of the sons. Every visit to this house was the occasion of an inner satisfaction. I was privileged to make such visits also in later years after I had left Weimar but returned to and fro to deliver lectures. Unfortunately this has not been possible now for a long while. It thus happens that I have not been able to see the Neuffers during the years in which a painful fate has broken in upon them; for this family is one of those most sorely put to the test by the World War.

[ 14 ] A charming personality was the father of Frau Neuffer, the elder Stavenhagen. Before this time he had been engaged in a practical occupation, but he had then settled down to rest. He now lived wholly in the contents of the library he had acquired for himself; and it was a thoroughly congenial picture to others – the way in which he lived there. Nothing self-satisfied or top-lofty had entered into the lovable old man, but rather something that revealed in every word the sincere craving for knowledge.

[ 15 ] The relationships in Weimar were then of such a character that souls which felt elsewhere unsatisfied would turn up here. So it was with those who made a permanent home there, but so also with those who loved to come again and again as visitors. One had this feeling about many persons: “Visits to Weimar are different for them from visits to other places.”

[ 16 ] I had this feeling in a very special way about the Danish poet, Rudolf Schmidt. He came first for the production of his play, Der verwandelte König.¹ During this very first visit I made his acquaintance. Later, however, he appeared on many occasions which brought visitors from elsewhere to Weimar. The fine figure of a man with those wavy locks was often among these visitors. The way in which a man “is” in Weimar had in it something that drew his soul. He was a very sharply marked personality. In philosophy he was an adherent of Rasmus Nielson. Through this man, who derived his thought from Hegel, Rudolf Schmidt had the most beautiful understanding of the German idealistic philosophy. And if Schmidt's opinions were thus clearly stamped on the positive side, they were no less so on the negative. Thus he became biting, satirical, utterly adverse when he spoke of Georg Brandes. There was something artistic in seeing a person revealing an entire expansive field of experience poured out before you in his antipathy. Upon me these revelations could never make any impression except an artistic one; for I had read much from Georg Brandes. I had been especially interested in what he had written, in a manner rich in spiritual wealth and out of a wide range of observations and knowledge, about the spiritual currents of the European peoples. But what Rudolf Schmidt brought forward was subjectively honest, and because of the character of the poet himself it was really captivating.

At length I came to feel the deepest and most heartfelt love for Rudolf Schmidt; I rejoiced on the days when he came to Weimar. It was interesting to hear him talk about his northern homeland, and to perceive what significant capacities had sprung up in him from the fountain-head of his northern experiences. It was no less interesting to talk with him about Goethe, Schiller, Byron. Then he spoke very differently from Georg Brandes. The latter is always in his judgments the international personality, but in Rudolf Schmidt there spoke the Dane. For this very reason he talked about many things and in many connections in a more interesting way than Georg Brandes.

[ 17 ] During the latter part of my stay in Weimar, I became an intimate friend of Conrad Ansorge and his brother-in-law, von Crompton. Conrad Ansorge later developed in a brilliant way his great artistic powers. Here I need speak only of what he was to me in a beautiful friendship at the close of the 'nineties, and how he then impressed me.

[ 18] The wives of Ansorge and von Crompton were sisters. Because of this relationship, our gatherings took place either at von Crompton's home or at the hotel Russischer Hof.

[ 19 ] Ansorge was an energetically artistic man. He was active both as pianist and as composer. During the time of our Weimar acquaintance he set to music poems of Nietzsche and of Dehmel. It was always a delightful occasion when the friends who were gradually drawn into the Ansorge-Crompton circle were permitted to hear a new composition.

[ 20 ] To this group belonged also a Weimar editor, Paul Böhler. He edited the Deutschland, which had a more independent existence side by side with the official journal, the Weimarische Zeitung. Many other Weimar friends besides these appeared in this circle: Fresenius, Heitmüller, Fritz Koegel, too, and others. When Otto Erich Hartleben came to Weimar, he also always appeared in this circle, after it had been formed.

[ 21 ] Conrad Ansorge had grown out of the Liszt circle. Indeed, I speak nothing but the truth when I assert that he considered himself one of the pupils of the master who understood him in an artistic sense most truly of all. But it was through Conrad Ansorge that what had come in living form from Liszt was brought before one's mind in the most beautiful way.

[ 22 ] For everything musical which came from Ansorge arose out of an entirely original, individual human being. This humanity in him might be inspired by Liszt, but what was delightful in it was its originality. I express these things just as I then experienced them; how I was afterward related to them or am now related is not here under discussion.

[ 23 ] Through Liszt, Ansorge had once at an earlier period been bound to Weimar; at the time of which I am here speaking, his soul was freed from this state of belonging to Weimar. Indeed, the characteristic of this Ansorge-Crompton circle was that it was in a very different relationship to Weimar from that of the great majority of persons of whom I have hitherto been able to state that they came into close touch with me.

[ 24 ] Those persons were at Weimar in the way I have described in the preceding chapter. The interests of this circle reached outward from Weimar, and so it came about that at the time when my Weimar work was ended and I had to think about leaving the city of Goethe, I had formed the friendship of persons for whom the life in Weimar was not especially characteristic. In a certain sense one “lived oneself” out of Weimar while among these friends.

[ 25 ] Ansorge, who felt that Weimar put fetters upon his artistic development, moved at nearly the same time as I did to Berlin. Paul Böhler, although editor of the most widely read paper in Weimar, did not write in the contemporary “spirit of Weimar,” but expressed many a sharp criticism, drawn from a broader range of view, against that spirit. It was he who always raised his voice when dealing with this theme to place in the true light what was born of opportunism and littleness of soul. And in this way it happened that, just at the time when he was a member of this circle, he lost his place.

[ 26] Von Crompton was the most lovable personality one could imagine. In his house the circle passed the most delightful hours. Frau von Crompton was there the central figure, a richly spiritual and gracious personality like sunlight to those who were privileged to be about her.

[ 27 ] The whole group stood, so to speak, in the sign of Nietzsche. They looked upon Nietzsche's view as possessing greater interest than all others; they surrendered themselves to that mood of soul which manifested itself in Nietzsche, considering it as representing in a certain way the flowering of a genuine and free humanity. In both these aspects von Crompton especially was a representative of the Nietzsche followers in the 'nineties. My own attitude toward Nietzsche did not change at all within this circle. But the fact that I was the one who was questioned when any one wished to know something about Nietzsche brought it about that the relation in which the others stood to Nietzsche was assumed to be my own relation also.

[ 28 ] But I must say that this circle looked up in a more understanding fashion to that which Nietzsche believed that he knew, and that they sought to express in their lives what lay in the Nietzsche ideals of life with greater understanding than was present in many other cases where Superman and Beyond Good and Evil did not always bring forth the most satisfying blossoms.

[ 29 ] For me the circle was important because of a strong and vital energy that bore one along with it. On the other hand, however, I found there the most responsive understanding for everything which I thought it possible to introduce into this circle.

[ 30 ] The evenings, made brilliant by Ansorge's musical compositions, its hours filled with interesting talk about Nietzsche in which all shared, when far-reaching and weighty questions concerning the world and life formed, so to speak, a satisfying converse, – these evenings were, indeed, something to which I can look back with contentment as having given a beautiful character to the last part of my stay at Weimar.

[ 31 ] Since everything which had a living expression in this circle was derived from a direct and serious artistic experience and sought to permeate itself with a world-conception which held to the true human being as its central point, one could not cherish any sense of dissatisfaction if there was manifested something opposed to the Weimar of that time. The tone was different from that which I had experienced previously in the Olden circle. There much irony found expression; one looked upon Weimar also as “human, all too human” as one would have seen other places if one had been in these. In the Ansorge-Crompton circle there was present rather --I mean to say – the earnest feeling: “How can the evolution of German culture progress further if a place like Weimar does so little to fulfil its foreordained tasks?”

[ 32 ] Against the background of this social intercourse my book Goethe's World-Conception came into being, with which I ended my work at Weimar. Some time ago, when I was preparing a new edition of this book, I sensed in the way in which I then shaped my thoughts for the volume an echo of the inner nature of the friendly gatherings of the circle I have here described.

[ 33 ] In this book there is somewhat more of the personal than would have been the case had there not re-vibrated in my mind while I was writing it what had over and over resounded in this circle with strong and avowed enthusiasm about the “nature of Personality.” It is the only one of my books of which I would say just this. All of them I can assert to have been personally experienced in the truest sense of the word; not, however, in this way, when one's own personality so strongly enters into the experiences of the personalities about one.

[ 34 ] But this concerns only the general bearing of the book. The philosophy of Goethe, as revealed in relation to the realm of nature, is there set forth as this had already been done in my Goethe writings of the 'eighties. Only in regard to details my views had been broadened, deepened, or confirmed by manuscripts first discovered among the Goethe archives.

[ 35 ] In everything which I have published in connection with Goethe the thing that I have striven to do has been to set Goethe's “world-conception” before the world in its content and its tendency. From this was to appear, as a result, how that in Goethe which is comprehensive and spiritually penetrating into the thing leads to detailed discoveries in the most varied fields of nature. I was not concerned to point out these single discoveries as such, but to show that they were the flowers of the plant of a spiritual view of nature.

[ 36 ] To characterize this view of nature as a part of what Goethe gave to the world – such was my purpose in writing descriptions of this portion of Goethe's work as a thinker and researcher. But I aimed at the same objective in arranging Goethe's papers in the two editions in which I collaborated, that in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur and, also the Weimar Sophie edition. I never considered it a task which could fall to my lot because of the entire work of Goethe to bring to light what Goethe had achieved as botanist, zoologist, geologist, colour-theorist, in the manner in which one passes judgment upon such an achievement before the forum of competent scientists. Moreover, it seemed to me inappropriate to do anything in this direction while arranging the papers for the two editions.

[ 37 ] So that part also of the writings of Goethe which I edited for the Weimar edition became nothing more than a document for the world-conception of Goethe as revealed in his researches in nature. How this world-conception cast its special light upon things botanical, geological, etc., this must be brought to the fore. It has been felt, for instance, that I ought to have arranged the geological-mineralogical writings differently in order that “Goethe's relationship to geology” might be seen from the contents of these. But it is only necessary to read what I said about the arrangement of the writings of Goethe in this field in the introductions to my publications in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur, and there could be no doubt that I would never have agreed to the point of view urged by my critics. In Weimar this could have been known when the editing was entrusted to me. For in the Kürschner edition everything had already appeared which had become fixed in my point of view before the idea had ever arisen of entrusting to me a task in Weimar. The task was entrusted to me with full knowledge of this circumstance. I will by no means deny that what I have done in many single details in working up the Weimar edition may be pointed out as “errors” by specialists. This may be rightly maintained. But the thing ought not to be so presented as if the nature of the edition rested upon my competence or lack of competence, and not upon my fundamental postulates. Especially should this not be done by those who admit that they possess no organ for perceiving what I have maintained in regard to Goethe. When the question concerns individual errors of fact here and there, I might point out to those who criticize me in this respect many much worse errors in the papers I wrote as a student in the Higher Technical Institute. I have made it very clear in this account of the course of my life that, even in childhood, I lived in the spiritual world as in that which was self-evident to me, but that I had to strive earnestly for everything which pertained to a knowledge of the outer world. For this reason I am a man slow in development as to all the aspects of the physical world. The results of this fact appear in details of my Goethe editions.

• 1. The King Transformed.

Mementos of time, the Festivals direct our feelings and thoughts to the past. By their own inner significance they awake in us the thoughts which bind us to all that our own souls held sacred in the past. And moreover, the understanding of everything which underlies the Festivals awakes in us thoughts which direct our gaze to the future of mankind, in other words, to the future of our own souls. Feelings are awakened in us which fill us with enthusiasm to fit ourselves to play our part in times to come; our will is fired by ideals which give us strength so to labour that we may be enabled to fulfil more and more perfectly our tasks for the future.

In the deeper sense of the word Whitsuntide may be characterised by a looking in spirit back to the past and yet on towards the future. The significance of the Festival for the nations of the West stands out before us in a stupendous scene, which appeals to the deepest feelings of our nature. The scene is familiar to every one here present. After the accomplishment of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Founder of Christianity lingers awhile among those who are able to see Him in that body which He used after the Mystery, and the further succession of events is placed before our souls in an impressive series of pictures. The body which the Founder of Christianity took after the Mystery of Golgotha, dissolves visibly, and is revealed to His most intimate disciples in the mighty vision known to us as the Ascension and ten days later there follows that which is now to be shown us in a picture, speaking a language which goes to the very hearts of all willing to understand it. The disciples of Christ are assembled; those who first understood Him are gathered together. Profoundly they feel the mighty impulse which has entered through Him into the evolution of mankind and their souls anxiously await the fulfilment of the promise made to them, of events which should be accomplished in their own souls. Gathered together in deep fervour of spirit are these first disciples and followers of the Christ-Impulse on the day, time-honoured in their land, of the Feast of Pentecost. Their souls are raised to a loftier perception; they are called upon, as it were, by a ‘rushing mighty wind,’ to direct their powers of observation to that which should come, to that which awaited them when, reborn again and again with that fiery impulse which they had received into their hearts, they should live on this Earth of ours. Before our souls there rises a picture of the ‘fiery tongues’ as they descend on the head of each disciple and a new and mighty vision appears to those present, in which they see what the future of this impulse will be.

Those first disciples of Christ who were assembled together and who beheld in spirit the spiritual world, felt that they were not addressing only those nearest to themselves within the Emit of space and time. They felt their hearts transported far away to the people scattered over the face of the Earth; they felt that something lived in their hearts translatable into all languages and into the understanding of the hearts of all men. In this mighty vision, in which the future of Christianity is revealed, these earliest disciples saw themselves as if encircled by the future believers out of all the nations of the Earth; it impressed them with the feeling that they would one day have the power to announce the Christian message in words which would be understood, not alone by those nearest to them in space and time, but by all the human beings who would in future work out their destiny on the Earth.

That was the sum of feeling and inner experience which filled the minds of those first followers of Christ on that first Christian Whitsunday. But according to the explanation given in the true esoterically Christian sense and clothed in symbolical language, the Spirit, also called the Holy Ghost, Who lives, and Who poured out His force on Earth at the time when Christ Jesus descended in spirit into the Earth, Who first appeared again at the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist—the same Spirit in another form, in that of many single fiery tongues, descended on the different individualities of the first Christian believers. On Whitsunday, we hear of the Holy Ghost in a special form. Let us call up the meaning of the expression ‘Holy Ghost,’ as it is understood in the Gospels. How in olden times (including pre-Christian times) was the spirit generally described?

In ancient times spirit was mentioned in many connections but especially in one. The view was held, which is now again justified by the knowledge gained through our present Spiritual Science, that when a human being at birth enters upon the existence between birth and death, the body in which this individuality incarnates is determined in a two-fold manner. In reality this body has a double task to perform. As regards our corporality we belong to the whole human race, but we are also more particularly individuals of a certain nation, race or family. In those olden times preceding the proclamation of Christianity, there was but little to be observed of what we may call ‘common humanity,’ there was little of that feeling of belonging to one another which has been gaining ground more and more in the human heart ever since the proclamation of Christianity, the feeling that prompts the words: ‘Thou art man in common with all men on Earth!’ On the other hand, the feeling of the individual that he belonged to a particular nation or family was all the stronger. This feeling is even expressed in the venerable Hindu religion, in the belief that only he can be a true Hindu who is one by community of blood. In many respects, though they had often broken through it, the old Hebrews kept strictly to this principle before the coming of Christ Jesus. In their opinion a man was one of their nation only because his parents, who also belonged to it through blood relationship, had placed him there. But there was something else that invariably made itself felt. In old times and in all nations the individual always felt himself more or less to be the member of a group, the member of an organism which was his nation, and the farther we retreat into the far distant past the more intense do we find the feeling of membership of an organism, of a nation and the rarer becomes the feeling of being a single individual. But gradually the human being learnt also at the same time to be conscious of himself as an individual,—as a separate human being with distinct human qualities of his own. Two principles were felt to be at work in ordinary human life: the attachment to a people, and the individualisation as a separate human being.

Now the forces behind these two principles were variously attributed to the parents. The principle by which the human being belonged to his nation, that which made him a part of the community, was ascribed to heredity on the mother’s side. One in sympathy with these old opinions would say of the mother: The spirit of the people reigns in her; she was filled with the spirit of the people, and has handed on to the child the attributes common to all the members of his nation. Of the father it was said that he was the bearer and transmitter of the principle that tends to confer the individual, personal qualities. When, therefore, a human being was born into the world, it was said—among the old Hebrews of pre-Christian time, for instance—he is a person, an individual, by virtue of the paternal forces, whereas the whole nature of the mother was steeped in the spirit of her people and she has handed that spirit on to her child. It was said of the mother that the national spirit dwelt in her. And in this connection the spirit specially meant was that Spirit who from the spiritual regions directs his forces to mankind, by causing them to flow into the human race in the physical world, by way of the maternal principle.

But now, through the impulse of Christ a new point of view had arisen, namely, a belief that the Spirit formerly reverenced, the National Spirit, should be replaced by one akin to him, indeed, but Whose activity was of a far, far loftier character—a Spirit Who held the same relationship to all mankind as the former Spirit had held to the separate peoples. This Spirit was to be communicated to mankind, and was to fill men with the inward strength which should inspire the thought: 11 no longer feel myself belonging merely to a fraction of humanity, but to the whole of it. I am a member of the whole human race—I shall continue to feel more and more a member of that whole race!’ The force which thus poured out over the whole of mankind the element of common humanity, was ascribed to the Holy Ghost. The Spirit dwelling in the force which communicated itself from the nation to the mother was exalted from ‘Spirit’ to ‘Holy Spirit.’

He Who should bring mankind the power of developing in earthly existence that principle common to all mankind, could only dwell as the First-born in a body inherited by the power of the Holy Ghost; and this power of the Holy Ghost was conceived in the Annunciation, by the mother of Jesus. And in the Gospel of St. Matthew we read of the consternation of Joseph, of whom we are told that he was a pious man. According to the old meaning of the words this would imply that Joseph was one who would consider that, if he ever had a, child, it must be born out of the Spirit of its nation. Joseph now learns that the mother of his child is filled, ‘penetrated’ (for this is the true meaning of the word in our language) by the force of a Spirit, but not merely of a National Spirit (Archangel); she is penetrated by the force of that Spirit Who is the Spirit of universal humanity I And he believes that he can have no fellowship with a woman who bears in her the Spirit of all humanity and not that Spirit in whom he had piously placed his confidence; he does not believe that such a woman could ever be the mother of his children. Therefore, as it is said, he was ‘minded to put her away privily.’ And it was not until he, too, had received from the spiritual world a communication bestowing power on him, that he could make up his mind to have a son of that woman who was penetrated and filled with the power of the Holy Ghost. This Spirit is therefore creatively active, inasmuch as He pours out His forces into the evolution of mankind at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. And the same Spirit is again active in that stupendous deed, the Baptism of John in the Jordan. Now we understand what is meant by the power of the Holy Ghost. It is the force which will raise man more and more above all that would tend to differentiate and isolate him, to that which makes him a member of the whole of humanity over all the Earth, that force which works like a link binding every soul to every other soul—no matter in what body it may be.

Now we are told of this same Holy Ghost that it is He Who descended, in a new revelation at Whitsuntide, into the individualities of the first confessors of the Christian faith. At the Baptism by John we have the picture of the Spirit in the form of a dove; but now another picture is given in the tongues of fire. It is one dove, a single form, in which the Holy Ghost manifests at the Baptism by John; whereas at Whitsuntide He manifests in many separate tongues! And every one of these tongues is an inspiration for the individual souls for every single individual among the first confessors of Christianity. What then does this Whitsun symbol represent to our souls?

After the Bearer of the universal human spirit had finished His labours on Earth, after the Christ had rendered up His last vestures to be dissolved in the Universe; when the visible form of Christ was dissolved as Unity in the spiritual part of the Earth,—then, for the first time, the possibility was created, that from the hearts of the disciples of the Christ-Impulse should go forth the ability to speak of that Christ-Impulse, to labour in conformity with that Christ- Impulse. Gone is the Christ-Impulse in so far as He had manifested in visible form, into the one and indivisible spiritual world, in the Ascension; ten days later He reappears, bom out of the hearts of every one of these first disciples. The reappearance in manifold form of the same Spirit that had been operative in the force of the Impulse of Christ, made of the first disciples of Christianity the channels and preachers of the Message of Christ, thus placing at the beginning of the Christian evolution the mighty token which proclaims to us the message. As each of the first disciples was privileged individually to receive the Christ-Impulse in the form of fiery tongues, kindling inspiration in his own soul, so can each one of you, if you endeavour to understand the Impulse of Christ, receive this power individually in your hearts. That power can then grow more and more in you and can become more and more perfect. That token that was set up at the beginning of Christianity may become the fountain of a vast hope welling up in us. And as he advances in perfection, the human being can feel that the Holy Ghost speaks from within him in proportion as his thought, feeling and will are penetrated with the Holy Ghost, Who, by cleaving asunder, or multiplying Himself, becomes an individual Spirit in each separate human individuality in whom He works. Thus, as regards our future evolution, the Holy Ghost is for us men the Spirit of development into free men, the freedom of the human soul. The spirit of freedom reigns in that Spirit which was poured out on the first disciples of Christianity, on that first Christian Whitsun Festival—the Spirit Whose most salient quality is indicated by Christ Jesus Himself in the words: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free 1’ Man can be free only in spirit; so long as he is dependent on that in which his spirit dwells, namely his body, so long is he a slave of that body; he can only be free when he finds himself again in spirit and when, out of that spirit, he becomes master of that which is within him. ‘To be free’ presupposes that we have found the spirit within us. The true spirit, in whom we can find ourselves, is the universal human spirit, which we recognise as the force of the Holy Ghost entering us at Whitsuntide, the spirit to which we must give birth within ourselves and which we must allow to become manifest.

Thus we see the symbol of Whitsuntide transformed into our mightiest ideal of the free unfolding of the human soul to a self-contained, free individual. This was felt more or less dimly even by those who, not impelled by any clear consciousness of their own, but acting on inspiration, were concerned in the fixing of Whitsunday on a definite day in the year. Even this outer institution of the Feast-days is remarkable and no one who is unable to trace the guiding wisdom, even in the fixing of the Festivals, has any real understanding of the world.

Let us take the three Festivals, Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide. As a Christian Festival Christmas falls on a certain fixed day of the year. It is fixed once for all on that particular day of December; every year we celebrate the Christmas Feast on that same day. Easter is different, it is a ‘movable’ feast, dependent on the constellations in the heavens. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the Vernal equinox. In order to determine this, man must turn his gaze heavenward, to the expanse in which the stars follow their course and from the fields of space proclaim to us the laws governing the world. Easter is a movable feast, precisely as in every individual the moment varies which awakens the force of the higher man, endowed with a higher consciousness, to free himself from ordinary, lower human frailty. As in one year Easter falls on one day, the next year on another day, so also in the case of the individual human being—according to his past and the earnestness of his striving—sooner or later the moment will come in which he will be able to say with conviction: ‘I feel that I have the strength to bring forth a higher self from within me!’

Christmas is, however, an immovable feast. At that Festival one can look back over the course of the year, on the blossoming and the decay of Nature, with all the joys of the swelling and bursting forth of Nature’s forces. Then one sees the Earth-life in its state of sleep, into which it has withdrawn its germinal force. External Nature has withdrawn, taking with it all its germinating forces. When the outer world of the senses sees least of the manifestation of these springs of growth, when the Earth itself shows how at a certain period the spiritual forces withdraw, in order that they may gather strength for a new year of life, when physical nature is most silent, at that time of the Christmas Festival man should let the thought of a hope stir within him—the hope that he is not only united with the Earth-forces now lying dormant at Christmastide, but is also united with those other forces, which are never dormant, the forces dwelling in the spiritual regions as well as on Earth. This hope should rise in his soul when he watches the Earth as it were sinking to rest. From the inmost depths of the soul itself this hope will spring; it will be the spiritual light of the soul at the time of deepest gloom outside in physical Nature. Then shall man be reminded by the token of the Christmas Festival that he is for a while bound to his earth-body with the forces of the ego, in the same way as everything in the nature of manifestation around him is bound to the circuit of the Earth during the year. Coinciding with the sleep of the Earth, which every year begins at the same period, is the Christmas Festival when man should call to mind that he is chained to a body, but that he is not condemned to remain bound to that body; that he may cherish the hope that he will find strength to make of himself a free soul. What we recognise as important in the Christmas Festival should thus remind us of our connection with our body and of the heritage which is ours to free ourselves from that body. But it depends on the earnestness of our endeavour whether we bring to fruition sooner or later the forces for which we dare to hope, and which will lead us back again to spiritual worlds, to heavenly places.

The Easter Festival should awaken such thoughts in us. It should remind us that we have not only at our disposal those forces that are ours through our body and which are also divine, spiritual forces; it should remind us besides that as human beings we can rise above the Earth. It is the Easter Festival that reminds us of that force which sooner or later will be awakened within us. The Easter Festival has been instituted as a movable feast, in conformity with the heavenly constellations. Man must arouse in himself the remembrance of what he can become, by raising his eyes to Heaven, in order to find help to free himself from all earthly existence, to raise himself above all earthly life. In the strength we derive in this way lies the possibility of our inner freedom, our inner liberation. When we feel in ourselves the ability to rise above ourselves, we shall be striving verily to attain that elevation. Then shall we desire to make our inner man free from the bonds that chain him to the outer man. Then shall we indeed dwell in the outer man, but we shall be fully conscious of our inner spiritual force, the inner man. On the consciousness that we can liberate ourselves, on the experience of that inward Easter Festival within us, depends the attainment of that other experience, that of Whitsuntide—the penetration of that spirit which has now found itself, with a content, not of this world, but of the spiritual realms. This content from the spiritual worlds can alone make us free. It is the spiritual truth of which Jesus Christ said: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ The Festival of Whitsuntide depends on the Easter Festival. It is a consequence of the Easter Festival—that feast determined by the constellations in the heavens; Whitsuntide is, as it were, a necessary consequence, one that must follow the Easter Festival at the end of a certain number of weeks.

On deeper reflection, we thus discover sovereign wisdom even in the fixing of the seasons for those Festivals; we discover that their recurrence precisely in this order in the course of the year is a necessity and that they show us with each new year what we as human beings have been, are, and may yet become. If we are able to reflect on these Festivals in this way, as Festivals uniting us with all the past, they will be to us like an impulse bestowed on humanity, urging us forward. Whitsuntide especially, if we so understand it, arms us with confidence, strength and hope, when we know what our inward growth may be if we become followers of those who, through their understanding of the Christ-Impulse first made themselves worthy of the outpourings of the tongues of fire. The anticipation of the conception of the Holy Ghost enraptures our spiritual gaze when we understand its character as a Festival of the future. But if we would attain this we must learn to understand the true Christian significance of Whitsuntide. Then we must learn to understand the language of those mighty tongues, of the stupendous Pentecostal Inspirations. What were the tones, as of sounding brass, which were heard above the ‘rushing’ of the mighty wind, described in that picture presented to us as that of the first Christian Whit-Sunday? What voices were those which in a wonderful cosmic harmony declared ‘Ye who are the first to understand it, have felt the force of the Christ-Impulse, and the power of Christ has become such a force in your own souls, that, since the Crucifixion on Golgotha, every one of these souls has become able to behold Christ present with you; thus mightily has the Christ- Impulse worked in some among you!’

The Christ-Impulse is one of freedom; its effect, in the truest sense, is not seen in its operation outside the human soul. The true working of the Christ Impulse appears when it is active within the individual human soul itself. Those who were the first to understand Christ felt themselves called by their experience on the Day of Pentecost to announce what they had witnessed, what was revealed to them in the visions and inspirations of their own souls as the content of the doctrine of Christ. Being conscious that the Christ-Impulse had been at work in the holy preparation that they had made before the Whitsuntide Festival, they felt themselves called by the power of the Christ-Impulse working in them, to let the tongues of fire speak through them—the Holy Ghost individualised in themselves—and to go forth and preach the message of Christ. Not merely what Christ had said to them, not alone the words spoken by Him, were recognised by those who understood the significance of the Day of Pentecost; they recognised as the words of Christ those uttered by the power of a soul that feels within it the Impulse of the Christ. For this reason the Holy Ghost pours Himself, as an individualised Spirit, into every single human soul that develops in itself the power to feel the Christ-Impulse. To such a soul the words: ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!’ have a new meaning. Those whose efforts to receive the Christ-Impulse are sincere, may also feel called by the stimulus of that Impulse working in their hearts to proclaim the Word of Christ, however new, however different it may sound in every fresh epoch of humanity. The Holy Spirit was not poured forth so that we might adhere to the few words in the Gospels which were uttered in the first decades after the founding of Christianity, but He was poured forth, so that the message of Christ might always say something new. According as the human souls advance from one epoch to another, and from incarnation to incarnation, a new message must be proclaimed to them. Is it reasonable to suppose that the souls progressing from incarnation to incarnation should always be obliged to listen to the proclamation of Christ in the words which were spoken when those same souls were living in bodies contemporary with the historical appearance of Christ on earth? The power to speak to all men till the end of the Earth-cycle is innate in the Christ-Impulse.

But something else is necessary, in order to make it possible that the message of Christ may be announced in every epoch, in conformity with the advance that has meantime taken place in the human souls. When the whole power and might of the Pentecostal Impulse is borne in upon us, we must feel that it is our bounden duty to give heed to the words: ‘I am with you always unto the end of the Earth-cycle!’ And if we are filled with the Christ-Impulse, we can hear those words, first spoken at the beginning of Christianity by its Founder, sounding through all ages—the words that Christ speaks at all times, because He is always with us—but words audible only for those who desire to hear them.

Thus we comprehend the power of the Whitsuntide Impulse as something that bestows on us the right to regard Christianity as an ever growing organism, ever revealing itself to us in new aspects. And we whose mission it is to proclaim in the Anthroposophy of our day the words of Christ, echoing to us from the heavenly choirs—we say to all who would preserve Christianity in its original form: ‘We are those who truly understand Christ, for we understand the true significance of Whitsuntide!’

When we feel thus called again and again to draw from Christianity new treasures of wisdom, we find in it that wisdom which is needed by the soul, developing from incarnation to incarnation. Christianity is infinite in its fulness and inexhaustible in its riches; but mankind was not ready for the reception of this fulness in the early centuries of its development, when it was necessary to proclaim it for the first time. Even to-day it would be a presumption to say that mankind is now ripe for the understanding of Christianity in its boundless fulness and magnitude! True Christian humility alone consists in the feeling that the extent of Christian wisdom is unlimited, but man’s receptivity for this wisdom, though at first restricted, will become ever more and more complete. Let us glance at the first centuries of Christianity and on up to our own time. A vast and powerful impulse, the greatest that has been given during the evolution of the Earth, was imparted to the world in the Christ-Impulse. Any one can realise this truth who has become acquainted with the fundamental laws governing the evolution of the Earth. But one thing must not be forgotten in this connection, namely, that only a fraction of all that is contained in the Christ-Impulse is as yet understood. In the two thousand years of Christian evolution which have almost elapsed since the coming of Christ, the teachings of esoteric Christianity have been hidden from the world to which Christianity was brought, nor have they yet penetrated into exoteric life. That doctrine, for instance, which can be proclaimed as a Christian truth in the present epoch, the return of the human soul to earth-life, or reincarnation, could not become a part of the Christian teachings at an earlier time. And if we now proclaim reincarnation, we do so in full consciousness, and in the same sense in which we have to-day characterised the Whitsuntide Festival—that reincarnation is a Christian truth which can be communicated to mature souls to-day, even exoterically, but which could not be proclaimed to the still immature souls of the first centuries of Christendom.

It is of little use to point out particular passages to prove that the idea of reincarnation is found in Christianity. We can learn from all the opponents of Anthroposophy who call themselves ‘Christians,’ how little is known of reincarnation in exoteric Christianity. All that is known is that theosophy teaches something called rebirth, and this is quite enough to call forth the assertion: ‘That is an Indian—or Buddhist—doctrine!’ How little do such people know that the living Christ is the living Teacher from the spiritual worlds of reincarnation. They merely think that reincarnation and with it the doctrine of Karma, have not as yet been able to find their way into exoteric Christianity. In fragments, and at different times, mankind has gradually to be prepared for the reception of the fulness of truth contained in Christianity. Together with the Impulse of the Christ, which is no doctrine or theory, but a force that must be experienced in the depths of the soul, we gain something else. What do we gain? It is precisely when we unite the doctrine of reincarnation with the Christ-Impulse that we can understand what it brings us.

We know that only a few centuries before the dawn of Christianity, other, more doctrinal teachings were given in the East:—the teachings of Buddha. While the force and the impulse of Christianity had spread from Asia Minor westwards, the East was the scene of a widespread extension of Buddhism. We know that that religion contains the doctrine of reincarnation. But in what form? For those acquainted with the facts, Buddhism presents itself as the final outcome of teachings and revelations that had gone before. Hence the accumulated greatness of primal ages is contained in Buddhism; yet we see in it the final consequence of the primeval wisdom of humanity, which likewise contained the teaching of reincarnation. What form does reincarnation assume in the revelations of Buddhism? It is presented so that the human being looks back on incarnations through which he has lived—and forward to others still lying before him. The doctrine that the human being passes from life to life is entirely exoteric in Buddhism. Let no one speak in abstract terms of the similarity of all religions; in reality, vast and mighty differences exist, for instance, between Christianity, in which for centuries there was no thought of reincarnation, and exoteric Buddhism, which lived and moved in this doctrine. Instead of bringing together abstractions, we must be willing to admit facts. To the Buddhist it is a positive truth that man returns over and over again to earth-life; but he regards it in a light which urges him to say to himself: ‘Fight against the desire to return to incarnation, for it is your duty to free yourself as soon as possible from the longing for rebirth, and to live in a spiritual realm free from all earthly incarnations.’ Thus the Buddhist recognises the sequence of human lives; but he strives to acquire all possible strength in order to free himself as soon as possible from the necessity for reincarnation. There is something lacking in Buddhism,—its exoteric teaching proves this. It is wanting in something which we may call an impulse strong and vigorous enough to prompt the Buddhist to say: ‘Let me be born again and again if necessary!’ We can so change ourselves through the Christ-Impulse that we are enabled to draw more and more strength from it. Through that Impulse a strength comes to us that makes each incarnation more perfect than the last. Penetrate Buddhism—or the teaching of reincarnation in Buddhism—with the Impulse of Christ, and you have a new element, one which imparts to the Earth a new significance in the evolution of man!

On the other hand we have Christianity. The Christ-Impulse is contained in it indeed, but exoterically. What has this Impulse been to Christians in the past centuries? The exoteric Christian undoubtedly sees in its infinite perfection something to which he looks up as his great ideal and which he approaches ever more and more. But what presumption would it be for the Christian to imagine that in a single life he could somehow gather strength sufficient to bring to fruition the germ that can be stimulated by the Impulse of Christ. What presumption it would be for the exoteric Christian to suppose that he were capable of doing anything adequate to bring the Christ-Impulse to fruition and unfoldment! Such a belief would cause the exoteric Christian to say: ‘We pass through the gates of death; in the spiritual realms the opportunity will be given us of evolving and of bringing to fuller development the Christ-Impulse there.’ And thus the exoteric Christian believes in a spiritual life after death—one from which he does not return to Earth. Does the exoteric Christian who believes in a never-ending spiritual existence following life on Earth, understand the Christ-Impulse? He does not understand it. Did he understand it, he would never believe that, without returning to earth, he could win for himself what the Christ-Impulse has to give him in a spiritual existence following death.

In order that the Deed on Golgotha might be accomplished, in order that the victory over death might be achieved, it was necessary that Christ Himself should descend to Earth-life;—this was necessary in order to fulfil that which could only be fulfilled and experienced on our Earth. For this reason Christ descended to Earth; because the force of that Deed of the Mystery on Golgotha must of necessity influence man in the physical body. If he has received the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha while in the physical body, that impulse will continue to work when he has passed through the gates of death. Only as much of the impulse as man has received in his life on Earth, continues to work after death. When he returns again to Earth, he must work out for himself the perfecting of what he has received. Only in the later earth-lives succeeding one another can man learn what is the real nature of the Christ- Impulse. Never could he understand the Christ-Impulse in one life; it must be his guide through repeated earth-lives; because Earth is the place for the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus Christianity will be lacking in something till the presumptuous thought that the Christ-Impulse could be exhausted in one life is replaced by that other: that repeated earth-lives are necessary to enable man so to perfect himself that he can give free expansion to the ideal of Christ within him. Then he can carry with him into the spiritual worlds the result of his experiences on Earth. But he can bring with him only as much of that Impulse as he has assimilated while on Earth,—that Impulse, the most important event in the whole history of our Earth, which had to be accomplished on the Earth.

We thus see that the next revelation by which Christianity must be enriched from the spiritual worlds, is the idea of rebirth, evolved out of Christianity itself. When we understand this we shall recognise the importance for us to-day, in the region of Spiritual Science, of the knowledge gained by us as a result of the Whitsuntide revelation. That knowledge confers on us the right to participate in the revelation; it means that we can feel a renewal of the revelation of the force conveyed in the ‘tongues of fire’ that descended on the first disciples of Christ.

We are reminded to-day in a new form, of much of what has been said of late in our movement. It is like the drawing together of East and West, of the two mighty revelations of Christianity and Buddhism. In spirit we can see the fusion of those two streams, and, through a right understanding of the Christian signification of Whitsuntide, we are able to vindicate the fusion of these two greatest of all religions at present on the face of the Earth. But it is not possible to unite two such streams of revelation by mere outer impulses: that would only be theory. Were any one to take what Christianity has given us up to the present time and weld it into a new religion, together with what Buddhism has so far given to the world, he would provide nothing new for the nourishment of the souls of mankind, but merely an abstract theory incapable of inflaming a single human soul. If such an event is to happen, new revelations must come. For us that is the message which has become known as Anthroposophy—a message now indeed audible only to those who have, by an assiduous assimilation of Spiritual Science, prepared themselves to let Christ speak through them—the Christ Who is ever with us. It has been pointed out that the present is a momentous time for the evolution of mankind; that before the close of this century new forces will be developed in the human soul, which will produce in man a kind of etheric clairvoyance, by which, as by a natural development, a repetition of the vision beheld by Paul on his way to Damascus will be experienced by certain persons; so that Christ will reappear clothed with etheric raiment, to those whose spiritual forces have been raised. The vision of Paul at Damascus will become a more and more frequent occurrence. Then the world will become aware of the existence of Anthroposophy, and will see in it the revelation foretold of a new presentment of the truth of the Christ-Impulse. This new revelation will be understood by those alone who believe that the fresh current of spiritual life into which Christ once and for ever poured Himself, will remain a living force for all time to come. Those who will not believe this may continue to proclaim a Christianity that has outlived its time. But they who understand it and believe in the real Whitsuntide outpouring will be able to comprehend that that which began with the Christian Annunciation will grow continually and will speak to mankind again and again in tones that are ever new. They will understand that the individualised outpouring of the Holy Ghost, the ‘fiery tongues,’ will ever be with us and that the human soul will know and bring to fruition the Christ Impulse with constantly renewed ardour and devotion.

We can believe in the future of Christianity when we truly understand the significance of Whitsuntide. And then with a power that works as a force immanent in the soul, the stupendous scene comes before us; then we realise the future as the first apostles realised it, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; so that we long to bring to life in our own souls something that knows not the bounds set between the separate fragments of humanity; something that speaks a tongue understood by all the souls on the face of the Earth. We are sensible of the peace, the love and harmony contained in the thoughts of Whitsuntide, and we feel the vivifying power of those thoughts at our Whitsun Festival. We recognise in them a pledge of our hope of freedom and of eternity. As we feel in our souls the awakening of the individualised spirit, the most momentous attribute of spirit—the infinity of the spiritual—is aroused within us. By his participation in the spiritual, man may become aware of his immortality and eternity. In the thought of Whitsuntide we feel most deeply the power of those primeval words, which Initiate after Initiate has implanted in various languages, revealing to us the meaning of Wisdom and Eternity. We feel them as a Whitsuntide thought that has been transmitted from epoch to epoch, in words spoken to-day for the first time exoterically:

‘Wesen reiht sich an Wesen in den Raumesweiten,
Wesen folgt auf Wesen in den Zeitenlaufen.
Verbleibst du in Raumesweiten und Zeitenläufen,
Bist du, O Mensch, allein im Gebiete der Vergänglichkeit.
Über sie aber erhebt deine Seele sich gewaltiglich,
Wenn sie erahnend oder wissend schaut das Unvergängliche
Jenseits der Raumesweiten und jenseits der Zeitenläufe!’

An approximate rendering of the foregoing is:

‘Being is ranged beside Being in the realms of space,
Being follows Being in the cycles of time.
Wouldst thou remain within the limits of space and time,
Then art thou, 0 man, in the realms of the Temporal alone.
But mightily thy soul wings its flight above space and time,
When, dimly foreseeing or knowing, it beholds the Eternal
Beyond the bounds of space and beyond the cycles of time.’

Anthroposophical friends in Berne have already heard that the aim of the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum was to bring a new trend into the Anthroposophical Movement. The importance of becoming conscious of this new trend cannot be stressed too often, for the gist of the matter is this: before the Christmas Foundation Meeting—in practice at any rate, even if not invariably—the Anthroposophical Society was regarded as a sort of administrative centre for the content and the impulse of Anthroposophy. This, essentially, has been the position since the Anthroposophical Society made itself independent of the Theosophical Society.

You know that I myself had no place on the Society's Executive, but have so to say held a completely free position within the Society. And in this situation the Society's development has not proceeded as it certainly could have done. The fact is that Members have been too little alive to what might have developed on this basis. What happened was that from about the year 1919 onwards—after the War, during which the problem of leadership of the Society was a very difficult one—all kinds of efforts were made and undertakings set on foot within the Society. These undertakings were the outcome of ambitions among the Membership and proved to be detrimental to the real anthroposophical work—detrimental in the sense that they aroused very strong hostility from the outside world. Naturally, when such undertakings are set on foot in a Society resting upon occult foundations, one must, for esoteric reasons, let them be. For think of it—if from the beginning I had stood in the way of all these undertakings, most of those engaged in them would have been saying to-day that if only this or that had happened it would have led to favourable results. But there is no doubt at all that these things made the position of the Anthroposophical Movement in the world increasingly difficult.

I do not want to go into details but to take a more positive line: let me say only that the time had come to counteract by something positive the negative trend that had gradually appeared in the Society. Before the Christmas Foundation Meeting I often found it necessary to emphasise that a real foundation like the Anthroposophical Movement—which is in truth a spiritual stream guided and led from the super-sensible worlds by spiritual Powers and spiritual Forces which are reflected here in the physical worlds—should not be identified with the Anthroposophical Society, which is simply an administrative body for the cultivation—as far as it is capable of this—of the anthroposophical impulse.

But since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum this has completely changed. And it was only because of this change that there was reason and purpose in my taking over the Presidency myself, in cooperation with an Executive which as a unified organism can work with great intensity for the Anthroposophical Movement. This means that the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society are now one. Therefore what was not the position before the Christmas Foundation Meeting has changed fundamentally since that Meeting. Henceforward the Anthroposophical Society is to be identical with the Anthroposophical Movement as presented in the world. But it has thus become essential that the esoteric impulse flowing through the Anthroposophical Movement shall also find expression in the whole constitution of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore since this Christmas Foundation Meeting in Dornach it must be recognised, unconditionally, that the establishment of the Dornach Executive is itself an esoteric matter, that a stream of true esotericism must flow through the Society, and that the institution of the Executive is to be regarded as an esoteric deed. This was the premise on which the Executive was formed.

Further, it must always be remembered that from now onwards the Anthroposophical Society will no longer exist merely as a body for the administration of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy itself must be practised in everything that happens in the Anthroposophical Society. What is done must itself be anthroposophical. That, apparently, is what it is so difficult to realise. Nevertheless friends must gradually get it into their consciousness that this fundamental change has taken place.

As a first step, in the News Sheet appended to the Goetheanum Weekly, an effort has been made to introduce into the Society something that can provide unified substance for the membership, can further a unified flow of spiritual reality through the Movement. A unified trend of thought is made possible, particularly through the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts’ which should be a kind of basic seed for work in the Groups. It is really remarkable that so much misunderstanding still exists as to what the Anthroposophical Movement really is.

A short while ago I received a letter from a fairly recent Member of the Anthroposophical Society. This letter expatiated on the alleged incorporation of the Christian Community into the Anthroposophical Society. (The matter is of no importance here in Switzerland, but I mention it as an example.) At a certain point I had made it quite clear from the Goetheanum in Dornach how the relationship between this Christian Community and the Anthroposophical Society is to be thought of. I emphasised that I cannot in any way be regarded as the Founder of the Christian Community on the basis of the Anthroposophical Society, but that the Christian Community formed itself, through me, by the side of the Anthroposophical Society. At the time I used the expression “through me as a private individual.” The letter referred to seizes hold of this expression, “private individual,” after saying that a renewal of religion cannot come about through a human being but only from the higher spheres, for a renewal of religion can be achieved only by divine-spiritual Powers. That is quite right, but something has been overlooked ... and it is essential for this ‘something’ to be fully grasped in the Anthroposophical Society. What must be grasped is that the Anthroposophical Movement as such—in which moreover there also lies the source for a renewal of religion—certainly does not owe its origin to a human impulse alone but has been sent into the world under the influence of divine-spiritual Powers and by their impulse. Only when Anthroposophy itself is seen to be a spiritual reality which flows as an esoteric impulse through civilisation will it be possible to have the right point of view when some other body comes into being with its source in Anthroposophy ... and an objection like that contained in the letter cannot arise. The consciousness must be there that henceforward the Anthroposophical Society will be led from the Goetheanum on an esoteric basis.

Connected with this is the fact that a completely new trend will pervade the Anthroposophical Movement as it must now be conceived. Therefore you too, my dear friends, will notice how differently it has been possible to speak since that time. In the future it will amount to this: in all measures taken by the Anthroposophical Movement, which is now identical with the Anthroposophical Society, the responsibility is to the spiritual Powers themselves. But this must be correctly understood. It must be realised that the title “General Anthroposophical Society” may not be used in connection with any event or fixture organised without understanding having first been reached with the Dornach Executive; that anything inaugurated by Dornach may not be made further use of without corresponding agreement with the Executive. I am obliged to speak of this because it is constantly happening that lectures, for instance, are given under the alleged auspices of the General Anthroposophical Society without any application for permission having been made to Dornach. Matters which have an esoteric foundation, formulae and the like, are sometimes adopted without obtaining the agreement of the Dornach Executive ... and this is absolutely essential, for we have to do with realities, not with administrative measures or formalities. So for all these and similar matters, agreement must be sought from or a request made to the Dornach Executive. If agreement is not forthcoming, the arrangements in question will not be regarded as issuing from the Anthroposophical Movement. This would have in some way to be made plain.

Everything that savours of bureaucracy, all administrative formalities must in the future be eliminated from the Anthroposophical Society. Relationship within the Anthroposophical Society is a purely human relationship; everything is based upon the human reality. Perhaps I may mention here too that this is already indicated by the fact that every one of the 12,000 Membership Cards now being issued are personally signed by me. I was advised to have a rubber stamp made for the signature, but I shall not do so. It is only a minor point but there is, after all, a difference when I have let my eyes rest on the name of a Member; thereby the personal relationship—abstract though it be—has been made. Even if it is an external detail it should nevertheless be an indication that in future we shall endeavour to make relationships personal and human. Thus, for example, when it was recently asked in Prague whether the Bohemian Landesgesellschaft can become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, the decision had to be that this is not possible; individual human beings alone can become members of the Anthroposophical Society; they can then join together to form Groups. But they become Members as individuals and have the Membership Card as such. Legal entities—in other words, non-human entities—will have no such Card. Similarly the Statutes are not official regulations but a simple statement of what the esoteric Executive in Dornach wishes, out of its own initiative, to do for the Anthroposophical Movement. In future, all these things must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Only so will it be possible to bring into being in the Anthroposophical Society the attitude which, if it were absent, would make it impossible for me to take over the Presidency of the Society.

Through the Christmas Foundation, a new character and impulse is to enter into all our work. In the future, whatever is said will have a spiritual source—so that many things that have happened recently, can happen no longer. A great deal of the hostility, for instance, has arisen as a result of provocative actions in the Society. Naturally, all kinds of questionable elements play a part, but in the future we can no longer adopt towards the hostility the attitude we have adopted in the past. For the Lecture-Courses are available for everyone and can be obtained from the Anthroposophisch-Philosophischer Verlag. We shall not let them be advertised in the Book Trade; their release is not to be taken to mean that they will be handed over to the Book Trade, but they will be accessible to everyone. This fact in itself refutes the statement that the Anthroposophical Society is a secret society with secret literature. In the future, however, a very great deal will flow through the Anthroposophical Movement in respect of which no kind of relation with a hostile outside world will be possible. Much of what will be introduced into the teachings of the Anthroposophical Society in the future will be of such a nature that it will inevitably evoke hostility in the outside world; but we shall not worry about it because it is a matter of course.

And so I want to speak to you to-day in this spirit, to speak particularly of how different a light is shed upon the historical evolution of mankind when the study of karmic relationships in world-existence is pursued in real earnest.

At the very first gathering held in Berlin for the purpose of founding the German Section of the Theosophical Society, I chose for a lecture I proposed to give, the title: Practical Questions of Karma. I wanted to introduce then what I intend to achieve now, namely, the serious and earnest study of Karma.

In the German Section of the Theosophical Society at the time there were several old Members of the Society. They literally quaked at my intention to begin in such an esoteric way. And in actual fact the attitude and mood for it were not there. It was quite obvious how little the people were prepared in their souls for such things. It was impossible at that time to proceed with the theme ‘Practical Questions of Karma’ in the form that had been intended. Conditions made it necessary to speak in a much more exoteric way. But now, with more than two decades of preparatory work behind us, a beginning must be made with real esotericism. The Christmas Foundation Meeting, when the esoteric impulse came into the Society, has actually taken place, and so now a link can be made with that time when the intention was to introduce this esoteric trend into the Society.

What is the historical evolution of humanity, when we consider what is revealed by the fact of repeated earthly lives? When some personality appears as a leading figure in the evolution of humanity, we must say: This personality is the bearer of an Individuality of soul-and-spirit who was already present many times in earthly existence and who carries over into this earthly life the impulses from earlier incarnations. Only in the light of his earlier earthly lives can we really understand such a personality. From this we see at once how what was working in earlier epochs of world-history is carried over from those earlier epochs by human beings themselves. The civilisation of to-day has developed out of the human beings who belong to the present in the wider sense. But they, after all, are the same souls who were there in earlier epochs and assimilated what those earlier civilisations brought into being; they themselves have carried it over into the present. The same applies to epochs other than the present. Only when we can discover what has been carried over by human souls from one epoch into the other can we understand this onflowing stream of the impulses working in civilisation. But then we have history in the concrete, not in the abstract. People usually speak only about ideas working in world-history, about moral will or moral impulses in general which carry over the fruits of civilisation from one epoch into the others. But the bearers of these fruits of earlier civilisations are the human souls themselves, for they incarnate again and again. Moreover it is only in this way that an individual realises what he has himself become, how he has carried over that which forms the basis of his bodily destiny, his destiny in good and evil alike. When, as a first step, we ponder how history has been carried from one epoch into another by the human beings themselves in their repeated earthly lives, then, and only then are the secrets, the great enigmas of historical evolution, unveiled.

To-day I want to show by three examples how karma works through actual personalities. One of these examples leads us into the wide arena of history; the other two deal more with the reincarnations of particular individuals.

Our modern civilisation contains a great many elements that are really not altogether in keeping with Christianity, with true Christian evolution. Natural science is brought even into the elementary schools, with the result that it has an effect upon the thinking even of people who have no scientific knowledge. These impulses are really not Christian. Whence do they originate?

You all know that about six hundred years after the founding of Christianity, Arabism, inspired by Mohammed, began to spread abroad. In Arabism, Mohammed founded a body of doctrine which in a certain sense was at variance with Christianity. To what extent at variance? The concept of the three forms of the Godhead—Father, Son, Spirit—is of the very essence of Christianity. The origin of this lies away back in the ancient Mysteries in which a man was led through four preparatory stages and then through three higher stages. When he had reached the fifth stage, he came forth as a representative of the Christ; at the seventh and highest stage as a representative of the Father. I want only to make brief mention of this.

It is the Trinity that makes it possible for the impulse of freedom to have its place in the evolution of Christianity. We look upwards to the Father God, seeing in the Father God the spirituality implicit in all those forces of the Universe which go out from the Moon to Earth existence. All those forces which in Earth existence have to do with the impulses of physical germination—in man, therefore, with propagation—proceed from the Moon. It must, of course, always be remembered that the human process of reproduction has its spiritual side. From the pre-earthly existence of spirit-and-soul we come down to earthly existence, uniting with a physical body. But everything that is responsible for placing the human being, from birth onwards, into earthly life, is a creative act of the Father God, a creative act for the Earth through the Moon forces. Therefore inasmuch as throughout an earthly life man is subject to the working of the Moon forces, he is already predestined when he enters earthly existence to be exposed to impulses of a very definite kind. Hence, too, it is the essential characteristic of a Moon religion, a religion like that of the ancient Hebrews, in which the Father Principle is predominant, always to attach value in the human being only to what has been bestowed upon him through the forces of the Father God, through the Moon forces. When Christianity was founded, ancient Mystery-truths were still current in Christ's environment—truths deriving, for example, from specific phenomena of life in the earliest period of post-Atlantean evolution. Grotesque as they seem to-day, these phenomena were grounded in the very nature of man.

During the first epoch of post-Atlantean civilisation, the ancient Indian epoch, when a man had reached the age of thirty a radical change, a complete metamorphosis, took place in his earthly life. So radical was the change that, expressed in modern words, it would have been perfectly possible for a man who had passed his thirtieth year to meet a younger man whom he had known quite well, perhaps as a friend, but when this younger man greeted him the other would simply not understand what he was trying to do. ... When the older man had passed the age of thirty he had forgotten everything he had hitherto experienced on the Earth! And whatever impulse worked in him in the later years of his life was imparted to him by the Mysteries. This is how things were in the earliest period after the Atlantean catastrophe. If he wanted to know what his life had been before his thirtieth year, a man was obliged to enquire about it from the little community around him. At the age of thirty the soul was so completely transformed that the man was veritably a new being; he began a new existence, just as he had done at birth. In those days it was known that until the thirtieth year of life the forces of youth were at work: thereafter, it was the task of the Mysteries, with the very real impulses they contained, to see to it that a genuinely human existence should continue in the man's soul. And this the Mysteries were able to do because they were in possession of the secret of the Son.

Christ lived in an age when the secrets of the Son—I can do no more than touch upon them here—had been lost, were known only to small circles of men. But because of the experience undergone in His thirtieth year, Christ was able to reveal that He, as the last to do so, had received the Son-impulse directly from the Cosmos—in the way it must be received if after his thirtieth year a man is to be dependent upon the Sun forces just as hitherto he was dependent upon the Moon forces. Christ has enabled men to understand that the Son-principle within him is the Sun Being once awaited in the Mysteries but then as a Being not yet on the Earth. And so, just as in the ancient Mysteries men had gazed into the secrets of the Sun, it was made clear to them that their gaze must now turn to the Christ, realising that now the Sun Mystery had entered into man. In the first centuries of Christianity this wisdom was completely exterminated. Star-wisdom, cosmic wisdom, was exterminated and a materialistic conception of the Mystery of Golgotha gradually took shape; Christ was thought of as nothing more than a being who had dwelt in Jesus but men were unwilling to realise what had actually come to pass.

Those who were true knowers in the first Christian centuries were able to say: As well as the Father God there is God the Son, the Christ God. The Father God rules over whatever is predetermined in man because it is born with him and works in him as the forces of Nature. It is upon this principle that the Hebrew religion is based. But by the side of it, Christianity places the power of the Son which during the course of man's life draws into his soul as a creative force, making him free and enabling him to be reborn, realising that in his earthly life he can become something that was not predetermined by the Moon forces at birth.—Such was the essential impulse of Christianity in the first centuries of its existence.

Mohammedanism set its face against this impulse in its far-reaching decree: There is no God save the God proclaimed by Mohammed. It is a retrogression to the pre-Christian principle, but clothed in a new form—as was inevitable six hundred years after the founding of Christianity. The God of Nature, the Father God—not a God of freedom by whom men are led on to freedom—was proclaimed as the one and only God. Within Arabism, where Mohammedanism was making headway, this was favourable for a revival and renewal of the fruits of ancient cultures, and such a revival, with the exclusion of Christianity, did indeed take place in the Orient, on a magnificent scale. Together with the warlike campaigns of Arabism there spread from East towards the West—in Africa as it were enveloping Christianity—an impulse to revive ancient culture.

Over in Asia, Arabism was cultivated with great brilliance at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—at the time when Charles the Great was reigning in Europe. But whereas Charles the Great hardly progressed beyond the stage of being able to read and write, of developing the most primitive rudiments of culture, great and illustrious learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. It cannot, perhaps, be said that Haroun al Raschid in himself was an entirely good man, but he possessed a comprehensive, penetrating and ingenious mind—a universal mind in the best sense. He gathered at his Court all the sages who were the bearers of whatever knowledge was available at that time: poets, philosophers, doctors, theologians, architects—all these branches of learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Rashid, brought thither by his genius.

At this Court there lived a most distinguished and significant personality, one who—in an incarnation earlier than the one at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—had been an Initiate in the true sense. You will ask: Does an Initiate, then, not remain an Initiate as he passes through his incarnations? It is possible for a man to have been a deep Initiate in an earlier epoch and then, in a new epoch, he must use the body and receive the education which this later epoch has to offer. In such a case the forces deriving from the earlier incarnation will have to be held in the subconsciousness and whatever is in keeping with the current civilisation will have to be developed. There are men who seem, outwardly, to be products of the particular civilisation in which they are living; but their manner of life enables one to perceive in them the existence of deeper impulses; in earlier times they were Initiates. Nor do they lose the fruits of Initiation; out of their subconsciousness they act in accordance with its principles. But they cannot do otherwise than adapt themselves to the conditions of the existing civilisation.

The personality of whom tradition says that he made magnificent provision for all the sciences at the Court of Haroun al Raschid was only one of the most eminent sages of his time, with a genius for organisation so outstanding that he was virtually the source of much that was achieved at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

The spread of Arabism continued for many centuries, as we know from the wars waged by Europe in an attempt to keep it within bounds. But that was not the end of it: the souls who were once active in Arabism passed through the gate of death, developed onwards in the spiritual world and remained connected, in a sense, with their work. This was what happened in the case of the Individualities of Haroun al Raschid and of the wise Counsellor who lived at his Court.

To begin with, let us follow Haroun al Raschid. He passes through the gate of death and develops onwards in the spiritual world. In its external form, Arabism is repulsed; Christianity implants itself into Middle and Western Europe in the exoteric form it has gradually acquired. But although it is impossible to continue to be active in the old form of Mohammedanism, of Arabism, in Europe, it is very possible for the souls who once shared in this brilliant culture at the Court of Haroun al Raschid and there received the impulse for further achievements, to work on. And that is what they do.

We find that Haroun al Raschid himself reincarnates in the renowned personality of Francis Bacon, Lord Bacon—the distinguished Englishman whose influence has affected the whole of modern scientific thinking, and therewith much that is to be found in the minds of human beings to-day. Haroun al Raschid could not disseminate from London, from England, a form of culture strictly aligned with Arabism ... this soul was obliged to make use of the form of Arabism that was possible in the West. But the fundamental trend and tendency of what Bacon poured into European thinking is the old Arabism in the new form. And so Arabism lives in the scientific thinking of to-day, because Francis Bacon was the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid.

The sage who had lived at his Court also passed through the gate of death, but he took a different path. He could not come down into a stream of culture as materialistic as that into which Francis Bacon could enter; he had inevitably to remain within a more spiritual stream. And so it came about that in the epoch when the influence of Francis Bacon was also taking effect, another individuality was working—in this case in Middle Europe—one who in his life of soul encountered what had issued from the soul of the reborn Haroun al Raschid. We see the Bacon stream pouring out from England to Middle Europe, from West to East, bringing Arabism in the form it had acquired in its sweep across Spain and France. It is comprehensible, therefore, that the tenor and content of this soul should differ from the tenor and content of that other soul—who passed through the gate of death, during the period of existence in the spiritual world directed its gaze toward Eastern and Middle Europe, and was reborn in Middle Europe as Amos Comenius. He resuscitated what he had learned from oriental wisdom at the Court of Haroun al Raschid inasmuch as in the seventeenth century he was the one who with much forcefulness promulgated the thought that the evolution of mankind is pervaded by organised spirituality. It is often said, superficially, that Comenius believed in the Kingdom of a Thousand Years. That is a trivial way of putting it. The truth is that Comenius believed in definite epochs in the evolution of humanity; he believed that historical evolution is organised from the spiritual world. His aim was to show that spirituality surges and weaves through the whole of Nature; he wrote a “Pan-Sophia.” There is a deeply spiritual trend in what he achieved. He became an educational reformer. As is known, his aim in education was to achieve concrete perceptibility (Anschaulichkeit) but a thoroughly spiritual perceptibility, not as in materialism. I cannot deal with this in detail but can only indicate how Arabism in its Western form and in its Oriental form issued from what arose in Middle Europe from the meeting of the two spiritual impulses connected with Bacon and Comenius.

Many aspects of the civilisation of Middle Europe can become intelligible to us only when we see how Arabism—in the form in which it could now be re-cast—was actually brought over from Asia by individuals who had once lived at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. This shows us how human Individuality is an active factor in the evolution of history. And then, by studying examples as striking as these, we can learn from them how karma works through the incarnations. As I have said on various occasions, what we learn from this study can be applied to our own incarnation. But to begin with we must have concrete examples.

Let us now take an example in which this country will be particularly interested. Let us take the example of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the Swiss poet. The very personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, apart from his poetry, may well arouse interest. He is certainly a remarkable personality. When he was composing his poems which flow along in wonderful rhythms, one can perceive how at every moment the soul was prone to slip out of the body. In the wonderful forms of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's poems and of his prose-poems too, there is a quality belonging intrinsically to the soul. Many times in his earthly life he was destined to suffer from a clouding of consciousness when this separation of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body became too pronounced. There was only a loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the physical body—this is quite apparent when we study the poems or the personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. We say to ourselves at once that this Individuality which in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation was only loosely connected with the physical body, must surely have passed through very remarkable experiences in earlier earthly lives.

Now investigation of earlier earthly lives is by no means always easy. Disillusionments and set-backs of every description have to be encountered in the course of such investigation. For this reason, what I say about reincarnations is most emphatically not for the purpose of satisfying cravings for sensation but always in order to shed deeper illumination upon the course of history.

As we follow the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, particularly in the light of this loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the body, we are led back to a very early incarnation in the sixth century A.D. We are led to an Individuality who, to begin with, eludes the spiritual intuition with which these things are investigated. Spiritually we are thrust back from this Individuality who in his life in Italy was finding his way into Christianity in the form in which it was spreading at that time ... we can never get really near him. And then we seem to be thrown back again to the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, so that when in this investigation of an earlier incarnation we really seem to have got hold of the incarnation in the sixth century, we have to come back again to the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, without having properly understood the connection between these two incarnations. .. until at last the solution of the riddle dawns. We notice that in the mind of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer there is a thought that puzzles and misleads us—a thought which was also expressed in his story The Saint, dealing with Thomas Becket, the Chancellor-Archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century at the Court of Henry (II) of England.

It is not until we follow the connections of the thoughts and feelings working in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer while he was writing this narrative that we gain any real insight into how his mind was working. We are led as it were from a clouding of consciousness into clarity, then again a clouding, and so on. And finally we come to the conclusion that there must be some special significance in the thought that runs through Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's story; it must have deep roots. And then we hit upon the clue: this thought comes from an impulse in an earlier earthly life, the life when the Individuality of the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived at a minor Court in Italy and played an important part in the development of Christianity. In that life he had an unusual experience. Gradually we discover that this Individuality was sent with a Christian Mission from Italy to England and this Mission founded the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The Individuality who later became Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was, on the one side, deeply affected by that form of art which has since died out but was prevalent in Italy in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and subsequently elaborated in the Italian mosaics. The Individuality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived and worked in this environment and then, filled with the impulse of contemporary Christianity, accompanied the Mission to England. After having participated in the founding of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, this individual was murdered, in strange circumstances, by an Anglo-Saxon chieftain.

This happening lived on as an impulse in the soul. And when this soul was born as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the destiny of that earlier time was still alive in the subconscious ... the murder in England ... it has something to do with the Archbishopric of Canterbury! Just as a remembrance is often evoked by the sound of a word, so it was in this case ... “I once had something to do with Canterbury.” And the impulse becomes an urge in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul to describe, not his own destiny, for that remains in the subconscious, but the similar destiny of Thomas Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England and at the same time Archbishop of Canterbury.

The strange infirmity of soul suffered by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer also causes experience of his own destiny to slip over into that of the other personality known to him from history.

During the period of the Thirty Years' War, when such chaotic conditions prevailed in Middle Europe, this Individuality had been incarnated as a woman. And all the chaos of those times profoundly affected the Individuality now incarnate in a female body. This woman married a rather uncouth, unpolished personality who fled from the conditions then prevailing in Germany to the region of Graubünden in Switzerland. And there this couple lived ... the woman deeply sensitive to the chaos of the impressions around her, the man more plebeian.

From the far-reaching events of that time the soul had absorbed all that struggles to come forth again in Jürg Jenatsch. The thoughts and emotions rise up again in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer from what he had experienced in those earlier circumstances. The difficulty is that the impressions welled up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul but that he felt compelled to transform them, because his life in the world was such that impulses were constantly rising up into his soul-and-spirit which then, in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, were responsible for the very loose connection between his soul-and-spirit and his physical body.

This will indicate to you how impulses from olden times work over in a remarkable way into a man's thinking, feeling, perception and artistic achievements. The truth of such things will quite certainly never be discovered by speculation or intellectual thinking but only in genuine spiritual vision.

Personalities who attract one's attention in some earthly life are especially interesting from the point of view of their reincarnations. There is a personality who is greatly loved and held in high esteem, above all in this country, through whom we can discern how souls pass through their earthly lives. When we have real knowledge of these matters they turn out to be different from what one would naturally assume.

There is a soul ... I was able to find this soul for the first time occupying a kind of priestly office in ancient Mysteries. I say, a kind of priestly office, for although he was not a priest of the highest rank his position in the Mysteries enabled him to do a great deal for the education of souls. In that incarnation he was a noble character, full of goodness of heart which his connection with the Mysteries had developed in him. About a hundred years before the birth of Christ it was the destiny of this personality, in line with the customs of the times, to serve under a cruel slave-owner as the foreman or manager of a host of slaves whose work was hard and heavy and who could only be handled in the way that was the accepted practice in those days. This personality must not be misjudged or misunderstood. The conditions prevailing in ancient civilisations must be seen in a different light from those of to-day; we must understand above all what it meant for this fundamentally noble personality to have been incarnated a hundred years before the founding of Christianity as a kind of foreman-manager of a host of slaves. It was impossible for him always to act in accordance with his own impulses—that was his hard destiny. But at the same time he had established a definite relationship with the souls living in the hard-worked slaves. He obeyed the crueller personality of whom I have spoken (his ‘chief’ we should say to-day) but in such circumstances antipathies and sympathies are formed. ... And when the one who often with a bleeding heart had carried out the orders he received, passed through the gate of death, his soul encountered the souls who had felt, for him too, a certain hatred. This lived itself out in the life between death and rebirth and established connections of soul-and-spirit which then worked as impulses, preparing for the next earthly life.

In the nature of things, karmic connections are formed between all human beings who have to do with one another. It was also destiny that the Individuality of whom I am speaking, who was a kind of slave-overseer and connected karmically with the chief whose orders he was bound to obey, should have made himself guilty in a certain way—it was really innocence and guilt at the same time—of all the misery caused by the cruelty of his chief. He acquiesced in it, not out of any impulse of his own but impelled by the force majeure of customs and circumstances. Thus a karmic tie was established between the two. In the life between death and rebirth this took shape in such a way that the former slave-overseer was born again in the ninth century A.D. as a woman: she became the wife of the one who had been the cruel chief—and in this relationship lived through much that constituted the karmic adjustment of what I have described as a kind of ‘innocent guilt’ in connection with the cruelties that had been committed. But these experiences deepened the soul: much of what had been present in the ancient, priestly incarnation emerged once again, but overshadowed by great tragedy. Circumstances in the ninth century brought this wedded couple into connection with many human beings in whom there were living the souls, now reincarnated, of those who had been together with them as slaves. As a general rule, human souls are reborn during the same time-period. And again in this case there was a connection in the life on the Earth.

The souls who had once worked under the slave-overseer now lived together in spatial proximity as a fairly extensive community. The official servant of the community—but a servant of fairly high rank—was the individual who had once been the cruel slave-owner. He had dealings with all the inhabitants of the community and experienced from them nothing but trouble; he was not their governor but it was his duty to look after many of their affairs. The wife lived through all this at his side. We find, therefore, that a number of human beings are associated with these two personalities. But the karma that had bound the two together—the erstwhile slave-owner and his overseer—this karmic tie was thereby done with. The ancient priest-individuality was no longer bound to the other; but the tie with the other souls remained, precisely because in the incarnation about 100 B.C. he had been at least the instrument for much that had been their lot. As a woman, this Individuality brought only blessing to the community, for her deeds were performed with the greatest goodness and kindness, despite the infinitely tragic experiences she was obliged to undergo.

All these shared experiences, all that wove the threads of karma—it all went on working, and during the next period of life between death and rebirth (after the ninth century and on into the modern age) impulses took shape once again whereby these human beings were held together. And now, the souls who had once been the slaves and later on came together in a village community—these souls were born again, not in any kind of external community but at least during the same period of time. So that there was again the possibility of relationship with the Individuality—now reborn—who had been the slave-overseer a hundred years before the Christian era, and the woman in the ninth century A.D. For this Individuality was reborn as Pestalozzi. The souls who were also reborn more or less as contemporaries in order that karma might be fulfilled—these souls whose relationship to him was as I have described, became the pupils for whom Pestalozzi now performed deeds of untold blessing!

When one studies life and behind life as it presents itself perceives the working of souls from incarnation to incarnation ... certainly it is disturbing and astounding, for things are always different from what the intellect might conjecture. Yet life's content is immeasurably deepened when it is studied in this kind of context. I think, moreover, that a man himself has really gained something when he has studied such connections. If they are drawn forth—often with very great difficulty—from their spiritual backgrounds, and if one points, as I have only been able to do in sketchy outline to-day, to what is present in visible existence, one perceives how karma works through the course of human life. Verily, life acquires serious backgrounds when we pay attention to studies of this kind; and they can be understood if with unprejudiced minds we observe what then presents itself in the external world.

Anthroposophy does not exist in order to expound theories about repeated earthly lives or to give tabulated details of every kind, but to reveal, in all their concrete reality, the spiritual foundations of life. Men will look into the world with quite different eyes once the veils are lifted from these things. One day, if destiny permits, we shall have to speak of how they can play a part, too, in the actual deeds of men. Such knowledge will certainly show that concrete studies of karma are needed by our civilisation as an impetus and a deepening. I wanted to-day merely to lay before you these actual examples of karma. The personalities in question are well-known figures in history. Study them closely and you will find confirmation of much that I have said.

... In the first period after the great Atlantean catastrophe, the life of man was intimately connected with the spirit; each human being could be told the nature of his Karma, according to the moment of his birth. At that time astrology was not the dilettantism it often is to-day, but signified rather a living participation in the deeds of the stars. And from this living participation, the way in which each human being had to live was revealed to him out of the Mysteries. Astrology had a living significance for the experience of each human life. Then came a time about the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, in which men no longer experienced the secrets of the starry heavens, but experienced instead the course of the year. What do I mean by saying that men experienced the “course of the year”? It means that they knew through immediate perception, that the earth is not the coarse lump modern geology sees in it. No plants could grow on the earth, if it were what geology imagines; even less could animals or human beings appear on it—this would be quite impossible; for according to geologists the earth is a mineral, and there can be direct growth out of the mineral only when the whole universe works upon it, when there is a connection with the whole universe. In ancient times men knew what to-day must be learned over again, namely, that the earth is an organism and has a soul.

You see, this earth soul too has its particular destiny. Suppose that it is winter where we are, Christmas-time or the time of the winter solstice,—then that is the time in which the soul of the earth is completely united with the earth. For when the earth is decked with snow, when as it were, a frosty cloak envelops the earth, then the earth-soul is united with the earth, rests in the interior of the earth. We find then, that the soul of the earth, resting within the earth, maintains the life of countless elemental spirits. The modern naturalistic conception which thinks that the seeds sown in autumn simply lie there until next spring is quite false, the elemental spirits of the earth must preserve the seeds throughout the winter. This is all connected with the fact that the soul of the earth is united with the body of the earth throughout the time of winter.

Let us take the opposite season: midsummer time. Just as man draws in the air and exhales it, so that it is alternately within him and outside him, so does the earth inhale its soul during the winter. And during the time of mid-summer in the height of summer, the soul of the earth has been exhaled entirely; breathed out into the wide spaces of the universe. The body of the earth is then, as it were, “empty” and does not contain the earth-soul; the earth shares with its soul in the events of the cosmos, in the course of the stars, etc. For this reason Winter Mysteries existed in ancient times, in which one experienced the union of the earth-soul with the earth. There were Summer Mysteries too, in which it was possible to perceive the secrets of the universe, when the soul of the initiate followed the soul of the earth out into the cosmic spaces and shared in its experiences with the stars.

The old traditional remnants still extant to-day can show that men used to be conscious of such things. Long ago,—it happened to be actually here, in Berlin—I often used to spend some time with an astronomer who was very well known, and who agitated violently against the very disturbing idea that the Easter Festival should fall on the Sunday immediately after the first full moon of spring; he thought it terrible that it did not fall each year, let us say on the first Sunday of April. It was of course useless to bring forward reasons against this idea; for what underlay it was this: If Easter falls each year on a different date, a frightful confusion comes about in the debit and credit of account books! This movement had even assumed quite large proportions. I have mentioned here before that on the first page of account books one generally finds the words “With God”, whereas as a rule, the things contained in such books are not exactly “with God”. In the times in which the Easter Festival was fixed according to the course of the stars,—the first Sunday after the spring full moon was dedicated to the Sun—there was still the consciousness that the soul of the earth is within the earth during the winter, and outside in the cosmic spaces during midsummer time, while in spring it is on its way out towards cosmic space. The Spring Festival, the Easter Festival, cannot therefore be fixed on a particular day, in accordance with earthly things alone, but must take into account the constellations of the stars. A deep wisdom lies in this, coming out of an age in which men were still able to perceive the spiritual nature of the year's course through an ancient instinctive clairvoyance. We must again come to this. And we can come to it again, in a certain sense, if we grasp the tasks of the present time by connecting them with what we have discussed and studied together here.

On several occasions I have stated here that amongst the spiritual Beings with whom man is united every night in the way I have described—for instance, with the Archangels through speech—there are some Beings who are the ruling spiritual powers for a particular period of time. During the last third of the nineteenth century, the Michael period began, that period in which the spirit otherwise designated in writings as Michael, has become the most important one for the concerns of human civilisation. Such things repeat themselves periodically. In ancient times, something was known about all these spiritual processes. The old Hebrew period spoke of Jahve. But it always spoke of the “countenance of Jahve or Jehovah” and by “countenance” it meant the Archangels, who were actually the mediators between Jahve and the earth. And when the Jews were awaiting the Messiah on earth, they knew: the Michael period, in which Michael is the mediator for Christ's activity on earth, is here; only the Jews misunderstood this in its deeper connection. Since the seventies of the nineteenth century the time has once more come on earth in which the Michael force is the ruling spiritual power in the world, and in which we must understand how to introduce the spiritual element into our actions, and how to arrange our life out of the spirit. “Serving Michael” means that we should not organise our life merely out of the material, but that we should be conscious that Michael, whose mission it is to overcome the base Ahrimanic forces, must, as it were, be our genius in the development of our civilisation.

Now he can achieve this if we remember how we can link again in a spiritual sense to the course of the seasons. There is really a deep wisdom in the whole world process, manifested in our being able to unite the Festival of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus with the Spring Festival. The historical connection (I have often stated this) is absolutely correct: the Spring Festival, i.e. the Easter Festival, can only fall on a different day each year, because it is something that is seen from the other world. It is only we on earth who have the narrow-minded conception that “time” is continuous, that every hour is just as long as another. We determine time mathematically, by our earthly means alone, whereas for the real spiritual world, the cosmic hour is endowed with life. One cosmic hour is not like another, but shorter or longer than another. Hence we are always likely to err when we try to determine from the earth what should be determined from a heavenly standpoint. The Easter Festival is rightfully determined in accordance with the heavens.

What is the nature of this festival? It is the festival that should remind us, and once did remind people in the most living manner, that a Divine Being descended to the earth, took His dwelling in the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, in order that during the time in which mankind was approaching the Ego evolution, human beings might find their way back, in the right way, through death into spiritual life. This I have often described. Thus, the Easter Festival is the festival in which man contemplates death and the immortality which follows it, through the Mystery of Golgotha. We look at this springtime festival aright when we say: The Christ has strengthened man's immortality through His own victory over death; but we human beings understand the immortality of Christ Jesus in the right way only when we acquire this understanding during our life on earth, i.e. if we awaken to life within our souls our connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and are able to free ourselves from the materialistic conception which takes away from the Mystery of Golgotha all its spiritual nature. To-day the “Christ” is hardly taken into consideration, but only “Jesus”, “the simple man of Nazareth.” One would almost blush before one's own scientific knowledge if one were to admit that the Mystery of Golgotha contains a spiritual mystery in the midst of earth-existence, namely, the Death and Resurrection of the God.

But when we experience this in a spiritual manner, we prepare ourselves to experience other things also in a spiritual manner. It is for this reason so important for modern man to gain the possibility of experiencing the Mystery of Golgotha above all as something entirely spiritual. He will then be able to experience other spiritual things, and will find through the Mystery of Golgotha the paths leading into the spiritual worlds. At the same time, man must understand the Resurrection in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, while he is still alive; and if he is able to understand the Resurrection in his feelings while he is alive, this will also enable him to pass through death in the right way. This means that death and resurrection, contained in the Mystery of Golgotha, should teach man to invert the relationship: to experience resurrection inwardly, within the soul, during life, so that after having experienced this inner resurrection in his soul, he may go through death in the right way. This experience is the exact opposite of the Easter experience. At Easter we should submerge ourselves in Christ's Death and Resurrection. But as human beings we must be able to submerge in what is given to us as the resurrection of the soul, in order that the risen human soul may go through death in the right way. Just as in the spring we acquire the real Easter feeling in seeing how the plants spring up and bud, how Nature reawakens to life and overcomes winter's death, so we are able to acquire another feeling when we have lived through the summer in the right spirit and know that the soul has ascended into cosmic spaces; that we are approaching autumn, that September and the Autumn Equinox are drawing near; that the leaves which were shooting so green and fresh in the spring, are now turning yellow and brown, are withering away; that the trees stand there almost bare of their leaves; Nature is dying. Yet we understand this dying Nature when we look into the fading process, when the snow begins to cover the earth: and say: the soul of the earth is withdrawing again into the earth and will be fully within the earth when the winter solstice has come.

It is possible to experience this autumn season just as intensely as we experience springtide. Just as we can experience the Death and Resurrection of the God in the Easter season in spring, so can we experience in the autumn the death and resurrection of the human soul, i.e. we experience resurrection during our life on earth in order to go through death in the right way. Moreover, we must understand what it means for us and for our age that the soul of the earth is exhaled at midsummer into the world's far spaces, is there united with the stars and then returns. He who fathoms the secrets of the earth's circuit during the course of the year will know that the Michael force is now descending again through the Nature-forces—the Michael force which did not descend in former centuries. Thus we can face the leafless autumn, inasmuch as we look towards the approach of the Michael force out of the clouds. The calendars show on this day the name of “Michael”, and Michaelmas is a country festival: yet we shall not experience the present spiritually, linking human events on earth with Nature's events, until we understand again the year's course and establish festivals of the year as they were established in the past by the ancients, who were still endowed with their dreamy clairvoyance. Men of old understood the year, and out of such mysteries, which I could to-day outline only briefly, they founded the Christmas, Easter and Midsummer (St. John) festivals. At Christmas time we give each other presents and do certain other things as well; but I have often explained in the Christmas and Easter lectures I have given here, how very little people still receive to-day from these festivals, how everything has taken on a traditional, external form. When, however, the festivals which we celebrate without understanding them, will again be understood, then we shall have the strength to establish out of a spiritual understanding of the year's course, a festival which only now for present-day humanity, has real significance: this will be the Michael Festival. It will be a festival in the last days of September, when autumn approaches, the leaves wither, the trees grow bare and Nature faces death,—just as it faces a new budding life at Easter time,—and when we experience in Nature's fading life, how the soul of the earth is then united with the earth and brings with it Michael out of the clouds. When we acquire the strength to establish such a festival out of the spirit,—a festival that brings with it once more a feeling of fellowship into our social life,—then we shall have established it spiritually: for we shall then have founded something in our midst which has the spirit at its source. Far more important than other reflections on social conditions—which can lead to no results in our present chaotic conditions, unless they contain the spirit—would be this: that a number of open-minded people should come together for the purpose of instituting again on earth something proceeding out of the universe, as, for instance, a Michael Festival. This would be the worthy counterpart of the Easter Festival, but a festival taking place in autumn, an Autumn Festival. If people could determine upon something, the motive to which can be found only in the spiritual world, something which can kindle feelings of fellowship amongst those who assemble at such a festival—arising out of the fullness and freshness of the human heart through immediate contact—then something would exist which could bind men together again socially.

For in the past, festivals used to bind human beings strongly together. Just think, for instance, of all that has been done and said and thought in connection with festivals for the whole of civilisation.

This is what entered physical life through the establishment of festivals directly out of the spirit. If men could determine in a dignified worthy way to establish a Michael Festival during the last days of September, this would be a most significant deed. But the courage would have to be found amongst them not merely to discuss external social reforms, etc., but to do something that connects the earth with the heavens, that reconnects physical with spiritual conditions.

Thus something would again take place amongst men, constituting a mighty impulse for the continuation of our civilisation and our whole human life; because the Spirit would once more be introduced into earthly conditions.

There is naturally no time to describe to you the scientific, religious and artistic experiences which could arise, just as in the ancient festivals—through such a new festival, established in a great and worthy way out of the spirit. How much more important than all that is going on to-day in the shape of social tirades would be such a creating out of the spiritual world. For what would that imply? It implies a great deal for an insight into man's inner nature if I can fathom his way of thinking, if I can really understand his words aright. If to-day one could see the working of the whole universe when autumn approaches, if one could decipher the whole face of the universe, and acquire creative force out of it, then the establishment of such a festival would reveal, not only the will of human beings, but also the will of Gods and Spirits. Then the Spirit would again be among mankind!

We have seen how out of the Mysteries has grown that which has bound the consciousness of man so closely to the universe that this bond found expression in the annual round of festivals, and we have seen especially how the Festival of Easter has evolved out of the principle of Initiation. From all that has been said, you must have been struck by the great importance of the part played by the Mysteries in the development of mankind.

Everything spiritual that passed through the world in ancient times, by which men were able to develop, did in fact have its rise out of the whole life and content of the Mysteries (Mysterienwesen). Making use of a modern expression, one might say: the Mysteries had a great deal of power in respect of the guidance of all spiritual life.

Now humanity was ordained from the beginning to develop freedom. That this might develop, it was necessary that the life of the Mysteries should decline, so for a long time men were not so closely associated with the powerful guidance coming from the Mysteries and were left more to themselves.

It is very certain we cannot yet say that the time has come when men have attained true inner freedom, that they are now sufficiently ripe to pass on to the next age following the one in which freedom has been gained. Truly we are unable to say this. All the same, there are a sufficient number who have gone through incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was less apparent than formerly; and if to-day the seed of their passage through these incarnations has not yet germinated, still it is there—it is implanted in the souls of men. And as an age is now approaching which will be again an age of greater spirituality, men must begin to develop what in their present state of dullness they have not yet developed. Without appreciation, without reverence and true knowledge, a spiritual life is really not possible. We make a right use of these festival seasons when we employ them to develop, and to some small extent to implant in our souls, this feeling of appreciation and reverence for what is spiritual that has evolved in the course of human history; when we endeavour to learn as intimately as possible how and why external historical events point to spiritual facts, and carry over what is spiritual from one age into another. This is mainly possible because men come again and again into earthly existence in recurring earthly lives, and therefore carry with them into later epochs what they had experienced in earlier ones. Men are the most important factors in the further development of human history. In every age they live in a definite surrounding or atmosphere (Umgebung), and one of the most important of these was that of the Mysteries. Thus one of the most important agents in human progress is the power to carry over what was experienced in the Mysteries and to live this again, whether it be in the Mysteries themselves, where it works into humanity at large, or simply as cognition or knowledge. To-day this must be in some form of conscious knowledge (Erkennen), for the true life of the Mysteries (Mysterienwesen) has withdrawn more or less from the external life of to-day and must come forth into it again.

We are here constrained to say: It is indeed the case that if that impulse which went forth from the Christmas session here at the GStheanum really enters into the life of the Anthroposophical Society, this society, by pressing onwards to ever greater depths of knowledge, can provide the foundation of a further “living content of the Mysteries” (Mysterienwesen). This must be nurtured consciously within the Anthroposophical Society. For this society has experienced an event that can be utilized in evolution in the same way as a similar event was once utilized: the burning of the temple at Ephesus. Both there and here a great wrong lies at the root of what was done. Things present, however, different aspects on different levels, and what at one level is a dreadful wrong, may be used in accordance with human freedom in such a way that real human progress can be achieved through it.

If we are to enter into such matters with understanding we must grasp them, as I have already said, in as intimate a way as possible. We must study the special way in which the spiritual things of the world were cultivated in the Mysteries. I indicated in the last lecture how out of the spiritual observation of the constellations of the sun and moon, as practised in the Mysteries, the fixing of the annual festival of Easter was determined; further, that the other planets were regarded from the point of view of the moon. I said that according to what was experienced in the observation of the other planets a man was guided at his descent from pre-earthly to earthly existence, that his luminous etheric body was constructed in accordance with what was then seen.

Now if anyone desires to gain some comprehension of how through the forces of the moon—or rather through the spiritual observations by the moon—these etheric forces are transmitted to man, this can be done, as we have tried to do, from observation of the cosmos itself, where it is inscribed, where it exists as fact.

But it is most important that the human interest, which throughout the ages has been felt in these truths, should be permitted to influence the soul. Never did the souls and minds of men take so much interest in the descent of the soul from pre-earthly existence, never was so intimate an interest felt in the last stage of this descent, in man's clothing of himself with the etheric body, as in the Mysteries of Ephesus.

In the Mysteries of Ephesus the whole ritual practised by the goddess of Ephesus, who is named esoterically Artemis, was really directed towards participating in the spiritual blending and interweaving of life in the ether of the universe—in the cosmic ether.

We can venture to say that, when those taking part in the Mystery of Ephesus approached the image of the goddess, an enhancement of perception occurred which amounted to hearing, and what was heard might be given in the words of the goddess somewhat as follows: “I rejoice in all that is fruitful within the wide-spreading universal ether.” This expression of inward joy on the part of the goddess exercised a very profound influence on all growing, blossoming life in the universal ether. And feelings inwardly connected with this springing life breathed like a magic sigh through the spiritual atmosphere of the sacred precincts of the temple of Ephesus.

All the arrangements at this centre of the Mysteries were so directed as to enable people to say: Nowhere but at Ephesus is there so close a union with the growth of living plants, with this sprouting and springing of the being of plants from the earth. This led to the fact that within those Mysteries especially clear instructions were given concerning those secrets of the moon of which I spoke in the last lecture, and which were for the special purpose of bringing an understanding of such things to the souls of those who were adherents of the Ephesian Mysteries.

To feel himself as a light-form was an individual experience to each of these Ephesian pupils and initiates, for it was a real and living fact to them that their light-forms came to them through the moon. The instruction they received was somewhat as follows:

Those able to let the instructions they received in the places of consecration work on them were entirely taken up with this self-construction out of Sunlight that came to them, though changed, by way of the moon. They then heard as if coming to them from the sun the tones: J O A.

They knew that these tones, J O A, stimulated their ego and their astral body. J O equalled the I (ego) and astral body, and they perceived the approach of the Etheric-Light-Body in the A, forming together J O A. When these tones vibrated within the pupil for initiation he was conscious of his ego, of his astral body and etheric body.

Then it was as if there rang forth from the earth (for the man was now entered into cosmic conditions) something which enforced the J O A, making of it eh v, J_ehO_vA. It was the forces of the earth that revealed themselves in the eh v.

The pupil now felt his whole human being in the J_ehO_vA. He felt a premonition of the physical body as it was first on earth in the consonants which accompanied the vocalization, which in the J O A indicated the ego, the astral body, and the etheric body. It was the experiencing of himself in the J_ehO_vA that enabled the pupil of the Ephesian Mysteries to experience the final steps in his descent from the spiritual world. At the same time the consciousness of the J O A was such that he felt himself to be in the light, that he was this tone, J O A. He was then a Man: a resounding (Klingendes) ego, a resounding astral body, within the luminous, shining etheric body. Man was then tone in light. This is the cosmic man.

Thus man is capable of accepting (aufzunehmen) that which he sees out in the cosmos, in the same way as here on earth he accepts the things he sees with his eyes when he looks out to his physical surroundings on the earth. The pupil of the Ephesian Mysteries really felt when he bore the J O A within him as if transported to the Moon-sphere. He shared in what was observed from the point of view of the moon. At that time the human being was still a universal being (Mensch im allgemeinen). It first became man and woman at its descent to earth. But man then felt he was transported to the realms of pre-earthly existence, though aware of the approach of what was earthly. This transporting of themselves into the Moon-sphere was, to the Ephesian pupils, an act of the greatest possible intimacy. They then bore within their hearts and within their souls all the things they had experienced and which sounded in their ears somewhat as follows:

Thou Being, offspring of worlds, who in thy Light-form art strengthened by the Sun under the Moon's control,

Thou art endowed by Mars with his creative resonance, with Mercury's swinging movement of thy limbs ;

Enlightened by the rays of Jupiter's wisdom, And by the love-bearing beauty of Venus,

And Saturn's age-old spiritual inwardness consecrates thee to life in space, to growth in time!

Consciousness of this filled each pupil of Ephesus. He realised that this consciousness which pulsated through him was of the greatest consequence to his humanity.

One can say: this was something which enabled a pupil belonging to the Ephesian Mysteries to feel himself most truly man. To put it trivially—when these words sounded in his ears he felt a consciousness dawn in him that connected him, through the powers of his etheric body, with the whole planetary system:

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,
Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen
Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit
Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

This is expressed most pregnantly in the following words spoken to the etheric body by the universe:

“Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt, Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt.”

The man now consciously felt himself within the power of the moonlight.

“Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen.”

Here the resonance, which has something creative in it, comes to him from Mars. And that which imparts power to his limbs, that enables him to become a being of movement, comes from Mercury:

“Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen.”

From Jupiter illumination comes to him:

“Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit.”

And from Venus there comes:

“Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit.”

In order that Saturn can gather together all that completes man inwardly and outwardly, preparing him for his descent to earth, clothing him with his physical body and enabling this physically clothed being, who bears God within him, to carry on his life on earth:

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

From all I have described you can gather that the spiritual life at Ephesus was inwardly bright and full of colour. And this inwardly bright and colourful life contained precisely all that is summed up in the thoughts of Easter, all that the consciousness of man was able to grasp as his own intrinsic worth in the whole cosmos, the whole universe.

Many of those wanderers to whom I alluded in the last lecture, who passed from Mystery to Mystery in order that they might gather the full sum of those influences that came from the Mysteries—many of these wanderers have given us the assurance: that nowhere had the Sphere-harmonies resounded so clearly, so inwardly, as they sounded at Ephesus, because of the perception they had of things as seen from the aspect of the moon. In no other place had the astral light of the world appeared so luminous as when perceived in the light of the sun flooded by the softly glimmering light of the moon—and spiritualized by this astral light as man is ensouled by it—in no other place had they been able to perceive this, or at least not with the same joyousness and inward artistic acceptance.

All this was associated with the temple which later went up in flames through criminal or crazy folly. Initiates of these Ephesian Mysteries were incarnated, as I informed you at the Christmas meeting, in Aristotle and Alexander the Great. These individuals came in touch at that time with what could still be traced of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

Now an external, apparently chance event is sometimes of great importance in the evolution of the world. Some considerable time ago I informed you that the time of the burning of the temple at Ephesus coincided with the birth of Alexander the Great. But other things also took place through this burning of the temple. Oh, how manifold and tremendous are the things that have happened in the course of centuries to those who belonged to this Temple! How much of spiritual light and wisdom has passed through these Temple Halls! And all that passed within these halls was recorded in the world-ether while the flames burst forth from out the Temple. So that one can say: the continuous Easter festival at Ephesus, enclosed as it was within the Temple Halls, has been inscribed ever since on the vast dome of the universe in respect of this dome's ether-nature, though perhaps in letters that are not perceptible to all.

And so has it been with many things. Much of the wisdom of humanity was in ancient times enclosed within Temple walls. It has escaped from these walls, has been inscribed on the universal ether, and henceforth is immediately visible there to those who have risen to real imaginative knowledge.

This imaginative knowledge is to a certain extent the interpretation of the secrets of the stars. What once was Temple-wisdom has been inscribed on the universal ether, and can thence be read by those possessing Imagination.

This can be put in a different way; yet it is the same in whatever way it is put. One can say: I go forth into the night, and gaze on the starry heavens, allowing the impression they make to sink into me. And if the necessary faculties have been acquired, that which is contained in the grouping of the constellations, in the movements of the planets, is transformed into a mighty script. And when this cosmic script is read, something emerges from it of a similar kind to what I described in the last lecture concerning the Secrets of the Moon. These things can absolutely be read in the script of the firmament by those to whom the stars are not merely objects for mathematical calculations but when they are letters in a cosmic script. Something further might here be added for the elucidation of this matter.

At the very time the Mysteries of the Kabiri arose in Samothrace, and the older Mysteries were declining, something emerged through the influence of these Kabiri Mysteries which for Alexander and Aristotle were like a remembrance of the earlier times they had passed through together in a certain century at Ephesus. (Samothrace was not a Mystery-establishment of remembrance, nor was it a place for work where development was practised; as a matter of fact the life of the Mysteries was in general decline at the time of Alexander.) In this remembrance they heard again the sound of the word J O A. Once more there sounded within them:

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,

Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen

Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit

Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit

Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe.

In this remembrance—in this historical remembrance of things long past—there lay a certain power for the creation of something new. From that moment a power went forth for the creation of something new—a very remarkable new thing which has attracted very little attention from mankind. You must try to understand how this new creation which proceeded from Alexander and Aristotle was really brought about.

Take some well-known poetic work, or any other work—the most beautiful you can find—take for instance a German translation of the “Bhagavad Gita,” GSthe's “Faust,” or the “Iphigeneia,” anything on which you set a high value, and think of its rich and mighty content, that of GSthe's “Faust,” for example. By what means is this rich content communicated to you, my dear friends? Let us take it that it is communicated to you as is done in the case of the majority of men: that at some time of your life you read GSthe's “Faust.” What came to you on this occasion on the physical plane? What was on the paper? Nothing was on the paper but certain combinations of a b c d e f, etc. These combinations were the only means by which the mighty content of “Faust” was passed on to you. When you know the Alphabet there is nothing on the printed page that is not comprised in its 26 letters. But the rich content of the “Faust” is conjured from the paper in a magic way by means of these letters. It is clear to the eye that the repetition of a b c is wearisome; it is the most abstract thing imaginable. Yet this abstract thing, rightly combined, gives you the complete “Faust”!

And now, when that cosmic world-tone of the moon was heard again—the tone in which Aristotle or Alexander were versed—the meaning of the fire of Ephesus became clear, they knew how this fire had borne out into the far spaces of the world-ether the secret of Ephesus—and there now arose in Aristotle the inspiration to establish (zu begründen) the Cosmic-script. Only this world-script could not be built on the foundation of a b c d e f; but just as ordinary script was founded on letters, the world-script was founded on thoughts. In this way letters of the world-script came into being.

When I write down the following list, the words are just as abstract as a b c d e:

You have here a few ideas. Learn to accomplish with these ideas which were first propounded to Alexander by Aristotle—learn to do with these ideas what you have learnt to do with abed; you then learn how from Being, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Space, Time, Place, Having, Doing, Suffering, to read the Cosmos.

In the age of abstraction something extraordinary occurred in the schools of logic. Only suppose, if in certain schools concern was not with teaching people to read, but with compiling books in which every possible combinations of a b c d had to be learnt—a c, a b, b e, and so on—but not so as to learn by this to make use of the letter in a way that could bring any rich content to their souls, this would be to do exactly the same as the world has done to the logic of Aristotle. In his logic what were called categories were put forward; they were learnt by heart, but people did not know how to make use of them. This is similar to learning the a b c by heart without knowing how to use it.

Reading in the script of the universe can be traced back to something as simple as the learning of a b c is to the content of “Faust.”

In fact, what has been put forward by Anthroposophy, and can continue to be put forward, is arrived at from these ideas in the same way as the reading of “Faust” is arrived at by means of letters. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are contained, as a world-alphabet, within these simple concepts.

You have to realize that in the course of the world's development it happened, that as opposed to the earlier direct perception of which the events at Ephesus were still the most characteristic example, something arose which had its beginning at the time of Alexander, and continued to evolve more especially during the Middle Ages, something most profoundly hidden and esoteric.

Most profoundly esoteric is the thought living in these ten simple conceptions. We must learn really to live more and more in them; we must strive to experience them in our souls, when these have a richly organized spirit-filled content, as vividly as we experience the a b c.

Thus we see, how in these ten concepts whose inner illumination and source of power has once more to be discovered, was comprised something which like a mighty instinctive revelation of wisdom endured through thousands of years. And it will one day come to pass that what seems actually to have been laid within a grave—that is, the Wisdom of the world—will once more emerge and find the Light of the world, men will learn to read in the cosmos once more, and the resurrection of that which has been kept in concealment during the interval of human evolution between the two spiritual epochs, will again be experienced.

Our purpose, my dear friends, is to reveal to mankind that which has been hidden. I can therefore say, as on other occasions: Anthroposophy is a Christmas event, and in all its acts it is also an Easter event, a resurrection experience that is connected with a burial. And it is important that we should feel, especially at this Easter Assembly, the solemn sanctity—if I may so express it—of our Anthroposophical aspirations, in that we have some perception of being able to go to-day to a Spiritual Being who stands near us, perhaps immediately beyond the threshold, and to Whom we can say: Ah! at that time humanity was blessed by a divine spiritual revelation, which shone with exceptional clarity at Ephesus, but now all that lies buried. How can I again bring forth what thus lies buried! Yet we can believe that what once has been can somewhere be found again—can be found in the grave where it was hidden.

Then a Being will answer us, as on a similar occasion this same Being answered once before: “That which ye seek is no longer here, it is in your hearts, if only ye will open them to receive it in the right way.”

Anthroposophy already dwells in the hearts of men. These men have only to open their hearts to it in the right way. Then we shall experience in full sunlight, not in the old-time instinctive way, our return to that Wisdom which lived in, and illumined the Mysteries.

These are the things, my dear friends, which I desired to bring before you at this Easter season. For to fill ourselves with that which like a sacred breath can inflame the heart of everyone who holds to Anthroposophy, and can bear us with it into the spiritual world, is an impulse which is closely associated with the Christmas Impulse given at Dornach. This impulse must not remain something that can be thought out; it cannot stop at intellectuality; it must be an impulse coming from the heart, not dry or insipid—not sentimental, but in accordance with its whole nature it must be a very solemn one.

In the same way as the flames at Ephesus were used by Aristotle to fire his heart anew, and after they had streamed up into the outer ether they had brought to him again the secrets which he was then able to grasp in their primal significance ... as the fire at Ephesus could be used in this way, it is laid upon us, and we shall soon be able to carry out the demand (I say this in all humility), it is laid upon us to use that which as the aim and purpose of Anthroposophy was carried up into the ether along with the flames of the GStheanum for the further carrying out of this purpose.

What is to be the outcome of this, my dear friends? The outcome is to be that we receive a new impulse from the GStheanum. At the annual commemoration of the sad event which falls at Christmas time, the time in which this misfortune overtook us, we must receive a fresh impulse from the GStheanum. And why? Because we should feel what formerly was more or less an earthly concern, founded and constructed as a thing of earth, has been borne up by the flames into the wide spaces of the cosmos. Because this misfortune has come upon us we ought to be able to say in recognizing the results of this misfortune: We now realize that we should not have carried this out as a merely earthly concern (Erdensache) but as one appertaining to the whole far-reaching etheric world in which the Spirit dwells: then what happened to the GStheanum becomes something that concerns the wide ether in which dwells the spirit-filled wisdom of the universe. It has been carried out far into the beyond, and we must fill ourselves with the impulses of the GStheanum that comes to us from out the cosmos.

Let us take this as we will, let us take it as an image. But the image contains a profound truth. And this profound truth can be expressed in simple words when we say: The activities (Wirken) of Anthroposophy have been permeated with an esoteric tendency since the time of the Christmas impulse, 1923. This esoteric impulse or tendency exists, for though the earthly part through the co-operation of physical fire streamed out into space as astral light ... this impulse works back again into the Anthroposophical movement if only we are in a position to receive it.

When we are able to do this we are aware of a most important factor in all that lives in Anthroposophy. This important factor or part (Glied) is the Easter-feeling (Osterstimmung), that Anthroposophical feeling that can never be persuaded that the spirit can possibly die, but that, when owing to the world it has to die, it rises eternally anew. Anthroposophy must hold to the spirit that from eternal foundations ever rises again.

Let us take this to our hearts as an Easter thought, an Easter feeling. We will then take with us from this place of meeting, when we take our way into other walks of life, something which will give us courage and power to carry on our work.

Gentlemen, I said last time that we have several matters still to discuss. I would like to consider them today. Maybe during the Christmas holidays you could confer among yourselves and decide what should be brought up during the next lecture hour.

The human being has his senses for perceiving the world. We have examined the eye and the ear, considered the sense of touch, which is spread out over the whole organism, and have discussed the senses of taste and smell. All these senses are significant only for man's becoming acquainted with his surroundings and, as I have already explained, for enabling him to shape his body. But man does not live by virtue of the senses; he lives through the process of breathing. If you ask why he is an erect being, why his nose is in the middle of his face, for example, you have to answer that it is because of his senses. But if you look for the reason why he is alive, you have to consider his breathing, because the breath is related to all aspects of life. In one respect, human beings breathe just as the higher animals do, although many animals do breathe differently. A fish, for instance, breathes while swimming and living under water.

If we now look at human breathing we have first to consider the process of inhalation. The breathing process is initially one of inhalation. From the air around us we inhale the oxygen that is required for our existence. This then permeates our whole body, in which carbon in minute particles is deposited; or rather, in which it swims or floats. The carbon that we contain in our bodies is also found elsewhere in nature. As a matter of fact, carbon exists in a great many forms. For instance, carbon is found in coal and in every plant, which consists of carbon, mixed with water and so on, but carbon is the main component of the plant. The graphite in a pencil contains carbon, and the diamond, which is a valuable gem, is also carbon. The diamond is transparent carbon; hard coal is opaque carbon. It is rather interesting that something like coal exists in nature. It is certainly not elegant or attractive, yet is of the same substance as a valuable gem, which, depending on its size, for example, is fit for a crown. Coal and diamonds have the same substance in different forms. We, too, have in ourselves carbon of various forms.

When we breathe in oxygen it spreads out everywhere in our body and combines with the carbon. When oxygen combines with solid coal, a new gas, carbon dioxide, arises. This is a combination of oxygen and carbon, and it is this gas that we then exhale. Our life involves incorporating our body into the rest of the world by inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.

If we inhaled only pure oxygen, however, we would have to contain an immense amount of carbon, and the carbon dioxide would have to remain in us. Yes, we would be forever expanding, finally becoming gigantic, as big as the earth itself. Then we could always be inhaling. But we do not possess that much carbon; it must be constantly renewed. We could not survive if we only inhaled. We have to exhale to acquire carbon anew, and the carbon dioxide we produce is lethal. Indeed, if oxygen is life for us, carbon dioxide is death. If this room were now filled with carbon dioxide, we would all perish. Our life alternates between the life-giving air of inhalation and the deadly air of exhalation. Life and death are constantly within us, and it is interesting to see how they initially enter into the human being.

To comprehend this you must realize that bacteria and bacilli—microscopically small living beings—exist everywhere in nature. Whenever we move, multitudes of these little bacteria fly about us in the air. Countless tiny living beings exist within the muscles of animals. As I have already mentioned, they can rapidly increase in numbers. No sooner does one appear—particularly one of the smallest kind—then the next moment there are millions. The infectious diseases are based on their capacity for tremendous multiplication. These minute beings do not actually cause the illness, but a feeling of well-being is engendered in them when something is ailing in us. Like the plant in manure, these little beings feel well in the stricken organs of our body and like to remain there. Anyone who claims that they themselves cause disease is just as clever as one who states that rain comes from croaking frogs. Frogs croak when a rain shower comes because they feel it and stay in water that is stimulated by what is active in the rain, but they certainly do not cause the rain. Likewise, bacilli do not bring about a disease like the flu; they only appear whenever the flu appears, just as frogs mysteriously emerge whenever it rains.

One must not say, however, that research with bacilli has no use. It is useful to know that man is exposed to a certain illness, just as one knows that frogs croak when it rains. One cannot pour the baby out with the bathwater and say that it is unnecessary to examine the bacilli, yet one must realize that they do not cause the illness. One never gives a proper explanation by merely stating that for cholera there are these bacilli, for flu there exist these other bacilli, and so on. That is only a lazy way out for people who do not want to examine the actual causes of illnesses.

Now, if you take these infinitesimally small living creatures away from their habitat, they cannot continue to live. For example, cholera bacilli taken out of the human intestines die. This bacillus can survive only in the intestines of men or of animals like rats. All these microscopic creatures can live only in specific environments. Why? That these tiny beings need a specific environment is an important factor. You see, if you consider the cholera bacillus at the moment when it is within the human intestines, the force of gravity does not have as strong an effect on it as when it is outside. The force of gravity immediately ruins it when it is out of its element. Man, too, was initially a tiny living being just like these countless little creatures. As an egg, an ovum, the human being also was such a microscopic living being, such a miniature living creature. With this, gentlemen, we come to an important chapter.

Compare a cholera bacillus, which can exist only in the human intestines, with the human being. All these bacilli need to live in a place where they are protected from the earth. What does this imply? It means that an effect other than that of the earth influences them. The moonlight that shines sometimes in one way, sometimes in another has its effects on the earth, and it is indeed so that the moon influences all these living creatures. It can be seen that these creatures must be protected from the earth so that they can surrender themselves to the cosmos, especially to the influence of the moon. Now, in its earliest stage the human egg also surrenders to the moon's influence. It gives itself up to the moon just before fertilization. Just as the cholera bacillus exists in the intestines, so this tiny human egg exists in the female and is initially protected there. The female organism is so constituted, however, that the human egg is protected only in the beginning. The moment it passes too far out of the body it becomes vulnerable; then the earth begins to affect it.

Women discharge such human eggs every four weeks. At first they are given up to the moon's influence for a short time and are protected. But when the female organism dispatches the human egg during the course of the monthly period, it comes under the influence of the earth and is destroyed.

The human organization is so marvellously arranged that it represents an opposite to the bacilli. Cholera bacilli, for example, remain in the intestines and are careful not to venture too far out. Left to their own devices, they remain where they can be protected from the earth's influence. The human egg also is initially protected from the earth's influence in the mother's body, but then it moves outward because of the blood circulation of the mother, and comes under the influence of the earth's gravity. With the occurrence of the monthly period, which is connected with the moon's course and influence, an ovum is destroyed; the human ovum is really destroyed. It is not an actual human egg yet, however, for it has not been protected from destruction through fertilization.

What really happens through fertilization? If left only to the earth's influence, this human egg would perish. Through fertilization it is enfolded in a delicate, etheric substance and is protected from the earth. It is thus able to mature in the mother's body. Fertilization signifies the protection of the human egg from destruction by the earth's forces. What is destroyed in the infertile egg passes over into the environment; it does not just disappear. It dissolves in the totality of the earth's environment. Eggs that cannot be utilized for the earth disseminate in its atmosphere. This is a continual process.

We can now look at something that people rarely consider. Let us draw our attention to the herrings in the ocean. They lay millions upon millions of eggs, but only a few are ever fertilized. Those that are fertilized become protected from the influence of the earth. It is a little different in man's case, because he isn't a herring—at least not always [Play on words. In German, “Hering” is a very skinny person.]—but all these herring eggs that are not fertilized and are cast off in the ocean extricate themselves from the earth's influence by evaporation. If you consider the herrings and all the other fishes, all the other animals and also human beings, you can say to yourselves, “My attention is directed to something that continually arises from the earth into cosmic space.” Gentlemen, not only does water evaporate, but also such infertile eggs are always volatilized upward from the earth. Much more happens in cosmic space than materialistic science assumes.

If someone were sitting up there on Venus, for example, the vapours that arise and condense again as rain would hold little interest for him, but what I have just described to you, rising constantly into cosmic space, would be perceived up there as a greenish-yellow light. From this we may conclude that light emerges from the life of any given cosmic body. We will also be led to the realization that the sun, too, is not the physical body materialistic science pictures it to be but is rather the bearer of even greater, mightier life. It is as I have explained earlier; something that radiates light must be fertilized, just as the sun must be fertilized in order to radiate light through life. So then we have this difference: When a human egg is not fertilized it goes out, it evaporates into cosmic space; when it is fertilized it remains for awhile on the earth.

What happens is like inhalation and exhalation. If I only exhaled, I would give my being up to cosmic space as does the infertile human egg. Consider how interesting it is that you exhale, and the air that you have exhaled contains your own carbon. It is a delicate process. Just imagine that today you have a tiny bit of carbon in your big toe. You inhale, and oxygen spreads out. The small amount of carbon that today is in your big toe combines with the oxygen, and tomorrow this little particle of carbon is somewhere out there in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That is really what happens. During his lifetime man constantly has in himself the same substance that the human egg contains when it is fertilized. If we only exhaled and never inhaled we would always be dying; we would continually be dissolving into the atmosphere. By inhaling we guard ourselves against death. Every time we inhale we protect ourselves from death.

The child that is still maturing in the mother's womb has come into being from the fertilized human egg and is protected from disintegration. The child takes its first breath only at the moment of birth when it comes into the world. Before that it must be supplied with oxygen from the mother's body. But now with birth something quite significant happens. At birth man for the first time receives from the outer world the capability to live. After all, man cannot live without oxygen. Although in the mother's womb he exists without oxygen from the outer air, he does get it from the body of the mother.

Thus, one can say that when man emerges from his mother's body and comes into the world, he actually changes his whole life process. Something radically different happens to it. He now receives oxygen from outside, whereas before he was able to assimilate it in the body of his mother. Just ask yourselves if there is a machine anywhere in the world that can supply itself with heat first in one way and then in another? For nine or ten months man lives in the body of his mother before he appears in the external world. In the womb he is supplied with what life gives him in a completely different manner from the way he does after he has taken his first breath.

Let us examine something else connected with this. Imagine that your sleep has been somewhat disturbed. You are awakened from a fitful sleep by a quite frightening dream in which you perhaps experience that you came home to a locked house and cannot get in. Someone in the house is expecting you so you struggle to unlock the door. You may have experienced something like this. In dreams we do indeed experience such conditions of anxiety.

Now, if you examine what actually happens when the human being has such nightmares, you always discover that something is amiss with the breathing. You can even experimentally produce such nightmares. If you take a handkerchief and plug up your mouth or cover your nose, you will dream the nicest nightmares as nightmares go because you cannot inhale properly.

It is rather strange that our having such conditions of anxiety depends simply on inhalation and exhalation, in other words, on oxygen and carbon. We can deduce from this that we live in the air with our soul element. We do not live in our muscles or in our bones with our soul element but rather in the air. It is really the case that our soul moves along with the air during inhalation and exhalation. Thus, we can say that the soul element seeks out the air in which it floats after the child has taken its first breath. Earlier, it had absorbed oxygen in a completely different way.

Where does the human being get oxygen prior to birth? In the prenatal state an actual breathing process does not yet exist. There is no breathing while the human being is in the mother's womb; everything takes place through the circulation. Various vessels that are torn away at birth pass into the embryo from the mother's body, and with the blood and fluids oxygen also passes into the embryo. With birth man carries his basic life principle out of the watery element into the air. When he is born he transposes the life principle from the fluid element in which it existed before birth out into the air.

From this you can conclude that before conception the human being is first an entity that, like the bacilli, is not fit for the earth at all. Initially he is a being alien to the earth. Later on, he is shielded from the earth's forces and can develop in the mother's body, but when he is actually born and emerges from the surroundings of the maternal womb, he is exposed to the forces of the earth. Then he becomes capable of life only by becoming accustomed to an activity that enables him to live in the air. Throughout his earthly life man protects himself against the forces of the earth by living not with the earth at all but by living with the air.

Just imagine how hard it would be if you had to live with the earth! A man who steps on a scale finds that he weighs a certain amount—a thin one less, a fat one more. Now imagine that you had to grab yourself by the hair and carry your whole body all the time, constantly carry your own weight. Wouldn't that be an exhausting chore! Yet, although you do indeed carry it around with you, you do not feel this weight at all, nor are you aware of it. Why? Your breathing protects you from the heaviness of the earth. In fact, with your soul you do not live in the body at all but rather in the breathing process.

You can now easily comprehend why materialistic science does not find the soul. Materialistic science looks for the soul in the body, which is heavy. In its research it dissects a dead body that no longer breathes. Well, science cannot discover the soul there, because the soul is not to be found in such a body. Materialistic science could find the soul only if our constitution were such that in walking around everywhere we would have to carry our own bodies, sweating profusely

from the effort. Then it would make sense to seek for the soul with materialistic means. But the way things really stand, it makes no sense at all. We sweat for other reasons. When we emerge from the maternal womb, we do not live within our solid substances. As it is, we are only ten percent solid substance. Nor do we live in our fluid element, to which we bestow life. With our soul we actually live in our breathing.

Gentlemen, please follow me now in a train of thought that belongs to the most significant matters of the present time. Let us picture to ourselves a human fetus. Through birth it emerges into the outside world and becomes a full-fledged human being who now inhales air with his lungs and exhales again through his nose. It should be quite self-evident to you that when a person is born, he actually lives with his soul in the breathing process. As long as he exists in the mother's womb, he lives in a watery element. In a sense, he emerges from the water into the air when he is born. As earthly man you can live only in the air, not in water. But before birth you lived in water, and up until the third week you were even shaped like a little fish to enable you to live there. You lived in water up to the time of birth, but the earth does not allow you to live in that element. What does it signify that before birth you lived in water? It means that your life cannot derive from the earth at all, that it must originate from beyond the earth because the earth does not permit you to live. We must lift ourselves up from the earth into the air to live.

Because we have lived in water up to the moment of birth, we may conclude that our life is not bestowed by the earth. Our life of soul is not given us by the earth. It is impossible for the earth to bestow this life of the soul on you. Hence we may understand that it comes from beyond the earth. When we comprehend how life is actually contained in the breathing process, and how life already exists in the embryo but in a fluid element, we immediately realize that this life has descended from a spiritual world into the mother's ovum.

People will frequently call such statements unscientific. Nevertheless, we can study a lot of science and reach the conclusion that what the illustrious scientists do in their science is much less logical than what I have just told you. What I have now told you is absolutely logical. Unfortunately, things are such in our age that children are already drilled in school to turn a deaf ear to something like this; or if they happen to hear it, they will say at most, “He's crazy. We've learned that everything grows out of the human egg.” Well, it is just as ridiculous as learning that the human head grows from a head of cabbage. A human head can grow from a cabbage no more than the human element, the whole human activity during life, can be derived from the human egg. But children are already taught these completely nonsensical things in school.

I have already given you an example of this. Even the smallest children are told that once the earth, along with the whole planetary system, was one huge primeval nebula. Of course, the nebula does nothing when it is still, and so it is made to rotate. It starts to revolve quickly, and as it turns it becomes thinner and thinner. Eventually individual bodies split off, and a round one remains in the middle. The children are shown with a demonstration how this can be imitated. The teacher takes a piece of cardboard, sticks a needle through it, and puts a small drop of oil into a glass of water. He now turns the piece of cardboard and the oil drop, which floats on top of the water, begins to move. It starts to rotate, and tiny oil drops split off. A large drop of oil remains in the middle. This is a little planetary system with its sun. You see, children—so he says—we can do it on a small scale. So it is quite plausible that there once existed a nebula that revolved, and from this nebula celestial bodies gradually split off, leaving the large star remaining the middle.

But now, gentlemen, what is the most important factor in this experiment? Why does the drop of oil rotate in the glass of water? Because the teacher turns the piece of cardboard. Likewise, a great cosmic teacher had to sit somewhere out there in the universe to turn things around, spinning off celestial bodies! Gentlemen, when from the beginning someone teaches children such things, they become “clever” as adults. When someone wants to be logical and expresses doubt, they call him a dreamer because they know how the world began!

You see, such thoughts contain absolutely no reality. This rotating, primeval nebula thought up by Kant and Laplace has no reality at all; it is really quite foolish. To postulate such rotating nebulas is really rather stupid. The only grounds for it are the supposedly spiral nebulas observed through telescopes. Out in the wide cosmic spaces there are indeed such spiral nebulas; that is correct. But if by looking out there with a telescope and seeing these spiral nebula, a man should say, “Well, yes, our whole solar system was once such a nebula too,” then he is about as clever as one who takes a swarm of insects in the distance for a dust cloud. This can happen, but the swarm of gnats is alive while the dust cloud is lifeless. The spiral nebula out in space is alive; it has life within it. Likewise, the whole solar system had its own life and spirituality in earlier times, and this spirituality continues to work today.

When the human egg is shielded in the body of the mother by fertilization, it can unite with the human spirit. When we gradually grow old, the heaviness slowly makes itself felt by the fact that our substances are seized by the earth's gravity. Suppose a person's digestion is amiss and, as a result, the life forces do not properly pass through it. Then all kinds of tiny solid particles form in the muscles. They become filled up with these small solid bodies, which are minute uric acid stones, and then we have gout. We begin to be conscious of heaviness, of gravity.

When we are healthy and oxygen invigorates us through our breathing, such uric acid deposits are not formed, and we do not become afflicted with gout. Gout occurs only if oxygen does not pass through our body in a truly invigorating manner and does not assimilate carbon correctly. If oxygen does not pass through our organism in the right way, carbon will cause all kinds of problems; then there will be present everywhere such minute particles in our blood vessels. We feel that as an effect of the earth in moving around. In fact, we have to be shielded from the earth. We remain alive only because we are constantly protected from the earth and its influences by the breathing process. The earth is not damaging for us only because we are constantly being shielded from it. We would always be sick if we were always exposed to the earth.

You see, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when natural science had its greatest materialistic successes, people were completely stunned by its accomplishments and scientists wanted to explain everything by way of what happens on the earth. These scientists were extremely clever, and they liberated man from much that had encumbered him. Nothing is to be said against them; they can even be praised but they were utterly stupefied by scientific progress and tried to explain the whole human being in such a way as if only the earth had an influence on him. They did not realize that when the earth's influences begin to take effect on man, he first becomes nervous and then becomes ill in some way. He is well only by virtue of being constantly shielded from earthly influences.

Eventually, however, man is overcome by these earthly influences. How do they make themselves felt? The earthly influences assert themselves because man gradually loses the art of breathing. When he cannot breathe properly anymore, he returns to his condition before conception. He dissolves into the cosmic ether and returns to the world from which he came. With his last breath, man sinks back into the world from which he emerged. When we correctly understand breathing, we also comprehend birth and death. But nowhere in modern science do we find the right understanding of breathing.

In sum, man first learns to live with the world through the female ovum, then learns to exist independently on the earth for a certain length of time by virtue of the male fertilization, and finally returns to the condition where he again can live on his own outside the earth. Gradually one learns to comprehend birth and death, and only then can one begin to have the right concept of what man is regarding his soul, of what is not born and does not die but comes from without, unites itself with the ovum in the mother, and eventually returns to the spiritual world.

The situation today is such that we must comprehend the immortal soul element, which is not subject to birth and death. This applies especially to those who are active in science. This, indeed, is necessary for mankind today. For hundreds and thousands of years, men have had a faith in immortality that they cannot possibly retain today because they are told all kinds of things that actually are nothing and fall apart in the face of science. Everything that a man is asked to believe today must also be a matter of knowledge. We must learn to comprehend the spiritual out of science itself, the way we have done here in these lectures. That is the task of the Goetheanum and of anthroposophy in general: to correctly understand the spiritual out of natural science.

You see, it is difficult to get people somehow to comprehend something new. It is Christmastime now, and people could say to themselves, “Well, we must find a new way to understand how the spirit lives in the human race.” If people would stop to think how the spirit lives in mankind, and if they would try to arrive at this understanding through real knowledge, we would find everything renewed. We could even celebrate Christmas anew, because we would observe this holiday in a manner appropriate for the modern age. Instead, on one hand, people continue to observe only what is dead in science and, on the other, they perpetuate the old traditions to which they can no longer attach any meaning. I would like to know what meaning those people who exchange gifts can still see in Christmas. None at all! They do it merely from an old custom. Side by side with this, a science is taught that is everywhere filled with contradictions. Nowhere does anyone wish to consider the fact that science presents something that can lead to the realization of the spiritual.

Today, one can say that if Christianity is to have any meaning at all, one must once again embark on attaining a real knowledge of the spirit. This is the only thing possible; it is not enough just to perpetuate the old. For what does it imply to read the Bible to people on festive occasions, or even to children in school, if along with this one tells the child that there was once a primeval nebula that rotated? The head and the heart come completely to oppose one another. Then man forgets how to be a human being on the earth because he no longer even knows himself.

Anyone is a fool who thinks that as human beings on the earth we consist only of what is heavy, of the body that is put on the scale and weighed. This part we do not need at all. It is nonsense to think that we consist of these material substances that can be weighed. In reality, we do not become aware of the body at all, because we shield ourselves from it in order to stay well. The curing of illness consists in expelling the earthly influences that are affecting the sick person. All healing is actually based on removing the human being from the earth's influence. If we cannot remove man from the earth and its influences, we cannot cure him. He then lies down in bed, allows himself to be supported by the bed and gives himself up to weight. When one lies down one does not carry one's own self.

So we have the old customs on one hand and, on the other, a science that does not enlighten man as to what he really is as a human being. Nothing positive can come from all this. It is true that the World War, with all the consequences that still afflict us today, would not have occurred if human beings had known something of the inhumanity beforehand. Even now, they do not want to know. Even now, they still want to get together at congresses without any new thoughts and just repeat the same old things. Nowhere are they able to conceive new thoughts. What at first existed in mankind as confused ideas became a habit and then became our social order today. We are not going to get anywhere in the world again until from within we really feel what in fact the human being is.

This is really what those who understand the aims of anthroposophy conceive of as Christmas. Christmas should remind us that once again a science of the spirit must be born. Anthroposophy is the best spiritual being that can be born. Mankind is much in need of a Christmas festival. Otherwise, it does away with the living Christ and retains only the cross of Christ. Ordinary science is only the cross, but once again we must arrive at what is living. We must strive for that.

Well, gentlemen, that is what I wanted to mention on this particular day in addition to the other things. With this, I wish you all pleasant holidays!