The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends!

For the kind of striving you are involved in, it is of primary importance to cultivate a true impulse for feeling yourselves within the spiritual world as well as striving towards the achievement of such an impulse, but taken from the viewpoint of your Movement, of which I intend speaking to you today. You see it really involves establishing a connection with a definite point to enable you to link to a spiritual impulse, if you want to be a sure, broad minded, active person, which you all want to be. It involves enlivening the appropriate impulses for this particular activity. From my observations in the spiritual world as such, it appears that the following will be helpful to you.

A connection can be established with the manifestation of the spirit of speech, the wielding of the speech genius. We must firstly be very clear, my dear friends, how far we are removed as a rule from the real spiritual, inner self-activation of grasping speech within ourselves. We basically are involved with speech but without its divine quality. We take up speech in such a manner that by the very act of applying it to ordinary life, we actually profane it. We allow ourselves as contemporary people to use speech by not venerating it in any way at all. We basically speak in sinfulness and this can awaken the awareness that our speaking sinfully enables us to acquire an attitude, I may say, to develop a relationship with speech towards obtaining a spiritual impulse. Examples to confirm this arise of course from all areas.

How many people today have obtained some guidance which empathises with any of the sounds in speech? This naturally means a large number of sounds are spoken conventionally and inhumanely, without comprehension, uttered as if without human input. Who feels at the moment the word “harden” is spoken, that in expressing the word the speaker's mood is permeated by something which hardens it like a mineral and simultaneously cools down his mood? Who feels, when the word “Word” is spoken that it is linked to life from ancient times, a past spiritual weaving which has been killed in the present time, the past crystallized in the present, and so on? We have absolutely no experience of the most important words any more. I would like to know how many people today have the experience with the word “thinking,” how many people have an experience with the word “feeling,” the word “willing.” This I'm only saying to you with reference to what I really want to entrust you with today.

You may of course name yourself in the most varied expressions of language. You can call yourself “I” as one does usually, or you can start to theorise about it and say to yourself you can be called a “human-being” (Mensch).¹ Then you substitute the speech genius and determine your own being out of the being of the language. However today a person has the feeling when he does something like that, he is applying a word which he designates to himself. When a person of today says to himself he can be called a “human-being,” he thinks that under all circumstances he has in a comprehensive way with a word, he believes, described an idea.

Now, when the starting point is feeling, it is good: in the true sense of the word language is so little understood, making the description which a person as a human-being applies to himself actually something whose understanding must first be wrestled with, whose understanding must first be arrived at. Feeling should actually always be a starting point so that when I believe I can describe myself in some or other words, even in my mother tongue, they designate an infinite pride in me. When we permeate ourselves with the feeling that we believe we can manage a language, even our mother tongue, so far removed from the spirit that we can legitimately name ourselves with the word “human-being,” if we consider this belief as terribly proud then we start to draw courage for the preparatory feeling towards a specific spiritual impulse such as I am indicating today. We should much more often be able to say: ‘I am placed on the earth as a human-being through some or other divine circumstances unknown to me and this leads me to call myself a “human-being,” but the basis for this description lies high above my horizon. It is the will of God who prevails here, who has lead me out of the unconscious deep substrate, to describe me as “human-being.” I have as a human-being, as this human individuality standing on earth, actually not the right to characterize myself.’ Then the next step must be to say to oneself: Before I can become capable at all of understanding the entire preliminary stages in existence which leads to me saying “I” to myself, I must undergo three developmental steps—right up to the judgement which I may express as the following: I have no right to call myself “human-being,” I need to first go through three steps of development, I must push through three tests. When I have passed these three tests to satisfy my own judgement, will I have earned the right to say to myself: ‘You are a human-being.’

This we should actually feel toward every spoken word: an extraordinary noble humility towards the point of origin for the development of spiritual impulses. We need to say to ourselves: Just like we as human-beings stand on earth today in our 5^th Post-Atlantean period, we may, if we are honest people, start by falling quiet, name nothing and then start to conquer the three steps which will give us the right to rename things out of ourselves. Through this can we first get a feeling for how extraordinary a meaningful cosmic experience it had been, as indicated in scripture, that in the presence of God Adam was permitted to name animals and things, which only God's proximity could enable. We come through such experiences which need indeed to be concrete personal experiences, to the necessary depths of the scripture, so that it, through its inner power which we can give it, reach the necessary nuances and coloration and out of every word in each verse let it ring out, to which we can't merely say: ‘We don't have the right to name things’—but we could say: ‘Through God the right has been given to us, to name things out of ourselves.’

These things must firstly be experienced through the depths of our soul in a priestly way to really encounter the world. Outer gestures do not make a priest, because the priest expresses what comes out of the deepest depths within. When we designate the words “human-being” as such to ourselves, we should only be able to do so when we have gone through these three stages:

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has depths which I must first need to fathom;

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has heights to which I need to rise first;

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has widths which I first have to look at and grasp.

These three sentences contain something meaningful: being a human-being. By deepening these sentences through meditation, they can take you a long way.

In truth it is so: by the human-being placing himself in earthly existence he places himself outside spiritual heights. Solely through the fact that our earth existence is a cooperative task towards human development, cosmically validated, do we contribute a part of our totality as earthlings. Earth shapes us while we walk on it between birth and death, as earthlings, and everything which is shaped out of the earth come out of the depths which cooperates in everything, even in the most minute parts of the smallest organs in us. Just imagine the earth as a being in space has endless secrets within it which work creatively. How your eyes, your ears are formed, how every singular, how every smallest member of your body is formed and fashioned, for all this the creative forces lie within the earth. If we succeed in gradually grasping what the earth's expression of its inner being is in its countenance, with thinking, feeling and willing as an unveiling of her inner secrets, so we meditatively, gradually come to search for an answer to the question: How do I fathom the depths of the being of man?

When we succeed in placing ourselves into our bodies as the multitudinous ways of crystallised earth, which dissolves the crystallisation again, atomised to a powder, when we succeed in observing this development, pulverising and re-crystallising which in the course of time was characterised for the sensitive human-being, for example with Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; if we succeed in experiencing this entire process which will be for us a kind of bed of the Godhead, by us being embedded in it, so that the bedding within this Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva process becomes something like a cosmic sleep for us during our earth existence, if we experience this crystallisation and dissolving as something which weaves through us with a cosmic urge for sleep, so that we could say: the human-being is so profound, so deeply fashioned in earthly existence that the depths of consciousness doesn't endure but with the entire created earth as a physical body it expires into a cosmic sleep—then we gradually approach the feeling of what it means: what it is for the human-being to be connected to the depths of the earth. If we can finally say to ourselves: the earth forms us out of its depths, permeates us out of its depths with earthly sleep, while out of the depths of earthly sleep the archetypal divine works fully consciously, then we experience something of this earthly depths within the human-being. If we could say something like: the harder the earth appears to us, diamond hard, the harder in its parts, just so more true, so powerfully speaks from this diamond hard heart the condition of sleep of the spiritual world, the light filled spirituality which works in the earth as awakened, active divinity.

Thus we need to go through our meditation in an ever more deepening feeling way and transfer the earthly foundation and say:

‘Oh man, before you can name yourself, before you can establish your depths, you need to ever more deepen yourself into the foundations of the earth.’ When we observe plants sprouting out of the earth, we may acquire a more lofty feeling of piety, a feeling of reverence, that in every plant morsel we can behold something of ourselves, something like a revelation of what is happening below in the earth. We must really clearly understand the exchange of activities taking place between the earth's depths and the breadths of the heavens. See how the blossoming roses grow out of the earth, look at the particular way the rosebud pinches its petals so tightly together as to complement the ground of the earth, counter positioned to the central point of the earth as a mighty rose of light, permeated with divine thought gestures which need to wait until the rose unfolds its bud upwards. Every sleeping rosebud you empathise with the waiting, creating, living light rose in the earthly depths. So it is with all plants. Look at the green cover of plants over the earth and experience that which sprouts out of the earth as green, in the depths of the earth, as quite light-filled but permeated with deep violet, which appears in the world, weaving through it with life. Then you have something which I have said to you: ‘I may only call myself a human-being, when I have explored myself in the earth's depths.’

So the feeling must be reached towards becoming worthy through such meditative penetration, through the conquering of this first step, for the word “human-being” to be used for people. When one takes what the profane person takes as obvious, as a level hovering high above and think one can only reach this level by climbing up to it; through humbling yourself three times more than an ordinary person, becoming three times more humble than an ordinary person believes himself to be, then one is only starting to sense oneself gradually approaching the calling of a priest.

When one has gradually in such a way led oneself to reach the first step, then one takes on the second step which lets us look into the infinite widths of the worlds and one says to oneself at the present moment: Oh, how trivial this world has become, where humanity has only developed trivial images of the wide world. Yes truly, wiser than the wisest student was Stifter's grandmother who was asked about the evening red glow and answered it was the mantle of God's mother, which is hung out in the heaven to be aired. This naive, picturesque imagination is in contrast to scientific knowledge much wiser, much wiser than the most learned astronomy.

This one must be able to absorb: To actually see the shining stars in wide space, stars with essentially the eyes of divine spiritual beings who glance down at us, children of the earth, while their spiritual hands reach out to us, while our spiritual hands reach up to their spiritual hands because we were with them before we came down to an earthly existence. The gods look after us out of space, out of the heights above worlds, in order to explore how we feel towards their predisposition while our spiritual hands reached their spiritual hands. When we are able to possibly develop many imaginations of the heights and become more and more empathic, how the being of humanity originate out of the heights, towards which it needs to climb up once again, then we will be able to come one step closer to earn the right to, as people, call ourselves ‘human beings.’

The word ‘human-being’ must first be dipped into the depths of the earth, as I have indicated, so that its absorption during this immersion becomes part of our minds and enable us to say: We understand this. Now this word ‘human-being’ need to rise up with the mists into the heights and give us the feeling that it will come again in the falling rain, when the word “human-being” will carry within itself the possibility of learning to understand it. We really must initially be clear about everything which works between the depths of the earth and the heavenly heights. In a lively way we must follow the haze rising from woods and mountains. We must not believe that the haze is rising from an area which belongs to the earth. We must develop every kind of modesty towards those people who see in a drop the dragon rising in a thermometer or a barometer, to facilitate measurements. The tendency is to immerse everything in earthly images only. We must reach a point where we can say: ‘How foolish to believe thunder develops out of the friction between clouds; clouds consist of water as every child knows, all moisture is completely kept away from a glass rod if electricity is to be created.’—Naturally this foolishness comes to the fore when a person tries to experience something in the heights of heaven which he experiences on earth for he has descended down from the heavenly heights and now he needs to feel related to it again before he can truly call himself a human-being. We must clearly understand that while the fog rises out of the mountains and forests, where water is somewhat different than it is on earth, in regions where water itself becomes spiritualised, it is ‘de-watered’ and goes through spiritual processes so that it can materialise once again until it descends again as rain out of spiritual spheres. We must know that if we rise up into such regions then we need to be familiar with these regions of our origination, out of which we descended from in a previous existence. We need to know that lightening is something which rules and weaves in spiritual regions and take the imagination of ancient times, where lightening was the arrow of the Gods, as an imagination far more wise than we can ever make today.

In total stillness we must be able to develop such meditative imaginations in the depths of our minds, enabling us to be the leaders turning a completely de-spiritualised world culture towards the Spirit. When we turn towards the hard earth, we must also turn towards the gentle, flowing water, combining with one another in the depths, right into the most concentrated minute matter, which expands in the heights and must atomise, then coalesce to become rain again in their descent to earth. We must discover all the secrets of water, everything relating to water and draw it all together in our minds. We must meditate over it, we must ask ourselves: ‘How does the sun's warmth come out of the world expanse during summer and into the earth to enable plants to bear fruit which turn ripe? How does this warmth of the sun sink into the earth to enable the farmer to entrust his seeds in the earth's warmth during winter?’ At the end of winter it is this warmth which expands again into the vastness of existence. This warmth, found in all areas of existence, working in all cosmic undertakings, is a communion of the opposites between the heavenly heights and the earthly depths. As human-beings we originate from both. We must fathom the earth's depths before we can enter into the world's expanse.

By increasingly entering into such meditations we come to a kind of feeling, a mindfulness, towards the second step, which gives us the right to apply the word ‘human-being’ to ourselves. We must achieve an awareness that all languages can only be provisional, until through the third step we have reached that union with the linguistic genius who actually speaks unconsciously within us while we, when we have made ourselves the tool of God's Word, only then need to have the right to apply the word ‘human-being’ to ourselves.

As a third step we must try and observe the world's expanse. This we can perceive when the rising and the setting sun becomes a reality in our minds. Similarly with the rising and sinking stars when we learn to understand the great journey of the sun chariot going through the world, then we are really able to recognise what the variations are between East and West, what is different from Southeast compared to Northwest and so on. This we can observe when we are able to say to ourselves: You as human-being may take five steps and so change your position on the earth's surface. For you to be able to do so, like the animal as well, is as a result of forces which draw from East to West in width and breadth, also working on you. You are also shaped out of the earth's depths. While the heights of heaven throw light on you from above and forms and enlivens you, you are all given the ability to be formed into beings able to walk on the earth's surface. The world's expanse you should sense and you can sense this by placing yourself in some distant landscape and experience the air as becoming something increasingly more real. In your immediate surroundings the air appears transparent to you, you don't see it; when you look at a mountain you can paint the air with it because it appears as dew on the surface; when you look at the air in the distance then you see the blue sky. Drenched with it you experience the beings of light as a feeling which becomes real because the experience is bound to actions of will. Thus you rise to the third step in your meditation which leads you to earn the right to name yourself a ‘human-being.’

When you deepen this step in the secret of breathing, you start to understand what the air and the widths of the world are; what is working in the heights and depths and in the horizon and you admit: what permeates your breathing lives in the wide world—it is how the wide world experiences you—and it is this that you must sense in your breath. Further, you must sense in your breathing that an act of will is the basis of penetrating your entire being with the powerful impulses of breathing. You get an inkling of how the depths of the earth give material cohesion to your entire body which you transform according to thoughts given to you from the wide world. So they work together in the whole person:

Depths of earth in your Physical
World widths in your Astral
Heavenly heights in your Etheric

Thus you can feel entire cosmic dimensions in yourself. You can sense when you enter with your feeling into the diamond hard earth how you are a sleeping being. You can feel, when you raise your gaze to the heavenly heights, you are snatched from sleep and become a dreaming being. Yet you can also feel how you are a being who is awake in the width of the world. Gradually you learn to recognise the comic human in the earthly human-being.

In this way you learn to recognise how the human-being is actually formed by God out of the entire cosmos, placed by God on earth. Thus you sense the threefold positioning in the cosmos. This is how you learn to feel how the Father God works out of the earth, whose lively activity must preferably be looked for in the past because what has remained is the firm ground on which we stand, the fixed forms repeated in the world, all that has remained appears to us in fixed images. By meditating with our mind sunk into the earthly depths we hear the words of the Father God sounding up to us. Out of the heavenly heights we hear how the presence of God speaks to us but the words are more profound and more complicated that human speech. God has descended from the heavens down to earth and had to go through the Mystery of Golgotha to allow heavenly speech to penetrate our words. The actual communion of the earthly with the heavenly we can depict in the rising water vapour, in the rain which falls down again, in the rising and again descending warmth of the world. When we allow that to work in us it will permeate us with spirit and we will sense the presence of Christ in those who we feel are under the influence of the heavenly heights. When we penetrate into our breath as coming out of the widths of space and we humbly link our feeling to what happens at every instant, when we in our physicality, ruled by the forces of earthly depths, feel formed and shaped under the leadership of Christ Jesus out of the heavenly heights then we come to really experience, and are permeated by, the activity of the Holy Ghost as the fulfilment of the Trinity and thus out of this our meditation could be:

The Father God has given me the strength which lies in my material existence, as solidified Spirit.

The Son God is always the heavenly which lives in me, which works and weaves like a watery cosmic existence, which is a symbol, an image of it. I sense Christ-God in all my weaving and living, in all which has made me from a child to an adult, in all which grows in me daily and needs to perish again, enabling me to be an earthling through my becoming.

I feel the Spirit God carry into the future that which Christ Jesus has become in us, in the past.

You see, when you meditate like this on the content born out of a word, a word previously only used provisionally, then you have earned the right to call a person a ‘human-being.’ We must begin by developing reverence towards the genius of speech because through such a meditation real reverence is cultivated. Our starting point must not be to refer to the outer impression of the human form only but as a human-being created by God, as a thought from God, as a God-filled human-being, when we speak.

When we prepare ourselves as we have through our meditation on a word such as ‘human-being,’ then the impulse is born for these three steps to be applied to some other words and for the human speech on earth to be implemented in this way. The genius of speech will teach us how we can become living tools for the Word of God when we allow the congregation to experience this Word of God. The Word of God is always there, and what we are doing, is but a moment's experience of the continuous spiritual cosmic weaving Word of God. In the very first beginnings the word existed, in ancient beginnings it was already divine. When we are however not in the position to sense the holiness in the words ‘human-being’ for the people, then our approach is not right, we do not have dignity to also express the first words of the St John's Gospel in the correct way. The priest today has not yet come so far as to be able to say these words in this way.

In our time the primary importance for priests, if they continue in their calling, is to further such things. What has actually been left over from the ancient words revealed from the holy heights above the earth? What has remained from the words such as “Deus,” “Christus,” “Spiritum”? Earthly sounds they now are, hardened by dogma. The truth within words need to be awakened in us, the truth of these words must live in us. We may not neglect anything which will still make it possible for the old, hardened and therefore dogmatic words to become alive again within us. We may no longer turn and twist in the way it was done with God's words in past times in which the Catholic Church extracted the Mystery of the Mass.

In the Old Mysteries priests were far more humble than those of today, when they are like I have just described them. The priest of old said to himself he couldn't be a priest if he was just as he was. As a result, before he was allowed to speak, those things were performed in which the last remainder of incense was still held. As a result of the sensing, which has come to its right in our Consecration of Man ritual, there is indicated that in the Mysteries of old, outer substances were used to shift the consciousness of the priests. This resulted in them feeling shifted out of their bodies and enchanted by the genius of speech, taking them to the higher Genius so that the priest of old, out of his body, experienced the Being of God. No priest was of the opinion that he could move his tongue when he expressed the Word of God; he knew he had to first go out of himself and allow his tongue to be moved from outside. We can no longer do this today and nor should we try. We should through inner spiritual means, with internalized feeling and will work towards the understanding of the foregoing, when we can call ourselves ‘human-beings.’

Just consider, my dear friends, what the Act of Consecration will become under your handling when you start from today taking these things I've spoken about into your priest meditations. These things can also just gradually be taken in by us. Mankind has distanced itself from the divine and must find its way back again. We have absorbed the Act of Consecration into the Christian Movement for Religious Renewal like religious artists. Today we have come to the point where what can only be accepted like a religious art must be taken up in such a way that we are in the position to make it into a lively organism, in order for the Act of Consecration to become really alive and in this way be experienced within the Christian Community as ever new at each fulfilment of the ritual, just like the physical body experiences something new each time it takes in nourishment.

My dear friends, take this into your souls: the Act of Consecration is to become alive. Through this you will earn the right to place yourselves in the earth's becoming and through the Act of Consecration be present within the earth's becoming. Then may you express the following truth: If this Act of Consecration is not performed then the earth will waste away and remain without nourishment. It would be just as if no plants would grow. Plants grow in the physical world; the Act of Consecration of Man must grow in the spiritual realm. If it was not enacted there on this higher level it would be the same as if on the lower level of the physical earth no plants would grow. A human-being only has the right to say this when he or she succeeds in continuously enlivening the Act of Consecration so that this self-expressed word ‘human-being’ has been achieved in the correct manner and being and weaving, within the earthly existence, through achieving the three steps of inner soul development.

Only then, my dear friends, when you have experienced it in this sensitive way can you really place yourself in the right way in our present time. According to your need to gather again after a certain time, I may say this to you, because it belongs to the entire development of the Christian Community. Thus you have taken something full of life into yourselves which can work in an enlivening way in yourselves. I wish that today's words are taken in all seriousness, in the right way.

• 1. Translator's note: “Mensch” has no English equivalent. Collins Dictionary considers mensch used in English as “a well-meaning person.” Reverso suggests ‘human,’ ‘person’ and ‘man.’ Google adds ‘individual’ to this list. The word ‘human’ is seen in contrast to ‘animal’ or ‘robot.’ To translate “Mensch” as ‘human-being’ is not quite correct, nor is ‘individuality’—the latter indicating a person being different from others in some way. “Mensch” has a humane as well as individual character so the best solution is using the expression “human-being” in this translation. As “the Word” is under examination, a hyphen is an attempt at forming a single inseparable concept.

From the descriptions given yesterday you will have gathered that man has gradually to acquire freedom in the present period of world and human evolution. On looking back into the past evolution of the world, we find how, in respect of his most important activities, his walking, speaking, thinking, man has been prepared from above by divine-spiritual Beings. We see how, in order to ensure that what these divine Beings have accomplished in man during his earthly existence shall take effect, if only unconsciously, he is always led between death and rebirth into association with these Beings.

You will remember that I spoke of a man being led through the forces of Sun and Moon, and then, in the realm of the Sun, through Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, into the world of the stars, spiritually understood. To this I would add that when a man in the life between death and rebirth has, so to say, to retrace his steps after, as at present, progressing in the region of the planetoids to a perception of the Saturn impulses, on this return journey he comes into relation with the most sublime divine-spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. These are spiritual Beings whose impulses extend over both spiritual and natural existence. While entering into the laws of nature and infusing them with life and with spirit, they have the purpose of bringing about enduring harmony between these laws of nature and the moral life of the whole Cosmos. They are Beings who have never appeared in any physical form, yet in the spiritual world they exercise a scarcely conceivable power upon the Earth, and make it possible for moral law to be brought into continuous harmony with natural law. And so, because a man during his existence beyond the Earth is able constantly to give new life to impulses of the past, he reaches a point in his evolution when he can work in accordance with these extra-earthly impulses.

In the present epoch of the evolution of world and of man, however, we are faced with the task of taking under our own free control everything that in the past was more or less a matter of compulsion, determined for all human beings by higher Powers.

When we survey this evolution of world and of man we find that at a certain definite time man encountered difficulties which had to be overcome on his way from being led exclusively by divine-spiritual Beings to the conscious work of raising himself to knowledge of these Beings and so to the gaining of human freedom. This point of time, which in a certain sense signifies the greatest crisis in the whole evolution of man, came approximately 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha. Such dates are only approximate owing to time being reckoned in various ways. According to our present reckoning, it was 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha that this crisis came about.

If we look back at this critical moment, we can describe it more or less in the following way. If the evolution of mankind and that of the Earth itself had continued as they were doing, if men had remained under the guidance of the divine-spiritual Beings who had been leading them up to that time, then, since it was intended by those Beings that men should acquire freedom, it would have been achieved—but with what result? At that time it would have meant upsetting the balance between the two parts of the human astral body.

Think of the connection between the physical body and the astral body: we will keep to the astral body first. Before the year 333 the greater part of the astral body had been active essentially in the upper man, and its smaller part in his lower body—the middle man being between the two. And because in those times the upper part of the astral body was the more powerful, it was through it that divine-spiritual Beings exercised upon man their greatest influence. In accordance with the plan for mankind, human evolution has proceeded in such a way that up to about 3,000 years before Christ those conditions for the astral body held good, but by 1,000 years before Christ the lower part of the astral body was becoming larger and the upper part relatively smaller, until, in the year 333, the two parts had become equal. This was the critical situation 333 years after the coming of Christ, and since then the upper part of a man's astral body has been continuously decreasing. That is the course taken by his evolution.

It is impossible to follow the evolution of man in its reality unless we are able to understand what happens to the human astral body in the course of earthly evolution. If human beings had not undergone this decrease in the upper part of the astral body, their Ego would never have been able to gain sufficient influence and they could never have become free. This decrease in the astral body therefore contributes to the evoking of freedom. I have already said that there is no sense in asking why the Gods have not arranged everything to give human beings pleasure. The Gods had to create a universe that was inherently possible. Much that gives men the greatest pleasure rests on that, besides other things which, until they are enlightened, they do not find at all agreeable. This decrease of the astral body is connected with something else, for on the size of the astral body in the upper part of man—not on its size as a whole—depends his power to control, with his Ego and astral body, his physical and etheric bodies. Hence all men are likely to have their health gradually impaired by this decrease in the astral body. We can form a true conception of human evolution only if we recognise that freedom has to be paid for on Earth by a general weakening of health. Not, of course, in the form of cholera or typhus, but freedom is not to be gained without bringing ill-health of some kind along with it.

If all human forces after the year 333 had remained as they were, men on Earth would have become weaker and weaker, increasingly powerless. And earthly life would have come to an end through this complete decadence of mankind.

At this point there took place what I should like to describe as follows. At a gathering of those divine-spiritual Beings I spoke of as belonging to the Sun, it was decided to send down to the Earth their representative, the Christ, there to go through something that the divine Beings connected with mankind would be experiencing for the first time. Birth and death are certainly not what materialists imagine them to be, but they are part of man's earthly existence. None of the divine-spiritual Beings above man—Angels, Archangels, and so on up to the highest—had ever known death, but only metamorphoses. They change from one form to another, but they are not born and do not die. A man, too, changes form, but at the same time he lays aside his physical and etheric bodies, thus making birth and death a more radical change than any change experienced by the higher Hierarchies. So the leaders in the harmonies and impulses of the Sun resolved to send down to Earth the Christ, as a Being who had not yet experienced birth and death, so that He might go through this purely human destiny. The Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, is not merely the concern of mankind; it is also a concern of the Gods, and this can be put into words such as these: The Sun Gods met and held counsel together as to the steps they should take for warding off from mankind the danger of becoming weaker and weaker through the decline of the astral body.

And so the Christ was sent down to Earth and went through birth and death—naturally not as a human being but as a divine Being. The consequence was that through the Mystery of Golgotha, through the fact of Christ's death, forces came into Earth-evolution for the healing of those other forces which, in the sense already described, were the cause of sickness. Thus Christ became for mankind, in very truth, the great cosmic and terrestrial Healer of mankind. In other words, His forces entered everything that has to be healed in human beings, so that man, having his tendency to decadence on the one hand, but on the other the saving forces of Christ, can find his way to freedom. Therefore, provision was made in world-evolution to ensure that, 333 years before the great crisis, the Mystery of Golgotha should take place.

Human evolution on Earth, accordingly, could not have gone forward without this threat of disastrous universal sickness, to begin in the year 333. Then, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came the great universal healing. Everything therefore done by man without Ego-consciousness, everything that derives from the deeper forces tending to his future downfall, can be healed through association with the Christ. That is what the Mystery of Golgotha means for earthly and human evolution.

The situation I have just been explaining was known, until the fourth century after the coming of Christ, to certain men who still had some knowledge of the facts through having absorbed the spiritual life of their time. In all ages before the Mystery of Golgotha there had been old Mysteries, where the pupils were instructed concerning men's past earthly evolution, the coming of Christ, and what was to take place in mankind's future evolution. They were shown in great and powerful pictures the connection of men on Earth with the spiritual Beings of the higher worlds. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there were still isolated individuals here and there who, though scarcely more advanced than the old Mystery pupils, had preserved some knowledge of these matters—a knowledge later called Gnosis. They were scattered through Western Asia, Africa, Southern Europe. Their knowledge, their wisdom, extended to the source of events in the evolution of Earth and man, and to the mighty part played by the Mystery of Golgotha for dwellers on the Earth. But these men, who still had knowledge of the old Mystery secrets, were filled with anxiety. They knew that a crisis was coming for mankind. They knew that in the future human understanding would no longer be able to fathom the depths of earthly and human evolution.

Thus, in certain personalities of the first four Christian centuries it is possible to discern anxiety—not about earthly affairs but about the whole course of world-evolution. Will men be truly ripe enough, they asked, to receive what the Mystery of Golgotha has brought? This, in the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, was the great question for those we might call successors of the old Initiates.

From among those who in these first centuries were still initiated in Christian Mysteries there came, for example, a wonderful poem. It told of the coming of Christ to Earth, but it also gave in impressive dramatic form—although as a whole the poem was epic—powerful pictures of the men of the near future, who would no longer be able to understand the need for a healing element in human evolution. After these pictures had revealed something of what the Gods had decreed from the Sun—in the way I mentioned—and the descent of Christ into the man Jesus had been impressively described, the poem went on to picture how in human evolution there was to be, in a new, metamorphosed form, a revitalising of the old Demeter-Isis being. It was shown how this being was to be revered in a special, powerfully depicted human form, coming in the future as a solemn promise to mankind.

These poet-priests, as I might call them, of the first four Christian centuries, or at least the most outstanding among them, described how in the further evolution a certain cult was to arise, practised by all who were to attain to learning and a life of the spirit. For such men a sacrificial act of some kind would be established.

The epic pictured a younger man who was to enter into the whole way in which human evolution at that time was understood. It was shown how he was to pass from youth to maturity by developing a cult of the Virgin. This ritual observance, this sacrificial act, shown as necessary for all who were becoming learned and wise, if humanity was to find connection with what had come to men through the Mystery of Golgotha, was portrayed in vivid colours. A mighty poem, full of colour, came into being in those early centuries of Christianity. And among those living more or less in the atmosphere of this poem there were also painter-priests, who, it is true, painted these scenes in the simple way understood by ordinary folk; but their pictures had power and went straight to the heart.

This is what that poem accomplished. But together with all that came definitely from the Gnosis, it was rooted out later by the Church. We have only to remember how it was merely by so-called chance that later on the writings of Scotus Erigena were saved, and it will not seem absurd when spiritual research claims that this greatest of poems, evoking the New Testament, was exterminated root and branch by the later Church, so that nothing of it was left in the following centuries. Yet this poem had been there. It was rooted out, together with all the simple but impressive paintings connected with it. Concealed in it was all the anxiety felt at the time by the successors of the old Initiates. There rang through this poem the grave tones of an elegy.

Now, among those who did not follow Augustine into a quite different stream, a number of people retained the capacity to understand these things right into the fourth century, even up to the beginning of the fifth. But this understanding could not remain as vivid as it had once been; the spiritual forces of people in Southern Europe were no longer adequate for that. So the fundamentals of understanding became crystallised in the dogmas that have endured, though this could not have happened if the dogmas had not been preserved in a language growing ever more lifeless—the Latin language. This carrying on of Latin into the Middle Ages by learned men had the effect of benumbing a once living understanding, so that finally all that was known about Christ becoming man, about the sending of the Spirit, and about the great healing of which I have spoken, had become rigidified in dogmas. These dogmas were propagated through the Latin tongue, the very words of which had nothing more to do with the true content of the teaching. Thus, in the spreading of Western scholarship through the medium of Latin, there took place a gradual drying-up of the fiery, phosphoric element which had permeated that exterminated poem.

Then came all the youthful peoples of the North, stirred up more from the East, and they received the Christ Impulse in the Latinised form through which it was losing vitality.

We must picture this Christ Impulse coming up from the South, and the peoples who spread over the North accepting a dried-up Christianity because their youthful spiritual forces lacked power to give fresh life to the greatness underlying the frozen dogmas. The aftermath of all this is still with us to-day. Even now in those Northern regions there can apparently be found—for all this is only apparent—forces that seem to have been too late in receiving the Christ Impulse, already rigid in dogma, but are called upon, out of direct knowledge of the spirit, to rediscover all the secrets of the fact of Golgotha and of Christ's entry into earthly life—all of which has, however, to be re-discovered in complete freedom. For even the fact that after the year 333, Christianity, in its benumbed state, made its way up out of Italy, and young races of men swept down, whose successors are now spread throughout Russia, Sweden, Norway, Middle Europe, England, still living under that same influence—all this came about so that, ultimately, human beings should be able to lay hold of the Christ Impulse in freedom.

It is the present task of those peoples who, as representatives of a civilisation, are the first to whom Anthroposophy has to be brought, to accept all that is connected with Christ Jesus, and to recognise that without the Christ Impulse all men would have become mere “pillars of salt”. We can use these physical terms, for the Christ Impulse goes into the physical—right into the healing of the physical. Christ has become the great spiritual Phosphorus working to overcome the salt-forming processes in man. Christus verus Phosphorus—this phrase could be heard on all sides in the first three centuries of Christianity. It was also a leading motif in the lost poem I have described.

So, between past and future, we must take our place in the present, and by the same token be able to look back. Naturally, I have no wish to urge upon you dogmatically what I have just been relating about a lost poem and a forgotten teaching. That is far from my intention. But the methods leading to investigation of man's true spiritual course bring us knowledge of such facts, no less reliable than the facts discovered by modern science and far more reliable than its hypotheses. Just as nobody can be compelled to interest himself in matters which, influenced by present-day materialism, he has always rejected, so will nobody who is as sure of them as of his own life be deterred from speaking of them to those who, with a sound feeling for the whole course of human evolution, are able to perceive the reality of such an impulse at work therein.

After the fourth century of Christianity, the poem referred to no longer existed, but in certain circles many details of it were passed on by word of mouth, and lived on in memory. But the members of these circles were prevented by the growing power of the Church from speaking publicly of any such occurrences during the early Christian centuries. One of those who still had some notion of the poem—though they knew of it only in a greatly changed and weakened form—and some idea of the mood from which it arose, was the teacher of Dante. It may indeed be said that Dante's Commedia, though dogmatically inclined, owed some of its inspiration to what had been there in the first few Christian centuries.

Naturally I am well aware of the objections that can be made to such an interpretation of history—I could make them myself. But recognising, as one must, the care taken by authors of the history taught in our schools, and with all respect for the precision that relies on records and conscientious historical criticism, what is it all worth? It cannot claim to be true history, real history, for it takes no account of those records which have been side-tracked in the course of time. Hence, though documents may be subjected to the most conscientious criticism, true history will be revealed only in the same way as true knowledge of nature and of the heavens—through spiritual investigation. Men must therefore find courage not only to speak about the world of the stars, as we have been doing during our time here, but also to introduce into the usual presentation of history all that it lacks because it was in the interest of certain circles to deprive posterity of relevant documents. But the impulses in those destroyed documents live on in the souls of human beings; live on in those who have come later and crave for the impulses no longer recorded but once so alive in mankind. Hence it will not only be necessary for men—if they wish to reach in their evolution the future intended for them—to transform, to a certain extent, many of their concepts; they will have also to transform their attitude to the truth.

To speak fundamentally: we must find our way again to Christ. Christ must come again. This assumes that during the present century there will be men able to understand in what way Christ will announce His presence, in what guise He will appear. Otherwise terrible disturbances may be stirred up by people who, having in the subconscious depths of their being a premonition of this coming of Christ in the spirit, will represent it to others in a shockingly superficial way. Clear vision into man's evolution during the early future will be possible only when an ever-increasing number of people are sufficiently ripe to see how spiritual research can make real progress; people who are able to discover in the spiritual world what men need for the right shaping of their further course. Failing this, we shall become more and more implicated in all that hinders our approach to the spiritual—not so much where ideas and concepts are concerned, as in our general attitude.

In the ideas and concepts of to-day there is much which looks like a movement towards what must be the true goal of knowledge in our time. In fact, however, this serves somewhat to hinder men from seeing the findings of natural science in the right light. They are left groping for the facts, as it were, in the dark. Observe how to-day—with the general spreading of scientific, medical conceptions—we hear of men who in their later life begin to suffer from nervous troubles that affect their whole physical constitution and lead to genuine symptoms of illness. Our present-day physicians realise, then, how powerless they are to get the better of these symptoms in any obvious way, or to proceed from pathology to therapy. As an immediate contemporary of the outstanding Viennese physician, Breuer, I remember his having a patient in whom physical examination could detect no pathological condition. It was decided to have recourse to hypnosis, which was becoming very popular at that time. Under hypnosis, the patient was found to have had, at an earlier period in his life, a terrible experience, overwhelming him with horror. As far as could be made out, this experience had been repressed into the realm of the subconscious, the unconscious, creating there a “hidden province” of the soul. Though the man himself knew nothing of this, it was there in his life and threatened his health. A man can thus have within him something which, beginning as a soul-experience, has disturbing after-effects; it sets up in his soul an isolated region of which he is unconscious.

It was thought that if the patient recalled his experience, and so became fully conscious of it, this very awareness would lead to his cure.

Cases such as this will be found with increasing frequency in life to-day. But if we are to understand why people are afflicted so often in this way, spiritual knowledge must teach us what happens when the upper part of the astral body decreases, while in its lower part there is a tendency to accumulate subconscious provinces of the soul. We must rise from knowledge of man's soul to the historical knowledge of the spirit, to cosmic spirit-knowledge, in order to explain such phenomena. I knew Breuer well; he was a man of depth; and, because he felt that with our present degree of knowledge no progress was to be made in these matters, he gave up this line of research. He then became involved with other interests, particularly with those of Freud and his followers. Out of that grew psycho-analysis, which rests upon something true, for the phenomena certainly exist. The origin of physical symptoms must be searched for in the soul; the idea is quite right. But the knowledge needed to master the phenomena is not to be found here, for it has to become spiritual knowledge.

Hence this psycho-analysis, which has to do with the quite natural, historical decrease in man's upper astral body, is in the hands of people who are not only amateurs at investigating soul and spirit, but also amateurs in the investigation of the physical body, not knowing how to follow the working of spirit there. So we have two forms of dilettantism coming together; they are really alike, for these people know just as little of the real life of man's soul and spirit as they do of his physical and etheric life. The two extents to which they are dilettante coincide; and when two similar quantities work on each other, they multiply: axa=a², or dxd=d²; thus dilettantismxdilettantism=dilettantismsquared. So it really comes about that something right, based on true foundations, appears amateurish because of the weakness of present-day research. In all this, however, we can see a striving in the right direction. Anything like psycho-analysis should not, therefore, be treated as an invention of the devil, but as an indication that this age of ours wants something it is unable to achieve, and that anything like psychoanalysis will prosper only when founded on spiritual research. Otherwise psycho-analysis will come to us in the strange form to which Jung's logic has driven it.

Jung is indeed capable of writing, for example, a sentence such as this: One can say that through the “hidden provinces” of the soul, man was at one time disposed to assume the existence of a Divine Being. Jung then adds (he is, of course, inclined to atheism): It is obvious that such a Being cannot exist. Psycho-analysis, however, argues that man, having this disposition to believe, must assume the existence of a Divine Being in order to preserve the balance of his soul. For a conscientious person—and I would never fail to recognise that a man such as Jung is both conscientious and precise—this really means: You are obliged to live with an untruth because you are unable to live with the truth. There is no truth in theism, but you have to live with it. In our state of development to-day such things are not taken in earnest; they must, however, be taken with all possible earnestness.

So on all sides, without it being realised, these subconscious yearnings arise. Those of you who have heard or read other lecture-cycles of mine will know that I have often pointed out, from spiritual perception, how it is not right to say: Light streaming from the Sun, for example, goes out endlessly into the infinity of cosmic space, always decreasing in intensity with the square of the distance.

I have repeatedly said that spiritual perception gives a different picture. The idea that light from a centre streams out into endless distance is not correct. Just as a bow-string when drawn can be stretched only to a certain point, and will then spring back, so light goes only to a certain point and always returns. It does not only expand; it is also elastic, rhythmical. Hence the Sun not only radiates light but is all the while receiving it back; for at the end of their outward course the intensity of the rays is different and their course can be changed. I want merely to indicate this as revealing itself in connection with higher cognition, with cosmic knowledge of the world—the true knowledge of Spiritual Science.

Please do not take these remarks as indicating any lack of respect for science on my part. I appreciate science fully; it cannot be sufficiently praised, and one must recognise the high level of intelligence it brings into life to-day. But its statements about light, for example, are amateurish compared with the truth. It is important that the truth should be reached, if only to bring into all these prevailing ideas, which men do not know how to deal with, the impulse that could raise present-day research into the spiritual realm.

In certain occult circles there is a wrong practice: the student is given various occult teachings, but is never brought to the point of being shown whence they derive. The teachings are given in pictures, and the student is not led on to the realities which are imaged in the pictures. Hence his soul is surrounded by a world of pictures, and he never comes to see that through the pictures he ought to be learning about the whole Cosmos.

For this reason, after my Theosophy had appeared, it had to be followed by Occult Science. Here the pictures given in Theosophy are led on into the reality of the starry world, into the evolution of the Earth through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so on. The two books are complementary to each other.

When in any sphere men are given nothing but pictures, they are hemmed in by them. Persons who practise a wrong kind of occultism do this with a student they are not sure of, and by this means they lead him into what is called “occult imprisonment”. He is then encircled by confusing pictures from which there is no escape—a veritable prison of pictures. That is how much occult harm has been practised, and is still practised to-day. There are even spiritual beings who drive certain people into this occult captivity; but for the soul the phenomenon is just the same. These spiritual beings are let loose in nature when nature is not understood spiritually, but viewed as though atomic processes were part of nature. The spirit in nature is thus denied. Those spirits who are always striving to work against man—the Ahrimanic spirits—then become active in nature, encompassing man with pictures of every kind, so that in this case, too, human beings are occultly imprisoned.

A great part of what to-day is called the scientific outlook—not the facts of science, for they can be relied on—consists of nothing else than pictures of the general occult captivity threatening to overtake mankind. The danger lies in the surrounding of people everywhere with atomistic and molecular pictures. It is impossible, when surrounded by such pictures, to look at those of the free spirit and the stars; for the atomistic picture of the world is like a wall around man's soul—the spiritual wall of a prison house.

This prospect can show us, in the light of Spiritual Science, what should be rightly striven for to-day. The facts of natural science are always fruitful and lead out into the wide realms of the spirit, if they are not approached with the prejudices of the occult prison in which, fundamentally, science is at present confined. These things must be a deep inward experience for us, if we wish to take our right place in the evolution of the Earth and mankind, in accordance with its past and its future. It is all this that speaks to us when in some region we have before our eyes the evidence of human aspiration in the past and are now able to see it in the full light of spirit and of soul.

When here we climb the hills and come upon the Druid stones, which are monuments to the spiritual aspirations of those ancient times, it can be a warning to us that the longings of those people of old who strove after the spirit, and looked in their own way for the coming Christ, will meet with fulfilment only when we, once again, have knowledge of the spirit, through the spiritual vision that is our way of looking for His coming. Christ must come again. Only thus can mankind learn to know Him in His spiritual form, as once, in bodily form, He went through the Mystery of Golgotha.

This is something that here, where such noble monuments of the past have been preserved, can be felt in a particularly living way.

The spiritual evolution of mankind must be brought into a living connection with the whole surrounding world. For many men to-day a great deal has become dead and prosaic; and this is true even of our religious festivals. A great section of mankind has only the smallest notion of what Christmas, Easter and Whitsun signify; it has almost entirely lost that overwhelming richness in the life of feeling which in earlier times men possessed through their knowledge of their connection with the spiritual worlds. Yes, even the festivals have for many men to-day become dead and prosaic. The pouring down of the spirit has become a mere abstraction, and this will change only when men come again to a real spiritual knowledge.

Much is said nowadays about the forces of nature, but little enough about the beings behind these forces. Our forefathers spoke of gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, but to see any reality in such ideas is regarded to-day as sheer superstition. It doesn't matter much, in themselves, what theories people hold; it only begins to be serious when the theories tempt people not to see the truth.

When people say that their ancestors' belief in gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders and the like was all nonsense, one would like to make a rather grotesque reply, and say: “Well, go and ask the bees. They could inform you: the sylphs are no superstition to us; we know well enough what we owe to the sylphs.”—Anyone investigating spiritual forces can find out which force it is that draws the bee on towards the flowers; he sees actual beings leading the bee to the flowers: amid the myriads of bees which fly forth in search of nourishment are the beings our predecessors called sylphs.

It is especially where the different kingdoms of nature come in contact with each other that certain elemental beings are able to reveal themselves. Where moss is growing on the rocks, for example, such beings can establish themselves; or again, in the flowers, in the contact of the bee with the flowers, certain beings have the chance to show themselves. Another possibility arises where man himself comes into touch with the animal kingdom. This does not happen, however, in the ordinary run of things, as for example, when a butcher slaughters an ox or when a man eats meat. It does occur, however, in less usual circumstances, where the contact between the two kingdoms is the result of something more than the mere fact of life. It occurs particularly where a man has that kind of relationship to animals which involves his own feelings, his own concern of soul. A shepherd, for example, may sometimes have such a special relationship to his sheep. Connections of this sort were very frequent in more primitive cultures in earlier times; they resembled the relationship which an Arab has to his horse. And such soul-forces as play over from one realm into the other—as they do between the shepherd and his lambs, or when the forces of smell and taste stream over from the flowers to the bees—these give to certain beings the possibility of incarnating themselves. The spiritual investigator perceives something like an aura around the blossoms, which arises as the bees thrust their way into them and taste what they find there. A kind of flower-aura streams out, and this provides nourishment for certain spiritual beings.

The question why there are beings just here and nowhere else, does not arise for anyone who understands the spiritual world. If opportunities are provided for such beings, then they are there; give them that on which they can live and they are there. It is just as when human beings let evil thoughts stream out from themselves, certain beings then incorporate themselves in his aura; they are there because he allows nourishment to stream to them. The opportunity is given for certain spiritual beings to incorporate themselves wherever different kingdoms of nature come into touch with each other. Where metal is found in the rocks, the miner as he hacks away sees certain tiny beings which were compressed together into quite a small space and now scatter in all directions. These are beings in some ways not unlike man himself; they have the power of reason, but it is reason without responsibility; and so, when they play some mischievous prank on a man, they in no way feel they are doing anything amiss. They are the beings our forefathers called gnomes; they prefer to take up their abode where metal and stone come together. There was a time when they did men good service, as in the early days of mining; the way to lay out a mine, the knowledge of how the strata ran—this was learnt from such beings.

Mankind will land itself in a blind alley if it fails to acquire a spiritual understanding of these things. As with the gnomes, so with the beings we may call undines; they are found where the plants come into contact with the mineral kingdom. They are bound up with the element of water, they incorporate themselves where water and plant and stone come together.—The sylphs are bound to the element of air, and lead the bees to the flowers. Now everything science has to say about the life of the bees is riddled with error from top to bottom, and nowadays the beekeepers are often misled by it; in this direction science proves itself unusable and again and again beekeepers have to come back to old practices.

As for salamanders, these are still known to many people. When someone feels that this or that element of soul is streaming towards him, this mostly arises through the salamanders. When a man relates himself to animals in the way the shepherd does to his lambs, the salamanders are then able to embody themselves; the knowledge the shepherd has in regard to his flock is whispered to him by these beings.

If we take these thoughts farther we shall have to say: We are entirely surrounded by spiritual beings; we are surrounded by the air and this is crowded with these spiritual beings. In times to come, if his destiny is not to be of the sort that will entirely dry up his life, man will have to have a knowledge of these beings; without such a knowledge he will be unable to make any further progress at all. He will have to put the question: Whence do these beings arise? And this question will lead him to see that, through certain steps taken by the higher worlds, that which is on the downward path to evil can through a wise guidance be changed into good.

Here and there in life we meet with the products of decay with waste products. Thus for example, manure is a waste product, and in agriculture it is used as a basis to further plant growth. Things which have apparently fallen away from a higher course of development are taken up again by higher powers and transformed. This happens with the very beings of whom we have been speaking.

Let us consider how the salamander, for example, originates. Salamanders, as we have seen, are beings who require a special relationship between man and animal. Now the kind of ego man has to-day is only to be found in man, in the human being living on the earth; every man has his ego enclosed within himself. It is different with the animals: they have a group-ego, a group-soul; that is to say, a group of animals with the same form have a common group-ego. When the lion says ‘I’, its ego is up above in the astral world. It is as if a man were to stand behind a wall in which there were ten holes, and then to stick his ten fingers through them. The man himself cannot be seen, but every intelligent observer would conclude that someone is behind, a single entity who owns the ten fingers. It is the same with the group-ego. The separate animals are simply the limbs: the being they belong to is in the astral world. We must not imagine the animal-ego to be like the human being of course, though if we consider man as he is as a spiritual being, we can then certainly compare the animal group-ego with him.

In many animal species the group-ego is a wise being. If we think of how certain kinds of birds live in the north in the summer and in the south in the winter, how in spring they fly back to the north—in this migrating flight of the birds there are wise powers at work; they are in the group-egos of the birds. Anywhere you like in the animal kingdom you can find the wisdom of the group-egos in this way. If we turn back to our schooldays we can remember learning how modern times gradually arose out of the Middle Ages, of how America was discovered, and how gunpowder and printing were invented, and later still the art of making paper from rags. We have long been accustomed to such paper, but the wasp group-soul invented it thousands of years ago. The material of which the wasp's nest consists is exactly the same as is used in making paper out of rags. Only gradually will it become known how the one or the other achievement of the human spirit is connected with what the group-souls have introduced into the world.

When the clairvoyant looks at an animal, he sees a glimmer of light along the whole length of its spine. The physical spine of the animal is enveloped in a glimmering light, in innumerable streams of force which everywhere travel across the earth, as it were, like the trade winds. They work on the animal in that they stream along the spine. The group-ego of the animal travels in a continual circular movement around the earth at all heights and in all directions. These group-egos are wise, but one thing they have not yet got: they have no knowledge of love. Only in man is wisdom found in his individuality together with love. In the group-ego of the animals no love is present; love is found only in the single animal. What underlies the whole animal-group as wise arrangements is quite devoid of love. In the physical world below the animal has love; above, on the astral plane, it has wisdom. When we realise this a vast number of things will become clear to us.

Only gradually has man arrived at his present stage of development; in earlier times he also had a group-soul, out of which the individual soul has gradually emerged. Let us follow the evolution of man back into ancient Atlantis. Mankind once lived in Atlantis, a continent now lying beneath the Atlantic Ocean. At that time the vast Siberian plains were covered with immense seas; the Mediterranean was differently distributed, and in Europe itself there were extensive seas. The farther we go back in the old Atlantean period, the more the conditions of life alter, the more the sleeping and the waking state of man changes. Since that time consciousness during the sleeping condition has darkened, as it were, so that to-day man has, so to say, no consciousness at all in this condition. In the earliest Atlantean times the difference between sleeping and waking was not yet so great. In his waking state at that time man still saw things with an aura around them; he did not attain to any greater clarity than this in his perception of the physical world. Everything physical was still filled out, so to say, with something unclear, as if with mist. As he progressed, the human being came to see the world in its clear-cut contours, but in return he lost his clairvoyance.

It is in the times when men still saw clairvoyantly what was going on up above in the astral world that all the myths and sagas originate. When he was able to enter into the spiritual world, man learned to know the beings who had never descended into the physical world: Wotan, Baldur, Thor, Loki.—These names are memories of living realities, and all mythologies are memories of this kind. As spiritual realities, they have simply vanished from the sight of man. When in those earlier times man descended into his physical body, he got the feeling: “Thou art a single being.” When he returned into the spiritual world in the evening, however, the feeling came over him: “Thou art in reality not a single being.” The members of the old tribal groups, the Herulians, the Cheruskans and the like, had still felt themselves far more as belonging to their group, than as single personalities. It was out of this condition of things that there arose such practices as the blood-feud, the vendetta. The whole people formed a body which belonged to the group-soul of the folk.

Everything happens step by step in evolution, and so it was only gradually that the individual developed out of the group-soul. The accounts of the patriarchs, for instance, reveal quite other relationships which confirm this fact. Before the time of Noah, memory was as yet something quite different from what we know. The frontier of birth was no real frontier, for the memory streamed on in those through whom the same blood flowed. This onstreaming of memory was in earlier times something quite different from what we possess; it was far more comprehensive. Nowadays the authorities like to have the name of each individual recorded somewhere or other. In the past, it was what man remembered of the deeds of his father and grandfather that was covered with a common name and called Adam or Noah; what was remembered, the stream of memory in its full extent, was called Adam or Noah. The old names signified comprehensive groups, human groups which extended through time.

Now we must put ourselves the question: Can we compare the anthropoid apes with man himself? The vital difference is that the ape preserves the group-soul condition throughout, whereas man develops the individual soul. But the ape group-soul is in a quite special position to other group-souls. We must think of a group-soul as living in the astral world and spreading itself out in the physical world, so that, for instance, the group-soul of the lion sends a part of its substance into each single lion. Let us suppose that one of these lions dies; the external physical part drops away from the group-soul, just as when we lose a nail. The group-soul sends out a new ray of being, as it were, into a new individual. The group-soul remains above and stretches out its tentacles in a continual process of renewal. The animal group-soul knows neither birth or death; the single individual falls away and a new one appears, just as the nails on our fingers come and go.—Now we must consider the following:—With the lion it is entirely as we have said, that every time a lion dies, the whole of what was sent out by the group-soul return to it again. It is not at all so, however, with the apes. When an ape dies the essential part does return to the group-soul, but a part does not; a part is severed from the group-soul. The ape detaches substance too strongly from the group-soul. There are species where the single animal tears something away from the group-soul which cannot return to it. With all the apes, fragments are detached in each case from the group-soul. It is the same with certain kinds of amphibians and birds; in the kangaroo, for example, something is kept back from the group-soul. Now everything in the warm-blooded animals that remains behind in this way becomes an elemental being of the kind we call a salamander.

Under entirely different conditions from those on the earth to-day, the other types of elemental beings have detached themselves in the past. We have here a case where cast-off products of evolution, as it were, are made of service under the wise guidance of higher Beings. Left to themselves, these would disturb the Cosmos, but under a higher guidance the sylphs, for example, can be used to lead the bees to the flowers. Such a service changes the harmful into something useful.

Now it could happen that man himself might entirely detach himself from the group-soul in becoming an individual and find no means of developing further as an individual soul. If he does not accept spiritual knowledge in the right way, he can run the risk of complete severance.

What is it that protects man from an isolation which is, without the direction and purpose which, earlier on, the group-soul had given him? We must clearly recognise that man individualises himself more and more, and to-day, he has to find a connection once again with other men out of his free will. All that connects men, through folk, race and family, will be ever more completely severed; everything in man tends more and more to result in individual manhood.

Imagine that a number of human beings on the earth have come to recognise that they are all becoming more and more individual. Is there not a real danger that they will split away from each other ever more completely? Already nowadays men are no longer held together by spiritual ties. Each one has his own opinion, his own religion; indeed, many see it as an ideal state of affairs that each should have his own opinion. But that is all wrong. If men make their opinions more inward, then they come to a common opinion. It is a matter of inner experience, for example, that 3 times 3 makes 9, or that the three angles of a triangle make up 180 degrees. That is inner knowledge, and matters of inner knowledge need not be argued about. Of such a kind also are all spiritual truths. What is taught by Spiritual Science is discovered by man through his inner powers; along the inward path man will be led to absolute agreement and unity. There cannot be two opinions about a fact without one of them being wrong. The ideal lies in the greatest possible inwardness of knowledge; that leads to peace and to unity.

In the past, mankind became free of the group-soul. Through spiritual-scientific knowledge mankind is now for the first time in the position to discover, with the utmost certainty of purpose, what will unite mankind again. When men unite together in a higher wisdom, then out of higher worlds there descends a group-soul once more. What is willed by the Leaders of the spiritual-scientific Movement is that in it we should have a society in which hearts stream towards wisdom as the plants stream towards the sunlight. In that together we turn our hearts towards a higher wisdom, we give a dwelling-place to the group-soul; we form the dwelling-place, the environment, in which the group-soul can incarnate. Mankind will enrich earthly life by developing what enables spiritual beings to come down out of higher worlds.

This spirit-enlivened ideal was once placed before humanity in a most powerful way. It was when a number of men, all aglow with a common feeling of fervent love and devotion, were met together for a common deed: Then the sign was given, the sign that could show man with overwhelming power how in unity of soul he could provide a place for the incarnation of the common spirit. In this company of souls the same thing was living: in the flowing together, in the harmony of feeling they provided what was needed for the incarnation of a common spirit. That is expressed when it is said that the Holy Spirit, the group-soul, sank down as it were into incarnation. It is a symbol of what mankind should strive towards, how it should seek to become the dwelling-place for the Being who descends out of higher worlds.

The Easter event gave man the power to develop these experiences; the Whitsun event is the fruit of this power's unfolding. Through the flowing of souls together towards the common wisdom there will always result that which gives a living connection with the forces and beings of higher worlds, and with something which as yet has little significance for humanity, namely the Whitsun festival. When men come to know what the downcoming of the Holy Spirit in the future can mean for mankind, the Whitsun festival will once more become alive for them. Then it will be not only a memory of the event in Jerusalem; but there will arise for mankind the everlasting Whitsun festival, the festival of united soul-endeavour.

It will depend on men themselves what value and what result such ideals can have for mankind. When in this right way they strive towards wisdom, then will higher spirits unite themselves with men.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

We have passed by the basic ideas in the Platonic worldview. I call them basic ideas because they are actually the most important for understanding Platonic mysticism, namely the Platonic ideas of the eternity of the soul and the ideas of love. The one idea has been revealed to us through an examination of the Platonic discussion "Phaidon", the other through an examination of the "Banquet". We have seen that these two ideas, which perhaps play the greatest leading role in the spiritual development of mankind - the great goal of the eternity of the soul and the path of love - are also among the most important and fundamental ideas in Platonic mysticism.

This is also the point where we can best understand the influence of Platonism on Christianity, i.e. how Christianity developed under the influence of Plato. It would not be making the most necessary contribution to clarity if we did not, on the occasion of the consideration of the eternity of the soul and love, at the same time draw attention to how these two basic ideas have reappeared in Christianity. I will pass over the intermediate stages. They will become all the more understandable if we touch on the relationship between Platonism and Christianity. I have thought a lot about this. You will therefore forgive me if I have to address some of the more difficult questions.

I am of the opinion that the views and relationships that exist between Platonism and Christianity have not unjustly given rise to such a great literature, a literature that is centuries old, because through the shadowing, through the peculiar way in which the Platonic spirit has settled into the Occident through Christianity, one can see how the Occident is influenced by Platonism. It can only be understood - and it is only possible to show the true relationship between Platonism and Christianity - if one looks at its mystical elements and considers the core ideas of Christianity.

The liberal, theological approach still insists that the relationship between Platonism and Christianity should be presented according to a mystical method. And so we must be clear about the fact that we must seek out the actual core ideas of Christianity in their original meaning. Only in this way will we be able to understand where Platonism meets Christianity and thus understand what Plato presents to Christianity as a kind of world view. Only the theosophical-mystical direction has the possibility of really grasping the core. All exoteric methods do not have the possibility of grasping what had to come from ancient mysticism in order for Christianity to emerge.

But in order to show what has happened, I would like to show the characteristic features, illustrated by the consciousness of the builders, those who have contributed to its development. I would like to show how it presented itself to the souls of the first [church fathers and teachers]. Then the most important key point is that [Christianity] presents something fundamentally new compared to Platonism. This fundamentally new thing is nothing other than that Christianity is direct, real life, life as it presents itself before our eyes and ears. If you do not hold on to this core point, you will not be able to see what distinguishes it from the old religions and also from the mysteries and Platonism.

I would like to point out once again what is emphasized in Platonism and Christianity. It was the immediate life, that which the everyday person perceives directly, that Platonism was supposed to overcome; and on the other hand, it was that it rose to something higher, which cannot be perceived with the senses, into the eternal view. Plato's "Phaidon" wants nothing other than eternity of the soul. He does not want to prove the eternity of the soul. It is not about logical proofs. His aim is to bring to life that which gathers around Socrates and to bring it into a new world. The soul should rise by turning away from what can be seen with the eyes and heard with the ears. In short, eternity should be something that one acquires, that one acquires through the introduction to the mysteries. Plato's pupil says: "The soul can become immortal when it rises to the vision of eternity. When it sees the spiritual, it participates in spiritual life. This makes it eternal. This is a developmental process that we went through in the Platonic "Phaidon", and also a developmental process that we see in the "Banquet". We see that it was Diotima who lifted us up to the higher standpoint.

I drew attention to what Goethe said about his view of such eternal conversations. He says: "If I have inserted myself into the spiritual course of development of the universe, then I am entitled to have a place assigned to me by nature. We are not immortal in the same way. We must first acquire this right. We have to develop this first claim first.

This is the basic element that runs through Plato's "Phaedo". Plato says [in essence]: You can see what you want, but if you only perceive what your eyes, ears, the external senses give you, then you cannot enter the spiritual. The supersensible is what guarantees you the eternity of the soul. - He could not have soul eternity proven. The disciples should acquire it, they should become immortal. This is the basic conception of the Platonic method. - Logic can only link together perceptions that you already have.

And now let us look at what lived in the first centuries of Christianity. The experience of the senses was what was emphasized. The message of salvation was to consist in the fact that the Savior, the one who brought the right to eternity for man into the world, was visibly there. So it is the Savior who is perceived by the senses. - Here are a few passages that show that it is about becoming visible, about the Good News:

"We behold his glory. - He who has seen it testifies to it, and his testimony is true, and he is conscious of speaking the truth so that you may believe." [John 19:35]

We have not preached the presence of Jesus Christ to you in a sophisticated way, but as eyewitnesses. We have heard his voice. - I am not saying that this is to be understood symbolically, I am saying that this is to be understood literally, not symbolically. - What we have heard and touched, we tell you so that you may have the message with us.

It is essential that we are assured by Irenaeus that we can be assured of this by people who have known such people themselves. Irenaeus himself still knew people who were disciples of the apostles, and he says that they still had personal experiences. This is the sensual truth that lived in the consciousness of the first Christians. This sensual truth, which was there for the eyes to see and the ears to hear, lives on in the Church. This [truth] is there for all time. It is not only the temporal truth that took place at the time when Jesus lived, but it lives on as such. This is what we call Christian mystery.

The Lord's Supper is not just a symbol and must not be just a symbol if we do not want to end up with something completely watered down. Christ has appeared today - Christmas. We must take this as an eternal truth, that what has happened once can happen again and again. So it does not happen symbolically, but in such a way that it is really there in the present.

This mystical view existed in the first centuries when Christianity was formed. I would therefore like to agree with [Möhler] and consider it to be the only correct thing to say: viewed from one side, the Church is one in which the living Christ lives, whose personality is repeated and continues uninterruptedly. Not in the way of a deceased person. He does it in a sensual way. In baptism he always takes us into his fellowship. The Savior has been foretold. And for the apostles and the first Christian teachers, the word and sensory perception are valid. They relied on the Old Testament as well as on visual evidence.

We must be clear about the fact that they see an incomprehensible continuation of life. What has happened once must be there forever. This must be emphasized, just as the words of Augustine must be emphasized again and again, which show us that even at the time of Augustine, appearances compelled him to do so, for he says: I would not profess it if the sensually perceptible authority of the Church did not compel me to do so. This is what guarantees the truth of the message of salvation.

There are two aspects to this: firstly, being a naturalized eye and ear witness and secondly, the authority of the truly continuing church. Without this continued existence of the church, even Paul would not have felt comfortable believing in it. The church must be the embodiment of the mystery, it must be a mystical community, it must be added to the testimony of the apostles and apostles' disciples. It must be clear to us that these views became firmer and firmer in the first centuries, and that they also became firm in Augustine's worldview.

What I have now explained as the basic characteristic of Christianity in the first centuries is the necessity that the content cannot be proven, but only vouched for, that human thinking has nothing to do with this content, that it can at most be a point of reference for understanding this content. We have to keep that in mind. It is essentially linked to Christianity that it is based on certainty.

The mysteries also have nothing to do with logic, they are also based on experience. Plato was familiar with the mysteries. Anyone who wanted to become a Mystic had to personally submit to the required process. He had to take part in it personally and allow himself to be initiated. He had to ascend to the pinnacles of knowledge. They had to climb up personally. And so it was in the Platonic initiation.

In Christianity, something new was added: the substitution by a single personality living in history. It was something that antiquity had in mind as an exemplary type of commitment in a historical act by a single historical personality. Three things had to come together - and that is the important thing that had to happen in order for Christianity to come into being. It had to be there:

- firstly, what lived in the ancient mystery cults as an explanation of the world;
- secondly, the initiation process that everyone who wanted to be initiated had to undergo;
- thirdly, a transformation had to take place.

Let's take a closer look at what this transformation was like. Platonic mysticism has already shown us the beginnings. This [transformation] is that we are dealing with a - I may best say - first materialization of the eternal being, let us say with a materialization of God. And then again we are dealing with the ascending process of the development of the worldly into the divine. We have to do - now let us say - with the divine, in order to make the conception that comes into consideration clear - with the eternal, divine essence, and on the other side with the Logos that forms itself in matter, that develops, that transforms itself in the most manifold ways, with a sequence of stages in the development of the Logos. [We need only follow Philon of Alexandria], and we will find this sequence of stages of the Logos.

First, we have the Logos before us in its pure spiritual form. No human being can grasp it, although human individuality rests in it. According to [Philon], this spiritual entity is the primordial Logos. It is a [prototype] of what appears in the world as the divine world order. Whoever lives and works in the world and recognizes the world must - and this must be noted - consider on the one hand the descending line that goes from the spiritual to the material, and on the other hand the line that ascends and goes from the material to the spiritual. Only by standing in the middle can he understand why he is an individual. Only through this can he understand why he is a being appearing as a duality. By realizing that he can have hope of entering into the spiritual primordial being, but also by realizing that this being forms the world order itself.

Because the world itself is spiritualized, he becomes aware that he is dealing with a twofold Logos, with a Logos that cannot be reached and with a Logos that is poured out, with the Logos that has become flesh, with the Logos that has become material. The material world is an exact image of the divine world; but it is not the same as the original divine essence.

[Philon] distinguishes between these two entities. God is the Father of all things, the primordial Logos; and the Son of God, the children of God are the materialized Logos in the world. It is that which develops, transforms, strives upwards towards the primordial Logos. This upward striving in one form or another can be found in mysticism. We will see this in neoplatonic theosophy, which form mysticism can still take. Then we have the basic skeleton that underlies all mysticism. That is one element.

The other element is the initiation process; and here I must try to express myself particularly clearly, because - according to the experiences of others - they say things somewhat differently. I am compelled by my experiences to express myself somewhat differently. I will try to be as clear as I can. We have to understand what it was all about. I will only be able to prove this with a few glimpses, let's say, of the initiation process of the Egyptian schools. [Gap in the transcript]

We must be clear that man, by moving further along this path, is making a journey that leads back in the true sense of the word. Now I would like to draw your attention to this: Initiation is that which a person achieves when he walks back along his path, goes through it, when his consciousness is illuminated. Deeper and deeper truths can be revealed to people. And these are the initiations that man encounters on his path into his inner being. These initiations are the same as the Principia of the world. They are the fundamentals and the foundations of the world that come to development in the world. Let us call the principles of development in the world "Logos. If man can really progress on the path of initiation to the real principles of the world, then he will find within himself the same thing that he finds outside as a principle. Thus initiation was a real, actual process, something that man actually goes through. It is not of subjectively human significance, but of objectively divine significance. The path of knowledge is a way back, a reconnection of man with the original source of existence. What he finds in himself is what he rests with in the objective of the world, that is what leads man to deification, to divinization. The path of knowledge is the path of deification.

The second way is that which is based on principles, on the Logos. This is also a real process. It is a real process, not an allegory. The idea that it is a real process can only be obtained through spiritual experience. Think of the initiation process that every Myste had to go through, intertwined with the process of the creation of the world. And now, instead of understanding this as an exemplary process that every Myst had to go through, think of a unique historical process, think of a single initiate and think of him as the original initiate, as the representative initiate for all others, then you have the image of the "Christ as it developed in the first century of Christianity. The materialization, the incarnation of the divine Logos conceived as a one-time event, but in such a way that it is the real incarnation of the divine Logos, then you have the Christ-appearance.

Three things must therefore be distinguished:
1. the old doctrine of the origin of the world,
2. the initiation process and
3. the combination of these two things with a historical

conceived, individual act. This is the view that Theosophy has of the origin of Christianity, and this is the one against which, of course, not the slightest objection can be raised from the esoteric point of view, because the esotericist must regard precisely this way of looking at the truth as much deeper.

Here you have what lived in the consciousness of the old Christians. They claimed that which was presented to them as a process of development in the old schools and which then happened as a single act. And that made it necessary to make it dependent on appearance. The purpose of the initiation process is to raise the lower aspects of man, to divinize them, so that the Word becomes flesh in the individual, so that the individual struggles upwards, is sanctified upwards. This was demanded as something done.

So instead of continuing the mysteries of antiquity, Christianity had to bring a new mystery into the world. Spiritual survival is not merely an allegory, but a matter of faith, and the ecclesiastical principle of authority had to take its place. For Plato, the concept of love was central. He regarded it as a kind of demon. It is that which leads people from the lower levels to the higher levels of knowledge, which transforms people from the temporal to the eternal. Love is the mediator between the temporal and the eternal. But love is also the demonic agent that brings about the process of development in each individual human being, the passage from the temporal to the eternal. And to the extent that this love is not at work, to that extent the review of ideas, as Plato says, cannot take place.

What is achieved through this initiation process, which is described to us as the initiation process of ideas, is an introduction to the divine, to seeing. This can only be mediated through love, which is a guide for every personality. Platonic love is something else. It is not to be confused with what "Christian love is. What can be found in Christian writings is not to be put together with Platonic love. Just think that the path was there in the ancient mystical teaching. The path of the mystics was a personal one. It was such for an individual. Now we are dealing [in Christianity with a vicarious mystery] with a historical event that happened once. It is a question of what used to serve as the idea of the origin of the world becoming, as it were, the map according to which the path is traveled. This whole world, which Plato calls the world of ideas, was removed from the personal perspective, it was removed from personal observation. It was that which was guaranteed by historical tradition or ecclesiastical authority. But that which underlies the ancient mystery, the eternal truth of the incarnation of the Logos, was that which was moved beyond the human perspective. For the people of Platonic philosophy, this was called the way of love. This love, this Eros, took on a different, a new form. It now became a principle through which man could look up to something that was beyond human comprehension. Everything Plato said boiled down to this: knowledge was there to lead to where one could make perceptions; but this knowledge could not lead there [because the Eternal born in the midst of knowledge, in the midst of light - Brahma, so to speak - was not accessible to knowledge]. What had to take the place of love was not something that had an end, but something that offered a view, that led to remaining in the apparent, in the historical. At the same time, a path was closed which the old Myste wanted to reach, but which can no longer be traveled. This is why Christianity had to put forward a different idea for the "path of love". And that is "faith. Faith is that [which no human knowledge can achieve, it is that] which can only be revealed, which must be guaranteed by sight. The Christian can believe, but not strive for the content of the infinite. This is what took place at the beginning of Christianity, because these views were actually transformed, because in each individual the mystical initiation process was re-stamped as a unique historical event. The element of Hermes, the guide from the earthly to the divine, was also transformed into an abstract element that had only a subjective meaning. The way in which the Platonic conception and the mystery doctrine in particular still had to take on an earthly form in everything that presents itself to us as Christianity is something I would like to talk about next time.

Answer to the question:

The Christ has been completely eliminated. Two things are to be distinguished, the believers and the teacher who taught the doctrines of the ancient mysteries. The parables reveal a teacher of the Essaean community. He spoke to the people as it was appropriate for the people. Behind Jesus stands the actual teacher, as with Krishna, Ramah and so on. What Jesus taught is no different from what the Orient taught. But what Christianity has become is something else. What was demanded by the mystics is something else[: to believe in] a unique historical fact.

The content of the Christian dogmas of the first centuries is exactly the same as in the old mystery schools. The content of the mystery teachings is presented as a diabolical imitation of the divine word in order to be able to say that they teach something else after all.

Philon deepened the Platonic philosophy. Philon broke through the principle of strict isolation from the outside world. The external dissemination of doctrine through the parable was cultivated. The esoteric core disappeared, the exoteric shell remained. Paul deepened the exoteric nature of Christianity.

Dr. Steiner: Unfortunately, our main problem is that we must give up the Waldorf School ideal for the twelfth grade. We cannot base the twelfth-grade curriculum upon our principles. We simply have to admit that we must take all the subjects in other high schools into account during the final year. I am looking with some horror at the last semester, when we will have to ignore everything except the subjects required for the final examination. It’s inconceivable that we can work any other way if the students are to pass the final examination. This is really a problem. After thinking about it a long time, I do not think there is much to say about the curriculum for that class except those things we already considered, such as chemical technology and such.

The students are about eighteen, and at that age it is best if they attain an overall understanding of history and art. We should give them an understanding of the spirit of literature, art, and history without, of course, teaching them about anthroposophy. We must try to bring them the spirit in those subjects, not only in the content but also in the way we present them. With the students, we should at least try to achieve what I have striven for with the workers in Dornach, pictures that make it clear that, for instance, an island like Great Britain swims in the sea and is held fast by the forces of the stars. In actuality, such islands do not sit directly upon a foundation; they swim and are held fast from outside. In general, the cosmos creates islands and continents, their forms and locations. That is certainly the case with firm land. Such things are the result of the cosmos, of the stars. The Earth is a reflection of the cosmos, not something caused from within. However, we need to avoid such things. We cannot tell them to the students because they would then need to tell them to their professors in the examinations, and we would acquire a terrible name. Nevertheless, that is actually what we should achieve in geography.

In physics and chemistry, we should try to cover every principle that reveals the whole system of chemistry and physics as an organism, a unity, and not simply an aggregate as most people assume. With the twelfth grade, we have a kind of conclusion, and we must draw conclusions everywhere. We must give answers to the questions that arise, for instance, in mineralogy, where the five Platonic solids manifest. We should do that when we study minerals and crystals.

In art, we can only continue what we previously did in music, sculpture, and painting. That can never be concluded.

Unfortunately, we can do none of that. The only new thing we can do is one hour of chemical technology. Elsewhere, we will need to make sure that we simply bring the students far enough along that they can answer the questions on the final examination. This is terrible, but there is nothing we can do to avoid it. However, we should follow our curriculum as exactly as possible until the students are fourteen. As far as possible, I would ask you to consider up to that year all the things that have fallen by the way. We need to strictly carry out the curriculum until the students are fourteen.

I am telling you all this so that you will know how you would need to think were it possible to apply the principles of the Waldorf School with eighteen-year-old students. Eighteen-year-olds need to understand the various historical periods in a living way, particularly regarding the “getting younger” of humanity. That would have an important influence upon people. In the oldest periods of humanity, people could feel the development of their souls until the age of sixty. Following the Mystery of Golgotha, they could feel it only until the age of thirty-three, and today that is possible only until twenty-seven. Students need to comprehend this ongoing decrease before they begin their studies at an institution of higher learning. It is something that belongs in the general education in a Waldorf school and would have a tremendously beneficial effect upon the students’ souls.

The situation is as follows. When we look at the learning goals of the twelfth grade, we need to imagine that the students will continue at a college, and we also need to imagine that they have completed their general education. We can find our teaching goals in the following circumstances. Today, you can represent anthroposophy to the world such that people with sound human feeling can understand it. (Sound human understanding does not exist today.) They can understand it through feeling. Today, however, if those who have gone through a modern high-school education do not have a particular predisposition, it is impossible for them to comprehend certain anthroposophical truths. Today, they have hardly any possibility of understanding such things.

If you consider Kolisko’s chemistry, it is clear that it is unimaginable for modern chemists. You can teach students that kind of imaginative capacity until the age of eighteen or nineteen, that is, until the completion of the moon cycle, which then begins again. If people are to comprehend certain concepts, they must achieve a particular development during that period.

Compared to other people today, you are all a little crazy. You all have something that sets you apart from the current general development, something that is present to a greater or lesser extent in each of you. You have a certain kind of eccentricity. You are, in a certain way, not quite normal. Those who are normal, that is, “normal people,” cannot understand some things. Chemists with a normal education cannot understand Kolisko’s chemistry. They simply have no concepts for it. Our goal should be to make that understanding possible for our students. However, we cannot achieve that when we are forced to work toward ruining brains in exactly the same way that modern schools work toward that goal. Souls cannot be ruined. They undergo a self-correction before the next earthly life, although if things remain as they are today and continue into the next earthly life, humanity will degenerate. We cannot do these things. It is simply impossible. Even people like Herman Grimm could maintain themselves upon their islands only by brusquely brushing away certain concepts. People like him simply went past others, but they were the last who had such concepts. Those people, who were quite old during the 1890s, were the last who had them, and that possibility died with them.

It is particularly difficult with today’s youth. Today’s young people, as we have seen quite clearly in our anthroposophical youth movement, have a tendency to reject all ideas. They are not interested in ideas and, therefore, to the extent that they do not accept anthroposophy, become disorganized. Today’s young people are forced into a terrible tragedy, particularly if they are academically inclined and have gone through our college preparatory schools. We can achieve more for those students who go into practical life at the age of fourteen.

It is impossible, for example, to develop a spatial concept as I described it in the recent teachers’ course in Dornach, that is, the three dimensions, up-down, left-right, front-back. That is why it is so difficult to give people an understanding of anthroposophical truths. No one today is interested in things for which there should be broad public interest. I have said that everything connected with the will works three-dimensionally in the earthly realm. Everything connected with feeling is not three-dimensional, but two-dimensional, so that when you move from willing to feeling in your soul, you have to project the third dimension onto the plane in a direction that corresponds with front to back. We need to remember that we cannot simply—we can reduce it to the symmetry of the human being, but we cannot limit it to only that. This plane is two-dimensional everywhere—thinking then leads to one dimension and the I to zero dimensions. When we do that, the situation becomes quite clear. Now I ask you, how can such elementary things be presented in a lecture? There is simply no possibility of making that plausible to the modern public. No one is interested in it.

It would certainly be wonderful if, for example, in addition to the normal perspective of orthogonals, planes, and centers, people understood perspectives of three dimensions to two, from two dimensions to one, and then from one to the zero dimension. It would be wonderful if people could do that so that we could differentiate a point in many ways.

I am telling you all these things so that you can see how things need to be in the future and how we should form a school that would really educate people. Today, so-called educated people are really very undeveloped because today’s students are required to know many things in a certain way, but they really need to know them in a quite different way. I think we should try to do as much of that as possible in the lower grades, but in the upper grades, we must be untrue to our own principles, at least for the most part. We can only include one thing or another here and there. Even someone like J.W. can say to me that she would take the final examination if she thought she would pass. I told her that would be sensible only if she is certain she will pass. If she failed, it would not be good for the school.

The worst thing is that if we could convince the state to accept our reports, our students could very well follow a course of study at the university with what they would learn from our curriculum. Everything connected with the final examination, which causes such misery in modern school life, is absolutely unnecessary for studying at the university. Students could take up Kolisko’s chemistry as a subject. They would at first be surprised by chemical formulas, of course, but they could learn that later. It is much more important that they understand the inner processes of materials and the relationships between them. These are the things I wanted to say. I would like to discuss this whole question further. I would have completed the curriculum, but it has no meaning for the twelfth grade. We already know what we must do.

The students need to complete all the practical subjects insofar as possible. That is something you will feel after a time. So that the children have some sense of security, I would like to ask them about these subjects. I had the impression a while ago that the children thought the questions were unusual when you stated them poorly.

A teacher: Could we split the classes?

Dr. Steiner: We would need to have parallel classes from the age of fourteen, but we do not have enough teachers. The problem is financial. I would like to know how the finances are now. We should always keep that in mind.

There is some discussion about the financial situation.

Dr. Steiner: Well, the important thing is not that we have a financial report, but that we always have what we need in the bank. We can certainly continue, but we will have to do something. Otherwise, it will be impossible to do what needs to be done. For now, we cannot consider such a split.

At the college level, we cannot reach our goals for a very long time. The Cultural Committee might have done that, but they fell asleep after a few weeks. We might be able to achieve the things we want so much if we had the situation that existed in Austria for many private high schools. There many parochial high schools had the right to give and grade the final examinations, and technical schools could provide an accepted final report. I believe there are no such institutions in Germany. We would need a state official to be present, but the teachers would actually do the testing. A state official, while certainly causing many difficulties in our souls, in the end would have little effect on the grades if the final examination was held by our teachers.

A teacher: I believe we should speak to the students who will not be able to pass the final examination.

Dr. Steiner: That depends. People will say the faculty is at fault if more than a third of the class do not achieve the learning goals. If it is less than a third, the fault is thought to be the students’, but when a third or more do not achieve what they should, then it is seen as the faculty’s problem. You know that, don’t you?

In general, no one who has had good grades fails. The problem is, that is not taken into account. A further point is whether we could avoid using those really unpedagogical textbooks. The teacher could, of course, use them for preparation. Most of those texts are simply extracts from various scientific books. I have noticed that the questions come from such books and that there are readings from them, also. That can, however, cause many problems. We need to get away from using such references. We can use Lübsen’s books since they are quite educational, although the last editions have been somewhat ruined. His books are very pedagogical through all the editions before those made by his successor. Imagine for a moment the wonderful value of calculus in pedagogy. His analytical geometry is also pedagogically wonderful, at least the older edition, as well as his volumes on algebra and analysis. He has, for example, a collection of problems that are extraordinarily good because the methods required to solve them are very instructive.

A teacher: Should we throw out all the textbooks?

Dr. Steiner: For translation, they are not so bad. However, for German readings, you should not use normal textbooks. They are quite tasteless. Perhaps we should write down our lesson plans for the following teachers, so they could at least have some material for reading. There are so many people here who can type. Why can’t we prepare documents that people can read? The offices are filled with people, but I have no idea what they do.

A teacher: The students in the twelfth grade would like an additional hour of French.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to make everything possible. It is terrible that the twelfth-grade students will not receive an introduction to architecture. If everyone teaching languages helped, it might be possible.

An English teacher asks about prose readings for the twelfth grade, about Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, and about the English art and literature magazine The Athenaeum.

Dr. Steiner: The Athenaeum is edited very practically. You should not give it to the students, but instead use some individual essays. You could also use it in the eleventh grade. We do not have such well-edited magazines in Germany anymore. This is an old magazine, a humanistic magazine par excellence. There was a terrible German imitation called Literary News. Zarnck’s Literarisches Zentralblatt (Literary journal) was also a terrible imitation. It was a magazine for people who do not exist even in England.

A teacher: We have done enough of Tacitus and Horace. Should we take up Sallustius?

Dr. Steiner: Sallustius and Tacitus. I think the Germania would be enough. You could have them read a larger piece from that and then give them a test.

A teacher asks about music for the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: A feeling for style, as such, an awareness of how Bach differs from others, is the main thing for the twelfth grade. At worst, you will have a problem at Christmastime if we see that we cannot continue all of the art instruction. Do not consider it an impossibility that we have to stop all art instruction at Christmas. Other people make fun of our things.

A teacher asks about religious instruction for the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: You should go through religious history and give an overview of religious development. Begin with the ethnographic religions and then go on to folk religions and finally universal religions.

Begin with the ethnographic religions such as the Egyptian regional gods, where the religions are still quite dependent upon the various tribes. There are also regional gods throughout Greece. You need to do this in stages. At first, we have the religions that are fixed at a given location, the holy places. Then, during the period of wandering, the tent replaces the holy places, the religion becomes more mobile, and folk religions arise. Finally, we have universal religions, Buddhism and Christianity. We cannot call any other religions universal.

In the ninth grade, read the Gospel of Luke, which is a pouring out of the Holy Spirit.

A teacher asks about the Apocrypha.

Dr. Steiner: The children are not yet mature enough to go through the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha contains many things that are more correct than what is written in the Gospels. I have always extended the Gospels by what we can verify from the Apocrypha. Sometimes there are strong conflicts. When they take up the Gospels, the children must grasp them. It is difficult to explain the contradictions, so if they took up the Apocrypha nothing would make sense anymore. I would simply study the Gospels. A teacher asks about religion in the tenth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Following St. John’s Gospel, a number of paths are possible. You could do either the Gospel of St. Mark or Augustine, selecting some sections from the Confessions where he speaks more about religion.

A teacher asks if they should teach zoology and botany in the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Those subjects need to be included if our reports are to be officially recognized. We study zoology in the fifth grade, then the human being, then zoology again. If we did not have this problem of final examinations, I think it would be wonderful to present zoology to the children in the course of three weeks. That would be eighteen mornings to handle the twelve groups of animals. In the twelfth grade, we should limit zoology to categorization; the same is true of plants.

The students already know about skeletal structure, since you have already done anthropology. The most important thing is that they gain an overview about how we classify animals. You should begin with single-celled animals, then go through the worms. You will have twelve if you consider the vertebrates as one class. A teacher asks about how continents swim.

Dr. Steiner: Usually people do not think about how it looks if you move toward the center of the Earth. You would soon come to regions where it is very fluid, whether it is water or something else. Thus, according to our normal understanding, the continents swim. The question is, of course, why they don’t bump into one another, why they don’t move back and forth, and why they are always the same distance from one another, since the Earth is under all kinds of influences. Why don’t they bump into one another? For instance, why is a channel always the same width? We can find no explanation for that from within the Earth. That is something that comes from outside. All fixed land swims and the stars hold it in position. Otherwise, everything would break apart. The seas tend to be spherical.

A teacher asks for more details. Dr. Steiner takes a teacher’s notebook and draws the following sketch in it while giving an explanation.

Dr. Steiner: The contrast is interesting. The continents swim and do not sit upon anything. They are held in position upon the Earth by the constellations. When the constellations change, the continents change, also. The old tellurians and atlases properly included the constellations of the zodiac in relationship to the configuration of the Earth’s surface. The continents are held from the periphery; the higher realms hold the parts of the Earth. In contrast, the Earth holds the Moon dynamically, as if on a leash. The Moon goes along as if on a tether.

A teacher asks about drawing exercises for fourteen- and fifteenyear- olds.

Dr. Steiner: You should have the children paint the moods of nature. The continuation students in Dornach have done wonderful work in painting. I had them paint the difference between sunrise and sunset, and some of them have done that wonderfully. They should learn those differences and be able to paint them. Those are the kinds of things you could work with, for example, the mood of rain in the forest. In addition, they should learn the differences between painting and sculpting.

In the lower grades, take care, when things get out of hand and you cannot get through the material, that you do not rashly reach for a substitute and simply tell the children a story to keep them quiet.

I hope to be here again tomorrow morning.

Easter is felt by many to be associated on the one hand with the deepest feelings and sensibilities of the human soul, and on the other, with cosmic mysteries and enigmas. The connection with cosmic mysteries becomes clear when we consider that Easter is a so-called movable feast, the date of which is fixed each year with reference to a specific constellation in the heavens. We will have more to say about this in the lectures to come. As for Easter's connection with the human soul, if we examine the customs and rites that have become associated with it through the centuries, we cannot fail to observe the great significance with which a large part of mankind has come to invest this festival.

For Christianity, Easter was not important initially, but it became so during the first few centuries. It is linked to Christianity's basic tenet, the Resurrection of Christ, and to the fundamental impulse to become a Christian provided by that fact. Easter is therefore a celebration of the Resurrection, but as such it points back to times and festivals predating Christianity.

These earlier festivals centered around the spring equinox, an event which, though not identical with Easter, enters into the calculation of its date, and celebrated nature's reawakening in the new life burgeoning forth from the earth. And this leads us directly to the heart of our subject, which is the Easter festival as a stage in the evolution of the Mysteries.

For Christians Easter commemorates the Resurrection. The corresponding pagan festival in a sense celebrated the resurrection of nature, the reawakening of what, as nature, had been asleep throughout the winter. However, there the similarity ends. It must be emphasized that with regard to its inner meaning, the Christian Easter festival in no sense corresponds to the pagan equinox celebrations. Rather, a serious examination of ancient pagan times reveals that Easter, in the Christian sense, is related to festivals that grew out of the Mysteries and that were celebrated in the fall.

This most curious fact demonstrates what serious misunderstandings regarding matters of the highest importance have occurred in the course of humanity's development. In the early Christian centuries, nothing less happened than the confusion of Easter with a completely different festival, with the result that Easter was moved from fall to the spring.

With this we touch upon something of enormous importance in the development of humanity. Consider for a moment the essential content of Easter. First, the figure central to Christian consciousness, Christ Jesus, experiences death, as commemorated by Good Friday. He then remains in the grave for three days, symbolizing his union with earthly existence. Christians observe this interval, the one between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, as a period of mourning. Finally, on Easter Sunday, the central being of Christianity arises from the grave. In essence, then, Easter involves Christ's death, lying in the grave, and resurrection.

Let us now turn to one of the many forms of the corresponding pagan festival, for only in doing so can we grasp the relation of Easter to the Mysteries.

Among many ancient peoples we find celebrations whose rituals enact a content strongly resembling that of the Christian Easter festival. One of these was the festival of Adonis, which was observed by certain Near Eastern peoples over long spans of pre-Christian antiquity. At the center of this festival stood a likeness of the god Adonis, who represented all that manifests itself in human beings as vigorous youth and beauty.

The ancients in many respects undoubtedly confused the god's image with what is represented; hence their religions frequently bordered on fetishism. Many indeed took the image of Adonis to be the actually present god, the god of beauty and youthful strength, of an unfolding seminal power that reveals in splendorous outer existence all the inner nobility and grandeur of which humanity is capable.

To the accompaniment of songs and rites portraying humanity's deepest grief and sorrow, the god's likeness was immersed for a period of three days in the sea if the Mystery site was near the sea, in a lake if it was near a lake, or otherwise in an artificial pond that was dug nearby. For three days a profound and solemn silence took hold of the entire community. When after that time the idol was lifted from the water, the laments gave way to songs of joy and hymns to the resurrected god, the god who had come back to life.

This was an external ceremony, one that profoundly stirred the souls of a great number of people. Even as it did so, however, it hinted at what happened within the sacred Mysteries to every person aspiring to initiation.

In those times every candidate for initiation was led into a special chamber. It was dark and gloomy and its walls were black. The chamber contained nothing but a coffin or at least something like it. Laments and dirges were sung around this coffin by those who had led the neophyte into the chamber. The latter was treated as if he were about to die. His teachers made it clear to him that by being laid in the coffin he was to undergo the experience of death and of the three days following. The candidate was to achieve total inner clarity regarding those experiences.

On the third day, in a spot visible to the occupant of the coffin, a branch appeared, signifying life's renewal. The earlier laments gave way to hymns of joy, and the initiate arose from his grave with transformed consciousness. A new language, a new script were revealed to him, the language and script of the spiritual world. He was permitted to see, and did see, the world from the viewpoint of the spirit.

Compared with these procedures enacted deep within the Mysteries, the external, public rites were symbolic, resembling in their form the initiation ceremonies of the select few. At the proper time these rites, of which the Adonis festival may be taken as typical, were explained to their participants. The rites took place in the fall, and participants were instructed in somewhat the following way:

“Behold, autumn is now upon us; the earth loses its mantle of plants and leaves. All is withering. In place of the greening, burgeoning life that began to cover the earth in spring, snow will now come, or at least a desolating drought. Nature is dying. And as it dies all around you, you shall experience that part of yourself that is similar to nature. Human beings die as well. Each of us has his autumn. And although when life comes to an end it is fitting that the souls of those remaining should be filled with deep sorrow, it is not enough to meet death only when it actually happens. In order that you be confronted with death's full solemnity, that you be able to remind yourselves of death again and again, you are shown each fall the death of that divine being who stands for beauty, youth, and human grandeur. You see that he too goes the way of all nature. Yet, precisely when nature becomes barren and begins to die, you must remember something else. You must remember that although human beings pass through the portal of death, although in this earthly existence they experience only things that are like those that die in autumn, at death they are drawn away from the earth and live their way out into the vast cosmic ether, where for three days they feel their being expand until it encompasses the whole world. Then, while the eyes of those on earth are focused only on death's outer aspect, on what is transitory, in the spirit world the immortal human soul awakens after three days. Three days after death it arises, born anew for the spirit land.”

In a process of intense inner transformation, the candidate for initiation into the Mysteries actually experienced this dying and reawakening within his own soul. The profound shock inflicted upon people by this old method of initiation—we shall see that in our day completely different methods are necessary—awakened within them latent powers of spiritual vision. They knew henceforth that they stood not merely in the world of the senses, but in the spiritual world as well.

What the students of the Mysteries received as timely instruction might be summed up in the following words: “The Mystery ritual is an image of events in the spiritual world, of what occurs in the cosmos; the public rituals in turn are a likeness of the Mysteries.” No doubt was left in the students' minds that the Mysteries encompassed procedures representing what human beings experience in forms of existence other than the earthly, that is, in the vastness of the astral and spiritual cosmos.

Those who could not be admitted to the Mysteries because they were deemed not mature enough to receive directly the gift of spiritual vision were taught appropriate truths in the cultic rituals, which symbolized what occurred in the Mysteries. These rituals, such as the Adonis cult, that took place amid autumn's withering, when all of nature seemed to speak only of the transience of earthly things, of the inexorability of death and decay, served to instill in people the certainty, or at least the idea, that death as experienced by nature in the fall must also overtake human beings, overtake even the god Adonis, representative of all the beauty, youthfulness, and grandeur of the human soul. The god Adonis also dies. He disappears into the earthly representative of the cosmic ether, into water. But just as he is lifted out of it, so too is the human soul raised from the waters of the world, the cosmic ether, about three days after it has passed through the portal of death.

The secret of death itself was thus portrayed in the ancient Mysteries through the corresponding autumnal festivals. These festivals coincided in their first half with the withering and decay of nature, and in their second half with the opposite, namely, with the eternal essence of the human being. Humanity was to contemplate the dying of nature in order to recognize that human beings die as well, but that in accordance with their inner nature they arise anew in the spiritual world. The purpose of these ancient pagan Mystery festivals was thus to reveal the true meaning of death.

As humanity developed, the time came when a particular being, Christ Jesus, carried down into bodily nature the process of death and resurrection that the candidate for initiation had achieved in the Mysteries only on the level of the soul. People familiar with the ancient Mysteries can peer into them and perceive that neophytes were led through death to resurrection within their souls, that is, they awakened to a higher consciousness. It is important to note that their souls, not their bodies, died and that they did so in order to rise again on a higher level of consciousness.

What aspirants to initiation experienced only in their souls, Christ Jesus passed through in the body, that is, on a different level. Because Christ was not of the Earth, but rather a sun-being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, he could undergo on Golgotha in the entirety of his human nature what initiates had formerly experienced only their souls.

Those who still possessed intimate knowledge of the old Mystery initiation, from that time on to our own, understood the event at Golgotha most profoundly of all. They knew that for thousands of years people had gained knowledge of the spiritual world's secrets through the death and resurrection of their souls. During the process of initiation body and soul had been kept apart, the soul being led then through death to eternal life.

What a number of select people had thus undergone in their souls was experienced all the way into the body by the being who descended from the sun into Jesus of Nazareth at the time of his baptism in the Jordan. An initiation process repeated over many, many centuries became in this way a historical fact.

That was the essence of what people familiar with the Mysteries knew. They knew that because a sun-being had taken possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth what had formerly occurred for the neophyte only at the level of the soul and its experiences could now take place on the plane of the body as well. In spite of Christ's bodily death, in spite of his dissolution into the mortal earth, the Resurrection could be brought about because Christ ascended higher in soul and spirit than was possible for a candidate for initiation. The neophyte was incapable of bringing the body into such profoundly subsensible regions as Christ did, so that he could not rise as high in resurrection. Except for this difference in cosmic magnitude, however, it was the ancient initiation process that appeared in the historic deed on sacred Golgotha.

In the first Christian centuries very few people knew that a sun-being, a cosmic being, had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, or that the earth had actually been made fruitful by the coming of a being previously visible only in the sun for students of initiation. And for those who accepted it with genuine knowledge of the old Mysteries, Christianity consisted essentially in the fact that Christ, who could be reached in the old Mysteries by ascending through initiation to the sun, had descended into a mortal body. He had come down to earth, into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

A mood of rejoicing, even of holy elation, filled the souls of those who understood something of this Mystery when it occurred. Living awareness then gradually gave way, through developments we shall discuss presently, to a festival in memory of this historical event on Golgotha.

While this memory was taking shape, awareness of Christ's identity as a sun-being grew dimmer and dimmer. Those familiar with the ancient Mysteries could not be mistaken about that identity. They knew that genuine initiates, by being made independent of the physical body and experiencing death in their souls, had ascended to the sphere of the sun and there found the Christ. From the Christ they received the impulse to resurrection. Having raised themselves up to him, they were cognizant of his true nature. From the events on Golgotha they knew that the being formerly accessible only in the sun had descended to mankind on earth.

Why? Because the old rite of initiation, through which neophytes had risen to Christ in the sun, could no longer be performed. Over time human nature had changed. Evolution had progressed in such a way as to make initiation by means of the old ritual impossible. Human beings on earth could no longer find Christ in the sun. For this reason he came down to enact a deed to which earthly humanity could now turn its gaze. This secret is among the holiest things of which we may speak here on earth.

What was the situation then for those living in the centuries immediately following the Mystery of Golgotha? If I were to draw it, I would have to sketch something like this:

In the old initiation center (red, at right), neophytes gazed up to the sun and through initiation became aware of the Christ. To find him they looked out into space, so to speak. In order to show later developments, I must here represent time in terms of the earth proceeding along a line from right to left—its subsequent positions from year to year represented by arcs beneath the line—even though the earth does not actually move this way through space. At the left, let us say, is the eighth century; the Mystery of Golgotha (cross, at center) had already taken place. Human beings, instead of seeking Christ in the sun from a Mystery temple, now look back toward the turning point of time, to the beginning of the Christian era. They look back in time (yellow arrow in figure) toward the Mystery of Golgotha, and there find Christ performing an earthly deed.

The significance of the Mystery of Golgotha was that it changed a previously spatial perception into perception through time. Furthermore, if we reflect upon what transpired in the Mysteries during initiation, remembering that initiation was an image of human death and resurrection, and then consider the form taken by the cult—the festival of Adonis, for example—which was itself a picture of the Mysteries, then these three things appear raised to the ultimate degree, unified and concentrated, in the historical deed on Golgotha.

The profoundly intimate rites of the Mystery sanctuaries now stood forth as an external, historical event. All humankind now had access to what was previously available only to initiates. No longer was it necessary to immerse an image in the sea and symbolically resurrect it. Instead human beings were to think of, to remember, what actually took place on Golgotha. The physical symbol, referring to a process experienced in space, was to be supplanted by the internal, immaterial thought, by the memory of the historical deed on Golgotha experienced within the soul.

A remarkable development began to take place during the centuries that followed. Human beings were less and less cognizant of spiritual realities, so that the substance of the Mystery of Golgotha could no longer gain a foothold in their souls. Evolution tended toward the development of a sense for material reality. Human beings could no longer grasp in their hearts that precisely where nature presents itself as ephemeral, as dying and desolate, the spirit's vitality can best be witnessed. The autumnal festival thus lost its meaning. It was no longer understood that the best time to appreciate the resurrection of the human spirit was when outer nature was dying, that is, during the fall.

Autumn simply became an unsuitable time for the festival of resurrection, for it could no longer turn people's minds to spiritual immortality by underscoring nature's transience. People began to depend upon material symbols, upon enduring elements of nature, for their understanding of immortal things. They focused upon the seed's germinating force, which, though buried in the fall, sprouts forth again in spring. People adopted material symbols for spiritual things because matter could no longer stimulate them to perceive the spirit in its reality. Human souls lacked the strength to receive autumn's revelation of the spirit's permanence in contrast to the impermanence of nature. Help from nature, in the form of an outwardly visible resurrection, was now necessary. People needed to see plants sprouting from the ground, the sun gaining strength, light and warmth increasing, in other words, a resurrection of nature, in order to celebrate the idea of resurrection itself.

But this meant that the immediate connection to the spirit present in the festival of Adonis, and potentially present in the Mystery of Golgotha, disappeared. An intense inner experience that was possible in ancient times at every human death gradually faded out. In those times people had known that although a departed soul's first experiences beyond the gate of death were indeed a matter for solemn reflection, after three days the living could rejoice, for they knew that then the departed soul arose out of earthly death into spiritual immortality.

Thus the power inherent in the festival of Adonis disappeared. It lay in humanity's nature that this power should at first arise with great intensity. Ancient peoples beheld the death of the god, the death of human beauty, grandeur, and youthful vigor. This god was immersed in the sea on a day of mourning. The mood was somber, for people were at first to develop a feeling for the ephemeral. This mood, however, was to yield in turn to a different one, to that evoked by the human soul's super-sensible resurrection after three days. When the god—or rather his likeness—was raised out of the water, rightly instructed believers saw in it an image of the human soul as it exists a few days after death. The fate of departed souls in the spiritual world was placed before them in the image of the risen god of beauty and youth.

Thus each year in the fall human minds were awakened to a direct contemplation of something deeply connected with human destiny. At that time it would have been deemed inappropriate to convey this by means of outer nature. Truths that could be experienced spiritually were represented in the cult's symbolic rituals. However, when the time came for the ancient, physical idol to be replaced with the inner experience of the unseen Mystery of Golgotha, a Mystery that embodied the same truth, humanity at first lacked the strength, for the spirit had retreated into deeply hidden regions of the human soul.

The need to look to nature for symbols of the spirit has continued into our own time. Nature, however, provides no complete image of our destiny in death; and while the idea of death has survived, that of resurrection has increasingly disappeared. Even though resurrection is spoken of as a tenet of faith, the fact of resurrection is not a living one for people of more recent times. It must, however, once more become so through anthroposophical insight that awakens a feeling for the true concept of resurrection.

If, therefore, as has been said on appropriate occasions, we as anthroposophists must cherish the Michael idea as a heralding thought, and must deepen our understanding of the Christmas idea, so too must our experience of the Easter idea be particularly festive. For it is anthroposophy's task to add to the thought of death that of resurrection, to become an inner celebration of the resurrection of the human soul, imbuing our philosophy with an Easter mood. Anthroposophy will be able to achieve this when people understand how the ancient Mystery concepts can live on in the true concept of Easter, and when once again a proper view prevails of the body, soul, and spirit of the human being and of the fates of these in the physical, soul, and divine-spiritual worlds.

Jean Paul's personality

[ 1 ] There are works of the mind that lead such an independent existence that one can devote oneself to them without thinking for a moment of their author. One can follow the Iliad, Hamlet and Othello, Iphigenia from beginning to end without being reminded of the personality of Homer, Shakespeare or Goethe. These works stand before the viewer like beings with a life all their own, like developed human beings that we accept for themselves without asking about their father. In them, not only the spirit of creation but also that of the creator is constantly before us. Agamemnon, Achilles, Othello, Iago, Iphigenia appear before us as individuals who act and speak for themselves. Jean Paul's characters, these Siebenkäs and Leibgeber, these Albano and Schoppe, Walt and Vult always have a companion who speaks with them, who looks over their shoulders. It is Jean Paul himself. The poet himself also speaks in Goethe's Faust. But he does so in a completely different way to Jean Paul. What has flowed from Goethe's nature into the figure of Faust has completely detached itself from the poet; it has become Faust's own being and the poet steps off the stage after he has placed his double on it. Jean Paul always remains standing next to his figures. When immersing ourselves in one of his works, our feelings, our thoughts always jump away from the work and towards the creator. Something similar is also the case with his satirical, philosophical and pedagogical writings. Today we are no longer able to look at a philosophical doctrine in isolation, without reference to its author. We look through the philosophical thoughts to the philosophical personalities. In the writings of Plato, Aristotle and Leibniz, we no longer remain within the logical web of thought. We look for the image of the philosopher. Behind the works we look for the human being struggling with the highest tasks and watch how he has come to terms with the mysteries and riddles of the world in his own way. But this idiosyncrasy has been fully expressed in the works. A personality speaks to us through the works. Jean Paul, on the other hand, always presents himself to us in two forms in his philosophical writings. We believe that he speaks to us from the book; but there is also a person next to us who tells us something that we can never guess from the book. And this second person always has something to say to us that never falls short of the significance of his creations.

[ 2 ] One may regard this peculiarity of Jean Paul's as a shortcoming of his nature. For those who are inclined to do so, I would like to counter Jean Paul's own words with some modification: Every nature is good as soon as it remains a solitary one and does not become a general one; for even the natures of a Homer, Plato, Goethe must not become general and unique and fill with their works "all the halls of books, from the old world down to the new, or we would starve and emaciate from oversaturation; as well as a human race, whose peoples and times consisted of nothing but pious Herrnhutters and Speners or Antonines or Lutherans, would at last present something of dull boredom and sluggish advancement."

[ 3 ] It is true: Jean Paul's idiosyncrasy never allowed him to create works that have the character of perfection through the unity and roundness of their form, through the natural, objective development of the characters and the plot, through the idealistic representation of his views. He never found the perfect stylistic form for his great spiritual content. But he penetrated the depths and abysses of the human soul and scaled the heights of thought like few others.

[ 4 ] Jean Paul was predisposed to a life of the greatest style. Nothing is inaccessible to his fine powers of observation, his high flight of thought. It is conceivable that he would have reached the pinnacle of mastery if he had studied the secrets of art forms like Goethe; or that he would have become one of the greatest philosophers of all time if he had developed his decisive ability to live in the realm of ideas to greater perfection. An unlimited urge for freedom in all his work prevents Jean Paul from submitting to any formal fetters. His bold imagination does not want to be determined in the continuation of a story by the art form it has created for itself at the beginning. Nor does it have the selflessness to suppress inflowing feelings and thoughts if they do not fit into the framework of the work to be created. Jean Paul appears as a sovereign ruler who plays freely with his imaginative creations, unconcerned about artistic principles, unconcerned about logical concerns. If the course of a narrative, a sequence of thoughts, flows on for a while, Jean Paul's creative genius always reclaims his freedom and leads the reader down side paths, occupying him with things that have nothing to do with the main thing, but only join it in the mind of the creator. At every moment, Jean Paul says what he wants to say, even if the objective course of events demands something completely different. Jean Paul's great style lies in this free play. But there is a difference between playing with complete mastery of the field in which one moves, or whether the whim of the player creates formations which give the impression to those who look at things according to their own laws that one part of the formation does not correspond to the other. With regard to the Greek works of art, Goethe bursts out with the words: "I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the very laws according to which nature proceeds and which I am on the track of", and: "These high works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature, which have been produced by men according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God." One would like to say of Jean Paul's creations: here nature has created an isolated area in which it shows that it can defy its own laws and still be great. Goethe seeks to achieve freedom of creation by incorporating the laws of nature into his own being. He wants to create as nature itself creates. Jean Paul wants to preserve his freedom by not paying attention to the laws of things and imagining the laws of his own personality into his world.

[ 5 ] If Jean Paul's nature were not very cozy, his free play with things and feelings would have a repulsive effect. But his interest in nature and people is no less than Goethe's and his love for all beings has no limits. And it is attractive to see how he immerses himself in things with his feelings, with his rapturous imagination, with his lofty flight of thought, without, however, seeing through the essence inherent in these things. essence itself. One would like to apply the saying "love is blind" to the sensuality with which Jean Paul describes nature and people.

[ 6 ] And it is not because Jean Paul plays too little, but because he is too serious. The 'dream that his imagination dreams of the world is so majestic that what the senses really perceive seems small and insignificant compared to it. This tempts him to embody the contradiction between his dreams and reality. Reality does not seem serious enough for him to waste his seriousness on it. He makes fun of the smallness of reality, but he never does so without feeling the bitterness of not being able to enjoy this reality more. Jean Paul's humor springs from this basic mood of his character. It allowed him to see things and characters that he would not have seen in a different mood. There is a way to rise above the contradictions of reality and to feel the great harmony of all world events. Goethe sought to rise to this height. Jean Paul lived more in the regions in which nature contradicts itself and becomes unfaithful in detail to what speaks from its whole as truth and naturalness. Appear therefore

[ 7 ] Jean Paul's creations, measured against the whole of nature, appear to be imaginary, arbitrary, one cannot say to them: "there is necessity, there is God"; to the individual, to the individual, his sensations appear to be quite true. He has not been able to describe the harmony of the whole, because he has never seen it in clear outline before his imagination; but he has dreamed of this harmony and wonderfully felt and described the contradiction of the individual with it. If his mind had been able to vividly shape the inner unity of all events, he would have become a pathetic poet. But since he only felt the contradictory, petty aspects of reality, he gave vent to them through humorous descriptions.

[ 8 ] Jean Paul does not ask: what is reality capable of? He doesn't even get to that. For this question is immediately drowned out by the other: how little this reality corresponds to the ideal. But ideals that are so unable to tolerate the marriage with harsh reality have something soft about them. They lack the strength to live fully and freshly. Those who are dominated by them become sentimental. And sentimentality is one of Jean Paul's character traits. If he is of the opinion that true love dies with the first kiss, or at least with the second, this is proof that his sentimental ideal of love was not created to win flesh and blood. It always retains something ethereal. Thus Jean Paul hovers between a shadowy ideal world, to which his rapturous longing is attached, and a reality that seems foolish and foolish in comparison with that ideal world. Thinking of himself, he says of humor: "Humor, as the inverted sublime, does not destroy the individual, but the finite through the contrast with the idea. For it there is no single folly, no fools, but only folly and a great world; unlike the common joker with his side-swipes, it does not single out individual folly, but humiliates the great, but unlike parody - in order to elevate the small, and elevates the small, but unlike irony - in order to set the great alongside it and thus destroy both, because before infinity everything is equal and nothing is equal." Jean Paul was unable to reconcile the contradictions of the world, which is why he was also helpless in the face of those in his own personality. He could not find the harmony of the forces of the soul that were at work in him. But these forces of the soul have such a powerful effect that one must say that Jean Paul's imperfection is greater than many a perfection of a lower order. Jean Paul's ability may lag behind his will, but this will appears so clearly before one's soul that one feels one is looking into unknown realms when one reads his writings.

Boyhood and grammar school

[ 9 ] Jean Paul spent his childhood, from the age of two to twelve, in Joditz an der Saale, not far from Hof. He was born in Wunsiedel on March 21, 1763 as the son of the tertius and organist Johann Christian Christoph Richter, who had married Sophia Rosina Kuhn, the daughter of the cloth maker Johann Paul Kuhn in Hof, on October 16, 1761. Our poet was given the name Johann Paul Friedrich at his baptism. He later formed his literary name Jean Paul by Frenching his first two first names. On i. August 1765, the parents moved to Joditz. The father was appointed pastor there. The family had grown in Wunsiedel with the addition of a son, Adam. Two girls, who died young, and two sons, Gottlieb and Heinrich, were added in Joditz. A last son, Samuel, was born later, when the family was already in Schwarzenbach. Jean Paul describes his childhood in a captivating way in his autobiography, which unfortunately only goes up to 1779. All the traits that later emerged in the man were already evident in the boy. The rapturous fantasy, which is directed towards an ideal realm and which values reality less than this realm, manifested itself at an early age in the form of a fear of ghosts that often tormented him. He slept with his father in a parlor of the Joditz rectory, separated from the rest of the family. The children had to go to bed at nine o'clock. But the hard-working father only came to Jean Paul in the parlor two hours later, after he had finished his night's reading. Those were two difficult hours for the boy. "I lay with my head under the comforter in the sweat of ghostly fear and saw in the darkness the weather light of the cloudy ghostly sky, and I felt as if man himself were being spun by ghostly caterpillars. So I suffered helplessly for two hours at night, until finally my father came up and, like a morning sun, chased away ghosts like dreams." The autobiographer gives an excellent interpretation of this peculiarity of his childhood. "Many a child full of physical fear nevertheless shows courage of mind, but merely for lack of imagination; another, however - like me - trembles before the invisible world, because imagination makes it visible and shapes it, and is easily frightened by the visible, because it never reaches the depths and dimensions of the invisible. Thus, even a quick physical danger -- for example, a running horse, a clap of thunder, a war, the noise of a fire -- only makes me calm and composed, because I fear only with my imagination, not with my senses." And the other side of Jean Paul's nature can also be seen in the boy; that loving devotion to the little things of reality. He had "always had a predilection for the domestic, for still life, for making spiritual nests. He is a domestic shellfish that pushes itself quite comfortably back into the narrowest coils of the shell and falls in love, only that each time it wants to have the snail shell wide open so that it can then raise its four tentacles not as far as four butterfly wings into the air, but ten times further up to the sky; at least with each tentacle to one of the four satellites of Jupiter." He calls this peculiarity of his a "foolish alliance between searching far and searching near - similar to binoculars, which double the proximity or the distance by merely turning around". The boy's attitude towards Christmas is particularly significant for Jean Paul's character. The joys that the near reality offered him could not fill his soul, however great the extent to which they materialized. "For when Paul stood before the tree of lights and the table of lights on Christmas morning and the new world full of splendor and gold and gifts lay uncovered before him and he found and received new things and new and rich things: so the first thing that arose in him was not a tear - namely of joy - but a sigh - namely about life - in a word, even to the boy the crossing or leap or flight from the surging, playful, immeasurable sea of the imagination to the limited and confining solid shore was characterized by a sigh for a greater, more beautiful land. But before this sigh was breathed and before the happy reality showed its powers, Paul felt out of gratitude that he must show himself in the highest degree joyful before his mother; - and this glow he accepted at once, and for a short time too, because immediately afterwards the dawning rays of reality extinguished and removed the moonlight of imagination." Not as a child, nor in later life, could Jean Paul find the bridge between the land of his longing, which his imagination presented to him in unlimited perfection, and the reality that he loved, but which never satisfied him because he could not see it as a whole, but only in detail, in the individual, in the imperfect.

[ 10 ] On behalf of his mother, Jean Paul often visited his grandparents in Hof. One summer's day on his way home, as he looked at the sunny, glistening mountain slopes and the drifting clouds at around two o'clock, he was overcome by an "objectless longing, which was a mixture of more pain and less pleasure and a desire without memory. Alas, it was the whole man who longed for the heavenly goods of life, which still lay unmarked and colorless in the deep darkness of the heart and which were fleetingly illuminated by the incident rays of the sun." This longing accompanied Jean Paul throughout his life; he was never granted the favor of seeing the objects of his longing in reality.

[ 11 ] There were times when Jean Paul wavered as to whether he was born to be a philosopher or a poet. In any case, there is a distinctly philosophical streak in his personality. Above all else, the philosopher needs to reflect on himself. The philosophical fruits ripen in the most intimate inner being of man. The philosopher must be able to withdraw to this. From here he must be able to find the connection to world events, to the secrets of existence. The young Jean Paul also shows a budding tendency towards self-reflection. He tells us: "I have never forgotten the phenomenon within me, which I have never told anyone about, where I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness, of which I know exactly where and when. One morning, as a very young child, I was standing under the front door and looking to the left at the wood, when suddenly the inner face, I am an I, came before me like a flash of lightning from the sky, and remained shining ever since: then my I had seen itself for the first time and forever." All the peculiarities of Jean Paul's character and those of his creations are already to be found in the earliest traits of his nature. It would be wrong to look for the cause of the physiognomy of his spiritual personality in his growth out of the limited conditions of his upbringing. He himself considers it a happy coincidence that the poet spent his childhood not in a big city but in the village. This generalization is certainly daring. For Jean Paul, because of his individual nature, it was fortunate that he received his first impressions in the idyll of Jodice. For other natures, another is certainly the natural one. Jean Paul said: "Let no poet be born and educated in a capital, but where possible in a village, at most in a small town. The overabundance and overstimulation of a big city are for the excitable child's soul like eating dessert, drinking distilled water and bathing in mulled wine. Life exhausts itself in him in boyhood, and he now has nothing more to wish for than at most the smaller things, the villages. If I think of the most important thing for the poet, of love, he must see in the city, around the warm earthy belt of his parental friends and acquaintances, the larger cold turning and icy zones of unloved people, whom he encounters unknown to him and for whom he can kindle or warm himself as little as a ship's people sailing past another strange ship's people. But in the village they love the whole village, and no infant is buried there without everyone knowing its name and illness and sorrow; - and this glorious sympathy for everyone who looks like a human being, which therefore extends even to the stranger and the beggar, breeds a concentrated love of humanity and the right strength of heart."

[ 12 ] There was a real rage for knowledge in the boy Jean Paul. "All learning was my life, and I would have been happy to be taught like a prince by half a dozen teachers at once, but I hardly had the right one." Of course, the father who provided the elementary lessons was not the right man to satisfy this desire. Johann Christoph Christian Richter was an outstanding personality. He inspired his small parish, whose members were connected to him like a large family, with his sermons. He was an excellent musician and even a popular composer of sacred music. Benevolence towards everyone was one of his outstanding character traits. He did some of the work in his field and garden with his own hands. The lessons he gave his son consisted of letting him "merely learn by heart, sayings, catechism, Latin words and Langen's grammar". This was of little avail to the boy, who was thirsting for real spiritual nourishment. Even then, he sought to acquire on his own what was not available to him from outside. He created a box for himself in which he set up a "case library" "made entirely of his own little sedes, which he sewed together and cut out of the wide paper cuttings from his father's octave sermons".

[ 13 ] On January 9, 1776, Jean Paul moved to Schwarzenbach with his parents. His father was appointed pastor there by a patron, Baroness von Plotho. Jean Paul now went to a public school. The lessons there did not meet his intellectual needs any more than those of his father. The principal, Karl August Werner, taught the pupils to read in a way that lacked all thoroughness and immersion in the spirit of the writers. The chaplain Völkel, who gave him private lessons in geography and philosophy, provided a substitute for those in need of knowledge. Jean Paul received a great deal of inspiration from philosophy in particular. However, it was precisely this man to whom the young mind's firmly pronounced, rigid individuality came to the fore in a brusque manner. Völkel had promised to play a game of chess with him one day and then forgot about it. Jean Paul was so angry about this that he ignored his beloved philosophical lessons and never went to see his teacher again. At Easter 1779, Jean Paul came to Hof to attend grammar school. His entrance examination revealed an unusual maturity of mind. He was immediately placed in the middle section of the Prima. Soon afterwards, on April 135, his father died. Jean Paul had no real luck with his teachers in Hof either. Neither principal Kirsch nor deputy principal Remebaum, the primary school teachers, made any particular impression on Jean Paul. And once again he felt compelled to satisfy his mind on his own. Fortunately, his relationship with the enlightened Pastor Vogel in Rehau gave him the opportunity to do so. He placed his entire library at his disposal and Jean Paul was able to immerse himself in the works of Helvetius, Hippel, Goethe, Lavater and Lessing. He already felt the urge to assimilate what he had read and make it useful for his own life. He filled entire volumes with excerpts of what he had read. And a series of essays emerged from this reading. The grammar school pupil set about important things. What our concept of God is like; about the religions of the world; the comparison of the fool and the wise, the fool and the genius; about the value of studying philosophy at an early age; about the importance of inventing new truths: these were the tasks he set himself. And he already had a lot to say about these things. He was already dealing independently with the nature of God, with the questions of Christianity, with the spiritual progress of mankind. We encounter boldness and maturity of judgment in these works. He also ventured to write a poem, the novel "Abelard and Heloise". Here he appears in style and content as an imitator of Miller, the Sigwart poet. His longing for a perfect world that transcended all reality brought him into the path of this poet, for whom there were only tears on earth over broken hearts and dried up hopes and for whom happiness only lies beyond death. The motto of Jean Paul's novel already shows that he was seized by this mood: "The sensitive man is too good for this earth, where there are cold mockers - in that world only, which bears weeping angels, does he find reward for his tears."

[ 14 ] In Hof, Jean Paul already found what his heart needed most, participating friends: Christian Otto, the son of a wealthy merchant, who later became the confidant of his literary works; Johann Richard Hermann, the son of a toolmaker, a brilliant man full of energy and knowledge, who unfortunately succumbed to the efforts of a life rich in deprivation and hardship as early as 1790. Furthermore, Adolf Lorenz von Oerthel, the eldest son of a wealthy merchant from Töpen near Hof. In contrast to Hermann, the latter was a soft, sentimentalist full of sentimentality and enthusiasm. Hermann was realistically inclined and combined practical wisdom with a scientific sense. In these two characters, Jean Paul already encountered the types that he later embodied in his poems in manifold variations, as the idealistic Siebenkäs compared to the realistic Leibgeber; as Walt compared to Vult. On May 19, 1781, Jean Paul was enrolled as a student of theology in Leipzig.

University life

[ 15 ] Conflicting thoughts and feelings waged a fierce battle in Jean Paul's soul when he entered the classrooms of the high school. He had absorbed opinions and views through avid reading; but neither his artistic nor his philosophical imagination wanted to unfold in such a way that what he had absorbed from outside would have taken on a fixed, individual structure. The basic forces of his personality were strong but indeterminate; the energy was great, the creative power sluggish. The impressions he received aroused powerful feelings in him, drove him to make decisive value judgments; but they did not want to form themselves into vivid images and thoughts in his imagination.

[ 16 ] At university, Jean Paul only sought all-round stimulation. As the eldest son of a clergyman, it was part of the family tradition for him to study theology. If the intention of becoming a theologian ever played a role in his life, it did not last long. He wrote to his friend Vogel: "I have made it a rule in my studies to do only what is most pleasant to me, what I am least unskilled at and what I already find useful and consider useful. I have often deceived myself by following this rule, but I have never regretted this mistake. - To study what one does not love is to struggle with disgust, boredom and weariness in order to obtain a good that one does not desire; it is to waste one's powers, which one feels are made for something else, in vain on a thing where one can make no progress, and to withdraw them from the thing in which one would make progress." He lives at the university as a man of spiritual enjoyment who seeks only that which develops his dormant powers. He listens to lectures on St. John by Magister Weber, on the Acts of the Apostles by Morus; on logic, metaphysics and aesthetics by Platner, on morals by Wieland, on mathematics by Gehler; on Latin philology by Rogler. He also read Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Pope, Swift, Young, Cicero, Horace, Ovid and Seneca. The diary pages and studies in which he collects and processes what he has heard and read grow into thick volumes. He developed an almost superhuman capacity for work and a desire to work. He set down his views in essays that reflect his struggle for a free world view, independent of religious and scholarly prejudices.

[ 17 ] The insecurity of his mind, which prevented Jean Paul from finding his own way in the face of the contemplation and appropriation of the foreign, would probably have held him back for a long time from appearing before the public with his attempts at writing if the bitterest poverty had not driven him to the decision: "To write books in order to be able to buy books." Jean Paul did not have time to wait until the bitterness he felt as a Leipzig student about the deplorable state of life and culture had turned into a cheerful, superior sense of humor. Early mature works emerged, satires in which the grumbling, criticizing man and not the poet and philosopher speaks out of Jean Paul. Inspired by Erasmus' "Encomium moriae", he wrote his "Praise of Stupidity" in 1782, for which he was unable to find a publisher, and in the same year the "Greenland Trials", with which he first appeared in public in 1783. When one reads these writings, one has the feeling that here is a man who not only vents his resentment on what he encounters that is wrong, but who painstakingly collects all the weaknesses and dark sides, all the stupidities and foolishness, all the mendacity and cowardice of life in order to pursue them with his wit. The roots through which Jean Paul connected with reality were short and thin. Once he had gained a foothold somewhere, he could easily loosen it again and transplant his roots into other soil. His life was broad, but not deep. This is most evident in his relationship with women. He did not love with the full elemental force of his heart. His love was a game with the sensations of love. He did not love women. He loved love. In 1783 he had a love affair with a beautiful country girl, Sophie Ellrodt in Helmbrechts. One day he wrote to her that her love made him happy; he assured her that her kisses had satisfied the longing that his eyes had aroused in him. But he also writes soon afterwards that he only stayed a little longer in Hof because he wanted to be happy in this place for some time before he would be happy in Leipzig (cf. Paul Nerrlich, Jean Paul, p. 138 £.). As soon as he is in Leipzig, the whole love dream has faded. His later relationships with women were just as playful with the feelings of love, including those with his wife. His love had something ghostly about it; the addition of sensuality and passion had too little elective affinity to the ideal element of his love.

[ 18 ] The insecurity of the mind, the little connection of his being with the real conditions of life made Jean Paul a self-tormentor at times. He just flitted about reality; that is why he often had to go astray and reflect on his own personality. We read of a self-torture that went as far as asceticism in Jean Paul's devotional booklet, which he wrote in 1784. But even this asceticism has something playful about it. It remains stuck in ideal reverie. However profound the individual remarks he writes down about pain, virtue, glory-seeking, anger: one always has the impression that Jean Paul merely wanted to intoxicate himself with the beauty of his rules of life. It was refreshing for him to write down thoughts such as the following: "Hatred is not based on moral ugliness, but on your mood, sensitivity, health; but is it the other's fault that you are ill? ... The offending man, not the offending stone, annoys you; so think of every evil as the effect of a physical cause or as coming from the Creator, who also allowed this concatenation." Who can believe that he is serious about such thoughts, who almost at the same time wrote the "Greenland Trials", in which he wielded his scourge against writing, against clericalism, against ancestral pride in a way that does not betray the fact that he regards the wrongs of life as the effect of a physical cause?

[ 19 ] The bitterest need caused Jean Paul to leave Leipzig like a fugitive on October 27, 1784. He had to secretly evade his creditors. On November 16, he arrived in Hof with his mother, who was also completely impoverished.

Educator and years of travel

[ 20 ] Jean Paul spent two years in Hof surrounded by a housebound mother and the most oppressive family circumstances. Alongside the noisy bustle of his mother, the washing and scrubbing, the cooking and flattening, the whirring of the spinning wheel, he dreamed of his ideals. Only the New Year of 1787 brought partial redemption. He became a tutor to the younger brother of his friend Oerthel in Töpen near Hof. There was at least one person in Chamber Councillor Oerthel's house who was sympathetic to the idealistic dreamer, who had a slight tendency towards sentimentality. It was the woman of the house. Jean Paul remembered her with gratitude throughout his life. Her loving nature made up for some of the things that her husband's rigidity and roughness spoiled for Jean Paul. And even if the boy he had to educate caused the teacher many a worry due to his suspicious character, the latter seems to have clung to his pupil with a certain love, for he later said of the early departed that he had had the most beautiful heart and that the best seeds of virtue and knowledge lay in his head and heart. After two years, Jean Paul left Oerthel's house. We are not informed of the reasons for this departure. Necessity soon forced him to exchange the old schoolmaster's office for a new one. He moved to Schwarzenbach to give elementary lessons to the children of his old friends, the pastor Völkel, the district administrator Clöter and the commissioner Vogel.

[ 21 ] During his time in Hof and Töpen, Jean Paul's need for friendship bore the most beautiful fruit. If Jean Paul lacked the endurance of passion for devoted love, he was made for friendship that lived more in the spiritual element. His friendship with Oerthel and Hermann deepened during this time. And when they were taken from him by death in quick succession, in 1789 and 1790, he erected monuments to them in his soul, the sight of which spurred him on to ever new work throughout his life. The deep glimpses that Jean Paul was granted into the souls of his friends were a powerful stimulus for his poetic creativity. Jean Paul needed to lean on people who were attached to him with all their soul. The urge to transfer his feelings and ideas directly into another human soul was great. He could consider it fortunate that shortly after Oerthel and Hermann had passed away, another friend surrendered to him in loyal love. It was Christian Otto who, from 1790 until Jean Paul's death, lived through his intellectual life with selfless sympathy.

[ 22 ] Jean Paul himself describes how he spent the period from 1783 to 1790. "I enjoyed the most beautiful things in life, autumn, summer and spring with their landscapes on earth and in the sky, but I had nothing to eat or wear and remained anemic and little respected in Hof im Voigtlande." It was during this time that his "Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren nebst einem notwendigen Aviso vom Juden Mendel" was written. In this book, the creative satirist appears alongside the polemicist. The criticism has partly been transformed into narrative. People appear instead of the earlier abstract ideas. But what is still laboriously struggling for embodiment here emerges in a more perfect form in the three stories written in 1790: "Des Amtsvogts Freudel Klaglibell gegen seinen verfluchten Dämon"; "Des Rektors Fälbel und seiner Primaner Reise nach dem Fichtelberg" and in the "Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterleins Maria Wuz in Auenthal". In these three poems, Jean Paul succeeds in drawing characters in which humanity becomes caricature. Freudel, Fälbel and Wuz appear as if Jean Paul were looking at his ideal image of man in mirrors, which make all the features appear diminished and distorted. But in doing so, he creates afterimages of reality. Freudel depicts the t'ypus of man, who at moments when he needs the greatest seriousness and solemn dignity becomes ridiculous through the trickery of his absent-mindedness or chance. Another kind of human caricature, which judges the whole world from the narrowest perspective of its own profession, is characterized in Fälbel. A schoolmaster who believes that the great French social upheaval would have been impossible if the revolutionary heroes had commented on the old classics instead of reading the evil philosophers. The Auenthal schoolmaster Maria Wuz is a wonderful picture of stunted humanity. In his village idyll, he lives human life on a microscopic scale, but he is as happy and content as none of the greatest sages can be.

[ 23 ] It is difficult to decide whether Jean Paul was a good schoolmaster. If he was able to follow the principles he wrote in his diaries, then he certainly turned his pupils into what they were capable of becoming. But schoolmastering was certainly more fruitful for him than for his pupils. For he gained deep insights into young human nature, which led him to the great pedagogical ideas that he later developed in his "Levana". However, he would hardly have been able to endure the confines of the office for three years if he had not found in his visits to Hof a conductor that was entirely in keeping with his nature. He was a connoisseur of the intellectual pleasures that arise from relationships with talented and excitable people. In Hof, he was always surrounded by a crowd of young girls who swarmed around him and stimulated his imagination. He regarded them as his "erotic academy". He fell in love, as far as he could love, with each of the academy girls, and the intoxication of one love affair had not yet faded when another began.

[ 24 ] This mood gave rise to the two novels "The Invisible Lodge" and "Hesperus". Gustav, the main character of the "Invisible Lodge", is a nature like Wuz, who only outgrows Wuz's existence and is forced to allow his tender heart, which could be content in a narrowly defined circle, to be tortured by harsh reality. The contrast between ideal sensuality and what is really valid in life forms the basic motif of the novel. And this motif becomes Jean Paul's great problem in life. It appears in ever new forms in his creations. In "The Invisible Lodge", the ideal sensuality has the character of a deep emotionalism that tends towards sentimentalism; in "Hesperus" it takes on a more rational form. The protagonist, Viktor, no longer merely raves with his heart like Gustav, but also with his mind and reason. Viktor actively intervenes in the circumstances of life, while Gustav passively allows them to affect him. The feeling that runs through both novels is this: the world is not made for good and great people. They have to retreat to an ideal island within themselves and lead an existence outside and above the world in order to make do with its wretchedness. The great man with a noble nature, a brilliant mind and an energetic will, who weeps or laughs at the world, but never draws a sense of satisfaction from it, is one of the extremes between which all Jean Paul's characters are to be placed. The other is the small, narrow-minded person with a subaltern attitude, who is content with the world because his empty mind does not conjure up dreams of a greater one. The figure of Quintus Fixlein in the 1794 story "Life of Quintus Fixlein drawn from fifteen boxes of notes" approaches the latter extreme; the following poem "Jean Paul's biographical amusements under the brainpan of a giantess", written in the same year, approaches the former. Fixlein is happy with modest plans for the future and the most petty scholarly work; Lismore, the main character of the "Amusements", suffers from the disharmony of his energetic will and weaker ability and from the other between his idealistically lofty ideas of human nature and those of his fellow human beings. The struggle that arises when a strong will that transcends the boundaries of reality and a human attitude that grows out of the limited conditions of a petty existence collide was depicted by Jean Paul in the book "Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornenstücke oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs im Reichsmarktflecken Kuhschnappel" (Pieces of Flowers, Fruit and Thorns or the Marriage, Death and Wedding of the Poor Lawyer F. St. Siebenkäs in the Imperial Market Town of Kuhschnappel), published at Easter 1795. There are two people here who, because of their higher nature, do not know how to come to terms with the world. One, Siebenkäs, believes in a higher existence and suffers from the fact that this cannot be found in the world; the other, Leibgeber, sees through the nothingness of the world, but does not believe in the possibility of any kind of better. He is a humorist who thinks nothing of life and laughs at reality; but at the same time he is a cynic who cares nothing for higher things and considers all idealistic dreams to be bubbles of foam that rise from the muck of vulgarity as a haze to the scorn of humanity. Siebenkäs suffers at the hands of his wife Lenette, in whom philistine, narrow-minded reality is embodied; and Leibgeber suffers from his faithlessness and hopelessness. But he always rises above it with humor. He demands nothing extraordinary from life; that is why his disappointments are not great and why he does not consider it necessary to make higher demands of himself.

[ 25 ] Even before finishing "Hesperus", Jean Paul had swapped his teaching and educational work in Schwarzenbach for one in Hof. In the summer of 1796, he undertook a trip to Weimar. Like the heroes of his novels in the midst of a reality that did not satisfy them, Jean Paul felt at home in the city of muses. In his opinion, everything that reality could contain in terms of grandeur and sublimity should have been crowded together in this small town. He had hoped to meet giants and titans of spirit and imagination, as he had imagined them in his dreams to the point of superhumanity. And he did find geniuses, but only human beings. He was not attracted to either Goethe or Schiller. Both had already made their peace with the world at that time; both had realized the great world harmony that allows man to make peace with reality after a long struggle. Jean Paul was not allowed to find this peace. His soul was made for the lust of the struggle between ideal and reality. Goethe seemed to him stiff, cold, proud, frozen against all men; Schiller rock-faced and hard, so that foreign enthusiasm bounced off him. Only with Herder did a beautiful bond of friendship develop. The theologian, who sought salvation beyond the real world, could be a comrade to Jean Paul, but not the worldlings Goethe and Schiller, the idolizers of the real. Jean Paul felt the same way about Jacobi, the philosophical fisherman in the murky waters, as he did about Herder. Understanding and reason penetrate reality and illuminate it with the light of the idea; feeling clings to the dark, the unrecognizable, to the world of faith. And Jacobi reveled in the world of faith, as did Jean Paul. This trait of his spirit won him the hearts of women. Karoline Herder raved about the poet of sentimentality, and Charlotte von Kalb admired in him the ideal of a man.

[ 26 ] After his return from Weimar, Jean Paul's poetry lost itself completely in the vagueness of emotional indulgence and in an unworldly way of thinking and attitude in "Jubelsenior" and "Kampanerthal oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele" (1797). If the journey to Weimar had not strengthened his eyes for an unbiased contemplation of life, the varied wanderings that lasted from 1797 to 1804 did even less. He now lived successively in Leipzig, Weimar, Berlin, Meiningen and Koburg. Everywhere he established relationships with people, especially with women; everywhere he was welcomed with open arms. People were intoxicated by his ideas, which flowed from the depths of the emotional world. But the attraction they exerted on him soon wore off. He wrapped thick tentacles around the people he got to know, but soon drew these arms in again. In Weimar, Jean Paul spent happy days in the company of Frau von Kalb, Duchess Amalia, Knebel, Böttiger and others; in Hildburghausen, he carried his love game so far that he became engaged to Caroline von Feuchtersleben, only to part with her again soon afterwards. From Berlin he fetched the woman who really became his wife, Karoline, the second daughter of the senior tribunal councillor Maier. He entered into a marriage with her, which initially lifted him to the highest heights of happiness that a man can climb, and from which all happiness then disappeared to such an extent that Jean Paul only held on to her out of duty and Karoline endured it with submission and self-emptying. On her union with Jean Paul, this woman wrote to her father: "I never thought I would be as happy as I am. It will sound strange to you when I tell you that the high enthusiasm which carried me away when I met Richter, but which subsequently faded away as I descended into a more real life, is revived anew every day." And in July 1820, she confessed that she no longer had any right to his heart, that she felt poor and miserable in comparison to him.

[ 27 ] In Meiningen and Koburg, Jean Paul was able to get to know the peaks from which the world is ruled. The dukes in both places were on the most friendly terms with him. He was not to be missed at any court festival. Anyone seeking intellectual entertainment and stimulation joined him.

[ 28 ] Jean Paul's two most important poems, "Titan" and "Flegeljahre", were written during his years of wandering. His poetic power appears heightened, his imagination works in sharper outlines in these works. The characters are similar to those we encounter in his earlier works, but the artist has gained greater confidence in drawing and more vivid colors. He has also descended from depicting the outside of people into the depths of their souls. While Siebenkäs, Wuz and Fälbel appear like silhouettes, the Albano and Schoppe of the "Titan", the Walt and Vult of the "Flegeljahre" appear as perfectly painted figures. Albano is the man of strong will. He wants great things without asking where the strength to achieve them will come from. He has an addiction to breaking all the shackles of humanity. Unfortunately, it is precisely this humanity that is confined within narrow limits. A soft heart, an over-sensitive sensibility blunt the power of his imagination. He is unable to truly love either the rapturous Liana, with her fine nerves and boundless selflessness, or the ingenious, free-spirited Linda. He cannot love at all because his ideals make him demand more from love than it can offer. Linda wants devotion and nothing but devotion from Albano; but he thinks that he must first win her love through great deeds, through participation in the great war of freedom. He first wants to acquire what he could easily have. Reality in itself is nothing to him; only when he can combine an ideal with it does it become something to him. In view of the great works of art in Rome, it is not the secrets of art that open up to him, but his thirst for action awakens. "How in Rome a person can only enjoy and melt softly in the fire of art, instead of being ashamed and struggling for strength and action," he does not understand. But in the end this 'thirst for action only finds nourishment in the fact that it turns out that Albano is a prince's son and that the throne is his by inheritance. And his need for love is satisfied by the narrow-minded Idoine, who is devoid of any higher impetus. Opposite Albano is Schoppe, who is a body giver in a heightened form. He gives no thought to the nothingness of the world, for he knows that it cannot be otherwise. Life seems worthless to him; nothing has value for him but personal freedom and boundless independence. Only one struggle could have value for him, that for the unconditional freedom of the individual. He derides all other activities. Nothing frightens him more than his own ego. Everything else does not seem worth thinking about to him, not worth enthusiasm and not worth hatred; but he fears his ego. It is the only great mystery that haunts him. In the end, it drives him mad because it haunts him as a single being in the midst of an eerie void.

[ 29 ] Something of this fear of the ego lived in Jean Paul himself. It was an uncanny thought for him to descend into the depths of the mind and see how the human ego is at work to produce all that springs forth from the personality. That is why he hated the philosopher who had shown this ego in its nakedness, Fichte. He mocked him in his "Clavis Fichtiana seu Leibgeberiana" (1801).

[ 30 ] And Jean Paul had reason to shy away from looking into his innermost self. For in it, two egos engaged in a dialog that sometimes drove him to despair. There was the ego with the golden dreams of a higher world order, which mourned over the mean reality and consumed itself in sentimental devotion to an indefinite beyond; and there was the second ego, which mocked the first for its rapture, knowing full well that the indefinite ideal world could never be reached by any reality. The first ego lifted Jean Paul above reality into the world of his ideals; the second was his practical advisor, reminding him again and again that he who wants to live must come to terms with the conditions of life. He divided these two natures in his own personality between two people, the twin brothers Walt and Vult, and portrayed their mutual relationship in the "Flegeljahre". How little Jean Paul's idealism is rooted in reality is best shown in the introduction to the novel. It is not the concatenations of life that are supposed to make the enthusiast Walt a useful person for reality, but the arbitrariness of an eccentric who has bequeathed his entire fortune to the imaginative youth, but on condition that various practical obligations are imposed on him. Any failure to fulfill these practical obligations immediately results in the loss of part of the inheritance. Walt is only able to find his way through life's tasks with the help of his brother Vult. Vult attacks everything he starts with rough hands and a strong sense of reality. The two brothers' natures first complement each other for a while in a beautifully harmonious endeavor, only to separate later on. This conclusion again points to Jean Paul's own nature. Only temporarily did his two natures create a harmonious whole; time and again he suffered from their divergence, from their irreconcilable opposition.

[ 31 ] Never again did Jean Paul succeed in expressing with such perfection what moved him most deeply in poetry as in the "Flegeljahre". In 1803, he began to record the philosophical thoughts he had formed about art over the course of his life. This gave rise to his "Preliminary School of Aesthetics". These thoughts are bold and shed a bright light on the nature of art and artistic creation. They are the intuitions of a man who had experienced all the secrets of this creation in his own production. What the enjoyer draws from the work of art, what the creator puts into it: it is said here with infinite beauty. The psychology of humor is revealed in the most profound way: the hovering of the humorist in the spheres of the sublime, his laughter at reality, which has so little of this sublime, and the seriousness of this laughter, which only does not weep at the imperfections of life because it stems from human greatness.

[ 32 ] Jean Paul's ideas on education, which he set down in his "Levana" (1806), are no less significant. His sense of the ideal benefits this work more than any other. Only the educator really deserves to be an idealist. He is all the more fruitful the more he believes in the unknown in human nature. Every pupil should be a riddle for the educator to solve. The real, the educated should only serve him to discover the possible, the yet-to-be-formed. What we often feel to be a shortcoming in Jean Paul the poet, that he does not succeed in finding harmony between what he wants with his characters and what they really are: in Jean Paul, the teacher of the art of education, this is a great trait. And the sense for human weaknesses, which made him a satirist and humorist, enabled him to give the educator significant hints to counteract these weaknesses.

Bayreuth

[ 33 ] In 1804, Jean Paul moved to Bayreuth to make this town his permanent residence until the end of his life. He felt happy again to see the mountains of his homeland around him and to pursue his poetic dreams in quiet, small circumstances. He no longer created anything as perfect as the "Titan", the "Flegeljahre", the "Vorschule" and the "Levana", although his 'urge to be active took on a feverish character. Upsets about contemporary events, about the miserable state of the German Reich, an inner nervous restlessness that drove him to travel again and again, interrupted the regular course of his life. Half an hour away from Bayreuth, he had made himself a quiet home for a while in the house of Mrs. Rollwenzel, who cared for him like a mother and had made him famous. He needed the change of location in order to be able to create. While it was initially enough for him to leave his family home for hours every day and make the "Rollwenzelei" the scene of his work, this also changed later on. He traveled to various places: Erlangen (1811), Nuremberg (1812), Regensburg (1816), Heidelberg (1817), Frankfurt (1818), Stuttgart, Löbichau (1819), Munich (1820). In Nuremberg he had the pleasure of getting to know his beloved Jacobi, with whom he had previously only written, in person. In Heidelberg, his genius was celebrated by young and old alike. In Stuttgart, he became close to Duke Wilhelm von Württemberg and his talented wife. In Löbichau, he spent the most beautiful days in the house of Duchess Dorothea of Courland. He was surrounded by a society of exquisite women, so that he felt as if he were on a romantic island.

[ 34 ] The fascinating influence that Jean Paul exerted on women, which was evident in Karoline Herder and Charlotte von Kalb and many others, led to a tragedy in 1813. Maria Lux, the daughter of a republican from Mainz who had played a role in the Charlotte Corday catastrophe, fell passionately in love with Jean Paul's writings, which soon turned into an ardent love for the poet she did not know personally. The unhappy girl was dismayed when she saw that her feeling of admiration for the genius was turning more and more stormily into a passionate affection for the man, and gave herself up to death. Sophie Paulus' affection in Heidelberg made a deeply moving impression, if not an equally shattering one. In constant vacillation between moods of fiery love and admirable renunciation and self-control, this girl consumes herself until, at the age of twenty-five and unsure of herself, she offers her hand to the old A. W. Schlegel in a union that is soon shattered by the conflicting natures.

[ 35 ] The cheerful superiority that enabled him to create humorous images of life left Jean Paul completely in Bayreuth. What he still produces has a more serious tone. He is still unable to create characters who lead an existence appropriate to the ideal human nature he has in mind, but he does create characters who have made their peace with reality. Self-satisfied characters are Katzenberger in "Katzenbergers Badereise" (1808) and Fibel in "Leben Fibels" (1811). Fibel is happy, despite the fact that he only manages to write a modest book, and Katzenberger is happy in his study of abortions. Both are distorted images of humanity, but there is no reason to mock them, nor, as with Wuz, to look at their limited happiness with emotion. Schmelzle's "Des Feldprediger Schmelzles Reise nach Flätz", which was written before them (1807), differs from them. Fibel and Katzenberger are content in their indifferent, meaningless existence; Schmelzle is a discontented hare's foot who is afraid of imaginary dangers. But even in this poem there is nothing more of Jean Paul's great problem, of the clash between the ideal, fantastic dream world and actual reality. Nor is there any sense of a struggle between the two worlds in Jean Paul's last great poem, the "Comet", on which he worked for many years (1815 to 1820). Nikolaus Marggraf wants to make the world happy. His plans are indeed fantastic. But he never felt that they were just a dream. He believes in himself and his ideals and is happy in this belief. Essays written with reference to the political situation in Germany and those in which Jean Paul discusses general questions of science and life were written between the larger works. Some of them are collected in "Herbstblumine" (1810, 1815, 1820) and in his "Museum" (1812). The poet appears as a patriot in his "Freiheitsbüchlein" (1805), in the "Friedenspredigt" (1808) and in the "Dämmerungen für Deutschland" (1809).

[ 36 ] During his time in Bayreuth, Jean Paul's humorous mood increasingly gave way to one that took the world and people as they were, even though he only saw imperfections and small things everywhere. He is disgruntled about reality, but he bears the disgruntlement.

[ 37 ] The great humorist was not granted a cheerful old age. Three years before his end, he had to watch his son Max die, with whom he laid to rest a wealth of hopes for the future and most of his personal happiness. An eye ailment that afflicted the poet worsened in his last years until he became completely blind. The old man, who could no longer see the outside world, now immersed himself completely within himself. He now lived the life he thought no longer belonged to this world, even before death, and from the treasure trove of these inner experiences he drew the thoughts for his "Selina" or "On the Immortality of the Soul", in which he speaks like a transfigured person and believes he really sees what he has dreamed of all his life. Jean Paul died on November 14, 1825. "Selina" was not published until after his death.

Today I would have liked to be able to lecture on a theme going beyond the events of the moment, and I hope that will be fully the case with tomorrow's lecture, which will begin at seven o'clock. For today, however, I still feel the need to say a few things that relate not only to the letter I had to read yesterday, but also to the very gracious letter from the members that Mr. Bauer has just delivered to me and to still another letter I have received. This is especially necessary now that the things discussed in these letters have come to pass. What I have to say will relate to the matter at hand only to the extent that this particular case can show us all kinds of things we need to know about the relationship of the details of what is going on among and around us to our spiritual movement with its teachings, for in discussing specific occurrences, it is often possible to discover something of universal importance.

I will start from the fact—speaking more or less aphoristically—that I read you a letter yesterday that was signed by two members of the Society and mentioned a third member of long standing.

I believe I will not be committing an indiscretion in telling you about a letter that Mr. Bauer showed me just fifteen minutes ago, a letter written by a Society member who is a physician.¹ The writer is quite rightly of the opinion, as I myself was yesterday, not only after but during the reading of Mr. Goesch's letter, that we are not dealing with anything logical but with something that has to be considered from the point of view of pathology.

Obviously, this is one of the many assumptions we can make in this instance, but in my opinion—and this is simply my personal opinion and should not be considered binding on anyone else—this assumption would be incomplete if we do not also ask whether we are allowed to tolerate the fact that our Society and our entire movement are constantly being endangered by all kinds of pathological cases. Are we to tolerate psychopaths who are destroying our spiritual-scientific activity? Yes, to the extent that we can have compassion for them. However, if we tolerate them without fully taking their pathological nature into account, we allow them to constantly endanger everything that is most precious and most important to us. Of course, we need to be clear that we are dealing with psychopaths, but we must also be clear about what we have to do so that our cause is not jeopardized. Even things we recognize as being caused by illness have to be dealt with appropriately in real life. Of course, how this applies to the personalities in question is a totally separate issue.

As you have seen from many things we have had to discuss over the course of time, there is a certain recurrent experience that is unavoidable in a spiritual movement such as ours: Personal interests and personal vanity inevitably get mixed up with our purely objective aspirations. This need not even be taken as a reproach, strictly speaking; after all, we are all human. But it does need to be mentioned, and I am simply stating my personal opinion on the subject; of course, you are not bound by my opinion. When people are willing to admit that they are subject to vanity in certain areas and that for the time being (perhaps for reasons having to do with their upbringing and so on) they have no particular interest in getting rid of that vanity, that is a much lesser evil than wanting to be absolutely perfect at any given moment. The greatest evil, so it seems, is when people want to believe in their own perfection in every instance, when they want to believe that they are doing whatever they are doing for totally selfless reasons, and so forth.

The greatest temptation faced by any spiritual movement such as ours is the very pronounced vanity that comes into play simply because such movements must necessarily have great and noble aims that can be realized only gradually, and not all of us can immediately broaden our interests to include the objective requirements of our cause. It is understandable enough that when some people first hear about reincarnation, they take an immediate personal interest in finding out about their own previous incarnations for reasons of personal vanity. Looking into history for this reason is the worst possible way to investigate previous incarnations, but that is what most people do out of personal vanity. Thus, instead of being an inner path of meditation, historical events or the Old and New Testaments become a treasure trove for the gratification of personal vanity. Simply put, it is nothing more than that. And it is good to be aware that looking for one's own incarnations in history or in the Bible is basically nothing more than personal vanity.

It is understandable that this kind of vanity should come into play. The trouble starts, however, when vanity is not recognized as such, and when instead of examining their deep-seated ambitious motives calmly, people shroud them in a mantle of occultism or let them merge into some nebulous mysticism.

Concerning certain things that prevail with some justification outside the confines of a spiritual movement, the movement must make a point of approaching them from the perspective of a much more elevated morality than is the norm. However, we must never disregard the possibility that a lot of what we consider higher morality may be nothing of the sort, but simply an outlet for our own drives and instincts. From the kinds of discussions we have been through before, you can see how people can have perfectly legitimate human instincts and drives, but let them get mixed up with all sorts of occult embellishments. They may even console themselves for the existence of these drives and instincts with all sorts of deceptively rational explanations. It would be much better if they would simply admit these drives exist and apply their esoteric schooling to understanding them.

I read Mr. Goesch's letter to you; you all heard it and followed what was going on. What I am going to say about it today is simply my personal, non-binding opinion. Among other things, it was stated in this letter: "I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe these insights—which I achieved under the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style… in the ideal form I had envisioned.”

We all know that Miss Sprengel is the keeper of the seal and that Mr. Goesch is the one who wrote the letter. I think if any French-speaking people were to read this letter and apply the old French proverb “cherchez la femme,” they would be quite right, in spite of the fact that “keeper of the seal” is a masculine noun in German. In fact, if you apply the principle of “cherchez la femme,” much of what is talked about in this letter becomes more understandable.

I still need to express my own personal opinion about some of the details in this letter. For instance, in this letter it is suggested that it is impossible to imagine that so-called lessons of the esoteric school could be held within our Society after all that has happened. I read that passage yesterday. It suggests that because of all the “crimes” the letter describes, lessons of the esoteric school could no longer be held.

We must look at these things, too, in the right light and not hesitate to look at them closely. As you know, we temporarily discontinued these esoteric lessons when the war broke out, and anyone who bothers to look at these things carefully will realize that this is due to nothing other than the present circumstances of the war.² These lessons are not being given anymore so as not to do our Society a disservice.

There are only two possibilities these days. One is to act in the best interests of the Society, which means that regardless of whether we live in a nation at war or a neutral country, we must refrain from holding meetings that are not open to the public. Just imagine what could happen, and what a windfall it would be for people who go around making insinuations, if we were to hold secret meetings behind locked doors. Obviously, we must not do that, and Society members will have to resign themselves to doing without these lessons. It is as clear as day that we cannot have meetings between members from different countries going on behind locked doors, which is not to say that anything unacceptable would be happening there. As far as we are concerned, such meetings could happen on a daily basis as a matter of course. But you know how strong the opposition to our movement is. This must also be taken into account, and we must not endanger the whole movement by doing anything stupid or foolish. That's why we must give up holding closed meetings—they would simply open the door to that modern illness known as “spy-itis.”

The other possibility, which is totally out of the question, would be to separate the members according to nationality in order to speak to them. That is obviously not in line with the purpose of our Society.

I hope you have realized by now that this measure was taken because the war made it necessary; it will be rescinded as soon as the war is over, as you could all have worked out for yourselves.
I must still mention a few more thoughts in connection with this measure. We cannot simply assume that all the people out there are so decent and respectable that they will assume that we, too, are only capable of decent and respectable actions. We cannot expect them to be concerned about us and about finding out what we are doing. They have no way of knowing whether or not we are doing something they would consider unacceptable. That is what stands behind taking measures like this. It is impossible to count on the outside world making positive assumptions about us, but we really ought to be able to count on this within the Society itself.

In recent months, not only in this letter but in all the events leading up to it, we have repeatedly heard the opinion—coming from people whose aspirations are expressed in this letter—that the lessons of the esoteric school have been stopped not because of the war but because the Society has assumed a form that makes it necessary for such lessons to stop altogether. After all, given the “crimes” that have been committed, it can no longer be assumed that people will have the requisite trust in such lessons. This means nothing less than that we have to expect that certain measures we take within the Society will be judged in a way that can no longer be considered a decent or respectable interpretation. This interpretation is absolutely inadmissible; it is real slander and cannot be excused as a simple mistake.

Legally speaking, it is no different from libel, and it is even more worrisome when the rumors being spread are veiled in all kinds of mystical disguises. The way such things are passed around is often much more disastrous than people imagine, although I wouldn't go so far as to endorse the point of view of this letter-writer and claim that rumors whispered from one person to another must necessarily make use of black magic. That is not what I mean. Spreading rumors can be accomplished by quite natural means and does not necessarily imply any talent for black magic.

Let me emphasize once again before I continue that what I am saying is my own opinion, not to be taken as binding on anyone else.

In the letter in question, there was much talk of how people are supposed to have been unduly influenced through me. I will not comment on the contradiction inherent in this—on the one hand, my friendly conversations and handshakes are interpreted as techniques of black magic, and on the other hand I am blamed for not seeking closer relationships with members. On the one hand it is stated that I cut myself off from the members and don't do enough for them, but on the other hand I am supposed to have used each and every conversation and handshake to influence people against their will.

We need to understand how such a contradiction can come about. For instance, someone may desire something—let's take the case of a person who wants to have been the Virgin Mary in a previous incarnation. This is a real example, not a made-up one. Suppose the person in question comes and makes me aware of this. If I were to say, “Yes, yes, my occult research confirms that,” then that person would most likely not take this remark as an instance of undue influence. If what people are told corresponds to their desires, they are extremely unlikely to interpret it as an attempt to influence them unjustifiably. Now, self-deception and vanity are not usually taken to such an extreme that people imagine themselves having gone through this particular previous incarnation—they are more likely to choose something else, but the principle involved is what we need to consider at this point.

At this stage of human evolution, the autonomy of individual souls must be respected in the most painstaking way. Basically, people who think like the person who composed this letter do not have a viable idea of this painstaking kind of respect. After all, the writer of this letter would have found it pleasant to have been influenced in line with his own desires, and he wished for much more personal discussion. Suppose he and I had actually discussed all kinds of stuff, and also exchanged handshakes. On the one hand, that would have been exactly what he wanted, and on the other hand, the terrible crime he mentions would have been committed against him. As I said, most people have no idea of the painstaking regard for individual freedom that has to be the rule in a movement like ours. We must make an intense effort to preserve the autonomy of individual souls.

Let's imagine people coming to us with relatively mild cases of incarnational vanity. If we agreed with them, they would surely not go on complaining about being unduly influenced. But suppose we said to them, “Don't be silly; never in all your previous lives were you any such person!” If we are being very precise about it, that would have to be considered an unjustified intervention in these people's inner being, although perhaps not a very serious one.

Let's look at this instance with all possible clarity. If people come to us and tell us who they think they were in an earlier incarnation, regardless of whether they have come to this conclusion out of vanity or out of something else, they have arrived at it themselves, out of their own individual souls. This is where their own soul's paths have led them. And it belongs to the fundamental nature of our movement to lead people further, if possible, starting from whatever point they have arrived at inwardly when they come to us, but not to break their heart and will at some particular moment. If in such a moment we simply make an end of the matter by saying, “Don't be ridiculous; that's nonsense,” that is not an appropriate response. It actually would be an unjustified intervention if we permitted ourselves to speak like this, and these people would have no option but to extend us their confidence in a very personal way not appropriate to the situation, which, as we shall soon see, requires a totally different kind of confidence.

Instead, we should really say something along the lines of, “Well, as things stand now, this thought is something you have arrived at in your own soul. Try to make this thought carry over into real life; try to live as if it were true. See if you can actually do what you would be able to do, and if what happens is what would have to happen if it were true.” An answer like this helps them arrive quite logically at how things really are. It truly preserves their personal freedom without cutting anything off short, no matter how erroneous a path they may have been on until now. It is important to realize that refraining from influencing other souls is actually a very deep issue.

If they stick to the facts, people who share the opinions expressed in this letter will also not be able to maintain that any individuals in this Society have been particularly spoiled by me when it comes to having their previous incarnations made known. Please take what I have just said extremely seriously: It is not adequate to have some clumsy idea of what it means to influence or not influence others; in this day and age, if we always try to respect the freedom and dignity of others, the standards we must apply will be extremely difficult to live up to.

I have always consciously cultivated this sort of respect for the souls of others within our Society, to the extent that, in my attempt to preserve individual freedom, I have made a habit of speaking much less affirmatively or negatively than most people probably would. I have always tried to say only what would enable the person in question to come to independent conclusions on the matter, without acting on my authority. I have tried to eliminate personal authority as a factor by simply advising people to take certain things into account. This is something I have always made a conscious effort to foster.

I hope you will also realize that the misconceptions set down in this letter are not even among the strangest ones that can come about. It has happened more than once that people showed up at a lecture cycle somewhere or other, saying that it was Dr. Steiner's expressed wish that they attend. That has happened many times. If you look into it a bit, you will find that the people in question had told me of their plans to attend the series and, since I am always heartily pleased to meet members again in different places, I had told them I was very glad. In many cases, however, what I said was so changed in the minds of the people in question that by the next day they were saying that it was my particular wish that they attend this course. This is another instance of these strange misconceptions.

Many of our friends want nothing more than to be told what to do, but I have always tried to conduct myself so the members would notice that it would not occur to me to want to give people personal advice about how to manage their everyday life. I am far from wanting to influence them in things like whether or not they should attend a certain lecture cycle. From my perspective, the thing people most often want me to do and that I have to resist most strongly is to influence them personally in details like this. I never want to do that and always have to refuse. Within a society such as ours should be, it is necessary to refrain from that kind of thing.

All of this relates to something else that needs to be stated once just as a matter of principle. Anyone who observes how I try to work will realize that I always attempt to let the matter at hand speak for itself. And that brings me to the issue of confidence, as I would like to call it. I would really like to ask you members to duly consider whether I have ever done anything with regard to either an individual or the Society as a whole to encourage confidence of a personal nature in myself. Try to think about this and come to a conclusion on the basis of how I hold my lectures.

Let us consider an obvious case. You were all so kind as to show up for the lecture I held two days ago on various mathematical and geometrical ideas.³ In the course of this lecture, I told you that from a certain spiritual scientific perspective, matter is nothing; matter as we know it is a hole in space. There is nothing there where matter is. However, I do not want you to simply take this statement on faith; I am far from wanting anyone to take these teachings on faith simply because they come from me. Instead, I try to show how modern science, including its most advanced and respected representatives, can arrive at the same insight as spiritual science. I tried to demonstrate an objective basis in fact, a basis that is also revealed by the results of scientific research, regardless of my own personal way of arriving at this discovery and quite apart from the fact that I am the one telling you about it.

I make a point of doing this so you will not need personal faith in me, but will be able to do without it and see how I try to let the subject, no matter how difficult, speak for itself.

I am sorry to have to present the issue of confidence to you like this; I would have preferred for you to see for yourself that all my efforts are directed toward making confidence in a particular personality unnecessary. The only kind of confidence that comes into question here at all would be the kind enabling you to say, “He is really making an effort to not simply lecture us on some kind of inspired insights; he is really trying to get everything together in one place so that things can be assessed on their own merit, independent of his personality.” Of course, this is not to say that I always succeed in “getting everything together in one place”—first of all, there isn't enough time for that, and secondly it is the nature of things to remain incomplete. My method, however, does tend in the direction of eliminating rather than encouraging faith in me personally. That is how we have to look at this issue of confidence in a spiritual movement. That is what is important to me, but in this, too, I am only expressing my personal opinion.

Admittedly, we must also recognize a certain perspective that tends to make everything relative, since in general it is true that everything should be subject to legitimate criticism. And it is certainly true that everyone should have the right to criticize where criticism is justified. On the other hand, this business of criticizing must also be taken relatively. Just think, the amount of work we can do is limited by time and cannot be extended in just any direction according to the whims of others. In view of that, you will realize that some of Mr. Goesch's ideas have not been thought through in terms of real life.

As I have often pointed out and can state quite openly, I would not venture to speak about certain things if I had not lived and worked with them for decades and become familiar with them over the course of a long life. For example, I would never have spoken about Faust if I had not lived my way into it over decades of intense involvement with the subject.⁴ Having done so, however, it is a real waste of time for me, as you can imagine, if someone who has not put anywhere near that kind of effort into it comes and wants to argue certain points with me. You really cannot ask that of me or of anyone else. Someone once wrote a letter to the poet Hamerling on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, addressing him as “Dear old man”; Hamerling was somewhat taken aback, needless to say.⁵ Now, I am over fifty already, but I think you will admit that my task demands a certain amount of time and will understand that I do not need to spend time debating with people about things I was already concerned with when those people were still in diapers. In the abstract, getting involved in such discussions may be the right thing to do, but it is not usually very fruitful, especially when it has to do with things like the contents of this letter. I really have to say that. It is quite a different thing when someone speaks out of age and experience than when some young upstart talks about it. That is simply a fact of life.

And then, just think about the blatant contradictions in this letter. You don't have to think as I do, but I do want to tell you what I think about it. One sentence reads: “Alongside the work dedicated to the good within your activity in our spiritual movement, I have noticed certain behaviors…,” and so on. In conjunction with this sentence, the writer lists a large number of undertakings that I would not presume to mention myself if they weren't listed here, since I would have to admit that everything on this list has been done imperfectly at best. I have always emphasized, for instance, that the Johannesbau represents only the beginning of what ought to be done. Even so, people do not seem to be able to understand that I might have to limit what I take on, that I cannot, in addition to all these activities, take the time to cultivate all the relationships dreamed up by the writer of this letter. It is really taking things too lightly to imagine that I can possibly do both.

I am reluctant to put it like this, and I ask you to recognize my reluctance, but in order to do all that I would really have to ask the person who composed this letter to make each year twice as long. Barring that, I have to be permitted to organize my own activity as I see fit, which, however, in no way limits what other people want and can do. That, in fact, has been the goal of all my efforts—that each person should do what he or she wants without anyone asking them to do anything other than what they want to do. In that case, however, I must also be granted the right to limit what I recognize as my own task. In most cases, it is just those people who do not want to get involved in any concrete tasks and do not want to develop their will to serve concrete purposes who are most involved in criticizing what has already been accomplished.⁶

However, this is not a constructive attitude in real life. People who are not in agreement with an association as it already exists are welcome to stay out of it, and to do whatever they are in agreement with. It is much easier, though, to become part of some society and criticize it from within than to do something on your own initiative. Finding fault is easy, but it in no way determines or restricts what you yourself can accomplish. Knowing what ought to happen and that someone else is doing something badly is never the crucial factor, but what is crucial is the effort someone makes to actually carry out what one talks about and is able to do. It is also not crucial that other people carry out what I want to have happen—they can take it up or leave it; their freedom is limited, not by me, but only by what they believe themselves able to accomplish. They must simply develop the will to carry out what lies within their own capabilities.

When this Society of ours was in the beginning stages, I believed it could be a prime example of this last-stated principle. It is the greatest failing of this day and age that people always want a tremendous amount but do not actually manage to do anything. Well, that is understandable enough. You see, anyone who has acquired knowledge and capability in any particular field and works with what has been learned knows that what one can actually accomplish is really terribly little. People who have had to develop their abilities are the most aware of how little can actually be done, while those who can do very little or have not yet tested their abilities think they can accomplish the most. That is why programs are more visible nowadays than accomplished facts; programs are floating around all over the place. It is extremely easy to set down in abstract terms what we hope to achieve through socialism, theosophy, the women's movement, community with others, and so on. It's easy to develop ingenious and appropriate programs. But people who have done something positive, even within extremely limited circles, have actually accomplished much more than the ones who put out the greatest programs for all the world to see. My friends, we must realize that what counts is what actually gets done. It would be best if we would more or less keep our programs locked up in a secret chamber in our hearts and only use them as guidelines for our individual lives.

Of course, it is very easy to misunderstand a movement like ours. Yesterday, I pointed out that we have to accept misunderstanding as a matter of course and spoke about how we should relate to misunderstanding on the part of people outside the movement who are not only unsparing in their criticism—their criticism would actually be a good thing—but unsparing with slander and false accusations as well. A significant amount has been accomplished in this regard over the course of the years. Especially in the area of slander and disparagement much has been achieved; yet the steps necessary to fend them off have not been taken. It is really necessary that the most intimate attributes of a spiritual movement like ours spread within our Society.

Something I always advocate and repeatedly mention because it is obviously part of my task is the fact that what I can mean to another person must be determined only by the spiritual aspect of our movement. And it is crucial that this spiritual factor, this purely spiritual factor uniting us, not be misinterpreted. I really cannot discuss the issue of the case at hand without touching upon these things. I am very sorry about all this because I always try to protect people as long as possible. However, our cause has to be more important than individuals. There is no other way.

Anyone who can judge these things objectively will be readily able to see the connection between what I said earlier about respecting the freedom of each independent soul and how I relate to individual members. I am constantly trying to make a reality out of something that is a natural consequence of our spiritual movement and that seems necessary to me in order to handle all personal relationships in such a way that they are appropriately integrated into our spiritual movement. This means I must leave each and every member of our Society free to act in ways that may differ completely from mine.

Some of you may share Mr. Goesch's opinion, and welcome any efforts to cultivate our social and personal interaction and cohesiveness. I myself think it would be a good thing if someone would make this effort, so that our Society would be a society in more than name only. However, my own role in this Society is necessarily limited. Nevertheless, I realize that I am still the one who knows by far the greatest number of members personally. Many people here know fewer than I do. I am certainly not opposed to people doing a lot to cultivate the personal aspects that play such a great role in this letter, but as I said, I must limit what I myself take on for reasons I have already presented adequately.

In view of that, it seems a very strange misunderstanding of what is actually going on when we hear opinions like those expressed again in this letter, claiming that the best of what I have to offer is becoming a mere shadowy image because of all this. According to this point of view, it seems that this Society built on the basis of spiritual science, this Society as I have to understand it, is seen as something that is too abstract and ought to assume a much more personal character. I am putting it like this—“ought to assume a much more personal character”—in order to avoid using a different expression. I have often explained that this personal character is not possible; it simply cannot be. I have even said so to some members individually. I would prefer to see this personal element rooted out to such an extent that I could, for instance, lecture from behind a screen so as to avoid mixing up personal connections to members with the main point, which is to disseminate anthroposophical teachings and make them effective in actual practice. I am sorry to have to say things like this, but how are we supposed to understand each other if these things are not said?

I would like to relate a particular incident and then comment on it. There is a certain person to whom I have always related as I described above, trying to practice what is right in relation to our spiritual movement, fulfilling my obligations with regard to this movement and disregarding any personal factors.⁷ Some time ago, this person found it necessary to write me a letter that begins as follows. I will not read the whole letter, but only the part of it that seems to be at the root of this whole incident. This letter arrived on December 25, 1914—Christmas Day of last year. I will now read this very characteristic passage, which begins with a quotation from one of the mystery dramas: “ ’Seven years now have passed,’ Dr. Steiner, since you appeared to my inner vision and said to me, ‘I am the one you have spent your life waiting for; I am the one for whom the powers of destiny intended you.’ ” Further on in the letter, we read, “Neither the teaching nor the teacher was enough to revive my soul; that could only be done by a human being capable of greater love than any other and thus capable of compensating for a greater lack of love.”

This is asking for something that cannot and must not be given in a personal sense. The teacher and the teachings are of lesser importance; what is wanted is the human being, the person. We should not play hide-and-seek in cases like this. At the conclusion of Mr. Goesch's letter, he says that he arrived at his insights under the guidance of the keeper of the seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style. Now, this keeper of the seal is the same person who wrote the sentence I just read, a sentence that shows that the things she is writing about have been slowly coming to a head for a long time. I will refrain from using any adjectives to describe the particularly pronounced insinuations in the letter Mrs. Steiner received from her yesterday. (See p. 115.) Such insinuations should not be repeated because of course people should be protected as long as they actually allow themselves to be protected. However, I really must point out that it is possible for things like this to happen in our Society.

Please do not imagine that I have been blind to this development, which has split into two parts, so to speak. I will speak first about the part that has to do with our Society as it is seen from outside, since it may be best to talk about that aspect first. Among the many things, some of them highly slanderous, that have been written in defamatory articles about our movement in general and myself in particular, there have been ever-recurring insinuations about the number of man-chasing hysterical women in our Society. I am not saying that this is true, but simply that it is mentioned in the many diatribes that have appeared, slandering us and myself in particular.

The current case is not an isolated incident, and things that appear in this form should not be interpreted personally but taken as symptomatic. Still, I must say that someone trying to get close to our movement should not try to do so by writing “Seven years now have passed, Dr. Steiner…” and so on. I do not want to go into these things at great length, but you will understand what was meant. These things cannot be judged on the basis of a single case, however. Instead, each individual case has to be interpreted as a sign that the teachings have not been received as impersonally as they should have been, and as an indication that there were some among us ready to set less store by the teachings and the teacher than by the human personality.

This was one of the secondary reasons why I and my loyal colleague, who had stood by me for so many years, were married last Christmas. I admit that we were not at all inclined to conceal the matter behind any occult cloak. First of all, as far as we were concerned, these personal things were nobody else's business. Secondly, with regard to the relationship between us, it had become necessary not to let misunderstandings arise because of things being taken on a more personal human level than they were intended.⁸ An expression used frequently between the two of us in those days was that by marrying me, Mrs. Steiner had become the “cleaning lady” with regard to things that had been accumulating in some people's heads. I think you understand what I mean. Our intent was to have things taken less personally than they had been until then.

I hope you will not misunderstand me when I say that in general in a society such as this one, liberating ourselves as much as possible from the customs of the rest of the world is not the point. Instead, we should be helping the world progress with regard to customs and ways of looking at things. It can only be of help to us to arrange such matters so they are quite clear in the eyes of the outer world and so no one can get mistaken ideas about them.

This also led Mrs. Steiner, in responding to a letter from the person who actually instigated this whole business, to write that a civil wedding ceremony was actually not such a terribly important event, considering our years of working together on things that were of utmost importance to our lives. The response to that was, “However, your civil marriage unleashed a disaster for me, one that I had feared and seen coming for years—not in what actually happened, you understand, but in its nature and severity.” It should suffice for me to point out that a certain relationship exists between what we are experiencing now and the appointment of the “cleaning lady.” As far as I am concerned, no further proof of the need for the cleaning lady is needed!

There is no harm in taking things at face value and not reading more into them than is actually there, my friends, but it is always harmful to link a particular occult mission with some petty detail, or even something of major importance, from one's personal life. That's why we prefer the image of the “cleaning lady,” which corresponds to the facts much better than any pompous pronouncements we might have come up with, although we never imagined we would have to talk about it.

It is my personal opinion that if someone in our spiritual movement looks for something so personal in things that are perfectly self-explanatory, it is a disturbing reminder of the prevalence of certain instincts in our Society. The only acceptable way to deal with these instincts is to admit that they exist and face up to them truthfully without any occult disguises. That is also the best way to move beyond them. It only works if you confront them for what they really are. In our circles, however, an incredible amount has been done to surround these things with an occult aura.

Why should we let the purely objective interest we actually ought to have in our spiritual movement be clouded by dragging personal vanity into everything? Why should we let that happen? People who spend a lot of time thinking about their incarnations down through history are not really interested in this cause; they lack the particular kind of interest they ought to have. The only difference between them and ordinary egotists is that ordinary egotists are not so presumptuous as to identify themselves with all kinds of historical incarnations, but satisfy their personal vanity with other things.

It is really true that it is much better for people to flaunt their clothes or their money than their incarnations—that is much the lesser of the two evils. These are things we have to take seriously and inscribe into the depths of our soul. They have done too much harm over the years and are so intimately bound up with what I am forced to call “personal vanity,” to use a general term.

When personal vanity plays a large part, the most unbelievable misunderstandings can arise. As she recounts in her letter, this “keeper of the seal” once came to me and stated that she was obliged to apply standards already long since present within her to whatever came toward her from the outer world. My response was, “Why should that mean you can't be part of our spiritual movement? Of course you can apply your own standards,” by which I only meant that our teachings have nothing to fear from anyone's personal standards. That is what people are supposed to apply. In my opinion, there was nothing wrong with her wanting to apply her own standards. But the way she interpreted this showed that what she actually meant was that she was already in possession of everything spiritual that could be given her; she had already seen it in visions and thus was already in possession of it.

Then this woman went on to ask whether in that case she could or should become a student of mine. I do not know why she asked that; the question is a contradiction in itself. Well, all I can say is that it was an undeniable fact that she wanted to join us in spite of everything, and there was no way to prevent her from doing it. However, her claiming to be already in possession of it all and condescending to work with this movement while insisting on applying her own standards reveal a kind of vanity that is looking for something other than our teachings. After all, she did not need the teachings if she had them already. People are so unbelievably unaware of this kind of vanity, and it plays such a very great role in a movement like ours.

This person assumed that what was being taught actually stemmed from her, no less. That is somewhat difficult to understand. She must have found some reason to believe that in something in Mrs. Steiner's letter of response to her,9 something that led her to point more specifically to this mysterious source of our esoteric movement. That is how this strange state of affairs came about. My friends, it is no longer possible to play hide-and-seek for the sake of protecting individuals; it is time for us to go into these things. In the seal-keeper's answer to Mrs. Steiner, she says, "Three years ago, like a sick person seeking out a physician, I asked Dr. Steiner for a consultation. There was something very sad that I had to say during that interview, and I have had to say it frequently since then: Although I could follow his teachings, I could not understand anything of what affected me directly or of what happened to me. I must omit what brought me to the point of saying this, since I do not know how much you know about my background and biography." She says this because I once had to hear a conversation in which this was discussed. “I was not able to express my need, and Dr. Steiner made it clear that he did not want to hear about it.” It's true that I did not want to hear about it, but I did respond. You cannot just avoid things like that by indicating that you do not want to hear about them. “The following summer, however, we were graced with the opportunity to perform The Guardian of the Threshold; in it a conversation takes place between Strader and Theodora, a conversation that reflected in the most delicate way the very thing that was oppressing me. Perhaps Dr. Steiner did not ‘intend’ anything of the sort”—intend is in quotation marks—“nevertheless, it is a fact. Perhaps it was meant as an attempt at healing.” In the passage in question from the mystery drama, Strader says he owes everything to Theodora.

When people write things like this, especially in an attempt at a formal style, though its grandiloquence contributes nothing to its clarity, we really cannot assume that it deserves to be treated as a personal communication. There is a lot that could be seen as personal, and I have mentioned none of that; everything I have mentioned is intimately related to the whole character and nature of our movement. If people don't want these things to be mentioned in public, they should not write them down. When the kind of attitude expressed in this letter becomes predominant, it undermines everything I am trying to accomplish with every word I speak and with everything I have been doing for many years.

If we are to go on working together, you must not remain ignorant of what I think my position among you should be. If in fact we are to go on working together, it will have to be on the same basis as before. We must find a way to create a form for our spiritual movement that will be appropriate to the stage of evolution of people in our day and age. That cannot happen, however, if all kinds of personal things take the place of what should be achieved and understood on a spiritual level. It astounds me that in these difficult times, when our interest should be focused on the development of a major portion of humanity, someone should have so little interest in the events of the day as to drag such highly personal interests into our Society. A person who thinks it permissible to live in the illusion that something did not happen the way she dreamed it would, and has nothing better to do than cause a crisis on that account, is really cut off from the most profound aspect of our times.

This is how these highly personal matters start creeping into our Society. However, personal matters cannot be allowed to enter our movement, not in this form and not in any other. People whose chief interest is in their own person will only find a place in our Society to a very limited extent. Generally, people who wrap themselves in a mystical cloud also attempt to do the same to those around them. It would be inconsistent to imagine that you yourself are everything under the sun and not have the people around you be something special too, so the tendency is to broaden the circle. But when, as so frequently happens, this purely personal interest and personal feeling of vanity take the place of objective observation of and efforts toward what our spiritual movement is meant to be, they inflict the worst possible damage on our Society.

One might have thought that the Johannesbau going up here would have presented enough problems to keep our members busy and distract them from the vainer and more foolish things in life. One really might have believed that this building would turn their thoughts to better things. But as you see, that has not come about as we might have hoped, and yet we have to go on working. I thank you all for the expressions of confidence contained in the letter our friend Mr. Bauer brought to me, as well as those expressed by other members, and I hope ways and means can be found to deal with these obstacles to our movement's true progress and to give a little thought to what it will take to keep our movement from being too seriously constrained by outer hindrances in the future.

Criticism, my friends, cannot harm us. People can criticize us objectively as much as they like, and it will do no damage. First of all, it will always be possible to counter the criticism with whatever needs to be said, and secondly, time is on our side. Today, people may well still think we're fools because of our boiler house or the Johannesbau itself, or whatever, but they'll come around, and we can wait until they do. That's the way it is with anything new.

It is something totally different when slanderous and untrue statements are made. In that case, we are obliged to set these claims straight again and again if we don't choose to simply ignore them, and of course the slanderers can always answer back. It can even reach the point of taking legal action. Yet, we do need to defend ourselves against such statements, even if it feels like washing our hands in black and filthy water.

If we could really foster an active attitude and strengthen our forces on these two fronts, we would be able to do a lot that has been left undone so far.

Of course, this is not meant as a personal reproach to anyone in particular; some of what I said applies to some people, other things to others. It is intended quite generally. However, what I have pointed out has a solid basis in fact, and in order for you to see it, I have had to present something of the situation to show how things that were only intended to be taken spiritually have been taken very personally.

Please don't take it amiss if I say that if someone comes with complaints, even if she says she already knew everything she has gained or can still gain through the movement, the only thing to do is treat that person like a child and offer fatherly admonition or friendly consolation. I was naive enough to believe that it had helped, and then had to watch these delusions of grandeur appear afterward, so it… [gap in stenographic record] great damage within this Society of ours.

Considering the claims of the keeper of the seal, there was never any point in doing anything other than smilingly forgiving her for this rubbish, the way you excuse a child. Please don't hold it against me that I said what simply had to be said. But for the sake of our movement's dignity, we cannot permit pathological elements to destroy it. That is why we cannot always take the stand that we should simply accept these pathological elements for what they are. When this pathological element takes on all the appearances of delusions of grandeur, we have to call it by name; we have no other choice. This is by no means directed against the personality in question, but only against what is deserving of criticism in that person. After all, we must face the facts and not hide the issue behind the cloak of the occult. It requires a particular effort at self-education to do that, but if we succeed, we will see things as they truly are instead of through a glass darkly.

Perhaps you will say that I myself am speaking out of vanity at this point. That will make no difference to me, since I have already been condemned to call a spade a spade in this instance. I have known many students who thought they were smarter than their teachers and proceeded to tell them off, claiming that the latter had made all kinds of promises without keeping them. That this should also happen within our Society comes as no great surprise.

Now I have given you my own humble opinion, which you are not to take as binding. I am simply asking that you take it in the same way I want you to take everything I say, that is, I would like you to try to see if we are better able to get on with life in our movement once a common resolve is there to call the big things big and the little things little instead of drawing a mystical halo around any old arbitrary personal vanity.

If we are not aware of the full seriousness of our movement, the temptation is very great to fake it by decking out all sorts of life's little vanities in this same serious garb. That cannot be, and this simple statement means more than it seems to. This is what I had to say, although I did not want to. I cannot read these letters in their entirety in front of the whole movement, but it would not occur to anyone who could read them that I have overstepped my authority by quoting passages from private correspondence. In this case, it had to happen because these things are related to the very foundations of what we are doing together.

• 1. It has not been possible to ascertain which physician and which letter are referred to here.
• 2. See the volume Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904 bis 1919, note 5 to section II above.
• 3. See II, note 1 above.
• 4. See the two volumes Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlauterungen zu Goethes “Faust” (“Spiritual Scientific Commentaries on Goethe's Faust”), GA 272 and 273, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1981). [These volumes have not been published in English—Translator.]
• 5. Robert Hamerling, 1830–1889, Austrian poet.
• 6. This seems to be a reference to Heinrich Goesch, who was not involved in any kind of practical activity. It was reported by some members that he had refused to help with the construction of the first Goetheanum.
• 7. The person referred to is Alice Sprengel. See Part Two, p. 109ff in this volume and also note 1 under I above.
• 8. The second half of this sentence is somewhat unclear in the stenographic record and may have not have been taken down exactly or completely.

What we have really been endeavouring to do in our talks together here is to delve a little more deeply into Waldorf School pedagogy, in order to find in that pedagogy the kind of education with which we can approach the so-called abnormal child. It will have been clear to you from our discussions that, if you want to educate an abnormal child in the right manner, you will have to form your judgement and estimation of him in quite another way than you do for the so-called normal child—and of course differently again from the way he is regarded in ordinary lay circles, where people are for the most part content merely to specify the abnormality and not trouble themselves to look further and enquire into the causes of it. For there is no denying it, the man of today is not nearly so far on (in his study, for example, of the human being), as Goethe was in his study of the growth and nature of the plant. (And, as we saw, Goethe's work in this direction was a beginning, it was still in its elementary stage.) For Goethe took a special delight in the malformations that can occur in plants; and the passages where he deals with such are among the most interesting in all his writings. He describes, for example, how some organ in a plant, which one is accustomed to find in a certain so-called normal form, may either grow to excess, becoming abnormally large, or may insert itself into the plant in an abnormal manner, sometimes even going so far as to produce from itself organs that would normally be situated in quite another part of the plant. In the very fact that the plant is able to express itself in such malformations, Goethe sees a favourable starting point for setting out to discover the true “idea” of the archetypal plant. For he knows that the idea which lies hidden behind the plant manifests quite particularly in these malformations; so that if we were to carry out a whole series of observations—it would of course be necessary to make the observations over a wide range of plants—if we were to observe first how the root can suffer malformation, then again how the leaf, the stem, the flower, and even the fruit can become deformed, we would be able, by looking upon all these malformations together, to arrive at an apperception of the archetypal plant.

And it is fundamentally the same with all living entities—even with beings who live in the spirit. More and more does our observation of the human race lead us to perceive this truth—that where we have abnormalities in man, it is the spirituality in him which is finding expression in these abnormalities.

When once we begin to look at the phenomena of life from this aspect, it will at the same time give us insight into the way men thought about life in olden times; and we shall understand how it was that education was regarded as having an extremely close affinity with healing. For in healing men saw a process whereby that in man which has received Ahrimanic or Luciferic form and configuration is made to come nearer to that in him which, in the sense of good spiritual progress, holds a middle course between the two extremes. Healing was, in effect, the establishment of a right balance in the human being between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And then, having a more intimate and deep perception of how it is only in the course of life that man comes into this condition of balance, of how he needs indeed to be brought into it by means of education, these men of an older time saw that there is something definitely abnormal about a child as such, something in every child that is in a certain respect ill and requires to be healed. Hence the primeval words for “healing” and “educating” have the very same significance. Education heals the so-called normal human being, and healing is a specialised form of education for the so-called abnormal human being.

If it has become clear to us that the foregoing is a true and fundamental perception, we can do no other than carry our enquiry further along the same road. All the illnesses that originate within the human being have, in reality, to do with the spiritual in him, and ultimately even the illnesses that arise in him in response to an injury from without; for when you break your leg, the condition that presents itself is really the reaction that arises within you to the blow from without—and surgery could certainly learn something by looking at the matter in this light. Starting therefore from this fundamental perception, we find ourselves ready to approach in a much deeper and more intimate manner the question: How are we to deal with children, having regard to the whole relationship of their physical nature to their soul and spirit?

In the very young child, physical and spiritual are intimately bound up together, and we must not assume—as people generally do today—that when some medicament or other is given to a child, it takes effect physically alone. The spiritual influence of a substance is actually greater in the case of a very little child than it is with a grown person. The virtue for the child of the mother's milk, for example, lies in the fact that there lives in it what was called in the archaic language of an earlier way of thought the “good mummy” in contrast to the “bad mummy” that lives in other products of excretion. The whole mother lives in the mother's milk. Mother's milk is permeated with forces that have, as it were, only changed their field of action within the organisation. For up to the time of birth, these forces are active in the region that belongs in the main to the system of metabolism and limbs, while after birth they are chiefly active in the region of the rhythmic system. Thus they migrate within the human organisation, moving up a stage higher. In doing so, the forces lose their I content, which was specifically active during the embryonic time, but still retain their astral content. If the same forces that work in the mother's milk were to rise a stage higher still—moving, that is, to the head—they would lose also their astral content and have active within them only the physical and etheric organisation. Hence the harmful effect upon the mother, if these forces do rise a stage higher and we have all the abnormal phenomena that can then show themselves in a nursing mother.

In mother's milk we still have therefore astral formative forces that work spiritually; and we must realise what a responsibility rests upon us when the time comes to let the little child make the transition to receiving his nourishment directly for himself. The responsibility is particularly great for us today, since there is now no longer any consciousness of how the spiritual is active everywhere in the external world, and of how the plant, as it ascends from root up to flower and finally to fruit, becomes gradually more and more spiritual—in its own nature and also in its activity and influence. Taking first the root, we have there something that works least spiritually of all; in comparison with the rest of the plant, the root has a strongly physical and etheric relation to the environment. In the flower however begins a life which reaches out, in a kind of longing, to the astral. In a word, the plant spiritualises, as it grows upwards.

Then we must carry our study a stage further, and enquire into the place of the root within the whole cosmic connection. Its part and place within the cosmos is expressed in the fact that the root has grown into the soil of the Earth, has embedded itself right into the light. The truth is that the root of the plant has grown into the soil in the same way as we have grown with our head into the free expanse of air and into the light. We can therefore say that here below

we have that which in man is of the head nature and has to do with perception; while here above we have the part of the plant that in man has to do with digestion, with nourishment. The upper part of the plant contains the spirituality that we long for in our metabolism-and-limbs system, and is on this account related to that system in us. One who is able with occult perception to regard first the mother's milk, and then the astral which hovers over the plant and for which the plant longs and yearns, can behold—not indeed a perfect similarity, but an extraordinarily close relationship between the astrality that comes from the mother with the mother's milk, and the astrality that comes from the cosmos and hovers over the blossoms of the plants.

These things are said, not in order that you may possess them as theoretical knowledge, but in order that you may come to cherish the right feeling towards what is in a human being's environment and enters thence into the sphere of his deeds and actions. As you see, we shall have to take care that we find the right way to accustom the little child—gradually—to external nourishment, stimulating him with the fruiting part of the plant, fortifying his metabolic system with the flowering part, and coming to the help of what has to be done by the head by means of a gentle admixture of root substance in his food. The theoretical mastery of these relationships will serve merely to start you off in the right direction; what should then happen is that in the practice of life the knowledge of them flows into all your care for the child, not as theory but more in a spiritual way.

In this connection we cannot but recognise how extraordinarily difficult it is in our day to “behold” a human being as he really is. Again and again, in every field of knowledge into which we enter, our attention is drawn away from that which is essential in man as man. Modern education and instruction is not calculated to enable us to see man in his true being. For it is a fact that in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century the power to behold what is essential in man died right away. Up to that time, and even still during that time, an idea was current which survives now only in certain words that have remained in use—lives on, here and there, so to speak, in the genius of language. We might describe this idea in the following way.

Surveying the whole human race, we find it subject to all manner of diseases. We could, if we chose to be abstract, write these all down. We could take some plane surface and write upon it the names of the various illnesses in such a way as to make a kind of map of them. In one corner, for instance, we might write illnesses that are inter-related one with the other; in another corner, illnesses that are fatal. In short, we could classify them all so nicely as to produce in the end a regular chart or map, and then it would not be difficult to find the place on the map where a child with a particular organisation belonged. One could imagine how some special pre-disposition in regard to illness could be shown in a kind of diagram on transparent paper and then the name of the child be written in on the region of the map where he belonged. Let us suppose, then, that you regarded illnesses in this way and made such a map as I have described. In the first half of the nineteenth century people still had the idea that whenever the name of an illness had to be written in, they could always write in, for that illness, the name of some animal. They still believed that the animal kingdom inscribes into Nature all possible diseases, and that each single animal, rightly understood, signifies an illness. For the animal itself the illness is, so to speak, quite healthy. If however this same animal enters into man, so that a human being, instead of having the organisation that properly belongs to him, is organised on the pattern of that animal, then that human being is ill.

It was not superstitious people alone who continued to hold such conceptions in the first half of the nineteenth century; this idea of the nature of disease in man was held, for example, by Hegel—and a very fruitful and productive idea it was. Think what a light can be thrown upon the nature and character of a particular human being if one can say: he “takes after” the lion, or the eagle, or the ox; or again, he gives evidence of being wrenched away in the direction of the spiritual—the spiritual works too powerfully in him. Or, let us say, carrying the idea a step further, suppose the ether body of a certain human being is too soft and flabby and shows obvious affinity to physical substance, then that would be for one an indication of a type of organisation that generally occurs only in the lower animal kingdom. These are fundamental conceptions of a kind that it is important for you to acquire.

And now I would like to go on to speak of what you as educators must undertake for your own self-education. You can take your start from certain given meditations. A meditation that is particularly effective for a teacher is the one I gave here two days ago. Meditating upon it inwardly with the right orientation of heart and mind, it will in time bear fruit within you. For you will discover that as you are carried along in your feeling on the waves of an astral sea, borne hence away from the body, you will begin to find yourself in a world—you can liken it only to a world of gently surging billows—where you are given the possibility to see around you the very things that provide answers to your questions.

But here, I must warn you that if you desire really to make your way through to the place where such things are possible, you must comply with the conditions—I do not mean merely knowing them in theory, I mean faithfully fulfilling in real earnest the conditions that are necessary for development on the path of meditation, and that are described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. [Now published by the Rudolf Steiner Press as Knowledge of Higher Worlds—how is it achieved? ] You will remember how mention is made there of egoism as a hindrance on the path of development—egoism in the sense that man centres his attention upon his own I, values his I too highly. What does it mean when we hold our I in such high esteem?

We have, as you know, to begin with, our physical body, which derives from Saturn times and has been gradually formed and completed with such wonderful artistic power in four majestic stages of development. Then we have the etheric body, which has undergone three stages of development. And we have besides the astral body, which has undergone only two. These three members of man's being do not fall within the field of Earth consciousness; the I alone does so. Yet it is really no more than the semblance of the I that falls within the field of Earth consciousness; the true I can be seen only by looking back into an earlier incarnation. The I that we have now is in process of becoming; not until our next incarnation will it be a reality. The I is no more than a baby. And if we are able to see through what shows on the surface, then, when we look at someone who is sailing through life on the sea of his own egoism, we shall have before us the Imagination of a fond foster-mother or nurse, whose heart is filled with rapturous devotion to the baby in her arms. In her case the rapture is justified, for the child in her arms is other than herself; but we have a spectacle merely of egoism when we behold man fondling so tenderly the baby in him. And you can indeed see people going about like that today. If you were to paint a picture of them as they are in the astral, you would have to paint them carrying each his child on his arm. The Egyptians, when they moulded the scarab, could at least still show the I carried by the head organisation; but the man of our time carries his I, his Ego, in his arms, fondling it and caressing it tenderly. And now, if the teacher will constantly compare this picture with his own daily actions and conduct, once more he will be provided with a most fruitful theme for meditation. And he will find that he is guided into the state I described as swimming in a surging sea of spirit.

Whether we are able to get in this realm the answers to our questions will depend upon whether we have in our soul the inner peace and quiet which we must seek to preserve in such moments. If someone complains that things are constantly happening that prevent him from meditating, the complaint will of itself afford a pretty sure indication as to whether or not he is in a fair way to make progress in this direction. For you will never find that one who is genuinely undergoing development will complain that this or that hinders him from meditating. In point of fact we are not really hindered by these things that seem to come in our way. On the contrary, it should be perfectly possible to carry out a most powerful meditation immediately before taking some decisive step, before doing a deed of cardinal importance—or, on the other hand, to carry out the meditation after the deed, in entire forgetfulness of what has been experienced in the performance of the deed. Everything depends, you see, upon having it in our power to wrest ourselves away from the one world and live for the time being completely within the other world; and whenever we want to summon up our inner spiritual powers, right at the very beginning must come the ability to do this.

Watch for yourselves and observe the difference—first, when you approach a child more or less indifferently, and then again when you approach him with real love. As soon as ever you approach him with love, and cease to believe that you can do more with technical dodges than you can with love, at once your educating becomes effective, becomes a thing of power. And this is more than ever true when you are having to do with abnormal children.

Wherever people have the right feeling about their activities, these activities do work together in the right way. Just as in the physical organism heart and kidneys must work together if the organism as a whole is to have unity, so must the Constituents work together for the great end they all have in view, while each of them fosters within itself that element in the whole for which it is in particular responsible. And anyone who then sets out to undertake some new task in the world, must bring what he is doing into co-ordination with what emanates from the Constituents.

Suppose you have the intention of undertaking work with backward children. The first thing you have to do is to study and observe the pedagogy that is followed in the anthroposophical movement. That whole living stream of activity must flow into all that you do and undertake. For within this educational stream is contained that which can heal the typical human being, and enable him to take his place rightly in the world. And then you will find that the Medical Section is able to give you what you need in order that you may deepen this pedagogy and adapt it to the abnormality of the individual in question. If you set out in all earnestness to accomplish this, yon will soon realise that there can be no question of expecting simply to be told: This is good for this, that is good for that. No, what is wanted is a continual living intercourse and connection between your own work and all that is done and given in the educational and in the medical work of the [Dynamic] movement. No break in this living connection must ever be permitted. Egoism must not be allowed to creep in and assert itself in some special and individual activity; rather must there always be the longing on the part of each participant to take his right place within the work as a whole.

Curative Eurythmy having come in to collaborate with Curative Education, the latter is thereby brought into relation also with the whole art of Eurythmy. Here too it should be evident that you must look for a living connection. This will mean that anyone who practises Curative Eurythmy must have gone some way towards mastering the fundamental principles of Eurythmy as an art. Curative Eurythmy has to grow out of a general knowledge of Speech Eurythmy and Tone Eurythmy—although the knowledge will not necessarily have been carried to the point of full artistic development. Nor must we lose sight of the importance before all else of human contacts. If Curative Eurythmy is being given, the one who is giving it must on no account omit to seek contact with the doctor. When Curative Eurythmy was first begun, the condition was laid down that it should not be given without consultation with the doctor. You see from all this how closely, how livingly interlinked the different activities have to be in Anthroposophy.

It will thus be necessary to take care that the work you are initiating at Lauenstein—a work, let me say, that I regard as full of hope and promise—is carried on in entire harmony with the whole Anthroposophical Movement. You can rest assured that the Anthroposophical Movement is ready to foster and encourage any plans with which it has expressed agreement—naturally through the channels that have been provided in accordance with the Christmas Foundation Meeting. And conversely you should keep constantly in mind that whatever you, as a limb or member of the movement, accomplish—you do it for the strengthening of the whole Anthroposophical Movement, for the enhancement of its work and influence in the world.

This then, my dear friends, is the message I would leave with you. Receive it into your hearts, as a message that comes verily from the heart; may it go with you, and may its impulse continue to work on into the future.

If we who are in this spiritual movement are constantly thinking: how can this spiritual movement be made fruitful for practical life?—then will the world not fail to see that it is verily a movement that is alive.

And so, my dear friends, let me wish you all strength and good guidance for the right working out of your will.

Dr. Steiner: Before I leave, we need to discuss the fate of the fifth grade, and I would also like to hear about your experiences.

The teachers who went to England will tell you about their experiences themselves. Haven’t you already reported your successes? It is a fact that the teachers’ activities made a great impression; seen from behind the scenes, each Waldorf teacher is a person who made a great impression. Everyone did that individually.

Baravalle made an enormously deep impression with his presentation of the metamorphosis of surfaces, which merges into the Pythagorean theorem. Miss Lämmert’s presentation on teaching music also made a very deep impression. Dr. Schwebsch then made an impression through his knowledge and ability, and Dr. Schubert was very convincing about the truth of the Waldorf School as a whole. We must, of course, say the same about Dr. von Heydebrand, an impression so large that most people said they would like to have their children taught by such a person. That was the impression she made. Miss Röhrle was more active behind the scenes, and I think she could tell you about her success herself.

Is the last issue of The Goetheanum here? I would like to recommend that you all read the book by Miss MacMillan, Education through the Imagination. In my copy, I wrote something I did not include in my essay: “It is as though someone were very capable of describing the dishes on the table without knowing how they were prepared in the kitchen.” What is so interestingly described in the book is the surface, an analysis of the surface of the soul, at least to the extent that it develops imaginative forces, but she does not describe the work that gives rise to them. It is excellent as a description of the child’s soul, only she does not understand the forces that give rise to it. I think that if you apply the foundation anthroposophy offers, it would illuminate everything. Every anthroposophist can gain a great deal from that book because a great deal of anthroposophy can be read into it. It is a sketch everyone can develop wonderfully for themselves—it is a reason for working thoroughly with anthroposophy.

Miss MacMillan would like to come with some assistants at Christmas. I would ask that you treat her kindly. For some, she is one of the most important pedagogical reformers. If you go into her school, you will see a great deal, even if the children are not present. She is a pedagogical genius. She wants to arrange things so that she will see some of your teaching. I already told her that if she looks at our school without seeing the teaching, she will get nothing from it.

We had planned the Zurich course, but when Wachsmuth and I came back from England and heard that it was being seriously undertaken, we both nearly fainted. We will need to change it to Easter. We will also present an Easter play for the first time. I have already arranged for that. It will be at Easter. Perhaps the teachers who were in England would like to say something.

A teacher asks whether such things as sewing cards are proper to use at the age of twelve for developing the strengths of geometry.

Dr. Steiner: That is correct. After twelve, they would be too much like a game. I would never use things at school that do not exist in real life. The children cannot develop a relationship to life from things that contain nothing of life. The Fröbel things were created for school. We should create nothing for school alone. We should bring only things that exist in real life into school, but in an appropriate form.

Some teachers report about their impressions of England.

Dr. Steiner: You need to take into account that the English do not understand logic alone, even if it is poetic. They need everything to be presented in concrete pictures. As soon as you get into logic, English people cannot understand it. Their mentality is such that they understand only what is concrete.

A teacher thought that the people organized through improvisation. He had the impression they were at the limits of their capabilities.

Dr. Steiner: All the anthroposophists and a number of other guests drove from Wales to London. All of the participants were from Penmaenmawr. There was an extra train from Penmaenmawr. We had two passenger cars and a luggage car. The train left late so it could go quickly. The conductor came along, and the luggage was still outside. Wachsmuth said it needed to be put aboard. The passengers saw to it that the train waited. That is something that is not possible in Germany. At some stations there was a lot of disorder. Here, people don’t know what happens, and there you have to go to the luggage car yourself. In Manchester, two railway companies meet, and the officials there had a small war. One group did not want to take us aboard, and the other wanted to get rid of us. They often lose the luggage but then find it again. These private companies have some advantages, but also disadvantages. No trains leave from such stations on Sunday because the same people who own the hotels also own the railways. People have to stay over until Monday because there are no trains on Sunday. I discussed the inner aspects of Penmaenmawr in a lecture.

A teacher: In England they spoke about the position of women in ancient Greece and how women were not treated as human beings. Schuré describes the Mysteries in which women apparently played a major role.

Dr. Steiner: Women as such certainly played a role, particularly those chosen for the Mysteries. They were, however, women who did not have their own families. Women who had their own family were never brought into public life. Children were raised at home, so everyone assumed women would not participate in public life. Until the child was seven, he or she knew almost nothing of public life, and fathers saw their children only rarely. They hardly knew them.

It was a different way of life that was not seen as less valuable. The women chosen for the Mysteries often played a very important role. Then there were those like Aspasia.

We need to divide the fifth grade. I would have liked to have a male teacher, if for no other reason than that people say we are filling the faculty only with women. However, since we don’t have an overwhelming majority of women and the situation is still relatively in balance, and, in fact, I was unable to find a man, we can do nothing else. As I was looking around for someone capable, I put together some statistics. I looked at how things are. It is the case that in middle schools women have a greater capacity. Men are more capable only in the subjects that are absolutely essential, whereas women can teach throughout. Men are less capable. That is one of the terrible things of our times. Thus, there was nothing to do other than to hire this young woman. I think she will make a good teacher. She did her dissertation on a remark in one of my lectures about how Homer begins with “Sing me, Muse, of the man,” and on something from Klopstock, “Sing, undying soul!” The 5c class will thus be taken over by Dr. Martha Häbler. I think she is quite industrious. I want you, that is, the two fifth grade teachers, to make some proposals about which children we should move from the current classes into the new class. We will take children from both classes. Dr. Häbler will be visiting, and I will introduce her when I come on the tenth. She will immediately become part of the faculty and will participate in the meetings.

That leads me to a second question. I am going to ask Miss Klara Michels to take over the 3b class. I have asked Mrs. Plinke to go to Miss Cross’s school in Kings Langley.

The gardening teacher asks whether they should create class gardens.

Dr. Steiner: I have nothing against that. Until now the garden work has been more improvised. Write something up. It can go into the curriculum.

The science teacher: From teaching botany, I have the feeling that we should grow plants in the garden that we will study in botany.

Dr. Steiner: That is possible. In that way there will be more of a plan in the garden.

A teacher asks about handwork.

Dr. Steiner: Mrs. Molt can turn over her last two periods in handwork to Miss Christern.

Since we have let a number of things go, I would ask you to present them now.

I would like you to take a serious look at S.T. He is precocious. He is very talented and also quite reasonable, but you always have to keep him focused. I gave him a strong reminder that he needs to take an interest in his school subjects. He has read Plato, Kant, and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom. He pretty much has his mind made up. If you think he needs some extra help, he should receive it. He would prefer that you analyze esoteric science for him. He has gone from school to school and was in a cloister school first. He will be a hard nut to crack.

A teacher asks about a second conference for young people and also about lectures for anthroposophical teachers outside the Waldorf School.

Dr. Steiner: We are planning another conference for young people, but you will need to decide how you want it. It is all the same to me, as I can adjust my lectures accordingly.

It would be good if we arranged to have lectures just for the teachers of the Waldorf School during the school year. That would be good. But it does not appear possible during the holidays. I don’t know about such a conference when so many deadly thoughts fly around between such beautiful ones. Those four days were terrible. Such conferences are not very useful for what we need here at school.

It seems to me, and I think we should discuss this, as though a somewhat different impulse is living here. That is what I think. I believe that an entirely new feeling of responsibility will arise out of the seriousness with which the pedagogy was taken up in England. That clearly indicates that we must develop very strong forces. I certainly think we need something. From the perspective of the entirety of Waldorf pedagogy, it would be desirable for us to speak about the effects of moral and religious impulses upon other subjects. We should speak about direct teaching experience, which we could do more easily at a youth conference. The youth conference will have open meetings. I think that is easier than if we have a conference where people sit from morning until evening. I will be here again from the tenth to the fourteenth of October, so we can plan to speak about this question in more detail then. Other than your participation, you will not have much to do with that conference. Since today’s youth want to be let loose, I think I will not have very much to do with such a conference either. It might be possible to have no school during those days, so that it would be easy to give a lecture.

I cannot easily be here at any other time; I have too many things to do. If we are to build, I must be in Dornach. During the fall holidays, we can speak about higher pedagogical questions, but only Waldorf teachers can attend. The public could attend the conference. We could arrange things so that everyone gets something from the conference, the parents as well as the teachers, but what they receive would be different. If I can present everything I have to say as something living, it will be that way.

(Speaking about a newly hired teacher, X.) I was satisfied with the periods I observed. He is really serious about the work and has found his way into the material well. The students understand him, but he needs some guidance. I have not allowed him here today because I wanted to say that. He needs to feel that you are all behind him. He needs to remain enthusiastic, which he is very much so now.

The music teacher asks about presenting rhythms in music that are different from those in eurythmy. He uses the normal rhythms and would like to know whether only the two-, three-, and four-part rhythms are important, or whether he should go on to five- and seven-part.

Dr. Steiner: Use five- and seven-part rhythms only with the older children, not under fifteen years old. I think if you did it with children under fifteen, it would confuse their feeling for music. I can hardly imagine that those who do not have the talent to become musicians would learn it alone. It is sufficient to go only up to four-part rhythm. You need to be careful that their musical feeling remains transparent as long as possible, so that they can experience the differences. It will not be that way once they have learned seven-part rhythm. There are certainly pedagogical advantages when the children actively participate in conducting—they participate dynamically, but everyone should do that. You can use the standard conductor’s movements.

The music teacher: Until now, I have only done that with all of them together. Should I allow individuals to conduct in the lower grades?

Dr. Steiner: I think that could begin around age nine or ten. Much of what is decisive during that period comes out of the particular relationship that develops when one child stands as an individual before the group. That is also something we could do in other subjects; for example, in arithmetic one child could lead the others in certain things. That is something we could easily do there, but in music it becomes an actual part of the art itself. A teacher asks about the order of the eurythmy figures.

Dr. Steiner: I had them set up so that the vowels were together, then the consonants, and then a few others. There are twenty-two or twenty-three figures.

You could, of course, put the related consonants together, in other words, not just alphabetically. It would be best to feel the letter you are working with and not be completely dependent upon some order. You should perceive it more qualitatively, not simply as a series of one next to the other.

If this were not such a terribly difficult time, I believe there would be a great deal living here. The difficulties are now more subtle. Before the children have learned a specific gesture, they cannot connect any concept with the figure, but the moment they learn the gesture, you should relate it to the figure. They must recognize the relationship in such a way that they will understand the movement, not just the character and feeling. The feeling is expressed through the veils, but the children are too young for veils. Character is something you can gradually teach them after they have formed an inner relationship to the movement. When they understand what the principle behind the figures is, that will have a favorable effect upon the teaching of eurythmy. Over time, they will develop an artistic feeling; when you can help develop that, you should do so.

How is the situation in the 9b class?

A teacher: T.L. has left.

Dr. Steiner: That is too bad.

A teacher: L.A. in the fourth grade is stealing and lying. She also has a poor memory.

Dr. Steiner: She is lying because she wants to hide that. It would be good if, and this always helps, you could dictate a little story to her so that she would have to learn it very well. The story should be about a child who steals and then gets into an absurd situation. Earlier, I gave such stories to parents. Make up a little story in which a child ends up in an absurd situation due to the course of events, so that this child will no longer want to steal. You can make up various stories; they could be bizarre or even grotesque. Of course, this helps only when the child carries it in a living way, when she has to review it in her soul time and again. The child should commit the story to memory just as she knows the Lord’s Prayer, so that the story lives within her and she can always bring it forth from her memory. If you can do that, that would really help. If one story is not enough, you should do a second. This is also something you can do in class. It would hurt nothing if others also hear it. The child should repeat it again and again. Others can be around, but they do not need to memorize it. You should not say why you are doing it, don’t speak with the children about it at all. The mother should know only that it will help her child. The child should not know that, and the class, absolutely not. The child should learn in a very naïve way what the story presents. For her sister, you could shorten the story and tell it to her again and again. With L.A., you could do it in class, but the others do not need to memorize it.

A teacher asks whether an eighteen-year-old girl who is deaf and dumb can come to the Waldorf School.

Dr. Steiner: There is nothing to say against it. However, it would be good if she remained at the commercial art school and took some additional classes here, for instance, art or eurythmy. She is completely deaf. An association can develop just as well with the movements of the limbs as with the movements of the organ of speech.

A teacher asks about the groups of animals and whether that should be brought into connection with the various stages of life.

Dr. Steiner: The children first need to understand the aspects of the human being. What follows is secondary. You can do that after you tell them about the major divisions of the head, rhythmic, and metabolic animals, but you cannot do it completely systematically.

A teacher asks about Th.H. in the fifth grade, who is not doing well in writing.

Dr. Steiner: It is quite clear that with this child certain astral sections of the eye are placed too far forward. The astral body is enlarged, and she has astral nodules before her eyes. You can see that, and her writing shows it also. She transposes letters consistently. That is why she writes, for example, Gsier instead of Gries. I will have to think about the reason. When she is copying, she writes one letter for another. Children at this age do not normally do that, but she does it consistently. She sees incorrectly.

I will need to think about what we can do with this girl. We will need to do something, as she also does not see other things correctly. She sees many things incorrectly. This is in interesting case. It is possible, although we do not want to do an experiment in this direction, that she also confuses a man with a woman or a little boy with an older woman. If this confusion is caused by an incorrect development in the astral plane, then she will confuse only things somehow related, not things that are totally unrelated. If this continues, and we do nothing to help it, it can lead to grotesque forms of insanity. All this is possible only with a particularly strong development of the astral body, resulting in temporary animal forms that again disappear. She is not a particularly wideawake child, and you will notice that if you ask her something, she will make the same face as someone you awaken from sleep. She starts a little, just as someone you awaken does. She would never have been in a class elsewhere, that is something possible only here with us. She would have never made it beyond the first grade. She is a very interesting child.

A teacher: Someone wants to make a brochure with pictures of the Waldorf School.

Dr. Steiner: I haven’t the slightest interest in that. If we did that, we would have The Coming Day print it. If we wanted such a brochure, we would publish it ourselves. Aside from that, we cannot go so far as to create competition for our own companies. It would be an impossible situation to undermine our own publisher by having publications printed somewhere else. Under certain circumstances, it could cause quite a commotion. Considering the relationship between the Waldorf School and The Coming Day, it would not be very upright. If we were to make such a brochure, I see no reason why we should not have it published by The Coming Day. We would earn more that way. For now, though, it would not be right.

Did one of the classes go swimming? I am asking because that terrible M.K. who complains about everything also wrote me a letter complaining about the school. I didn’t read it all. He is one of those sneaky opponents we cannot keep out, who are always finding things out. He is the one I was speaking of when I said it is not possible to work bureaucratically in our circles as is normally done, by having a list and sending things to the people on it. The Anthroposophical Society needs to be more personal, and we do not need to send people like M.K. everything. We need to be more human in the Anthroposophical Society. I mean that in regard to how we proceed, whether we are bureaucratic about deciding whether to send something to someone or not. He just uses the information to create a stir and to complain. He complains with an ill intent, even though he is a member.